Latest / Follow the Leighder / Christian Nationalism at the Air Force Academy | Mikey Weinstein, MRFF
Transcript
- Leigh/@followtheleighder: Howdy folks and welcome back to another episode of Follow the Leighder. I'm your host, Leigh Larson, and joining me from Albuquerque, New Mexico is Mikey Weinstein. Welcome to the studio. Mikey Weinstein, Military Religious Freedom Foundation: It's great to be here. Leigh/@followtheleighder: So ⁓ folks who are unfamiliar, Mikey Weinstein, let me give you resume it's pretty impressive. He went through the United States Air Force Academy in 1977 ⁓ and then continued on to get his Juris Doctor degree and serve a JAG ⁓ for the Judge Advocate General's Corps ⁓ in the United States military the Air Force. ⁓ Folks, that the legal team. After that, he went and served in the Reagan administration and then did some time for ⁓ Ross Perot, Texas billionaire for my Texas listeners. But really what you have been focused on for the last few decades is you're the president and the founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. ⁓ Wow, you have been so busy. Thank you for your service, sir. A, ⁓ but also Talk to us about your time at the Air Force Academy. I feel like that's in the news quite a bit. ⁓ What have you seen and what are you familiar with them? Mikey Weinstein, Military Religious Freedom Foundation: Well, you I graduated in the 77 and then my two sons and my daughter-in-law graduated, ⁓ a son and daughter-in-law graduated as classmates in 04 and then another son graduated in 07. ⁓ Our daughter was married for nine years to a 2010 graduate. She's since gotten divorced from him. And my brother-in-law also graduated from there. My dad went to the Naval Academy. So we have three years, three consecutive generations of military academy graduates in the family. And I think over a hundred and... 160 years of combined active duty military service for our family in pretty much every major combat engagement the country's been in from the Civil War to the present time. I say that only because it means that we understand the peculiar peculiarly adversarial, communal, ritualistic and tribal aspects of the military. Most Americans have no clue about that. And so the Air Force Academy ⁓ sadly was located in Colorado Springs or El Paso County, which is ⁓ Most of it is a very ruby red place. ⁓ the Air Force Academy has kind of been, ⁓ Colorado Springs is often described as the ⁓ fundamentalist Christian Vatican, if you will. There's over hundred organizations there, national and some of them international that push what we would now view as Christian nationalism. The Navigators focus on the family or just two of them. The Air Force Academy has a hideous, wretched, repugnant, ⁓ stench-filled You know, doster fire of a track record in protecting the wall separating church and state. I saw it when I was a cadet from 73 to 77. And then, you my kids went through it. it was, and it's, it is still a terrible place that has systemic pervasive and pernicious pattern and practice of pushing Christian nationalism. And so it just seems as though it doesn't ever go away. so we have to keep fighting there. And initially that's where we found the fight. On February 4th, 2004, when Mel Gibson came out with that wonderful family movie, The Passion of the Christ, or as we refer to it here, the Jesus Chainsaw Massacre or Freddy versus Jesus. know, a lot of Mel Gibson's movies are pretty bloody, apocalypto, Braveheart, and this one was no different. you know, the cadet wing, I had three of my family members there, were being forced by their cadet chain of command and officer chain of command to go see it. So that's when my wife and realized something's wrong here. And we pulled on that thread and the sweater came off and we initially had five clients there, four of them Jewish, one of them an atheist. This is, know, it's been 20, well, it's been we're in our 24th year fighting this thing now in the foundation in 21st year. And so we're a very aggressive and militant organization, but our militancy and aggression, Lee, is in support of the constitutional mandate of separating spiritual and temporal church and state in the technologically most lethal organization ever created by our species, Homo sapiens, which is the US military, where all the nukes are laser guided weapons, conventional weapons, and of course, nuclear weapons. So it turned out that it wasn't just at the Air Force Academy, was throughout, it was integrated into the very particulate of what we call the Pentecostal gun or the Pentagon. Now we have over well over 100,000 clients across all branches, Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and of course the Space Force, all 18 national security agencies, the Coast Guard, which is not DOD or the Department of War Crimes. It's the Department of Homeland Security. And of course, ⁓ we often go after the ⁓ US Merchant Marine Academy, which is part of the US Maritime Service, which is neither DHS or DOD, but the Department of Transportation, which is run by another Christian nationalist. named ⁓ Sean Duffy. And so, ⁓ you know, we're not a