The Forum with Josh Cowen Podcast

Whether you’re a first-time or long-time reader of this series, you know the main connecting points for me are policy and political questions around kids and families. In my own writing that means focusing on the big issues around resources, attention—and attacks—on education, child care and other important investments.

But when I talk to other authors or to public figures, I’m interested in how they are working on different problems within that same larger connecting space of family policy and well-being.

I was absolutely fascinated by a new book from the historian Helen Zoe Veit, who like me also teaches at Michigan State University. Helen specializes in the history of American food, has consulted on a variety of major media projects on the topic, and recently had a piece in the New York Times outlining the work from her new book.

That book, Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History is out now. This week, I sat down with Helen to talk about Picky, food policy, and even the MAHA movement in American politics.

A Conversation with Helen Zoe Veit

So let's just start at the top. You’ve written this book, and you're a historian of food in the United States. I'd love for you to tell us a little bit about that. But Picky is also something new. Are you trying to solve a puzzle or tell a story?

I think there is a puzzle at the center of American children’s food. Which is that a lot of the food that we feed our kids today is not that healthy. About two-thirds of the food that American children eat is now highly processed.

There’s a growing body of good evidence suggesting that diets that have a lot of highly processed food are not that great for us. They’re correlated with a lot of health problems, they’re correlated with high obesity rates—and obesity has quadrupled since the 1970s, just among children in America.

At the same time, all sorts of health problems that never used to be an issue in childhood like high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes, heart problems—these are starting to be regular parts of childhood.

This is all really, really new. So there’s this sense that there’s something that’s not right with the way that we’re feeding American kids.

And at the same time, there’s broad acceptance of the idea that children are naturally picky, that there’s something natural, biological, or evolutionary that makes children narrow eaters that makes them the perfect audience for these highly processed products.

As a result of those two things, there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance. Parents know that Lunchables and Cocoa Puffs and Fruit Gushers are not the natural food of our species, and yet at the same time, we’re told the pickiness is natural and inevitable, and that they shouldn’t try to do much to change it.

So, yeah, the book is an attempt to explore this puzzle and this contradiction by looking to the past, where people had really not gone before to talk about children’s food, and where children used to eat totally differently than children do today,

And with vastly more pleasure.

How does Picky differ from a book, say, a nutritionist would write on the same general theme?

I think there’s a reason that this topic was written about by a historian. It could have also been written about by an anthropologist.

There have been books about children’s food written by people who are nutritionists, doctors, and psychologists. But the problem is that we are all products of our own historical period, of our own culture. And it is so dominant in our culture, this idea that children need special diets, that they have special, requirements around food, that things that please adults are not pleasing to children.

This is so dominant that most people start with that presupposition when they even talk about children’s food: the idea that children have special needs.

Whereas, what history shows so compellingly, and shows so strongly, is that in the past, there was no such thing as children’s food. There was no sense that children were incapable of loving exactly the same foods as their parents.

In the 19th century, children, if anything, were seen to be uniquely omnivorous, uniquely wide-ranging, curious, eager, even greedy eaters. That’s what it meant to be a childish eater back then.

This is totally countercultural. And so I think, for that reason, what historians do, and also what anthropologists do, is that we leave our current culture. We go to different time periods or different places, and we see how people, you know, do things totally differently.

Now, of course, there are really strong biological aspects to this story, too. As a historian of science, that’s what I find so incredibly fascinating, is this intersection of biology and culture. But I think the countercultural nature of this book needed a perspective outside of our own culture to get, really, the wedge into it. And that’s, I think, one of the benefits of approaching it historically.

“Our model of feeding children has actually resulted in such a constriction of children’s pleasure, in such a narrowing of the foods they take pleasure in, and it’s been incredibly stressful for parents.”—Helen Zoe Veit

The story is temporal in that it’s history and moves through time—you’re a historian after all. But is there something first, that’s specific to the US here? You do bring in some comparative pieces but I’m trying to get my head around the American-specific development. And then, second, is there something different about our relationship to food and how that’s changed over time as opposed to, say, our attention spans, reading, fitness, labor, and so on?

Well, it’s been a really long rollout of childhood pickiness. Although I think there are some unique things going on today with children’s pickiness, and some things that are specifically indebted to social media—especially the rise of a new eating disorder called ARFID, which stands for Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder.

There’s been an explosion of diagnoses, in part just because more people are hearing about it. So I think there’s something very modern going on about this new eating disorder. But in fact mass pickiness, and one of the reasons that it’s been so naturalized and normalized, has really emerged over generations.

We first start to see Americans talk about children as picky eaters almost 100 years ago, in the 1930s.

At the time, nobody thought it had to do with children’s taste, or textures, or things like that. People said it had to do with children’s levels of hunger, that some children just weren’t hungry enough—you had to try to increase their appetites.

By the 1940s and 50s, there was a much more psychological explanation for pickiness. The idea was that children are natural rebels, so they want to, you know, assert their independence through food, and that others, especially, should stay out of their children’s food choices.

This actually surprised me doing the research. You don’t really see people talk about taste buds or texture until really the last quarter of the 20th century, as the dominant explanation for why children need special food.

So it’s been this really long development which, again, has made it really powerful, because people have lost the lived experience of: well, I grew up in a world where nobody was picky. No one can say that today. I mean, unless they from a different country.

In fact, I’ve heard from a lot of immigrants writing this book, or people in other countries, who have said: you know, I had a totally different experience at the same time. Childhood pickiness is now spreading around the world, which is one reason that I think there’s some urgency here.

Building off that last part of the question, this is also a story about poverty, race, class, and geography. How has food and our relationship to it differed over time with respect to those elements (poverty, race, and so on) as opposed to leisure or education or the workforce? What’s uniquely food-specific about, say, racial or income inequality?

I think the most obvious thing that’s changed is that, until the 1960s, poor children, children growing up in economically disadvantaged households, were the least likely to be picky. And people just took that to be natural: well, of course poor kids aren’t picky because they have to eat what they’re given, there’s not enough food.

We’re in a really strange situation today where often—and I don’t know if there have been studies of this, but anecdotally, you hear it a lot—children in food-insecure households, children who don’t have enough to eat, or where food is scarce, or where there’s just general hardship in the household are often the most likely to be picky about their food.

And the explanations have been that, well, the parents in those households don’t have the luxury of buying food, offering it, and then throwing the food away.

But that, historically, is a very strange model. That’s a very modern way to approach child feeding, the idea that you would offer a food and if it’s not eaten, you would discard it.

People in the past never did that. They would just keep offering the food until it was eaten, or another family member would eat it.

This also gets to one of the questions that’s at the heart of this book. When we hear that children in the past didn’t used to be picky, most of us assume that it was because of scarcity.

We think children in the past, they ate broadly because they had to, that there wasn’t enough food to go around, so they forced down vegetables and other hated foods because those were the only alternative to starvation.

But one of the fascinating things about this history is that when you look in the past, you see that children’s lack of pickiness was a cross-class phenomenon in the 19th century.

Poor children, for sure, were eating eagerly and indiscriminately then. But so were children on prosperous farms, so were indigenous children living in situations of abundance, so were the wealthiest children, who were the children of tycoons in the Gilded Age,

None of them were picky. The idea that children can eat broadly was affecting all children, and in part, it did have to do with hunger. It was because even children who had plenty to eat overall tended not to snack very much between meals.

They tended to get much more exercise and physical activity than children do today, so they would come to meals with a roaring appetite, the kind where if you’ve ever gone grocery shopping on an empty stomach, you know that all kinds of food just suddenly looks so good to you.

That used to be the basic model for how people approached meals.

At the end of the day, I’m a political scientist who writes about problems of policy—especially concerning kids and families. So I read you book and my question goes to: do we have a policy problem here? If so, what are some solutions?

I think there are lots of policy implications here. I will say for any listening parents, if you have the ability to do so, you don’t have to wait for policy.

I think there’s incredible power that can be created through family culture to create environments that are similar to those in the past that can encourage children to try new foods, not to offer alternative foods, to avoid snacking, to be enthusiastic about food, to reward kids for eating vegetables. There are all sorts of things that families can do.

