Thank you for watching! In the face of unrelenting disinformation and authoritarian actions, clear truth-telling and independent media are a necessity. If you value pro-democracy journalism, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to my newsletter. Paid subscribers empower this work and gain access to exclusive benefits. Your support makes a difference.
James Matthewson and I had our first guest on Across the Pond this week, and she was fantastic.
Andra Watkins is a New York Times bestselling author and one of the earliest voices to document Project 2025 as a Christian nationalist manifesto. Her Substack, For Such a Time as This, is dedicated to decoding the language, funding, and infrastructure of white Christian nationalism. She joined our weekly Substack Live as the inaugural guest of Across the Pond to help us better understand the interconnected Christian nationalist global network driving the far right. What followed was one of the most analytically rich conversations we have had on this show.
The thesis we built together over the course of the conversation is this: Christian nationalism is a globally coordinated authoritarian project, backed by identifiable money, carried by recognizable institutional networks, and exported with deliberate intent to countries where the religious infrastructure looks completely different. The far right has cultivated a shared global ideology.
What makes Andra’s perspective uniquely valuable is that she is not analyzing this movement from the outside. She grew up inside Christian nationalism. She was indoctrinated early into what she described as a mini-dictatorship structure, where you trust the authority figure, you do not question the leader, and deviation is punished. That training, she made clear, is exactly why this ideological vehicle is so useful to authoritarians. The congregation is pre-built for it.
James brought the UK angle with the kind of on-the-ground fluency that makes Across the Pond worth watching. He tracked Farage’s evolution from someone who could not have cared less about religion into a figure now explicitly invoking “Judeo-Christian” heritage. He named the class dimensions of British far-right politics, the way Farage looks down on Tommy Robinson as low-brow while still absorbing his energy. And he flagged something important: in a society as secular as Britain, the Christian nationalist playbook lands differently. The religious hook does not grab the same way. What travels instead is the racial subtext underneath it.
We covered a lot of ground. The three factions funding the movement. The international conferences where these networks compare notes. Project 2025’s stumbling implementation and the structural reasons for it. Whether the global far right is actually declining, and what the honest answer to that question looks like. And the role real Christians can play in dismantling a movement that has hijacked their faith.
This is the kind of media I like to create. The better we understand the global dynamics of authoritarianism, the more effectively we can combat it.
I appreciate those of you who tuned in live and contributed so much to the conversation. This is truly the best community on Substack. If you’re just catching it now, feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.
You can watch our full conversation above and read key takeaways below. And, as always, thank you for supporting independent media.
Religion Has Always Been the Authoritarian’s Best Tool
Authoritarians do not reach for Christianity because they believe in it. They reach for it because it works. Andra opened the conversation by placing this moment inside a much longer history.
The Nazis did it. Mussolini did it. This is not new. Andra was direct about this from the start: the merging of authoritarian political power with religion is a recurring pattern across history, not an American invention. What is distinctive about the current moment is how explicitly coordinated and well-funded the effort has become. She pointed out that other active theocracies around the world use different faiths the same way, making the point that the tool is religion itself, not any specific tradition.
The church structure is pre-built for authoritarian indoctrination. Andra described what she experienced growing up: pastors and priests as mini-dictators, congregations trained to accept what the leader says as truth, punishment for questioning. Fifty years of Americans sitting in those pews, she said, have produced a deeply radicalized base that is already primed to accept a political strongman. The infrastructure of submission was built long before Trump arrived to exploit it.
The charlatans are the most dangerous operators. I made the point that the most revealing thing about this wave is watching people like Donald Trump, perhaps the most ungodly figure in modern public life, and Nigel Farage, who James noted has likely never spent meaningful time in a church, deploy Christian language as a political cudgel. The exploitation is the point. They are not believers. They are abusers of believers.
The Money Behind Christian Nationalism
This was the section of the conversation that I think most people have never heard laid out this clearly. Andra broke down the organizational architecture of white Christian nationalism in the United States and explained how that architecture is being exported.
The Protestant wing, the Opus Dei Catholics, and the New Apostolic Reformation all hate each other and work together anyway. Andra identified three loose but powerful factions: the Baptist and conservative Presbyterian tradition she grew up in; the Opus Dei and related Catholic networks, which she described as a captive of the Heritage Foundation; and the charismatic, Pentecostal New Apostolic Reformation, represented by figures like Paula White-Cain. She was emphatic that these groups genuinely despise each other theologically. They all believe the others are going to hell. But the billionaire money behind them does not care about the theology. So they have been funded into an uneasy, effective coalition.
