We catch up on three figures this week.
First is Bari Weiss, who's trying to sell her upstart media org, The Free Press, to Skydance for a reported $250 million, just days after the network's merger with Paramount was approved and they said bye-bye to Stephen Colbert.
Then we talk about RFK Jr's continued dismantling of our public health system, as well as an interesting lawsuit filed by the very nonprofit he founded.
Finally, we look into Texas state representative and Presbyterian pastor-in-training, James Talarico, and discuss his viral moment on Joe Rogan.
Show Notes
Anti-vaccine group that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. founded files lawsuit against him over vaccine safety task force
RFK Jr. to Oust Advisory Panel on Cancer Screenings, HIV Prevention Drugs
Was Colbert Cancelled for Trump?
Bari Weiss in Talks with Skydance for $250M
Billionaires Back Anti-Woke “University.”
James Talarico Delivers Sermon Against Christian Nationalism
James Talarico Questions Republican Bill Forcing Ten Commandments To Be Displayed In Classrooms
Joe Rogan Experience #2352 - James Talarico
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hey everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
You can find us on Instagram and threads at ConspiritualityPod.
We are also all individually on Blue Sky.
You can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon at patreon.com slash conspirituality.
You can also access our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions if you're on that platform.
As independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.
Conspirituality 268, Rogan's Christian President.
We live in a time of mercurial brave contrarians, who, but time itself, can say which are the heroes and which are the villains.
Take RFK Jr., the Camelot-born Democrat and erstwhile environmental lawyer who survived heroin addiction only to become the patron saint of wellness grifters and anti-vax paranoia.
Then there's Barry Weiss, the plucky journalist who survived anti-Zionist professors at Columbia and then fled the New York Times to take a stand for free speech in her unbiased independent grassroots newsletter, only to end up knee-deep in IOUs to oligarchs and carrying water for Trump and conservative Christian values.
But all is not lost.
Out of the haze of COVID and MAGA, Epstein and ICE, fake news and the death of democracy, a strange new development.
Joe Rogan hosts a 36-year-old Texas state representative and Presbyterian pastor in trading who's tearing up the state house with his sermons and legislative counterattacks against Christian nationalism.
What do you know?
Rogan tells him to run for president.
Today we catch up with all three of these figures.
CBS's recent cancellation of Stephen Colbert's late show has gotten a lot of coverage.
It's another worrying addition to the chilling effect on left-of-center media, along with the PBS and NPR loss of government funding in sweeping budget cuts.
And I should say here, NPR receives only 1% of its budget from the government.
They otherwise rely on listener donations.
PBS receives 15%.
But the local member stations is really what's going to be hit hard by this in the smaller markets because they rely much more heavily on that government money.
I was just reading Axios this morning.
I get the Axios Portland Daily Newsletter.
And it turns out that some of our local affiliates here get up to 90% of their funding from NPR or PBS.
So that means we are looking at even more gutting of local journalism.
And that's already a really big problem here and across the nation.
Now, the Late Show decision happened in the shadow of an $8 billion merger being attempted between CBS's parent company, Paramount, and another company called Skydance Media.
That merger was actually approved by the FCC on Monday, yesterday as we were recording, and it will create a behemoth worth $28 billion.
Colbert, a frequent critic and lampooner of Trump, had recently bemoaned Paramount settling a ludicrous $16 million lawsuit filed by Trump against CBS based on untrue claims that 60 Minutes had deceptively edited their interview with Kamala Harris before the election last year.
Bemoaned is one way to put it.
I mean, he is roasting them on a daily basis on the show.
It's tremendous.
But this really does set a dangerous precedent because what 60 Minutes had done was edited an interview.
That's it.
They just edited an interview like we do on this show, like every credible media organization has to do, both to take out a lot of the banter and filler words and all of that, especially when at the higher level of media, like something like legacy, like 60 Minutes, or just because you want to get to the point quicker.
I mean, there's a whole host of reasons, but the fact that they got the Trump administration got anything from the process of editing and is now going on to threaten other media organizations is a really dangerous signal.
Yeah, it's a combination of pure corruption because here's a bunch of money so that you leave us alone and just the narrowing of actual free speech norms as compared to something we'll talk about a little bit later.
Colbert show appears to have been sacrificed to appease the Trump administration gods behind the FCC.
Meanwhile, someone I bring up a lot on this podcast looks set to benefit from these types of developments.
Barry Weiss is in talks herself with Skydance Media about a potential acquisition.
According to the Financial Times, she's seeking a valuation as high as $250 million on her company, The Free Press.
Same as us.
All right.
Roughly.
I mean, we're almost there.
Same bracket, right?
The Free Press was started as a sub-stack blog just four years ago after Weiss had very dramatically resigned from her roughly three-year role as staff opinion editor at the New York Times in July of 2020.
And this was in the early months of COVID, right?
And the summer of George Floyd.
And Weiss had become increasingly unpopular at the paper for her contrarian positions and complaints about the paper's supposed stifling of free speech.
In a very public resignation letter, she accused her bosses of creating a hostile work environment, her colleagues of bullying her, and the paper of caving too easily to the whims of critics on Twitter.
The free press then was positioned as a remedy to the terrible problems with woke American media.
Anne Weiss very quickly found a lot of support and enough money coming in to expand to a paid staff of five.
The audience continued to grow quickly and venture capitalist injections Would then come from Mark Andreessen, David Sachs, and others of their ilk.
More recently, British conservative media tycoon Paul Marshall, who owns The Spectator, GB News, and Unheard, became a major investor as well.
Now, over the last four years, the free press only continued to grow by trending more and more to the right, promoting anti-woke culture war stories as if they are hidden by the mainstream media, and it takes this brave, independent voice to reveal them to us.
And also, Sainwashing Trump.
I'm somewhat lenient when it comes to funding in terms of people and these large investment companies, they spread their money out in a lot of directions to look for a return.
They know they're going to lose.
Andreessen Horowitz is notorious for this, meaning they will throw small amounts of money at tons of companies, knowing that one of them is going to hit.
And that is just the name of the game, unfortunately.
And sometimes there's, you find out things like when I was looking into Function Health, Mark Hyman's company, which I'm very critical of, I saw that Pedro Pascal is an investor.
And part of me is like, damn, I really like him, but someone is probably handling his portfolio.
We don't know the sort of connections that exist there.
In this case, however, she is being funded.
She's being funded by a very conservative, libertarian, techno-focused roster of people.
And when you have that kind of funding pressure coming from you, it's just, it either means they are already aligned with what you're doing and want to see more of it, or they're going to put pressure on you to cover things from a certain angle.
