Amanda (Amanda Prestigiacomo)
speaker
1,029 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 21 Jul
Amanda (Amanda Prestigiacomo)’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
In order to build a rock-solid majority coalition, they needed another issue.
Weyrich, who watched the 1978 midterm elections carefully, was as surprised as the rest of America to see the success of Catholic anti-abortion activists in toppling pro-choice candidates.
Abortion, he thought, could be worth another try.
He liked that he could frame abortion to hit where Americans cared most, framed as defense of the family.
He liked that it could appeal to growing distrust and anxiety over second wave feminism and sexual politics.
Unlike segregation, abortion could be framed as protecting innocent life.
Unlike taxes, it evoked profound moral emotion.
Unlike economic policy, it united conservative Catholics and evangelical Protestants.
So he went back to the well and pulled up abortion as the bait and switch to hide the origins of the movement, which was actually evangelical racial resentment and leadership greed, into an irreproachable political identity defending morality and the family.
It was a good idea.
But ideas need story and emotion and broad buy-in.
So starting in 1979, Weirich and other new right leaders began to enthusiastically promote a film created by evangelical theologian Francis Schaeffer, his son, and pediatric surgeon C. Everett Koop, who later became Reagan's Surgeon General.
The film was called Whatever Happened to the Human Race.
It toured churches across America and expressly linked abortion to a much larger story.
The decline of Christian civilization, the rise of secular humanism, the collapse of the family.
Millions of evangelicals watched the film in their home churches.
The film, reinforced by evangelical leadership messaging from the pulpit, reframed abortion, which the congregation supported or ignored just three years prior, as the defining moral issue for conservative Protestants.
And evangelical voters integrated the anti-abortion cause into the mainstream of the conservative political movement.
So Wyrick now had the masses, the evangelical churchgoers.
He had their enforcers, the evangelical leaders.
Showing 321–340 of 1,029 · page 17 of 52
← Previous
Next →