However, on a bigger scale, policy changes would be incredibly important for changing the larger structures that families operate within. On the biggest bird’s-eye view imaginable, one is trying to create more reasonable work schedules for parents, and maybe for all Americans. You know, work-life balance is tragically out of whack for many people.

People just don’t have a lot of time to spend with their families in many cases. We also live in a culture of busyness, even among often middle-class parents. Kids are highly scheduled, parents don’t often have time to eat with their kids, that can all contribute to more pickiness.

I also believe strongly and have for my entire career, in the power and potential—really landscape-changing power—of teaching cooking in public schools. For years, I have been an advocate of returning Home Ec to public schools.

We don’t have to call it Home Economics. It doesn’t have to include sewing, as far as I’m concerned. It should certainly be for all children and not gendered, as it often was in the 20th century.

But I think teaching cooking in public schools is one of the most important things that we could do. Both to improve public health in general, because cooking is such a potent tool in getting people to avoid highly processed food and fast food and other food that’s not great for our health. But also, cooking in public schools could be a mechanism of teaching children to enjoy a range of foods that they might not have tried before. It can be a way of inculcating taste and an awareness of foods that can be a source of pleasure for kids.

So that’s a very important area of policy. The one other thing I’d say that’s the low-hanging fruit here is to change the way our subsidy system works.

Currently, farm subsidies disproportionately, overwhelmingly, are supporting things like corn and soy, which, in practice are the basis of processed and fast food. You go into the middle of the grocery store, the package sections, you know, the majority of it is made with subsidized corn and soy products.

It does not have to work this way. We can subsidize vegetables, we can make vegetables more affordable to working families.

There are all sorts of policy things we can do to try to get healthier food to make it easier to buy it, easier to cook it. And I would love to see programs that are teaching people to love these foods.

Because one of the things is that if we’re just working within the family, and if the model is children should eat what their parents eat—and generally, I think that’s an excellent model—if the parents have really narrow palates, they have narrow diets, they’ve grown up with really limited foods, and may be picky themselves, then there’s limited benefit that will come from that.

Trying to teach people to like new foods is something they’re experimenting with in Europe and other places. I think there’s a lot of really interesting things that could come of this.

“Teaching cooking in public schools is one of the most important things that we could do.”—Helen Zoe Veit

There are a few pages devoted specifically to milk. I have to ask: what do you make of MAHA [RFK Jr’s Make America Healthy Again initiative]? Should we be drinking raw milk? How do you make sense of our relationship to food and nutrition today or, if you prefer, how do you think future historians or even your future self looking back and writing 20 years from now will look at today?

I think the MAHA movement is a fascinating movement as a scholar. It’s really a big tent movement that I think is a sign of a larger sense across American culture that things in our food system are not working as they should. They’re not ideal. There are so many diseases, chronic diseases related to obesity and to other parts of our food system are now the leading killer of Americans.

It’s a growing problem that I think people are only increasingly aware of: the many, many problems in our food system.

That being said, certainly as a historian, there are parts of the MAHA movement that are very troubling. For example, I have never met a 19th century U.S. historian who is anti-vaccine.

You don’t have to spend a lot of time in the 19th century to realize that whatever risks vaccines may pose, an unvaccinated population is cataclysmic for children—about a quarter of children died.

With milk, you know, in the book, I talk about milk because the push to get children to consume large amounts of milk was so important in making them less hungry and less eager to try new foods, and less appreciative of new foods.

Today, the claims about raw milk are similar to some other claims within MAHA, which is to say they’re not well-substantiated with research. There’s a lot of really exaggerated claims about what raw milk can do.

That being said, I’m part French, by marriage, my husband’s part French, so I’m a French citizen. I’ve spent a lot of time in France, and I’m a huge proponent of changing US laws around raw milk cheese, having nothing to do with health, but having everything to do with taste and pleasure.

Our current US laws around cheese are really limited. In most states, you can’t buy fresh raw milk cheese because of potential risks from bacteria, which are real risks—there are all sorts of potentially negative bacterias and harmful bacteria in cheese, just as there are in raw oysters and sushi and other things that are perfectly legal.

But the problem is that cheese is made of bacteria and when we have to pasteurize the milk, you kill much of the wonderful bacteria that creates all these wonderful tastes. So, in terms of cheese, I would love to see those particular laws changed.

“When people hear about trying to teach children to eat more broadly, most people they bring out the battle metaphors. They talk about standoffs and battles and showdowns at the dinner table and that is not how it has to be.”—Helen Zoe Veit

Last question. What haven’t I asked you about? What else do you want readers to know about the book?

I think if there is a through-line in my work as a historian generally, and if there’s a theme in this book, it’s pleasure.

That can be surprising to people, because when they hear about trying to teach children to eat more broadly, most people they bring out the battle metaphors. They talk about standoffs and battles and showdowns at the dinner table and that is not how it has to be.

Parents in the 19th century rarely talked about discipline or anything like that when it came to food. They just talked about children as joyful, omnivorous eaters.

All the talk about discipline really came into being in the 20th century, when mass pickiness was emerging, and 20th century parents just often didn’t know what to do. So they often tried some kind of ham-handed, draconian methods to get their kids to eat. You know, you stay at the table till you finish.

With my own children, raising them from birth with this very different countercultural model around food, we didn’t have much conflict around food at all. It was mainly about teaching them to love food from an early age. Structure was necessary, including not offering alternatives, which is something that’s very difficult for many Americans to hear today, because they’ve been told that it’s psychologically harmful.

I mean, that’s kind of the crux. Parents today are just trying to do the best they can. They’ve been told that if you push your kids too hard, if you don’t offer alternatives, that’s cruel, that’s psychologically harmful, there’s no evidence for that. Literally, there has never been a rigorous comparative study of the psychological outcomes of children raised under different feeding models.

This is all kind of these Freudian rumors that have been circulating for 75 years now. We’ve been told that children’s food, as packaged and sold in supermarkets, is child-pleasing. But the great irony is that that model of feeding children has actually resulted in such a constriction of children’s pleasure, in such a narrowing of the foods they take pleasure in, and it’s been incredibly stressful for parents.

And so, I think there’s a lot of good news in this book, because we have these models of how people used to parent in the past, how children used to eat, that resulted in vastly more pleasure and vastly less stress for parents and children alike.

Once again, the book is Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History, by historian Helen Zoe Veit.

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Tonight marks Holy Thursday, or Maundy Thursday, in the Christian Tradition. It’s the night we commemorate the Last Supper, and Jesus Christ’s Agony in the Garden. Last night, Passover began in the Jewish tradition, commemorating the end of slavery and exodus from Egypt for the ancient Israelites.

It’s an incredibly important spiritual week for many Americans—both those who support what Donald Trump and his regime are doing to this country, and those who are working actively to oppose it.

I’ve been writing and speaking about Christian Nationalism for several years now, but my expertise is more specific to the policy side of their priorities: education plans, programs concerning families and children, that sort of thing. My first book, The Privateers, was about a very important Christian Nationalist policy priority: school vouchers for religious education.

To mark this week for this newsletter, I wanted to talk to someone who’s a true expert in Christian Nationalism more generally and ask: what is Christian Nationalism? What are its goals? Where is the movement going? How do we think about what’s happening right now in the United States?

So today I’m talking with the sociologist Andrew Whitehead, author of American Idolatry: How Christian Nationalism Betrays the Gospel and Threatens the Church and, with Samuel Perry, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States. I think Andrew is one of the sharpest writers and thinkers on this topic working today, and I’m glad we’ve had a chance to connect this week, of all weeks, to learn what he has to say.

Watch the video or read our chat below—as always, only lightly edited for length and clarity.

A Conversation with Andrew Whitehead

We’re talking about Christian Nationalism today. Let’s level-set. I’m a political scientist and a policy analyst by training so when I talk about Christian Nationalism I’m especially focused on the idea that various right-wing organizations want to use politics and policy to remake America in the image of this very specific, evangelical and white-centered version of “Christianity.” But I’m wondering what’s your working definition of Christian Nationalism for starters here?

It's good to be with you. I think when we’re talking about Christian Nationalism, there’s a number of ways that we can kind of think about it and look at it. So [one is] the way that you’re talking about it, too, this network of people and groups that have this specific aim, and they’re working at high levels, well-funded—that type of thing. So it is this network.

