New Speaker of the House, new freak to examine. In Mike Johnson's case, we'll be looking at his connections to the New Apostolic Reformation, Christian dominionism, election denial, young earth creationism, and a Noah's Ark theme park in Kentucky. Our guest is Dr. Bradley Onishi, a scholar of religion who teaches at the University of San Francisco. His writing has been published in the New York Times, LA Review of Books, and Religion & Politics, among other outlets. He is also the co-host of the podcast Straight White American Jesus and the author of the book Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism And What Comes Next.
Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week + access to ongoing series like Manclan, Trickle Down and The Spectral Voyager: www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous
QAA x Goosecult Party on Saturday December 16th: https://dice.fm/event/e8pkd-qaa-podcast-x-goosecult-party-w-john-vanderslice-16th-dec-the-goldfish-los-angeles-tickets
Straight White American Jesus Podcast: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
Bradley Onishi: https://twitter.com/bradleyonishi
Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism And What Comes Next: https://www.bradonishi.com/books/
Music by Max Weber & Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz.
http://qanonanonymous.com
Welcome, listener, to the 253rd chapter of the QAA podcast, the Mike Johnson is Too God-Pilled episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rogatansky, Julian Field, and Travis View.
Before we kick off this week's episode, we have some exciting news.
We're throwing a party.
QAA and the Goose Cult will be assembling in Los Angeles at the Goldfish on Saturday, December 16th, for a fun, loose, live podcast, followed by DJ sets from myself, Julian Field and John Vanderslice, the legendary musician and producer.
There will be dancing, there will be hanging out, there will be pool tables, vintage arcades, and even good Thai food available to order from the restaurant next door for those who are hungry.
Tickets are $15 and all proceeds will be donated to the Mutual Aid Los Angeles Network.
Come celebrate five years of QAA and all of us getting older and probably near death.
Basically, this is like you can bring your letters to us, any final words, that kind of thing.
Yeah, I'll already be, you know, when we do the podcast, I will be in a coffin on stage already.
Yes, Jake will be, let's say, dressed as a Halloween ghost, but he will be lying horizontal, covered with a white sheet, and he will not be moving or speaking during this performance.
And also, the stench of decay may be coming from his corpse.
Doors?
At 7 and the show starts at 8 p.m.
And once the show is over, we will start the DJ sets.
I can't wait.
Advanced tickets are available to Patreon subscribers.
So go to patreon.com slash QAnon Anonymous and you can find a code to input on the website.
And then the link will basically go live for everybody else in, I think, like a few days from this episode going up.
So get them while they're hot and mark the date.
Saturday, December 16th.
We will see you there, friends.
Travis has guaranteed me that he will do Dutch gabber dancing for at least an hour and a half, and he will be dressed in a neon strappy outfit that I have had imported from Berlin for this event, right, Travis?
I'm actually training to build up my stamina specifically for that.
I've got a coach, so I think I'm gonna hit it once the time finally comes.
That's good, yeah.
I'm training Jake to tell the difference between house music and techno.
Travis will know the difference between breakbeat and drum and bass.
So don't you worry, folks.
I've got the education team on them, and the guy that's in charge of this, he sounds a lot like Werner Herzog, and he's been eating about three or four pills of ecstasy every day for the last 18 to 20 years.
And if all else goes south, Travis always has a quick ten ready on Young Earth Creationists.
I've got a hot ten on Nancy Pelosi.
We're actually going to have Dawkins there, so Travis will attend.
He said he would not attend if he didn't have Dawkins, because I will be debating, both of them, with one hand tied behind my back, about the need for spiritual salvation.
It's gonna be like the end of 8 Mile with Dawkins versus Travis in like a final freestyle battle?
No, not versus.
They have to join powers and still will be weaker than my one hand.
Alright.
Alright, that's enough of that.
Let's get to the topic at hand.
So what happened?
Let's set the scene.
So last month, the House of Representatives, they removed Kevin McCarthy from his position as Speaker of the House.
And this happened with help from several Republican votes, despite the fact that Republicans did not have a clear plan for his replacement.
And this was kind of a clusterfuck.
There was a scramble to find a new speaker.
Candidates included well-known names such as Jim Jordan, Steve Scalise, and Tom Emmer.
But they all fell by the wayside on October 25th when the House voted 220-209 to elect a man named Mike Johnson, a representative from Louisiana, as the 56th Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.
His election prompted many questions, most commonly, who the hell is that?
Because, you see, while usually the Speaker is a long-serving member of the House, Mike Johnson had only served for six years and ten months when he was sworn in.
That is the shortest tenure of any House member elected Speaker in 140 years.
You'd have to go back to the administration of Chester A. Arthur to find someone who has served less time for being elected Speaker.
What is it with the Republicans and just electing guys with last names that could be confused with Boners or Johnsons?
I mean, you know, is that it?
It's just like an entire party of guys who are NPCs in The Sims and have last names that could be reinterpreted as Dick?
It would have been really funny if he got up to make his, you know, uh, his first speech and he was like,
"Ooh, uh, so the way I'm every don't think so."
I just understood where you're going with that, Jake.
Good job.
I'm working on my Sims glitch.
Anything to interrupt Travis.
In Mike Johnson's first speech as Speaker of the House, he seemed to indicate that his ascension was not the end result of a chaotic Republican Party that was more interested in performative gestures than actual governance, but rather it was purposeful and ordained by God.
Oh, here we go.
I want to tell all my colleagues here what I told the Republicans in that room last night.
I don't believe there are any coincidences in a matter like this.
I believe that Scripture, the Bible, is very clear that God is the one that raises up those in authority.
He raised up each of you, all of us.
And I believe that God has ordained and allowed each one of us to be brought here for this specific moment in this time.
This is my belief.
I'm sorry, but if that's the case, that is the best case for God not existing.
And I am not an unbeliever.
I am someone who's like definitely open to the idea of a greater spiritual reality beyond the physical.
But if God appointed the people in Congress, then I am going to be a Satanist.
That's it.
Fuck this.
Yeah, I mean, what just God would appoint like an off-aspect ratio Stephen Colbert to be the Speaker of the House?
Oh my God, this, this collection of freaks are the chosen?
These are the people?
Forget it.
And it does, it feels so weird to have somebody get up in government in like 2023 and be like, well, you know, according to the Bible, each one of us are made in his image.
Like it just feels like, it feels like we're watching like the first 20 minutes of like an apocalyptic movie, like right before the apocalypse happens.
If God made us out of, like, homemade Play-Doh, this is like the runoff that you wash down the sink.
This is what you feed through the Play-Doh Spaghetti Maker.
I would like to feed Congress through the Spaghetti Maker, yes.
