Going Nuclear by Tim Gregory review – a boosterish case for atomic energy
The bomb came first, of course, but atomic dread coexisted with tremendous optimism about what President Eisenhower dubbed 'atoms for peace': the potential of controlled fission to generate limitless energy. As David Lilienthal of the US Atomic Energy Commission observed, atom-splitting thus inspired a pseudo-religious binary: 'It would either destroy us all or it would bring about the millennium.'
Nuclear optimism was shattered by the 1986 Chornobyl disaster but, as the subtitle of his book advertises, Gregory is determined to bring it back. A nuclear chemist at Sellafield, where the Queen opened the world's first commercial nuclear reactor in 1956, he's a cheerleader for Team Millennium. Writing in a Promethean spirit of 'rational and daring optimism', this self-proclaimed 'nuclear environmentalist' believes nuclear energy is the only viable route to net zero by 2050. 'The nucleus could power the world securely, reliably, affordably, and – crucially – sustainably,' he declares.
Gregory is an excellent popular science writer: clear as a bell and gently humorous. If you want to understand the workings of fission or radioactivity, he's your man. But he is also an evangelical pitchman whose chapters on the atom's myriad wonders can read rather like high-end sales brochures. Radiation? Not a problem! Less dangerous, in fact, than radiophobia, 'the irrational fear of radiation'. High-level nuclear waste? It can be buried in impregnable catacombs like Finland's state-of-the-art Onkalo or, better yet, recycled through breeder reactors. Gregory wants the reader to learn to stop worrying and love the reactor.
Of course, there is a radioactive elephant in the room, which Gregory eventually confronts in the chapter We Need to Talk About Chernobyl. Like Three Mile Island (1979) and Fukushima (2011), the Soviet disaster caused reactor construction to crash. Europe built more reactors in the five years before Chornobyl than it has in the four decades since. The Fukushima meltdown spooked Germany into dismantling its entire nuclear programme. Whereas France, which has one-eighth of the planet's 441 active reactors, currently generates two-thirds of its electricity from nuclear, Germany produces none, cancelling out its gains from renewables and making it painfully reliant on Russian gas. Gregory argues that the construction of reactors like Hinkley Point C in Somerset runs behind schedule and over budget because we've lost the habit, even as China and South Korea streak ahead.
To Gregory, all this is a tragic case of radiophobia. Only around 50 fatalities have been directly attributed to radiation from Chornobyl, while the official death tolls for Fukushima and Three Mile Island are one and zero respectively. Roll them all together and the same number of people are lost roughly every three minutes to air pollution caused by burning fossil fuels.
No doubt, the kneejerk rejection of nuclear energy can be ignorant bordering on superstitious, but safety concerns demand more space and consideration. Oddly, Gregory doesn't mention Serhii Plokhy's 2022 book Atoms and Ashes, which explains how the Fukushima disaster could have been much worse if not for the courage and judgment of a few key officials. More offputtingly, he attacks renewable energy with roughly the same arguments used by rightwing critics of net zero, warning of 'energy scarcity, industrial wind-down, and food insecurity' if we choose wind and sun over good old uranium-235. But surely it is not a zero-sum game?
After a while, Gregory's relentless boosterism begins to lose its persuasive power and he sounds rather like the blithely confident scientist in the first act of a disaster movie. Even though I'm personally convinced that anybody focused on the climate emergency would be foolish to dismiss nuclear out of hand, I suspect that sceptics may require an argument that sounds a little less like 'Calm down, dear.'
Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World by Tim Gregory is published by Bodley Head (£25). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
The Rev William Barber's ‘moral movement' confronts Trump's America. Can it work?
