Weekly Roundup: MAGA Conservatives vs "Non American Americans"
Brad and Dan begin by discussing the Senate Judiciary Committee's findings on how Trump sought to overturn the election by pressuring the DOJ. Dan relates these revelations to the concepts of populism and nationalism, showing how Trump used tactics used by populist leaders who take control of every aspect of government in order to take complete control of a nation.
They then turn their attention to a brand new interview with the president of the Claremont Institute, the MAGA think-tank that helped produce the lawyer who outlined Trump's plan to decertify the electoral college votes. Brad and Dan discuss the view expressed in the interview (and an additional essay) that half of Americans aren't real Americans, the Founders framed the Constitution to work for an exclusively Christian nation, and that a civil war is on the horizon.
They finish the episode by discussing how the Texas abortion bill may be the catalyst that finally turns the Lone Star state blue over the next decade.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi.
I am faculty at the University of San Francisco, our show's host in a partnership with the Kapp Center, UCSB, and I'm here today with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, associate professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
It's good to see you, Brad.
Good to see you, too, Dan.
Off-air, you've been giving me parenting advice and things to expect as, you know, I progress through my My child's newborn stage and then toddler stage and then, you know, early childhood and all of the children's movies and songs I'll listen to, the birthday parties, things that are on my horizon.
Well, you've already gotten off to a good start because, first of all, I know that we've talked about this.
You're not a gender essentialist, so you probably aren't like, yay, it was a boy or a girl or whatever.
But more importantly you didn't have a gender reveal party that managed to like burn down half of a state or kill anybody or dismember anybody so you're off to a good start.
Your next big one on these kind of commemorations will be the obligatory first birthday party where like basically the baby buries their face in a cake and everybody thinks it's cute and takes pictures and so we all look forward to those in due time I think.
Yes, and I have long used the first birthday party in classes as a way to explain to students how rituals work and that sometimes they're not about what we say they are.
Like, yes, it's the kid's first birthday, but are we celebrating them because they're going to remember?
No, we're celebrating them because a lot of parents and grandparents and relatives and others want to celebrate the fact that They're with us anyway.
Blah, blah, blah.
All right.
And you also just, you have to have that material for when they start dating.
That's where those pictures really come out, right?
It's the embarrassing materials for those kind of things.
So, well done.
Dan and I will be starting a new podcast on... No, we won't.
Okay.
No one wants that from us.
Everyone right now is like, please shut up and talk about politics.
So we will.
All right, here we go.
Yesterday, Dan.
Well, let me tell folks what we're doing today.
So we're going to talk about Senate Judiciary Committee and what they found in relationship to January 6th and Trump's attempts to overturn the election.
This will let Dan really give us some insight into populism and nationalism and how they work.
We'll then talk about Just, to me, a bombshell interview from The Atlantic with someone from the Claremont Institute, and we'll explain why that's important.
But the Claremont Institute is the think tank that basically gave us the lawyer who outlined Trump's six-point plan to overturn the election on January 6.
So the Claremont Institute is really kind of at the forefront of MAGA Nation.
And if there's a think tank that is the MAGA think tank, it's Claremont, and so we'll get into that.
We'll then also talk about the Women's March from last week and what that means for a new generation of activists, especially in the wake of the Texas abortion bill.
I will, at the end, tell you why I'm so angry at Joe Manchin.
And then we'll go to reasons for hope.
So, Dan, yesterday, Senate Judiciary Committee found a number of things, okay?
Number one, there was a concerted effort on the part of Trump and his Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to Overturn the election by involving the Department of Justice, okay?
And so this led to many machinations behind the scenes and here are some of the findings that the Senate Judiciary Committee released yesterday.
President Trump repeatedly asked the Department of Justice leadership to endorse his false claims that the election was stolen and assist his efforts to overturn the election results.
Beginning on the day that Attorney General Barr announced his resignation and accumulating to the January 6th insurrection.
Chief of Staff Mark Meadows asked Acting Attorney General Rosen to initiate election fraud investigations on multiple occasions, violating longstanding restrictions on White House DOJ communications about specific law enforcement matters.
So there's been this sort of wall of separation between the White House and Department of Justice because the Department of Justice, Dan, is not supposed to be the kind of police arm of the president.
It's supposed to be separate and independent, and yet Mark Meadows reaches out and says, hey, we would really love it, attorney general, if you would basically initiate election fraud investigations.
Number three, after personally meeting with Trump, Jeffrey Bossett Clark pushed Rosen and Donahue to assist Trump's election subversion scheme and told Rosen he would decline Trump's potential offer to install him as acting attorney general if Rosen agreed to aid the scheme.
So who is Jeffrey Bossett Clark?
Well, somebody who was potentially going to become attorney general or acting attorney general if Trump decided to get rid of Rosen for not trying to overturn the election.
Number four, Trump allies with links to the Stop the Steal movement and the January 6th insurrection participated in the pressure campaign against DOJ, including U.S.
Representative Scott Perry, PA Representative Doug Mastriato, and Trump campaign adviser Cleta Mitchell.
So you have some Trump lackeys, a couple of representatives and campaign advisers who are pressuring the Department of Justice alongside Trump and Mark Meadows, okay?
There's a number of others.
I could go on.
I don't want to sort of just read to everybody all day.
But a couple things, Dan.
This gives us another glimpse behind the scenes of the plan to try to overturn the election.
We talked two weeks ago about the sort of legal blueprint for this and the ways that John Eastman, the lawyer from, among other things, the Claremont Institute, gave to Trump and was going to implement through Mike Pence.
We now have another glimpse behind the scenes into how Trump is going to try to overturn the election using DOJ and pressure on the Department of Justice, among other avenues.