Johnson's surprise rise to the highest position in the House prompted investigations into his background, and those investigations uncovered connections to theocratic movements, election denialism, and even young earth creationism.
In other words, Johnson's Christianity is so fringe and extreme, he makes Mike Pence's theology look like Jimmy Carter's.
I just realized why they believe in Young Earth.
It's because they spend all their time saying we should drill it, we should frack it, and, you know, they would never want to do that to something overage.
Okay, I'm done.
Oh, no.
Oh, terrible, terrible.
Can we sub in the joke that I was going to make about they all play Ark and want to coexist with the dinosaurs at the same time?
Yeah, sure, we could quote-unquote sub that in.
It's a friendlier joke, it's a little bit, you know.
We'll leave mine in and then we'll sub yours in too.
Is that how it works?
Yeah, go ahead, go ahead.
We'll leave yours in and we'll bleep out mine.
What I'm trying to say is that they're b******.
To help us better unpack the beliefs of Mike Johnson and the general theological waters that he swims in, I am joined by Dr. Bradley Onishi.
He is a scholar of religion who teaches at the University of San Francisco.
His writing has been published in the New York Times, the LA Review of Books, and Religion and Politics, among other outlets.
He is also the co-host of the podcast Straight White American Jesus and the author of the book Preparing for War, The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next.
Bradley, thank you so much for joining us today.
Great to be here.
Thanks for inviting me.
And so I really enjoy your podcast.
I've been listening to it.
So I was wondering if we could start kind of broadly.
So the majority of Congress, like the majority of America, is Christian.
In Congress, that's about 88 percent Christian, according to the Pew Research Center.
But how would you draw a distinction between Christianity, as Mike Johnson practices it, and the Christianity of other Americans?
It's a good question.
I think I don't even know where to start in terms of being brief on this.
What I'll say is that there are always Christianities, and that's true of what's practiced in the United States.
And when it comes to who's in Congress and their Christianity, we do really have a wide array of representations.
So we can think about someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who thinks of herself as a person of faith and who clearly, regardless of if you agree with every policy position and everything that AOC stands for, Is somebody who is practicing her faith in a way that's bent towards justice, that is oriented towards science, and is willing to engage in a public square that is supposed to be built on pluralism, a multi-ethnic democracy, and so on and so forth.
We then get some people like former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, for example, who is definitely an evangelical Christian in some sense, or a conservative Christian we might say in some sense.
And I do think that someone like Kevin McCarthy is going to talk about God and the chosenness of the United States at times.
But to me, a lot of that is fueled by a desire for political power, with the latter being the driving engine.
And I know those people.
I used to be a Christian nationalist.
I used to be a minister.
Those guys at church, sure, they believe in God.
Sure, they want to take their family to Sunday school.
But when they get up in the morning, they're thinking, what do I get?
And what am I going to get?
Mike Johnson is distinct because for Mike Johnson, what comes first and foremost is dominating the world for God.
One of my colleagues described it as he and the people that he is with in terms of his theology and his politics want to colonize the earth.
for their creator.
And they will say it in those terms.
So you can see there three examples.
One of a leftist politician who renders her Christianity one way.
Another of a very conservative politician whose policies and theology I have no agreement with whatsoever.
But then there's an even further rightward lurch with Johnson, who I think is more scary than McCarthy because his first question in the morning is not, what do I get?
His first question in the morning is, how am I going to colonize the earth?
Yeah, on a recent episode of your podcast, you discussed Mike Johnson's connection to a movement called the New Apostolic Reformation, which is also commonly called the NAR.
I think we've briefly touched on it on the podcast before, mostly because people affiliated with this movement have appeared at the Clay Clark's conferences, sort of his traveling tent revival show.
Now, first of all, what exactly is the New Apostolic Reformation?
New Apostolic Reformation emerges in the 1990s, and the way that I trace this as a scholar really follows my colleague Matt Taylor.
And that is to say that the New Apostolic Reformation develops in the 1990s around this man named C. Peter Wagner, who was a seminary professor.
And he really wants to put into practice a revolution or a new reformation in Christianity.
He called it the most radical change to the way of doing church since the Protestant Reformation.
Now, in the 90s, hundreds of people joined in with Wagner, and what they wanted to do were a couple of things.
One, they wanted to get beyond denominations.
They had no interest in being Methodist or Presbyterian or Assemblies of God.
What they wanted was a denominational list or a post-denominational Christianity.
And in place of the authority of the denomination, of the Methodist bureaucracy or the Catholic hierarchy, Wagner proposed that prophets and apostles As in the biblical age, would be the spiritual authorities who would guide the church.
Meaning, just as in the New Testament, when Peter, or Paul, or James, had the authority of the apostle, that someone like Wagner, or someone in his circle, might also be dubbed an apostle.
And they would have the same legitimacy and authority as the biblical Peter.
So the New Apostolic Reformation really is a very different brand of Christianity because it sees certain individuals as imbued with the gifts of prophecy or imbued with the title of apostle.
And in essence, what they say goes and they are seen to be direct conduits from God.
A lot of people think, wow, this is crazy, must be on the fringe and kind of weird.
Who's doing this?
It's actually one of the fastest growing segments of American Christianity.
It is represented by millions and millions of Americans.
It is also a global phenomenon, and I know we'll get into this, but the New Apostolic Reformation leaders, such as someone like Dutch Sheets or Lance Wallnau, these were some of the very first to come out in support of Donald Trump in 2015, when some of those evangelical old-timers, the Falwell families and the Graham families, were still not sure if Donald Trump was their man.
These guys were all in, and therefore Trump repaid them by giving them unfettered access to the White House and to his administration and so on.
Yeah, one interesting component of this movement is this belief in, like, latter-day saints or modern-day prophets.
We saw this with some with, like, there's a woman named Julie Greene that goes along with the Clay Clark Great Awakening tour, and so that is very strange to me because Yeah, I don't know.
I usually think of like Protestant, most of Protestant Christianity as a very belief in like, well, the biblical is the revelation of God.
But this is a belief that there's, I guess, new revelations, new sort of communications to God, new ways to access, you know, the intentions of the divine.
So, I mean, what was that about?
So the New Apostolic Reformation is really best described as independent, charismatic Christianity.
It's independent because no denominations, right?
They're not part of a denomination, so they're independent.
But it's charismatic in the sense that just like if you went to a Pentecostal church, you're going to see people speaking in tongues, people rolling around on the ground, people doing all of the things that they believe happens when the Holy Spirit inspires them, touches them, whatever you want to say.
This fits with the idea of, as you say, new revelations through modern-day prophets and apostles, because these churches emphasize the Holy Spirit.
Other Protestant churches might emphasize Jesus and the Bible.
