The Orange Elephant In The Room: Jared Yates Sexton, Pt. 2

Sea Change Radio

As election season kicks into high gear, it can be a challenge to talk about anything else but the race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. This week on Sea Change Radio, we succumb to that temptation as we turn to the second half of our discussion with political analyst Jared Yates Sexton. Then, we dig into the archives to hear from Lauren Kim, a born-again Christian environmentalist who volunteers for an organization called Young Evangelicals for Climate Action.

Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.

Jared Yates Sexton (JYS) | 00:16 – I don’t think anyone should give him any space to discuss anything. And quite frankly, I think by giving him the trappings of interviews and space on networks or whatever, it normalizes something that is inherently abnormal and dangerous.

Narrator | 00:33 – As election season kicks into high gear, it can be a challenge to talk about anything else but the race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. This week on Sea Change Radio, we succumb to that temptation as we turn to the second half of our discussion with political analyst Jared Yates Sexton. Then, we dig into the archives to hear from Lauren Kim, a born-again Christian environmentalist who volunteers for an organization called Young Evangelicals for Climate Action.

Alex Wise (AW) | 01:20 – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Jared Yates Sexton. Jared is a political analyst and he is the host of the Muck Rake podcast. And his online writings can be read at dispatches from a collapsing state. Jared, welcome back to Sea Change Radio.

Jared Yates Sexton (JYS) | 01:33 – Hey, Alex, it’s great to see you.

Alex Wise (AW) | 01:35 – So, we were talking about trying to get local elections higher on people’s radar. Some of the things I would add to the points that you’ve made in addition to caring about your school board elections and all these other smaller elections than the President, it’s important to think about politics in a less abstract way. If we can think about how it affects not just yourself personally. I, I’m privileged and I will be okay if Donald Trump gets elected. I’m horrified by the prospect of it, not for my own fortune, but for the fortune of the world and, and the people who can’t afford to have him be in charge. And we feed into that in, in our media questions like, politician, A, how are you gonna please black voters in Georgia by giving them things that black voters in Georgia care about? What, why, why do we have to slice and dice our issues into demographics that way?

JYS | 02:33 – Well, I, want to make a few points because you’ve brought up, uh, a lot of good, important issues that I think we need to get into. First things first, I’m a white dude who used to live in Georgia. I don’t live in Georgia anymore. My wellbeing and my family’s wellbeing depends on the wellbeing of black people in Georgia. And what I have been taught, and this is a larger thing, I want to point out, we’re in a political crisis. We’re in a democratic crisis. We’re also in a spiritual crisis. We’re also in a mental health crisis. And here’s the reason why, since the 1980s, we have been absolutely bombarded and abused by this idea that the only thing that matters in the world is what you get and whether or not you are able to have wealth and comfort and safety, right? And, and by the way, it’s been used against us completely. It’s alienated us from each other. Everyone says, oh, it’s social media, it’s tv, it’s whatever. No, it’s not. Those things have built off of a larger idea, which is that neoliberalism tells us, you are alone. You are in danger. Take care of yourself. Right?

AW | 03:38 – Tax cuts has been one of the most obvious go-to things for the Republican party for 50 years. It’s like you care about taxes being lower, right? And then let’s just feed into that beast for decades.

JYS | 03:51 – And look what’s happened. And I want to be honest about this because this is like a deeper part of the politics that has become very obvious to me for a while. The idea that we are alone, that only your safety matters and other people are out to get you. Which by the way, conspiracists, the Far rights conspiracies is built off of this. But that conspiracy is throughout America, right? Those people over there are evil and they’re trying to take what is mine, right? That paranoia, this is a symptom of mental unwellness. We have been abused as people, as a culture, as a nation. We have been abused to the point where it’s like, well, you know what? I’m just going to take care of me, and like I’ll just, hopefully I’ll, I’ll keep it at the door, right? Which you notice, it’s like they are, the, the, the GOP is talking about everything from like disappearing gay and trans people to like, you know, taking away voting rights or whatever. And you keep hearing these things. It’s like, “Hey, we really want gay and trans people to be okay, but maybe that’s a little too extreme to talk about.” Maybe, that’s just what happens in authoritarian cycles. You sacrifice people because you’re trying to protect yourself, and it grows and grows and grows and grows. What we have to do as individuals is heal from the abuse that’s been heaped on us. And do not get me wrong, the abuse from the GOP has been overt, but from the system, which is, you’ll take what you get and you’ll like it, right? Like, you, you just be happy that you have the rights that are remaining. That idea is meant to tamp down expectations. It’s meant to keep us from working with one another. It’s meant to keep small d Democratic movements from growing in order to defeat this thing. We have to heal from that and recognize at long last that we’re all interconnected. If any group is being oppressed, if any group is being hurt, if any group is having the rights trampled on it is not isolated. It’s spreads throughout the interconnected body and it hurts everybody. A system is like an ecosystem. And what has happened now is that the inequality that has been there, it has thrown everything out of balance. It’s like having a, a, an aquarium where like, you know, the, the pH levels get outta balance and all of a sudden algae starts growing and fish, fish start dying. And that causes another thing. We’re connected in a way that we’ve been told that we aren’t, and it should be obvious at this point, but it’s not obvious to some people because they have been so abused and their worldview has been so soured and poisoned that it has led to this thing growing worse and worse and worse.