complex meal like Chateaubriand Lee, you know, we're a simple hamburger. You can't use your position of military authority over an otherwise helpless subordinate to force your version of weaponized Christianity on a subordinate. You know, the relationship between a military superior, as you know, having been in, and a subordinate, you know, is not the same as your shift manager on Starbucks or your supervisor at IBM. They have complete and total control over you. So, ⁓ subordinates are limited in what they're able to do. And so we've provided them as an NGO, non-government organization. ⁓ We never charge anybody anything. We're a nonprofit. We've never blown anybody's identity. We provide our clients AARP-ly, not the one you're thinking about, but anonymity action results and protection. And... ⁓ As I said before, we go right in and we understand ⁓ when we have an offensive ⁓ NCO or officer, we go two levels above when we first swoop in and we see where things are going to go there. And sometimes we blow it up in the media. We've been in the media an awful lot since the war started, but we're in somewhere every day. And we have over 1,200 folks who work here. Like most civil rights organizations, Lee, like the ACLU, we have many volunteers. We have MRFF representatives. on most US military installations and even on nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers. In Colorado Springs, we have a retired one-star general who himself, he himself was an Air Force Academy grad, Brigadier General Marty France, like the country. He represents the Pikes Peak region for us. that, know, Fort Carson, Shreve Air Force Base, Peterson ⁓ and Shreve might be actually Space Force Base now. I gotta think about that. And of course the Air Force Academy. yeah, that's what we do. People come to us, we don't charge them when we fight. very, very hard because ⁓ I don't mean to be going off trying to answer your one question with saying everything, but if you look back in history, whenever an extremist version of any religious faith, particularly Christianity, is joined at the hip, it becomes inextricably intertwined ⁓ like an alloy with that part of the state that makes war. Well, Lee, we don't end up with little babbling brooks, streams, creeks, ponds, or lakes, right? We end up with one thing. oceans and oceans of blood. It's not just the eight crusades from the 11th through the 13th century. It's not just the ⁓ Inquisition, the pogroms, the Holocaust. It happens and it's continued to happen. we were the first organization and the only one that screaming about this 20 years ago when people used to try to make fun of us saying, ⁓ yeah, the bad Christians are going to take over. The bad Christians are coming. Well, hello, they're here and they have. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Well, and that's a perfect segue because I was my next question is you and 2005, I'm sorry, hold on, I want to make sure I my date 2012, where the defense news named you one of the most 100, you were 100 most influential defense figures out there. This is 2020 12 by defense news naming you. So you have been saying this for a very like for a minute and people have been talking about your influence. Why now? What is going on now that is different than what you have seen? Or not different? What is, how is the difference? Mikey Weinstein, Military Religious Freedom Foundation: This has been there, you all along, but during George W. Bush, it was bad. All eight years under Obama, it was, know, we loved Obama as our leader, but it was still very bad. Under Biden, it was bad. Under the first Trump, it was bad. But now it's Katie by the door. I mean, if you're familiar with Project 2025, that is a 1,000-page document that MAGA put together. They weren't hiding anything, saying, here's what we're going to do if you vote for us. Project 2025 is to MAGA and Trump what Mein Kampf was to Hitler. and national socialism. And we have to remember that Hitler only had, 7.9 % of the German public in his National Socialist Movement. Stalin only had 2.9 % of his public in his movement. But it's our best estimate that somewhere between 28 and 32 % of our military is full-on MAGA Christian nationalists or sympathizers of that. And that's an enormous number. And ⁓ you have a secretary of defense, the most unqualified, am I allowed to cuss on this or not? The most, the worthless piece of shit that he is, holding ⁓ monthly Jesus praise services in the largest auditorium of the Pentagon Leigh during duty hours in uniform, and then televising on internal Pentagon channel two. ⁓ And eviscerates every aspect of the time, place and manner Leigh/@followtheleighder: Yeah, ⁓ yeah. Mikey Weinstein, Military Religious Freedom Foundation: requirements and mandates that have been put out the protocols by our U.S. Supreme Court with its case law, the federal case law, the state case law, the directives and instructions, the regulations of the Pentagon, the core values of the military services, and certainly the Uniform Code of Military Justice. And so we're not, we have no issues with evangelicals. We have many evangelicals that are clients, they're on our staff, they donate to us. It's just all about time, place and manner. mean, we have 12 members of the Church of the Jedi right out of their clients, right out of Star Wars. The only religious faith that we've never had yet is a Scientologist. I keep waiting for Tom Cruise to call, but he's not really a Navy fighter pilot, right? But 95 % of our clients are Christians. 