You know, enough in the weeds.
I'm wondering what you think about this and how this works In terms of your background with populism and nationalism and so on.
Yeah, so one of the first things, and it's another shout out to the participants of our first Straight White American Jesus seminar, we were, you know, some of us were talking about this and the issue of rhetoric and how the rhetoric matters around this, and words like coup are now coming out, as well as the language of insurrection, and it fits.
It fits if people look at, like, what was actually going on, what the significance would have been if the election had not been certified or had been overturned.
I think you and I both see this, the run-up to January 6th, as culminating in January 6th, because these things didn't work for Trump.
The Department of Justice ultimately didn't do these things, and the GOP is hiding behind that right now.
They're saying, like, this is all a bunch of silliness, no steps were taken, therefore there was no attempt to subvert the election.
When, had Trump had his way, steps would have been taken.
But the part of it, I think for me, and I'll put on my sort of, you know, geeky academic hat for a minute, right, is we use these words like populism and nationalism, these big fancy words.
We don't need to worry about everything that they are, but you and I have been talking about Christian nationalism, right, and what that is.
And people who study populism and nationalism will point out that there are certain really typical features of what they do if they are in power, right?
And one of those things is that they take over state mechanisms, mechanisms that are supposed to be mechanisms of the state.
The Department of Justice does not belong to a political party.
It's not supposed to be the tool of a particular president.
It represents the United States.
That's what it does.
It represents the U.S.
as its own entity, regardless of who's in power.
And a defining feature of populisms and authoritarian regimes all over the world, right, is that the judicial system and their departments of justice, their justice systems, become just arms of the person in power.
This is Trump trying to do this.
And there were plenty of people, it appears from these reports, within the orbit of the DOJ who were happy to let this happen, who would have let this happen.
Thankfully, I think for all of us, there are people in the DOJ who take seriously that the DOJ is not an arm of the President of the United States.
But that's one.
I mean, this is just a defining feature.
We talked about this before.
Banana Republic stuff, right?
That if this was going on somewhere in, you know, some former Soviet Republic or in South America somewhere, we would be shocked and appalled.
It's the United States, so people want to play it down.
The other sort of more interesting thing for me, and this brings us into, I think, a kind of theological or political theological element of this, is if we think about, like, what do elections actually do?
Like, what are they, right?
So we live in a country of 330 plus million people or whatever it is since the last census came out.
Huge country, very complex, diverse.
We have a variety of people of different religious and ethnic backgrounds and languages and all that sort of stuff, right?
So in what we could call a sort of established democracy, a democratic system with structures and institutions intended for democratic governance and I just, as an aside, will say there are more than enough problems with the U.S.
already, but acknowledging that that's what we mean with these democratic systems.
If we're a democratic country, what do elections do?
What they are is they're a kind of mediating institution that is intended to help take all of those differences and from that to discern what do we as a country most want to do.
Not everybody can have their way.
Not everybody can have what they want.
But we are going to, at least in principle, enfranchise as many people as we can, have legitimately representative structures so that everybody's represented, and together we'll adjudicate those differences of opinion and policy and all that sort of stuff.
And in a presidential election, that's what it is.
So there's an element of majority rule and people emphasize that, but another feature of a meaningful democratic system is pluralism and difference in the incompatibility of political views.
Real choice, right?
Within populism, that's not what elections are, right?
We've talked about this.
Populism works to this sense of who the real or the true or the authentic people are.
And within populist systems, the populist leader occupies a really, really significant position.
And what they are is it's a different model of representation.
It's an almost incarnational model.
It becomes the model where the populist leader is not just a representative of the authentic people.
That person is an embodiment of those people, right?
They are present in and through the actions of that person.
And just for people that are interested, if you want to go look at people like Carl Schmitt or Kantorowicz writing about the Middle Ages, it's a very, very similar model to what's called the theory of the king's two bodies, that the king embodies the state.
It's very much a part of populism.
There's a sense that Trump playing that for and we see this.
This is why there's the fervent nationalist fervor that people have for him because he is not just somebody they elected to represent them.
He is them.
He is the embodiment of what they want.
He's the embodiment of the popular will and within that elections are not about selecting a leader.
They are not about working through differences and and identifying what a majority is or what the common good is.
They are about Making sure the right person is in power and keeping their they're about acclamation, not election.
And that's exactly what we see here.
This is like populist logic 101.
Trump is the leader, not the president, not the elected leader, the leader, like the, you know, with a sort of a capital L, and any effort to replace him, including an election that's duly carried out is illegitimate by definition, because he is the embodiment of the true and authentic Americans.
And that's what we saw.
We saw that in the lead-up, when he was worried he was going to lose, so he tried to delegitimize the election.
We saw it through tying this together with those taking of state mechanisms to try to make sure that he remains in power.
And when that failed, we saw it in January 6th, as people said we were going to rise up and make sure that the rightful leader of America remains the rightful leader.
And we have to understand, the people have to understand, when we say rightful there, it does not mean duly elected.
It means the person who embodies the authentic, true Americans, all those straight, white, Christian Americans out there who are the real Americans and who need to be kept in power and control those mechanisms.
So, I'll take my geek hat off just a bit, back off, take a breath, and toss it back to you for your thoughts or other insights about this.
We won't, but we could spend hours on just this Senate report.
So, just to bring it down to the ground, I think everything you said there about how Trump is supposed to incarnate MAGA Nation and the United States rather than to represent them, right, gives people a window.
So if you're wondering, why do people have Trump flags?
Why do people have shirts with Trump on them?
Why is it about Trump and not the United States?
