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Katie Gaddini:The public figures, you know, the person that runs for prime minister or president is a male. And so it is assumed or maybe their chief of staff is as well as a male. So it's assumed that that it it's a very masculinist and male led movement. When, actually, when you peel back the layers behind the scenes, a lot of the organizing, the ideas, the on the ground activism is happening with women. And that's what I'm really hoping to show in this book that historically, there were women involved in the right wing party that had a major influence and especially in the contemporary.
Katie Gaddini:And just because you may think Donald Trump is a sexist doesn't mean there are not women involved in the MAGA movement who are really driving it.
Voiceover 2:This is Research for the Real World. Conversations about education and social science research and its impact on policy, practice, and our everyday lives.
Jason Ilagan:This is Research for the Real World. Hello. I'm Jason Ilagan, senior digital communications manager here at the IOE and executive producer of the IOE Insights podcast and occasional research for the real world presenter. There's a lot going on in the world at the moment, and you can be forgiven for struggling to keep up. However, there's help at hand with IOE Research working hard to navigate our way through uncharted territory, and a lot of it is due to deep social and political division.
Jason Ilagan:So that brings me to today's guest, doctor Katie Gaddini. Katie is an associate professor of sociology at the UCL Social Research Institute and a visiting scholar at Stanford. She's got a book that covers a lot of what we'll discuss today. So, Katie, welcome to the podcast.
Katie Gaddini:Thanks for having me.
Jason Ilagan:Alright. Katie, it's good to have you here. So so let's start off. Could you tell us a little bit about your journey as a researcher, and how did you find yourself in the area of sociology of religion?
Katie Gaddini:Yeah. So when I started my PhD in sociology, I really wanted to look at the convergence of religion and politics in The United States. I have a religious background myself. I grew up a conservative, an evangelical in The US, and it wasn't until later when I was becoming an adult that I started to reflect upon how closely embedded conservative politics is with Christianity. And I wanted to study this in the PhD. and I ended up not studying it and doing a more personal project around women in the church in The US, in The UK, and their marginalization. And it wasn't till I finished that project that I was able to go back to the original idea that I had, which is what I study now.
Jason Ilagan:What was the most surprising thing about all of that?
Katie Gaddini:So I went to churches in London that were so similar to ones I'd been to in The US, and I thought, wow. This is basically the same thing just with British accents. And when I got deeper into the research, I found out I was very wrong that some of the issues that were important to evangelicals in The US were really different in The UK. So even though they were reading the same books and listening to the same worship music and they have the same speakers and the services were similar. And in fact, a lot of evangelicals will move between the two countries.
Katie Gaddini:Their relationship with politics is so different, and this really came into sharp relief when Trump was the nominee for the Republican Party and Brexit happened. And placing those two events side by side showed me how different the religious political relationship is in the two countries.
Jason Ilagan:There's that understanding that there is a persistent narrative that women in these kind of political movements have often been passive or influenced by male leaders. So why does that framing you know, why is it wide off the mark, and what is actually happening on the ground?
Katie Gaddini:Yeah. It's a great question. So this is something I hear a lot in feminist circles actually, and I've heard this in The US and The UK and and other places as well. This idea that the reason that women vote for right wing candidates, and this isn't just in The US case, I've heard this when it comes to Reform. I've heard it when it comes to Georgia Meloni's party.
Katie Gaddini:I've heard it when it comes to France, is that they are at the behest of their husbands or their fathers or there's some sort of brainwashed element. And I think especially for feminists, it's inconceivable that a woman would vote for a right wing candidate or a party who is supporting issues such as no abortion, limited gay rights, and issues that liberal feminists would see as really essential to being a woman. And what I found in my research is that that's simply not true, that there are a wide range of reasons for why women would vote for right wing parties and candidates.
Jason Ilagan:Yep.
Katie Gaddini:Some of them do have to do with their gender and some of them don't.
Jason Ilagan:Do you wanna sort of elaborate on that a little bit more, Katie?
Katie Gaddini:Yeah. So for example, the twenty twenty four election is a really good case in point. And if you look at what happened with the two candidates, Kamala Harris was running for the Democratic ticket. Donald Trump, of course, was running for the Republican side. And one of the strategies in the Harris campaign was to appeal to women voters and to really position herself against Donald Trump as being someone who took down bad guys, who cared about reproductive rights, and as such cared about women's issues.
