Christian white lady from Blaze TV explains how Mean Libruls and their "critical race theory" are forcing polite white folks to form a "White Identitarian movement"

Allie Beth Stuckey is part of Glenn Beck's Blaze TV operation, which of course is highly ideological and very conservative, even radical rightwing. She has a podcast in which she presents conservative views from a Southern Baptist perspective. In the recurring schisms in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) she currently seems to be on the right wing of the SBC, which is by general American standards, already very rightwing.

I'll start out by giving her credit for criticizing the creepy idea that Tucker Carlson recently proposed on his FOX News White Power Hour that public school classes should all be recorded on camera. In order to make sure the innocent white en aren't being poluted by "critical race theory" (CRT), the Republicans' latest bogeyman conspiracy theory, of course. "Critical race theory" as it used by the Republicans actually is code for "Scary Jews! Scary black people!"

The Republicans didn't go all in on the CRT conspiracy theory until this year. But now it's become the Republican "Tea Party" of 2021.

Stuckey had this to say, though (07/08/2021 YouTube post):

But she's with Blaze TV, and she's all in on pumping up the CRT scare, so I'm not going to take that as any sign of emerging liberalism on her part. Maybe she's just enough of an adult to recognize some of the ways that children could be hurt by this, including in ways that have nothing to do with what's being taught.

I'm linking to her recent video on CRT, not because it contains anything substantive, but because it shows a couple of things about the limitations of the CRT slogan that I found a bit surprising to see: Critical Race Theory: The Left Loves It ... But Doesn’t Understand It 07/09/2021.

The rightwing meme on CRT is a sleazy conspiracy theory, which not only incorporates another longtime conspiracy theory on the far right called "Cultural Marxism," but seems to be pretty much just a rebranding of it. I've posted numerous times about both on this blog. Here I'll just summarize the narrative. It claims that a group of Jewish Marxists in Germany in the 1930s came up with a theory about culture that later spawned something called "postmodernism" and Political Correctness and now CRT, and it's all about destroying capitalism and undermining White Pride.

As with any conspiracy theory, refuting it can have the unfortunate effect of spreading it. But when the US Republican Party makes a slogan like CRT central to their political identity as they are doing in the current moment, it's also not really possible for non-Republicans to completely ignore it.

The two things that most strike me about this presentation are (1) she seems to recognize that that some of the pushback from even mainstream liberals is likely to be effective for people who aren't besotted true believers in the Glenn Beck Republican Gospel, and (2) in trying to explain in more detail how terrible CRT is to give her listeners additional arguments to use, she winds up making the Republican CRT meme actually sound like the silly mush that it is.

Because once you get beyond CRT being scary anti-white-people stuff and start talking in the slightest detail about what the concept of "whiteness" means among the theorists she's condemning, you have to at least hint at the idea that race is a social construct that does is applied to defining and reinforcing social power relations. And that already starts to dilute the message of, "scary Jews! Scary black people!"

Once she starts actually laying out the arguments of the fairly narrow legal academic field whose advocates themselves call "critical race theory," she quotes arguments that involve more serious points than "white people are all evil," for instance in citing the book Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (Third Edition, 2017) by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. She uses the term "liberal order" as something she defends, which is sure to befuddle most of her audience. She says, "CRT rejects the idea of judging people by their individual actions and rather judges people by group and by the systems they uphold either actively or just complicitly [sic]." (29.00 in the video)

Anyone who reads a few pages of the Delgado-Stefancic book is likel to see right away that the critical race theory that actually identifies with the name will see that it's an introduction to a specialized academic field. But Stuckey in that podcast spends a lot of energy into repeating that this is some kind of a comprehensive ideology that is Communism and Marxism in thin disguise. Maybe she didn't get to the page in the book that says, "Critical race theory has yet to develop a comprehensive theory of class." (Hint: Class is kind of a key concept in Communist theory. But, hey, class, race, oppression, colleges - it all sounds like icky Commie stuff, amirite?)

She repeats again and again with an arrogant smile that the CRT bugaboo is aimed at creating racial discrimination against white people, which FOX News viewers of course hear constantly, so most will just hear that and say, "Yeah, that's what I already knew." And if you're a self-righteous scold looking for ways to complain about black people in a respectable middle-class way, you might pick up a useful phrase or two.

But, apart from sporadically citing a couple of books published within the last 20 years, it's not really a whole lot different than what a Bircher or White Citizens Council fan would have been saying in 1960, or 1965, or any time since. In other words, the Mean Libruls are all Commies who are helping the Jews and black people take over. And, oh yeah, public schools are dangerous for nice white children, so better to send them to a Christian private school or homeschool them with fundamentalist Christian texts.

In other words, even a presentation that tries to expose CRT as a dangerous new menace in what would count on the right as an intellectual presentation - Stuckey does speak in complete sentences with understandable syntax - it winds up as mainly a list of all the white nationalist fears that segregationist-minded white people have been passing on from generation to generation. Stuckey's presentation is too sad and boring to be infuriating, although it does rise to the level of mildly annoying at points. Still, it's deeply dishonest rightwing propaganda.

She manages to stay on her dreary script most of the time. But near the end, just after 54:00 in the video, she warns her audience that CRT is meant to be "anti-White Power." She thinks that is a bad thing. She assures her listeners that CRT is "anti-white," but mealy-mouths around that point a bit, because that make it sound like she's being thoughtful, or nuanced, or something.

To make sure she summarizes the key points at the end, she explains that how CRT "manifests itself is in the explicit condemnation of white people as a whole." And then not-too-subtly suggests that it's time for a "White Identitarian movement" to counter CRT ("Scary Jews! Scary black people!") - not that she's advocating it, you see, it's just that some white people will "inevitably" take that as a necessary response to CRT ("Scary Jews! Scary black people!"). "White solidarity is going to come together as a reaction to [white] people being constantly maligned," she says.

