What the ever loving fuck. That’s our intro today.
But we do have a structure. Julian’s going to review the Executive Order chaos, including the pardoning and deputizing of fascist street gangs. Derek’s going to explain what the ever loving fuck it means for health agencies to turn off access to health data. And I’ll look at two Xtian responses to fascism: one hypocritical and one poetic… but maybe toothless.
Show Notes
Freed Capitol riot ringleaders regroup - and vow 'retribution'
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Hey everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remski.
I'm Julian Walker.
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Conspirituality 242, Executive Disorder.
What the ever-loving fuck.
That's our intro today, by the way.
That might be our whole show, Derek and Julian.
But we do have a structure.
Julian is going to review the executive order chaos, including the pardoning and deputizing of fascist street gangs.
Derek's going to explain what the ever-loving fuck it means for health agencies to turn off access to health data.
And I'm going to be looking at two Christian responses to fascism.
One craven and hypocritical, and one...
Really poetic, but maybe toothless.
Trump's executive orders illustrate a shock and awe level of preparation and ruthlessness.
Aggressive decimation of climate measures, dismantling of DEI policies and structures, militarizing the southern border, and clearing a path for deportation camps are amongst the most immediately alarming.
Unprecedented day one activity is designed not just to flood the zone, but to intimidate opponents, test the waters for his appetite for expanded powers, and throw red meat to supporters, allies, donors across his coalition.
The implications of Trump rescinding 78 of Biden's orders, plus his own first 46 actions, which include technically 26 executive orders, 12 memoranda, and four proclamations, Range from performative to sadistic to catastrophic.
If there is a through line in all of this, it seems to be prioritizing naked power over any adherence to facts, ethics, or ideology, while posturing as the new sheriff in town who's going to restore order and greatness.
You said day one, but we're recording this on day eight, and it's not stopping, just to be clear.
Here's some red meat.
In terms of how our beat specifically intersects with politics, the QAnon deep state religious-style conspiracism that red-pilled the New Agers we started off covering in 2020 is given fresh blood with a side of adrenochrome by the blanket pardons of all January 6th convictions.
That mob wore QAnon and Christian nationalist insignia into their election-forward conspiracy theory-inspired battle.
Trump had started ceding that ground nine years ago as an alternate route to power that he now holds.
Despite top Republicans saying that exceptions should be made for those who attacked Capitol Police, like don't pardon them, blanket pardons by Trump send a clear message to his supporters.
Their violent loyalty matters more than facts or legality.
Releasing Oath Keepers Stuart Rhodes and Kelly Meigs and Proud Boy leader Enrico Tarrio, who'd been sentenced to 22, 12, and 18 years respectively for a seditious conspiracy, in effect legalizes a proven plot to overthrow the government.
And this says, believing, spreading, and acting upon false conspiracies about my enemies gets rewarded.
Even when it leads to real treasonous conspiracy against democracy.
All of the 1,500-plus pardoned can now actually legally purchase firearms again.
When asked by a reporter outside the prison how he feels about January 6th now, Stuart Rhodes, that's the Oathkeeper founder, said it should be called Patriot's Day.
And then our old buddy QAnon shaman Jacob Chansley took to Twitter.
He'd already been out of jail for some time, but now he's pardoned.
And he said on Twitter, gleefully, I'm going to go out and buy some guns.
The stunning contrast here is that on the same day, another executive order directed attorneys general to find whatever ways they can to still execute the 37 people Joe Biden commuted from death row to life in prison.
That order frames the death penalty as a deterrent to crime and orders that all states secure adequate access to lethal injection drugs, which had been hard to come by for a while.
It also underlines that killing a cop, as well as any capital offense by an illegal alien, should definitely lead to execution.
But beating cops within inches of their lives, causing them severe injuries and mental health crises, that's all fine if you do it for Trump.
You know, amid the flood of executive orders and all of the chaos, to me, this is the most terrifying because he deputizes street brawling.
And when that happens, there's no time or space to even begin clawing your way back into thinking about the Paris Accords.
Because you can't fight for trans rights legislation if, for instance, gangs are outside beating up queer people with impunity, among other groups.
I saw that the BBC is already reporting that the Proud Boys and other groups are already planning their return to street violence.
And you know, it's like any student of fascism knows how crucial...