Why in your lifetime have you never seen somebody with a, I mean, In all those Obama years, Dan, in 2007 and 2008, right, when we started to get excited about the possibility of a Barack Obama presidency, there was never an impulse to start carrying around Obama flags, right?
I mean, there was the hope poster of Obama, but that was the closest anyone ever got to this kind of fervor.
What you said really explains, I think, for people why Trump becomes something else.
He becomes a totem of Maga Nation rather than a representative of the American people.
And I think that's really important to keep in mind.
And so I appreciate that.
I also appreciate you just putting in context how what Trump did is a classic move.
out of the playbook of authoritarians who use a populist movement in order to gain power over all aspects of government and its administration.
So I think that's important.
All right.
We need to make a couple announcements.
And when we come back, we're going to go to how this looks just in a bombshell way out of the Claremont Institute, We're going to tie all this back in language that I think is really startling and unsettling.
Two quick announcements, friends, for today that we need you to know about when it comes to Straight White American Jesus.
Number one, I, Brad, am going to be leading a group on masculinity and love and sex after purity culture through the Center for Trauma and Resolution and Recovery.
That group starts next week.
There are a few spots left.
So, if you go to traumaresolutionandrecovery.com and look for support groups, you will see it listed.
You can sign up and take part.
It lasts 10 weeks all the way up until the end of the calendar year.
And so, I do encourage you, if those are things you've heard about on the Mild at Heart Series and you're interested in, please jump in and grab one of the last spots.
Dan has just finished running our first Straight White American Jesus seminar, and that seminar is called Pure America, Religion, Race, Nation.
It went great.
It was just an amazing, dynamic conversation and a set of interactions.
And we want to do it again.
So, it's going to be happening in January, and next week we will be opening up the signups, announcing the dates, and letting you know all of the details.
So, if you're on the waiting list, or if you're somebody who wanted to sign up but couldn't last time, your chance is coming.
Be on the lookout at Straight White American Jesus in the next week for all the details for that seminar in January.
All right, Dan.
So we just talked about populism and a sort of understanding of President Trump as representing the real Americans or the real people, right?
And we talk about this a lot in this show.
I think some people might start to wonder, like, all right, Brad and Dan say that a lot.
Is that actually what's happening out there in the world?
I mean, is this just them repeating a line on their podcast so that they can sort of have the same discussion over and over again?
So, if you listened to our show two weeks ago, we talked about this guy, John Eastman, who's a lawyer who really outlined The legal strategy to overturn the election.
He was the one that told Trump and Trump's people, OK, when it comes to January 6th, here's what Pence needs to do in order to basically say we don't have enough legitimate votes to elect a president according to the right, you know, the normal procedure.
So we're going to do it in this alternate way.
Blah, blah, blah.
By the end of the six points, we get to a Trump presidency.
Dan, we went over this in our weekly roundup blueprint for a coup.
OK.
John Eastman is from the Claremont Institute.
The Claremont Institute rose to prominence during Trump's reign because it was a think tank that was unabashedly MAGA Nation and unabashedly pro-Trump.
The Claremont Institute is located in California.
It's about 20 minutes from where I grew up.
It is not part of the Claremont Colleges, which you might have heard of.
It is not part of Claremont Graduate School, which you might have heard of.
It is one of those Institutes that is separate from all of that, but because of its name, it sort of, I think, very slyly likes to sort of rely on the association, even though that there is no absolute connection institutionally among them.
There's a new interview at The Atlantic where Emma Green interviews Ryan Williams.
Ryan Williams is the president of the Claremont Institute.
Dan, when I read this, it was just the chance for us to bring to everyone listening The kind of real and concrete ways that the thought leaders in MAGA Nation understand the United States as it stands today.
So, I want to play my favorite game, which is for us to read a text, for me to throw the text to you and say, Dan Miller, what do you think?
At the Atlantic, a couple of days ago, Emma Green interviews Ryan Williams, the president of the Claremont Institute.
Okay?
Here's my first quote from Ryan Williams.
Let me start big.
The mission of the Claremont Institute is to save Western civilization.
Okay?
So this is something he says in a video that he made for the Claremont Institute.
The founders were pretty unanimous, with Washington leading the way.
That the Constitution is really only fit for Christian people.
This is something he told Emma Green, who interviewed him for the Atlantic.
So, Dan, A, he's going to save Western civilization.
B, the founders were pretty unanimous with Washington leading the way that the Constitution is really only fit for a Christian people.
Dan Miller, thoughts on this one?
Uh, he's wrong.
I'm done.
No, I'm not done.
Alright, so... No, so I mean, a couple things.
Number one, again, and we've seen this, right?
That Western civilization, constitution's only fit for, you know, Christian people.
What's this gonna be?
Again, we talk about decoding language all the time, right?
Like, of what the language is doing.
That's code for white Western Europeans, right?
And white Western European civilization.
It's what some people used to call a kind of European chauvinism.
We could call it white supremacy, whatever.
And it's going to play out as this goes.
It's just ways of talking all around the notion that exactly what we say, real Americans are white and they're Christian and they're patriarchal and so forth, right?
So we'll see what quotes you bring out.
But again, we invite others.
Go look at the Atlantic piece.
Just Google Atlantic Claremont interview.
It'll pop right up.
The other piece about the founders is just nonsense.
I'll steer people toward Andrew Seidel, a friend of the show and his book, The Founding Myth, where he talks about this.
Another book that just comes to mind it's it's it's several years old now but still really useful is called That Godless Court that looks at this.
All kinds of books that look another one is I think it's called The Faiths of the Founding Fathers or something like that.