And Barry Weiss is not disappointed.
And when you have a group of venture capitalists like the ones that you were referring to and the ones I just listed, some of them, then interfacing with a very small but very influential company, there's a lot of firewalls and procedural kind of barricades that would be there, say, with some legacy media, especially in the past.
That's just not there.
It's Barry Weiss talking directly to whomever the person is, you know, I would imagine.
At a restaurant.
Yeah.
Right.
Like over like over Zoom or on speed dial or through WhatsApp.
It's very, very close relationships.
Or not that Barry Weiss was necessarily there, but as an example, at the conference that Jordan Peterson spoke at, that I did a brief about a few months ago, that was largely funded by Paul Marshall's organization and his investment group, which is very, very heavily like Paul Marshall is basically, I would say, aspiring to be something like Rupert Murdoch in terms of his ability to control a lot of the media.
And his main agenda is anti any kind of climate measures.
And that has to do with his investment portfolio.
So yeah, here we are.
Let's pause there to list some of why I'm not a fan of Barry Weiss.
So we covered her day after the election interview with Peter Thiel last year.
That was titled The Triumph of the Counter Elites.
And she glazed the openly anti-democracy Svengali to JD Vance for two hours straight, while he simultaneously managed to frame the oligarch mega donors and Project 2025 Christian nationalists as the anti-elite rogue alliance from Star Wars, but then also critiqued the Democratic Party leadership for not having gone to Ivy League schools and therefore not being very smart.
Weiss also hosted, promoted, and moderated a live debate here in LA, which featured Anna Kachian of Red Scare on the question, has the sexual revolution failed?
And I believe the original title may have been more along the lines of Has the Sexual Revolution Failed Women?
Which is what sort of alludes to the title of one of the panelists on that debate.
That was back in December of 2023.
This year, they hosted a debate titled, Does the West Need a Religious Revival?
So in every case, like the answer to the question posed is basically the wrong one.
Exactly.
These themes, as featured in their choices of debate topics, fit in with endless think pieces at the Free Press about things like the ethics of interfaith marriage, how Catholicism got cool, and they're talking about the J.D. Vance Opus Day Rod Dreher version of Catholicism, why it's logical to believe in God.
And these articles also sit alongside the celebrating of the selfsame COVID contrarians, anti-vaxxers, and pseudoscience peddlers we have critiqued for years before they then ascended to the highest positions in our medical science institutions, painting them, I'm talking about RFK Jr. and Jay Bhattacharya, people like that, as brave outsiders who've now been vindicated.
Then there's the recurrent claim, often coming directly from Barry Weiss's lips, that the lab leak hypothesis has turned out to be true, and it hasn't.
And it also lines up with the funding, because the perspective that many of the funders take, which is that COVID is either not as bad as it was or hoaxed, whatever it is, and business needs to get back operating as quickly as possible, is the line she's been towing.
Now, it could just be that that is her belief as well, but it does fit very well into that profile.
And she has only platformed these health contrarians.
And even when she does push back, like I saw her push back on Bhattachari and Hyman a bit on vaccines, she doesn't have the scientific chops to actually push back.
So she'll say, but how about this?
And then they'll answer.
And eventually she'll let it go without actually making any progress in their arguments.
So that's a real problem, especially for someone who's supposedly trying to have open conversations.
They never seem to be actually informed or grounded anything that would matter, except from the perspective of the people she's platforming.
Yeah, she is very actively engaged in taking offense at anything woke and or DEI and very phobic at offending any of the reactionary people that she interviews or the conspiracy theorists, pseudoscience peddlers, et cetera.
So now that Barry Weiss, she's kind of the icon of this, right?
The archetype of this, she's ridden this turbocharged opportunistic elevator to the new media grift pinnacle.
She's looking to cash out.
$250 million is a very ambitious asking price, given that the annual subscription revenue at the Freebirds is currently estimated at about $15 million.
So it's very ambitious.
But this is not Weiss's only entanglement with the oligarchs.
She's also a founder and member of the board of trustees at the glorified conservative think tank known as the University of Austin.
And that's alongside Joe Lonsdale, who is co-founder with Peter Thiel of Palantir Technologies, as well as conservative British historian Niall Ferguson.
Palantir, which was just cited today as being worth $275 billion, making it more valuable than a lot of the tech companies that Thiel has funded that exist in America.
Yeah, yeah, and probably the scariest tech company ever to have existed, appropriately named after the all-seeing evil eye of Sauron or one of the stones.
Correct me, Lord of the Rings people.
Colbert will come on to correct me.
Yeah.
So far, University of Austin has raised about $200 million in seed money, and she's one of the founders.
Some of that comes from investors like Harlan Crowe.
Remember him?
He's the Clarence Thomas SCOTUS corruption scandal guy.
They raised funding last year using a video that contrasted one of their small classes in the office building that they inhabit with pro-Palestine protests at places like Columbia University.
Like, don't send your kids there, send them here.
The first cohort started, so they've had one group of students in 2024 with just 100 students.
Every single one of them was given a full scholarship.
So Colorado University is a stretch.
To complete the rogues gallery here, executives from Elon Musk's SpaceX are apparently involved in the programming for the engineering courses at the school.
So the university, of course, not accredited, but I would argue that Barry Weiss has emerged as one of the most influential media, cultural, and educational drivers of the post-truth era, all while posturing as this plucky little independent free speech warrior.
Isn't that her main sort of capital?
Is that she's actually able to fulfill many, many cultural roles while sort of affecting this kind of independence?
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
She somehow, she's found, it's a different kind of charismatic influence than I think we've covered before, right?
She's able to position herself.
I think a lot of it has to do with coming onto the national stage quite young and being very outspoken and very eloquent, but also sort of very, very appealing as someone who is just speaking common sense.
She's able to really mimic a kind of credibility that is recognizable to, I think, a lot of consumers of legacy media.
Yeah, I bet the Columbia education helps with that.
She has a certain way of speaking.
Yeah.
So back to the media side of the growing Barry Weiss empire.
In addition to her talks with Skydance's David Ellison, she reportedly has also had separate meetings with Rupa Murdoch's News Corps about potential collaborations.
Meanwhile, again, based on reporting from the Financial Times, Ellison apparently wants to position the Free Press alongside CBS News, and he has found the Free Press appealing due in part to their pro-Israel stance.
In lobbying for the merger with Paramount, Ellison has assured the FCC that he will dismantle DEI at CBS, that's a lot of three-letter acronyms, and create an ombudsman to monitor complaints of bias.
So we know where this is going.