Street violence is and carrying out leadership desires outside of the law while that leadership is stealing power from within a democracy and destroying those laws.
And you brought this up when we were constructing this episode because it does start with targeting marginalized groups, but then it's going to spread out to anyone who supports the marginalized groups.
So as a white man, I am not targeted, but if I go out and protest and support, I am now going to be open to that sort of violence, which is how it works.
It acts as a deterrent for anyone to protest for those groups.
Yeah.
So I think that it, I mean, it poses a challenge for all three of us really, you know, in a very specific way.
Yeah.
And these guys become the initiated...
The mythologized, kind of glorious inner core of the new brown shirts, essentially, is how it looks to me.
Among those pardons, there were also 23 anti-abortion activists, a little more red meat for you here, who blockaded clinics by doing things like chaining themselves to the doors.
He also inexplicably pardoned two cops convicted just this past September of a second-degree murder, which they then tried to cover up.
And, you know, it appears to be that they were giving a reckless pursuit of someone who had committed a crime.
Probably he's an illegal alien, and so that makes it all good.
And then finally, he pardoned Ross Ulbricht, creator of the Silk Road.
And you may remember, this is that illegal marketplace that made most of its money facilitating drug deals, which I guess is okay because it was all done using Bitcoin.
Ulbricht generated somewhere between $183 million and $1.2 billion, depending on the coin values in relative terms of what period you're looking at, over 2.5 years.
He also was shown to have paid close to $750,000 for murders of five people.
And even though the guy he paid appears not to have actually killed anyone, this was taken into account at his sentencing hearing where Ulbricht was given life in prison.
This is all under the order titled Ending Weaponization of the Federal Government.
And Trump took to Truth Social to say about Ross Ulbricht, the Silk Road founder, the scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern-day weaponization of government against me.
Calls to free Ulbricht amongst libertarian crypto bros, including RFK Jr., by the way, led to Trump vowing early in his campaign, To do so on day one.
And this kind of rhymes with Donald and Melania doing an opportunistic pump and dump on their own meme coins the week of the inauguration.
Trump's tech bro supporters will also have noticed he rescinded a Biden order that sought to provide safety, security, and ethical oversight of AI development.
Okay, so can one of you explain to me what a meme coin is?
Because I'm totally lost.
Okay, you have an hour, Matthew?
No, no.
Can you do it quick?
Yes, I can.
Well, there is no definition of meme coin.
Different people will tell you different things.
Basically...
The idea of cryptocurrency is that it's a utility.
You can use it for payments.
So, for example, an international payment can take days or weeks to go through, depending on what country you're in.
The idea of cryptocurrency is it can take those days into minutes and be cleared.
Now, a meme coin has no utility.
That is the basic thing.
There's nothing that it's used for.
Different currencies are launched.
Yeah.
Some are very widespread.
Oh, we're going to replace the dollar.
Some are very specific.
We're going to be used for this gaming platform and we're the currency of that platform.
Those are all utilities.
Meme coins are pure pump and dump schemes.
They only exist.
They are just gambling.
They exist.
And basically everyone tries to game the system.
We're going to run it up as much in value as possible, buy it up, and then we're going to dump it.
We're going to try to sell it as quickly as possible.
That is every meme coin that exists.
So it's actually less value than the Bored Ape thing.
Because the ape, you can choose.
You can have your own ape thing, right?
Am I getting it?
Yeah, I mean, that would be moving into store of value.
More likely, you have artwork that is going to increase in value, just like traditional artwork.
It doesn't have utility, per se.
So Bored Apes, you can buy with different currencies.
We're talking about the actual currency here.
Bored Ape is an art.
Now you're a crypto expert, Matthew.
Excellent.
You see, Matthew, it's a system of nodes.
No, I mean, the thing to me is it sounds like a combination of those commemorative gold coins that they sell on TV ads plus an MLM, where basically everyone under you is a sucker.
But gold has value.
You can always...
Sell the gold purely as weight and derive something.
You cannot do that with code.
There's no weight to code.
You can't weigh the code.
All right.
We've clarified all of that.
Now, with regard to this political weaponization order, Douglas Mackey is specifically cited in the text.
Who the hell is Douglas Mackey?