Katie Gaddini:And yet a lot of the women, most that I interviewed around that election, their main concern going into it was the economy. So for mothers, this played out with wanting to have a stable economy so they could afford petrol, so they could afford food for their children. For younger women, this meant that they would look to a future where they could be economically stable, where they could maybe buy a house one day and not be saddled with debt. So all that to say, a major concern for them going into this issue wasn't anything to do with reproductive rights or abortion or what has been classed gender issues, and instead it was the economy, which I suppose you could make an argument that that too is a gendered issue. But it just shows the bias that was at play when it comes to the left in The United States.
Jason Ilagan:Yeah. If I remember quite well with sort of the platforms that both candidates were running on, and again, I'm basing this on what my algorithm fed me. So like I saw all the Kamala memes, Kamala is brat, that kind of thing. So, yeah, I mean, my algorithm sort of fed me stuff off in that direction. I'm curious as to what kind of content or or what kind of messages did folks on the on the right of the political spectrum or what kind of messages did they say?
Jason Ilagan:And and was it all to do with, you know, cost of living kind of thing?
Katie Gaddini:Yeah. It's a good point. So there was one ad in particular that really stands out in my mind, and the Trump campaign played this ad during major sporting events in The US where there are a lot of viewers. And the ad I forget the preamble to it, but the bottom line at the end was Kamala Harris is for they them and Trump is for you. And it was an ad about the economy and about the cost of living.
Katie Gaddini:And basically what that communicated to Americans, only on the right, but in general who were susceptible to that kind of messaging was Trump cares about the economy and all Harris is worrying about is gender pronouns and abortion, which for a lot of Americans seems trivial when it comes to not being able to afford health care.
Jason Ilagan:It's quite interesting now given this Trump administration sort of now sort of focusing on things like that. Like, I'm just thinking about, you know, keeping trans women out of, you know, women's sports, that kind of thing. That is quite the one eighty, I'd say.
Katie Gaddini:Yeah. And not only that, the economy is in pretty bad shape right now for you know, the we're in a war with Iran and the petrol prices are really high, So most Americans do have cars. Public transport is notoriously bad in this country. The the prices are astronomical, so it's really pinching people's wallets. And I think we're gonna talk about this later, but this is this is not looking good for Trump and the make America great, the MAGA camp when it comes to the forthcoming midterm elections.
Jason Ilagan:Yeah. Let's hold that thought for sure. We'll we'll come back to it later. Why don't we go about ten years or so back? And you did mention that, you know, you've come from an evangelical background and, you know, sort of knew what you know, the the lay of the land there.
Jason Ilagan:So would it be fair to say, yeah, you've spent many years embedded in those kind of networks? So I I guess what would be interesting to know is, you know, what does organizing actually look like on a day to day basis for the women that you've been researching on?
Katie Gaddini:Yeah. So it really varies. And I have to I should probably say from the outset as well that this project was about ten years long when it was ethnographic, which means that I was on the ground doing participant observation and doing interviews. And I was doing that all over the country. So I even I interviewed somebody who worked for the federal government, but in Alaska.
Katie Gaddini:So I really covered a wide range. I had cattle ranchers in Texas. I had stay at home moms in the Midwest. And then I had women that worked for the federal government in Washington DC. So organizing looked different depending on the region and depending on the population.
Katie Gaddini:In some cases, it was really small. It was a group of women at a church, let's say, in the South Yep. That would meet and pray, and then they would also mobilize other women in their community to vote, to sign petitions, to go out for assembly persons who were running, who aligned with their views. And then at other times, it was a much bigger, more well funded apparatus that women were a part of that had millions of dollars and a very comprehensive international strategy behind it. So I saw the range.
Jason Ilagan:Interesting. So, yeah, like a lot of grassroots stuff and there's that saying that, you know, all politics is local. So when you talk about groups of three people, like that is very understandable. But then, you know, with all the you did mention larger organizations, were they kinda like apex and that kind of thing that were sort of funding these movements? And how did they sort of make their way into the grassroots?
Katie Gaddini:Yeah. So grassroots is an issue is a word that really became one that I had to check a lot throughout the research. So groups that would present themselves as grassroots or I would maybe go to their rallies and they seemed grassroots in their presentation and the way they were organizing. And then I would find out that actually they had, you know, billionaire donors behind them who were funding certain aspects of their organizing. And a lot of this is hidden behind what's called in The US dark money.
