This week, Gen Z activist Olivia Julianna joins Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush to discuss the importance of political engagement and the pursuit of social justice at an incredibly difficult moment in our history. Together, they explore how a rising generation of young leaders is doing critical work to address systemic injustice and inequality – and the influential role that faith and faith communities can play in fueling that activism and change.
Olivia, known for her work in reproductive rights and advocacy, discusses her journey as a young activist and the challenges and triumphs she has already experienced. She emphasizes the importance of using one’s voice and platform to create meaningful impact, and the necessity of working together to build a more just and compassionate society. Olivia discusses how her faith informs her activism – and helps give her the strength and energy to persist in her work no matter what obstacles are thrown her way.
I posted a video where I said if Jesus, Mary, and Joseph showed up at your door and asked for a place in the inn, would you welcome them into your home? Or would you say, “Show me your papers”? And this woman, she’s a conservative, she responded to me. She said, “If three strangers showed up at my home in the middle of the night, I would answer the door with a gun.”Do you not understand how insane you sound? Do you not understand how warped your view of religion has become? … I’m like, do you not realize that you are the false prophets that we are warned about in the Bible, do you understand that?
– Olivia Julianna, abortion rights activist, democracy organizer, and political influencer from Houston, Texas. With over 1 million followers across TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram, her content has accumulated over 1 billion views, putting youth voices front and center in the fight for our future. She rose to national prominence for initiating the takedown of a whistleblower website that targeted those in the state of Texas who aided in abortion access, and raised $2.2 million for abortion funds after she was publicly attacked by Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz. Olivia spoke at the 2024 Democratic National Convention about the complexities of her religious upbringing while championing progressive causes. An influential force on social media, more of Olivia’s work can be found on her Substack.
Please share this episode with one person who would enjoy hearing this conversation, and thank you for listening!
—INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT—
REV. PAUL BRANDEIS RAUSHENBUSH, HOST:
Olivia Julianna identifies as a queer Latina activist living with disability and, most importantly, in Texas. Just 22, Olivia is widely recognized for her impactful work in political advocacy. She was raised in a conservative Christian household, but she was also a speaker at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, having navigated the complexities of her religious upbringing while championing progressive causes. An influential force on social media, she writes and hosts a spectacular Substack that you can find @OliviaJulianna.
Olivia, welcome to the State of Belief!
OLIVIA JULIANNA:
Thank you for having me!
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
Well, I am so glad that you’re here, and I want to start in an unusual way – by quoting you to you, and then going from there. This is from a recent Substack that you did. Here’s what you said: “For older generations, it might seem relevant to point out the unprecedented nature of his – his being Trump – blatant disregard for government institutions or the Constitution. But for young Americans this isn’t unprecedented. For younger Americans, this isn’t unprecedented, it’s just American life. And then you go on to say, how many times have you heard someone say, ‘The kids will save us’ or ‘The kids are all right.’
“The kids will not save you; the kids are not all right.”
And I literally sat back in my chair when I read that. I felt very much spoken to – in a good way. I just want to open with that, and just recognize: maybe the kids aren’t all right aren’t all right.
OLIVIA JULIANNA:
Yeah, the kids are not all right. I work so closely with people from just each generational cohort, and what I’ve really found is that GenX and Boomers in particular – they don’t really understand the perspective that a lot of younger Millennials and GenZ have, because they haven’t lived the life we have, growing up in the environment we have.
So what I usually tell people is, I have never lived in a world where 9-11 didn’t happen. So I was born in 2002. I was in kindergarten when Barack Obama was sworn in as president of the United States. So the first president who I was old enough to really understand and comprehend what they were doing and what was going on was Donald Trump – and that was the case for a lot of people my age.
And so at the time when we’re seeing him be our president, we’re also watching school shootings happen, over and over and over again. I was a freshman in high school when the Parkland school shooting happened. In that same time frame, there was a shooting at Santa Fe High School here in Texas, and then you just keep going down the line. There’s more and more and more.
We were in high school when the pandemic happened. When COVID happened, I lost my junior year. I lost senior year activities. Some of us lost our junior, senior, and freshman year of college to the pandemic, our very critical developmental years. The politics in those time periods have been defined by the tone that Donald Trump has set. And if you’re not someone like me who studies political history or who studies the history of the government, you don’t understand how critical of a moment that we’re living in – because all you’ve seen from the government is Donald Trump.