For these folks, the foremost aspect of their faith is the Holy Spirit and all of its movings and shapings and dynamics.
I'll add one more thing in here too, which is that it's also about spiritual warfare.
There is a deep belief in these circles that there is an ongoing battle between good and evil, between God and Satan, and that battle is not yet decided.
It's open-ended.
It's not one like in a Calvinist view where, hey, we all know what's going to happen.
It's predestined.
We're just sort of letting it play out.
This is a, the battle is not yet won, and we're not sure what's going to happen.
And therefore, we not only are participating in a movement where God is still speaking, God is still revealing.
That's pretty exciting.
But we're also soldiers in a war that's not yet decided.
That's also pretty exciting.
So you can see how people who are part of this really fashion themselves as part of something a lot bigger than that really kind of suburban, bougie church down the road where they have like lattes and a good kids program.
That seems kind of lame in comparison to fighting a spiritual battle with modern-day apostles and prophets.
Take away the kids lattes.
Let's let's get these kids rifles.
We need child soldiers.
Let's go.
Satan will never sleep.
I mean, yeah, this is this is something we've we've seen a lot in QAnon, the belief that, number one, that this this is the sort of the political battles are merely sort of the, you know, I guess the what we can see of much deeper spiritual battle where what they're fighting are the influence of like, you know, you know, these horrifying I mean, they often frequently, you know, accuse people being Satan worshipers in the style of the satanic panic.
But that's also very exciting for the people get involved because like it's all of a sudden you're, you know, by logging on every day, you're fighting in the battle, which is, you know, a lot more engaging than just, you know, praying for guidance or whatever.
You know, what I've found speaking to Americans who are Protestant is that they often don't even know what that means.
They often don't even know they're Protestant.
You know, for them, they're just Christian.
And I kind of, like, I guess explain to them the difference between Catholics and Protestants and stuff like that.
But, you know, what do you make of that?
Just this complete unawareness of the roots of your own spiritual movement?
I think that speaks to the status of being a Protestant Christian in this country.
I think what it speaks to is there's a long history of Protestants in America being the standard of the real Christian and the real American.
And when you're given that standard, you have Christian privilege.
You don't actually even have to reflect On the history or contours of your faith or your church or your scriptures, because they're invisible.
They just are.
It's like asking that white person for the first time to be like, oh, I guess I am white.
And I guess that means, you know, I have a different social reality than the black person walking down the street or being pulled over by the cops or whatever may be.
And so that is what I make of that.
That if you visit rural Mississippi, if you visit, you know, certain parts of the Midwest, if you visit Orange County, where I come from, oh yeah, I'm just a Christian.
Oh, you're Protestant?
Uh, I guess.
I don't, yeah, I don't know.
I'm Christian.
I believe in Jesus and the Bible.
Okay, so you're Protestant, and you're Lutheran, or you're Methodist, or you come from this tradition as a Calvinist, and they look at you like... They just don't, yeah.
I have never been forced to reflect on it.
I'm just the best.
I'm the best one.
I've even met some that identify as Catholic, and you'll speak to them, and it's so clear that they, you know, kind of hold a Protestant view.
I'm like, well, if you were Catholic, you would let the Bible be interpreted by the structure of the Church and those appointed to do so.
And you probably wouldn't be talking about how like the bad things that happen to you in your life are Satan attacking you.
That's not, that's not a part of Catholicism.
But yeah, there doesn't seem to be a lot of awareness of these distinctions, you know, like, so we can kind of discuss them here, but for them, it is really just the water they swim in.
And, uh, and it's, it's just amazing to me that they just like often have just not even, they don't even know what that would mean to be a Protestant.
One thing that I find really interesting is, you know, you were saying how this battle between good and evil is open-ended, and, you know, it's not yet decided, and that puts a lot more agency, I guess, in the believer, you know, well, how can I guarantee a victory?
And what I find interesting about that is when you look at QAnon, who specifically, you know, in the drop says stuff like dark to light, you know, good versus evil, But they also are pretty explicit that God will win.
I mean, there's the famous, you know, the famous Q-drop quote, you know, God wins.
And so, it's really interesting that, you know, in the sort of religion of QAnon, it is predetermined.
God will win.
Which, you know, I guess, you know, in sort of the early days of QAnon, tracked a little bit more with this idea that, well, all you have to do is sit back and watch the show.
Don't worry.
Light always wins.
God always wins.
And so it's really interesting that they believe that they're in the same battle, but one sort of thinks it is predetermined, and one thinks that, you know, we're not sure yet.
And, you know, I also think that, as we've seen more recently with QAnon within the last, you know, couple years or so, that it does feel more like the messaging is moving towards, no, you are the plan.
You actually, no, you know, this doesn't happen without you.
you know, and so maybe they are moving towards sort of this symmetry in belief that maybe,
you know, the battle isn't won yet. And it's up to the believers to sort of determine the fate
of this conflict. "Conflict" in quotes, for sure.
And yeah, I do think that the New Apostolic Reformation think God will ultimately win.
I just think that they, unlike many of their Christian counterparts, they're not going to give you the line of, you know, just sit back and let it happen.
They are LARPing, right?
This is live action role play.
We are part of the battle, just like I think some Q folks might think of themselves.
Sure.
And I also think that as you say that with Q, you know, and I'm happy for all of you to correct me on this as folks who know way more about Q than I do.
There's a sense of like, when things don't happen the way you expect and the way you want, you start to, in the community, you're like, well, maybe it's us.
We need to do it because Q's not doing it.
And I really feel like the rise of the New Apostolic Reformation in this country is white Christians and many other Christians saying, Yeah, you know, George W. Bush didn't really do everything we wanted, and there's like still gay people getting married, and there's still just gay people generally, and immigrants and stuff, and there's all these non-Christians running around, and all these young people are atheists now.
Maybe we need to do the battle.
Maybe we were wrong.
It's not God just saying, sit back and watch.
It's us, I don't know, need to storm the Capitol so we can actually change what's happening.
Yeah, you have to go back to the scripture or go back to the drops and say maybe there was something that we decoded improperly.
You know, maybe, you know, maybe we interpreted it wrong and what it's really telling us is that we are, you know, we are the plan.
We are the soldiers.
What I've found is that they're able to hold both of these things in their minds and in their beliefs at the same time, even though there's obvious tension between both.
God has already won and or God will definitely win in the end, but also we have to do our part and this is an ongoing battle and, you know, you are in danger of Satan's attacks and you have to look around and make sure that you stay vigilant.
I think you see that with Johnson, right?
Johnson gets up there and says, God's raised up all these leaders.
And I want to say to him, like, hey, Mike, if that's true, why did you try to overturn the election, man?