84 % of our staff are Christians. And our largest and oldest endorsing organization, is the... ⁓ California Council of Churches, Churches Impact Organization, which comprises 5,500 individual Protestant churches in California, just under two million Protestants, and I think it's 21 different denominations of Protestants. this is talking about a tortured and twisted version of Christianity that is the mirror image, Liddy, of Salafist or Wahhabist Islam. And it's making us look exactly deliberately. It's what exactly Hexeth wants and Trump would take. he's a two-year-old, but those that are using him as a sock puppet, we look like the ninth version of those eight prior crusades, which is providing a propaganda bonanza of Jovian proportion, unparalleled magnitude to Boko Haram, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, ISIS, the Taliban, you name it, while we make war on the largest ⁓ population of Shia Muslims. Most Americans have no clue there's Shia and Sunni denominations within them on planet Earth, is, you know, that's the country of Iran. which was intimidating us as much as Mickey Mouse was before we decided to bomb them on March 1st. So, you know, that's it. I'm speaking to you in this podcast with the, you know, the gun smoke in my face. We go around the clock ⁓ and ⁓ military members know that when they call us, they're gonna get safe. They're in a safe place to tell us what's going on and that we will fight back based on what they want us to do. ⁓ Having been in, know, there's only so much you can do if you're being... ⁓ spiritually assaulted by a superior. that means, I mean, you can talk to the chaplains or JAGs, but they're not commanders, they're staff officers. You can file an EEO complaint or an IG complaint, Inspector General Equal Employment Opportunity, but then you have to out yourself. we, you when you do that, you turn yourself into a tarantula on a wedding cake. I know you've been to weddings so Levi, tarantulas and wedding cakes don't last very long, Lee. It's not really good for the tarantula or the wedding cake. Or they can try to go up 13 of command. But that's really hard to do since it's generally the chain of command that is the source of the oppression and tyranny against them. look, my job is not to be the ⁓ pearl in the oyster. No, it's to be the irritant in the oyster that causes the pearl to form. So ⁓ it's just been, we've been doing this for a very, very long time and military members need that kind of help. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Well, I will say I have two questions for you and then we'll wrap up. But I know that you have been an irritant because I've interviewed evangelical chaplains who have talked about, they're like, well, love them, hate them. He did change the chaplain corps in the military. You did. And they talked about how the things that you were asking and pushing for, it did cause everyone to pause and do some self-reflection and say like, ⁓ And he talked about like, just kind of like, over the years how he changed and it made him, it was a really cool conversation. So you've definitely irritated people. You've woken some people up to things. You've probably forced some people to double down on some things too and gotten the opposite of what you wanted. But you've talked about going after and advocating for so many people. Again, thank you. Can you talk about the endorsing agents of these chaplains? And can you talk about these legal teams as a lawyer who has worked for some pretty wealthy ⁓ clients? Can you talk about the legal teams of some of these Christian denominations? Mikey Weinstein, Military Religious Freedom Foundation: Well, ⁓ we'll start with the endorsing agencies. ⁓ We have some who are very, very close to us. And it doesn't make a difference whether they're mainline Protestant or Catholic or ⁓ evangelical. In the main, we've been very ⁓ pleased with a lot of these endorsers. And of course, you cannot be a chaplain in the military unless you are ⁓ certified authorized by an endorsing entity. The endorsing entity is your lifeline to you staying ⁓ viable as a chaplain, right? And so the legal teams, I'm not quite sure what you're talking about. If you're talking about parachurch organizations, I mean, I'll say this. President Eisenhower, if people still remember him, right? His most famous speech, Lee, was his last one where he warned America and the world about, do you remember, the military industrial complex. What we're fighting here at MRFF is nothing less than a parachurch military corporate congressional proselytizing complex. And certainly the Parachute organizations like Campus Crusade for Christ, military ministries, Officers Christian Fellowship, Christian Military