Katie Gaddini:So it's not reportable in many instances where money is coming from. There are a lot of loopholes to prevent reporting. I think there's different standards on that in The UK. So it's getting harder and harder to trace what is truly grassroots and what is astroturfed as it's called, which has actually been financed by big groups. One example of that is a group, Don't Mess With Our Kids.
Katie Gaddini:So this was a group that presented itself as grassroots. They actually started because they were inspired by a similar group - Con mis hijos no te metas - which was operating in Latin America. And it was started by this one woman. She's got the story of living in Oregon and hearing God call her to this organizing. And then when I went to their rally, there was actually an article in The Guardian that came out the next day that revealed that Moms for Liberty was one of the major silent donors behind this rally.
Katie Gaddini:Moms for Liberty is a very well funded, largest conservative moms group. It's actually been considered a hate group by some parties, and they also have billionaire donors behind them. So it becomes harder and harder to really understand what's grassroots, who is being bankrolled, and where is that money coming from?
Jason Ilagan:That is incredibly interesting. Like, this is a topic that I'm genuinely interested in, and I probably get a lot of my American political commentary and analysis from The Daily Show. So that's my kind of connection to it all. May maybe the odd Mehdi Hasan, you know, Instagram reel kind of thing. So this has been very illuminating so far, so I really appreciate this.
Jason Ilagan:So can we talk about, you know, the angles that a lot of this activism is sort of framed around? So, you know, there's areas such as, you know, care, protection, and motherhood. So how did these ideas sort of, you know, gain political momentum and sort of more visibility and especially around, you know, debates concerning education and parental rights?
Katie Gaddini:Yeah. So that one has a very clear inflection point and that's the twenty twenty pandemic. So if you look historically, there was a very at least fifty, sixty year history in The United States of conservatives advocating for parental rights and specifically maternal rights when it comes to conservative issues and wanting to have oversight of children's curriculum, what they're learning, what literature is in the libraries, what vaccines they're receiving. It covers a range of issues and that's been a real mobilizing strategy for conservatives, especially conservative women since the fifties. In 2020, we saw that rhetoric really brought back to life and put on steroids basically.
Katie Gaddini:So in The United States, when there were mask mandates, when there were stay at home orders, which we referred to as lockdowns in The UK, when there were the potential for mandated vaccines, which didn't end up happening, but was proposed in several states as well as California where I'm from, this became a rallying cry for conservatives. And even women who were not politically active became politically active because of this. And they drew upon this long standing narrative of parental rights and maternal rights to agitate politically. They pulled their children from schools. They started Christian schools or they began homeschooling.
Katie Gaddini:They moved states so that they wouldn't have to do any sort of vaccines. They started with the COVID vaccine, and then it became all vaccines, and then it became Western medicine in general, and then they stopped seeing doctors. So you can I'm kinda describing to you this snowball effect that took place that started with the pandemic. And what I found really interesting when I was in the field in 2024 is this hasn't gone away. I kinda went into the the pre election research thinking, okay, maybe these women will have gone back to what whatever they were doing before they became so politically active.
Katie Gaddini:They haven't. As one woman said to me, you know, once your eyes are opened, you can't close them. We're not going back. So this has been a major mobilization for the MAGA movement is this idea of parental rights, and now it's really focused on opposing any sort of trans rights.
Jason Ilagan:Yeah. What got me thinking when you were when you were talking, it's kinda like the thing that I thought about, you know, this is sorta like gateway content in a way, like to sort of draw people in. So what comes to mind for me is like, you know, the wellness industry and the kind of content that you get fed on, you know, social media or on, and that kind of thing, like stuff about clean eating and all those kinds of things. But then, you know, it's a potential slippery slope to then being indoctrinated with sort of, you know, far right extreme extreme views. So have I got that right?
Jason Ilagan:And like in terms of, you know, sort of drawing those things together?
Katie Gaddini:Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, around that same time, the MAHA, which is the Make America Healthy Again movement, started to get its footing. And it didn't crystallize as an actual movement until RFK junior entered the political scene and was running for president and then later dropped out and endorsed Trump. But that's where the seeds of that movement also began. And then when MAHA and MAGA joined together, you had this sort of unity of two groups that were previously not aligned on very much, and this was really fomented by the pandemic.
Jason Ilagan:And just for the benefit of listeners, RFK junior is Robert f Kennedy junior, the current US health secretary. He's also got some really interesting stories
Katie Gaddini:Yes.