On 2 June, at St Mark's Episcopal church in Washington DC, people packed the sanctuary – elders in denim jackets, seminarians in collars, organizers clutching clipboards. Some had come in from North Carolina; others walked from their homes just a few blocks away. The seats were full, so the crowd lined the aisles and leaned against the red-brick walls beneath stained-glass windows that cast streaks of light across the floor. It was the first Moral Monday of the summer – a tradition of weekly, nonviolent protest that began in North Carolina in 2013 and now serves as the beating heart of the Rev William Barber's national movement to end poverty and systemic injustice. 'I am not afraid,' the congregation sang. They clapped in rhythm. They swayed in place. Their voices, layered and lived in, reverberated through the rafters: 'I would die for liberation, because I know why I was made.' It was part worship, part invocation, part warning. They folded into the center of the sanctuary as they sang covenants of nonviolence – pledges to neither resist arrest nor retaliate, to remain disciplined and dignified in the face of confrontation. One organizer stepped forward and asked them to consider the gravity of what they were saying. 'In every cell of your body,' he said, 'do you believe that?' Barber, the co-chair of the revived Poor People's campaign, a national movement to challenge inequality in all its forms through moral protest and policy change, has spent years preparing people for moments like this. Barber draws on a tradition that views justice as a covenant rather than charity, as a sacred demand to confront moral rot. Right now, that means challenging the Trump administration's second-term agenda – and the Republican-controlled Congress advancing legislation that would slash Medicaid, food assistance and public education, while simultaneously giving tax breaks to some of the wealthiest Americans – or, what Barber has simply called 'policy murder', a wholesale dismantling of services for the poor and vulnerable. But Barber's battle is both a moral rebellion against Trump's America and against the deeper architecture of inequality that has survived every administration. His movement doesn't simply resist a president. It challenges a political theology that weds nationalism to capitalism and cloaks exploitation in scripture. In Barber's view, Trump isn't the disease – he's the symptom of a nation that never fully confronted its sins. 'Jesus was not crucified because he was just talking about private sin,' he told me. 'He was crucified because he turned over the money tables. That's where government and religion had come into an unholy relationship, and were robbing from the poor.' In a sermon the day before, Barber had turned to 2 Kings – to four lepers outside a besieged city, caught between certain death and uncertain deliverance. 'Why sit we here until we die?' they ask, before rising to move toward the enemy camp. That movement, Barber reminded his audience, is what made the miracle possible. The lepers rose to risk the unknown and found the enemy had already left, leaving behind food, shelter and silver. Deliverance had already come; it just took the marginalized to move first. The US is in its own such moment, Barber said. 'This is murder by policy,' he preached, pointing to the $1.1tn in proposed cuts to healthcare, food aid and climate infrastructure. 'We cannot stay here and die.' Organizers passed protest signs around the sanctuary like communion: Fund Life, Not Death. Our Faith Demands Justice, Not Policy Murder. Handouts followed: 13.7 million people are at risk of losing health insurance. Eleven million at risk of losing food assistance. Billions redirected from public programs to tax breaks for corporations, defense contractors and deportation forces. Congress was deliberating over what Barber calls a 'big, bad, ugly, disgusting, deadly budget', and they wanted to take a moral stand. The room was intentionally diverse – it's what Barber calls a fusion movement, rooted in the idea that poor and working people across race, religion and region have a moral force capable of reshaping the nation. They prayed. They assigned roles. Some would march. Some would risk arrest. All would bear witness. Slowly, deliberately, the congregation began to move. First, those in wheelchairs; then the people along the walls peeled off. Then, one section at a time, released with care – no rush, no clamor. They lined up two by two, like they were boarding an ark. It was a practiced procession, not chaos. The organizers had been clear: move like the black-and-white footage you've seen, like those who marched before you – with order, with discipline, with conviction. 