And then you see Democrats doing this thing where, for the last four years, they’ve made it a point to say: Donald Trump is dangerous to democracy. MAGA Republicans are destroying our institutions, and very correctly emphasizing the seriousness of this moment. But at the same time, the perspective there is, well, if Donald Trump was able to do all this damage from the White House, then why can’t you do XYZ thing that we want you to do? Why are you respecting the institutions for the sake of protecting the institutions, and not eroding them for the sake of doing good for us?
And so it creates a lot of anger and resentment in young people, who then kind of feel like, well, there’s no point in me voting at all – because both sides are the same. And I don’t think a lot of people really understand and grasp that. I think that they oftentimes just perceive it as young people being very entitled or lazy or just not wanting to work – which, honestly, I agree with at times. I do, but I think it’s this larger picture here is, we’ve kind of always been told that the government is supposed to work for us and that the government is supposed to do things for us. But the things that have affected us the most, like school shootings or the pandemic or climate change, we haven’t ever really seen the large scale, broad, expanding actions that we want now. I know that President Biden did a lot of things around those issues, but I also know that because I’ve been paying attention, because I’ve been engaged in this. A lot of young people don’t.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
I think that that’s really interesting, especially right now. You’re like, oh, wow, so you can do that? Like, what Donald Trump is doing in the last three months… Three weeks, rather, sorry, seems like three millennia. But yeah, in three weeks he’s like oh, I’m going to do that, I’m going to destroy that, I’m going to do this, I’m going to rip apart that, I’m going to decide to take all funding from that. And you’re like, oh, okay, we didn’t know that was in the playbook.
So I can imagine when you’re a young person and you’re not used to successive presidents – some that I would view as positive, some very negative – but they never kind of ripped up the playbook, they all kind of went ahead with it the way I was used to. And so I can imagine young people just being like, oh okay, so he’s doing that, but you don’t do that, and are we on the same playing field?
But anyway, let me just back up to this moment, and I’m kind of asking everyone who I talk to the impossible question of how they’re doing. There’s no right way to answer it, but it does give us some insight, the way you choose to answer it. So I’m just wondering, when someone asks you, me, for example, how are you doing, what’s your immediate reaction?
OLIVIA JULIANNA:
Not great. I have this unfortunate privilege, is the way I’ll phrase it, I have the unfortunate privilege of politics and political analysis and commentary being my full-time job. So I am very comfortable and secure in my own life, but I’m constantly seeing and witnessing in my research what is going on across the country and across the world, and the thing that hurts the most to me is understanding the reality that I’m going to be okay under Donald Trump’s presidency. You know, God willing, he doesn’t go after liberal content creators or weaponizes the IRS against us, but in the broad scheme, me and my family, we will be okay.
There are a lot of families out there that won’t be, and I think it’s really hard to digest that, especially when you’re someone who is a Christian and actually reads your Bible. There’s a pretty radical sense of empathy there of just, oh, my God, are we going to be able to come back from this? Are we going to be able to rebuild these institutions that are being torn down, and how many people are going to suffer and die because of all this? And so that, honestly, it’s just constantly top of mind for me, and I haven’t been able to quite find the balance yet between being good at my job and informing people, and just overwhelming my body and my heart and my spirit with the negative constant stream that’s going on.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
I appreciate your honesty with that. I feel very similar. I feel very privileged in the work that I do at Interfaith Alliance, where we are finding ways to be, hopefully, impactful and productive in this moment and in protecting the communities. But finding the balance and not going to sleep and being like oh my God, oh my God – it’s tough.
We mentioned earlier – and you’ve talked publicly about your religious background, and you mentioned – that you still turn to that in moments when looking for moral guidance, in looking for moral guidance. Can you say a little bit about your background and a little bit more about where you come from? You didn’t all of a sudden just bleep onto the Internet; you come from somewhere. And actually, one of the great things which I’m really enjoying about your Substack is that I feel like I’m going deeper, because reading actually allows me a little more time to kind of sink into it and just appreciating everywhere you’ve come from. So can you give the listeners a little bit of insight into where you come from and and why your answer actually is really important in understanding what you’re doing today?
OLIVIA JULIANNA:
So you know, when I was young, young, young, we moved around a lot when I was a kid, but I spent most of my childhood in a very small town, Needville, Texas. Nobody knows where this is. My family had lived there for a really, really long time. I graduated from that high school, my dad graduated, my grandfather. So, just, very small town, Texas values.
My parents actually met at a Baptist college in, I think, Missouri, so that’s how my parents met. And so when I was growing up, we went to, for a long time, Baptist churches, Southern Baptist churches, and then eventually we started going to nondenominational churches.
