Jesus never was. Freak Out and Carry On

 Richardson is an expert—which is most certainly true: She wrote her dissertation on the Republican Party’s economic policies during the Civil War. Before Richardson entered the realm of public intellectualism as the co-host of the NPR-affiliate podcast Freak Out and Carry On in 2017, all of her books were focused on nineteenth-century America, including works on Reconstruction, the Battle of Wounded Knee, and the history of the Republican Party. Although fascism does have nineteenth-century roots, albeit in Europe, much of her newsletter is devoted to what is best described as punditry: analysis of the president’s mental state, upcoming Senate elections, and the weaponization of government agencies.

She wrote with confidence, “...the United States of America was not founded as a Christian nation. The Founders were quite clear about that…,” and she went on to quote the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, which famously declared that “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion” and “has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility [of Muslims].” It’s a bold, appealing proclamation, one that seeks to co-opt, if not to obliterate, a key trope on the right, where the Founders’ status as (almost exclusively) white Protestants and their invocations of the Almighty trump the constitutionally protected rights they enshrined, most notably in the First Amendment.

Outside of Sinclair's fiction ,  and earlier , Andrew's Jackson and Johnson, there is no well-known precedent for the rise of MAGA. As in a version of the twentieth century that exists to provide “lessons” to anti-fascists in the present, the idea that there is a pure, uncontested American history available for use by those disgusted by the current regime is comforting, even inspiring. The Treaty of Tripoli is not just an early example of diplomacy and statecraft from a new nation struggling for legitimacy, but a tool to be used against Christian conservatives who wield history and Scripture dishonestly as bad-faith and bullshit.