Brad and Dan begin by discussing the recent news that Ron DeSantis and his administration rejected the AP course in African American studies course in Florida high schools, because in their estimation it holds no "educational value" and does not align with the historical record. This leads to a longer examination of the history of MLK Jr.'s holiday and the White Christian nationalists who have always opposed it.
In the second segment Dan lays out the newly opened rift between evangelicals and Trump. Both hosts wonder if this could spell a decisive blow to Trump's political viability - and what it means for the GOP moving forward.
In the final segment, Brad goes through the gas stove culture war discussion and explains why culture was are often both silly and incredibly important.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Our show's hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center, UCSB.
Here today with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
And Brad, it's good to see you as you make your sort of West Coast sojourn, like talking to people about your book.
It's pretty cool.
Yeah, it is fun.
And I'm coming today from Seattle and had a great time last night at Elliott Bay Book Company, so shout out to them.
Thanks for having me.
Great to see a lot of Swag listeners there and folks that just have great stories and incredible kind of lives and just, I don't know.
I always just am so energized by getting to meet people who listen to the show and anyone who just wants to talk about important stuff.
So I'm pretty stoked.
Today, well, let me actually tell you real quick, coming up, if you're in Philly, if you're near Philly, if you're in L.A.
L.A., that's not near Philly, Dan.
If you're in New York or Baltimore or somewhere like that, February 11th, I'm coming to hang with Blake Chastain and Tim Whitaker of the New Evangelicals and Exvangelicals.
So come on down.
The details are in our link tree.
If you are in San Francisco or Oakland or Berkeley, February 2nd, coming up, like in 12 days or something.
I'll be giving a talk at the University of San Francisco, absolutely free.
All you got to do is show up and hang out.
So February 2nd, San Francisco, February 11th, Philadelphia.
Think about it.
If you do both, I will give you a gold star.
So that would be a really a lot, but I still gold star your way and a free swadge hat.
So there you go.
That's the deal.
I'll, I have to run that by Dan Miller, see if he approves that, but if he does, then you get the free hat.
Okay.
Dan, we're going to talk today about a bunch of important stuff.
We're going to start in Florida with Ron DeSantis.
It's going to take us into a wide ranging conversation about race and Martin Luther King Jr.
Talk about Donald Trump and evangelicals and the growing rift that may be a fight he doesn't want to pick.
We'll see.
And then we're going to talk about the incredibly enthralling and overwhelmingly important, crucial issue of gas stoves and gas stove conspiracy theories slash denialism.
So we'll get there in a minute.
Take us into Florida, Dan.
What's happening in Ron DeSantis' jurisdiction in terms of Schools, curricula, so on.
So our favorite Uncle Ron is continuing to fight the battle that he fights against basically higher ed, secondary ed, right?
We know that that has turned into kind of the new culture war front.
And so this news came out which sort of, I don't think it necessarily tied in with this, but it's inopportune if people want to think about it this way, given that we just had MLK Day.
We'll talk about that in a few minutes.
But basically that the college board, they're the ones that put together AP classes.
If people remember these from when you're in high school or you got kids in high school or maybe you teach high school, right?
These are the courses that maybe seniors can take that then transfer into college to help take care of some of their like gen ed stuff.
So they don't have to take history 101 or whatever it is, right?
I remember taking AP English.
I remember not taking AP History, but there's a new AP course that was I guess been in the books or in the works for like 10 years on African-American studies that would be in there, and the state of Florida just banned it from their state.
They sent a letter, I believe January 12th, to the AP board saying that the course was, quote, inexplicably contrary to Florida law and lacks educational value, end quote.
They also said that the description there were, quote, gaps that could be ideologically filled, and so they wanted a fuller articulation of the curriculum.
They basically told the College Board, in the kind of condescending language that these letters have, that they could resubmit at any time when they had a course that, quote, incorporates historically accurate content, end quote.
And this is all in line with DeSantis's broader efforts to ban so-called critical race theory.
What he's now pitching is this campaign of anti-wokeness and so forth.
We know how this plays, right?