But the work I’ve been involved in for quite some time now, too, is also looking at Christian Nationalism as this ideology: how prevalent is it among the American public, right? Because you can have groups, but can they actually speak to a particular group of people, get them out to vote? Those types of things.

And I’m focused on, too, with everyday Americans, what what do they see and think? And so Christian Nationalism, the empirical definition, after all these different surveys and research, is an ideology that’s committed to fusing together a very particular expression of Christianity with American civic life. It demands that government at all levels preserve and defend this fusion as being central to our national identity, and determining which Americans truly belong.

Because what you’ll see a lot of times is folks, politicians, whoever else, religious leaders saying, well, Christian Nationalism, this is something that’s just made up by whoever—the left academics, that type of thing. Like, I’m a Christian, and I am patriotic, and that’s all Christian Nationalism means.

But that isn’t what we find over and over in the research. The key here is that, as you stated too, the desire is to infuse what they would call biblical principles into American civic life. And it may seem innocuous, but the question then is, well, which biblical principles, why those principles, and then how are we excluding people who aren’t religious, who aren’t Christian?

And so, when we’re looking at Christian Nationalism, again, the key is it’s a desire to privilege a very particular expression of Christianity, and using the lever of government to really defend and preserve that.

Christian Nationalism is an ideology that’s committed to fusing together a very particular expression of Christianity with American civic life. It demands that government at all levels preserve and defend this fusion as being central to our national identity, and determining which Americans truly belong.—Andrew Whitehead

I understand you grew up in an evangelical community. I grew up in a Catholic community and in fact one affiliated with the same Catholic covenant community as Amy Coney Barrett. But there was some real emphasis on mission work, on poverty, and on maintaining your intellect—in the service of God, yes, but not at a loss of your own humanity. I look at so much of the Christian Nationalist support for Trump—embrace of Trump—and it’s not only horrific but it’s manifestly un-Christian. Do you see Trump and Christian Nationalism as necessary to each other right now in American politics? Is there any other way this could have gone?

Yeah. In in my second book, American Idolatry, I am kind of writing to a Christian audience as somebody who grew up in this space, northern Indiana, a very religious area, and it really was kind of the the air that everyone was breathing, right?

There was no reason for me to question this idea of, yeah, the United States is a Christian nation, and everything we do is, you know, because God is on our side, that type of thing. And so, growing up in that space, I really knew it from the inside out. And then as I went off to college and then went to graduate school and started learning sociology, social science, and that methodology, I was really interested in how culture shapes religion and how religion shapes culture.

I knew that viewing the world in this way, just because I had grown up in it and how powerful it is: when you believe the U.S. is a Christian nation, that is going to affect how you see war, economic policy, school policy, that you’re an expert in, right? All these different areas, it’s going to affect it. And so I just kind of then turned and used those [social science] methods to kind of examine this.

And what we found and what I found over and over is that it really is powerful in shaping how folks see almost every aspect of social life. It is an organizing principle for the way they see the social world. And then I think in regard to the current moment, it really is necessary [to understand] what we’re living through.

Christian Nationalism has been with us, obviously, for centuries, in this country, and even before. But this iteration of it is really flavored by the rise of the Religious Right in the 1970s, as they were responding to the cultural upheaval of the 1960s. And so Trump really is just a very natural endpoint to what was happening with the Moral Majority and trying to draw evangelicals, but particularly white evangelicals, into the Republican fold. To really bring this together as a voting bloc within the Republican Party.

And Trump is the perfect distillation of the work that they were doing. Because for them it was truly about political power. And while GOP presidents from Reagan to both Bushes would talk about our country and its religious roots, and also be religious themselves, Trump really is all about, yeah, I’ll give you power.

And that’s what this group wants: political power to be able to leverage, to ensure that their particular expression of Christianity is privileged. And so it isn’t about Trump being necessarily religious. But that he’s the one that’s going to put them close to the levers of power.

And they have celebrated that. So if we remember, Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, when Trump was a candidate the first time, he’s like, we just want somebody to punch the bully in the mouth. We don’t need somebody that’s religious like us, we need somebody who’s gonna fight for us. And I think that’s where Trump is at for them in this current moment.

[Ed Note: for more on the Family Research Council in education policy, and its relationship to the DeVos family, see my book The Privateers; for a more general analysis, see Katherine Stewart’s book The Power Worshippers]

I want to talk about Pete Hegseth who is, in my mind, the most prominent Christian Nationalist in power. JD Vance is something else—we can do another chat on him one day! But Hegseth is out there right now sporting Bible quotes to justify the war in Iran and specifically the violence in Iran. But not just any Bible quotes. The stuff that summons warfare, strength, power: Christ as King and Conqueror, not the Christ who humbled himself, not the Christ who wept at Lazarus’s grave. What do you make of Hegseth in general and his use of the Bible right now from the Pentagon podium?

I think this is a great question. I think Pete Hegseth, and then Mike Johnson as well is another person that we’ve been tracking, that kind of in these top positions of power that really embody what Christian Nationalism is, and shows what it’s all about.

You made a point there that I think is really important, where the Bible is a very flexible resource, right? So no matter what expression of Christianity, the Bible can be drawn upon to show and define this is what we should do and how we should do it.

Christian Nationalism really is about making space to protect “true American citizens,” from whatever threats might be out there. And again, defining those as key. And so Christian Nationalism really provides a framework to do that through the threat of violence or through violence to defend, yourself, your family, your country— because the world within this cultural framework is viewed as a dangerous place. And sometimes we need good guys with guns to go in and restore order.

A really great book, I know that you’re obviously familiar with, and probably many of the folks that follow you is Kristin Du Mez’s book, Jesus and John Wayne. She’s following the thread of this militant masculinity within American Christianity, and that is wrapped up in the cultural elements of Christian nationalism, where over and over again, we’re looking for: who are our enemies, right? And defining who we are against them. Because the quickest way to know what we’re all about is to know what we’re not, and to kind of sow fear and threat from those groups, that we need to fight back, protect ourselves.

So we look to movies like Gladiator or Braveheart and these Christian leaders were like, we need to be like this, right? Through violence, you protect your group, the in-group. And then—I’m sure you heard these stories, too—I know I did growing up in Christian spaces of David and Goliath, or Israel’s battle in the Old Testament. God was always on their side. They needed to use violence to restore order, to restore God’s hierarchy, and His plans.

And sure, they say, Jesus never fought back, but how realistic is that today? We can look to the future, because when Jesus comes back—as they interpret the Book of Revelation—He’s going to come back and destroy his enemies. We’ll look to that Jesus, not the one that had to die and proclaim peace and serve our enemies.

So they look to the Bible, as they find those places that help reinforce the narratives that they’re into and want to forward: it’s good over evil through violence if and when necessary. And to use that violence to protect power. To serve the in-group. So altogether, Christian Nationalism provides that framework of, we want power to serve us, we’re afraid that they’re gonna come take it, so we need to use violence in order to protect and enact that power.

One thing that we find over and over in the empirical data is that both race and gender are central cultural elements of Christian Nationalism. —Andrew Whitehead

I don’t think you can go wrong looking for a through-line around the issues of race, especially, but also gender when it comes to motivating right-wing politics right now. This kind of stupid, performative masculinity that’s anything but biblical: you have to go back to David and to my namesake, Joshua, to find warrior-heroes in the Bible and you have to ignore that Jesus revealed his resurrected self to women. How do you connect race and gender in American politics right now to the world Christian Nationalists want to make or remake?

One thing that we find over and over in the empirical data is that both race and gender are central cultural elements of Christian Nationalism. And what I mean by that is, again, when we define Christian Nationalism, it’s this desire to elevate one particular expression of Christianity. And what that means is that when Americans hear this idea, or see the words, you know, “Christian nation” or advocating Christian values, we’re able to determine what what’s going on in their minds when they see Christian there.

What we know is that it isn’t just about the divinity of Jesus or the kind of other Orthodox aspects of the historic Christian faith. When they see “Christian,” this other—what I like to call this extra-cultural baggage—comes with it, that is particular to that particular expression of Christianity within Christian nationalism.

