From Cowboy State to Christofascist State: Kevin Roberts, Wyoming, and Cultural Revolution

A discussion with Rone Tempest, former national and foreign correspondent for the L.A. Times and co-founder of the the Wyoming nonprofit public policy news site, Wyofile.

For 26 years, Rone Tempest—my guest on today’s PREVAIL podcast—was the national and foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, based in Paris, New Delhi, Beijing, and Hong Kong, as well as the craziest capital city, Sacramento. After his retirement, he worked for Pro Publica and was the co-founder of the Wyoming nonprofit public policy news site, Wyofile. He’s taught journalism at Berkeley and has won numerous awards. He’s also the author of two books, including The Last Western: The Unjustified Killing of Michael Rosa by Ed Cantrell.

Now based in Salt Lake City, he lived for many years in the foothills of the Wind River Mountains outside of Lander, Wyoming, where his neighbor was Kevin Roberts—the subject of his excellent profile in Wyofile, the head of the Heritage Foundation, and the prime mover behind Project 2025.

Here are three takeaways from our discussion:

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The American Revolution was not a revolution.

“I was in France at the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. And I was also there when they, for the first time, allowed public money to be used to support parochial education,” Tempest tells me. “And so essentially, that was the end of the French Revolution, 200 years later. And the one thing that I learned…is that cultural revolutions are really difficult. They’re dangerous. They veer out of control. And you know, when the French Revolution happened, they changed the number of days in a week. They changed the names of the months. They, you know, they did a bunch of pronoun changes and all sorts of other things that they did that were disastrous and then had to be, you know, rescinded later on.”

In the U.S., we were spared that kind of radical upheaval. “I think the reason I mention these revolutions is that I think, first of all, people confuse our American Revolution as a revolution,” Tempest says. “It was really a rebellion or a war for independence. And culturally, we remained the same, basically. We were Anglo-Saxon country. And so there was no real cultural change or challenge. It was more about independence and taxation and in some cases slavery….So there’s lots of things like that. But I’m just saying, we didn’t have a revolution in the same way that France did in 1789, that China did” under Mao.

If Kevin Roberts and the Project 2025 people have their way—and this is me saying this, to be clear, not Tempest—a second Trump government will lurch the country into a fascist model of the kind imposed by Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Brynn Tannehill calls it “minoritarian rule.” The extremist religious beliefs of one subset of Americans will be foisted on the rest of us. If the other side wins the culture wars, isn’t hat a cultural revolution?

Here is one paragraph from Roberts’s foreword to Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership:

Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.

Imposing that single policy on the country would entail criminalizing the entire trans community, expanding the definition of “pornography” to include anything Roberts doesn’t like, imprisoning thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people, establishing some sort of federal Oprichnina—Thought Police, in Orwellian terms—to monitor librarians and teachers, screwing with the telecommunications system, shuttering all the “regular” adult content sites and depriving those content creators of income, and—oh yeah—suspending the First Amendment. That smells Cultural Revolution-y to me.

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Our current political situation has a lot in common with Spain during the Spanish Civil War.

In the discussion, Tempest mentioned talking to Roberts about this, and agreed with the thesis. I asked him to elaborate.

The Spanish Civil war, Tempest says, “was a clear contest between right and left. And the right was, you know, a dictatorship, a religiously backed dictatorship. And the left was a very divided bunch of movements that…fought more with each other than they did with Franco. And you know, this was a time of the show trials and of the purges and of the killings between…sects on the left.”

So: a political left squabbling with each other while the right coalesces around a strongman. Yep, that tracks.

“And to me, our left is divided, too, in a lot of ways that are dangerous,” Tempest says. “And the right is pretty much the way it was under Franco. And I think Roberts’s argument would be that Franco was the right guy. You know, he was on the side of the just. And mine, mine would be that the rebel, you know, the, the left was incredibly divided and ate…itself.”

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The far-rightward shift in Wyoming politics is inexplicable.

What’s up with the Cowboy State? Why the lurching to the right? Why reject Liz Cheney at the behest of that little shit Matt Gaetz, who seems the least Wyoming Republican I can imagine (except perhaps for Trump himself).

“Yeah, that’s such a good question,” Tempest says. “And still to me is a mystery in a lot of ways. I mean, I spent part of my childhood in Wyoming and then later came back after some years overseas. So I spent part of my early childhood grade school in Laramie and then came back to Wyoming in 1994….And a lot of this just surprises me. I always thought of it as a pretty tolerant place, you know, a laissez-faire kind of state where you minded your own business, but you didn’t, you know, you didn’t make a lot of judgments about other people….[G]enerally speaking, I thought it was a kind of a place where you could say what you thought, you could sort of be what you thought, what you wanted to be.”

In terms of population, Wyoming is tiny. The state has two Senators but only one House representative. An influx of rich, powerful, like-minded newcomers from elsewhere could have an outsized effect there.

“Then somehow, I would say in the pre-Trump period, but it was suddenly, I think, Wyoming became a destination the way that the panhandle of Idaho was for conservative right-wing people to seek refuge,” Tempest says.

“It has almost no—you know, it’s only 600,000 people. So, and two United States senators. And I think they started to get an immigration of people like that, that panhandle of Idaho, and then you started—I started hearing people talking too loudly at post offices, basically bragging and, you know, making kind of political pronouncements, like they were just having a conversation,” he tells me. “And then people who had been long-time respected, like Al Simpson—you know, he was a Republican, bipartisan guy. These people started getting dissed. And then you had sort of establishment right wing people like the Cheneys getting dissed—and losing.”

The state had never been particularly religious, Tempest says. “[T]he other element that, as far as I’m concerned, is pretty new to Wyoming is religion. Religion never really played a factor in my memory. It was still a missionary state for the Catholics. There was a large Mormon presence, which tended to be pretty conservative, but relatively isolated in the western part of the state. No Catholics to speak of.

“You know, we went to an Episcopal church when I was a kid in Laramie. I mean, it was just typical coffee and doughnut kind of thing. The minister drives the Buick. I mean, there was nothing.” Abortion, too, which was never a hot-button issue, suddenly was. “I can’t totally explain it, except that there has been an immigration,” he says.

“There are some things that have happened that are really disturbing.”

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LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

In this discussion with Greg Olear, Tempest discusses his experiences as a foreign correspondent in China, Afghanistan, and Paris; Liz Cheney’s demise and the enigma of Wyoming politics; and his Wyofile profile of Kevin Roberts, head of the Heritage Foundation, thought leader behind Project 2025, and Tempest’s erstwhile Wyoming neighbor. Plus: Amazing Mace!

Follow Rone:
https://twitter.com/RoneTempest

His website:
https://www.ronetempest.com/bio

The Roberts profile at Wyofile:
https://wyofile.com/wyomings-catholic-cowboy-could-remake-government-if-trump-wins/

Buy his book:
https://www.amazon.com/Last-Western-Unjustified-Killing-Cantrell/dp/B08NWWY984

Prevail is sponsored by BetterHelp. Get 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com/greg

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Photo credit: J. Stephen Conn. Entering Wyoming from Utah on Wyoming State Highway 414.