He's the guy who created and shared a convincing fake social media meme that purported to be from African American women for Hillary.
And it told people to avoid the line and instead text Hillary to this particular number to vote.
In typical doublespeak style, the order then tells the Department of Justice to retroactively investigate anyone who acted contrary to this order for the purposes of election interference.
So Douglas Mackey was censored and punished due to weaponization of the justice system because he tried to affect the election by getting African-American women specifically to text to a number that was not actually a way to vote.
And then this gets spun into that was a form of election interference, like prosecuting him.
So this direction to prosecute people who were involved in that activity seems to threaten January 6th committee members, amongst others.
So this relates to another order, to restore freedom of speech and end federal censorship.
This is part of that ongoing effort to reframe.
The attempts to counter malign foreign influence, terrorist propaganda, dangerous medical misinformation, and conspiracy lies online, that countering that is actually biased and censorship, and it's unconstitutional.
Meanwhile, the recent bending of the knee by Mark Zuckerberg on fact-checking and content moderation, and the romantic courtship between Trump and TikTok CEO Shozi Chu, and Elon picking out curtains seemingly for an office in the West Wing, It means that the tech platforms are already folded into the new power structure.
Although with Elon...
You never know.
It's all a bit volatile.
I think bending the knee is one way of putting it, but there's also the class solidarity theme.
And I think that means that if there's any time for the whole left of center to pull together, it's now.
But that can be really hard to do.
Yeah, I mean, class solidarity.
But Zuckerberg's motivation also cuts a little closer to the bone.
When asked by a reporter if he thought the Meta CEO's announcement was a reaction to threats, he would be jailed.
Trump replied, probably.
Yeah, probably.
My brief coming up this Saturday includes comments from disinformation researcher and previous guest, Renee DiResta.
About Zuckerberg's changes to content moderation, here's a quick preview.
We saw a phenomenal rhetorical propaganda campaign to redefine terms like censorship in ways that make no sense.
If you stop to think for even 30 seconds, the idea that a fact-check is censorship is surreal, actually, because a fact-check is adding more information.
The way that the platforms usually presented it was adjacent to the story.
You could see it.
Ironically, even in this sort of idealization of community notes, community notes is also adding more speech.
It's just implying that speech from ordinary people is more legitimate than speech from professional fact checkers.
That doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
That, again, is a reflection of distrust, not of any kind of coherent definition of censorship.
And also, the people who write the community notes are usually citing the fact checks.
They're citing professional media.
That's what we still consider to be a reputable source.
An interesting piece of connective tissue here is released January 6th convict Jake Lamp.
He's the guy who attacked and fought cops with a baseball bat for hours, wearing a gas mask.
He celebrated outside the jailhouse saying, we're back, the patriots.
We don't have to crawl in the back corners of Facebook and Instagram.
We've got Trump, we've got X, we've got Musk, we've got the dream team.
Well, Jake, it turns out you've got Facebook and Instagram too, and probably TikTok as it happens.
Speaking of power...
Trump sought last week to move closer to the unitary executive theory style of expanded power mapped out in Project 2025 and propagated by our most conservative Supreme Court justices.
He declared the energy crisis an issue of national security, which may be a way to sidestep any existing EPA limitations or congressional legislations against drill baby drilling, but also against seizing federal land to do so.
He also declared another national emergency at the southern border, which can pave the way to robust militarizations.
These orders characterize undocumented immigrants as enacting an invasion, and they seek to designate drug cartels as terrorist organizations so as to expand reasons to deny visas and aggressively prosecute anyone suspected of being related to the cartels.
This is all too much to summarize.
I've done my best, but I'll end by saying That Trump also threw red meat to climate denialists, conspiracy theorists and the corporate donors who stand to profit from our abandoning climate treaties, stopping foreign aid for climate measures, freezing the Green New Deal and dismantling wind power infrastructure and accelerating the already terrifying global climate crisis.
Something for everyone.
Yeah, the first few days of the new administration, as it turns out, are a huge victory for corruption, disinformation, conspiracism, Christian nationalism, and authoritarianism.
And with that, I wish you a good day.
Good day.
As you referenced earlier, Julian, the zone is being flooded.
And with so many orders, it's hard to focus on one.
I want to just pull back and look at what a few orders around health agencies means for us American citizens and for the world.