'When politicians and priests bless policies that hurt the poor,' Barber said, 'that's when the prophets have to rise.' For Barber, this is the prophet's role: to expose, to indict and to force a moral reckoning in the public square. The structure of his movement's actions, the insistence on grounding resistance in both scripture and strategy, is shaped by a long religious protest tradition in the US. Now, under a second Trump term, with safety nets unraveling and rights under siege, that witness feels urgent again. As the movement experiments with decentralized leadership, more youth recruitment and a sharper digital presence, it will have to decide: is it a movement to awaken the conscience, or to seize the wheel? Can this movement still meet the scale of today's coordinated assault on democracy, rights and the poor? Barber met the demonstrators at the corner of East Capitol St NE and 1st St SE, where the procession paused before the slow walk towards the steps of the supreme court. He stood with his cane in hand, a white stole slung over his shoulders that read: Jesus was a poor man. He joined the group like a hinge between past and present. No microphone. No grand announcement. Just a nod, a steadying breath, and then a turn toward the supreme court. Passersby smiled and posed for selfies, unaware or unbothered by the stakes. The procession kept moving, singing as they went. The air filled with hymns and the weight of memory. At the court steps, the crowd swelled; marshals implored folks to move closer. They sang battle hymns through the speaker system, a thread of the sacred pulled taut across the concrete. The day was structured to echo the civil rights movement, orderly, solemn and visually potent. When Barber took the mic, he drew on the movement's rhetorical authority as well. 'We gather here not in protest alone,' Barber said, 'but in prophetic power. We stand not just as people of faith, but as stewards of moral memory. Injustice has written itself into the budget lines, and silence is not an option when lives hang in the balance of a ledger.' Barber reminded the crowd that the country's wounds were not just policy failures; they were moral abscesses. 'There can be no healing of the soul of America without healing the body,' he said. Not while people are starving. Not while they're uninsured. Not while injustice is passed off as fiscal responsibility. He said something similar in 2020, in the days after Biden was elected president and many people across the nation released what felt like four years of held breath. Biden called for unity; Barber pushed back. 'There has to be division before there can be healing,' he said. In Barber's theology, peace doesn't mean calm. It means justice. False unity, he warned, is not reconciliation – it's complicity. And that is the deeper challenge beneath Barber's movement: not just to resist one budget, or even one party, but to confront the country's underlying sickness: its habit of mistaking cruelty for order, and order for peace. 'They say they're cutting waste, fraud and abuse. But what they're saying is it's wasteful to lift people fraudulent to help them live, and abusive to make sure they have healthcare,' he said. For a moment, it felt like the church services I'd grown up in. Come on, Barber! a clergyman shouted. Yessuh! a resonant voice rang from the other side of the crowd. By the time Barber started whooping – stretching his syllables as his voice reached a thunderous crescendo – the crowd had been whipped into a passionate holler. Barber told stories of movement members who died without care – Pam in Alabama, Jade in North Carolina – who called him not for comfort, but for commitment. Don't quit, they said. 'They had the courage to fight even while they were dying,' he said. 'We ought to have the courage to fight while we're living.' Then he slowed and asked a simple question to those gathered: 'What will you do with the breath you have left?' The question hung in the air. He didn't wait for an answer. A few days later, he told me why it sticks with him. 'That was George Floyd's cry. That was my brother's cry – he died in his 60s, waiting on healthcare. That was the cry of people during Covid: 'I can't breathe.' That's what I hear when I say that,' he told me. 'The breath you have left – that's what you've been given. That's what you owe.' Breath was a gift and a responsibility. 'We're not gonna sit here and let healthcare die,' he said. 'We're not gonna sit here and let living wages die. We're not gonna sit here and let democracy die. It's time to live. It's time to stand. It's time to speak. To protest. To live justice.' The line echoed down 1st Street. Whether it reached the halls of power was another question. Barber has always insisted this movement isn't built for the news cycle. 'Movements are not driven by whether the media covers it,' he told me. 'They're driven by whether it's right. You don't build fusion coalitions because it's sexy, you build it because it's necessary.' The spotlight matters, though. And as the glare has dimmed since 2020, so too has the movement's leverage in elite policy spaces. For Obery Hendricks, a professor in the department of religion at Columbia University, the tension is theological and tactical. Barber speaks from the Black prophetic tradition, a tradition that calls out injustice with moral clarity. But clarity alone isn't always enough. 'Too often, prophetic rhetoric is co-opted as performance,' Hendricks told me. 'It becomes poetry without praxis.' But even when the national spotlight is not focused on the organization, that hasn't stopped the Poor People's campaign from lining up in moral opposition to what it sees as destructive policy across the country. 