Ben Marsh is a pastor at First Alliance Church Winston-Salem. He's an advocate for the maligned, lonely, afraid, and harmed. Deeply suspect of the rising linkage of Christianity and partisanship, he aims to disentangle awful social and theological ties that have created *where we are now.* He has particular interests in the areas of Christian Nationalism, sexual abuse, and mental healthcare. You may have seen him on CNN (2024, 2021), Al-Jazeera, World Relief, or other news outlets. Previously he worked in DC as a human rights advocate for Dalits.

Ben and I talk about Christian nationalism, the rise of the New Apostolic Reformation, the differences between some of these groups, and, most importantly, how he thinks people can heal. It's a great conversation.

You can find him on his Substack "It's Me Ben Marsh" and Bluesky with the handle itsmebenmarsh.

Benjamin Carter Hett is Professor of History at Hunter College and the Graduate Center at City University of New York. He specializes in German history, and his books include The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic; The Nazi Menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War; and more.

He is one of my favorite historians, and I was really excited to get to have him on the show. We dive into the parallels he thinks do and don't exist between today and the 1920s and 1930s. We also spend some time on the f-word debate and whether he thinks fascism is the best term to describe what we're facing in Trump 2.0. Then we get into contemporary politics in Germany and the strength of the AfD ahead of the upcoming elections.

Franziska Wagner studied comparative political sciences at the University of Mannheim and at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, Sciences Po. Her research interests lie in party politics, far-right politics, social media, and computational approaches to social sciences. Currently, she is pursuing a Ph.D in Political Sciences at the Central European University, where she works on party communication on social media, and the role of discourse and emotions. Franziska is a researcher at the AUTHLIB project (Neo-authoritarianisms in Europe and the liberal democratic response) that aims at exploring the varieties of neo-authoritarian, illiberal ideologies in Europe and their political implications.

You can read her piece here: https://www.authlib.eu/
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpos.2024.1390587/full