Jason Ilagan:That that have come up from his past, stuff to do with bears. You I'll leave it to our listeners to to find those out for themselves. Okay, Katie. Your research shows that these groups often borrow the language of empowerment or even feminism. How do they reconcile that with anti feminist politics?
Jason Ilagan:I think we've kinda covered it off, but I think it might be good to sort of, you know, flesh that out a bit more.
Katie Gaddini:Yeah. So this is one of these things that surprised me in the research because it's a major break from the past. And I should also add that my project was looking at conservative women from 1970 to present. And I wanted to trace some of these historical continuities and to see what was new and what was different in the present con contemporary moment. And this was one of those major changes.
Katie Gaddini:So when we look at the right wing women who were politically active in the seventies and the eighties, and I'm thinking of Phyllis Schlafly, they built their whole political messaging on opposing feminism. That was the very big aim of theirs. Second wave feminism, they were the anti feminist and they were proud of that, and that was what they were trying to do. Today, on the other hand, especially when it comes to the younger women, the gen z women, they're not opposing feminism in the same way. And in fact, some of them are even calling themselves feminist, but calling themselves conservative feminists.
Katie Gaddini:And I know that might sound a bit shocking to listeners, this idea of being a right wing feminist, but they're putting forward the idea that you can be, that you can be anti abortion and anti trans and be a feminist. And they have a new articulation of it. And even when they don't call themselves a feminist, they're still using a lot of the language of feminism, especially this girl boss feminism of you can do anything and empowerment and glass ceilings and the like.
Jason Ilagan:Yeah. Because I've associated girl boss with, you know, like, going up, you know, and and sort of having it all. Don't know if it's got any relevance with, you know, Sheryl Sandberg's kind of lean in rhetoric. What do you think about that?
Katie Gaddini:Yeah. Mean, even I've heard women say, especially these younger women, again, who were in at university say, we can have it all now. We can have the political career and the husband and the children, and that is such a big departure from their foremothers who were arguing that women need to stay at home.
Jason Ilagan:Yeah. It it is interesting that they that they've taken, you know, the language of empowerment as as you say and kind of reframing it to sort of suit their their place, their space on the political spectrum. So I guess the next thing we're kind of curious about is you have written about various archetypes that have come out of the woodwork over the last couple of decades or so. Could you give us an overall sense of how they've managed to organize and campaign to reshape democratic or rights debates in in The US?
Katie Gaddini:Yeah. Sure. So one of them that I find the most interesting because it's a feature of the contemporary politics that we're in are the social media influencers, and this is a chapter in my book. And originally, I have to be honest, I didn't wanna include influencers. I'd written about them in my last book, and I'd studied them before, and I just I didn't wanna do it again.
Katie Gaddini:I didn't wanna spend all that time on social media looking at their content, if I'm perfectly honest. And it became really clear to me as the research went on that I had to include social media influencers, especially conservative ones because they are having such a big influence on conservative politics. And the democratic side in The US just does not have any sort of competition when it comes to influencers. They are not influencing politics in the same way. So one interesting thing that I found out is that groups like Turning Point USA, which used to be led by Charlie Kirk who was assassinated last September on a college campus, they funded, recruited, funded, and trained over 350 influencers ahead of the twenty twenty four election.
Katie Gaddini:So this is a very deliberate strategy to leverage social media, especially the alternative media ecosystem, which we can talk more about. Yeah. In order to sway politics. And they adhere to something that's called the Breitbart doctrine, which is named after Andrew Breitbart who's passed away and he was a right wing figure as well, which is that politics is downstream from culture. So their view is if we can shape the culture, we can shape the politics.
Katie Gaddini:Now, Turning Point USA is not, you know, indicative of all the politics and the conservatism in The United States, but they are one group. They're a powerful group. They're a well funded group. And I just use this example to show what a huge impact influencers can have when it comes to politics. And I found this in my research.
Katie Gaddini:So many women, most women I would speak to got their news from social media. They had a social media figure that they followed consistently. They had several. They communicated with each other in Facebook groups. This is where they were exchanging information on politics, on poll on health, on culture, on current events.
Katie Gaddini:And to ignore this realm is to really miss a huge part of American conservatism in the present day.
Jason Ilagan:Picking up from where Charlie Kirk left off, where does this leave Erica Kirk, who was Charlie's wife? Where does she fit in all this right now?