It's been speculated that Trump is doing this to health agencies and communications so that Congress will rush.
The confirmation of RFK Jr. as Secretary of HHS, that's certainly plausible, especially because now RFK is fundraising off the fact that he froze all comms.
That happened on Monday.
I want to run down what three different decisions mean for the American public, and I reached out to a few friends in medical research and comms positions for their thoughts, and I'll share as I go through these.
So first, what does it mean that the U.S. is leaving the WHO? So first off, the U.S. is the largest single contributor to the WHO. It provides about 19% of the agency's total budget.
Withdrawing will create a substantial financial gap, and it will also probably give some leverage to Trump because we supply so much of that budget.
And this hampers the WHO's ability to carry out global health initiatives.
And it will also adversely affect public health programs in developing nations.
And it will also diminish every country's readiness for any sort of health emergencies.
So we're talking about mosquito nets, antibiotics, water filtration, sanitation.
Vaccine distribution and sort of epidemiology, like things like that?
Well, the last one is the big one.
It's pandemic response.
We are no longer getting data from other countries on, oh, I don't know, any pandemics that are breaking out in their countries.
We no longer get that.
And on a different level, yes, all those other things as well.
Correct.
So when we're talking about developing nations, if you think about malaria in certain African countries, it could affect the budget for those, for example, for mosquito netting as one.
All right.
So next one.
This disrupts ongoing negotiations for the WHO pandemic agreement, and it'll hinder global efforts.
So I've just mentioned that, but it'll also – pandemics are going to increase because of climate change.
We know this.
So on our side, you see all the wellness influencers being like, oh, the bird flu.
It's the next pandemic they're planning.
No assholes.
This is what we've done to the planet, and now we have to continue to respond to viruses as they arise.
A big one is that because of that financial gap, China is likely to step up, and they could increase global policies when it comes to global health.
We will lose access to the WHO's global database of health information.
So again, surveilling for infectious diseases.
But also, you know, we think pandemic, but we will no longer get updates on the influenza strains, which is kind of important.
And finally, it will hamper the CDC and FDA from doing their jobs.
If we don't get global access to, you know, news on influenza strains, we can't update yearly vaccines.
Is that right?
Or we can't do it accurately?
Yeah, it won't be.
Well, it depends.
I mean, so influenza is a global effort.
The season starts every year in Australia, so we look there to start to develop the vaccines.
I don't know where they're all made and distributed, but it will affect our ability to monitor and our researchers and scientists to work on what appear to be the coming strains.
So I talked to Jonathan Jerry, who is a science communicator at McGill's University Office for Science and Society.
He was on last week's episode on the telepathy tapes as well.
He's a frequent guest.
He told me...
Public health in the 21st century is all about collaboration.
It's about sharing data and coordinating and tracking the spread of diseases.
By withdrawing from the WHO, Trump is reminding us that he's inadvertently on the side of the diseases.
He's gouging the eyes out of his country to play pretend that everything is fine.
The consequences are likely to be a reduced worldwide pandemic readiness, a rise in communicable diseases, and an increase in healthcare costs.
The world will be worse off.
Yes.
So that brings us to the next one, which is the stopping of all communications from health agencies.
Off the record, I've talked to friends of mine who work for state departments in roles of epidemiology, and they tell me that they cannot do their job right now.
On the record, when I researched this, the pause has halted the release of routine public health tools like the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
That means they don't know who's dying from what now.
We don't have that public information anymore.
Any health advisories sent through the CDC's Health Alert Network, which informs universities and research institutions across the nation.
And any public health data releases from the National Center for Health Statistics.
Just to clarify, these data are continuing to be collected, but the agencies are forbidden from transmitting them to the researchers.
who need them, right?
I can't answer that question.
I can answer that the institutions that need them are not getting them.
What I can't answer is the fact, which ties into something else, which is all federal grants have been stopped.
Yeah, right.
And I don't know all of the different departments that's affecting because people will lose their jobs if this goes on and it might be limiting their ability, especially because on Sunday night, it was demanded that all government especially because on Sunday night, it was demanded that all government agencies stop talking to the So that means they're actually not collecting all that data.
Maybe domestically, but definitely not internationally.
You would actually have to look at it department by department to understand what is and what is not being collected.