I thought God, you know, like, I think what you just said, Julian, is really apt in Johnson as well.
Like, he's holding the incoherence of both that God is God is raising up all the leaders, but I got to, like, try to overturn the election because I want this leader to be in charge.
It doesn't make sense, but it does to them.
And that's that's how they hold it.
Yeah.
So how is Mike Johnson personally connected to this new apostolic reformation movement?
Yeah, it's a great question.
So there's a pastor in Shreveport, Louisiana named Timothy Karkaden, and he leads the Shreveport Christian Center, which is a very benign name.
But Karkaden is an out-and-out New Apostolic Reformation And he follows all of the teachings and sort of pathways of the New Apostolic Reformation.
He's particularly close to Dutch Sheets.
So Dutch Sheets is someone that people may be familiar with, but Dutch Sheets is perhaps the—and this is what my colleague and I have argued—the Christian leader in the United States who did the most to stoke mobilization around January 6th.
After the election was called for Biden in November, he created a whole set of rallies, prayer marches at state capitals and other things.
His whole goal was to get Trump back in the White House.
And so Dutch Sheets is very popular.
He's written 18 books.
He's sold more than a million copies.
He was part of a faith advisor role in Newt Gingrich's candidacy for president in 2012.
He thought Obama was a secret Muslim.
And one of the things that Dutch Sheets has done is he's really popularized this symbol, the Appeal to Heaven flag.
The Appeal to Heaven flag comes from the Revolutionary War.
It was supposed to be something that basically said, hey, we don't appeal to the king, we appeal to heaven, right?
It's an idea from John Locke, and it gets filtered through George Washington.
But the Appeal to Heaven flags for Dutch Sheets became a way to say things like, our rights come from God, not from the government.
Our rights and our legitimacy as a country comes from the Lord, not from a constitution.
You can see him pointing beyond democracy and beyond the constitution to say, ultimately, it is God who gives any order to this country.
Sarah Palin wrote something in Breitbart in 2015, thanking Dutch Sheets for this flag and joining her fellow Americans to take up the flag and fly it.
And so you have Dutch Sheets as this overwhelmingly influential person.
Now, my colleague and I, Matt Taylor, reported this year that one week before J6, Dutch Sheets was at the White House with 14 people in his posse, and they have been really sort of closed-lipped about what exactly happened there.
But what has leaked is we were there strategizing, we were there learning about things, big things that are going to happen, right?
And then, of course, January 6th happened.
And if you look at January 6th, there were hundreds and hundreds of appeal to heaven flags flying at J6.
Okay, so Dutch Sheets is this sort of like really big deal in the New Apostolic Reformation.
Timothy Karkaden, part of his inner circle.
Dutch Sheets has spoken at Karkaden's church.
Karkaden has traveled with Dutch Sheets.
They are certainly colleagues, brothers in arms, fighting the spiritual battle.
Mike Johnson can be found very often at Timothy Karkaden's church.
He has visited there.
He had Karkaden come to Washington when he got sworn in.
So it's not like Karkaden is just this guy in his district who he goes to like Gladhead
once in a while.
This is a guy that he was like, "Hey, I want you to come to Washington with me."
Now, just one more bit here.
Not only does Mike Johnson sort of seem to be very close to Card Caden and by extension Sheetz, but if you walk by Mike Johnson's office today, you will see two flags hanging outside his office.
The Louisiana flag and the Appeal to Heaven flag.
So, to me, there are very clear and direct indications, if you can decode the symbols, that Mike Johnson has some deep sympathies with and participation in the New Apostolic Reformation.
Dutch, what are we going to do about this Joe Biden?
His name is Dutch Sheets?
I'm sorry, that's going to take a little while to sink in.
Yeah, this is clearly like a Red Dead Redemption character.
This man's name is Dutch Sheets.
His name is basically like European colonizer, white piece of textile.
He fucking rules.
I try to explain to my wife what I do sometimes.
I'll come downstairs and she's like, what have you been doing all day?
I'm like, well, I was writing this thing about Dutch sheets.
And she's just like, what?
What did you?
Who?
Who?
She's like, what?
Did you get a targeted Instagram ad for a very special kind of bedding?
Yeah, I bought them.
They have a high thread count.
Very high thread count.
Much higher than Egyptian sheets.
Yeah, we're going with the Dutch.
You know, the fact that these individuals are really pushing to sort of ignore or degrade, I guess, the secularism of the government is kind of ironic historically, because when the U.S.
government was first being formed, the people who were really pushing for the government having a purely secular function, not interfering with religion, were people who belonged to minority Christian religions, like the Baptists, right?
Yeah, I think so.
And I think that there are a lot of Christians in this country, and I don't want to overlook them, who are trying to push back on the Christian nationalism and Christian supremacy you see from someone like Mike Johnson or Dutch Sheets.
You know, there are many people that would say, being Baptist, means that I don't want the government involved in my religion and I don't want my religion involved in the government because freedom from religion is the only way to have freedom of religion.
We remember the European wars of religion.
We remember what it was like in the UK or in England, etc.
So there's a deep strain of American Christianity That has been integral to our ideas of a separation of church and state.
However, once again, I think that the threatened nature of white Christians in the country who are no longer a majority, who are shrinking as a demographic, means that their tactics, their theology, has become ever more aggressive.
And so this is where you get someone like Lauren Boebert saying, separation of church and state's a myth.
They never intended that.
This is where you get, right, someone like Mike Johnson as speaker, who is going to tell you, and this is a quote from him, right, that separation of church and state was not meant to protect the government from the church.
It was meant to protect the church from the government, meaning the government should have more church, even if the church should have not, should not have more government.
And so you can see this Christian supremacy on the rise in a way that I think reflects their threatened nature.
Even if there remain many Christians in the country fighting for that separation of church and state on the basis of their faith rather than in spite of it.
Yeah, and like, I guess one way this Christian supremacy is being expressed is through this belief that's also connected to the New Apostolic Reformation of Christian dominionism.
Now, could you give me a sort of a brief overview of what that entails?
Yeah, and this just dovetails on everything I just said.
So, dominionism is a word that gets thrown around a lot, and I'll just couch it in this idea of the Seven Mountain Mandate.
And it's a theological paradigm that kind of came about in the mid-2000s.
The Seven Mountain Mandate is an idea, it's actually a prophecy, that sees society in seven domains.
Religion, family, government, education, arts and entertainment, media, and business.
So the mandate, the seven mountain mandate, is to conquer all seven mountains of human society.
And what that means is they need to take dominion or control of all seven.
So if you are a dominionist, What you think of yourself in terms of your Christianity is not to evangelize to the lost so that you can save them.
The idea is, I'm going to conquer the world for God.