There was an interesting article—I invite people to take a look at—by Rodney Kennedy.
It was actually in Baptist Global News.
But he has this really, I think, telling and correct article talking about DeSantis as the anti-woke prophet to the evangelicals.
Google around a bit, you'll find lots of articles about the kind of angry white men that are banning behind DeSantis.
We know that woke, for the right at this point, is code for a lot of things.
It's code for what those of us who use the language of intersectionality will highlight, you know, sort of the intersections of different kinds of marginalization, oppression, and so forth.
But its primary focus is anti-Black.
It's opposed to any kind of discourse that poses questions about Black experience in America, the significance, as we know, of, say, African-American slavery in the U.S.
and so on.
The last point I'll throw out there is it's like the people that They'll deny climate change, and they'll say, we're not being anti-science.
We're being scientific.
We're just saying there should be more proof.
There should be more evidence.
We should have red team, blue team.
You know, argue these things and debate them, and it gives a patina of legitimacy.
This is the same thing when they have this notion that when it incorporates historically accurate content, Which is fundamentally circular because this is how history works for everybody who doesn't know.
We don't know what historically accurate content is until we go and look at historical materials and ask what they mean and how they fit together and try to get perspectives from different Different social locations and so on and so forth.
This is just a clear attempt to continue this campaign of appealing to angry white Christian nationalists who simply don't want any story of America that isn't the whitewashed founding fathers who were Christians and guided by God and so forth.
So we can go on this forever.
I'll throw it over to you and get your thoughts or reflections on this.
Well, you said two words I want to kind of focus in on today.
One is woke and one is whitewashed.
And so what you were saying before we started recording was something I thought was really, really quite accurate.
You said, you know, that woke these days is a code word.
It's a dog whistle.
And it really is a code word for black.
Black Lives Matter.
Anyone who supports Black Lives Matter or the movement for black lives, anyone who is on any sort of Organization, momentum, anything that really questions the systems of oppression related to race and racism in this country.
What am I trying to say?
What I'm trying to say is woke is a stand-in now.
And if someone from the right is using woke, it's a slur.
And it's really become something that is akin to welfare queen or other words that have been in the past.
We just had Martin Luther King Jr.
Day, and here we have this banning of the AP African American Studies course and the really condescending language.
I want to read something that made the rounds on Twitter, Dan, and just kind of make a historical note.
So this is from Tim LaHaye, and I'll talk about who Tim LaHaye is in a second.
I think many of you listening already know, but here's Tim LaHaye.
Dear sir, writing to Wheaton College, president of Wheaton College.
In 1968.
Recently this report came into my hands and I find it very difficult to believe.
It seems incredible that a Christian college could participate in honoring an outright theological liberal heretic whose quote non-violent demonstrations have resulted in the deaths of 17 people.
As a pastor, I'm asked every year by parents and prospective students to express my sentiments at Wheaton College or of Wheaton College.
In all fairness, I would like to know if this article is accurately describing the facts.
I honestly will be quite delighted if you can say no.
So why was Tim LaHaye writing to Wheaton College, Dan?
He was writing because Wheaton College was going to hold a memorial for Martin Luther King Jr.
after his assassination in 1968.
So here he is writing to him, to the president of Wheaton College, and saying, I can't believe you would do this.
Now, I want to zero in on the language because it should sound familiar.
How does Tim LaHaye characterize Martin Luther King Jr.?
He starts by saying he's a Christian heretic.
So he's not a real Christian.
That's one.
And two, his demonstrations have led to death.
And this is always kind of like the play.
These movements have led to destruction.
So what's the conclusion you should draw?
What is it that you should take away from the letter and from the insinuation?
Well, they are unilaterally bad.
How could you be part of this?
And so 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. has just been assassinated.
It is one of the most devastating, tragic, and covered, I don't know, I mean, this is a worldwide event, something that rocked the nation, something that rocked the world.
And here's Lahaye riding and saying, I cannot believe you're going to memorialize another human being who's been shot and whose death is causing just overwhelming sadness for tens and hundreds of millions of people across the world.