'People say, where's the movement?' Barber told me. 'We say, where are you? The movement is here. Maybe you're just not paying attention.' Fusion organizing in 2025 isn't theory – it's practice. Amazon workers marching with choirs in Alabama. Climate activists linking arms with veterans on Capitol Hill. Disability advocates and union reps shaping policy in North Carolina. Barber's once-local campaign is now connected with movements across the country, from Georgia's voting rights drives to Los Angeles's housing struggles. Sometimes, the actions pay off. Inside of St Mark's, I met Emma Biggs, a childcare advocate from North Carolina who had made the trip to DC for the rally. She had joined similar protests before. In June of last year, she was among those who were arrested inside the state legislature while protesting a looming childcare shortfall. The state legislature had passed a stopgap funding bill by the time protesters were released. To Vaughn A Booker, a scholar of religion and African American history at the University of Pennsylvania, though, the power of Barber's model lies more in its moral insurgency than the results it produces. 'He has this style that's like a preacher reading out the names on judgment day. He's not just naming problems. He's naming people, policies and outcomes,' Booker said. 'It lands differently when it comes from the pulpit.' And maybe that's the point. In an era of institutional drift, moral confrontation remains a kind of clarity. 'Moral discourse may not be a dominant mobilizer anymore,' he said. 'But that was always the case. The prophets didn't expect to win. They expected to witness.' Barber echoed the sentiment. Bearing moral witness matters even when it doesn't automatically produce results, because failing to show up at all cedes ground unnecessarily. 'A moral fight is one that you have to engage, because not to engage is to risk damage that might not be reversible,' he said. 'If a group of politicians were going to crucify voting rights and crucify healthcare, then every crucifixion needs a witness.' Not everyone will be reachable through scripture, though. Whereas nearly half of Americans attended weekly religious services at the height of the civil rights movement, only about 30% of Americans do so now, according to a recent Gallup poll. Barber sees the rising suspicion of moral language, and the growing distance from the church, but he doesn't see it as an obstacle; rather, he sees an opportunity. 'Young people are not leaving the faith because they don't want justice,' he told me. 'They're leaving because we've too often offered them religion without justice, and theology without truth.' So, he remains committed to preaching in public, to claiming a tradition that doesn't just soothe, but disrupts with the intent of building a kind of moral pressure. Barber believes the system has rotted at its core. It's why he often refers to a sickness in the country's body, a deterioration of its heart – but he also believes it has the capacity to be reformed, and is drawing on a prophetic tradition to push it towards change. 'He's operating within the system,' Booker told me. 'He's not outside of it burning it down. He's trying to get the system to live up to its stated values.' Barber's strategy mirrors that of Martin Luther King Jr a generation before: not to write legislation personally, but to focus enough attention on a moral crisis that the system has to respond. The marches weren't meant to replace lawmaking, but to expose it – to show where justice had failed, and to make action unavoidable. Barber began a labored walk to the Capitol. A woman caught up to him quietly and asked if he had a moment to speak. His eyes were forward, fixed on the entrance. 'If you don't mind,' he said gently, 'I'm trying to focus on what I'm doing.' She apologized and nodded, but had to say her piece. She walked beside him and told him that the A was missing from DEI – the A for accessibility. So many movements, she said, leave out people with disabilities. People who walk with a limp. Barber smirked. 'Oh, people like me?' he said. The procession stopped and Barber, alongside a small group, descended down the elevator. This is where conviction met cost. At the Capitol rotunda, the group prayed with the purpose of arrest. Suvya Carroll, a disability rights advocate born with cerebral palsy, clutched a Bible. Carroll told Barber she and her friend were there because 'people like us always get left out. But we believe this movement sees us.' As Capitol police moved in, she was arrested along with Barber and five others. Barber later reflected on Carroll's arrest in particular: 'That child looked the Capitol police in the eye and said: 'I'm ready.' And we all prayed. Right there, in the middle of that dome. And I thought, Lord, if this doesn't matter, what does?' The arrest was symbolic – the third time Moral Monday activists had been detained since April – but it also surfaced a deeper truth. The witness came from many, but the weight still fell on one. When Barber turned toward the elevator, others followed. And once inside the rotunda, all eyes returned to him. As questions swirl around the future of his organization, a harder one remains: how long can a movement built on moral clarity lean on a single voice? Barber's voice remains central, but the campaign's future may depend on how well it distributes that moral authority across a broader base. If the theology is prophetic, the structure has to be plural. Barber's protest is grounded not in outcome, but in obligation. He's asked: what will you do with the breath you have left? For Barber, that's not just a question. It's a way to keep moving. 