That bit about CBS is important because about the news branch, because in addition to caving to Trump's lawfare against political opposition, in addition to being willing to axe Colbert, potentially bringing Barry Weiss's media company into the mainstream means that conspiracy theories, anti-woke talking points, pseudoscience peddlers, Christian nationalists, and other reactionary voices at the heart of dismantling our democracy right now will continue to be legitimized.
The opportunism and hypocrisy of Barry and her ilk is quite blatant.
The very accusations of audience capture, ideological bias, and collaborating on censorship that Weiss and her outfit cosplayed as opposing are now openly for sale to the highest bidder.
The idea that any media organization in this day and time would actually be able to hire an independent ombudsman to oversee things, I just don't see it happening at this point, given how fractured media is.
And it also plays into this perpetual repetition in media.
Years ago on this podcast, I did an episode where I talked about the history of media.
And the reality is we're 500 years into this idea of presenting news in some capacity to people through a written or the evolution of those texts in terms of podcast media, video, et cetera.
And we're about 170 years into the idea of unbiased news being presented.
And throughout that entire time, there have been two ways it's been monetized.
It has been done through subscriptions and through advertisements or funders.
We'll put that in the subscription button.
So people coming in and funding that.
So anytime something comes around like Weiss saying, you know, we're going to create a new space that doesn't exist anymore or a brand new space that has never existed, it is inevitably going to fall into the same buckets there for better and worse, because people need support.
Some people will remain independent and take subscriptions.
Some people do advertisements.
We do both for a variety of reasons.
But when you get down to it, she is going to be beholden to whoever is writing those checks.
And when you decide that you're going to get in bed with people who have a very specific view of the news, then you are going to have to parrot them if you want to keep that money flowing in.
And that is just the situation she's in.
Now, if she does sell to a higher bidder who is going to come in and then give Andreessen Horowitz and all the others their return on their investment, which is what they want, she will still be beholden to certain rules.
And given that Paramount says the canceling of Colbert was purely for financial reasons, we know otherwise.
And she's going to now be beholden to that as well.
Yeah.
So you're saying The technology changes, the type of platform changes, right?
The way you get the way that the money flows to some extent changes.
But the model is basically a very, very old model.
And I would argue that within that, as much as we can be super critical of legacy media for a bunch of different reasons, there was something that evolved over time in legacy media to attempt to limit bias and editorial control from the moneyed interests as much as possible.
And that's what we've tried to, you know, hold up as good journalism, right?
The New York Times, that is the one that came in to try to create it.
And for better or worse, they've done a pretty good job to varying degrees.
I just like, given that this is the way of the world, Derek, that everybody's going to move into one of these two funding streams, what problem or what market hole is Barry Weiss filling?
Because it's not like the content is discernibly different from, you know, right word-leaning centrism and the rest of the media landscape.
It seems to me that like the actual value that she brings is the appearance of independence, as I was saying before, but specifically in an era in which, you know, not even right word-leaning centrists are trusting the major networks.
And so what they need for the time being until the co-optation is complete and until people can start complaining that Barry Weiss is just repeating talking points from the administration or whatever, they need what the, you know, the $250 million that her company is worth is basically the appearance of her being an independent person.
Like that's, it's, it's really about just the person, isn't it?
It's charisma, which is the original model 500 years ago in Italy, meaning that the way that broadsheet started in the news were that certain men would go and talk to the people returning from the ships, gather information, and then try to sell that to business owners and landlords.
That is how news originated.
And so it relied on who can I convince to pay me to go get the news from the people on the ships.
So there's not much difference between the sort of illusion that Weiss is putting up.
I mean, at least then they really were going down the ships to gather the information.
Weiss, you know, who knows how biased it was at the time?
I'm sure there were always biases because a lot of the times what would happen were the landlords, they wanted to maintain control of the local business.
So if they received news they didn't want the public to hear about, they would not allow them to be published in the broadsheets.
So again, not much different from where we started.
Yeah, I mean, Matthew, to your point, I think the hole that she's filling, I mean, it would be interesting to really, really dig into all the details on this at some point.
But I feel like, you know, the Fox News phenomenon, the far-right news channels being sort of seen as legitimate by a certain amount of the culture, and then they're, through their culture war tactics, framing all other media as having liberal bias, you end up with a group of people who, a group of consumers who are looking for something that is not too extreme on the left or the right.
They're looking for people who are speaking common sense, people who are not beholden to some ideological purity.
That is the situation we found ourselves in, especially in the last 10 years.
And with the rise of digital tools, I think it just opened up a whole space for people to present themselves that way to consumers who really didn't identify with the Fox News kind of ideology, but were open to some right-wing talking points.
And, you know, what we inevitably see with most of these people is they trend further and further to the right over time.
but that where they start off is appealing to people who don't necessarily identify as right-wing in the way that a Fox viewer might.
Fox viewer: On July 21st, Children's Health Defense, the anti-vax nonprofit RFK Jr. founded from the previously inconsequential World Mercury Project, announced that it was suing its founder, RFK Jr.
Now, why are they doing that?
What?
Because Kennedy has supposedly failed to establish a task force dedicated to making childhood vaccines safer, according to the Children's Health Defense blog.
The lawsuit alleges Kennedy is violating the National Child Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, which requires the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to promote the development of safer childhood vaccines that cause fewer and less serious adverse reactions than existing ones.
Before we get into discussion and analysis, the 1986 Act, here's what it does.
It established the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which is a no-fault alternative to traditional lawsuits that allow individuals alleging harm from certain vaccines to seek compensation through a special program instead of from the courts.
The Act stabilized vaccine supplies and costs by limiting the financial liability of manufacturers and providing compensation for rare adverse outcomes.
It required mandatory reporting and record keeping by health care providers and vaccine manufacturers.
And it promoted safer vaccines by tasking the Secretary of HHS with promoting research for safer vaccines and providing Congress with biennial progress reports.
The children's health defense lawsuit says that this is all not being done.
Yeah, but I think they may have misspelled another phrase, which is, or another sentence, which is, it has turned out not to be necessary because they were already subject to phase three trials and are spectacularly safe and effective.
But who are doing the trials, Julian?
Okay, why would they sue their founder?
Obviously, they're claiming it's for the children, but it also follows a playbook that Kennedy himself established while heading up children's health defense.
And it's the same one he's used as a so-called environmental champion before he trained his focus on Vaccines, which is sue anyone and everyone to get the legislation that you want passed, which is why this lawsuit sounds pretty suspect to me.
Dr. Peter Hotez, who is wonderful on social media, he is one of the most vocal vaccine proponents in America.
This is what he told CNN: It's difficult to know how much of this is performative.