Tim LaHaye is of course the man who wrote or co-wrote the Left Behind series, so many of you will know Tim LaHaye that way.
What some of you may not know is Tim LaHaye was right in the middle of the religious right.
He was one of Jerry Falwell's right-hand men, and in fact he was kind of the West Coast lieutenant because he was from San Diego, okay?
Tim LaHaye was also a tried and true member and leader in the John Birch Society.
The John Birch Society is the grandfather of QAnon.
So Tim LaHaye was very much into what?
Conspiracy.
He was very much into the idea that elites are trying to rewrite American history and take over the country and they're doing so in service of communism and godless heathenism and so on and so forth.
Dan, as DeSantis bans African-American studies in Florida, he's continuing a long lineage of so-called Christian leaders who are calling things, whether they be Martin Luther King Jr.' 's life as heretical or an AP studies class, African-American studies class, as having no educational value and making the case that they don't belong at the center of American life, okay?
This brings us to Martin Luther King Jr.
Day, and I think there's just a great quote from Jacobin Magazine that really talks about how this works and why Martin Luther King Jr.
Day is in many ways an American triumph.
Martin Luther King Jr.
is the only person named on the United States holiday calendar.
There's no other proper names.
I mean, you could say Christ because Christmas, but you know, Dan, I don't want to get into it with you, okay?
I'm not trying to take Christ out of Christmas, so don't give me that look.
All right.
So, in many ways it's a triumph to have his holiday, but here's what Jacobin says.
Since 1986, those seeking political and social reform in the United States have used it to advance their cause, despite its original apolitical tone.
Those who have wanted to maintain the status quo have used it to argue that King's dream has been fulfilled.
In the process, King's words have often been distorted beyond meeting.
His virtues exaggerated and his deficiencies weaponized.
Today, every effort to memorialize him is fraught with contradiction.
To remember King risks forgetting his radicalism.
And so we've talked about this on the show before, but I do think it's worth talking about again in light of what happened in Florida.
I think there's two things that happen across the country with Martin Luther King Jr.
Day, not obviously unanimously, not obviously unilaterally, but they're kind of trends.
One is what I just read.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Day is used as a way to say, hey, what a hero of the past who helped end something that is now in the past.
Yay!
We love him.
Great job.
We're going to use his quotes.
And for Marjorie Taylor Greene or for some other Republican, Ted Cruz, we're going to find a nice quote that will fit into our sense of victimhood and use it to advance our cause.
I think there's a sense here of neutering Martin Luther King Jr.' 's radicalism.
That you neuter what he did by saying it's in the past and also by incorporating him into a kind of American tradition that refuses to look into the systemic inequities and oppression of our country's history.
So that's one.
But I want to bring up another Dan that I think is pretty close to home in Florida with Ron DeSantis, and is pretty close to home, I think, with what he did with the AP study.
So this is from the Washington Post by Meena Venkataramanan.
And Meena writes, or she writes, that Martin Luther King Jr.
Day is, in some parts of the country, as I just said, kind of a a neutered approach to King's legacy.
And others, it's an outright sort of like, well, we will celebrate Martin Luther King Jr., but we'll do that with other Americans.
In many cases, Robert E. Lee.
And so some of you listening don't realize that Mississippi and Alabama still celebrate King Lee Day, meaning that they hold the Martin Luther King Jr.
celebration at the same time as they celebrate Robert E. Lee, who, if you don't know, was leader of the Confederate Army and fought in the Civil War to keep black people enslaved.
Arkansas celebrated King Lee Day until 2018.
So they were doing this, Dan, all the way up until when?
1960?
Nope.
1980?
Nope.
2000?
Nope.
2018.
Okay.
Virginia, where I've lived a number of times in my life, observed Lee King Day also, and along with Stonewall Jackson until 2000.
Okay.
Now, other parts of the country have different approaches.
So there are ways that Martin Luther King Jr.
Day is wrapped up into kind of other holidays.
So if we go up to a state that is, I don't know, not in the former Confederacy, in the South, I don't know, a place I talk a lot about, Idaho, they wrap Martin Luther King Jr.
Day into a human rights day.