Let me just say this if you take your average white evangelical American church and they've got their belief statement and for somebody to join their church what usually happens in an evangelical church is you have to profess that you've had a conversion experience And you believe certain things, right?
That's how you join it?
Most of the founders would not be able to join those churches.
They would not be able to join First Baptist Dallas and our MAGA friends down there.
Why?
Many of them were not Orthodox Christians.
Most of them are what are called deists.
We don't need to worry about that too much, except that they weren't card-carrying Christians.
Very few of them would have fit into a contemporary white evangelical model of religiosity or spirituality.
And if you broaden it beyond the founders to the philosophers they read, right, or the people who influenced them, people like John Locke and others, there's an argument to be made that John Locke really has a pretty limited view of what religious toleration entails.
But there's no way to draw a straight line and be like, "Oh, it's only a Christian nation." The U.S.
had that option when they had the Constitutional Convention.
There were proposals to say that the U.S.
would be a Christian nation and just not specify what brand of Christianity.
Those proposals were explicitly rejected.
So the notion that it was always intended just to be a Christian nation, I think is just untenable.
And again, just check out Seidel's book, The Founding Myth.
It's probably the most recent and a really great takedown of that line of reasoning.
Again, I just want to reiterate that the Claremont Institute is a place that was favored by the Trump administration.
It was a place that the Trump administration was getting advice and getting input.
John Eastman, the lawyer, I mean, all of that stuff.
So, again, I know some of you listening are going to be tempted once again to be like, oh, some fringe think tank out in, you know, the desert of California.
Who cares?
And again, I just want to reiterate, when this guy says we're trying to save Western civilization, And the founders were clear that, you know, the Constitution works only for a Christian people.
We're talking about the president of a think tank that had the ear and the eyes and the attention of the 45th president and his administration.
Okay.
He then goes down in the interview to talk about his enemies and the people that he thinks are really ruining the country, and that are progressives.
So this is how he talks about progressivism.
Okay.
Progressives think that limited government, in the Founder's sense, checks and balances robust federalism, a fairly fixed view of human nature, and the rights attendant to it, all has to give way to a notion that rights evolve with the times.
So there's this resistance to rights evolving or changing, Dan, and then there's this idea that there's a fixed human nature, okay?
I'm going to give you a couple more lines and then we'll let you run with it.
I would say the leading edge of progressivism now is this kind of woke social justice anti-racism.
It's a threat to limited government.
So he's trying to tie his opposition to anti-racism to a limited government worldview or political philosophy.
He talks about Ibram Kendi, who has written several prominent books about being an anti-racist, and he says that Ibram Kendi wants a department of anti-racism that would basically have carte blanche control over local and state governments.
His, meaning Kendi's, definition of racism All right.
I'll leave it there, Dan.
results and disparate outcomes for different groups.
Now, I just want to note everyone, I've read Ibram X.
Gendi, and his definition of racism is much different than that and much more expansive.
The pursuit of equal results is only going to be successful in a new woke totalitarianism, he says.
All right, I'll leave it there, Dan.
There's a lot to unpack and probably more than you can say in a couple of minutes, but what do you think?
Yeah, these are the kind of things that like, you know, it's so the reasoning is so bad that you want to not engage it, But you have to, as you say, it's a think tank and it's it's it's just sort of unreal here.
So a couple of things.
And just notice you do this with students.
I do this with students.
Right.
Just notice the sly the sly connections that are made, the equivalences between terms.
Right.
So he's talking about, you know, these kind of, um, pretty progressives and the evils of progressives and what we call classical liberalism or the founders.
Um, and he says a fairly fixed view of what of human nature and the rights attendant to it and contrast this with the notion that rights evolve over time.
That notion of a fixed human nature is one of the most pernicious and dangerous ideas that there is.
Why?
Among other things, he's talking about race and gender.
He's right.
A lot of the founders did think human nature was fixed.
I mentioned John Locke earlier, who's not one of the founders, but hugely influential thinker on folks like Thomas Jefferson.
And we could look at other classical thinkers like Immanuel Kant or others.
Guess what they believed?
Very, very explicitly and clearly that when they talked about human nature and human rationality and universal rights, they were for white people.
They were explicit about it.
John Locke, one could make an argument that his entire political theory is premised on the notion that there's this North American continent that's populated by savages, that would be a term he might use, and that if you don't like Europe, you can go live there because it's quote-unquote empty.
They don't count as human beings.
So yeah, that's your fixed notion of human nature.
The notion that women are not rational enough to do things like vote or hold government or control property or anything else.
All the stuff about gender identity that's implied there that is just biologically indefensible at this point, psychologically indefensible, was just based on kind of armchair notions of gender and whatever.
So when they defend it in the sense of, well, you know, human nature is fixed, That's bad.
We don't want that, right?
And so I would agree.
I'd say, yeah, rights evolve.
Why do they evolve?
They evolve because we understand that human nature isn't fixed, that there is no human nature, right?
There is no fixed human nature.
And we realize that groups deserve rights and recognitions they haven't had and so forth.
I want to just jump down now to this issue of anti-racism.
And so first of all, I don't know how I want to be labeled.
I don't know if I want to be an anti-anti-racist.
They used to say not to use double negatives.
I think if you put anti-anti-racist together and cross out the anti's, you're just left with racist.
So, there's that.
But the other one is this, when he says that what supposed anti-racism is about is preventing differential outcomes, right?
That's overly simplistic.
Everybody knows this.
It doesn't have to be the suggestion that the teenage clerk at McDonald's should make the same amount of money as the well-trained emergency room physician or something silly like that.
It's the evidence that those differential outcomes are heavily correlated with gender, or sexuality, or ethnicity, or whatever, and that that should be adapted.