The steady stream of pseudoscience policies and propaganda pushed out of the Humphrey building in Washington, D.C. are both straight out of playbooks from both RFK Jr. and children's health defense.
As far as I can tell, there's no real daylight between the two.
In my opinion, Hotez nails it there.
Take Kennedy to court so that he can say, my hands are tied.
I have to push this thing forward.
It's a neat way to further endanger the childhood vaccination schedule while continuing to foment distrust in vaccines overall, which is what they've been doing for months and years.
UC Law San Francisco professor Dorrit Rees also told CNN that it looks performative.
She said, It may give Kennedy cover for convening this task force that he may already want to convene.
It may well be collusion.
To me, this looks like a way to give political cover to something the secretary may want to do anyway and can do without anything.
The government has answers to this lawsuit, but may not want to.
Kennedy never seems to want to answer things he doesn't want to address.
A few days after this suit was announced, it was revealed that he plans to disband the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force.
This is a 16-member volunteer advisory group that was established in 1984 and is predominantly made up of practicing clinicians in internal medicine, pediatrics, nursing, behavioral health, and OBGYN.
The panel's primary responsibility is to make evidence-based recommendations about clinical preventive services, including screenings like cancer screenings, counsel services, and preventive medications.
Their work shapes preventative care practices across the U.S. and guides which services are covered for Americans at no out-of-pocket cost.
Yeah, but it makes sense, though, that he'd want to get rid of that because, you know, a lot of Americans are now going to stop consuming food dyes and they're going to eat fast food that's been fried in tallow instead of seed oils.
They're going to enjoy the benefits of bacteria-rich raw milk.
He's really making America healthy again.
They're going to have real sugar in their Coca-Cola.
So most of that Western medicine stuff is going to be obsolete, right, Derek?
I woke up to a text from Mallory because two people we regularly cover were on each other's podcast and they were talking about how bad Trader Joe's is.
And you just look at it and you're like, you people are fomenting eating disorders over to everyone.
Like nothing except Erewhon is going to be pure enough for you.
We're seeing this all the time.
It's so ridiculous.
Yeah, but Erewhon's probably going to be trans, right?
Next on the chopping block of purity.
It's definitely.
When I was in there in LA, I saw one company had a rainbow on their packaging.
So, you know, that's oh, man.
Were those artificial colors in the rainbow?
No, they were natural food dyes.
I want to go back to what I said about Americans.
This is really important because what's happening is the task force, when they say something, it helps shape policy so that Americans don't have to pay for out-of-pocket things.
So I just got my shingles vaccine, my first dose, having turned 50, and my insurance covered it because it's under that bucket because I'm 50, I qualify, I've had chickenpox in the past.
I didn't have to pay for it.
My insurance covered it.
If RFK was just like, yeah, no, fuck the shingles vaccine, then it would no longer be covered by insurance.
So that, you know, extrapolate from that and apply that to every sort of preventive medication out there that exists, which clues us into why he's disbanding the panel.
I've speculated a lot that he is mandated to follow the Project 2025 playbook.
He wouldn't have been allowed into the Trump administration without agreeing to follow their deregulatory practices.
He's repeatedly stated he has issues with Medicare and Medicaid, which is another way of saying he wants to completely privatize healthcare.
I've already said that I feel he's going to soon shuffle taxpayer money earmarked for healthcare to his buddies like Mark Hyman and Function Health, who I mentioned, maybe the Mean siblings.
He's more than hinted at this when he says he wants every American to wear a wearable to track health, which is exactly what Casey Means Company Levels offers.
We know his love for supplements, and that slots in Callie and Hyman.
There's another layer here, too.
And we covered this in our book, and I more recently wrote about it in the essay of the week for The Guardian, which is eugenics.
I learned about Kennedy's disbanding of the panel on Blue Sky from cancer and nutritional epidemiologist Elizabeth Jacobs.
I really enjoy her posts.
In response to her post, which was just informative, off-message co-host Brian Butler, he responded, Republicans are waging a generalized war on science, but I think many of them don't fully grok that RFK isn't at war with science alone or per se.
He's at war with sick people and of the view that only the lucky should be allowed to survive into old age.
They are no-nothings.
He is Mengele.
And then New York Times columnist Jamal Bowie chimed in, writing, When RFK says he wants to end chronic disease, what people hear is he wants to cure us.
But what he means is, I want to call the weak.
I just want to say that, you know, we came up to the edge of saying things like that over probably the last three years.
I think I can't remember when we started using the phrase soft eugenics.
I mean, it was in our book, but hearing more mainstream commentators just come right out and say it is kind of shocking, actually, because it's like I'm seeing it in black and white.
It's almost like I didn't quite trust my own analysis to begin with.
And like, now, well, it's obvious, isn't it?
Yeah, we may have felt that we were warning of some potential escalation that had a flavor of this kind of thing.
And now it's like, no, that's Actually, exactly what it is.
Yeah.
And there's this process of not quite believing that that's the intention until there's enough sort of water in the boat to the fact, you know, point that you're sinking.
And then, yeah, like, what else are you going to conclude, actually?
And, you know, guys, I don't know if I'm imagining this or I'm making it up, but everything about RFK these days just looks more aggravated, more ill, more belligerent than when he was on the campaign trail.
Like we watched him spend two years begging for power and basically showing up everywhere on every podcast he could shake a stick at, hat in hand.
I don't think governing feels very good for him or for anyone in Trump's cabinet, but I've just really noticed that things look a lot more sort of disturbed.
Yeah, I mean, it makes me think of how Obama was, I think, one of the youngest presidents we've had in a while.
And his eight years in power, he aged significantly.
And, you know, he looked really good when he started.
I can only imagine what's going to happen to RFK Jr. given his starting point.
There's the physical looks, but there's also just his attitude.
Like he's always been a stubborn asshole, but now it's just he feels that everyone has to bow to him.
And just, you know, one more, one more point here.
Just yesterday, we're recording on Tuesday.
So on Monday, he announced along with Linda McMahon that they are going after Duke University and Duke Medical School specifically because they're saying that they were following woke policies and they're going to look into it.
It's just another shakedown.
So we started this episode talking about Trump shaking down Paramount and now Kennedy has just been following Trump's playbook at every step.
I mean, Maha, MAGA, every step.
They are going to shake down Duke now and hold probably hold back funding and investigate them because what?
Because they're actually turning out larger number of African-American, Latino, and women doctors.
That's basically what they're saying.
Just to follow up on this reticence that I think I personally had around going straight to Mengela, I think I spent a lot of time hand-wringing over, you know, his family history is so complicated.