We're no longer able to promptly inform the public about foodborne illness outbreaks.
Great for the raw milk industry, but not so great for us.
Many meetings have been canceled on this, including an upcoming meeting on antibiotic-resistant germs, which is kind of a big deal.
This will also further erode trust in government institutions, which seems to be the goal of this administration.
Because if there's a foodborne illness outbreak at Trader Joe's and no one's told about it and it sickens thousands of people, well, you're going to look to the government and be like, what the fuck were you guys doing?
Oh, well, we couldn't tell you about it.
Well, this is why when I first got...
Wind of this, I thought this was about access that science reporters would have to current data, but it's not that at all.
It's not just about the public not being informed.
It's about the actual experts who work with this data not having access to it.
Yes, correct.
So it's not just science reporters, it's everyone.
It's epidemiologists creating predictive models for pandemic outbreaks, for example.
It's hard to believe this, Derek, but if you're a working epidemiologist in any...
Any university right now, you've had the main source of data shut off, so we're flying blind, and there's nothing that those professionals can do without that data.
And let me just clarify, because you guys did all of this reporting over months, was this very specific to the blueprint of Project 2025?
I don't remember the stopping of all communications.
That I don't recall.
I do recall folding agencies into other agencies was a very common tactic.
I do recall cutting down on the bureaucracy of these agencies, but I don't ever remember reading, we're just not going to tell the public anything.
Because even Project 2025 had to couch it in the idea that this is for the betterment of American society.
Ending communications about science is not better for anyone.
And again, when you referenced a moment ago, if you're an epidemiologist working in a university, so you said the main source of data is cut off from the government level.
That is true.
But your grant money is just cut off as well.
And the longer this lasts...
It's not like it's going to be turned right back on.
When it's turned on, those delays in funding could have serious downstream effects.
Yeah, this all looks to me much more like the influence of Maha than stuff that was in the original Project 2025 blueprint because this is all a crazy paranoid reframing of the complex communication network between these different agencies at the national and international level being framed as some kind of Yeah,
and when it comes down to it, the biggest enemies in the Maha universe are...
Paul Offit and, you know, people who actually do the, you know, on-the-record research and they publicize it and they're able to keep the wheels on the bus, they are actually the enemy because they have chops.
It's not that they're, like, politically oriented the wrong way.
It's that their data can actually prove that, you know, the Maha plans around polio vaccines or whatever are incorrect.
Yeah, this is the anti-science rhetoric come home to roost.
That science is the enemy.
To your point, Julian, Heritage, if you read it, they frame it as, well, fuck the pores.
But that is not what Maha is saying.
They are saying, fuck everyone because we have supplements and protocols to sell.
Right.
That's a very broad heuristic, but it's pretty applicable in this situation.
So that's a good comparison there.
I talked to longtime friend of the pod, Dan Wilson, Debunk the Funk, about what...
This means that we end all public comms.
And he said...
COVID arguably could have been contained if things were different.
That means we never would have locked down, never would have suffered economic consequences, and millions of people would not have died.
This scenario requires health agencies to communicate and share information so that we can notice an outbreak of a new disease and act quickly.
Without this communication in place, it's hard to realistically see any hope of preventing the next pandemic.
I'm glad that Dan is posting more often now.
He has two little ones at home now, so he had to take a break.
But when we were chatting, he told me that he is now going to be utilizing his YouTube channel a lot more.
I've been getting his Patreon updates more, so I'm very happy.
He is someone you should definitely follow for all this information.
I also talked to someone who is a newer friend of mine.
Her name is Sabina Vohran.
An information vacuum provokes misinformation, exacerbates chaos and uncertainty, and ultimately breeds distrust.
My hope is that this pause is short-lived, but every day that goes by without these pressing communications leaves American people.
Again, in an exceptionally vulnerable position.
The last one.
Now, this is the ending of NIH, National Institutes of Health study sections.
I want to point out that I wrote this before the freezing of all grants.
Again, I can't even cover all the ramifications of what the ending of that federal grant money is doing.
And that comes from the Office of Management of Budget, the OMB. But it also affects every federal grant, which a lot of NIH funding comes from there.
But for specifically...
For the freezing of what's called study sections, it stops the grant review process for one.