But I grew up in a very conservative Christian household. There were times in the household where my mom would instill rules like we were not allowed to watch Disney Channel, we were not allowed to listen to secular music, you were not allowed to paint your nails – like, very much conservative Christian. And when I was in high school my parents got divorced, and I moved in with my dad back to Needville, and at that point I really kind of dove into my Christianity. I was on the board of a ministry in Southeast Texas. I was an officer in my school’s chapter of Fellowship of Christian Athletes. I was leading Bible study. I was president of the Christian Club of my school my senior year – so, very deeply involved in my faith all through high school and into adulthood.
And when I was 17 is when the pandemic happened. My school shut down after spring break, and I was at home. And the moment for me that really sparked that political fire, where I was like, I have to do something about this, was after George Floyd was killed and we saw these protests happening everywhere. I saw people in my community reacting to that in such an ugly way, and these were the same people who, when I went to church on Sundays, were sitting behind me in the pew.
And that was a crisis of faith that I had never really felt before. And it just was only exacerbated when I saw the video of protesters being gassed in front of a church in Washington, DC, and Trump walks out and holds up the Bible. And that moment for me, it made me so angry that I felt like I had to do something. So I went to my dad and I told him, you know, I want to go into Houston in march. I think this is wrong. My dad told me, you know, God love him, he told me: if you go out and march, don’t come home. And so me, being my father’s daughter – my father’s a very stubborn man – I was like, okay, I’m gonna find a way to do what I want to do, whether you like it or not.
So, instead of going out to march, I started posting videos online talking about why young people should vote for Joe Biden. And I just I just kept going all through the 2020 election and I grew a following there. After the election, I just continued. I graduated high school and – you know, actually, I’ve never talked about this before, but in that same time period, graduating high school, that’s when I started doing abortion advocacy work, and I started talking about the civil bounty abortion ban here in Texas.
And like I said, at the time, I was very involved with the ministry – and this wasn’t just like passively involved; I started being involved with this ministry when I was 14. These are people who I had grown up with. These were adults who I had spent holidays with, who had taken me when my parents were going through their divorce, people who were very, very important to me. And when I started doing abortion advocacy work, I was kind of pushed out, because there was a perception that I was going to be a bad influence on the other young women that were in the ministry.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
Can I ask you, how did you have your consciousness awoken around abortion issues? I mean, especially because it’s so, like, the defining issues – that and and the gays – for the evangelical community. So I’m curious how that became the awareness, like George Floyd, was there something that came crashing in or…
OLIVIA JULIANNA:
So my freshman year of high school, I joined Debate, and I was a Lincoln-Douglas debate kid, which meant that we were given a topic that we had to prepare to debate about, but we had to prepare to debate both sides of the topic. We didn’t know which one we were going to get in any given competition. And so the first topic that I got was whether or not fetal stem cell research was ethical, and so I had to research where fetal stem cells came from, which led to me having to do research about abortion. And it really, really taught me that a lot of the things that I had been taught growing up in the Church about abortion were wrong.
And at the same time that was going on, I was also dealing with my own medical problems. I was diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome when I was 13. And so at the time I’m learning about this and researching this, I’m also 13 years old and I’m having to have ultrasounds and exams because I have this incurable condition. And so I learned there – in a pediatric gynecologist’s office – how important consent and freedom of choice in medicine is really truly is.
And so, even though I was a Christian and I didn’t morally necessarily agree with abortion, I understood that it was not anyone else’s place to dictate that, and I, especially to this day, because it really – when I tell people I’m a Christian, still, and I talk about abortion and they get so angry about it. When I talk to conservatives about this, I ask them, I’m like, the very core of our religion is freedom of choice and freedom of will. We have to make the conscious decision to follow Jesus. We have to make the conscious choice to live by the Bible. He gave Eve the choice of whether or not she was going to eat the fruit. We cannot take that choice away from other peopl,e because that is antithetical to what our religion is based on.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
Especially for Baptists, because the free will – that’s a core Baptist… If you’re going back, it’s a very big Baptist principle; but it’s a fascinating blend, isn’t it? When you look at how that formed within you, it’s just really amazing.
