I am not a witch, and I am determined to fight wealth inequality. I believe in universalism and equality. Empiricism and the scientific method. Progress and tolerance. I believe reason is the primary authority and that daring to know is a good thing. I am skeptical of both authority and tradition, and I believe that a claim to authority should be examined critically rather than accepted at face value. And perhaps most important, given the forces I am fighting against, I believe in secularism, and that religion should be separated from civil authority.

Mike Johnson was recently a perfect example of the growing antipathy toward those principles, Enlightenment principles. The Christian Nationalist revolution to which he has contributed was funded by billionaires, and he wants to maintain billionaire power to ensure his movement’s authority. Whatever his intent, the effect of his rhetoric is to fuse the Billionaire Class with capitalism, to code capitalism as morally good and socialism as morally evil, and to hand Christian Nationalists a witch who threatens their ability to gain wealth and prosperity, and who, therefore, must be destroyed.

This was recently discussed by and on Unholy Ground, their weekly show at Lincoln Square:

Sam Osterhout: Let’s start with capitalism. Because Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House, keynoted the 15th Annual Family Leadership Summit in Des Moines this week or last. He called the midterms a spiritual battle… He said the US was founded as a Christian nation. And he went a step further and argued that Marxism and communism and socialism begin with the premise that there is no god… I don’t know how capitalism begins with the premise that there is a god. But that’s kind of what he was implying… He never cites a single verse where God endorses capitalism because that would be impossible. But what is the whole trick here? Why this fight with the white Christian nationalists? Why do they pick a fight between socialism and capitalism?

Andra Watkins: I grew up in white Christian nationalism… The Family Leadership Summit is one of the key kickoffs of an election season. That’s why they do it in Iowa. And it has been going on for 15 years. It started in 2012. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Citizens United was decided in 2010… When Mike Johnson stands up at an event like that and says all other economic systems are godless and not biblical, he’s by default saying that capitalism must be biblical, right? Even though the Bible doesn’t talk about economic systems at all.

— Unholy Ground with Andra Watkins & Sam Osterhout, Lincoln Square

The Christian Nationalist revolution that has been executed in the United States is commonly referred to as populism, but notice how well ’s critique of populism fits as a critique of Christian Nationalism:

Populism is in many, many ways a rejection of Enlightenment principles, and many of the targets of MAGA have been Enlightenment institutions such as free trade, international organizations of cooperation, science, universities, the separation of powers in liberal democracy.

— Steven Pinker, Trump’s War on the Enlightenment, The Mona Charen Show

Most of us are frustrated by wealth inequality, but unfortunately, many of us are unable to see the systems that produced the situation we’re in. makes this point about Trump himself, in conversation with on the Podcast:

He is not able to think in terms of systems or abstractions — ideas like the market… I think that Trump is basically psychologically incapable of understanding things as process that don’t have a person behind them. That’s the way he’s always done business. He always thinks someone’s trying to screw you or you’re trying to screw somebody.

— John Ganz, Does This Theory Explain the Entire Republican Party?, Bulwark Podcast

The Enlightenment brought us a great deal — but that doesn’t mean the pre-Enlightenment habits of Western society went away. put the point to Pinker this way:

Mona Charen: You point out in the book that in the pre-Enlightenment world, when things did go wrong, it was absolutely routine to find scapegoats or to blame a minority group or to burn witches or to engage in some kind of scapegoating that would find a culprit for what had gone wrong. And one of the great accomplishments of the Enlightenment was to say, well, let’s look at what a more rational explanation for this might have been, and let’s test it against reality.

Steven Pinker: Right. Yes. Right. That is, just not believing that there is such a thing as a witch eliminates at a stroke burning and drowning witches… So Voltaire said, those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

— Trump’s War on the Enlightenment, The Mona Charen Show

Christian Nationalists peddle absurdities because the witch still exists in the minds of millions. To them, progress and tolerance, empiricism and the scientific method, universalism and equality, and the separation of religion from civil authority may all be heretical. But if my heresy is solving our problems by knowing how things actually work, then so be it.

Sources

Sam Osterhout and Andra Watkins, “Unholy Ground,” Lincoln Square.

Steven Pinker, interviewed by Mona Charen, “Trump’s War on the Enlightenment,” The Mona Charen Show.