And so there are two aspects, two cultural elements that are key. One is a desire for traditional social hierarchy. And this tends to revolve around gender and sexuality. There are people at the top, in the middle and at the bottom of American society. But the strongest nation, right? The U.S., if it’s going to be strong, it needs to have men leading, women submitting and supporting men—and they need to be married. But only heterosexual married. Marriage, having lots of kids, the pronatalists. And this is a key to a strong nation.

So those families and people that represent this ideal will have the easiest access to civil rights and social benefits. Those that are further out? They can live here, but they won’t be the true Americans that we want to see. So there’s one aspect.

Another is a commitment to strong ethno-racial boundaries. A lot of this is due to when Christianity first came to these shores, having to make sense of the Brown people that we need to push off this land, and the Black people that we’re enslaving. How do we understand what we’re doing to these groups?

So this idea of this Christian group and nation is that, well, being white and Christian is God’s design and desire for this people group. We see over and over that Americans who embrace Christian Nationalism are more likely to see, you know, racial diversity as a hindrance to this nation. Or that immigrants and refugees aren’t true representations of what it means to be an American, because of their skin color, not because of their religion.

So when we look at Project 2025, for example, and the racial and gender and sexuality aspects of that, you see these two central cultural elements of Christian Nationalism at work.

I’ve been interested in Hegseth since well before he became Secretary of “War.” This is guy who wrote a book called “Battle for the American Mind” in 2022, just basically an entire screed against democracy as an American value, the need to return to what can only be called a Christian Nationalist vision of American culture, and the need to use education and schools to do that. I have my own thoughts on this but curious where you think education falls into the policy and political priorities for these folks.

Honestly, I’ve learned a lot from you working in this area and helping to connect those dots. But it is central, as you point out. Many see the education of the next generation as central to taking this country back or ensuring that this nation stays on the right track to reach that aspiration of this Christian nation.

Looking at the history of the Religious Right—the current moment really is flavored by the rise of the Religious Right—we know with that history that education and schools have been central and that connects, too, to the question we were just talking about with race. Brown v. Board of Education and integrating public schools was a formative event in galvanizing this response for the political and Religious Right. Then a little bit later, well, you know, all these private segregation academies pop up.

The IRS revoking the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University was also central to the rise of the Religious Right. It gets couched in this idea of the federal government imposing itself upon you. Nothing to do with race, necessarily. It’s the fact that the federal government is imposing itself when in fact it actually had to do with race. And so, yeah, schools have been a flashpoint for we need to ensure that we’re teaching this future generation our culture, our values, our beliefs.

So creating alternatives to public schools, weakening public schools, alternative curriculums, free educational materials, making that widely available that really tell “the truth” about American greatness and who we are.

This has been a formative aspect of evangelicalism, focusing on schools and education. But as we look even more broadly, the creation of kind of alternative institutional structures is key to what we see happening here.

Yeah, with Christian nationalism. Yeah, it’s been a key part of what they see for the future to ensure that we’re on the right track and ensuring that the next generation is in line with what they want to see take place.

This has been a formative aspect of evangelicalism, focusing on schools and education. But as we look even more broadly, the creation of kind of alternative institutional structures is key to what we see happening here with Christian Nationalism.—Andrew Whitehead

I want to close with a wrap-around question around wealth and power. Jesus talked about wealth more than any other issue in the Gospels accept the kingdom of heaven. The longest conversation he has on record, to use a modern term, is with the Samaritan woman at the well. We have a Pope now who is directly challenging notions of wealth and power and the use of Christian faith to pursue both. But that’s pretty directly going against the organizing principle of Christian Nationalism, is it not? Where do you think this all heads going into not only the second half of Trump’s term but what comes next for this country?

There’s a lot there to work with, because as we look at Christian Nationalism, and I write about in American Idolatry, three of the central idols of Christian Nationalism are power, fear, and then violence. Wealth and power are wrapped up together, and as we look at our history, much of the desire for self-interested power, defending power for “us,” is to defend and preserve unequal access to resources and wealth, right?

So freeing slaves means that we would lose all this economic benefit, and so we don’t want to do that, or pushing native peoples off their lands means we now have access to their resources. And if you look globally, this is happening too. So I think those are always tightly intertwined.

Then through the 20th century, Kevin Kruse, in his book, One Nation Under God, is really great, looking at capitalism and how that plays a central role. Billy Graham was tapped to help spread the gospel of capitalism as God’s perfect economic system by really wealthy capitalists who were like, we need to defend our wealth against these creeping ideals of the New Deal and socialism and communism and all those things. And so, this is part of that history in the modern iteration of Christian Nationalism.

That’s actually another central cultural element is this preference for neoliberalism and capitalist ideals. As you’re pointing out. And something that I explore and write about, too. One of my most read posts on Substack is titled “Christians Will Have Power” and Other Things Jesus Never Promised, right? Because as He goes into the wilderness, the Deceiver says, hey, I can give you every kingdom of the world, and He says no.

His relationship to power and turning away from that is key, but many Christians, and I think Christian Nationalism, really is so centrally focused on power and defending access to it because it defends wealth. That’s always going to be a key part of it.

As we look towards the future and where we’re going in this country, you know, Christian Nationalism and those cultural elements will still be really powerful in motivating people towards this desire for particular ethno-racial boundaries around national identity—a traditional social hierarchy. And lifting up capitalism and neoliberalism, which really does tend to benefit those with a lot of resources already.

That’s going to continue to be a part of it, and we’re going to see that taking place. And so I think for folks of all or no religious faith, [the question is]: how do we live in this moment, or what do we do to respond to Christian Nationalism?

I think it really is focused on exercising the reach that we have to political power now within the democratic process to ensure that those who are marginalized are brought into the discussion.

What can we do to leverage the power and privilege and everything that we have to ensure that this country works for all, right? Liberty and justice for all, and not just the “us” or the “we?” Because Christian Nationalism is ultimately focused on earthly power, self-interested power that serves us at the expense of others

Whereas a lot of expressions of Christianity, and of other world religions, and folks that are non-religious at all: a lot of those folks want to leverage political power and access to it to benefit those that don’t have power—for the benefit of others. That’s the way that we can think of how to respond and push back. Similar to, as you said, the Pope, who knows a thing or two about this.

Andrew L. Whitehead is Professor of Sociology and Executive co-Director of the Association of Religion Data Archives (theARDA.com) at Indiana University Indianapolis. He is a research fellow with the Charles F. Kettering Foundation and author of the award-winning books American Idolatry and Taking America Back for God with Samuel L. Perry. His Substack is titled American Idolatry.

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If you’ve been reading these newsletters—or you’re just now checking in—there are three broad themes.

The first is ongoing exploration of right-wing politics—especially around kids, families, and schools.

The second is regular conversation with policymakers, candidates, and other public figures on those issues.

The third is exploring different ways to push public education forward—both for its own sake, and for the sake of learning, but also as a proactive response to a hostile right-wing agenda that uses schools to transmit their own vision of American society.

It’s within that last theme that I sat down to talk to the filmmaker, author, and former venture capitalist Ted Dintersmith. Ted is a former NEA Friend of Education—joining Dolly Parton, Quinta Brunson, Malala Yousafzai and, well, yours truly in receiving the award for service to public education.

He’s written a new book called Aftermath: The Life-Changing Math That Schools Won’t Teach You. It’s a fascinating—and fun—read. It reminded me of Freakonomics.

And I thought about that connection before the actual author of Freakonomics, Steve Levitt, blurbed Aftermath, saying:

"In the age of AI and data, we badly need to rethink the way we teach math in U.S. schools. Dintersmith has joyfully illustrated how we can pull the subject out of irrelevance in the eyes of our students — a must read for teachers and parents alike."

Last week, reports emerged that social conservatives are lobbying red states to change their math standards to require more memorization. Using math standards developed by an assistant (e.g early career) professor at Hillsdale College, the National Association of Scholars is urging more memorization, simplicity, and rigor. The group is turning to math after pushing science standards and, initially, social science standards that stressed the “American birthright” of liberty.

So one way or another, math is a new target for reform. And that kind of rote memorization of math tasks is exactly what Ted writes against in Aftermath—he talks about it in our chat too.