OLIVIA JULIANNA:
Well, it’s funny, too, because I’ll crack a joke to people. When I’m going to meetings or whatever, I’ll tell them, lyou know, I grew up in a church and they always told us that sexuality was a choice – and I always believed them, because I liked men and women. And so I believed what the Church was telling us. And then, as I got older, I was like wait, y’all don’t all feel like this? Okay…
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
…My experience isn’t normative for you? Okay, that’s interesting. Well, let me interject here just that I grew up in the Church because my mother like made us go to church. My father was nominally Christian, but, really, Jewish Christian. Didn’t really care, agnostic. My mother really cared, made us go to church – but she was also a major pro-choice activist. She introduced contraception into Wisconsin. And so for me, actually, faith and being pro-people making their own decisions about abortion was the way I grew up. So that’s actually my tradition – and people have a really hard time imagining that, but it actually is a tradition in America. There’s not always this antithesis. In fact, most religious people believe in some sort of freedom of people to choose around abortion. It’s just important to underline that, because people think all religious people are against abortion. They’re not.
OLIVIA JULIANNA:
Yeah, well, people don’t talk about the fact that Roe v Wade, the case itself, it came out of Dallas here in Texas.
And at that time, it was synagogues – it was Jewish faith leaders and other Christian faith leaders in Dallas who were helping women access abortion care. It was Christians.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
Yeah, and the Southern Baptist Convention did an amicus brief in support of Roe v Wade. Anyway, how do you go from a small town in Texas – and literally, I love the way you write about it, you could see fields and that your grandparents had worked the fields, you’re from the land, and then all of a sudden you’re in this incredible digital space and you realize, oh, I can do this. And not everybody can. So what was that like, to go online and start to get people saying oh, I’m so interested in you, I’ll follow you. I mean, what was that moment like?
Because I think, especially for older listeners, they kind of think, oh no, social media, or, oh no, the Internet. I’m like, listen, that’s life, now. That’s just life, there is no online-offline. It is life, it’s a part of life. It’s bad and good and all of that. We get that, but it is just life. But what was it like for you to go online and realize that maybe you had a voice?
OLIVIA JULIANNA:
It was really weird. And this might be a little arrogant to say, but it didn’t surprise me that people really wanted to hear what I had to say. And I don’t mean that in the way of, like, I’m always right; but I’ve always just really been a very outspoken, charming, have all kinds of friends type of person. When I was in high school, I talk about being in this small town, at my junior and senior year, I was already openly a Democrat, openly pro-choice, openly bisexual – and in that very small conservative town, my senior year of high school, I was elected senior class president, student council president, FCA president, yearbook editor, and prom queen.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
Lord. Wow, that is amazing.
OLIVIA JULIANNA:
Thank you. So people always kind of really listened to what it was I had to say, and so for me it was just kind of like, well, now I’m just doing it online. But it really didn’t start taking off until I was 19. I moved to Houston when I was 19. And it was the summer right before I was turning 20 when I had my public spat with Matt Gates.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
So what year was this? Can you remind us?
OLIVIA JULIANNA:
This is 2022. So this was July. So to make a very long story short, for some reason, Matt Gates decided to single me out. After he gave this really messed up speech at this conservative convention about abortion rights activists, he decided to single me out. And here’s the thing. All the love to Michelle Obama with the, you know, when they go low, we go high… When they go low, I go lower. I think there is a fine line between being a Christian and being a pushover. And you know, they say, spare the rod, spoil the child; some people just need to learn, okay.
So when Matt Gaetz targeted me, I pretty much said, dude, you’re an alleged child predator. I might let people feel bad about me, but I’m definitely not gonna let you make me feel bad about myself. And I started fundraising for abortion funds, and it really blows my mind when I talk about this now, because at the time, I didn’t really grasp the severity of the moment. But now, when I look back on it, I’m like, oh my God. So we started fundraising for abortion funds.
Within a week, we raised 2.3 million dollars – and it wasn’t just being talked about on the news and stuff. It was trending on Twitter for three days. Every major senate or gubernatorial candidate in the country – Josh Shapiro, John Fetterman, Tony Evers, JD Pritzker – they were quote tweeting me, they were writing about it, they were making posts. It was written about in every major publication. I was on ABC, MSNBC, CNN.
I was named one of Bloomberg’s 50 people who defined the year, and you can only win that award one time. I won it at 19. And so it just blew up – not just here, but internationally. I was seeing videos about it in Hindi and in Australia and in England. And I just was shocked at the depth of it. And so that was the moment where it became very real for me, and understanding these aren’t just numbers on my phone screen of people who are liking and listening to what I have to say; there are tens of millions of people around the world who are listening and watching everything I’m doing.