John Ganz, interviewed by Tim Miller, “Does This Theory Explain the Entire Republican Party?” Bulwark Podcast.

“Speaker Mike Johnson condemns Democratic Socialists at Iowa Christian gathering,” Iowa Capital Dispatch, July 17, 2026. Kadin Luhmann

Andra Watkins, “Christian Nationalists: Where Late-Stage Billionaire Capitalism is Godly”

For Such a Time as This

Christian Nationalists: Where Late-Stage Billionaire Capitalism is Godly

WEDNESDAY! 22 July 2026. Noon eastern. Substack LIVE…

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11 days ago · 77 likes · 17 comments · Andra Watkins

Citizens United v. FEC, 558 U.S. 310 (2010).

That’s the claim I want to defend here, and it sits at the intersection of two things I encountered in the same week: ’s conversation with on The Nerd Reich podcast and James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State.

Intentional thoughtlessness

Bracy, founder of Tech Equity and author of World Eaters: How Venture Capital Is Cannibalizing the Economy, described the venture capital playbook known as blitzscaling — getting as big as possible, as quickly as possible, by any means available. What struck me was her characterization of the strategy’s relationship to thinking:

“The strategy is, actually, to be imprecise. An intentional thoughtlessness… we don’t have time to take precision and to be thoughtful about the direction we’re going. We just need to throw as much at this as we can. And the fallout is a feature, not a bug.”

Read that again: the fallout is a feature. The destruction isn’t an accident of moving fast; it’s part of the design. The obvious problems with this have been discussed elsewhere. What I think is underdiscussed — if it’s discussed at all — is what, exactly, gets destroyed in the fallout, and why it never shows up as a cost.

What Scott would call it

Scott gives the destroyed thing a name. Drawing on the Greek concept of mētis, he distinguishes the practical knowledge embedded in local experience from the general, abstract knowledge deployed by states and their technical agencies:

“…we can find in the Greek concept of metis a means of comparing the forms of knowledge embedded in local experience with the more general, abstract knowledge deployed by the state and its technical agencies.” (Seeing Like a State, “Metis: The Contours of Practical Knowledge”)

Mētis is the harbor pilot’s feel for the current, the farmer’s sense of this valley’s frost — knowledge that works, that lives in people and places, and that cannot be written down. Scott’s book is a catalog of what happens when powerful institutions bulldoze that knowledge in the name of rational improvement: the improvement fails, because the illegible knowledge was doing the real work all along.

Blitzscaling is Scott’s story transplanted from the state to capital — high modernism minus even the utopian pretense. His planners at least believed their designs were thoughtful. Blitzscaling has dispensed with the belief and kept the bulldozer.

The asymmetry

Here is the part I find genuinely galling. When a blitzscaled company enters a community, mētis is what it liquidates. Uber didn’t just displace taxi medallions; it liquidated the accumulated street knowledge of drivers and dispatchers. Airbnb converts neighborhoods — dense webs of neighbors who know each other — into inventory. In each case a working, illegible order is replaced by a platform’s legible one, and the difference is booked as efficiency.

But look at how Silicon Valley itself operates. The industry runs on warm introductions. On knowing which angel’s interest signals what to which fund. On what “we’d love to see more traction” actually means, learned over a hundred coffees. None of this is written down anywhere; all of it is why the industry still clusters in one valley instead of dispersing across the very internet it built. Elites depend on the same social cohesion they destroy in other communities — a cohesion they undermine everywhere else under the guise of efficiency.

If you frame our moment as a fight over who deserves and who does not, then mētis — the knowledge that cannot be written down — may be the most valuable thing we’re fighting over.

Why the ledger never notices

Budgeting is an expression of values: when you say you have money for this but not for that, you are saying you value this over that. And it is always easier to value what is legible. The health of private enterprise is quantifiable; the health of human beings — especially their mental health, especially the relational webs they live inside — is not. So the destruction of a community’s mētis appears on no balance sheet, and the “fallout” of blitzscaling is, in the most literal accounting sense, unaccountable. A feature, not a bug.