You know, he grew up praying to St. Francis of Assisi.
And, you know, he's like, you know, he likes the Falcons and he likes the outdoors and he likes, he's such a complicated guy.
And I'm like, what the fuck?
What am I?
And also I think that part of that comes out of my own sort of, you know, familial democratic, not, not idealization of the Kennedys, but at least the idea that there's something complicated going on, right?
At least that these are conflicted people that have some good impulses and some bad impulses.
And I'm like, I wasted my fucking time on all of that.
I can tell you.
That's why they say never meet your heroes, right?
Like you, you meet someone and then you're like, oh, you're not who I imagined at all.
And that happens over and over again.
Yeah.
I never thought of him as any kind of hero.
I just, I wanted to, well, part of, part of what I think was going on for me is I wanted to try to understand what was so compelling about him to his own followers.
Because if I could understand that, I could speak more directly to, oh, who is this Maha gang that's gathering underneath him?
And I think there is some like, there's some value in that.
I think that value is gone because he's in power now.
He doesn't need any of those dupes.
And so, yeah, I think it's more of like a sociological reflection on, oh, what was attractive about this guy who people thought, you know, Aubrey Marcus thought he was literally, you know, guided by God.
And so did Charles Eisenstein.
Yeah, I mean, do you think maybe there was this hope that there was some, that if we understood his psychology and his history enough, some of the core kind of moral motivators might be constraints against this kind of shit?
I think so.
And I think that is also sort of evidenced by whatever we learned, whatever we knew about his environmental record, because that is there, right?
Sure.
It's not like, and I saw him speak in probably 2002 or something like that on a stage at the Fighting Bob convention in Wisconsin.
And he was extremely compelling, right?
Like he was an amazing speaker on, you know, ecological justice.
So I think that probably stuck in my brain for long enough for me to say, how the hell is this happening?
Is it really, does it really have to go this far?
But yeah, I don't know.
Sometimes the goodness in people just disappears.
I wasn't implying that Kennedy was ever a hero to you, but I just from my experience as a music journalist, like I would love these people's records.
And then when I would talk to them, I'd be like, oh, fuck, you're an asshole.
Yep.
Musicians are terrible for that.
Thankfully, thankfully, one of the one I was most nervous about was Ben Harper, and he turned out to be amazing.
And I ran into him years later in a DOSA shop, and he was awesome.
Oh, good.
Sometimes your heroes do turn out to be good, but not always.
Oh, good.
Okay, changing pace just a little bit here, guys.
This next figure is not really in the same category as the previous two.
And I want to talk about James Tallarico.
And that has to start with his recent appearance on Joe Rogan.
And I'll just say that, you know, it's taken Joe about eight months to go from endorsing Trump on the eve of the election to hosting this guy who's 36 years old.
He's from Texas.
He's a Democratic state rep, and he is on his show.
And at this certain point, Joe just says kind of really nonchalantly, but quite pointedly at the same time and directly, you should run for president.
And then he breaks into this moment of cathartic laughter, like he can't believe he just said that.
And then what he says is, we need someone who's actually a good person.
And I think Rogan is kind of telling on himself here, maybe on his prior judgment, because, you know, he's a little bit feckless.
And I'm sure he's going to continue to be a kind of infotainment Pepe Le Puew, this cartoon skunk who's floating involuntarily after whatever wafting smell hits his nostrils, unaware that it's his own farts.
But I think he can also feel something in the air around Tallarico.
And I don't think he's alone.
This guy has a million followers on Instagram.
He has 100,000 YouTube subs.
One of his videos, which we'll quote from, catches 1 million views.
And the title of that is James Tallarico Delivers Sermon Against Christian Nationalism.
So what's the hook on that sermon?
Here's what he says right at the top.
My faith means more to me than anything.
But if I'm being very honest, sometimes I hesitate before telling someone I'm a Christian.
There is a cancer on our religion.
Until we confess the sin that is Christian nationalism and exorcise it from our churches, our religion can do a lot more damage than a six-pack of Lone Star.
There is nothing Christian about Christian nationalism.
It is the worship of power, social power, economic power, political power in the name of Christ.
Okay, so you can hear his voice, which is like magnificent, but also his delivery in general in these sermons is very powerful.
He can tell jokes too, like the quip about Lone Star Beer.
It rolls off a bunch of opening quips about how beer can be better than religion, because when you have beer, you don't knock on other people's doors trying to give it away and so on.
And I think that might be part of what gets him in Rogan's door, which reminds me of the joke about how do you get to Carnegie Hall.
And the other thing is that he's on the stage here at his Presbyterian church in Austin.
He's on the altar.
And he delivers, I watched probably five or six 25-minute sermons, and they are fully memorized.
There's no teleprompter.
He's not consulting notes or anything like that.
He's got it all.
No stumbles, no sort of, he's not backing out of anything.
So just presentation-wise, pretty, you know, pretty, pretty special guy.
Talented and polished, right?
Talented and polished.
Yeah, very polished.
Very polished.
And I think I've been behind the curve on this guy who I think, well, I'm going to argue he's shaping up to be an antidote to the spirituality stream of American Christianity.
For the past couple of years, I've argued that one of the cures for bad religion is better religion.
And, you know, I think that he brings it.
And I've heard about him for a number of months, but now I really dug in.
Yeah, I mean, this is interesting, Matthew, because you and I had quite different reactions to the initial sort of point of discussion here, which was a clip from that Joe Rogan episode that was kind of going viral on Instagram.
It was published by Now This Impact.
And, you know, the thing for me is I like his demeanor.
I like his politics.
He's young.
He's progressive.
He's humble.
He seems like a passionate public servant, is sincere.
I would most likely agree with most, if not all, of his politics.
But my sticking point is I don't think the reason Christian nationalism is a problem is that someone interpreted this old book incorrectly when really Jesus actually wants us all to be progressives.
And for me, it's just kind of out of place to justify either conservative or progressive politics with scripture as if it is some kind of moral authority on how we ought to structure society.
Like, politically, I just don't envision a sea change in which a decent percentage of the evangelical right somehow gets born again on abortion and gay marriage because James Tellarico has a wonderful way with words, you know?
Yeah, I understand that argument.
I think that we'll get to the passage where he does cite scripture, but in this opening, he's not using scripture at all.
He's talking about a culture of Christianity that he adheres to, and he's saying that it doesn't include this cancer of nationalism.
So he's talking about his political values.
He's going to cite scripture because that's the culture he moves in.
I just don't think it has, you know, he has to do that to make a basic values statement about nationalism.
That's true.