And honestly, I have like almost a strange peace to it now. I think it’s because I’ve been doing it for five years now that it’s kind of just normal to me at this point. But when it really started to settle in, I was kind of like, okay, you know, like, clearly, like, this is my purpose, this is what I’m supposed to do, and if I’m going to do it, I might as well be the best at it. So it’s been like that for the last five years.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
It is amazing. And what I like about Substack – I don’t know how long you’ve been doing that, but there’s lots of ways to do it and everything is always evolving. And I see you in another moment right now, and I think one of the things that is helpful in what you’re doing now. I want to get into some recent moments that you’re having, but I think one of the things that’s really important is what do we expect of one another at this point? Like, what do we expect of the elected officials that represent our perspective? What do we, what are they? How are they failing us? How are they delivering? More the former than the latter right now, I would say.
And also, like, how do we imagine the future of electoral politics? I mean, 2026 is going to be here. What are we going to do about it? How are we going to position ourselves? I’m just curious, because I know that you think in kind of three-dimensional chess; what are some of the ways you’re thinking about the broader picture? But then also, the kind of generational representation that you kind of represent for us.
OLIVIA JULIANNA:
I have many, many, many thoughts on this. You know, I have consistently been, at least for the last three years, a pro-Democrat new Dem. I’m not one who is quick to criticize the Democratic Party or Democratic leadership – and the last month, I genuinely believe that we have been failed. I genuinely do. And I have thoughts, and I’ve written about this and I’m going to be posting about this today on YouTube. Our leaders have spent the last four years telling us about the severity of this moment and how much of a threat Donald Trump was. And then Kamala Harris loses the election. She gives a very light, hopeful speech and she goes back to California, rightfully so. I don’t think Kamala should have to do anything for anyone, because we failed her, she didn’t fail us. So Kamala should get to enjoy her peace and her serenity.
In the last few days of his presidency, Joe Biden speaks to military personnel at an event and says, you know, remember your oath.
Donald Trump is sworn in. They’re both in attendance. And now congressional leadership is just kind of shrugging their shoulders and saying, well, like, what do you want us to do? We don’t have a majority. You cannot set the tone that this is a constitutional crisis, that we are in danger, that this is fascism – and then go, oh, nothing we can do about it. Even if there’s not things you can legislatively do, you need to make us feel like you are doing something. There is no reason why Hakeem Jeffries should say, we have no leverage, and then, the same day, you have Chuck Schumer saying democrats aren’t going to put up a fight around the government shutdown. Those two things do not align.
And also, the reason we are behind, the reason we’re in this situation, is because Democrats, Democratic consultants – and, mind you, I am a Democratic consultant – they are trying to make politics work like it’s 2012, like it’s 2016. That’s not the moment we’re in.
Any politics is theater. Now, whether people want to admit or not, it’s theater. It is theater. It is 24/7, and social media is the stage. Okay, that’s where the overwhelming majority of people are getting their news and where their opinions are being formed, and Republicans and conservatives have mastered this. Trump has mastered this, and we are still playing catch-up, and it’s because we get so caught up in this decency politics and this polished professional poise that we don’t know how to talk to people anymore. You don’t know how to talk to normal people, and I’ll go as far as to say this about myself: I don’t know any influencer out there who is doing what I do in the way that I do it. And what I mean by that?
First of all, there’s a lot of political influencers you can look at. I am the only woman who has the numbers that I have. There are no other women in my generation who do. That’s just a fact. And a lot of the men who you look around, who have my engagement or numbers or whatever, they’re not really doing it in the way I am.
And the way that I do it is, I do not hold punches. I am to the point, I’m direct, I’m blunt, I do not concern myself with hurting people’s feelings – and you can do that without kicking up the mud like they do. You’ve just got to be honest and treat them how they’re treating others. And honestly, it works! And it’s what conservatives do, but they go into the mud a lot more than we do. But Democrats have been so afraid to do this that we’re just behind. The only Democrat who does, who has done it consistently, is John Fetterman – and there’s a reason why John Fetterman is liked by both Republicans and Democrats. He’s made some real questionable decisions that I don’t agree with, but his communication style clearly works.