You can watch my conversation with Ted Dintersmith in the video at the top of this page, or browse our interview below.

Lightly edited for length and clarity.

Here’s My Conversation with Aftermath Author Ted Dintersmith

I am happy to be joined here today by Ted Dintersmith. We’re going to talk about his new book, Aftermath: The Life-Changing Math That Schools Won’t Teach You. Sounds like a provocative title. I’ve read this book. I think of it as kind of a Freakonomics for math and math education,

I’d love to hear more about what Ted has to say, but I have gotten to know Ted over the last couple of years as we’ve both been out there in the public space talking about schools, improving schools, what public schools can be doing.

Ted Dintersmith, how are you, man?

I’m doing fine, and great to be here. Always great to see you, Josh.

I want to ask before we get to the book itself, just a little bit about your background. You’re a venture capitalist, you've worked in a lot of different industries, and you got interested in education over the last, what, decade? More than a decade, 20 years, something like that? So tell me a little bit about that before we get to the book itself.

Yeah probably 15 years ago. So the short version: my whole career was tied to technology innovation, so I have a fairly good sense of what it can do and how fast it’s getting better.

And when my kids got to middle school, which was around 15 years ago, I started to look at what they were being pushed to get good at, and what they were being discouraged about. And I realize it’s all upside down: that they were being pushed to get good at rote skills, to take tests that reward speed, accuracy, and the ability to pick the right multiple-choice answer on an exam expressly designed to be graded by a computer.

What I knew, even back then, was if a computer can grade it, it can do it. And I’m saying, like, wait a minute: the thing that gets you on the honor roll, the thing that defines school success, the thing that defines not just a child’s success, but a teacher’s, a school’s, a district’s, a state’s success, are these low-level things that are exactly aligned with what machine intelligence does perfectly.

Which started me on this journey. And I started with, and I’m a big believer, as you know, in film. And I’m proud of the films we’ve produced, Most Likely to Succeed, premiered at Sundance. You know, I turned down Netflix, they wanted to buy the film and I instead took it to communities. That film has been screened by over 10,000 communities. That’s a big reach. And we have a new film out called Multiple Choice, but I’ve been itching to write this book about math, for a long time, partly because I’ve spent a lot of time in the math world, so I think I have quite strong math credentials.

We use math as half of our high-stakes accountability measures. You know, whenever policymakers or journalists, or often parents talk about the quality of a school or a district or a state, they immediately go to math and reading scores.

I think the chase for reading scores has largely made kids hate reading.

The book focuses on math. We [in the U.S.] blow up tiny declines in test scores, and turn them into a national catastrophe. But when you actually look at the questions tested, it’s tied to an obsolete body of math that no adult uses.

I felt like somebody needs to step up to this, because math should engage, empower, and elevate kids. Instead, it ranks, sorts, and mostly punishes kids.

We inevitably run into the block of, well, what will this do to our math and reading scores? When our accountability measures are all wrong, it’s not just that they’re not helpful. When they’re downright punitive and counterproductive, we can’t get school right. As much as our teachers want it to be right.

I also hope this book stands on its own right as being just plain interesting. It’s a book about math with almost no equations in it. It’s really better set as a book about math ideas.

The book pulls math out of irrelevance. It shows what it actually does for us and to us in life.

Let’s get into the guts of the book for a little bit. The book is structured with chapters linked to math topics. And I want to get to how we think about putting some of that out there in the policy space in a minute, but just inside the book: tell me how you built the book and how you chose these topics.

I have taken a lot of math in my life, and I spent way too many years in school, I will readily confess to that. But I ended up with a PhD in math modeling from Stanford.

What was interesting about that is, if you go back to that time—so I’m dating myself—but I was in grad school in the late 1970s, so basically 1975 to 81.

A lot of the math then: computers were sort of just getting going in life. That made for great papers. But now it’s everywhere. You know, you think about optimization routines that are all over our supply chains, or personal recommendation algorithms that determine what we read, what we watch,

And often what we believe. Those went from academic papers to the mainstream. I had that grounding, and it took me a long time. High school math, undergrad math, I got a master’s in physics to start. I took all these math courses but have never, ever, ever used any of the symbols or formulas—all the stuff that turns us off to math and makes most people feel in many ways that are important, that they’re not proficient or smart.

How many people say, well, I’m just not a math person? I think everybody is.

And I start every chapter intentionally with something I did or have observed with kids in grade 3 through 8. This is not graduate school stuff. This is stuff that anybody can do, and it makes for great dinnertime conversations, or walks, or car drives, or if you’re a teacher, you can splice some of this into your classroom to get people more interested.

But these concepts actually are unbelievably important.

So some of these chapters and concepts are statistics and probability. I teach some of that myself. I can see how some of that’s fitting into, you know, even elementary school instruction. But some of the other chapters, especially later in the book: optimization, prediction, probability. Maybe stuff that you know, and I know a lot about. But what about a third grader? What’s a fifth grader need to know about optimization theory and about decision analysis?

You would think nothing, right? I mean, most people are going to immediately say, you’re on to an interesting point: why does anybody need to know that?

But I have in the optimization chapter this unbelievable challenge. I came across it in a very low-income area in Hopewell, Virginia where they give each kid 10 bucks, and their goal is to use their money to make Hopewell better. They have a couple constraints. You know: you can’t do anything illegal. Good constraint. And you can’t get somebody to just give you money:: it’s gotta be money you generate somehow.

Then you let these kids go. Now, they’re not learning linear programming math behind optimization. But they’re learning the concepts of what is my goal, what constraints do I absolutely have, and what constraints do I perceive that I have?

That actually turns out to be incredibly important to people in the field of education: what are things you’d love to do with your life, and what do you perceive as holding you back? And then think yourself, and solicit feedback. Do those things really hold you back?

I cite a very specific example. This was done several years ago, but the Nellie Mae Foundation pulled together a room full of about 50 principals. They said, what are the regulations in your area—district, state, federal—that absolutely keep you from doing what you want to do?

And then Nellie Mae had some of their staffers go out and reach them: 70% of what those leaders thought was an ironclad constraint didn’t exist.

I mean, we go through life thinking we can’t do this because of X. And so it’s that idea of being clear: what’s your objective? Being clear: what holds you back? Being thoughtful: how can I make progress toward my objective on a daily basis, without violating my ironclad constraints, but also bulldozing through things that really don’t hold me back?

That’s optimization.

Book titles get put together for lots of reasons. I don’t want to hold you too much to this. But the subtitle of Aftermath is: the “life-changing math that schools won’t teach you.” So I actually want to take this in 2 parts. The life-changing math piece. You’ve talked a little bit about this now. A lot of the folks that listen to what I have to say, or read my stuff, are very policy-oriented people thinking about policy, thinking about politics.

I think you can, even if you aren’t one of those people, you could read this book—it’s a very fun read, frankly—if you’re a parent and you want to remember something about math. Or you want to encourage your kid to try some math out. So that’s the life-changing math piece, I think you talked a lot about. But the second part of it is this, the “schools won’t teach you piece.”

So I guess my question for you is both internally to the book, but also just how you think about and operate in the world and what you want the book to achieve. Is it that schools won’t teach it? Is it that they can’t? Is it that like we’ve got this larger structural problem in education that makes us hate math?

Great question. I will say, I agonize over titles for my films and books, and I thought about calling this “What Math Could Be”to sort of follow in the footsteps of my last book, What School Could Be.

But I loved Aftermath, because it actually has two definitions, right? The consequences of a disastrous experience, which for most people, high school math was a disastrous experience. And then a fertile second-growth crop, which I try to bring to readers in the book.

But I thought hard about the choice of words. Could schools teach this? Absolutely. Do lots of math teachers and other subject teachers— would they absolutely lean into this?

For sure. One of the things that got me going on this was the 2022 NAEP scores, and how unbelievably botched the interpretation of those scores was, and how it set us back.

The second thing was this interview with somebody in a position of enormous power to influence math education. And in the interview, and this was quoted in The New Yorker, and it’s quoted in my book. He said, well, math is unique among all disciplines because there is always one right answer in math.

“Always one right answer.” And I said that the only reason he would say that is he has no understanding of math.