OK, so Idaho is not part of the old South.
There was no Jim Crow in Idaho, and nonetheless it is a human rights day, okay?
Florida, let's talk about Ron DeSantis Florida, honors King on MLK Day but also marks Lee's birthday on January 19th and Confederate Memorial Day on April 26th as holidays.
So Dan, it's really amazing, right, to hear Ron DeSantis and his cronies write to the education board and say that the class holds no educational value And yet the state of Florida continues to hold celebrations for Robert E. Lee and Confederate Memorial Day.
Think about that.
There was a Confederate Memorial Day and they have the audacity to say in a letter, there's no educational value to this course.
So I have more to say.
I just want to point some of that out.
I have some stories about these things I can share, but anyway, I'll stop talking here, throw it to you about King's legacy being neutered or kind of tagged into other American figures that Whose legacies are related to the Confederacy or to slavery and so on?
I think both of those things are worth noting.
The domesticating of King, the neutering of the legacy, the whitewashing, like whatever language you want to use about that.
We push this a lot.
I'll reference it again though, but Robert Jones' book, White Too Long, like for those who are still, and I think it still surprises me how many people are surprised when they find out that like Some of these prominent evangelical figures back in the 60s were super opposed to King, or they were opposed to racial integration, or desegregation, or whatever.
And it's baked in.
It was part of what it was to be an evangelical.
And for many, the only way King became palatable was to domesticate that legacy, right?
I'm pretty sure in past episodes around this, I highlight this, I highlight it all the time, but one of, for me, The most powerful things King says, you know, his letter from a Birmingham jail, one of the things that everybody's read, if they've read anything, right?
They've read, they've seen the I Have a Dream speech, and they've read portions of the letter from a Birmingham jail.
But the part of there where he says that he, and I'm not going to get the quote exactly right, has reluctantly come to the conclusion that the biggest obstacle is the moderate white man.
And that is the passage that always Strikes at me because that's exactly what's happening.
He has been moderated, right?
And it's not just on the right.
These other things where, yes, we'll do campaign, but it has to be qualified in some way.
When I hear the Human Rights Day in Idaho, Land of the White Militias, and so forth, all I can think of is when somebody says, well, you know, of course we shouldn't be racist about anybody.
Everybody should be opposed to racism, right?
It can't acknowledge that there's anti-Black racism without having to make it about White people and other people in some way.
It's that, you know, we can't have King by himself.
That's just, that's too much.
It's beyond, it's beyond the pale.
But it's also not just the right.
Another person I like to hammer on some is you also get the moderate You know, Democrats in the world, the kind of super white, kind of old school, I'm just going to say Clinton-esque liberals who do this.
I will throw out Mark Lilla, historian at Columbia University, wrote the book The Once and Future Liberal, a really pretty awful book in my opinion, wrote about it in my book.
But he takes that same line and he's critical of Black Lives Matter, among other groups, and he says, well, they're not like King.
They're too radical.
They're after everybody.
They didn't work in the system.
King worked within the system, which is a bunch of nonsense.
And to know that, we just have to look at everything that happened around King to know that he wasn't operating within the system.
That's why the white system was so opposed to him.
So it's a kind of practice.
of domesticating King and his message that cuts across a wide swath of basically white America, right?
And the last thing I just want to throw out, because I still hear this from people, and they say, well, they talked about nonviolence, but people died as a result of that.
It's like, yeah, who was doing the beating and the killing and the fire hoses and the dogs and all of that stuff, right?
It wasn't black protesters marching with King.
What I tell people is, I'm like, you know, that's the, uh, look what you made me do logic of domestic abuse or other violence, right?
It's like, you know, oh wait, I mean, you, you beat your kid or you beat your partner.
Well, yeah, but they, they made me do it.
They just made me so mad or whatever.
We don't stand for that logic there.
We shouldn't stand for it here when it comes to somebody like King.
So.
Again, I think we could go on this forever, but those are sort of some of the things that just come to mind for me when I hear this kind of rationale and reasoning annually, right?