When I was a Christian nationalist back in the 90s, I converted when I was a teenager.
We really had this idea of like, we better convert our family members and friends because if Jesus comes back tomorrow, they might go to hell and we'll be really sad.
So you can see that if you have that framework, when I was young, I didn't have a dream of being a congressman.
I wanted to go out and just tell people about Jesus so they wouldn't go to hell.
You know, it's a 16-year-old belief I had, right?
If you're a dominionist, you're thinking, all right, the goal is for us to conquer the world, and when we conquer it, when we have dominated the world in every sense, then God will return.
You see the difference there?
The end times is now up to us to bring about, rather than for us to wait for.
And so, if you're a Seven Mountain Mandate person, if you're a Dominionist, as a Christian, you wake up in the morning like Mike Johnson thinking, how are we going to get control of media, business, government, on down the line?
Well, he's third in line now, so I'd say that's a pretty good start.
Pretty good start.
We haven't even talked about how he and his son are running a spy program on their phones so they both know what the other person watches if they look at any porn.
What?
That is so cool to do with your 17-year-old son.
Yeah, yeah.
I read about that too.
It's the program as well called Covenant Eyes, right?
Covenant Eyes!
Yeah, right.
Oh my god.
Yes, Jake.
Oh no.
I know, it's your worst nightmare, right Jake?
Yeah.
Do you want to do it with me?
You and me, we can have the Covenant, Jake.
Come on.
No, the only thing that you're going to see, Julian, under my Covenant eyes, is like, news about the Ghostbusters sequel, arc patch notes.
For some reason, I think that if you do use search terms, they're like the cutest ever.
Like big, wet, titty.
I mean, you're not wrong.
Yeah.
You're like typing in porn.
Yeah.
Pornography.
Good.
Good.
HD.
I think that the QAA podcast should be doing this.
We should have Covenant Eyes running so all three of us can get, let's just say, yeah, we're monitoring each other.
Not about inspiration.
Monitoring.
This isn't some sort of group activity like the Beatles partook with each other.
Mike Johnson was also heavily involved in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
So back in 2020, Johnson argued that Biden's win was bogus because some state officials had changed voting procedures during the coronavirus pandemic without legislature's approval, and it was reported that he pressured 125 House Republicans to join him in filing a brief to the Supreme Court supporting a text Texas lawsuit to overturn Biden's win in Georgia, Michigan,
Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
In one radio interview from November 17, 2020, he stated that he didn't concede anything
when asked a question about the election, and there was a lot of merit, he said, to
lawsuits attempting to overturn the election.
You're conceding the election is over and Joe Biden is president-elect.
I don't concede anything.
I'm just telling you what Cedric's done.
Look, here's the thing.
I've talked to the President in the last few days and he is still dug in on this.
Look, we believe, all of us believe, I think all of us know intuitively that there was a lot amiss about this election day.
the fact that all these states with Democrat leaders changed the rules in the fourth quarter
of the game late this year, and they decided to allow for all these late mail-in ballots
and the allegations about these voting machines, some of them being rigged with this software
by Dominion. Look, there's a lot of merit to that. And when the president says the election
is rigged, that's what he's talking about, that the fix was in. I could give you example
after example in all these states. I don't know how much time you all have this morning,
but there's some... Some of these lawsuits have a lot of merit, and we need to exhaust
all the legal remedies.
Yeah, Mike Johnson was taking this interview from his walk-in closet that is just full
to the brim with my pillows.
(laughing)
So Bradley, in your work, you discuss how the kinds of religious movements that Mike Johnson is aligned with are more involved in these anti-democratic efforts than is commonly known.
So I was wondering if you could discuss that a bit.
Yeah, if we think about what I just said about dominating the world for God and taking control of every domain of human society, it's pretty easy to see how democracy could be seen as an obstacle rather than as a goal.
That there was this assumption for a long time in this country, even as this country never practiced democracy in the full sense and has never reached that idea of a more perfect union, There was idea that democracy is a sacred value.
The argument I would make is this, if you see your role as a person of faith, as dominating the world for God, in government, in education, in economy, if democracy gets in the way, okay, we're here to colonize the earth for God.
We are God's dominators.
Why do you think that I'm interested in the majority's vote?
Why do you think I'm interested in 51% of the people said this and 49% said that?
So I guess we'll just live with it and I'll try to do my best to convince my congressperson or my mayor to listen to me because I'm a good citizen of democracy even though I'm this Christian person.
You can see very clearly the jump is, if democracy is a problem, we will gain power any way possible because that is the sacred value, not the will of the people.
Yeah, you know, I'm wondering, because we were recording this shortly after Ohio passed a constitutional amendment enshrining the right to access to abortion.
And, you know, a lot of people after Roe v. Wade was overturned, a lot of people made this, were supportive of that too.
That's like, well, we're just going to kick it down to the states.
You know, this sounds like a perfectly secular kind of argument.
Sounds like, you know, something that's based in federalism.
At least that's the way we're trying to make it come across.
But I'm really curious to see how they will react to states basically having this negative reaction to the Roe versus Wade and ensuring that abortion rights are better protected.
You know, I think states' rights has always been a call.
It goes back to the Confederacy, of course, and that whole lineage.
But I think states' rights were always a call, too, where you had confidence if you were somebody kicking down abortion or any other issue to states' rights, you had confidence that you could control the state legislature through minority rule.
You can gerrymander the state and you can get control of that legislature in Tennessee or in North Carolina or in Wisconsin through like 34% of the vote, right?
Because you can gerrymander the hell out of it.
So states' rights is really a code word for, well, we'll get this in a, we'll get this on a field where we have the advantage when it comes to like the referee and the dynamics of how the field's set up.
So then we'll be good.
Now we're seeing that field is just being overwhelmed by a lot of inspired voters who are voting Perhaps many of them with one issue involved in mind and that's reproductive rights.
And so now I think what we're going to see is a renewed interest in a federal abortion ban taking power away from the states and so on and so forth.
Of particular interest to me is Mike Johnson's involvement with young Earth creationism.
Now, this is the belief that the whole universe, including Earth and humanity, appeared somewhere in the neighborhood of 6,000 to 10,000 years ago.
As I often point out, that's way off.
It's not a little bit wrong.
If it was 10,000 times more than that, it would still be way, way wrong.
But this is interesting to me because it was kind of my entry point to the subject matter of people who are extremely wrong, and it led to me exploring its spinoff Intelligent Design, which led to more general interest in online conspiracism and extremism.
Mike Rothschild wrote a great article for the Daily Dot about Mike Johnson's involvement with Young Earth Creationism.
And that article notes that before Johnson was elected to the House, he worked as a spokesman and senior attorney to what's now known as the Alliance Defending Freedom.