Katie Gaddini:Yeah. So I'm gonna answer that question a little bit obliquely because I think it's a really good one, which is where are we now without Charlie Kirk? So I'm gonna answer that one first, and then I'll get to Erica. So for sure. Charlie Kirk left a really big vacuum in the conservative movement, especially the MAGA movement, and there have been a few competing figures to fill that void.
Katie Gaddini:And we're starting to realize that more and more. So on the one hand, Nick Fuentes, who is a far right white supremacist online personality, is rising up to fill that void. He has a group of followers. They call themselves Groypers. And a recent article in the New Yorker claims that they are growing in numbers and power, and there's actually now a candidate in Florida running for office on that Groyper platform, which is incredibly worrying because they are explicitly anti Semitic, anti black.
Katie Gaddini:They don't even think women should vote. Okay. So we have that group kind of trying to fill the void. Then we have figures like Allie Beth Stuckey, and she was a big part of my research, and she is a right wing social media influencer. And her star has really been shooting since Charlie Kirk died.
Katie Gaddini:She is speaking at so many events. Her book on toxic empathy has become a New York Times bestseller. She is headlining conservative events. Her social media account has gone way up. So we have figures like her who are very avowedly female and conservative, and she was friends with Charlie Kirk, we have her kind of filling the space.
Katie Gaddini:Now Erica Kirk is a really interesting one because I've been tracking her for a long time now. Even before she got married to Charlie Kirk, I was tracking her. She had a streetwear brand and and was kind of you know, she was a pageant winner. She was really well liked and popular prior to the assassination of Charlie Kirk and taking over Turning Point USA, and now she's really vilified when it comes to the media. Now there's certainly a population of women, especially younger women who still adore her and look up to her and see her as an example of having it all, But she has received such hate when it comes to online content that it's actually a little bit perplexing.
Katie Gaddini:She really hasn't been able to capture the population that is left looking for a leader since her husband's death. She's I would not put her up there as one of the sort of contenders as a new political figure in his death.
Jason Ilagan:Okay. So with regards to sort of Gen Z women, are there any female versions of your Joe Rogans, that that kind of thing?
Katie Gaddini:On the right?
Jason Ilagan:Yeah. On the right. Yes.
Katie Gaddini:Yeah. Absolutely. And in fact, there's been a a few mainstream articles on what's alternatively been called either the femosphere or the woman sphere, and I actually think they're they're right on about that. And I noticed this as well because evangelicalism and Catholicism and Christianity in general is very gendered. And so when it comes to conservative Christians, they also operate in in highly gendered ways, and this also trickles over to the media.
Katie Gaddini:So there are social media influencers who are women influencers that are really appealing to a right wing Christian audience. These women aren't gonna be tuning into Joe Rogan or Nick Fuentes. They are looking to Christian women influencers to follow and they are being swayed by them. So figures like Allie Beth Stuckey, who I mentioned before, Alex Clark, who's a big MAHA, Make America Healthy Again, conservative figure who works for Turning Point, Candace Owens, who is a well known firebrand pundit. Women like that are shaping this alternative right wing media ecosystem in a very gendered way, and they're appealing to the women and they're kind of the counterpart to the Joe Rogans.
Jason Ilagan:So are the likes of Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, do they have cut through with sort of with Gen Z women?
Katie Gaddini:Absolutely. I mean, so and they're you know, mentioning those two together is a really interesting comparison because what I found is because the right wing alternative ecosystem is so vast, there is an influencer for everyone. So if you are a, let's say, 55, six year old conservative woman who is Christian, you're gonna be listening to Megyn Kelly. And if you are a millennial, but you're single and you live maybe on the West Coast, you're gonna be listening to Alex Clark. And if you are a millennial mom who is maybe in the Midwest or the South, you're gonna be listening to Allie Beth Stuckey.
Katie Gaddini:So they have such a vast ecosystem that there is someone for every emotional balance, every type of content that you might want, every sort of presentation of politics, and it's really a wraparound service, and that is what makes it so effective.
Jason Ilagan:Yeah. I mean, as someone who works in digital content marketing and communications as my bread and butter, this does really sound like a mixed media multichannel strategy covering all bases. So Yeah. Absolutely. Incredible.
Katie Gaddini:All bases. And I have to say as well, you know, it's it's YouTube. It's podcasts. It's books that they're writing. It's bible study guides.