'This country gets amnesia,' he told me. 'We forget. That's why prophetic work is not about a moment. It's about building a memory that resists the lie.' Even though he's become a brand, he's trying to build a witness. 'I don't want people to follow me, I want them to follow the truth,' he said. 'Prayer,' he likes to say, 'is never the end of protest. It's the beginning of a demand.' That day in the rotunda, his prayer echoed through marble. Maybe it reached no one. Maybe it moved someone. But it was heard. That's the point of prophecy. Not certainty. Witness.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
I chaired the FCC. The 60 Minutes settlement shows Trump has weaponized the agency
It is time to unfurl the 'Mission Accomplished' banner at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Paramount Global, the parent of CBS Television, has agreed to pay $16m to settle a lawsuit brought by Donald Trump over the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. Presumably, the FCC can now cease its slow-walking of the Paramount-Skydance Media merger. Just two days after the president took office, the agency's new chair, Brendan Carr, inserted the FCC into the issues in the Trump lawsuit that alleged 'news distortion'. As the New York Post headlined: 'Trump's FCC pick Brendan Carr says '60 Minutes' editing scandal could affect Paramount-Skydance merger review.' That lawsuit was filed in the final week of the 2024 presidential campaign under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, a statute historically used against false advertising. The case was filed in a single-judge federal district court that one legal publication characterized as 'a favored jurisdiction for conservative legal causes and plaintiffs'. CBS characterized the case as 'without merit'. The 60 Minutes broadcast aired in October; the day before, a different excerpt had appeared on Face the Nation. Soon after, the Center for American Rights – a group that describes itself as 'a public interest law firm dedicated to protecting Americans' most fundamental constitutional rights' – filed a complaint at the FCC alleging CBS had engaged in 'significant and substantial news alteration'. The complaint was dismissed as seeking 'to weaponize the licensing authority of the FCC in a way that is fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment'. Immediately upon becoming the FCC chair, Carr reversed that decision and ordered a formal proceeding on the matter (but let stand the dismissal of a complaint against a local Fox station over its 2020 election coverage). The election of Trump and the installation of a Trump-appointed FCC chair transformed the Paramount/CBS merger from a review of the public interest merits of the transfer of broadcast licenses into a broader question that included the 60 Minutes editing. Carr told an interviewer: 'I'm pretty confident that the news distortion complaint over the 60 Minutes transcript is something that is likely to arise in the context of the FCC review of that transaction.' The formal paperwork for FCC approval of the license transfers was submitted 10 months ago, on 6 September 2024. Now that the lawsuit has been settled, it will be interesting to see how quickly the FCC acts. The CBS case is just one example of the tactical leverage the Trump FCC regularly exerts over those it regulates. Carr, who wrote the FCC chapter in the 'Project 2025' Maga blueprint, has not been shy about using this authority to achieve such political goals. Even before formally assuming the FCC chair position, Carr began exercising chair-like authority to advance the Maga agenda. This began with a letter to the CEOs of Alphabet (Google and YouTube), Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Microsoft and Apple alleging: 'you participated in a censorship cartel … [that is] an affront to Americans' constitutional freedoms and must be completely dismantled.' Going beyond traditional FCC authority, he threatened: 'As you know, Big Tech's prized liability shield, Section 230, is codified in the Communications Act, which the FCC administers.' Carr suggested he might investigate whether those editorial decisions were made in good faith. Recently, Carr conditioned the approval of Verizon's acquisition of Frontier Communications on Verizon agreeing to drop its corporate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies. Continuing his anti-diversity efforts, he launched an investigation into Comcast Corporation because it promotes DEI as 'a core value of our business'. In his pre-FCC chair days, Carr championed