AW | 06:25 – Let’s shift gears for a moment to the media. You mentioned earlier how one of the examples from this week that the media kind of shifted the goalposts a little bit in that Dana Bash interview in CNN, where they asked Kamala Harris if she would consider putting a Republican in her cabinet. And she said, yes. And I read your tweets responding to that, saying you would never hear a journalist asked Trump whether he’d consider putting Democrats in his cabinet. So why do we always demand that Democrats move to the center? But Republicans can just be Republicans, they have to go farther and farther, right? That seems to be their M.O. from their party is like play to the base. You never have to placate the center.

JYS | 07:14 – So let me ask you a question, Alex. I’m going to give you a hypothetical. Do you, do you like sports at all?

AW | 07:18 – Love it. Yes. I’m a huge Boston sports fan.

JYS | 07:21 – Boston sports, okay, let’s go back. I’m sorry to bring up a hard memory. Let’s bring up Mookie Betts, okay?

AW | 07:27 – Yeah, that’s painful.

JYS | 07:28 – Okay. Mookie Bets is a fantastic baseball player who left for Los Angeles, where they paid him a lot more money. So let’s say that this player, we’ll just use a generic player, let’s say this player. It’s being reported on in the news and in the articles about the negotiations, the news media is asking the player…

AW | 07:47 – “Aren’t you under contract?”

JYS | 07:49 – Yeah. “Why don’t you accept a little less money?”

AW | 07:51 – “You’re making $30 million a year. Isn’t that enough?”

JYS | 07:53 – Yeah. “Aren’t you happy with what you have? Like, are you ungrateful?” And meanwhile, when they ask the, the, the team, they’re like, Hey, are you giving this all you’ve got? And they’re like, yeah. And they’re like, okay, great. What would you infer from the media’s stance in that negotiation?

AW | 08:10 – That they are more beholden to the owners than the players?

JYS | 08:15 – That is exactly 100% right? And so what is happening in this is that our media, and by the way, one of the, the smartest things the Republican Party and Donald Trump have ever done is christening our media as being leftist, right? They’re so left. No, they’re not. They’re centrist. Corporatist. The only thing that our media wants, and by the way, it’s owned by your Jeff Bezos’s. It’s owned by your NBC giant corporate conglomerates. They will talk a little bit about things that seem liberal or whatever, but meanwhile, what they care about is keeping the status quo in which the money keeps moving from the working in the middle class to the wealthiest people.

AW | 08:56 – I think it’s a little more nuanced than that in that I think a lot of the journalists are liberal leaning, but their marching orders are to get clicks and to get viewers.

JYS | 09:06 – So within that, and I’m glad you brought this up, because that is a nuance that needs to be talked about. The larger corporate ideology is to keep the status quo in which corporations and the wealthy continue to get more and more wealthy and powerful. Meanwhile, who are the journalists, the journalist. And by the way, you don’t get paid anything as a journalist anymore. It’s, you don’t get paid. It just don’t, you basically get underpaid. And who do you go and get? Who can afford to live in New York City and Washington DC on a small salary.

AW | 09:38 – Privileged people who have rich parents, generally.