But notice what he says.
He says you always, he says this a little further on, you always have different outcomes between different groups.
Why, he says?
Because human nature is varied.
So we've just moved from the sense that there's a fixed human nature to there are different human natures.
He says we all have different talents.
No, he's not talking about different talents.
What he's saying is, and it's the same thing people have said for centuries, well you know the reason that black people don't have as much money as white people is white people are just better by nature, right?
So that's one of those things.
It's literally chilling to me.
I break out in like sort of a cold sweat when I read that.
This language that human nature is varied.
Human nature is fixed.
Number one, it can't be changed and it's varied.
We don't all have the same human nature and rights shouldn't evolve.
So we're not all entitled as people with different human natures to the same rights in a society.
Sorry everybody, this is just fascism 101.
That's all this is.
And that's what this is.
All this language about going to the founders and so forth, it's just a kind of patriotic American fascism.
Yeah, there's so much here, and we could go on forever about this.
I would just encourage you all to look this interview up, because as Dan said, I think chilling is the right word.
We could exegete this text, Dan, for the next three hours.
We really could.
All right, let's take a break, and when we come back, we're going to look at another essay from the Claremont Institute that might even be more chilling, Dan.
I'm not sure.
I don't think so.
Okay, so let's go to another essay from the Claremont Institute.
And again, friends, why are we doing this?
Because the Claremont Institute is the think tank that not only produced—or not produced is the wrong word—but is a strong backer of the lawyer who provided Trump with his blueprint for a coup, but it is also a place that just gained incredible notoriety during the Trump administration as an ally and as a place that Maga Nation looked for its sort of intellectual foundation.
Okay, so I want to look at an essay by Glenn Elmers from March of this year, 2021, and he talks about how in this essay being conservative is no longer enough.
Okay.
So, he says, all hands on deck as we enter the counter-revolutionary moment.
So, this is Glenn Elmer's writing for the Claremont Institute in March.
Here's how he starts, Dan.
Let's be blunt.
The United States has become two nations occupying the same country.
When pressed or in private, many would now agree.
Fewer are willing to take the next step and accept that most people living in the United States today, certainly more than half, are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.
So there it is, y'all.
You think Dan and I are just out here making stuff up, caricatures, straw men, so we can have a podcast.
Guess what?
The favorite think tank of the Trump administration, the place that is all MAGA all the time, the place where the person who drew up the blueprint for the coup on January 6th is associated, okay?
We have somebody riding here, Glenn Elmers, who's also, I should mention, Dan, affiliated with Hillsdale College.
So many of you will know Hillsdale, which is in Michigan, is a private evangelical school.
Evangelical might be the wrong word.
Fundamentalist.
It is, you know, founded by Free Will Baptist, and it is notorious as sort of a Christian nationalist place, a place that is conservative even for Christian colleges, right?
The kind of place that people sort of So, Glenn Elmers is associated with Claremont Hillsdale College, and he's saying, Dan, that more than half of the people in this country are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.
I gander you have some thoughts about this.
I do, yeah.
So, every now and then, you know, you read, you're an academic, I'm an academic, we read lots of abstruse stuff.
And every now and then, you know, you're trying to find like, how can I possibly illustrate this?
How could I do?
And then something just falls out and you're like, oh, that's like a caricature of what I was just saying.
It fits so well.
I gave a couple talks last year.
My book Queer Democracy came out this August.
Last year I was, you know, I was talking about some of the themes in it and in trying to explain the distinction between nation and state, right?
We talk about nationalism and I've made this point so many times that the idea is that not all those who are a member of a nation are also members of the state or vice versa.
This is exactly what he says.
There are two nations in the state.
And in trying to explain this, people, what I've said is this means that when we talk about the real Americans, who the real Americans are, it's not everybody who lives within the borders of the United States.
And it's not everybody who has citizenship in the United States.
It's only those who are part of the true or authentic nation or the people.
These ideas we were just talking about.
And here's what he says, right?
As you said, more than half are not Americans in any meaningful sense.
So not everybody who lives in America is an American.
He goes on to say this, I don't just mean the millions of illegal immigrants.
Obviously those foreigners who have bypassed the regular processes for entering our country and probably will never assimilate to our language and culture are politically as well as legally aliens, right?
So it's not everybody within the borders, but then he goes on to say this, and this is the key.
This is what makes nationalism nationalism, right?
This is what differs from just the idea that, oh, well, we all live in a nation, so what does nationalism mean?
Here's what.
I'm really referring, he writes, to the many native-born people.
To be an American is not to be a U.S.
citizen.
To be a U.S.
citizen is not to be an American.
be citizens of the United States, but are no longer, if they ever were, Americans.
To be an American is not to be a U.S. citizen.
To be a U.S. citizen is not to be an American.
There's something more than that.
For these folks, it's Christian nationalism, right?
If you're not a Christian nationalist, you're not a real American.
If you don't fit, we've talked about this, the image of the prototypical real American as straight, white, Christian, native-born, and on and on and on, you're not a real American.
And that's exactly what he's saying.
So, yeah, as you say, the reason I emphasize this is I've said kind of this to try to explain what it is that Christian nationalists think about Americans And then along comes Elmer's, whose essay I wish I'd had when I was giving those talks, who says exactly the same thing.
So just to make that point, it's not just a bunch of egghead academics talking about this stuff.
The right-wing think tank is saying exactly the same thing.
Not all Americans are real Americans.
Real Americans are some other subset of those who are in this country.
He calls them in the essay citizen aliens, and he also calls them non-American Americans.
Again, it's hard to make this stuff up.
Like, you know, Dan, yeah.