Going back to my graduate school program, the best course I took was The Art of Mathematical Modeling. So I wrote an entire book about all these great math ideas that beg for creativity, beg for curiosity. The teachers would love to teach,

And students would love to take on.

But they don’t lend themselves to a high-stakes, multiple-choice exam.

We can’t keep making kids march through things that we know they’re not gonna use in ways that mostly punishes them, blocks life paths, eats up, and consumes all the oxygen from all the important things they could learn.—Ted DintersmithAuthor, Aftermath: The Life-Changing Math That Schools Won’t Teach You

To that point, in the program evaluation community, the people whose job it is to work with state departments of education, and researchers, and so on, they’ll actually point to math, whether it’s on NAEP or some other standardized test score. They’ll say “if you only had one subject that you could use to study, say, school effectiveness, you would pick math.” Because the assumption is that students are getting less math instruction in their home environment as they might in, say, reading. Whereas math is much more carefully defined in schools. We can call that the school effect. Do you think that’s the right way to think about that?

I think that what they’re really saying is we love math because it’s easy to test. You know, if we just go back to before we had computers, back when people did actually have to know how to factor a polynomial: that little math micro-tidbit of how you factor X cubed minus 3x squared plus 2X minus 5 is perfect for, you know, a state-mandated math exam or an SAT, or the ACT math section, or the Nation Report Card section.

But nobody does that, right? I mean, that’s the point. If I had to make one point, I’ve got this graphic that’s basically the concepts covered in high school math, beyond ratios, fractions, decimals, and percentages. It’s 75 terms. I put that in front of audiences easily of more than 100,000 people and ask, can anyone find one thing on this chart that they use regularly and can explain?

No one can. I mean, we don’t get up every day trying to factor polynomials, or having to use polar coordinate substitutions to solve a closed-form integral, or roll out the Taylor series expansion, or say, “oh yeah, I remember what an irrational number is, or yeah, what’s the cube root of minus 27?” And on and on and on.

And what you realize is that this is a massive amplifier of the gap, because the kids in well-off circumstances, with parents that can hire tutors, they will bribe their kid with an iPhone in schools that can actually find a math teacher who can bring this to life,

They’re gonna do better on that. And you could say all you want about AI tutors or video lectures, or whatever. But that’s not changing. And the kids that don’t have those advantages look at this—and I’m on their side—and say, I don’t see when I’m ever going to use this.

You know, there’s a reason we made a film, Stand and Deliver, about this calculus teacher in Los Angeles who got kids to like calculus.

If that were to happen everywhere, we wouldn’t make a film about it. It’s like these one-offs that make everybody say, “Oh my gosh, if we could just clone Jaime [the teacher] and put him in every high school.”

I’ll go off on this, because it’s important: You would not believe how hard I’ve tried to get college admissions officers off of the calculus bone.

I travel all the time, and I’ve given lots of talks. No one in America does closed-form integrals by hand today. I mean, maybe for kicks at home, or maybe if they’re tutoring their kid on you know, calculus.

But Boeing, their engineering group, car companies’ engineering groups, 3D…It’s all done computationally. Except that’s still the pinnacle of high school math. That’s still maybe the most decisive criteria to get into a more selective college. It’s often the prerequisite for medical paths, or business paths, or whatever: something that nobody ever uses!

And what does it cost us? Statistics. I’ll say to these college admissions officers: “would anyone here prefer an applicant who had taken statistics over calculus?”

No one. I walk them through. No one does close-form integrals by hand.

The ideas of calculus are really important, but they’re best taught in physics.

Statistics is enormously important for careers, and for informed, responsible citizenship. And bears on our most important finance and healthcare decisions.

How do you justify that? Their answer is: well the smart kids take calculus, so it gives us a nice, convenient way to rank them.

And I say: “if you guys just locked arms today and 150 of you walked out and said, from now on, we will not care very much about AP Calculus scores and care a lot about AP Statistics scores. Guess what all the kids would take? It’s in your power.”

But they don’t change it. And there’s not, I would bet, not a college admissions officer in the nation that could do a hyperbolic cosine transformation by hand to solve a closed-form integral. But that’s what you gotta get good at in calculus, and you never use it anywhere.

We can’t keep making kids march through things that we know they’re not gonna use in ways that mostly punishes them, blocks life paths, eats up, and consumes all the oxygen from all the important things they could learn.

I have a lot of readers and listeners who are educators, policy staff, state legislator types, some decision makers, and electeds who actually have hands on some of these levers that you and I are talking about. What would you like them to get from a book like this?

We have a choice, right? I would say to them—and this is not a math observation, but it’s a broad, general, important perspective—when you read that AI is coming for lots of jobs, take that unbelievably seriously.

It gets better and better by the week. And if you’ve played around with it 2 years ago, or you used the free version, or you just are a casual person that will say, oh, I heard it hallucinates or makes a mistake. You don’t understand.

This is super-duper serious, and we don’t have a lot of time to wait.

And if you say, well, we’re just fine with 2,500 hours of high school kids’ time on math they’re never going to use, because it’s nice for ranking kids, I mean, it’s irresponsible. It’s borderline criminal.

And so I would like those policymakers first to go look at some of the practice questions on the math exams that determine whether somebody can get a high school degree and ask themselves, could I do this? And would I ever, ever in a million years need to do this?

And if they take that seriously, they’ll say, I couldn’t do it, and there’s no reason why I need to do it, because I never use it, and if I did, for whatever bizarre reason, I just put PhotoMath or put it into ChatGPT and it would do it perfectly.

But also, those policymakers, honestly, I don’t think they understand the important math ideas. I don’t think journalists understand the important math ideas. And let me talk about one that’s in a chapter on predictions.

Two data sets are correlated. Most people couldn’t even begin to tell you what that means. When they’re correlated with some number,

Then you’ll see the inevitable study that says, Data shows that A is causing B. Well, I explained that two datasets could be correlated, Because it’s coincidence, and I have this example of mozzarella cheese consumption in the U.S. and the number of civil engineers produced.

I don’t think anybody thinks the key to getting more civil engineers is to chow down on mozzarella cheese. Coincidental.

Some are actually causal, but many are due to a shared underlying cause. And so when we say a better AP Calculus score means that the kid will do better in college, it’s not it’s not because somebody later in life is doing closed-form integrals by hand,

There’s a shared underlying cause. Family affluence, how much wealth, the budget for the school, the quality of the math teachers, whether you can cajole one way or another the kids to take it seriously.

It’s shared underlying cause.

I have enormous affection and admiration for our teaching force.

And we’ve done everything. I mean, my films, my books, like, it’s important to innovate, and I find teachers in the field are all in on that. But they run into this roadblock, where the more time they spend creating and inventing, or having their kids creating and inventing, it takes away from test prep.

And we’re worried, because if our reading or math scores drop by 0.5%, policymakers and journalists will make that sound like an unbelievable catastrophe.

On math, they’re never going to use, and with reading drills that make kids hate to read!

You can read more about Ted Dintersmith’s work, and the book Aftermath: The Life-Changing Math That Schools Won’t Teach You here, where you can order a copy. Also available at the usual online retailers. You can read more of Ted’s work with his Substack: ted dintersmith.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshcowen.substack.com/subscribe

One of the persistent themes in American politics right now is the influence of dark money on our elections and public policy. Especially dark money when it comes to corporate dollars, right-wing advocacy, and billionaire influence.

The entire point of my book The Privateers is that a handful of billionaires created right-wing think tanks to stand up arguments for specific policy priorities in education. Most notably, school vouchers.

But obviously the issue goes well beyond education. And we’re heading into a critically important election season. So to tie some of this all together I wanted to talk with an expert in campaign finance, law, and corruption.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy is a lawyer, professor at Stetson University College of Law, and an expert on election law, corporate governance, and campaign finance. She is also a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice—one of the most important organizations for safeguarding democracy in the United States.

Her most recent book is Corporatocracy: How to Protect Democracy from Dark Money and Corrupt Politicians.

I met Professor Torres-Spelliscy when we were both invited by Nikole Hannah-Jones to speak at the Democracy Summit organized at the Center for Journalism and Democracy, which Nikole had founded at Howard University.

NOTE: I’ve been asked by readers and subscribers to provide reading options for that chats we do here.