So the NIH cannot issue research grants, and it is temporarily freezing 80% of the agency's $47 billion budget, which will likely result in significant delays in funding decisions and affect thousands of ongoing research projects that are happening right now.
So that gets to your earlier question, Matthew, about the immediate ramifications.
This also jeopardizes hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions, and it potentially forces some researchers to seek employment elsewhere.
I recently talked to nutritionist Kevin Klatt for my Clarity Lab podcast, and we were just talking about all of the problems with privatizing research.
If you are a researcher and you're trying to do good work, There's just more money going into private industry.
And this is not what you want if you want, oh, I don't know, universal healthcare or inexpensive treatments because venture capital money that flows into private research wants a return on investment.
By stopping all of these tenure decisions and hiring right now, it's going to just make scientists and researchers turn to the private market even more, which kind of feels like another goal of this administration.
Last couple.
It strains institutional budgets.
It will lead to staffing cuts and project determinations, including I was reading this morning that some cancer research projects are being stopped.
It slows down progress in critical areas of biomedical research, like Alzheimer's disease.
It stops collaboration, travel conferences, data sharing, so not only from the government to the institutions, but between institutions themselves.
And then...
Once the freeze is lifted, whenever that is, there's going to be a backlog of grant applications and all of these study sections are going to need to be rescheduled.
So it's just going to clog up the whole system, during which time a lot of researchers will likely have moved on because they either had to find new jobs or they need to focus on something else.
I think you were right, Julian, to peg this particular sort of onslaught to the Maha movement.
But you mentioned, Derek, that the blanket ending or pausing of federal grants and loans that just was issued by the OMB, it was coming out of the OMB. And this is where, like, I just wanted to throw this in here, part of that memo that came from Matthew Vaith, who's the...
It sounds like it could have been written by Jordan Peterson in 2016 because he says, the use of federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and Green New Deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve.
So, like, yeah, Maha has its fingers all over the NIH, but then there's this broader attack that...
That is coming straight out of just the anti-woke heterodox spheres, like straight copy and paste.
Well, interestingly, it was actually written by Jordison Peterson's AI. Okay, right.
Yeah.
Yeah, and then the third piece there is it's a venture capital kind of bone as well, right?
And so in a way, this may be too much to get into, but it's like libertarian Lysenkoism.
I think that's the lesson for this episode is that it's all too much to get into.
And I think we're going to be pulling on these threads for the months to come for sure. . . .
Guys, I don't know what happened to this episode because I initially proposed that we all cover aspects of the executive orders, but then I just got freaked out by my own idea because they all ran together in this blitzkrieg of fascist rage.
So my brain dealt with that by turning to the question of how people are responding and will respond.
And I started working on something that turned out to be too long for this episode, so I'm going to put it into a brief that comes.
You know, up soon.
But it's a taxonomy of responses.
We have like craven bootlicking to, you know, that might move the needle for some people to, well, is now the time to crack open the anti-fascist handbook, you know, and talk about direct action and street defense?
Or are we just hunkering down to survive?
Or is it all of the above?
So I'm collecting and collating and analyzing the responses for an upcoming brief, because I think like that's really what...
I'm thinking about most.
Because I think if we're really serious that this is a fascist era, there's a whole history out there that says some pretty compelling things.
You can't put your trust in rational discussion entirely.
You can't put your trust in the police and the courts or in legislative politics.
You have to keep these things alive for when the regime falls.
These are precisely the instruments that fascists don't care about and are destroying.
But let me focus on the question of, do they care about religion?
And the answer is no.
But at this juncture of fascists consolidating power...
Clerics are going to have some influence over moral discourse and the conscience of the people.
So I wanted to talk about that for a bit.
So the two responses I want to look at.
The second one everybody heard of, but this is the first one, which is just...
Totally craven and hypocritical, and it comes from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
And Julian, I'm going to give you the pleasure of reading, pretending that you have the hat on.
Many of the issues President Trump addresses in his current executive orders, along with what may be issued in the coming days, are matters on which the Church has much to offer.
Some provisions contained in the executive orders, such as those focused on the treatment of immigrants and refugees, foreign aid, expansion of the death penalty and the environment, are deeply troubling and will have negative consequences, many of which will harm the most vulnerable among us.