Again, if anybody out there thinks we're just out here erecting straw men every week to knock down, well, here you go.
Not only is this from the Claremont Institute, but the Claremont Institute is, as we've said, Pretty prominent when it comes to MAGA Nation and the Trump administration.
Let me continue, Dan.
Elmer says, both right and left know where they stand today, and it's not together, not anymore.
Practically speaking, there's almost nothing left to conserve.
So this is Elmer's sort of polemicizing against What he takes to be conservative, like all of the conservative think tanks and the conservative apparatus in terms of money and funding and donors, basically the Republican Party, as it has been understood for the last 75 years, he's like, that doesn't work anymore.
Okay.
There's nothing left to conserve.
So it's not about being a, Dan, I want to get something clear for Elmer's.
It's not about being a conservative.
That's not what he's after.
There's nothing left to conserve.
What is actually required, he says, is a recovery or a re-founding of America as it was long and originally understood, but which now exists only in the hearts and minds of a minority of citizens.
Overturning the existing post-American order and re-establishing America's ancient principles and practice is a sort of counter-revolution and the only road forward.
So, I want to just say this.
About a month ago, I interviewed Dr. Liliana Mason from Johns Hopkins, who has a paper out with co-authors called Animating Animus.
If you look at that interview, what Dr. Mason and her colleagues explain is that the data shows us That Trump voters and the Trump coalition is made up of people who are not necessarily Republican, but people who have animus toward religious racial minorities and immigrants.
I mean, the data shows us that if you dislike and openly have disdain for black people, for immigrants, for people of non-Christian and non-Jewish faiths, okay?
Then you are very, very likely to be a Trump voter, and we can track that.
And there's even a chance that you were not a Republican before, that you didn't care about the likes of Mitt Romney or George Herbert Walker Bush.
But when Trump came along, you were willing to vote for him twice because he was the guy that was openly against all these groups that you consider un-American and tearing down your country.
We see that here in Elmer's essay, Dan, right?
That there's nothing left to conserve.
Start over.
What we need is a re-founding, a counter-revolution that we have to re-establish America.
This is dangerous, dangerous rhetoric.
Anyway, what do you think?
I agree.
Like he goes on to say in here, he says that he says very explicitly in this essay, real Americans are Trump voters.
Like he says that that's who the real Americans are.
He goes on, he says, he says the position they represent transcends the conservative divisions by representing the true nonpartisan understanding of America.
Right.
So that's that's the real Americans.
But he also says, as you noted, that they're a minority.
And what does that mean?
Right.
Again, we're back to populist logic.
It means That there ought to be minority rule of the country and it ought to be ongoing, right?
That this privileged minority holds the key to returning the nation to what it's intended to be.
And the logic here, if you follow it out, is that everything that happened on January 6th should have happened.
One of the things that happens, and this happens with the conservatives, it happens with MAGA Nation, it happens with all of this, it happens in populist movements, is they always claim to be speaking for the majority, right?
It's a kind of radical majoritarianism.
That there can be no minority, there can be no dissent, you know, we speak for the majority.
And people will say, well, yeah, except that they're a minority of the U.S.
population.
Like, how does that work?
And here's how it works.
If you believe that only Trump voters are real Americans, Then you can say you're speaking for real Americans.
You represent real America.
You represent the majority of real Americans, even if numerically you're a minority, because all those other people, they're usurpers.
They're not real Americans.
They're a threat to American identity.
And so populism actually envisions in the U.S.
and Christian nationalism a kind of minority majoritarianism.
That is, even if they're a numerical minority, they still, and I think they really believe, that they are in fact the true Americans, And therefore the majority of those for whom this country was built and by whom it was founded and that they're the ones who are entitled for it.
And again, it's a recipe for disaster, right?
It's as anti-democratic as you can possibly be to have this political ideology that says the real Americans are a numerical minority of the people in this country, even of citizens in this country.
And they should rule.
And if they're not ruling, it's, it's the end of Western civilization.
They've been usurped.
It's a departure from the founding intentions and so forth.
So it is, it's, it's chilling.
And again, just to say that this is put forward as, as an intellectual piece, right?
This is, this is what passes for intellection.
This is, this is the best thought that MAGA Nation has behind it.
Well, and Elmer's is sort of self-reflexive.
So in the essay, he's like, look, sometimes people call us Claremont Conservatives or True Magas, okay?
And here's what he says in response, right?
In fact, however, they, meaning Claremont Conservatives or True Magas, are not a partisan faction or an interest group at all.
On the contrary, the position they represent transcends the conservative divisions by representing the true nonpartisan understanding of America.
So there it is, Dan, right?
He did everything you just said in terms of minority majoritarianism and Christian nationalism and populism, right?
It is, we represent the true nonpartisan understanding of America.
That's just, that's who we are.
Everyone else is a non-American American or a citizen alien or whatever.
And so, you know, we just have to work to refound the country despite them.
And even though he says, as you just outlined, Dan, in the beginning of the essay, that over half the country does not agree that this is the true understanding of America.
He's telling you, I know that I don't have a majority here.
I know that in a democratic way, I can't win.
So I have to say that everyone who's against me is not a real American.
I have to try to incite a counter-revolution and then claim that I have the true understanding of America, and that is why it is legitimate for me to do it this way.
Okay?
So he says at the end, it's time to give up on the idea that conservatives can have anything useful to say.
Except the fact that what we need is a counter-revolution and go from there.
It's pretty vague, Dan, and what I really don't like when I read between the lines here is there's no encouragement to vote to overturn Senate seats or congressional seats or whatever, right?
It's just this open-ended like, well, what we need is a counter-revolution.