It's an annual, it's our own annual national right at this point to say nice anodyne things about King and make sure that he's not too radical or doesn't really challenge anybody anymore.
There's a couple things just to wrap up here.
Jerry Falwell, the kind of figurehead, or one of them at least, of the religious right, in 1983 went on TV and did everything he could to explain why there should not be a Martin Luther King Jr.
holiday.
I think one of the reasons That the religious right eventually became a little bit fed up with Reagan is that the King holiday was instituted as a federal holiday in the 1980s.
I mean, just remember, and I do this in my book and we've talked about this for hours on the show, just remember the long histories of Jerry Falwell.
So Jerry Falwell, religious right, But he starts out with a segregation academy at his church.
His church was not integrated when he started it.
So I'm not going to go into that today.
I just want to point out that this man's on TV in 1983 saying no Martin Luther King Jr.
holiday.
Tim LaHaye, one of his best friends in 1968, is writing to Wheaton College and saying, how can you even have a memorial for this man?
And One of them was part of the John Birch Society, which labeled Martin Luther King Jr.
a communist Soviet agent when he was alive.
And the other is Jerry Falwell, who had a segregation academy school and a whites-only church.
So just keep that in mind, okay?
A couple other things that have gone around.
The FBI tweeted, like, on this 40th anniversary of MLK Day as a federal holiday, the FBI honors one of the most prominent leaders of the civil rights movement, blah, blah, blah.
And many folks have pointed out why this is ridiculous.
I'll just quote Mark Lamont Hill, who talked about how The FBI spied on King.
They reached out to him and basically harassed him.
They even wrote him a letter at one point and said that he should take his own life.
So, the FBI looked at him as an American enemy because he was upsetting the very systems that you talked about, Dan.
So, anyway.
All right, let's take a break.
We'll come back and talk about the growing feud between Trump and evangelicals, which seems like something to keep an eye on.
All right, Dan.
It's one of those things where, like, you don't really want to look under the rock because you know there's, like, stuff under there you don't want to see, but we do need to do it.
We need to, like, pick up the rock and look what's under there because we need to know.
So what's happening between Trump and evangelicals?
Recently, it was in a podcast interview, but it also ties into some other things that he said, made really, you know, open, angry statements against evangelical leaders who have not come out and openly endorsed him for his 2024 campaign.
And this got a lot of people's attention because we know and It's like literally part of what kicked off this podcast, right, was evangelical support for Donald Trump.
And people can go back and listen to some of the very first episodes where we talk about that.
Trump never would have been elected in 2016 without evangelical support.
He got historic numbers of white evangelical supporters.
And we all know maintained a lot of that following the stories, the images of like him autographing people's Bibles, all that kind of stuff, right?
So now we have Trump lashing out at evangelical leaders because of their perceived lack of support.
He decries their lack of loyalty for not supporting his campaign.
And that's his word, loyalty, right?
So the transactional nature of this for him is right out in the open.
And it's worth noting, as you say, people have asked us What's going on with evangelicals now?
Like, what's the support for Trump?
And we've said, you know, the bear's watching, right?
It's not clear what that's going to be.
So we start seeing this.
Some of the things that he said, he decries them for being disloyal.
And then he said this, he said, nobody has ever done more for the right to life than Donald Trump, his typical third person thing.
I put three Supreme Court justices who all voted and they got something that they've been fighting for for 64 years, for many, many years, of course, referring to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which is accurate.
He did.
He helped with Mitch McConnell's help to stack the Supreme Court to get that done and so forth.
But the other piece of this that's interesting is he also has been critical of the tack on abortion that some of these same evangelical leaders have taken, that some of the candidates who didn't win in the midterm election who ran on a strict anti-abortion platform.
He's been critical of them for not allowing for exceptions and so forth, for saying it was a losing strategy and so on, which one would presume is going to further alienate him from many of those same supporters.
As people are getting ready to mass in Washington for, on the anti-abortion side, so-called Right to Life marches, and on the abortion access side, that's coming up this weekend.
That he's got this timing.
So a lot of things going on.
What does it mean?
What are some takeaways?
So one question is how much of this is Trump out in public and what goes on behind closed doors?