press freedom. In a 2021 statement, he wrote: 'A newsroom's decision about what stories to cover and how to frame them should be beyond the reach of any government official.' Once he became Trump's FCC chair, however, he not only picked up on the 60 Minutes matter, but also launched an investigation into the public broadcasters NPR and PBS 'regarding the airing of … programming across your broadcast member stations'. The FCC's regulatory authority directly covers about one-sixth of the American economy while also affecting the other five-sixths that rely on the nation's communications networks. What was once an independent, policy-based agency has been transformed into a performance-based agency, using any leverage it can discover or invent to further the Trump Maga message. Tom Wheeler was the chair of the Federal Communications Commission from 2013 to 2017
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Revealed: the far-right, antisemitic men's club network spreading across US
A nationwide US network of dozens of far-right, men-only fraternal clubs has what members describe as 'literally hundreds' of participants who include past and currently serving military personnel, lawyers, civil servants, and prominent antisemitic influencers, a Guardian investigation can reveal. The Old Glory Club (OGC) – which has at least 26 chapters in 20 US states and until now has drawn little attention – exemplifies the alarming rise of organized racist political groups in the past few years but especially during the rise of Donald Trump and his return to the White House. The OGC network has held conferences, meetups and other events. Key members like podcaster Pete Quinones use their platforms to push far-right ideas about Jewish people and immigrants. Other members have used their platforms to respond to political events, and to advocate measures including 'cancellation insurance' for members whose extreme political views might impede their professional lives. Harry Shukman, a researcher at UK anti-fascist non-profit Hope Not Hate, who last month published an exposé on the OGC-affiliated Basketweavers organization in the UK, told the Guardian: 'Groups such as the OGC are a new breed of extremist organisation which aims first to build an offline social network before taking over society.' He added, 'They seek to lower the bar to participating in the far right, and by doing so have proved attractive to a cohort of mostly male members, some of whom have never before undertaken any form of activism.' Heidi Beirich, co-founder and chief strategy officer of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said the OGC 'appears to be another major new network of racists, too many of which are springing up in the era of Trump'. She said the group was 'pushing violent ideologies, including race hate and antisemitism and has links to prominent figures on the far right'. The OGC was incorporated on 16 June 2023, according to Virginia company records, but the organization took shape over more than a year through in-person conferences and online networks. The Old Glory Club Substack began publishing in October 2022, with an X account launching the same month. Podcast aggregators show Old Glory Club podcast content appearing online by November 2022 at the latest. At that time however, the organization appeared to be conceived as mostly a collaborative effort at content production. In a November 2022 podcast the pseudonymous YouTuber and central OGC figure known as Charlemagne told far-right podcaster Auron Macintyre – now an on-air personality at Glenn Beck-founded Blaze Media – that OGC was 'a group of American gentlemen who have decided to organize a social club … to publish content and … try and figure out a new political settlement for Americans'. Also in October 2022, another pseudonymous YouTuber, the Prudentialist, appealed for donations to OGC in a podcast, saying that the money 'will one day be used for mutual aid for our friends that get doxed or fired or affected by natural disasters and other acts of God'. By April 2023, the Prudentialist was presenting OGC in podcasts as part of an effort by the far right to 'create networks of patronage [and] political support' in order to 'maintain not just some semblance of power, but … anti-fragility against a state that wants you broke, dead or transitioned' He added that OGC would offer opportunities for members to 'meet, host conferences and … to support people in the future who like that firefighter in Virginia was fired for simply donating to Kyle Rittenhouse's legal defense fund', an apparent reference to the fallout from 2021 Guardian reporting on donors to Rittenhouse's legal defense whose identities were revealed in leaked data from a Christian crowdfunding site. Other key members advocated a strategy of decentralization for the far-right to create enduring activist institutions. In a 10 July 2022 republication of his speech at that year's rightwing Tennessee Scyldings conference, charter member and frequent OGC spokesman Ryan Turnipseed lamented the fact that Spain's authoritarian fascist dictator Francisco Franco – a touchstone for the contemporary far right – had 'failed to secure his line of succession' despite propaganda and purges. 