Fellowship, Cadence International, ⁓ they have offices on almost every military installation. What the hell they're doing there? You know, they make it clear that they see particularly at the initial entry places like at ⁓ Black Island Air Force Base and the other places, know, MCRD, San Diego. for the Marines, Parris Island, certainly the Army does it at a bunch of different places, Great Lakes for the Navy. They see these young recruits, or for that matter, cadets and midshipmen, their words, not mine, they're as black, they're as ripe as black bananas. So they wanna get in there and try to, another term they use is that they wanna be government missionaries for Jesus Christ. So that's great, but that is not the way this country was designed. our framers, it's been a quarter of a millennia now, right, 250 years, they looked east and they looked at Europe where most of the bloodbaths that had occurred Lee had been when men, not women, men had of the cloth had been men in political power. They looked at Cromwell in England. looked at the, they didn't have to even leave our shores. They looked at the Salem witch trials and they said, not here. You can make a case that America was founded as a Christian nation, but not the United States of America. That's very, different. The Puritans came over, right, and they created their own ⁓ aspects of religious tyranny themselves. But the United States of America were deliberately fashioning the beauty of what we did here by, again, claiming this grand canyon between church and state because they saw what happens when that is not there. And what's happened now, going back to your earlier question, is that the guardrails are off. And we are not driving to the abyss in a car, Lee. We're not going to the parking lot that's adjacent to the abyss. We're not staring into the abyss. We are in the abyss. And people listening or watching this podcast, please listen to me. You can't just sit there and freaking circulate blood, reflect light and breathe. God damn it. Do something. I have four kids and three grandkids. One of my grandkids is having her ninth birthday today. And, ⁓ At some point, if we ever get back, we may not. As a subject matter expert, we may have crossed too many Rubicons to ever get back away from Gilead out of the Handmaid's Tale, know, Margaret Atwood's great book or the Hulu series based on that, because that's where we are. If we ever get back, our children and grandchildren will ask, what did you do to fight this? I know what the calendar says. I know it's May of 2026, but you know what? It feels like May of 1933 in Nazi Germany. speaking of somebody who lost family members at places like Malthusen, Bergen-Belsen, Treblinka, Dachau, and Auschwitz, I understand what that means. I get it. And just going to one no-kings rally, not good enough. You can look at the people of Minneapolis and get out there and fight and let you know, you can try to call your congressional reps if you want to. That's on a macro level. On a micro level, I advise people terminate your relationships with family members, people you went to school with. people you were on the job with, neighbors, if they are full on mega Christian nationalists, cut them off. Because it is not just a political thing anymore. This is freaking life. I can't, know, whether it's Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, George Orwell, we're there. We're there. And the most amazing thing that I think has ever happened in the human history, the most amazing. is that we haven't used atomic or nuclear weapons since August 9th, 1945. And I have a little story to tell you, real quick story. Right after we started, right, 21 years ago or so, we've been out maybe a year when I got a strange call from Tokyo one day. It was from the Kyoto News Service. Lee, you may know they're like the Associated Press for the Far East. They're huge. They said, we would like your permission as to why I you send a journalist to Albuquerque from Tokyo. I said, why? They go, we're going to do a... a kind of a major expose on what you're doing. And I said, okay, we can do that over the phone. There wasn't, there were no podcasts back then and already sort of FaceTime. He said, no, actually we wanna go ahead and invest in getting the journalist out to Albuquerque. And I said, well, why? And they said, if you let him come out, that'll be the first thing he answers for you. So I said, okay. And a week and a half later, this gentleman shows up at our home. immaculately dressed, perfect English, graduate of Tokyo University, which is like their Harvard. He sat down and he said, we did a four hour interview, which came out, it was all in Japanese. And I think it was translated into a number of other far Eastern languages. But I think about what he told me every goddamn day. But he said, you probably want to know why I'm here, Mr. Weinstein. I said, I do. He said, we're here. Because in 1936, the Imperial Japanese military, the Army-Navy Air Force invaded Manchuria. Five years later on Sunday, December 7th, 1941, we bombed Yerpa Harbor in Hawaii. A few years after that, the only two