The Heritage Foundation is going international, and Alliance Defending Freedom is doing the legal groundwork in Europe. Andra explained that organizations like Alliance Defending Freedom and Heritage Foundation affiliates are opening offices abroad, taking the temperature of local populations, and running the same judicial strategy they ran in the United States, manufacturing religious liberty cases and using local courts to pull countries rightward through legal precedent. This is an organized infrastructure.
Peter Thiel believes in Peter Thiel. The religious affiliation is a management tool. Andra was unsparing on this point. She said directly that Peter Thiel, affiliated with Opus Dei, believes none of it. What he understands is that millions of Americans do believe it, and that a billionaire vouching for those beliefs amplifies them. His association with the movement is not based on faith. It is leverage. As James put it, it does the legwork for you. You hitch your wagon to a framework that already exists and use it to move people.
The AfD’s rural youth radicalization strategy was studied and imported. Andra made a point I found genuinely eye-opening: the German far-right party AfD spent years and significant money targeting rural youth in Germany, radicalizing young people in areas outside major cities. Her view is that the American far right watched that, learned from it, and brought adapted versions of it home in the form of the manosphere and the trad wife movement. These are not organic cultural phenomena. They are downstream of a deliberate international strategy.
Farage And The British Replication Of Christian Nationalism
James brought serious analytical depth to the UK dimension of this conversation, tracking how Christian nationalist rhetoric has been grafted onto a fundamentally secular political culture.
Farage was never religious. He adopted this because it works. James was precise about this: Farage was a Catholic Thatcherite, a banker, a free-market guy. His background had nothing to do with the evangelical tradition that powers American Christian nationalism. What changed was the rise of figures like Tommy Robinson, whose appeal he originally looked down on as low-brow, and the dawning realization that the energy behind that appeal was something he wanted. So he fused with it.
Britain is secular in a way America is not, so what crosses the Atlantic is the racial subtext, not the theology. James made a distinction worth holding onto. In the UK, creationism is rare. Active religious practice is in long decline. The church-as-political-organizing-tool simply does not have the same infrastructure to attach to. What does translate is the ethnonationalist dimension. When Farage says Judeo-Christian values and British heritage, James was clear about what that signals: it means white. It is not a statement about Abrahamic monotheism. It is a racial identifier dressed in religious language.
Rupert Lowe is now out-Christian-nationalizing Farage, and that tells you everything about the race to the bottom. James noted that since Lowe split from Reform to form his own party, Restore, Farage has actually been outflanked on the Christian nationalist right. There is now a competition within the British far right for who can own that lane most aggressively. The secular barrier in the UK may slow the movement, but it is not stopping it.
Project 2025: Stumbling Fascism
I pushed on the question of whether Project 2025’s implementation has backfired, and Andra agreed with the general assessment while adding important texture about what is actually driving the stumble.
The problem is an unpredictable leader that no one can fully control. Andra’s read was that Trump was never going to execute the playbook the way its architects designed it. The plan assumed a figure who could be directed. What they got was someone who follows his own impulses, and those impulses do not always align with the project’s goals.
Stephen Miller and Russell Vought are the real operators, but they cannot do it alone. Andra named these two as the most ruthlessly effective implementers in the administration. But they have had to rely on people like Kristi Noem to fill out the implementation layer, and that is where things have broken down. I added that Elon Musk’s public role directly undercut Vought’s quiet bureaucratic gutting of the federal government. The richest man on earth with a chainsaw was not part of the plan. I also added that Trump’s overall approach and botched implementation of Project 2025 have backfired on him politically in ways that are still playing out.
They have not given up on the midterms. That is where the next assault is coming. Andra was clear that the stumbling does not mean retreat. Her read is that the coordinated attack on the midterms is already underway because they understand they are behind schedule and need to lock in political control before the implementation window closes. Getting worse, she said, does not necessarily mean they are winning. But it does mean the pressure will increase before it decreases.
Is The Global Far Right Actually Declining?
I asked both Andra and James whether Viktor Orbán’s fall, Trump’s collapsing approval numbers, and the fractures inside MAGA were evidence of the global far right declining. Their answers were more sober than my framing.
Andra sees global gains, not decline. She ran through the landscape: Colombia went badly in recent elections, Peru chose a dictator, Chile returned a Pinochet acolyte, Argentina lurched further right, Bolivia is experiencing violence, Paraguay has rejected democracy, and Brazil is the next major frontier the techno-fascists are targeting for its resources. The AfD has made strides in Germany. Spain’s Sanchez government is, in her words, a Frankenstein coalition one election away from collapse into a center-right and Vox alignment. Hungary was won after years of patient groundwork. The takeaway, she said, is that democracy is a daily job, and the far right has understood that far longer than the left has.