And I actually agree with his critique, with this criticism of Christian nationalism, but he's criticizing it based on that's the wrong interpretation of Christianity.
I have the right interpretation.
And we've been down that road before.
This one just happens to be wearing more progressive clothing.
To me, it's still the heart of it is still a kind of fallacy or out of place in our political system, the separation of church and state.
Yeah.
I mean, you also say, though, that, you know, you're not, I can't imagine him changing anybody's mind because he has a way with words.
But it's not just that.
I mean, he gets onto Rogan because he actually does have a robust activist legislative record, you know, in the state house.
He's doing school reform stuff, you know, pre-K class size caps, banning reality TV policing.
I didn't even know this was a thing.
He's capped insulin copays.
He's also pushing a constitutional amendment to prohibit the legislature from restricting access to abortion against all of the sort of Trump legislative action.
So yeah, he's doing a lot.
Yeah, Julian said that he likes his politics.
I agree too.
Everything I've seen from his politics is great.
I don't know why you need to inject metaphysics in any capacity into any of that because it plays absolutely zero role.
We're going to get to the clip.
We don't need to argue that now.
I'll have thoughts then, but it plays zero role in actually legislating with the people.
Even if it's in the background, you don't have to foreground it.
Well, yeah, I think what I'd say is that if you're looking for some kind of sea change in evangelicals, you never know what kind of permission Someone's going to need to think differently about what they've been taught.
And if the guy is going to use metaphysical language to speak to that portion of the population, that might work because the cognitive dissonance that Christians have to hold around saying that they worship a God of love, while they should also dominate women or dehumanize trans people, is really powerful.
And you never know who's going to, what's going to break that, right?
Sure.
Anyway, I saw him probably eight months ago because there was this viral clip of him grilling his GOP colleague, state rep, on her bill that was going to mandate the posting of the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom in the state.
I say this to you as a fellow Christian.
Reps and Nova, I know you're a devout Christian, and so am I. This bill, to me, is not only unconstitutional, it's not only un-American, I think it is also deeply un-Christian.
And I say that because I believe this bill is idolatrous, I believe it is exclusionary, and I believe it is arrogant.
And those three things in my reading of the gospel are diametrically opposed to the teachings of Jesus.
You probably know Matthew 6, 5, when Jesus says, don't be like the hypocrites who love to pray publicly on street corners.
When you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret.
A religion that has to force people to put up a poster to prove its legitimacy is a dead religion.
So that really pricked up my ears.
But I didn't really follow up on it to find out that he's basically doing that in every committee meeting that he sits on.
He eviscerates his fellow Christians who happen to be bigots on their bills about school vouchers and trans panics.
And there's this one video where he's going to town on the guy who did the furries act, who just made up this bullshit about how public schools are putting cat litter into their classrooms and stuff like that because children are acting like cats or whatever.
And he just question after question after question, just tearing this guy to shreds in the most polite and mannerful way I've seen, you know, with this clarity of the grade school teacher that he was, you know, and the politeness of the Presbyterian minister he's training to be.
Yeah.
I mean, it's really fantastic, if only to see these guys get roasted in their own language and with a version of their own theology.
I just wish it wasn't happening in a government capacity.
You know what I mean?
Like, like, I don't want the fate of our children or of women's freedoms and control over their body to rest on which particular strain of Christian ideology ends up having political ascendancy in our country.
Like, I don't want any of it anywhere near the government.
Yeah, I mean, that's fair.
But it's here, right?
Sure.
It's there.
Like, it's there because he's responding to it in its own framework.
Yes, yes, which it's important that he be able to do that.
So who is he?
His bio is pretty plain.
Comes from a single mom home, had a fairly stable church experience life growing up.
He began to teach in elementary school.
All of his education degrees are in educational theory and philosophy.
He's done a lot of progressive kitchen table lawmaking in Texas in a short time.
But I do want to spend some time on his theology and inspirational sources because I was able to collate them from analyzing several sermons that he's given to his home congregation, but also while he does these drubbings of his fellow Christians in the state house.
So he regularly pings his granddad, who was a Baptist preacher, as a staunch defender of the separation of church and state.
This is a big part of his whole deal.
His line on the establishment clause is that only a dead religion, so he mentioned this in the clip that we just heard, only a dead religion has to seek power through mandating belief.
He has this other grandfather who was an Italian immigrant, and I guess this is where the name comes from, who lived through Catholic theocracy in Italy and used to take young James on walks to meet G.O.D. or the great outdoors.
He was an agnostic at most.
A real free thinker.
Right.
And so Tallarico also takes this line coming out of liberation theology that describes Jesus as a revolutionary Jewish rabbi who only taught two laws, love God and your neighbor.
And he says, training to, I found this interesting, training to be a minister while being a legislator has put them in the full fire of that tension.
Like you love God as a minister, you love your neighbor as a legislator.
He also references the Jubilee tradition of the Torah, which he says is central to Jesus' politics.
When Jesus talks about this is the year of the Lord, he's talking about like the Jubilee, which is every seven years the culture goes through a Sabbath reset and they redistribute wealth and people who are doing indentured labor are released and all kinds of things are sort of rebalanced and everybody takes a deep breath for a whole year.
He also loves Rumi.
He quotes a lot of different sources, which I'll get to.
He loves particularly the quote, every religion has love, but love has no religion.
He also quotes Hafiz, God repeats only four words, come dance with me.
He loves that one.
Tallarico also is broadly ecumenical because he cites ahimsa as an alternative to the logic of violence.
He says Buddhist meditation is an alternative to the abuse of attention.
He references Taoist teachings, you know, the soft overcomes the hard.
And he also says that Native American traditions provide some kind of alternative to ecological astraction.
So these are all sort of like in his back pocket.
He's also ruthless on capitalism.
And his sort of biblical perspective on that is that he finds, you know, 3,000 pings for economic justice in the Bible, but none for abortion.
Now, in his library, here are some other references that he makes.
He really loves Dorothy Sola, who's a German theologian, progressive activist who said there's only one legitimation of power, and that is to share it with others.
He loves Barbara Brown Taylor, a theologian who concentrated on the Good Samaritan parable by saying that, you know, if she had to choose between her religion and her neighbor, of course, she'd choose her neighbor.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who I'm actually doing some work on now, he was the German pastor who was executed by the Nazis for his support for a plot to assassinate Hitler.
Oscar Romero, the Catholic bishop who advocated for the poor, he's assassinated on the altar by a Salvadorian death squad sent by the U.S.-backed junta.
He said, as a Christian, I don't believe in death without resurrection.
If they kill me, I will rise again and the people of El Salvador, which is like a directly poetic translation of what like a literal resurrection belief would mean.