JYS | 09:40 – Privileged people who have we wealthy parents. And by the way, Alex, it’s so weird. All of these people who are in the media now are the sons and daughters of people who used to work in the media, right? So basically these people, and by the way, some of them are really good journalists, some of them have a lot of integrity. But guess what, it’s almost impossible for a person who came from wealth and privilege and access to then look in the mirror and say, the system that created me and gave me this power is wrong. So like from the very top, the corporate media has this ideology, the people underneath them, they have their own stories and they interact over and over and over again. And the problem is, with this country, and this, I think a nice little bow on this. Our understanding of class mentalities is gone. We do not understand classes in this country. We do not understand economic persuasions and how they affect us.

AW | 10:35 – When you were at the convention in Chicago, how many times did you hear the middle class? I didn’t hear much about the poor. They was all about the middle class, because everyone considers themselves middle class.

JYS | 10:45 – And that is very, very notable for a specific reason. The Democratic party has become the party of the middle class.

AW | 10:51 – But the middle class is basically 90% of America in terms of self-identification, right? I think people who own $5 million homes in San Francisco consider themselves middle class.

JYS | 11:01 – So this is one of the weirder things about this, this moment that people don’t really want to wrestle with. The Democratic Party represents the middle class professional managerial people, people who went to college and are now middle managers. They managed logistics, content creation, you name it. They also have a bunch of like, sort of corporate tie-ins that, you know, fund a lot of their things. The Republican party has become the party, uh, and, and by the way, they’ve, they’ve captured, you know, a large part of middle America by creating a faux populistic base that by the way, is completely designed and directed by the people who screwed those people over in the first place. And now blames people of color and vulnerable communities and women, and you name it, they’re enemies.

AW | 11:43 – And immigrants.

JYS | 11:44 – And immigrants, and then small business owners, what used to be called burgers, who were people who used to have a lot of political power, who used to run cities and states and don’t anymore. Because larger corporations are the ones who sort of, you know, are at this next strata of wealth.

AW | 12:01 – And those burgers were the ones who led to things like prohibition and they led to women voting and they led to unions.

JYS | 12:09 – Like these were powerhouses.

AW | 12:10 – These were the smaller voices that actually added up to incredibly powerful voices.

JYS | 12:17 – Exactly. And that isn’t to say that they’re not wealthy. And I want to remind people how many January 6th Insurrectionists flew to Washington DC on private jets. They have an incredible amount of wealth, but they feel alienated from the Elon Musks of the world who have their own private space agencies, right? Meanwhile, there’s an army of right wing libertarian, just anti-democratic donors who basically run the Republican party and create project 2025 and all these other things. They’ve been undermining education, they’ve been undermining, uh, science, you name it. So what has happened is that things are so weird. It’s like looking at a gerrymandered map, you know what I mean? Where like the lines just don’t make sense. And so our politics doesn’t make a lot of sense anymore, which has discouraged people, which has made representation so hard and what has happened. You don’t hear people talking about working class people anymore. you, you, you hear the middle class because those are the people who are still voting if they’re going to vote for the Democratic Party. And what ends up happening is the class dynamics that we’re discussing right now, it gets mixed in it. It’s almost like making a stew and like you get just like a big sort of mess of things and you don’t remember what’s in it. And so our politics is almost incoherent at this point because we don’t under have an understanding of power class wealth or how any of these things actually affect things.

AW | 14:55 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to political analyst, Jared Yates Sexton. So Jared, can you take an educated media member who’s gone to journalism school or has worked their way up from a local newspaper to become a, a columnist for the New York Times or whatever it might be. That person did not grow up thinking, okay, I’m going to have to interview Donald Trump as a potential presidential candidate. Let’s say you got Donald Trump to come on the Muckrake podcast. I think this would be a great idea for him, by the way. But let’s say he comes on next week. How do you prepare for something like that? What questions would you ask him?

JYS | 15:35 – I would not afford him the dignity of asking him a question. If he managed to get on Zoom or on a phone call, I would demean him. I would call him out for being a small, petty, pathetic man. I don’t think anyone should give him any space to discuss anything. And quite frankly, I think by giving him the trappings of interviews and space on networks or whatever, it normalizes something that is inherently abnormal and dangerous. So what I would do is I would be very respectful talking to his handlers, and I would have him for about 10 seconds. And I would spend that time by talking to him the way that somebody has always needed to talk to him.

AW | 16:13 – I would do something similar, but I would go after his inherited wealth much more. The fact that he’s never really made any money and that he’s, he inherited tons of money, hasn’t built on that and yet is considers himself a a, a great businessman. I I, because I think that would just get under his skin. That’s what I would want to do is get him mad.