James sees cracks, but credits them to the movement’s own internal flaws, not external pressure. His read on the UK is that the fractures appearing in Reform are self-inflicted. Farage is in hiding because of questions about a five-million-pound donation from a Thai tech billionaire and an overnight conversion to crypto deregulation that followed it. In Britain, unlike America, conspicuous wealth does not inspire admiration. It triggers suspicion. The Scottish Reform leader bragged about six houses and three boats in a debate and immediately tanked. The movement is fragile precisely because it is built around deeply flawed individuals who cannot stop revealing themselves.
My view is that their arrogance and incompetence are genuine assets for the opposition, and the polling shows it. I responded by injecting some optimism. Trump entered this term cracking over 50% approval, which was historically unusual, because voters gave him a genuine window assuming he might restore the pre-COVID economy they remembered. Instead, he squandered every bit of that goodwill within weeks. His disapproval has climbed steadily. The Republican Party’s generic ballot numbers are declining alongside his. The Democrats, for all their current internal chaos, are still ahead in the generic ballot by as many as ten points in some polling. I did a whole video tracking how Trump is destroying the Republican Party here:
And the No Kings protests, millions of people in the streets, tell you something real about where the public’s head is.
The Fight For Christianity’s Soul
The conversation closed where it needed to: not just on what the far right is doing, but on what people of faith, and people outside of religious institutions, can actually do about it.
Pope Leo is now one of the most powerful voices speaking out against Christian nationalism, and that matters. I quoted his line directly: “Woe to those who manipulate religion in the very name of God for their own military, economic, or political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.” That is the most powerful religious leader in the world calling out this movement by its function. Andra affirmed that it is professing Christians who need to be the loudest voices in this fight, and named Pope Leo alongside figures like James Talarico, John Pavlovitz, and John Fugelsang as people doing that work credibly.
Andra’s NYT study on media coverage reveals how protected Christianity has been from scrutiny. Andra shared research she conducted: since the mid-1800s, The New York Times has used terms like radical Islamist, radicalized Islam, and jihad nearly 4,000 times. The equivalent language applied to radicalized Christianity appears fewer than 100 times, according to Andra. Christians are not persecuted, she said. They are among the most coddled groups in American media history. Calling out Christian nationalism is not persecution. It is accountability. And people should not let the inevitable accusations of religious persecution deter them from doing it.
James sees the UK’s relative ignorance of the term as an opportunity, not a disadvantage. His point was reframing: if so many Americans still do not know what Christian nationalism is, the UK is even earlier in that curve. Which means there is time to get ahead of it. He committed to directing UK audiences to Andra’s work, noting that even as someone who has fought the Catholic Church on multiple fronts, he recognizes that the path to preventing Christian nationalism from taking hold in Britain runs through respectful conversation with people of faith, not around them.
The deprogramming happens in trusted spheres of influence, community by community. I closed on this note because I believe it. The work Andra is doing, coming from inside the movement, being able to say this is what I saw and this is how I got out of it, is a model for how radicalization gets reversed. Not through top-down messaging. Through trusted relationships, local communities, and hard conversations in rooms where the people already trust each other. That is how the far right built this. And it is how it gets dismantled.
The Bottom Line
The conversation we had with Andra made several things clear. This is a well-coordinated global far right enterprise. The funding networks are real. The international infrastructure is documented. The legal groundwork is already being laid in European courts. What looks like a cultural wave is actually the output of decades of patient, coordinated organizing across factions that despise each other but share enough common interest in authoritarian control to stay aligned.
What gives me genuine optimism is that they needed everything to go right, and it has not. They needed a controllable front man, and they got Donald Trump. They needed quiet implementation, and they got Elon Musk with a chainsaw. They are running out of runway, the polling is moving against them, and the coalition is fracturing in ways they cannot paper over.
But Andra’s warning deserves to sit with you. The far right has operated on a time horizon that the left has rarely matched. The answer is not one leader, one election, one ruling. The answer is all of us deciding that democracy is a daily job.
Andra Watkins writes at For Such a Time as This on Substack, where she decodes Christian nationalism for readers across the political and faith spectrum. Subscribe to her work. Also, subscribe to my brilliant co-host, James Matthewson.
Support independent media and analysis that fearlessly tells the truth. If you have not yet become a paid subscriber to Ahmed Baba News, you can do that below. And if you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you! It truly means a lot.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the ongoing right-wing takeover of mainstream media and the media we actually deserve. I wrote a Substack note with my thoughts in more detail if you’re interested in reading more:
