Christian legal armies on the march | Mary Fitzgerald of openDemocracy | CitizenGO and VOX | Cake case goes to the European Court of Human Rights | Blaž Zgaga on faith-based lobbying and invisible donors
Pastors and plutocrats are sponsoring an ultra-conservative agenda in Europe. Many of them have links to Donald Trump. It’s a world that's pretty opaque. But over the past year, investigative journalists have done painstaking work to pierce the veil. We talk to Blaž Zgaga, a multi-award winning investigative journalist from Slovenia. Zgaga writes for Croatia's Nacional and publications including EUobserver. He’s also a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and European Investigative Collaborations where he helps coordinate large cross-border investigations — including on the reach of the Christian lobby. He’s emerged with extraordinary detail about some of the biggest funders of faith-based causes in Europe and their links to Trumpworld. Another chronicler of the merging of fundamentalist Christianity with European public policy is Mary Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald was formerly with online activist network Avaaz and was a senior editor at Prospect magazine. She’s now editor-in-chief of openDemocracy, an online platform that's also done exhaustive work on what U.S. non-profit groups disclose about their foreign spending. Fitzgerald's platform also has reported on the arrival in Europe of US-style political campaign funding — funding of the kind that's hard to trace and potentially unlimited.