'This is a lesson we need to learn,' he added. He proposed a decentralized network of groups, which would allow 'us to draw upon the knowledge and abilities of these groups. We no longer have to wait on a Caesar or a Franco to 'unite the right' into some effective fighting force. Instead, we can be effective with what we have now.' Others stressed the importance of in-person meetups, and directly referenced similar initiatives overseas. According to a July 2022 Substack post by the pseudonymous 'Red Hawk' inviting applications for local chapters, chapters must consist of at least 'five American men over the age of 18', and meet quarterly and annual reporting requirements on membership and finances. Local chapters and the organization as a whole are overseen by an OGC central committee, according to the post and subsequent podcasts. The organization's core members have orchestrated four annual conferences, with the last two happening under the OGC banner. According to speakers on a recorded after-action report on the most recent OGC in-person conference held in May, OGC membership has burgeoned in the last year. They claimed that OGC now has 'literally hundreds' of members, and 'We're so large at this point that we've passed the point where the Central Committee is going to be able to know all or even most of the individual members'. 'Altogether we've built a very, very effective organization' It is not yet clear how the names in company records for the umbrella organization and its chapters correspond with all of the online aliases of key members. But those records do reveal that members include prominent far-right influencers, current and former US military members and police officers, court officers and contractors with US government security clearances. The Guardian has contacted all named members for comment. Turnipseed is a charter member of the OGC umbrella organization, a frequent contributor at its Substack, a frequent podcaster, and has spoken at OGC and Skyldings conferences. Previously, Turnipseed was excommunicated in May 2024 by First Lutheran church in his native Ponca City, Oklahoma, after a viral 2023 Twitter thread criticizing the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod's new catechism for accommodating progressive political positions, briefly making him a cause celebre for the online far right. In February 2023, Turnipseed had been identified by antifascist researchers as a member of what they called a rising 'white supremacist faction within the Lutheran faith'. Later that month the president of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod called for the excommunication of those 'propagating radical and unchristian 'alt-right' views'. Not long after his excommunication, Immanuel Lutheran church in Wichita, Kansas, defied the ban by accepting Turnipseed into membership. Other OGC chapter members have connections with the wider world of rightwing politics. Matthew Pearson of Tampa Bay, Florida, is listed on the initial filings of the Yellow Dog Pack, a Florida OGC chapter. Pearson is a writer for two Christian Nationalist publications, American Reformer and Truthscript, where he has praised a book that says Christians should be anti-gay, and commended the social theories of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. Other members are connected with the armed forces and defense contractors. Evan Dale Schalow, 25, of Midlothian, Virginia, is listed as a charter member of the OGC in Virginia company records. According to his LinkedIn bio, Schalow has also been a horizontal construction engineer in the Virginia national guard since 2022 and before that he was an ROTC cadet while at Longwood University from 2020. According to the same biography he has US government secret security clearance. The Guardian emailed the Virginia national guard to confirm Schalow's service but received no response. Harvey Pretlow Rawls III is named as a charter member of the Old Glory Club and the Vetus Dominicum Club chapter in Virginia company records. According to his LinkedIn page, Rawls is also a systems engineer at HII, the US's largest military shipbuilder. The same page indicates that he has an active secret clearance, the second tier of US security clearances, which can take up to a year to investigate and approve. The Guardian contacted HII about his role at the company. Michael R Gibbs of Phenix City, Alabama, meanwhile, is the only person listed on the initial filing of the Magnolia League, an OGC chapter in Alabama. According to his LinkedIn page he served as a sergeant in the US Marine Corps between 2008 and 2013, and then as a deputy in the Muscogee county sheriff's office between 2014 and 2016. The same page says he is now a buyer for firearms company Remington. Two members of OGC Indiana chapter the Tippecanoe Society, meanwhile, are lawyers who have spent time in government service. Kyle Lindskog of Zionsville, Indiana, is now a freelance attorney, according to his LinkedIn biography, but between 2015 and 2018 he was a city attorney in St Petersburg, Florida. Paul Scott Lunsford Jr of Carmel is an intellectual