Katie Gaddini:They are covering so many different type of media and so many different personalities. And a lot of these influence aren't doing straight politics. They're doing mothering podcasts or health and wellness podcasts or Christian living podcasts, and yet politics is woven into it. And that's also highly effective.
Jason Ilagan:Yeah. As we touched upon earlier, it it it it's that kinda gateway content, which is a slippery slope to sort of being fed those views. Yeah. Katie, yeah, so all this work all this work of yours has culminated in your book, Esther's Army, the Christian Women Who Power the American Right. In that book, you argue that women are actually quite central architects of conservative politics.
Jason Ilagan:First of all, who is Esther, and what are we still getting wrong about their role?
Katie Gaddini:Esther is a figure in the Old Testament. She actually has a book in the Old Testament Bible named after her. She was a queen and she begged the king to spare the Jews from destruction because she was Jewish herself, though she was hiding that and she saved the Jews. And so in the modern retelling, I noticed a lot of these right wing Christian women present themselves as contemporary Esther's. They see themselves as saving children and saving the nation from destruction from the left.
Katie Gaddini:And specifically, you know, the the the sort of figure that is doing the destruction can change from, like, the left in general to woke ideology as they call it, to trans rights, but they see themselves as in a battle and as gonna be these sort of heroin queens that are saving the country from evil.
Jason Ilagan:So with their emergence, could you offer some reasons as to why they are consistently being underestimated by, you know, the likes of civil institutions, the media, their political opponents even?
Katie Gaddini:I think a lot of times the public figures, you know, the person that runs for prime minister or president is a male. And so it is assumed or maybe their chief of staff is as well as a male. So it's assumed that that it it's a very masculinist and male led movement. When actually when you peel back the layers behind the scenes, a lot of the organizing, the ideas, the on the ground activism is happening with women. And that's what I'm really hoping to show in this book that historically, there were women involved in the right wing party that had a major influence and especially in the contemporary.
Katie Gaddini:And just because you may think Donald Trump is a sexist doesn't mean there are not women involved in the MAGA movement who are really driving it.
Jason Ilagan:Yeah. So in the book, you you do mention a number of archetypes. I know we we we got you to touch upon one of them, but do you have a moment to just quickly touch upon each of them and maybe sort of one one key thought about each?
Katie Gaddini:Sure. So I start by looking at the the gen z, the college women, which college is what we call it in The US, university in The UK, and those are the women who are attending these right wing Christian colleges and aspire to a career in politics. They wanna be on the supreme court. They wanna run for office one day. They see role models such as Amy Coney Barrett, who is a justice on the court as these inspirational figures.
Katie Gaddini:And and, again, this we can have it all rhetoric. And then I move on and I also talk about lawyers in that chapter because I noticed there is a huge upsurge in conservative women aspiring to law school. There are a lot of conservative law schools in The US, so they train you specifically for career in conservative politics. And then I I'm gonna go out of order, but I look at black activists. So this is another group that people are like, what?
Katie Gaddini:Black women voting for Trump? He actually made gains with black women in 2024. And I look at how they have been organizing under an organization called Blexit and what issues are important to them and how they are sort of changing the racial realignment of the conservative party. I look at mama bears, and this is a really big group of women who are politically active under the name of being a mother and parental rights and and protection their idea of protection from gender and sexual diversity, which includes actually a really big coalition of Latina women. And and that's a new feature in contemporary American politics.
Katie Gaddini:Social media influencers who we've already talked about, white suburbanites, which is probably in terms of numbers, the biggest population. And this population has been up for grabs politically between the left and the right over the last few decades and has been very pretty solidly devoted to Trump when it came to 2024. He made gains with them as well. And then I also look at the powerhouses, and these are the women who run for office, political office, and hold more what we would consider classic political power. And I interviewed a number of women who ran for office, whether it's governor or house of representatives.
Katie Gaddini:One woman even ran for president and look at how this is again a break from the past when women in the seventies and the eighties would not have been agitating in that sort of way.
Jason Ilagan:Very fascinating. And, yeah, I guess the thing that did catch my interest with regard to the six archetypes was the Latinx folk, and they did turn out for Trump, if I remember correctly, in terms of sort of like the the post election wash up.