The other person who does this is Jasmine Crockett, who, I would argue, is one of the faces of the party now, because she doesn’t hold back. And so they’ve got to get it together and they’ve got to start doing this, and if they don’t, we’re going to lose the midterms. That’s my concern. There is every formula for us to come back with an Obama 2008-level victory if we get it together, but I’m concerned that what we’re going to end up seeing is we’re going to see a three-peat of 2022, 2024, where we did lose seats that we should have won. That’s my concern.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
I have to say, I’m even more like, the Democratic Party has its flaws, but let’s all kind of go along together. And I have been overwhelmingly disappointed and frankly disgusted, and it’s one of those moments where I’m writing my senators just saying, how about a spine right now? How about a spine? I mean, something, show me something, put your body somewhere.
And I do think some people are doing it. I had a chance to interview Rep. Crockett briefly at the DNC, and she immediately went into Jesus. She was like, you know, they’re using Jesus like the slaveholders used to use Jesus. You know, there’s another side to Jesus, and she got into it. And I think that what we’re doing at Interfaith Alliance right now is just like we’re…
You know, I was on CNN and C-SPAN and all these things, and I said to myself the night before, I was like, come out swinging; and I was just like, “Donald Trump is attacking religious communities. We are under attack. We are going to fight back”, flipping the narrative, coming back at them. It’s really important. Don’t let them set the terms of the debate. And I love the way you do it on social media is like, okay, here’s what they’re doing, here’s the way that actually translates. You’re offering people a way to translate that. Messaging matters right now; how we understand how to turn things and and not be always going well, oh no, you know, this is terrible. Yep, um, the takeover is happening… You can’t just say that!
OLIVIA JULIANNA:
You can’t just say, ehh, whatever. And calling out Christians. The other thing is, it is not above me to call out Christians, who I see as weaponizing Christianity. Because people will be like, don’t take the Lord’s name in vain; and what they say is that means like, don’t say “Oh, my God.” That is not what that means! That means, you do not use the Lord’s name to justify your bad behavior. That’s like the whole thing.
And so I posted a video where I said if Jesus, Mary, and Joseph showed up at your door and asked for a place in the inn, would you welcome them into your home? Or would you say, “Show me your papers”? And this woman, she’s a conservative, she responded to me. She said, “If three strangers showed up at my home in the middle of the night, I would answer the door with a gun.”
Do you not understand how insane you sound? Do you not understand how warped your view of religion has become? And I tweeted something out the other day, and people were like oh, this is… And I was like, are we about to go through the rapture? I feel like all these things are happening, and I’m like, do you not realize that you are the false prophets that we are warned about in the Bible, like do you understand that? And so I just think, as a Christian, I have just been in a real panic and tizzy the last few weeks.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
Yeah, it is very hard to see. And you know what I said when Donald Trump issued an executive order rooting out anti-Christian bias, I’m like, we need protection from you. You are not protecting us. We need protection from you. Time after time after time after time, and we laid it out: here’s ten examples – in three weeks! – where you have directly gone after religious leaders, the Catholic Church, the Quakers, the Episcopal bishop who, for God’s sake, her big crime was asking for mercy. And it goes on and on and on.
The Lutherans – oh, they’re money laundering when they’re helping the poor, helping the elderly. These people are being attacked by this administration. I mean we haven’t even gotten into the Muslim… Wait, just wait. These are all Christians that are being attacked!
OLIVIA JULIANNA:
The other thing too is, you know, he recently made this White House faith office…
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
Yeah, Paula White.
OLIVIA JULIANNA:
Paula White, who I actually knew as a child. I wasn’t directly associated with Paula White, but I grew up in those circles in Texas with her and all those other very well-known pastors and preachers who made the rounds, , and so that’s why it’s especially twisted to me, is because I know these people. I know what you knew about that was going on in the church that you helped cover up. I know about the people who you have directly hurt with your own actions that you will never address and who will never speak out. And it’s such this fine line to walk, because if you say these things, it’s like oh well, what proof do you have? So like, with Paula White in particular, she is not a good woman, and the things that she says about, you know, to speak out against Donald Trump is to speak out against God.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
But this is the nature of that faith White House, is to is to attack anybody who attacks Donald Trump or any of the positions that they have. That and using God in that way, weaponizing God in that way. And you know, it’s it, Paula White… Listen, I actually really don’t judge people, but I do think it’s very interesting that we have twice-divorced Donald Trump, twice-divorced Paula White. Listen, I don’t care about that, particularly, but I do thin that you’re setting yourself up as the moral safeguards of our country, when, you know, there’s just so much.. You know, we can’t even go down that road with Donald Trump, but the fact that they have anointed him a Messiah, literally…
OLIVIA JULIANNA:
A golden calf.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
Well, that’s what I would say. But you know, they have literally said he’s like a Cyrus figure. God has anointed him to do this work, and so anybody who goes against him is going against God’s will. See, it’s the most dangerous… Let’s get into it. I mean, what is the way that you feel is the broader mishmash of people who are uncomfortable with what is happening? There’s some of us who are activists, what do you think we should be doing? What do you think people… Like, there’s a lot of McCain folks, I don’t know where they feel this is going. I mean, do you have any sense, because you do have a broad community which touches on a lot of people. Do you feel like there is going to start being disaffection among Republicans, or do you think it’s mostly that any sort of resistance is going to happen within the more left wing and the Democrats?