And I'm quoting now, he says, learn some useful skills, stay healthy and get strong.
Then he quotes his weightlifting mentor and kind of goes from there.
It's ominous in what it does not say.
It does not say, we need a counter-revolution through voting, we need a counter-revolution through, you know, free and fair elections.
It's, we need a counter-revolution and let me talk about staying healthy, getting strong, and lifting weights.
There's an open-endedness here that, if you read between the lines, is quite ominous.
Any final thoughts on the Claremont Institute, on Elmer's, on Williams, blah blah blah?
One, I'm just going to make, you know, we talk about originalism a lot when it comes to like the constitution and judicial things.
And just, I want people to notice the operation of this because it's really, really important, right?
This, this endless affirmation of the founders and what the founders wanted and what America was.
And two really different, and I'm not going to say two Americas, I'm going to say two really different understandings of what America is.
One is that its meaning is fixed, right?
What it was is its essence.
It's what it always has to be, and any departure from that can only be bad.
And another one is an understanding that says whatever America is, That is ongoing and that's the kind of thing that we as a nation, as a country, I should say country not nation in this context, that we as a country, that's what we're debating.
That's what we're trying to decide.
That's the debate that is going on is what we are as a country.
It is an open question what we are as a country.
It's not fixed.
It's not immutable.
It's not ever-changing and or never-changing.
And just to throw this out there, to give a simple example for people, I've been married a long time.
I know other people have too, or maybe people have been a parent for, you know, a long time.
Brad Onishi's been a parent for a little while.
He already knows this.
What that means?
Changes, right?
Friendships change over time.
Parenting relationships change over time.
Marriages change over time.
Work relationships change over time.
None of those things are fixed and immutable and timeless.
And they're sick and unhealthy if we think that they are.
It's the same thing with who we are as a country.
And that's the difference, Brad, that I think you're highlighting, is that we're not going to vote about this.
We're not going to have a political debate about this.
This isn't even an issue for debate.
It's simply settled.
This is a country for white Christian people.
And go and learn useful, quote unquote, useful skills.
We're not going to tell you what those are, but I'm like you.
I fear that they involve, you know, storming Capitol buildings and carrying zip ties and things like that.
I'm going to give everyone a little tool for your intellectual toolbox.
If you ever encounter somebody who wants to argue for their position by referring to an unchanging and idyllic paradise-like past, if anybody ever refers to that which used to be as perfect, as ideal, and then says, now things have gotten worse and therefore we have to return to what was.
They have set up something that does not exist in order to argue for their point.
In this case, it is setting up for the Founders America that was supposedly this wondrous paradise-like America that had these ideals that everybody consented to.
You hear this with toxic masculinity, Dan.
You'll hear toxic Masculine sort of voices out there saying, you know, there's alpha males and there's beta males.
And in our primordial past, it was the alpha males who won.
They took control.
And so if you want to be a successful, powerful man now, you have to be an alpha male, right?
And what they've done is they've projected something in the past.
They've told you, oh, Alpha males are the ones that took over the world and were successful, so therefore you need to be like them, right?
And what is going on there is a projection of the past that is in essence completely false, and it provides a false foundation for the argument.
So in this case, Elmer's and everyone at the Claremont Institute really relies on, as you're saying Dan, this vision of the unchanging America as founded in a Garden of Eden-like way and us having to return to that when in reality that never existed.
And two, that is not how the human condition works.
Everything changes, evolves, and grows and passes away.
That is what it means to be involved in this thing called the human condition.
And so when people try to argue for the timeless Eternal, unchanging, invulnerable states run away and see the red flags all over the place.
All right, Dan, let's switch gears and finish up with this.
Last Saturday, there were women's marches all over the country, and these have been happening, of course, since 2016 when Trump was elected.
I was in D.C.
at the first women's march all those years.
It feels like a lifetime ago, but it was only five years ago.
And the thing I want to highlight, though, is what happened in Texas.
So I think that this year's women's marches across the country, as always, were focused on women's rights, but there was a particular focus on abortion and reproductive rights in the wake of what happened in Texas about a month and a half ago.
There's a nice piece at The Nation that talks about this, and it's on the ground in Texas at the rally, and here is what Amy Littlefield writes in that piece at The Nation.
She's talking about this woman, Anna, who's a 21-year-old person who's an organizer of the march.
A poised 21-year-old in platform combat boots and round wireframe glasses, Anna is here with a contingent of activists from Texas.
That feels like a delegation from the future.
I say this not only because states elsewhere have moved to pass laws copying the near-total ban in Texas, or because in less than two months the Supreme Court, with its new conservative majority, will hear a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade.
If the court upends Roe, as many as 26 states are expected to ban abortion, cutting off access to almost half of all women of reproductive age and even more trans and non-binary people who are able to get pregnant.
I want to tell you about Anna because compared to 2017, Saturday's march felt to me less like a reaction to an impending crisis and more like the national debut.
of a new generation of visionary feminist leaders, many of them young, many of them black, or Asian, or indigenous, or Latina, many of them queer, many of them from the South, many of them from Texas in particular, many of them who have had abortions, all of them unashamed of that fact.
Couple comments, Dan.
One, it seems like that this abortion ban in Texas could be the foundation, as Anna Littlefield says here, for a new generation of activists to really become organized and involved in politics in Texas and across the South and across the country.
That's number one.
Number two, I wonder if this is not also, if we zoom out, One of the ways that we see Texas go blue.
Friends, I know out there it's easy, and this happens on social media, to sort of, in the wake of laws being passed like Texas' abortion bill, to just blithely place all of Texas into some sort of bucket as deep red and anti-reproductive rights and etc.