JYS | 16:33 – I wrote about this back in 2016 and 2017 after the election, one of the biggest mistakes that the Democratic party has made is that they have portrayed him as a complete and utter loser. Right? Somebody who has just failed and had so many bankruptcies, guess who else has declared bankruptcies? Everybody in my family, everybody in my family has like declared bankruptcy at some point.

AW | 16:57 – But they didn’t inherit $400 million.

JYS | 16:59 – . Exactly. So what needed to happen and what didn’t happen and, and they still fail at this, is that they fail to talk about the fact that Donald Trump is the type of person who would buy your family’s, well not your family’s business, but the business your family works for, and then drive everybody with slave labor and then fire them and leave them on the side of the road.

AW | 17:23 – To me, that sounded almost like normalizing him like Mitt Romney. ’cause that was the argument against Mitt Romney.

JYS | 17:28 – And it worked out okay.

AW | 17:30 – Well, sure. But I think that Mitt Romney is a much saner actor in American politics than Donald Trump, right?

JYS | 17:37 – I think the way that you square that circle is this, you point out the fact that Donald Trump has lost and been a bigger failure than almost anybody. And look how the system held him up, right? You need to talk about the fact that we have a system that is designed once you are a white wealthy man to never, ever, ever let you fail. To the point of actually suffering, which for the record is the lesson. We need to learn from what has happened from all of his legal problems, which is you cannot take a powerful, wealthy white man and actually hold him accountable or else the whole house of cards falls apart. But the Democratic Party can’t make that argument right now. Alright?

AW | 18:13 – How about this? You frame it as “Donald,” because he hates being called Donald, “Donald, you inherited all this money. You’ve been able to own a USFL football team, you own casinos. You’ve done all these amazing things. You’ve been a TV star, you got to be president of the United States, and yet you’re constantly bitching and moaning. You’re never happy.”

JYS | 18:33 – So that is one of the larger things because Donald Trump and Elon Musk have done us an invaluable service, which is that they have made a point that wealth and power at the level that they have. It’s not about accumulating wealth and power, it’s about the fact that they are hollow, ugly, unhappy people. I find Donald Trump endlessly fascinating because he is a Shakespearean tragic character. Like this is a person who is not well, who has gone through their entire lives absolutely miserable. He didn’t even want to be president. He still doesn’t really want to be president.

AW | 19:09 – Except to stay out of prison.

JYS | 19:11 – Well, I I don’t think he can go to prison at this point. I think it’s because it’s like, it’s like the old idea. I know it’s not true. It’s the old idea that the great white shark can’t stop swimming. Like there’s a hole inside of these people that cannot be filled. And it doesn’t matter how much wealth, how many toys, how much power, how much fame, like it is a giant sucking hole. And it should be, it’s, it’s almost like, you know, it, it should be a warning sign to the rest of us that this entire thing, what we’re told, we’re supposed to want, what we’re told, we’re supposed to strive for, that it’s empty and it’s rotting and it’s poisonous. And that is something I would like to say to Donald Trump to his face.

AW | 19:49 – Well, I’m looking forward to him coming on the Muckrake Podcast. If it’s going to happen, you got to let us know.

JYS | 19:56 – If it does, I’ll let you know, but I, I wouldn’t hold my breath on that one.

AW | 19:59 – Jared Yates Sexton, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.

JYS | 20:03 – Thank you, Alex.

AW | 20:19 – I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Lauren Kim. Lauren is the financial secretary and a steering committee member for YECA – Young Evangelicals for Climate Action. Lauren, welcome to Sea Change Radio.

Lauren Kim (LK) | 20:32 – Hi, thank you so much, Alex, for having me.

AW | 20:34 – Very interested to hear more about YECA. Why don’t you first explain the mission of your organization, if you will?

Lauren Kim (LK) | 20:42 – Yeah, absolutely. The mission of YECA, we exist to equip, empower, and catalyze young Christians to love God and our neighbors. And we do this through climate action in both in churches and communities. And we do this to create a more just and equitable and loving world. And I think we can sum up our entire mission statement through Micah six eight, which is do justice. So justice as an act, love, mercy, and walk humbly with our God. So we’re a faith-based organization. We’re nonprofit and we do creation care.

AW | 21:21 – What does that mean, creation care?