Other provisions in the executive orders can be seen in a more positive light, such as recognizing the truth about each human person as male.
Very, how cooperative.
So Trump makes sense on the transes, they say, so they can find some common ground on the executive order that basically ends any human rights or accommodations claims by trans people.
So they're not so concerned that trans people are at this moment becoming political refugees, like I know several who have left the country, or that if trans women are...
Shipped off, you know, are in women's prisons now.
They'll be cut off from their medications and moved to men's prisons.
So the principle is very important to them, right?
And so hounding trans people, of course, isn't going to impact anybody else.
Yeah, but as people have pointed out, the way that this order you're referencing was written, Matthew, says that every human is female.
Because they got the science wrong, right?
They got the science wrong on the order, so the Catholic Church apparently isn't too up on their science either.
Yeah, not that conference anyway.
I mean, this is peak hypocrisy for this body after basically putting the majority of U.S. Catholics in the bag for Trump over abortion and sexual hangups.
And many figures in the hierarchy questioning COVID policy, and a whole chunk of them backing Bishop Strickland, who's the QAnon Pope.
And then at the end of the statement, they have the goal to cite Francis as though they haven't spent the last decade calling him too woke and fighting him on everything.
So then we have the most annoying and powerful newbie convert on planet Earth responding.
This is J.D. Vance on Face the Nation saying, I think the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has frankly not been a good partner in common sense immigration enforcement that the American people voted for, he said.
And I hope, again, as a devout Catholic, that they'll do better.
So the race to out-trad the trads is on.
It's amazing.
He keeps doing this every time he speaks on these different things as a practicing Catholic.
Like, dude, you've been a Catholic for five minutes.
Yeah, five and a half minutes, yeah.
So let's listen to this, because we just want to review it.
It sounded really nice.
It was a lot of relief for a moment.
In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country.
We're scared now.
There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in...
Democratic, Republican, and independent families.
Some who fear for their lives.
And the people.
The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meatpacking plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals, they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation.
But the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals.
They pay taxes and are good neighbors.
They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, Wadara, and temples.
So that's Bishop Marion Edgar Buddy speaking from the pulpit at the National Cathedral in Washington, staring directly at Donald Trump.
And Derek, where was Bishop Buddy born?
Jersey.
She's one of us.
Yeah.
One of me.
Yeah.
So she was born in New Jersey.
She grew up in Sweden.
In a Swedish-American family, she came back to the U.S. and started her Episcopal ordination process at 24. Then she served as a priest in Toledo, then in Minneapolis, and then she was elected to her current position as Bishop of the National Cathedral in 2011. She's always had a political, social gospel angle.
Julian, do you want to read this bit of her memoir here?
As a young adult, my understanding of faith grew more political and committed to justice.
Dorothy Day and the Catholic worker, the example of martyred missionaries in Central America, and the sanctuary movement all shaped me as I sought to live my faith in the world.
After college, I worked in Tucson, Arizona with a Methodist church among homeless people, refugees, and the working poor.
So there's some background there, but then there's something really prophetic because in 2018, Bishop Buddy presides over the internment.
In the National Cathedral of the ashes of Matthew Shepard.
He's the young gay man who was murdered in 1998 in a homophobic hate crime in Wyoming.
So he was laid to rest beside Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan and other luminaries at the National Cathedral.
And at the service, Buddy's co-celebrant, Bishop Robinson, who's the first openly gay Episcopalian bishop, exhorted attendees, quote, if you are here just to pay your respects and to remember Matthew, it's not enough.
Reverend Robson told attendees that violence takes lots of forms, and right now, the transgender community is the target.
So, we saw Buddy on, what was it, the Tuesday?
She said what she said.
She said it to his face, and Trump and his band had to sit there and take it, because they're not quite at the, okay, we're just going to burn down your fucking church stage of fascism yet.
But then he lashes out on truth and he demands an apology along with his toadies.
Representative Mike Collins of Georgia called for the bishop to be deported.
Of course, she's a citizen.
But she put me in mind of a guy named Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the 1940s in Germany.
And I wonder if she'll...
He was a German-Lutheran co-founder of something called the Confessing Church that emerged in response to Nazism.
He was one of the first and loudest protesters of Hitler's idolization by German Christians.