So in that spirit, you can watch my full conversation with Ciara Torres-Spelliscy in the video, or read an abbreviated version here (edited only for clarity and length).

My Conversation with Ciara Torres-Spelliscy

Let’s start with some background. One of your chapters is called “How corporations benefit from civil death?” Can you explain “civil death” and how that sets up the issue of campaign finance and corporate influence?

So, the concept of civil death is the collateral consequences that go along with felony convictions. As I explain in my book, Corporatocracy, the concept of civil death is a really old one. It goes back to ancient Greece and ancient Rome.

And essentially, if you committed a particularly heinous crime back in ancient Greece you lost all of these abilities to participate in civil life, including voting. And that old concept is alive and well in the United States today.

Corporations benefit from this in a number of different ways. Our 13th Amendment, famously, ends slavery, except for punishment for crimes. And that means that you actually can be put to slavery if you are convicted of a felony. That is part of your civil death.

And that means that corporations have the ability to have workers who are in prison, who are basically modern-day slaves. And this has its own history in the United States. Right after the Civil War, when we abolished slavery, we get convict leasing. Convict leasing was this ability to lease out convicts to corporations, and that happened for decades and decades and decades.

I think that lineage is sort of still alive and well today, because you have corporations who are using prison labor. Which means that their labor costs are either actually free in some instances, or way below market. It’s one of the ways that corporations undercut the minimum wage and get labor for a lot less than its true value.

But, another way that civil death is still with us is prisoners in the United States lose their right to vote in 48 states. The only place where you can vote while you’re incarcerated is Vermont, Maine, and DC.

Everywhere else, while you’re incarcerated, you cannot vote. In many states, even after you’re out and back in the community, you still can’t vote, including here in Florida.

I think corporations benefit from that because it changes the electorate. If you have a felony conviction in many states you cannot vote. In some states, it really is like a lifetime ban, and so I think corporations benefit from that.

Because people who might be against corporate interests, just can’t vote for policies that would hamper or hem in corporate greed. So corporations benefit both from the cheap labor, and from the changed electorate.

Is that the on-ramp to the conversation about corporations and politics? Like, a good chunk of the book itself is about corporate influence on politics through dollars. We’ll get to that in a second, but I thought this was sort of an interesting and really important way to kind of frame the conversation around this, because there’s a lot of folks talking about corporate influence on politics, but you’re beginning from a different place here with this kind of notion of civil death and the effect on the electorate and the effect on voting.

So, the inspiration for me writing this book was January 6th. And I wrote it during the Biden administration. Trump was president, he was running for re-election while I’m writing this book. And one of the things that struck me as someone who has to teach constitutional law, is there is no prohibition in our Constitution on convicted felons running for office.

And that got me to look at, well, what are the restrictions in our Constitution for people running for office? And that brought me to the disqualification clause. The disqualification clause basically says that if you are a oath-breaking insurrectionist, then you can’t run for office in the United States.

There was an enormous amount of litigation around this during the Biden administration, trying to get candidate Trump off the ballot for the 2024 election. That effort went all sorts of different places, so there were at least 31 litigations trying to get Trump off the ballot.

The one that got the furthest was in Colorado, so the Colorado Supreme Court, right at the end of 2023, kicked Trump off the ballot, and they kicked him off the ballot because the Colorado Supreme Court came to the conclusion that Trump had engaged in an insurrection on January 6th, and that was disqualifying for him under the 14th Amendment.

That then gets appealed to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court, in, I think, a very frustrating and sort of strange opinion, Trump vs. Anderson, says he’s not disqualified, because under our reading of the Constitution, no state can disqualify a candidate for the presidency.

That is a wild opinion to come to because our states run our federal elections. And they act as gatekeepers to make sure that everyone who’s on a presidential ballot, for example is 35, and is a citizen. You would think that they would also have the ability to disqualify oath-breaking insurrectionists, but here we all are: the Supreme Court 9-0 said no.

So, that leaves us in sort of a very strange place, and for me, all of this comes back to the question of civil death. Because while there are lots of different consequences for felons in terms of losing their civil rights, one of them that they do not lose is the ability to run for office, even federal office and even the presidency.

Alright so let’s get to the finance piece. And speaking of January 6th. You write in the book about some of the organizations (ALEC, Heritage Action and so on) behind the Big Lie, working closely with corporations. Where do these “non-profit” or political organizations and their various tax structures fit specifically into the general problem of corporate money?

Corporations have been trying to control American elections for a really, really long time. And there have been reactions from Congress and from state legislatures going back at least 100 years.

One of the things I think people misperceive about this is that corporations are actually banded from giving money directly to federal candidates under an old law called the Tillman Act. That’s an act from 1907, and it says that corporations cannot give to any federal candidate, including for the presidency.

But over the years, corporations have found many different ways of weaseling their way back in. And one of the ways that corporate money gets into politics is through the use of nonprofits. So, nonprofits are in this very weird liminal space where if you really looked at the tax code, then certain nonprofits shouldn’t be in politics at all. Those are the 501(c)(3)s, so that’s your basic charity. They are supposed to be completely nonpartisan and to stay out of elections entirely.

Then, there are the c4’s and c6’s, so the 501(c)(4)s are social welfare organizations. They can spend about 50% of their resources on politics, and the c6s are trade associations, they can also spend 50% of their resources on politics. My favorite trade association is actually the National Football League. They are a non-profit, which is sort of wild, given how much money the NFL has.

But nonetheless these groups, especially the c4’s, have played a really outsized role ever since, uh, the Supreme Court decided Citizens United in 2010 [editor’s note: the American Federation for Children, a group founded by Betsy DeVos and about which I’ve been critical in this space and in The Privateers, is a 501(c)4)].

So, the thing about these nonprofits is by placing them sort of in the middle, you create dark money. So dark money is money that is spent in politics where the public cannot tell what the original source was. The way that dark money is created is the following:

You either have your neighborhood billionaire or a corporation who doesn’t want to spend under their real name. And so, instead of spending under their real name, they give the money to one of these c4’s, and then the c4 spends it in politics. And the reason why that creates dark money is under the tax code, c4’s are generally allowed to keep their donors private. And this is where two parts of law overlap and sort of interfere with one another.

The norm in elections is that spending should be transparent. We get that from the Supreme Court, going back to Buckley v. Valeo, that there is a value in telling voters who is spending in politics.

Meanwhile, we have these non-profits who are pulling on a different line of case law. that allows for anonymous donations.

So, you use these c4’s, in politics, and that thwarts the transparency that you would otherwise have to figure out who is giving money.

They have been a huge source of dark money in recent elections. In the 2024 election cycle, there was around $2 billion of dark money, so whenever I’m asked who the biggest spender in the 2024 election is… my honest answer is I don’t know.

The related issue with nonprofits is not everything is captured by the campaign finance system. There are nonprofits like ALEC, which is the American Legislative Exchange Council, and ALEC has sort of a different mode of being than the dark money nonprofits.

With ALEC, they get together mostly Republican legislators from state legislatures. And they then partner them with corporations. And then what they do is they have these big conferences. And they invite both the Republican lawmakers and corporate representatives, and then they sit them in a room, and they write legislation together.

And some of the legislation that they’ve written together includes voter ID bills, and I think we’re now seeing the fruits of that at the national level, where we’re having a fight over the SAVE Act.

And I think the ultimate point of these voter ID laws is to disenfranchise otherwise completely lawful voters.

If I could ask about that specifically, about the SAVE Act in the news a lot, being debated this week in Congress. Because states run their own elections, as you said. So what is the kind of legal theory of action that the folks behind SAVE Act are trying to push to argue that Trump’s federal government should be involved?

In terms of federal elections, the Elections Clause of the Constitution gives the first cut to the states, but does reserve power to Congress to amend the time, place, and manner of how federal elections are run.

Depending on the way that, say, the SAVE Act is actually passed, you could have a lot of challenges on 10th Amendment grounds if they are trying to enforce it on state elections, because state elections have been the purview of states. States are allowed to have rules for their elections, and they run state elections. So because of efficiency, most states run their federal and state elections at the very same time. From the point of view of the voter, it looks like it’s one election, but it’s actually two different elections that have different constitutional roots to them.