The strange thing is that the people atop this system know better, at least about themselves. Bracy describes founders raising venture capital they know is wrong for their businesses, because a term sheet from Sequoia or Andreessen Horowitz has become the definition of success “even if it has nothing to do with the actual fundamentals of the business itself.” Even at the summit, the legible signal has replaced the real thing. They’ve done to their own judgment what they do to our neighborhoods.

They can’t see what they stand on

Paulina Borsook, the Wired-era critic who saw all of this coming in Cyberselfish, put her finger on the tech libertarian’s defining blindness a generation ago: no sector of society has benefited more from government — the funded research, the rule of law, the water and power that simply worked — and none is angrier at it. They cannot see what they depend on, because what they depend on is invisible by design: infrastructure, civic and social, the mētis of a functioning society.

That’s the fight. Not over who is efficient, but over whether the knowledge that holds communities together — theirs and ours — counts as real. They’ve bet everything on the proposition that it doesn’t, while living, every day, off the proof that it does.

This is where the Field Notes begin — the working record of how I’m converting the full-cast audiobook of my novel Coliseum into a TV miniseries using AI, with no studio, no crew, and no Hollywood.

Before you write a single prompt, you need the lay of the land. In this note, I cover the foundation everything…

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I stopped waiting. I’m converting the full-cast audiobook of my novel Coliseum — recorded with 11 professional voice actors — into a TV miniseries using AI video models: Seedance for action and character consistency, Kling for dialogue and camera moves, Nano Banana and Ideogram for frames, OmniHuman for lip-sync, DaVinci Resolve for the edit.

No studio. No crew. No budget beyond subscriptions and a workstation.

And I’m documenting everything in the Field Notes — the exact prompts, the failures, the workarounds, and the finished episodes.

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He whistled while he worked. He thought he was doing God’s will.

On an ordinary Sunday morning, a man walks into a South Side Chicago church. The congregation is singing. An elderly woman sways in her pew. A meal is set out in the fellowship hall for after the service. Nothing about the morning looks like the beginnin…

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Here’s the link for people to get the Next Wave Guide and the Ethical Digital Nomad GPT: https://kristinemadera.com/try-the-next-wave-destination-finder/

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Or when, in discussing a threat made by the President of the United States, a TV personality asks the question, “This deadline that President Trump has set, 8:00 p.m., has threatened to destroy a civilization. How does an investor process that? Is it a bigger upside risk or downside risk?”

In a conversation on April 17th with , I presented vice and virtue as two separate worlds, one that includes common habits like smoking, drinking, and gambling, and another that includes healthy eating, exercise, and time spent enjoying the outdoors. To people who judge personal habits, I cite Kristine’s article as a rebuttal.

Rewriting Your Reality

Vice, Virtue, and the Problem of a Morally Superior Breakfast

In this conversation with Henry L Sullivan III, we started with the question of whether vice had an advantage over virtue, and quickly delved into how those categories collapse once the inner landscape gets involved…

Listen now

3 months ago · Kristine Madera and Henry L Sullivan III

I also cite my own rant, which makes the point in a slightly different way.

In this video, I propose the Virtue Machine, a program that encourages people to publicly commit to their values.

It’s clear that our society is grappling with the moral failing of a corrupt elite. Some are gleeful of the societal collapse they are creating. Others are indifferent to that collapse and watch it with the casualness of a spectator at a sporting event.

Others are discussing the matter in the context of moral failing. I don’t recall hearing that word vice, but, as I implied at the beginning of this article, we need a term for that moral failing.

The Christian Nationalist Revolution that has been executed in the United States of America is ostensibly predicated on the idea that our society is suffering from an epidemic of common vices. It is a political movement that glorifies the idea of a traditional wife as a woman who joyfully submits to her husband, while condemning the common vice of sex between consenting adults who share the same gender, or the common vice of publishing and watching videos of sex between consenting adults. The backlash to banning pornography would be intense, which is probably why the radicals behind the Christian Nationalist Revolution haven’t implemented that part of the plan yet.

The Virtue Machine is a way to confront the moral/ethical vices that plague our country. I believe that most Americans are hungry for a pathway to becoming their virtuous selves, one that does not fixate on common vices, but rather elevates the virtues of courage, temperance, generosity, friendliness, truthfulness, and patience. The video is less than 10 minutes long, and I believe the idea can be implemented through a platform like Substack.