Father Richard Rohr, he quotes, Dorothy Day, he loves.
In his sermon against Christian nationalism, this is the most far-out woo he gets.
He cites the Catholic philosopher and evolutionary biologist Theatre Chardin, who asserts that the very physical universe is love, which is very Marianne Williamson.
So there is some new agey bars that are spitting back against what he sees as the rigid exclusionism of Christian nationalism.
But let's get to the quote at hand, right?
This is the thing that went viral.
This is the excerpt from the Rogan appearance where Tallarico makes a theological and biblical argument for taking a pro-choice position.
Mary is probably my favorite figure in the Bible, the mother of Jesus.
And, you know, she is an oppressed peasant, teenage girl, living in poverty under an oppressive empire as a Jew.
And she has a vision from God that she's going to give birth to a baby who's going to bring the powerful down from their thrones, going to scatter the proud, who's going to send the rich away empty.
I mean, this revolutionary song that she sings, it's called the Magnificat.
And it's actually been banned by certain authoritarian regimes because it is so radical.
But I say all this in terms of, in context of abortion, because before God comes over Mary and we have the incarnation, God asks for Mary's consent, which is remarkable.
I mean, go back and read this in Luke.
I mean, the angel comes down and asks Mary if this is something she wants to do.
And she says, if it is God's will, let it be done.
Let it be.
Let it happen.
So to me, that is an affirmation in one of our most central stories that creation has to be done with consent.
You cannot force someone to create.
Creation is one of the most sacred acts that we engage in as human beings.
But that has to be done with consent.
It has to be done with freedom.
Yeah.
So this one was a major eye roller for me.
Like, I like where he's going with it, but he's way out on a limb in terms of how he's trying to justify it.
He's shoehorning pro-choice politics into what?
The Holy Spirit asking the Virgin Mary's consent for the Immaculate Conception of Jesus.
So it's the Annunciation.
It's not the Holy Spirit.
It's Gabriel, but that's okay.
Oh, okay.
Well, we should be clear about that.
Yeah, we should.
So none of that ever happened.
I think he'd do much better to make a moral argument grounded in reality.
And then if he wants to reference being inspired by Christ's compassion or something like that, and then quote Rumi, I'd be fine with that.
But to me, we're always on dangerous ground when we're justifying any political stance by the authority of God's very special.
I'm in agreement with all of that.
I mean, I do like where he gets up.
I've long said that if your religion brings you to be a good person and cherish the value and freedom of others, then I don't really care how you got there, but he is in a public role here making a public argument and he has legislative power.
My issue with this special book thing is more of one of just trying to understand how we got to a place where I'm reading Cormac McCarthy, the border trilogy right now.
I'm sure there are people who have done studies on the use of his understanding of environmentalism in his books.
I can think about someone who maybe has done a study on the role of cats in Morakame's novels because they appear in every one of them.
Or take the Oryx and Craig trilogy where she talks about Happy Kuppa and the role that Happy Kappa plays throughout.
Like literary scholars look into these things.
Yet we've taken these couple of books throughout time and said, no, no, no, these are real.
Over here, we have all this imagery, metaphor, mythology we can study, we can try to understand how it plays into reality.
But these ones, these texts, they really happened.
And that will always get me tripped up because one of the best classes that I took while getting a degree in religion was called Bible is Literature.
And it was presented by a Catholic priest, but he was not pushing religion.
He really treated it as a novel.
And it was absolutely fantastic because it was the first time in my life that I was really starting to be able to understand the metaphors and how we could relate to actual moments in life without getting caught up in, oh, these metaphysics actually happened.
And I think along the lines with what you're saying, Julian, as long as we keep treating the metaphysics as real, we're never going to make actual progress.
But I want to know, Derek, why do you think Tolarico isn't doing exactly what your Catholic priest was doing with Bibles literature?
Because he's not saying that.
He's not qualifying it.
He's presenting it as if it's a real thing.
God asks for Mary's consent.
Nowhere in that class that I took, he made it very clear that the Bible was something that was treated as real by a lot of people, but we're going to be looking at it differently.
I didn't see any of those qualifiers coming from Tallarico here.
Well, he gave them, though, because he rounds out that statement by saying that theology And scripture are interpretive, and that no one should assume that a dogmatic Christian position on abortion should be any specific, come to any specific conclusion.
He's actually doing what you're arguing for.
He is treating his materials like a musician treats music, right?
But he's still putting God in a role as if it's something real.
I don't know how you can substantiate that.
I mean, he's quoting literature in the same way that your Catholic priest would have had to use the word God to talk about the story that he was talking about, right?
Why is he choosing this particular literature?
Well, because that's where he's coming from and that's who he speaks to.
And if you want to know, I mean, from my perspective, why is this appealing and who would it appeal to?
I mean, because you guys are also very much pragmatic with regard to building coalitions.
Big Tent.
Building coalitions in Big Tent, right?
Like think of the 17-year-old girl in a red state who grew up in a sexually repressive church, but has heard about consent culture on the internet.
And now Tallarico brings these two things together for her in a way that feels digestible and unthreatening because he looks like a choir boy.
I'm thinking about, do you remember Jeremiah, who I interviewed along with Julia of the Sex Evangelicals podcast?
Totally.
Tallarico, I think for him, like if you think of him as a younger boy, remember his story a little bit, could model a different type of like receptive, listening masculinity who's depicting a gentler interaction with God.
And that might have let him relax a little bit earlier in his life from the burden of all of this premature responsibility that turns Christian nationalists into self-armoring assholes.
So, I mean, I just see this guy as doing exactly what the person who taught Bible as literature in my college experience, Northrop Fry, did, which is like, these are the stories that we work with, and I'm going to bring new meaning to this particular story for this audience who's already familiar with it, because the story goes through millions of iterations over and over again.
I also don't know what you mean by metaphysics either, because he's really just talking about the story, the story that's in the book.
Well, the metaphysics is easy.
He thinks there's this thing called God, which is an all-powerful being that is talking to a human, that is intervention.
But you're being a little disingenuous in your argument because you're not looking at it contextually.
You're looking at one paragraph of text we're talking about, whereas you referenced listening to numerous sermons that he gives at a church in which he is playing the role of a pastor.
Like that context matters in this argument.
He is not saying, I am going to step out here and use this as a metaphor.
Nowhere does he do that.
And my problem with it is that for that specific tradition, like I said, I like where he ends up, but he is not talking about anything about the thousands of years since that time of science that we know of the harm that the lack of consent does.
He is not talking in a scientific language whatsoever, which most people who care about the rights of women will include.