One of the challenges that I think, if we get the SAVE Act, it will be subject to are federalism objections that this is overstepping what Congress can do. It’s possible that we might, you know, in a few years, end up with different rules for what you need to vote in a federal election compared to what you need to vote in your state or local elections, which would cause a bit of chaos.

A lot of the current language in Democratic politics is around billionaires. There’s certainly plenty left for corporations, but much of the focus has been on extreme individual wealth too. Good development and framing? Or should we be sticking with the corporate side.

Well, it’s an interesting question. Let me just give the thumbnail on Citizens United. Citizens United was a Supreme Court decision from 2010 where the Supreme Court decided that corporations could spend an unlimited amount of money in U.S. elections, so long as it was independent of candidates and political parties. So, what that then led to was the creation of what are known as Super PACs.

A Super PAC can take in money from any source except for foreign nationals, and then they can spend it in an unlimited amount. And one of the things that happened after Citizens United is while the biggest spenders for a very long time had been billionaires, not corporations, what we’ve seen post-Citizens United is actually corporate spending which, while still dwarfed by the billionaires, is now quite large.

So, in the 2024 election, the biggest corporate spenders were from cryptocurrency firms. And they were—for the new players on the block—wildly successful in getting their candidates of choice elected.

They intervened in the U.S. Senate from California race in the primary. They gloated about defeating Katie Porter, who was running for that race. They focused on Sherrod Brown who was a senator from Ohio, and then basically gloated about defeating him in the general election.

And they have been supporting both Democrats and Republicans, which makes them a little bit unique, so long as those politicians are “pro-crypto,” as in, they will allow for cryptocurrencies to continue to be very deregulated or not regulated at all.

That type of corporate spending can be just wildly effective in getting out good people who used to be in the government. And it can be wildly effective in getting the nose of the camel into the tent in terms of lobbying. Often what you see in the pattern over time is that corporations will spend an enormous amount of money getting certain people elected. And then after they’re elected, they show up with their lobbyists, and they ask for basically the payback.

There is this sort of misbalance and, you know, a David vs. Goliath problem that we have in terms of: there are public interest lawyers and public interest lobbyists, and people who work for the public good. But they are just outgunned and outnumbered and outspent by the corporate side.

What are you looking for in terms of campaign and political money heading into 2026, what’s the lay of the land? Lots of Democrats take the “corporate PAC pledge” and then turn around and set up side PACs of their own to take plenty of unlimited or at least less regulated high dollar contributions from corporate chiefs. What’s the cleanest approach right now?

A long time ago, corporations figured out one of the ways around the Tillman Act. So the Tillman Act means that corporations can’t give directly from a corporate treasury into the coffers of a federal candidate. But, they can spend through corporate PACs. So, a corporate PAC is created by individuals who are associated with the corporation.

So typically the employees of a particular corporate entity, especially the higher up the food chain, if you pull the donations from the average corporate pack, you’re going to see a lot of people with the title Vice President next to them. As in, they’re the vice president of operations at a particular corporation.

Technically, all of this is voluntary, so you have this corporate PAC, and the people who are associated with the corporation voluntarily give. But I think it is sort of indicative of trying to show your loyalty to the corporation, and that you see your future with this corporation, and thus why you would pony up your hard-earned dollars and give it to a corporate PAC.

And then that corporate PAC can spend in federal elections. The other thing that corporations are doing, which actually gets their corporate treasury funds back into the game, is giving to Super PACs. So, the ruse of the Super PAC is that it is nominally independent of candidates and political parties.

Now, in reality, it is ridiculous to think of these things as independent.

Like if you look at some of the fundraising that happens between candidates and Super PACs, often you have the candidate at the Super PAC event. So, it is completely nonsensical to think of that as independent.

Yet another weird thing that you see some federal candidates do is they will tape themselves for “B-roll,” and they will just put up all of these videos of themselves online walking by a lake, or petting a dog. It tends to be with no sound.

And the whole point of that is so that Super PACs can use that footage in their ads. And so, technically, the candidate hasn’t provided the footage directly to the Super PAC. But if you just, like, throw it up on YouTube, then it’s there for the Super PAC to take and use, however the Super PAC wants.

Now, to the question of the, “I’m taking no corporate money!” pledges.

A lot of times, these are individual candidates who wouldn’t get corporate money anyway. So, in some ways, it’s just a marketing ploy to say that they have taken no corporate money. Maybe true. But they might be not taking any corporate money, because there is no corporation that would fund them.

You book concludes with a bunch of recommendations. How do we fix this mess?

Well first and foremost, vote. If you are age 18, a US citizen, make sure that you’re registered to vote, and that you make a plan, and that you do vote in this year’s elections.

Now, beyond that in terms of solutions, I guess it always depends on how you diagnose the problem. If you think that this is a corporate law problem, then we could change corporate law. You could change the laws in places like Delaware, and you could say, corporations can’t spend corporate dollars in any type of election.

That would be one approach to this.

If you think it’s an election law problem, then you need to change things like the Federal Election Commission, and how they are run, and how they often turn a blind eye to violations of campaign finance laws.

If you think the problem is Citizens United, well, the only way we can get rid of a Supreme Court decision like that is the Supreme Court itself overrules Citizens United in a future case—that is unlikely given the makeup of the Supreme Court right now.

Or, you get a constitutional amendment. There have been many constitutional amendments proposed that would end Citizens United. And that is a grassroots effort that I think is largely overlooked and underestimated.

But many, many different states and many, many different cities have signed pledges to overturn Citizens United, and I think that is one of the things we might see, when all the dust settles from this period in history.

Until we fix all this, not just with corporate money in politics, but billionaire money in politics, we’ll have this problem for the foreseeable future.

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Hi everyone, I hope you’ll take a moment at some point over the next few days to check out this particular conversation.

I appreciated the chance to chat with the renowned Heather Cox Richardson about education history, politics, and policy.

We covered school vouchers, why the American Right is so obsessed with schools, and the importance of education to democracy and the American project.

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I had a chance to sit down at the end of last week with Bridget Brink, who served as Ambassador to Ukraine under President Biden—the first woman to serve as ambassador in a war zone.

Bridget is now running for Congress back home in Michigan, in a district that could determine control of the House.

We talked about Trump’s war in Iran, and what Putin’s ongoing aggression in Ukraine means both for international security and for Americans every day. We also covered Bridget’s campaign—why she’s running, and what she’ll do once she gets to Washington.

I couldn’t help myself: I also had to ask her about Netflix’s hit show The Diplomat.

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Earlier today I sat down with Elaine Godfrey from The Atlantic, who just returned from Texas after covering the Democratic primary between James Talarico and Jasmine Crockett.

I asked about that coverage, as well as her ongoing series reporting on conservative women in the MAGA movement, the Democrats efforts to build a “big tent,” and new groups like the Searchlight Institute making the case for heterodox approaches to winning elections.

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Thank you to all who tuned in live for the chat with Jason Zengerle!

To recap, Jason is a staff writer with The New Yorker, and author of Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind

In my twenties, I worked for Tucker and the other three hosts of CNN’s Crossfire, and saw first-hand many of the stories recounted in Jason’s new book.

Jason Zengerle and I went through Tucker’s origin story, his rise as a right-wing media figure, and the special role he plays in far-right conservative politics today. We also touched on Tucker’s role in Christopher Rufo’s career, and how racial resentment helps explain the Tucker Carlson phenomenon.

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Thanks to everyone who tuned into the chat with Katherine Stewart! You can watch the full conversation linked to this message.

To recap: Katherine’s the author of the New York Times bestseller Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy.

In just a half-hour, we went through a whirlwind of history on the Christian Right, billionaires, schools, and democracy itself.

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Thank you to everyone who tuned in live. Here’s our full conversation on how Milton Friedman’s DIY economy hurts kids and families across the country. Check out Jess’s book Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net for more.

On Thursday, watch for my next 5 Questions newsletter interview with MN State Rep. Kaela Berg, running for Congress in the Minneapolis suburbs. She talked about ICE raids in her city, working as a flight attendant while running for a competitive seat, leading in her union and what to do about schools.

-Josh

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshcowen.substack.com/subscribe