He founded and taught at an illegal seminary and trained pastors in non-Nazi-aligned theology, and he spoke out against the persecution of Jews.
He wasn't just a thinker, though.
He had international liaison connections, and he also joined the Abwehr, which is the German military intelligence, as a double agent, participating in operations to smuggle Jews out of Germany, and also in conspiracies against Hitler.
He eventually got caught, but he traveled.
To nearby countries in order to secretly meet with foreign governments to shore up support for German government should Hitler be deposed.
And then he's implicated in an assassination plot and hung by the SS in 1943. We have this precedent for, like, you know, brave clergy during these times, and I guess I'm listening to her voice ring through that cathedral, and I'm wondering what you guys think about whether stuff like that moves the needle and for whom, or, you know, is it naive to think Buddy will be really moving hearts and minds?
I don't think it'll move the needle.
You initially posed this question after the day that it ran, actually.
And so I published an article on Monday about this.
And everything that we have is just, how will it affect you personally?
We just experience that over and over again.
So on my algorithm, I'm sure on your algorithms, we have people like Sean Korn transcribing the beautiful message and then sharing it and people loving it.
But then you go to Twitter and you see something else entirely.
So my general feeling is that until someone is directly affected by one of these orders and Trump's policies and realize it's because of him and not because of Obama, then the needle might move.
So just a few of the things that have happened so far, Medicare patients probably will lose their $2 copay on generic drugs because Trump rescinded that order.
Will they realize that that happened because of that?
If they do, maybe that'll move the needle.
Medicaid patients are going to lose access to life-saving procedures.
Union busting is going on already in the Trump administration because, of course, it is.
In Idaho, the state government is trying to petition the Supreme Court to end same-sex marriage in America.
So maybe then you realize that this all happened.
Point being is, I just don't see, as much as I appreciated her message and her courage, it really was beautiful, I don't see the needle moving in any direction because people just aren't taken by things like that.
Yeah, I mean, I guess it depends on what you mean by moving the needle, right?
So do I think it will have the power of persuasion over people who don't already agree with her?
No.
But do I think it is an example of courage and speaking truth to power and using your...
I think I have two thoughts.
One is that I'm not sure of how many people in the MAGA sort of universe are How soft they are in their votes and how many statements like that or hearing how many statements like that is going to build up some kind of moral conscience resonance within them that finally trips over.
I mean, that's not something that anybody can research or really say anything about.
And I think a fantasy that I have is that somehow...
I think that Derek is right, that until it really starts affecting people, there's a certain level of, there's a certain bar you have to clear before you really start to have that crisis of recognizing that the implications of these policies and of these ideas and these ideologies are negative for you personally and for people you know.
But I think there's another thing here which has to be said, which is that as the inevitable I can only imagine that there has to be a point at which it starts to create a critical mass where there will be a small group of people who have been MAGA who start to go, this is getting really diabolical.
And then the question is, what do they do?
And this is the second thing that I wanted to say, because when I listen to Buddy, I have this feeling, you know, automatically my mind goes to Bonhoeffer.
And I realize that I'm in fantasy territory, right?
Like, I am fantasizing that I would act as he did under those circumstances.
Like, I even like his tailored suits, you know, his wire-rimmed glasses.
It's very classy.
I think it's a very noble position for him to take historically.
And I know that whenever I'm engaged in a kind of fantasy about who I would be, I wonder whether I'm actually defending myself from my own fears, particularly my own liberal fears, that somehow arguing religious morality with fascists would be my version of arguing vaccine science with RFK Jr. And there's a broken premise there that...
I believe that will work.
I could be that guy who would convince Trump to show mercy and grace.
But there's a century of anti-fascist history out there that says you don't reason with fascists who fight them.
You don't sermonize against fascists, you fight them.
So I think I'm fantasizing about that nice suit and the glasses because it's probably easier than picturing myself in a black ski mask, slashing the tires on ice fans or something like that, right?
And this goes to something that we circle around very often, which is, you know, who are you talking to?
Who is your message directed to?
What are the different strategies and tactics and messaging that are required depending on whether you hope to change someone's mind?
Or whether you're hoping to change the mind of your enemy or change the perception of that enemy's ideology and truth claims in the eyes of an observer.
Those are different things.
And then the third thing is, are you just going to stop them?