This is a legal advocacy group working to erase the boundary between church and state.
And in this capacity, Johnson filed suit against the state of Kentucky on behalf of Ken Ham, who runs the creationist organization Answers in Genesis.
So that 2015 lawsuit by Ken Ham demanded economic subsidies from the state's tourism-focused sales tax to realize his dream of building a Bible-based Noah's Ark theme park called the Ark Encounter.
In fact, Johnson wrote an op-ed for the Answers in Genesis website in which he says, quote, Kentucky officials are smart to enthusiastically embrace the Ark Encounter, and the millions of tourists the park will welcome to the area from every viewpoint, race, color, religion, and creed.
And this is also very weird because I think it's something I learned it was really interesting when sort of first exploring Young Earth creationism is like this is actually a fairly new kind of theological concept in Christianity.
You can trace it back to like the 17th century with what was called the Usher chronology, this particular priest He just made a particular chronology of the Bible by adding up the ages of the people in the Old Testament.
From this, he calculated that the universe started in 4004 BC.
But in American Christianity, it's surprisingly popular.
There's a Gallup poll that usually says that about 40% of Americans think that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old.
But yeah, I was like, what exactly does this strange belief have in his broader Christian worldview?
I think there's a couple layers to mention when we talk about Young Earth Creationism.
So I think one, we can talk about the biblical dimension.
If you are Mike Johnson and you come from a tradition that says the Bible should be interpreted literally and the Bible is the inerrant or infallible Word of God, then what you're stuck with is, hey, I just read Genesis.
It says God created the world in six days.
What do I do?
I've been there.
I was part of this movement as a young person, and I remember having these intellectual kind of dances of like, what do we do with this?
And one of the things you arrive at is, if it says it in the Bible, it's supposed to be true.
So we really just need to find a way that this can be true scientifically, historically, archaeologically.
So that leads you down the road of someone like Ken Ham and him creating this whole museum and this whole theme park, etc.
So I think that's one.
There's the theological dimension.
But then if you go from there, you mentioned, Travis, that this starts in the 17th century.
What I would argue is Young Earth Creationism is something that really reflects, again, the threatening of the authority of the Christian Church, of the Christian faith.
Once you start with the scientific revolution, Once you start with eventually the theory of evolution, you arrive at a place where science is now an authority that is taking the place of scripture, of the priest, of the church, of whomever.
And you double down, right?
So we have a theological dimension, but we also have a dimension of authority.
Who are you going to find truth from?
So young earth creationists are often contrarian They're often the kinds that like to be the ones in public who have a different view from everyone else because they're saying, I get my info, I get my truth from the real source, not from where you get it.
This is, of course, not unlike conspiracy theorists a la Q and others.
There's also here, I think, a civic dimension.
Mike Johnson, the lawyer, is going to stand up and say, we Christians should not be persecuted.
What he's really saying is, you should give us government subsidies for our Bible theme park, otherwise you're persecuting my faith.
Even though that Bible theme park is based on one iteration, one conception of the Bible, one conception of where human life came from.
That has no bearing in science, has no bearing in the state-of-the-art archaeology, and so on.
So what he's saying to me in his little write-up there that you mentioned is, look, Christians founded this country.
We are the rightful heirs to the revolution.
And if you say no to us, that's persecution.
We're either victim—this is Lauren Kirby, right, her words—we're either victim or founder.
There's nothing in between.
And so when you try to have a multi-racial, pluralist democracy, it's really hard to do that with the likes of Mike Johnson or Kim Ham, because anytime you tell them no, we're actually not going to give government subsidies to your creation museum.
They're like, I cannot believe you hate God, hate Christians, and hate America.
You're persecuting us.
So there's a theological, there's an authoritative, and then there's a moral-civic dimension that's all wrapped up in Mike Johnson writing his op-ed for Kim Ham's Bible theme park.
You know, finally, I want to ask you about, particularly about like Christian Zionism, because I don't know if you've been following the news recently, but there's been some really horrifying shit that area that's been going on recently.
And I'm curious, because I've been hearing a lot my whole life about how Christians serve believe Israel, what role that Israel has in the end times,
their particular eschatology.
And they're particularly invested in Israel because of this particular interpretation
of the book of Revelation.
So I wonder if you could speak a little bit about how that particular crowd feels about,
not necessarily what's been going on recently, but like just generally what role that plays
in their theology.
I think the easiest way to talk about it is this subset of Christians has, they fetishize
Israel without actually practicing any real love for Jewish people.
And I would say that because I think they are a classic example of supersessionism.
Supersessionism says God chose Israel in the Old Testament.
They were his people.
And then Jesus came and was the Messiah.
So Jesus and his teachings supersede all of that stuff with Israel in the Old Testament.
So in essence, Jews, These days, according to these folks, you are the folks that had it all.
You were chosen by God, had all the signs, had all the prophets, and you didn't see it.
So Israel continues to be a sacred place that will have a special role in human history and the end times.
But Jewish people on the whole, unless you're a Christian, you really blew it, right?
You really failed to see the Savior who appeared on earth and redeemed the world.
So when I think of Christian Zionism, I think of people who are fetishizing Israel.
But often have no real love for Jewish people.
Doug Masriano, the former candidate for governor in Pennsylvania, he and his wife famously said in a press briefing, we love Israel more than most Jews, right?
And like, you know, listen, I'm Japanese American.
Do you know how many people?
Love sushi, but they don't really love hanging out with Asian people when it gets down to it, man.
I mean, I know that in my bones.
And I think that there's a lot of folks who love going out to spend $100 on sushi, but had a lot of go back to China in the pandemic.
You know what I mean?
And so I feel like it's the same thing with this group and their Zionism and their fetishization of the state of Israel.
Yeah, I find that this kind of like, well, you're not a real Jew if you don't support what Israel is doing in Palestine, is such a huge way of thinking of things.
And it isn't only this group, but it really puts it over the edge.
Like, this group allows it to become a kind of majority belief system among the ruling class, and unfortunately locks us in this kind of Endless cycle of providing arms so that, you know, this this state can continue to essentially commit extended genocide.
It's like, yeah, it's like the you know, when the Jesus shaped UFO, you know, comes down to, you know, beam up all all of the believers, you know, in Israel, all of the Jews that are sort of standing on the outer rim will just will just become incinerated, you know, by the you know, by the liftoff engines afterwards.
Yes, thank you for being our technicians for the landing pad.
We really appreciate you.
Yeah.
Unfortunately, you perished in the exhaust, but yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
You didn't see.
You didn't know to step into the right area, you know, where you would get beamed up, and now you're boned.
Sorry.
I think it really speaks to the issue of associating an entire nation that has its own national interests, military, and all of this stuff with a religion.
