Uh Oh. They’re Doing A Course On Us!
There’s a new online course available in NZ by the Dark Times Academy entitled “Unmasking Theocracy: Project 2025 and the Christian Nationalist Agenda”. No – not a cooking course. It’s a ‘cooker’ course. They seem to be wanting to ‘import a culture war’! We check it out.
SCRIPT:
Uh Oh – They’re Doing A Course About Us
Have you heard of the Dark Times Academy in New Zealand?
No we hadn’t either – but we do recognise some of the names involved – and they’ve even started a course, after googling our website.
We might enrol.
Let’s check it out.
So there’s a course available by the Dark Times Academy entitled “Unmasking Theocracy: Project 2025 and the Christian Nationalist Agenda”.
No – not a cooking course. It’s a cooker course.
Now we’ve talked about Project 2025 before. Project 2025 report was unveiled in April 2023 by the Heritage Foundation – an amazing conservative organisation that I actually visited last year – and the report was supported by 100+ conservative organisations, but left-wing opposition to the document exploded when it became apparent that Trump was going to beat the then-candidate sleepy Joe Biden in the polling last year before being replaced by another disaster – Kamala Harris. Ironically the week I visited Heritage Foundation was the week that Biden stepped down.
The NZ media have also attacked Project 2025
The state broadcaster radio New Zealand did a lengthy piece on it. And I checked back and noticed that in July, Stuff then a week later the NZ Herald and then a week after that 1News had covered it. And 2 weeks after that, it’s Radio NZ’s turn. So it’s not a breaking news story. It’s almost like a coordinated hit piece. Gotta love these independent media corporates!
As you can see immediately from the article, the implication is – this is all about Donald Trump and JD Vance.
But even left wing news sites had to admit that wasn’t the case.
Radio NZ continues to panic…
The “Mandate for Leadership” document, which was first released in early 2023, is a whopping 922-page manifesto available online here which lays out a plan for radically overhauling the US federal government. More than 100 authors and contributors crafted the plan.
In the introduction, Heritage Foundation President Kevin D. Roberts writes, “If conservatives want to save the country, we need a bold and courageous plan. This book is the first step in that plan”.
Roberts says the four fronts of the plan are to “Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children”; “Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people”; “Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats”, and to “secure our God-given individual rights to live freely”.
Yeah I know. You’re saying – great. Sounds excellent. What’s the issue.
Well, according to Dark Times Academy here in New Zealand, we need an 8 week course on it.
Panic stations.
So who is involved with Dark Times Academy.
According to the website, Byron Clark is one of two people. And the only name I recognised. The other is Mandy Henk.
According to the awful Spinoff website
Byron C Clark is one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s foremost experts on the far-right and alt-right extremism… He is also a disinformation researcher..
And according to the Dark Times Academy,
Byron is a former IT professional and educator who holds a Certificate in Tertiary Learning and Teaching in addition to a bachelors degree in history. He is currently studying media and communications. He is better known as the author of the national best seller ‘Fear: New Zealand’s Hostile Underworld of Extremists’.
He had an article in the Spinoff a couple of years ago entitled “Women and the alt-right in New Zealand” featuring an excerpt from this book where he ranted and panicked about social conservative females including Carol Sakey, Hannah Tamaki, Helen Houghton and Chantelle Baker, Voices for Freedom – and trad-wives!!! Nasty!
I bet Mr Clark can’t even define what a woman is.
In an interview on Radio NZ in 2023, Kim Hill put it to him that he is “extremist left”. He responded: “I certainly don’t reject the label of being far left…”
Now the Dark Times Academy has done a few courses. They were going to do one on “Settling the battle between good and evil: moving beyond a toxic story” but that was postponed. Obviously good and evil is still around.
Another one was “Media Capture, control, and misinformation in the digital age”
He’s a big ally of groups like the Disinformation Project and the research centre into white supremacy and violent extremism which the Government recently defunded because it was headed up ironically by an extremist who was white – Dr Joanna Kidman!
Now they also have a Sponsors page on their website – which is blank. So that’s going well.
But here’s their latest course
“Unmasking Theocracy: Project 2025 and the Christian Nationalist Agenda”.
I mean – this is a course about an American policy paper from a US think-tank.
Is the Dark Times Academy importing US culture wars?! Where’s Chloe and Chris Hipkins when we need them! Imported culture wars.
But it’s not just about the US apparently. It’s worldwide – even here in New Zealand.
Conservative religious and political forces have been working patiently for decades to impose their beliefs on the world. With Project 2025, victory seems within their reach. Join Dark Times Academy for an eight-week course where we will learn what Christian nationalism is, where it comes from, what it means for the world, and what we can do to fight back.
Instructor
Dr. Eric Repphun has worked as a university lecturer, an instructional designer, and journal co-editor, among many other things. He has a PhD in Religious Studies and has published original research on Mormonism in Battlestar Galactica, religion in the work of Douglas Coupland and Chuck Palahniuk, and different ways to understand the perverse biblical story of the sacrifice of Isaac. He has spent way too much time thinking about the idea of re-enchantment, or how modernity produces its own monsters and its own forms of unreason.