LK | 21:24 -So creation care is, in simple words, is environmentalism, but I think we differ from other environmental organizations because our motivation. So a lot of environmental orgs, they revolve around, um, scientists or people who are passionate about a certain issue, um, or tribal rights or something along those lines. Our interests and the reason why we care about the environment is because of Jesus and because he came down, we take the Bible seriously and in order to love our neighbors and be be obedient to the word, we try to advocate for climate action and care for the environment, um, because we’re mandated to and it helps people around us.

AW | 22:12 – So give us some examples of some of the climate action that your organization is involved in. How, how do you try to affect change directly?

LK | 22:21 – Yeah, so we actually have three pillars for our work, and we base everything around these three pillars. Um, so these three pillars are empowering, equipping, and accountability. So empowering. We want to empower young Christians, this generation to take action and advocate together. And we actually have a college fellows program, which we, where we train dozens of students across the country from various colleges, um, to be more effective advocates, and we help guide them, um, with a project on their, on their campus. So currently we have a cohort. We have a cohort every single year, and we have students from Notre Dame to Arizona State University. And they take on projects like aeroponics research, which is really cool to creating a sustainability committee on grounds to recycle or have compost on their schools. The second thing that we do is equipping young Christians to engage with their church communities. Church communities are a great place to have a conversation about creation care and we have various fellows programs. We have community fellows and climate fellows programs where we train people interested on how to talk about it, how to write about it, and to support them with whatever project or interest that they have in mind so they can best equip their communities. And then lastly, we hold political leaders accountable directly. Um, and we want them to enact like ambitious climate policy. So our national organizer will put out statements on whatever’s out there. Right now we have direct action. We’ll go to dc we’ll have fly-ins, we’ll bird dog, we’ll get up and talk to politicians. We’ll testify at the EPA, that’s something that I’ve done before. And we also believe in making disciples of disciples. And that means instead of directly being there and doing the work, equip others to advocate. So we sponsor students to go to CO, which is the Christian Climate Observers Program, and these Christians will be trained at COP and go to COP 28 or whatever conference is out there to talk about Christians who care about the environment.

AW | 24:55 – So the term evangelical Christianity, it gets folded in with fundamentalist Christianity quite a bit in people’s minds. Why don’t you explain how evangelical Christianity differs from fundamentalism and, and why the distinction is important when we talk about climate change and environmentalism.

LK | 25:16 – I’m actually really glad that you brought this up because I think every time I say I am part of YACA and I talk about being evangelical and caring about the environment, I think people get it twisted a lot because they, the word evangelical has become such a hot red button issue and it’s become so politicized. Let me start with the, the definition of evangelical. So the NAE, the National Association of Evangelicals, they define being evangelical as someone who takes the Bible seriously. They believe in the word of Jesus Christ. And it’s important for that person to encourage non-Christians to trust in Jesus and have faith in him as his savior. So two parts, believing in the Bible as the word, and then it’s important to them to tell others about it. So that’s what evangelical means. Fundamentalism is a movement within religion. So it can, there are fundamentalists Christians, there are fundamentalists Muslims and fundamentalists Hindus, and that basically means someone who is religious and they take their text literally. And the difference between someone who, and someone can be a fun fundamentalist evangelical or be evangelical and not fundamentalist, um, depends on what that person is. I would say overall, in my experience, um, a lot of evangelical churches that I’ve been into, they take the Bible seriously, but not literally. It’s important to take the texts meaningfully, but not but important to place scripture in context.

AW | 27:03 – So you’re not advocating for stoning people for adultery, et cetera.

LK | 27:07 – Yeah, I think it’s important to, like when you read a text, a lot of biblical texts are very scary at first or kind of throw you off, but you have to read it in the context of when it was written and by who it was written by. And I think that distinction is really important when talking about it because I think a lot of people when they think of evangelical, they think of someone who takes text literally and are way too legalistic about it. And that is different from who, what the definition of evangelical is in itself. Sure, there are evangelicals who are fundamentalists and they’re fundamentalists who aren’t evangelical. I don’t think those two terms are like mutual.

AW | 27:52 – The organization is Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, YECA. Lauren Kim, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.

LK | 28:01 – All right, thank you so much, Alex.

Narrator | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to See Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis. And our outro music is by Alex Wise, additional music by Freddie Hubbard and Sharon Van Etten. To read a transcript of this show, go to see change radio.com stream, or download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others, and tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability for Sea Change Radio. I’m Alex Wise.