Katie Gaddini:Yeah. That's true. So Trump made much more substantial gains with Latinx men in particular, and that's been covered really widely in the media. But he also made 13 percentage point gain with Latina women, which is pretty substantial, especially when we consider that this is a population that has been solidly Democrat and that the Democrat side relies on, that's a big deviation. And that's something that I cover in my book as well because I found that a surprising result.
Jason Ilagan:You do a lot of work with the media and engage beyond academia, and from a researcher's point of view, it is good to sort of get out there in the field. How has your research shown up in the real world and where do you see it having the most impact?
Katie Gaddini:Yeah. It's a great question. I do a lot of public facing events now. So I do a lot of public talks, whether those are hosted by universities but marketed to the public. I did a talk recently in Germany for a cultural center that covers issues in The United States.
Katie Gaddini:Mhmm. I have been asked to write pieces for public facing outlets like the British Medical Journal opinion section. The Royal Shakespeare Company asked me to write a piece for their latest production. I wrote a piece for the Fabian Society in The UK as well. And I think it's really important to make my work publicly accessible.
Katie Gaddini:So I do a lot of interviews with journalists who are translating research for wider audiences. I'm very careful about what journalists I speak to. I wanna make sure that they're going to not write an inflammatory piece that is going to exacerbate the tensions that are already happening in this country. Understandable. Yeah.
Katie Gaddini:But I think, you know, my topic is very topical, and I'm really happy to be able to share these insights with the public and with particular audiences that are interested in them.
Jason Ilagan:And, of course, you've looked at The UK as part of your work. Would you say that we're seeing similar forms of gendered organizing coming to emergence here, or has it taken a different shape?
Katie Gaddini:I'm not seeing the gendered take shape yet, though I do have a feeling it's coming. What I am seeing taking shape is the Christian nationalist form. And Christian nationalism is the merging of a Christian and a political identity with the idea of the nation. The nation is Christian. It should be.
Katie Gaddini:It has an inherently Christian character. And I use Christian loosely. So that does not mean that you're a practicing Christian and you go to church every week. It means that you are invoking the language of Christianity when you speak about the nation and a particular set of values and norms and ideas that you think are inherent to the nation because they align with your version of Christianity. And we're seeing some of that language energized with Nigel Farage And one of his top advisers, James Orr, who is a professor at University of Cambridge, they are using that kind of Christian nationalist language.
Katie Gaddini:And I'm seeing more signs of that building and growing in The United Kingdom more than I'm seeing the gendered aspect as of now.
Jason Ilagan:Katie, how do you think the findings of your research might be able to inform policymakers or those involved in political and social discourse during this time of social political division, upheaval, that kind of thing?
Katie Gaddini:One area that I'm hoping to really translate findings for is when it comes conspiracy theory and particularly health conspiracy. So in The US and The UK, we've seen a surge of outbreak of measles and that is due to vaccine hesitancy in both countries. And in The United States, you go to health centers now and there are signs of what to look for for signs of measles. And I know in The UK, there have been some really bad outbreaks as well. And so one thing that I looked at in my research is how these conspiracy theories develop and how vaccine refusal, especially when it comes to measles and and really important vaccines, has taken hold with women and then spread within communities.
Katie Gaddini:And I'm hoping that there is some more careful approach, especially from the medical community on how to address this because some of the approaches that we've seen in The US, like mandatory vaccines, and some people just move out of state and find a way around it. That does not working necessarily. So we need to find a different approach that is gonna ensure health safety for communities while also ensuring that we're not just mandating because that's not working necessarily. I just think there needs to be more careful understanding of where people who are who are very deeply involved with conspiracy theories, where they're operating from, and how they're operating from. And I've noticed in The US case that conspiracy even really far fetched ones like the democrats control the weather is operating at all levels of government.
Katie Gaddini:I've I've met people who work for the Pentagon who believe that. And saying that those people are stupid is just not is not going to fix the problem. They're in high positions of government. They're intelligent individuals, and they have a robust theory of how democrats are controlling the weather. So countering disinformation and conspiracy in particular is something that needs a lot more careful attention right now.
Katie Gaddini:And I'm not a scholar that works on disinformation. There are a lot of excellent scholars that are, but I did, by virtue of this research, get into it, and it alerted me to the fact that these ideas, once they take hold, they're very hard to shake, and they have huge ramifications for for communities and and for sort of a political animus that individuals develop.
Jason Ilagan:Now thank you for that. Thank you for that. Let's finish off with some quick fire questions to to wrap things up. Okay. Are there rifts in gender and power inside the kind of the Christian women right wing movement?