Yeah, looks totally normal.
So let’s check out the course
It’s 90 minutes online every Saturday during the day for 8 weeks. Obviously none of them play sport on a Saturday. Maybe they should – to help their panicking and conspiracy theorising.
Week 1: Project 2025 and the contradictions and dangers of Christian nationalism In our first week,.. We will ask ourselves a series of questions: What is Christian nationalism? What are the dangers it poses? What contradictions are encoded within its ideas and practices? How do we approach Christian nationalism as scholars, researchers, and humans?
Well you can just watch my McBlog. It’s only 23 minutes long. You’ve just saved yourself over an hour. You quickly realise just how great Project 2025 is – and how its “not the end of the world as we know it”.
Week 2: Christian nationalist ideas and stories
In our second week, we will dig more into Christian nationalist ideology, theology, and the narratives. What do Christian nationalists believe? Are these beliefs shared by all Christian nationalists, or are there internal disagreements? What stories does Christian nationalism tell about themselves, faith, religion, and government?
Yawn. But the next session, you soon see that it’s not really so-called Christian nationalists or even Project 2025 that’s the problem. No – it’s Christians. You know – the ones who read & follow Biblical teaching and live their lives accordingly – and who believe biblical values and morals are what benefit society and families. You know – those radicals & terrorists. And tradwives of course!
Week 3: Using words to order and divide people
In our third week, we will delve into how Christian nationalists – and right-wing Christian extremists more broadly – use and abuse language, including how the movement reframes and redefines common words and concepts like “religious freedom” to further its own political and cultural goals. We will also explore how Christian nationalism seeks to impose a gendered and racialised order on human society through coded language and other means.
Using words? They can’t even define “marriage”, “woman”, “mother”, “gender” and they think men can get pregnant, and “ze zir” and “hu hu” are personal pronouns. They’re the last people to talk about the manipulation of the language.
Week 4 : Is Christian nationalism a set of beliefs or an identity?
In our fourth week, we will take a break from all the words and get into some statistics. Who calls themselves a Christian nationalist? How do Christian nationalists understand themselves and their movement? At the same time, we will confront a very difficult question: is Christian nationalism defined by a set of beliefs and practices, or is it merely an identity? We will also engage with what we might call a “soft Christian nationalism”, which pervades the thinking of far-right but not explicitly Christian nationalist figures like Jordan Peterson.
That nasty Jordan Peterson. Once again, you can see that it’s not actually about Christians as such, but all those who hold social conservative values.
Except for Muslims, of course.
The fifth week gets a bit weird though. I’m looking forward to this one.
Week 5: Christian Purity Culture and the War on Bodies
In week five, we will grapple with some of the most confronting material in this entire course when we examine how Christian nationalism seeks to control, define, and even define out of existence certain kinds of human bodies. We will delve into the anti-abortion movement, which is a defining part of Christian nationalism, and will also explore how Christian nationalist ideas about purity and pollution define sex, sexuality, gender, and ethnicity. Which bodies are pure? Which threaten the nation with pollution, and what does this mean for how Christian nationalism treats women, LGBTQIA+ people, and other marginalised groups?
Note the recommended book also – “Decolonizing Purity Culture: Gendered Racism and White Idealization in Evangelical Christianity”
Week 6: Declaring war and creating enemies
IN our sixth week, we will look at how the language of warfare defines non-Christians and others as enemies, and what this means at the level of geopolitics. Who is allowed to have authority, and who must be subjected to authoritarian control?
Yeah – I don’t see any country based on Judaeo-Christian values and laws with dictatorships – unlike Iran, China, and many other non-Christian countries.
And why do these courses never talk about the subjugation of women in Islamic countries?
Good question Bob.
Week 7: Open week / guest speaker(s)
This is a reserve week or one that we can use for guest speakers, debates, etc.
And then the battle plan
Week 8: How can we fight back?
IN our final discussion, we will focus on some methods for combatting Christian nationalism, taking inspiration from both outside of and within the Christian religious tradition, which has a deep history of social justice activism, from the Quakers who played a major role in the abolition of slavery in the United States to many prominent leaders of the Civil Rights movement. We will look at and discuss some ways people are fighting back, rejecting the imposition of narrow, exclusionary ideas about religion, bodies, order, violence, and identity.
Don’t tell them that William Wilberforce was a devout Christian eh. Or that Martin Luther King Jr was a Christian and a Baptist pastor.
It will blow their minds.
By the way, to give up your Saturdays to attend this cooker course, it will also cost you $350!
Somebody will make great money from the two people that attend this course.
Anyway, got to go.
Need to enrol. I’ve missed the first week which I’m gutted about.
Hope they still accept my enrolment.