Like I'm thinking of Jen Gunter, who talks about it often when you're talking about how women's bodies function.
He is using an Iron Age idea of women's bodies here in this situation contextually.
You know, if you want context, you have to actually listen to him because one of the things that he says is that it is not Christian to reject scientific advancement.
He's like Catholics in that realm.
Then why doesn't he talk about it?
Nothing that you've brought has talked about it.
Wait a minute.
I just brought three clips.
I brought three clips.
I'm telling you that I watched more content than you did.
And I'm telling you that he's not doing what you think he's doing.
I haven't heard any science and why you chose.
That's fine.
He's not a scientist.
What is that your purity test?
He has to bring like, he has to quote fucking studies or something like that in order for him to make a good point to Christians?
Oh, no.
It's not a purity test because if I lived in his district, I would still vote for him, even if I didn't agree with him on things.
So it's not a purity test.
Great.
You can't have it both ways.
Terrific.
Terrific.
So why are we, but why are you making assumptions about his literalism?
I don't get it.
You can't have it both ways.
I mean, fair enough on, like, you've looked into his stuff.
He probably does reference science because he's an educated guy and he's a worldly guy and he's a political figure.
I think part of what I hear Derek reaching for that I think is an important thing to consider is that when someone positions themselves as a literary scholar or as a comparative mythologist and they say, now I'm going to talk about this myth and now I'm going to talk about that myth and I'm going to talk about how we might interpret this and situate it within a particular cultural and historical context in terms of what people were thinking about, about how the world works and where they were at in terms of the progress of science.
That's one thing.
It's another thing when you are positioning yourself as a Christian, as a pastor, no less.
And yes, you're interpreting these stories, but in that role, hovering behind you always is the implication that there is some great spiritual, cosmic, supernatural mystery that is being referred to that has a special kind of authority, especially over how we ought to live morally.
And when that is in the realm of politics, to me, that's usually gone quite badly.
I think we can make better arguments for politics and for moral philosophy that don't have to have that particular presence hovering in the background.
Well, I think I would agree with you if what he was pointing to was some sort of belief that there was an ultimate truth that God was going to somehow magically, you know, reveal.
But from what I hear, he's in a sort of theological formation and a type of seminary training that is really more engaged in like process and liberation theology, which is about like figuring out together what these myths, what these stories, what these rituals mean to us.
It's like that's, there's a, there's a, there's a different, you're kind of imputing that this, that this guy, because he's becoming a pastor, must be sort of standing in for some sort of authoritarian truth that he's going to be the vessel for.
And I just don't see it.
I'm just not seeing it.
When he stands up in front of believing Christians, that's exactly what he's doing.
And I'm not even giving it the level of authoritarian truth.
I'm just saying it's a kind of religious authority that I have problems with.
For me, one of the reasons why this one did not land well for me, this particular clip, is that he's referencing the central idea of Christianity, that Jesus was this very special person who is born of a virgin and is the son of God.
To me, we're fairly adjacent to the Jordan Peterson conversation where people say to him, do you believe Jesus really rose from the dead?
And he refuses to answer directly.
It's like, either you do or you don't.
And whether you do or you don't determines where you position these kinds of religious beliefs in your worldview.
You can't have it both ways.
Either you say, no, I don't think Jesus was born of a virgin.
I don't think he rose from the dead.
I don't think he's literally the son of God.
I'm not even sure there really is such a thing as God.
But here's the story that I think is really interesting in terms of how we think about human psychology and culture and world mythology and how we try to make sense of the world through these kinds of myths.
Yeah, it feels like you're both reading from sort of statement of faith that he's made that I haven't seen.
And the reason that I bring up his sermons and any of his quotations at all is that the messaging appeals to me precisely because this is a guy who can obviously engage with a literature and a tradition and make something new out of it, as I said before, like a kind of a music that can be played in a new way.
I will say that in that vein, he's stretching the text when he suggests that Gabriel asks Mary if this is something she wants to do.
There's nothing in the text like that.
But the post hoc inference that he needs, that Gabriel needs Mary's affirmation is a very old idea about Mary's consent being essential to the incarnation.
Like this is all over the ancient literature.
All of the early church writers are talking about it, you know, including Augustine.
And it's interesting because like Tallarico is now pinging the person who's most loved by J.D. Vance and Leonard Leo against them.
Which is delicious.
Yeah, the patristic idea is that the human has to say yes to the plan, right?
Has to say yes.
And it's an extremely important point.
And it's underlined by Aquinas in the 13th century.
He goes, if it was necessary that she should be informed in mind concerning him before conceiving him in the flesh, so that she might offer to God the free gift of her obedience, which she proved by saying, behold the handmaid of the Lord.
So this is not like it's funny because he actually stretches the scripture, but then he refers back to a very old argument about whether or not participating with this story of the mythos of God's plan or whatever is something that you can freely participate in or not.
Yeah, I mean, this whole handmaid thing, I think, is very interesting too, in terms of the case you're making, right?
It goes back to the Magnificat as well, where basically she's saying, I am just this poor, humble person, and now I have become the handmaid of the Lord.
I am the one who's going to give birth to the Holy One who will change everything.
And wouldn't you know it, like we base our calendar from the time that he was supposedly born.
Right.
Yeah.
And he grounds that further in the political context of she's an oppressed peasant teenage girl living in poverty under an oppressive empire as a Jew.
This is a little bit resonant for the present day, right?
And then she has a vision from God that she's going to give birth to a baby who's going to do all of these things.
He notes that her assent is symbolically powerful as this kind of ground level response of agency and willpower that authoritarians have banned the recitation of the Magnificat.
And I had heard about this, but I had to go back and look it up.
So the details are, yeah, the occupying Brits in India banned the Magnificat.
Then on the final day of British rule, Gandhi requests it be read whenever the British flag is lowered.
In the 1980s, the junta, backed by the U.S. and Guatemala, banned recitation of the Magnificat to quell revolutionary zeal.
Same thing happened in Argentina.
The junta there banned the Magnificat after the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo used its words in protest against the regime's disappearance of their sons.
So Tolarico is telling Rogan, of all knuckleheads, about a pivotal moment of anti-colonial revelation in ancient Palestine and how it produced a poem about agency and empowerment that was so powerful that a U.S.-backed military regimes in Latin America suppressed it.
And now we can read it as a hymn for women seeking to regain control over their own bodies.
So Rogan, I don't know whether he got hip to that, if that's what caught him on fire.
Well, he is going to church these days in Texas, maybe.
Right.
Right.
Who knows whose church?
I want to know if he's going to Tallahassee's church.