OLIVIA JULIANNA:
No, I don’t think that. I think that all the Republicans who were going to stand up and who were going to push back against Trump, I think that they left the party in 2016, when they voted for Hillary Clinton.
Even look at Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney was our presidential nominee in the Republican Party in 2012. And now he has been forcibly removed from the party. So any of those Republicans who were going to do those things, they’re gone. They’re gone now. The only way that we get rid of trumpism, honestly, it’s two things. It’s, first, people are going to have to feel what they voted for – and even then, they’re not going to admit it.
You know, I saw a video of a farmer, I think in Mississippi, who, because of something that Trump did with some kind of funding or whatever, he’s probably going to lose his farm – and it is directly tied to something Trump did. He knows that. And his response was, well, you know, things in America are going to get worse for us before they get better. So they’re fully entrenched in everything he has done.
So it’s going to be people who are otherwise on the outside of, like, oh well, all politicians are the same, who are going to come into the fold. But, honestly, I think you have to beat Trump at his own game – which you can do. You can do, and, honestly, I think, as someone who has actually done this pretty well, it’s so silly to even say this… Stephen A Smith, ESPN commentator, who has never been outwardly Democrat, voted for Kamala. But he’s dedicated his platform, now, to just kind of going after Trump, and he’s doing it in a way that appeals to everyone.
I think the problem that Democrats have had so often is – and I wrote a Substack article about this, too – in our effort to make our party inclusive, we have twisted ourselves into a pretzel that makes it very exclusionary. And what I mean by that is, we kind of force people to go into these different boxes. You know, if you’re Latino, you go in this box. If you’re Black, you go in this box. If you’re straight, you go here, you go here.
And the result of that has been a lot of young men, especially young White men, have felt like they don’t want to be involved in that situation. They feel like there’s not a place for them there, and those are the people that Donald Trump speaks to. And since 2020, I would say, we kind of have this language we use where we say things like, you know, I want to protect X marginalized group and Y marginalized group and Z marginalized group, and I want to do it in a way that empowers XYZ…. And the way that we talk about things, it’s so specific in its attempt to be broad that people feel like it’s not directed to them. And that’s why Trump has been able to kind of make so many inroads with different minority groups and different young people is because the substance of what he says is exclusionary, but the way that he gives the message is broad-reaching. And so Stephen A Smith, he is doing he’s…
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
By the way, he’s a sports commentator, predominantly. And he’s Black himself. He’s on ESPN, but also shows up in other spaces.
OLIVIA JULIANNA:
Yes. He went on Fox News. And he had a back-and-forth with Sean Hannity, and he made Sean Hannity look like a fool. And it’s because he’s not afraid to say the things that need to be said.
He was talking about DEI. Sean Hannity and him were going back and forth, and he said something about, look, I completely agree with you. People should be hired on merit. People shouldn’t be hired just because of their identity. I completely agree with you. But you can’t say that you are against DEI and then support a Fox News commentator with no experience to be the Secretary of Defense.
He’s like, “Come on, Sean!” And that resonates with people, because he’s just saying, no one should be hired for their identity, because that’s not what we believe, that’s not what DEI is. But some people feel like you just can’t say that because it might be deemed as offensive. It’s not offensive, it’s the truth. And we should stop being afraid to be open and honest about those kinds of things. And he’s not, and that’s where Trump has succeeded. And that’s why Stephen A Smith is showing up now and polling about the 2028 primary!
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
Wow. I do want to get into Texas because that is like, that is your place, it’s where you are committed to. Tell us how you feel about Texas. I mean, Texas for the last several cycles has just been like oh, this is the moment Texas is going to turn blue! And it couldn’t have been less blue this year. What is your sense? Because I know so many cool people from Texas. I’m still like, Ann Richards… There’s an amazing tradition of progressive values in Texas, and I’m just curious how you understand your role in Texas, and also how you understand Texas in general as a location where all of this is probably playing out in a microcosm.