times atomic weapons have been used in anger were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We did all of those things, Mr. Weinstein. because radicalized Shintoism, extremist Shintoism, took control of our Imperial Japanese military. And now we look at what you're fighting. And mind you, we've been out, maybe we had 1,500 clients. We've been out for a year, but we're the only ones warning about this. We're looking at what you're doing, and frankly, we're scared. When you find Christian nationalism, Lee, in a middle school, elementary school, high school, junior college, college, among the public, don't know, sewage workers, cops, and firefighters, or legislatures, it's bad enough. But when you find it in that part of the state that makes war, as I said, it's oceans and oceans of blood. And I think back to that over and over again. And I've done a lot of interviews even recently since the war started ⁓ with Japanese journalists. Only half of them were aware of this radicalized Shintoism. They went back to, my God, you're right. And so I view that as a ⁓ gift that that person made me aware of it. So that's an example where it wasn't extremist Christianity, which of course is the JP4S, the military term. That's the fuel that drives and animates MAGA. But you know, this is, we're in a war right now and people better wake the fuck up and realize that and do something. Not just to answer what your kids say or your grandkids or your friends, but if I'm asked what you can do, I talk about the macro stuff. Yeah, go out to demonstrations, no kings. Micro. Cut off those people so they're going, why would you do that? Maybe that will wake them up a little bit anyway. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Well, that's a perfect segue as we come up to the last few minutes here. Where can folks follow everything that's going on? I mean, there is so much news, the Holy War, the Armageddon, all of this. How can people stay up to date with what is going on and how can they support you and Military Religious Freedom Foundation? Mikey Weinstein, Military Religious Freedom Foundation: appreciate that. Our URL is very simple. just MRFF.org. It's not dot com. We're a nonprofit. If you donate to us, you you get the tax deduction. We don't run on chocolate sauce. We could use the help. So we're a nonprofit. Just remember the terms Mr. firefighter, MRFF.org. I mean, it doesn't stand for this answer. Military religious freedom dot org. But I have somebody tell me, hey, Mr. firefighter dot org is the easiest way to do it. ⁓ And obviously, I If anybody ever wants to call here, you know, I'm not at all shy about my personal cell number, which is 505-250-7727. It's a very dangerous job, which is why we are never very far away from weapons. We have a lot of weapons in this house. We've had the window shot out of our house twice. We've had innocent animals beheaded and disemboweled, left on the front of the house. We've had swastika and the crucifixes painted on the house, beer bottles and feces smeared on the house, thrown at the house, smeared on the mailbox. We've had tires slashed. We get about 12 to 18 fairly grotesque threats on a daily basis. And so that's the nature where we are right now. And so ⁓ we live with private bodyguards and we live in a blue state, a blue town and a blue neighborhood in a blue town. So ⁓ this is, I don't say it for, ⁓ I'm feel so sorry. No, it's just the nature of this business. It is a blood sport. And so I've very much enjoyed your questions and I'm definitely an honor and a privilege. Leigh/@followtheleighder: I do appreciate you staying on here ⁓ and I, like I said, please come back, sir. Thank you for your service. Thank you for all you've done and thank you for your You know, thank like that is so it's like, inspiring, healing, restorative, I don't know what the term is, but to see other people get passionate and angry about things that I've observed as well, I'm like, yes, right, that is the appropriate outrage reaction. Right, that is how we should all be responding. Mikey Weinstein, Military Religious Freedom Foundation: There's a German word that mitleifer and that's I learned that from a German journalist the last month doing an interview in Germany and that's the use for those members of the ⁓ German public that just went along with the Nazis they were called mitleifer and They just went along to get along Don't be mitleifer Don't be like that stand up and do something be like springsteen whom we just saw a couple weeks ago in Phoenix You know be like the people in Minneapolis stand up and fight for this We're an imperfect nation, we have an imperfect democracy, but we have some wonderful aspects and we should be a North Star for this world. And this current MAGA administration has despoiled that. So let's fight to get back to that. Leigh/@followtheleighder: Amen. Alrighty, folks. Well, that's another episode of Follow the Leighder. I'm your host, Leigh Larson. What did you think of this episode? Let me know down in the comments. Don't forget to like, follow, subscribe. You all know the drill. Until next time, I'll see you. Bye-bye.