Because a lot of Jewish people are protesting and saying, you know, not in my name, not in the name of this large group of people.
And yet the conflation of both puts everybody in a bind.
I don't know.
It speaks to the shortcomings.
I mean, I guess we should be grateful that America doesn't just have a cross in their flag.
Well, you know, I guess you don't speak too soon.
Yeah.
Maybe reshape those the bars in the stars and bars.
Make the stars into the little crucifixion points like we're almost there, folks.
I have a question for Bradley.
I'm just curious because, you know, you had said, you know, as a younger person, you had a much different belief system than it seems like you have now.
And I was just curious if there was a specific moment that changed that for you?
Or if it was just something over time that as you got older and you saw more things out in the world that all of a sudden, you know, how you saw yourself as a person didn't necessarily fit in with the beliefs that you had been brought up with or that you had sort of embraced, you know, as a young person.
I was just curious about that because It's, you know, a lot of times, you know, the hardest thing to do is change your mind and be honest about changing your mind about stuff.
So I'm always curious to see if there's a pivotal moment or if it was just something that you just sort of grew differently out of.
There was a bunch of small moments, and I'll say that there's a lot of us out there like this.
I converted at 14, and then I went hard.
So I was not the kid that grew up in church and was like, Oh yeah, I've just been a Christian the whole time.
And my dad's a pastor.
I was like the kid who was like eighth grade, you know, sex, drugs, rock and roll, getting in trouble.
And then Jesus.
Right.
And so by the time I'm like 15, my mom's like, what do you want for Christmas?
And I'm like, I want you to buy Bibles for people in Nepal and send them there.
Cause they need to hear about like, you know, and she's looking at me like, damn dude, I wish you were just smoking pot and sneaking out again.
Cause like, This sucks, you know?
This is not fun, but all right, cool.
Yeah, let's send some Bibles to Nepal.
Sounds good.
Like I gotta look up all these addresses in Nepal?
And so I went hard, but like when you go that hard, you're the kid who's like, I'm gonna read everything, right?
So I'm gonna go read those books on intelligent design.
I'm going to go read those books about why evolution is not real.
I'm going to go read about why all the other religions are false.
And if you read enough, the center stops holding.
The center falls out.
Because you start to realize intellectually, as many gymnastics as I do, this is not going to work.
So that's one.
I just read my way out of it, like in college and in seminary.
I got to this point where I was like, this is not coherent.
You know those coherencies we talked about earlier?
About holding those in tandem?
Sure.
I just got to this point where I was like, nope, this is not working.
So then I was like, I'm going to go find a Christianity that does, and I sort of realized along the way, I think I'm good.
I don't need to be doing this anymore.
Additionally, I remember going in the voting booth to vote for either George W. Bush or John Kerry, like either Bush Term 2 or John Kerry.
And I was like, I'm voting for John Kerry, because I am at least mature enough at 24 or 23, whatever I was during that time, that This guy's more Christian than Bush.
And I told all the older pastors, I was a pastor by then, I told all the older guys at church that they were like my mentors, like, I'm voting for Kerry.
And they were like, you can do that if you want to vote for the murder of millions of babies.
It's up to you.
So they were essentially like, look, John Kerry might do more for the poor or education or whatever.
He's pro-choice.
He wants to murder millions of babies.
Is that what you want?
So I get in the voting booth and I'm like, I'm voting for Kerry.
But then I'm just like haunted by all of that.
Yeah.
And I walk out of that voting booth and I remember thinking, I got to do this different.
We are reducing the most important human issues, environmental issues, scientific issues in our time to either this or that.
This is not smart.
I got to find something that attends to the complexity in some way.
So then I went off to England for grad school and all the wheels came off.
And when I was finally away from home, I was like 6,000 miles from home, I could like think and read by myself and not be a Christian minister.
The wheels came off real quick.
Your story reminds me a lot of the story of Bart Ehrman, who is an extensively cited textual critic of the Bible, and he wrote some really great books.
One of my favorites is Misquoting Jesus, and he talks a lot about how he was an extremely devoted biblical literalist, and like you say, the wheels came off in seminary when he studied it so deeply that he just couldn't make those connections anymore.
It just stopped making sense.
It's like when you study Christopher Nolan's movies too hard as I have.
What the hell?
You know, you go in as like, you know, oh man, this stuff is like so genius and I love it, which I still do, don't get me wrong.
But the more you read and the more you go in, you're like, Like, the stuff's not lining up, and how can they be going forwards and backwards at the same time?
And yeah, you end up ruining this thing for yourself that you loved, that held so much water in how you viewed the world.
I think that's really interesting.
Bradley, if you're unfamiliar with the podcast, we're playing a game called This Is Not That.
It's, you know, the movies of Christopher Nolan and the Bible.
Well, you know, as a Jew myself, you know, I don't know a ton about Christianity.
I did have to learn a lot.
I recently did an episode for the spinoff series that I'm doing that's about hell.
And, you know, I learned a lot about it, and that a lot of the, you know, a lot of the
modern sort of ideas of hell come from Jesus himself and what he said in the New Testament.
But you know, you sort of hit on something when you went to your more senior sort of
pastors and they said, "Well, yeah, you can vote for this guy, but you'll be murdering
thousands of babies."
And it's so interesting how that image is so violent and so potent that it seems to
be and still is in politics, you know, this major, major point of contention.
Even in this hell episode, there was a woman who, you know, who had died and was brought
back to life, and she claimed that she went to hell in the, you know, the couple minutes
where she was clinically dead.
And one of her memories is that she was forced by demons to carry aborted fetuses from a
hospital room to a, you know, to a big pile of bodies and throw them on.
And so even in this woman's dream or her fantasy or her made-up story, you know, whatever the
reality is doesn't matter.
That this particular image is so strong that it seems to be used to control, you know, people's belief, you know, well, how could you be for the, you know, the murder of all this?
And then of course, you know, when there are children murdered out in the real world, you know, you don't really care.
If 4,000 children are bombed into a pancake in a month, like, well, you know, whatever.
But if the imagination that your neighbor's getting an abortion, oh, horrifying.
Horrifying stuff.
I can't stop thinking now about Jake as a youth pastor for Nolan movies, like with his backwards cap and he's like, have you heard the good word?
Interstellar.
Oh my gosh, that would be so funny.
If we were like a sketch show, I would have done that.
I would have done like four versions of that sketch.
It would be the only sketch actually that I write.
Oh man, you're getting poached by Saturday Night Live for sure.
No, but thanks, Bradley.
I really appreciate you telling us that story, because I'm always fascinated to hear about the intersection between, you know, sort of shifting your beliefs and being able—because a lot of people are, you know, they spend 10 years, 5 years going hard on something.