property attorney at a firm he founded, but between 2006 and 2010 he was an operations officer in the US navy. Beirich, the extremism expert, said: 'The fact that OGC members apparently include current and former military members and police officers, and similar government officials, is a particular cause for alarm, and frankly shocking.' She added: 'This may ultimately pose a national security threat right at the time when the Trump administration is abandoning efforts to root extremists out of the military while hiring racists, antisemites and Qanon believers to staff the administration.' The OGC Substack reflects the broader preoccupations of its members: a mix of far right causes and racist politics. They includeneo-Confederate pleas for the redemption of Confederate symbols and the Confederate cause and a laudatory discussion of the 1967 documentary of post-colonial Africa, Africa Addio, which film critic Roger Ebert once called 'a brutal, dishonest, racist film'. There are claims that white Evangelical Christians are the west's 'most hated minority', and a reproduced Dave Greene speech in which he characterizes 'Jewish Talmudic law' as 'an attempt to trick God', and telling his audience that they and the 'Jewish community' are 'on the opposite ends of this age's struggle'. In many ways, however, the Substack appears to give a more acceptable face to the politics that key members express in cruder terms elsewhere. For example, Peter R Quinones – a self-described 'charter member' of the group – is listed as an officer on the initial filing of the foundational Old Glory Club. Quinones is a broadly influential figure on the far right. His Substack is the 78th most popular Substack newsletter on US politics, according to that platform's figures. His podcast was 142nd most popular in US political podcasts according to data from podcast tracking service Rephonic, putting it roughly on par with shows by CNN's Kaitlin Collins and Andrew Sullivan, and ahead of podcasts by Jim Acosta and Candace Owens. He has issued a regular podcast since 2017, first titled Free Man Over the Wall, and later under its present title, The Pete Quinones Show. During that time and continuing up to the present, he has unleashed hundreds of hours of content marked by racism and antisemitism, which has included urging listeners to take direct action against Jewish and non-white neighbors. In a podcast last month in response to US attacks on Iran – which he attributed entirely to the malign influence of Israel – Quinones urged listeners to respond by simply boycotting businesses owned by Jews, and took sideswipes at Indians. 'It's Jews,' he began. 'You can't live with them. You can't allow them in. If you allow them in, you have to suppress them. But it's better not to allow them in.' Quinones continued: 'Don't do business with them. Do as much business as you can with Heritage Americans'. 'Heritage Americans' is a phrase that, according to rightwing commentator Mike Coté, the so-called New Right uses to describe 'the ethnic population of the United States prior to 1940, with a strong emphasis on Anglo-Protestant Europeans' in an expression of 'European-inflected 'blood-and-soil' nationalism' which is opposed to older 'creedal' versions of American nationalism. In the same broadcast Quinones also said 'Don't do business with Indians,' adding: 'We got an app down here that some of the guys at the Alabama Old Glory Club are doing, which is to show which gas stations and hotels are not owned by Indians here.' Quinones later encouraged listeners to likewise 'build an app for your local area, which shows where there's, are owned by heritage Americans, or at least stuff that's not owned by Indians. And you may want to include another group in that.' In other recent podcasts, Quinones has proffered elaborate anti-Semitic conspiracy theories often promoted by white supremacist groups. In one podcast he worried about the far-right being persecuted for its beliefs about Jews. 'You start, you know, persecuting people who are you know, starting to ask the Jewish question,' he said. The 'Jewish question' is an antisemitic framing of Jewish presence in society as a problem requiring a 'solution,' and has historically been used to justify persecution and genocide, including in Nazi Germany. Since 2022, Quinones has also collaborated in making content for the Old Glory Club network, and has promoted it on his own show. On an Old Glory Club post-election livestream in November, Quinones referred to Black voters with a racial slur favored by white nationalists, saying: 'The North American street ape is hopeless.' He used the same slur a month later in response to a video of a black teenager. Shukman, the Hope Not Hate, researcher said: 'The Old Glory Club and its affiliates like the Basketweavers may claim to provide community, but the truth is they conceal a much more sinister aim.' He added: 'We have seen that the leaders of these groups can be vicious and degrading to junior members, especially maladjusted young men. The OGC's senior figures also have a track record of making deeply racist statements and affiliating with known far-right activists. '