But if you look at Texas, there are more, you know, Democratic voters in Texas than there are in New Hampshire or Vermont or Massachusetts because there's so many people in Texas.
When Beto O'Rourke ran for Senate, you know, a couple years ago, he lost but only by a few percentage points, right?
There's a chance, friends, that with the right organization that you see a Democratic governor and senator in Texas In our lifetime, we've seen Texas districts turn blue as it comes to Congress.
So, the reason I bring this up, Dan, is A, just this issue of abortion and a new generation of activists, and B, this could really backfire on the Republicans because this could be what actually turns Texas blue for the first time in a long time.
So, as we close, thoughts on this?
Yeah, so to that latter point, and not just Texas, but sort of national, because of course the Texas law has gained national significance.
There is, I think, a real risk that the GOP has overplayed its hand here, right?
So the Supreme Court, of course, allowed the law to go into effect.
54% of the American public opposed that, right?
They felt like the law should not have been allowed to go into effect.
And just some other numbers.
6 in 10 Americans say abortion should be legal all the time or legal with some limitations.
And those are pretty limited.
That's 60%.
6 out of every 10 Americans.
62% of Americans say the Supreme Court should leave Roe v. Wade as it is.
Right?
So two-thirds of the U.S.
There isn't massive popular support for this.
In the United States, and it has become a national issue.
Within Texas, is it higher?
Of course it is.
There are more, you know, more Republicans and all of that.
But as you just highlighted, Texas is a much more heterogeneous state than a lot of people recognize, and it's one of those states that the GOP is really nervous about because it's becoming bluer and younger over time, right?
The population is younger.
It's drawing lots of people from all over the country, which means lots of young people, which means people who don't tend To support anti-abortion restrictions, more and more people of color, and on and on and on.
So I think you and other observers are on to something and recognizing that this could be a really, really significant phenomenon for Texas.
I think it could be significant, Texas and other laws like it, sort of nationally, when people see how much opposition there is to this kind of legislation, right?
Conservatives are badly out of step.
With a majority of Americans on these issues.
And so I think it could be a could be really significant in the sense, not just a sort of starting something, but as a symptom or an indicator of the dissatisfaction that exists among lots of Americans about these efforts to overturn abortion rights.
So I think it's potentially really significant.
And I just want to throw out there one last thing, all those numbers I was just throwing out.
It's from a Monmouth poll from just last month, right?
So like really, really recent and current numbers on where Americans stand regarding abortion and abortion access.
All right, let's go to Reasons for Hope.
So we got a couple here to throw out at you, Dan, from the Discord.
So Nathan talks about how there was, just continuing on this whole issue, a federal judge blocks the Texas abortion law.
And so there's already sort of, as we've discussed on this show, there's already legal challenges to the abortion law in Texas.
Obviously, you know, Nathan and Austin talk about the debt ceiling did get raised.
McConnell lost in some limited sense, I would say, but at least we're not going to default on our debt as a nation.
Someone talking about Facebook and how Facebook was under the microscope this week, and they were, and there was, you know, I definitely watched some of the whistleblowers' testimony and what they talked about as regard to Facebook and its algorithm and so on.
And then somebody out in California near where I am talks about there's a chance that the Pfizer vaccine will be approved.
for kids five and up.
And that is good news.
And I wonder if this is the one where we're going to get Dan out here in California.
Governor Newsom also announced that you'll have to be vaccinated to attend school.
And so that plan is going into place pretty soon.
So, Dan, did we get you?
First of all, I tried some misdirection last week with the Patriots.
And I just I just want to acknowledge it was not the gratifying loss that I'd hoped it might be.
But I'm still reveling in schadenfreude.
No, those are all good.
Abortion law being blocked, the debt ceiling, Facebook.
I had hoped my misdirection might work better than it did.
Yeah, they got me with the Pfizer one.
I saw that.
I, like lots of people, am eager for that to happen.
I still have one child whose birthday is today.
Who is underage for vaccines, and it's really, really scary, and so I saw that news and was really excited about that.
I wish I understood better the pace of government movement when, like, they have a meeting scheduled for October 26th, and I'm just like, can't they do that faster?
I want them to follow all the protocols.
So somebody from California, as you say, got it.
So that was my main one for this week.
But I mean, all these others are legitimate.
This whistleblower from Facebook, whose testimony was really pretty amazing and pretty riveting, and earned a response from Zuckerberg, which was like really pretty weak and not well received.
I think that that was really significant.
The debt ceiling, I wish, would just go away.
We'll talk more about that in the extended segment, because I have some things to say about that.
I'll bet you do.
So, Reason for Hope, it was the Pfizer vaccine, so gold star for that.
But thank you to everybody for the others and just for all of us to keep looking for those.
I think that's really important.
There's a lot of negative things to focus on.
They're important to focus on.
You and I spend a lot of time doing that, but to try to find those positive hopeful signs as well, I think is really important.
All right, friends.
As we announced, we have a couple things.
One, I'm leading a group, a support group on love, sex, masculinity after puberty culture.
If you want to sign up, go to traumaresolutionandrecovery.com and go to the support groups tab.
That's starting next week, so you have a couple more days to have one of the last spots.
Number two, we will be unveiling our next Straight White American Jesus Seminar for January next week, so we'll have dates, and the sign-up link will be going live, so please be looking forward to that.
Our last one filled up very quickly.
We already have folks on a waiting list, so if you're interested, I would say get ready, and next Friday when we open all that up, be ready to go.
We are thankful for all of you.
You can find us online at Straight White JC, at TikTok, Instagram, and on Twitter.
You can find me at Bradley Onishi.
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