Then, you know, if they change their mind, there is this You know, you have to sort of be like, oh, well, oh man, like I was wrong.
You know, it's hard for people to think, oh, I was wrong or this time was wasted.
Yeah.
Did you know, did you have any issues with that?
With the sunk cost?
You know, there was a lot of issues for me.
It hurt like hell to leave because I, I was a minister by 18 in my hometown and you know, some of my family members that converted, right.
And I was really known as this guy in high school and college who you probably didn't agree with him.
But at least he believed in this thing and he was pretty devoted to it.
You could at least respect him, right?
Because he was never, he was not, like, he's not the dude on the basketball team you're ever going to get to go get hammered after the game.
You're never going to get me to, like, do anything weird.
I was just totally in.
So it's hard, like, am I going to go to my high school reunion and be like, yo, what's up guys?
Yeah, I was wrong.
Definitely wrong.
Yeah, that was, you know, so there was a lot of regret.
I will say that what I've come to grips with now is those years gave me an opportunity to explore the fundamental questions of being a human, which is still what I do.
I'm like a religion professor.
When I wake up in the morning, I'm like, why the fuck am I alive?
What am I doing here?
Right?
And it means I'll never be super rich or wealthy or successful because my brain is always just like, yo, what are we fucking doing here?
And so those years set me on the course to train and to read and to be this guy whose life is just, yeah, I get to read books and think about that shit.
That's cool.
But yeah, it hurt.
I mean, my whole life, my friend group, My money.
What kind of career did I have at age 24?
I was a minister.
And I'm like, yeah, I'm done.
Like I didn't have a 401k.
I didn't have a plan.
I wasn't like training to be an accountant.
I was just like, I wasn't going to film school.
I was just like some, I got nothing now.
I got to figure it out, you know?
So yeah, I got divorced.
I was married when I was 20.
So by the time I finished my second year of college, I was in charge of a youth group of 200 kids and I was married.
She's a very, very different experience than a lot of people have, you know, at 20 years old.
Yeah.
Have you been back to your high school reunion?
You know, I have not, but I've always been living too far away or something, but I've reconnected with folks from those days and it always makes me feel good when they actually want to talk to me, you know, and they're like, yeah, you know, We know you're a good dude.
You were super hard line, but you cared a lot.
And now, you know, so that makes me feel like I wasn't completely inhuman and just this sort of Jesus warrior that people hated.
But I'm also like fully understand, man, if like you see me from those days and you're like, no, not that guy.
I'm not what I'm not mad about it.
I get it.
Like walk the other way, you know, pretend you didn't see me.
I'm with you.
I really respect the fact that you are able to have the humility to still look for something beyond the physical, to reach towards the spiritual.
Because so many times these kinds of movements, especially when they're connected to some pretty despicable politics, they can really disgust someone from this.
And the risk is to get Dawkins' brain.
You know, and I'm very glad that you seem to have this amazing kind of open heart and that you're still searching and still kind of asking questions about the meaning of what we're doing here and finding answers that, you know, align more with a humanist approach to your fellow man.
You know, I've always looked at Dawkins as, he's a fundamentalist, just he's a different kind.
Yeah.
And those, a lot of those guys are.
And I just, I don't find that appealing.
I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna take the wounds of one experience and then go cover them up in the sheen of another fundamentalism.
That's not the answer.
Yeah.
Wise words, wise words that apply to many things.
Conspiracy theories included.
You know, you see a lot of people who will exchange one conspiracy for another, and even though the main characters sort of have been swapped out, the ideology and the pattern of thinking remains the same and still, you know, has the potential to have really detrimental effects.
I'm still trying to organize a kind of intervention in the kind of astral realm where I would get the Buddha and Karl Marx together and we'd show up to Travis's mind palace and we'd do some work on him.
Do some like Rock'em Sock'em Robots or something like that.
Sure, yeah, we'd play Hungry Hungry Hippos.
George Carlin's there somehow, yeah.
He's the announcer.
All right, Bradley, thank you so much for sharing your deep insight into this really disturbing world that Mike Johnson lives in, and your own personal testimony.
It's very fascinating.
So where can people learn more about you and your work?
Yeah, so I just have a book out called Preparing for War, and that really is a mix of a history of everything we talked about today with my personal story.
So if you want to hear more of how all this unfolded for me in the context of the history of Christian nationalism, that's out.
Podcast is Straight White American Jesus.
So we don't think Jesus was straight white or American, but we want to figure out why so many people do.
So we cover Christian nationalism and the religious right three times a week.
And so check that out.
And then online, you can find us at Straight White JC or me at Bradley Onishi.
And always writing stuff, have something out at Rolling Stone on Mike Johnson, have some other things in the works.
So appreciate y'all.
Thanks for inviting me.
Thanks for being here.
It's a great conversation.
And just, yeah, really, really thankful to get to do it with y'all.
We'll put links to that in the episode description so you can go check out the book and the podcast.
Thanks so much, Brad.
Yeah.
Thank you guys.
Thank you for listening to another episode of the QAA Podcast.
You can go to patreon.com slash Q Anon Anonymous and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second episode every week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes and our mini series.
We are about to finish the glorious run, uh, first run of the Spectral Voyager and launch into season two of Trickle Down with Travis View.
Holy shit.
We're going to find out more about these ideas from the top, developed by the elites, that then trickle down into our lives, the actual redistribution, which is of bad ideas.
For everything else, we have a website, QAnonAnonymous.com.
Listener, until next week, may the deep dish keep you and connect... Connect you, yeah, good.
Connect you, yeah.
No, it's perfect.
It's not a conspiracy, it's fact.
And now, today's Auto-Q.
Mr. President, will you visit Capitol Hill for the Speaker of the House race to meet with House members in person?
I may, but I think Mike Johnson is doing very well.
He's a tremendous congressman, respected by everybody.
I hear it looks like he's really good.
I haven't had one negative comment about him.
Everybody likes him.
He's respected by all, and that's something we need.
And it looks like that's going to happen.
So that'll be a wonderful thing.
I put out a truth today on him.
And I did one last night.
You saw that.
With somebody that's going to be really spectacular, and maybe for many years to come, he'll be very good.
So we're very happy about that.
On the trial here, it's going very well.
This is a Biden witch hunt deal.
It all comes out of the DOJ.
It's to interfere with the election.
Our company has turned out to be much stronger than anyone even thought.
The financial statements are much lower.
Then the actual numbers, the actual numbers are much higher.
We're in the process of proving that.
We already have proved it.
They had Mar-a-Lago valued at $18 million, the Attorney General, with the judge.
We're working in coordination with the judge.
And it's worth approximately 50 to 100 times that amount.