This is nasty stuff. Seriously boring, but nasty.

Checking in with Allie Beth Stuckey and other denizens of The Blaze

Following up on some of the rightwing nonsense around the latest conservative moral panic over "critical race theory," I've listened to some podcasts by Allie Beth Stuckey, a Southern Baptist who is able to attract people who count as rock stars in the SBC (Southern Baptist Convention), like Brother Al Mohler, who has a reputation as the leading Southern Baptist theologian. Although as the SBC continues to lurch rightward in its theology and politics, even Brother Al is starting to be regarded as dangerously moderate by many SBC conservatives. Other guests featured on her podcast recently include more secular figures like Georgia's pro-voter-suppression Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and longtime rightwing Republican ideologue Ken Blackwell.

Political chameleon Joe Rogan is also a recurring guest on Stuckey's program. Both Stuckey and Rogan are part of Glen Beck's politically conservative Blaze group. There a 06/16/2021 video of her with Rubin as a guest in which they exchange current Republican talking points with each other while warning that Joe Biden intends to Communize the US.

Her podcasts are pretty boring. Because a major theme is to provide reassurance and comfort to fundamentalist Christians who are constantly plagued by having to interact with people from what they disparagingly call "the world." But they do recall for me some of the long-standing, typical features of fundamentalist theology and church teaching.

In this episode of Stuckey's, How to Talk to Progressive Christians 05/04/2021, her guest is Alisa Childers.

This episode is sponsored by something called the Freedom Project Academy, which sounds pretty dodgy to me. To be fair, not everyone thinks so. The John Birch Society touts it on their website.

Stuckey's broadcast seems particularly targeted to women. This is consistent with the SBC principle of "complementarianism," a church doctrine/policy/ideology that holds not only that women cannot be SBC ministers - a policy the SBC shares with the "papist" Catholic Church - that they shouldn't even teach men in a religious context. (See: Yonat Shimron and Bob Smietana, Beth Moore apologizes for her role in elevating ‘complementarian’ theology that limits women leaders Religion News Service 04/07/2021)

The conversation with Alisa Childers doesn't really offer much new in conceptual terms. That's kind of the whole point of Christian fundamentalism, as the stereotypical but unfortunately realistic example of "God said it, I believe it, and that's all there is to it." Or some variation thereof:

Of course, there is always more to "it."

One thing that strikes me is that Stuckey takes a pleasant, intelligent tone. Don't look for Marjorie Taylor Greene types of provocations from her. And the fundamentalist framework she uses is effectively in staying in that tone, because she normally engages with like-minded believers and continually frames the discussion in the terms of fundamentalist thought. This approach doesn't work so well in a context where critical analysis is called for, or with guests who would respectfully decline to accept the really narrow fundamentalist framing she uses.

But I do have to give her credit for one of the more eye-catching podcast titles I've come across, Was Jesus a Palestinian Communist?

In Stuckey's corner of Christianity, the kind of doctrinal references she provides can sound like serious intellectual engagement when takes on their face. For instance, Stuckey and Childers discuss the Trinity, one of the more inscrutable Christian doctrines, that holds God to be a single deity but three divine Persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This is a concept that took a long time to emerge in its current form and is very much a later interpretation, not a formula spelled out in that way in the New Testament Scriptures fundamentalists hold to be "inerrant." The Britannica Online article on the life of Jesus by Jaroslav Pelikan, E.P. Sanders et al, has a section called The dogma of Christ in the ancient councils of Jesus that gives an overview of the longstanding theological controversies over the definition of what mainstream Christianity came to call the Trinity.

Stuckey and Childers use the concept of the Trinity is the most narrow sectarian way, to argue that the God worshipped by the Jews (including Jesus of Nazareth, btw) and Muslims is not at all the same God Christians worship because Jews and Muslims don't acknowledge the Trinity. And to argue that other groups who emerged from the Christian tradition and consider themselves Christian, like the Mormons, are not really true Christians at all because they depart in some way from their fundamentalist formula of the Trinity.

In that podcast after 29:00, they discuss the observation that women fundamentalists seem to be more likely than men to be attracted to what the call "progressive" Christianity, "progressive" being like a cuss word in their environment. That would be an interesting topic on which to elaborate, though any thoughtful discussion of it would quickly start trampling on the SBC's "complementarian" understanding of proper gender roles.

But that episode is also striking in how we can see to whom the discussion is addressed: to men and particularly women who are in fundamentalist church communities who feel that they should only be personally close to people in that sphere, but are confronted with the reality that there are people they care about who do not share the fundamentalist worldview. Childers even starts off by acknowledging that it is not unusual for people to become alienated from the fundamentalist environment because of some real harm or serious disappointment they encountered within it.

Still, the context is not about how good conservative Christians can find a way to appreciate that their parents, siblings, close friends, and even husbands may experience their religious views, or reject religious views altogether, and still maintain those relationships. The framework in which they discuss it is proselytizing, which is a central impulse for fundamentalist Christians. And even imperative, because their view holds that people who are not "saved" (in a right relationship to God) will spend eternity in Hell, a place of eternal torment. For some people, that can become a painful dilemma.

But the Stuckey-Childers conversation doesn't suggest any helpful coping strategies for people in that situation other than trying to convert the others. The discussion is largely about talking points to use in proselytizing pitches to people who have succummed to "progressive" Christianity.

Stuckey's most recent YouTube video of the moment (06/18/2021) about the dangers of demons with a former "faith editor" at The Blaze, Billy Hallowell. Stuckey seems to think the anti-demon guy might be a touch too liberal for her liking.