OLIVIA JULIANNA:
Oh yeah, I mean, we’ve been living under Project 2025 here for a while. Texas is a test ground for a lot of the stuff they wanted to do. We are oh, I think, 184 statewide elections since 1994 that we have lost. And the worst enemy to the Texas Democratic Party right now is the Texas Democratic Party. This past year, I worked on the Colin Allred campaign, so I was directly involved. And in this I realized – and I wrote about this in my Substack – that the real problem here in Texas, I think, is what I call the political aristocracy. And you know, it’s been 30 years since a Democrat has won here, and so what’s happened is we’ve kind of created our own little community that is very close, tight-knit, and is constantly picking on each other. Constantly, constantly, constantly. And the truth of the matter here is that Texas is not going to have a statewide victory for Democrats until this aristocracy is broken up.
You know, we have a lot of clubs here that just conduct themselves in the same way over and over and over again. We have a Texas Democratic Party chair who hasn’t done anything revolutionary. We’re in the middle of a chair election now – I’m actually glad you said this, because I went to the forum the chair candidates were holding this past week, and they asked them, they were like, what are – you know, this is Harris County, it’s where I live, biggest county in the state – what are your plans to increase the voter turnout in Harris County? And every single one of them said, to work with the clubs that are already on the ground. That’s great. The clubs already on the ground have been working here, and we still lost. So that’s not the solution.
There’s all these little common sense solutions we could be doing that nobody’s doing, because we’re more focused on dissecting our party messaging platform than we are in investing in the fact that we have hundreds of empty precinct chair positions in all of the major communities. So you know, Texas, it’s a really great example of what happens when you organize in a bubble, and you don’t organize in a broad-reaching way – and this is the same exact problem that we’re having with DC congressional Democrats right now. We are messaging to each other; we are not messaging to the people we need to reach to get voters.
And Colin Allred gets a lot of flack, and I’m very defensive of him because I worked on the campaign. I know how good-hearted of a man he was, how good of a father he is to his children. Colin made inroads in places he should not have. He made inroads in the suburbs in a way that, if this was 2018, he probably would have won that election.
But the larger problem here is – and this is a problem in every state – every state we have Democratic incumbents who are in heavily gerrymandered districts who, in their eyes, the only election they have to get through is the primary. So after the primary, they stop campaigning or they don’t campaign at all because they have no challenger. So now we have the most heavily Democratic-populated districts in the state, and their voter turnout rate is 15, 20 percent. That is costing us elections at a substantial rate. And until we organize on a broader scale, and until, honestly, we get some of these older incumbents who are just simply not doing their job out of here, we’re going to keep losing.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
Well, let’s not end on that dour note. First of all, I want to make sure that we hear from you all the places that our listeners can follow you. So what are the various platforms and ways that people can keep up? Because you know, I know, that not everybody wants to be on social media, let me just guarantee you definitely will enjoy following Olivia. So what are the places where people can find you?
OLIVIA JULIANNA:
Oh my gosh, everywhere. “Olivia Julianna” on Twitter, Threads, Bluesky, Instagram, TikTok, Substack…
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
Oh, my goodness, Okay, so wherever you are, she is there, so just look around, you’ll find her.
I used to ask folks on this program, what gives you hope? But right now, I want to get a little more tactical. What is the one thing that you would like listeners to The State of Belief to consider doing? A lot of people are just so overwhelmed, and they just are like, I don’t know where to start. Let’s just start with one thing. What’s the one thing you would urge our listeners to do?
OLIVIA JULIANNA:
You need to change your perspective on where the power is coming from. And what I mean by that is, you need to know every single one of your local representatives – not just in the federal government; county school board, every single one of them. You need to know who they are. You need to find out when those elections are, because Donald Trump might sign the executive orders, but it’s your county sheriff that’s going to carry it out. You need to know these people, and the more we organize on a local level, the better outcomes we will have and the more progress we will make. So you need to think locally. And that also, I think, will provide you a little bit of peace of mind, because that’s a lot more achievable and usually a lot calmer than the big federal-scale stuff.
PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:
Olivia Julianna is a progressive activist living in Texas. A popular Gen Z voice on social media and beyond, her smart insights and writings can be found on her Substack at OliviaJulianna – and that’s her handle on social media, all across every platform.
Olivia, there’s lots of leaders that should be listening to you today, as well as our listeners, and I feel so grateful for you being with us today on The State of Belief.
OLIVIA JULIANNA:
Thank you for having me.