Katie Gaddini:Yes. So we're seeing some recent rifts, and this is really structured around this war in Iran and The US support for Israel. The cracks were already starting with The US supporting Israel's bombardment in Gaza, and it has the rifts have deepened and widened since the war began. This is an unpopular war. There are a lot of MAGA diehard supporters who are turning their back on Trumps, and this is happening with a lot of high profile women as well.
Katie Gaddini:And this is one of the biggest rifts, if not the biggest, I've seen in the movement.
Jason Ilagan:That's interesting. Speaking of kind of rifts with regards to religion, so Donald Trump has had beef with Pope Leo. Do you see any kind of rifts sort of deepening perhaps with the Catholic church at large and its relationship with with with the president?
Katie Gaddini:I see that and him and J. D. Vance is both really having these public
Jason Ilagan:That's right.
Katie Gaddini:spats with the pope Yep. Are unpopular. Donald Trump's AI generated image of himself as Jesus, which he later said was him as a medical doctor, was very unpopular with the evangelicals. And this is happening amidst this larger rift, which I just mentioned around Iran and Israel. So, yes, we are seeing these rifts kind of splinter in different directions, and those two incidents were certainly unpopular for the president.
Jason Ilagan:Thank you for that. And final question, it's probably in two parts. So what's next? First of all, do you have a view in terms of how the upcoming midterm elections in The US will take shape? And secondly, what's next in terms of your work?
Katie Gaddini:In terms of the midterms, I think it's not gonna be great for the Republicans. I don't think it will be as much of a blue sweep as Democrats hope. It is customary for midterm elections to have an uptick with the opposing party that is not in power. So I think we will see that happen. And I think if this war drags on, it will only deepen the chances of the democrats picking up more seats in the house and the senate and when it comes to some really big governor races.
Katie Gaddini:My own project, I'm now turning my attention to the transnational. So I am starting to look at transnational linkages of the Christian right. I'm looking at how these ideas are shared, how resources are shared, how individuals that live in rural Texas this is a real story. One of my participants flew to The UK for the Margaret Thatcher Centennial, And this is what piqued my interest as I thought, okay. If this stay at home homeschool mom is flying across the world to go to this event in London, there is something happening transnationally.
Katie Gaddini:There are these exchanges going on. And so I'm turning my attention to that, and I'm really excited to dig into it.
Jason Ilagan:Thank you, Katie. Just a quick follow-up off the back of the potential midterms and, you know, the should, you know, things drag out in Iran and The Middle East, will it have a kind of pocketbook impact? When I say pocketbook, it's an American term for purses and wallets. Am am I correct?
Katie Gaddini:Yeah. I mean, I think that's that's exactly why this war is unpopular and why it's gonna hurt the Republicans in the midterms is because it is hurting the economy and it's hurting the pocketbook. And that is a major concern for Americans across the political spectrum. That is what they cared about in 2024, and that's what they care about in 2026.
Jason Ilagan:Katie, we've covered so much ground today. It's been really interesting to get to know you and all about your research. I particularly enjoyed, especially from having a personal interest in politics and social media. I I think that was a that was a really big thing for me and just sort of seeing how, you know, maybe what is innocuous content with regards to, you know, well-being and and health can you know, if you've sort of follow people of a certain it could lead to a slippery slope where, you know, you do get fed things, you know, from misinformation, stuff that, you know, is quite discriminatory and hurtful. So, Katie, it's been a pleasure.
Jason Ilagan:Thank you for joining us on the research for the real world podcast here at the IOE.
Katie Gaddini:Thank you so much. I've really enjoyed it.
Jason Ilagan:That was doctor Katie Gaddini. Some of the topics we've covered today plus links to her book Esther's Army is also available in the episode notes. If you've enjoyed this episode, why not listen to another? Search IOE Insights to find more episodes of research for the real world as well as other podcasts from the IOE. And a quick favor before you go, If you're listening on Apple or Spotify, we'd really appreciate it if you could give the IOE Insights podcast a rating.
Jason Ilagan:A five star rating would be very much appreciated, and that'll help us reach more people interested in hearing about such important work. I'm Jason. Thanks for listening.
Voiceover 2:Research for the real world is brought to you by IOE, research development and IOE marketing and communications at University College London. The series producer is Amie Liebowitz. The executive producer of the IOE Insights podcast is Jason Ilagan.
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