There are some other people.
There was some, you know, evangelical leader who chose to speak on the condition of anonymity who said, no, no, no, this is Trump making noise, but he's still friends with all the evangelical leaders.
They're all still talking to him and so forth.
There's another who says they just think there may be somebody more electable in the next election cycle, which, if people want to put their cynical hat on, it's the, aha, see, we knew the evangelical leaders are only voting for Trump because they want power and so on and so forth.
You could also put on the evangelical theology hat.
We've talked about this for years, that the line that came out from the evangelicals when people said, well, Trump's not a good card-carrying Christian, he's not a moral person, was, well, God kind of works in mysterious ways.
God can work through whatever social agent he might want to.
That was good news for Trump.
The bad news for that is God can change his mind at any time and start working through someone else, right?
So there's that piece of it.
There are those who said, well, Trump didn't get evangelical support by winning over the leaders.
He won over the masses of evangelicals.
And if he still has those people, then he's got nothing to worry about.
I'm not so sure about that.
I'm not so sure that if Dobson hadn't come out in support of Trump, that if certain theologians and evangelical leaders hadn't, that it might not have steered some of those churches and those pastors in different ways.
So I don't know where all of that goes.
I think it bears watching.
And I think the other big takeaway from this is it does highlight this changed terrain of the abortion debate that we've been talking about, right?
That you have an energized Left but also a lot of energized moderates over the issue of abortion in a way that I think they hadn't been for a long time.
We're seeing better grassroots activism and so forth.
You have, we've used the analogy, other people have used the analogy of the GOP, the dog that caught the car, and like now they have to wear this millstone around their neck of This being seen as extremists and banning abortion and so forth.
You've got some in the GOP who want a full-scale national ban on everything.
You've got others who see this as not a winning strategy.
No doubt you have some who say, well, yeah, I think in general it shouldn't be permissible, but there have to be exceptions for, you know, legitimate reasons and so forth.
So it's a lot of stuff wrapped up in this that I think is worth watching to see what happens.
Because the one thing everybody agrees on about the evangelicals is Trump cannot win a nomination.
No GOP candidate can win the White House.
There's any hope of winning the White House without winning white evangelical voters.
They are too much of a block.
Within American conservatism and the GOP base to alienate them.
So it's going to be really interesting to see what Trump does with this, how people respond to it.
We've seen before that sometimes his followers just have the, well, he has to say that.
We understand he has to say that, but the truth is he's with us and that might happen, but I don't know.
And it'll be interesting to see where that goes.
So I'm interested in your thoughts about this as it sort of continues to develop and unfold.
So, in some sense, I'm not going to lie, this feels like a topic that I'm like, really, do we have to talk about this again?
Because we talked about it in 2016, we talked about it in 2018, talked about it in 2020.
In some sense I'm tired of it but in another sense we do need to talk about it because this will have an incredible effect on what happens in 2024 and I think in many ways could signal the end of Donald Trump as a viable candidate more than the J6 Select Committee if he really does pick the fight.
So on the Trump side Here's what I see coming out is Trump is not a strategist in any grand sense.
And so if he senses disloyalty or hedging from them, he will just continue to come out, I think, with these kinds of statements.
And if he continues to do that, there is a chance that he turns them off and that they really do start to say, all right, DeSantis, Junkin, Kristi Noem, whoever.
Who's our guy?
Who's our woman?
Who's the person?
And I guess what I'm getting at here is Trump's narcissism comes back into play because if you slight him in the least, he's going to come out in public in ways that will hurt him and say, you're disloyal.
You never loved me.
I did everything for you.
You've done nothing for me.
And that's how the narcissist works in a toxic relationship.
If he doesn't get a hold of this and he doesn't realize that, I think there could be the end of Donald Trump as a 2024 candidate.
And that's why it is worth talking about.
Okay.
Now, in terms of evangelicals, I think they've always just seen, like, if you, if you take Trump as the Cyrus, the King Cyrus, which the New Apostolic Reformation folks have done, many others have done, that God anointed this man, whether he's a baby Christian or a non-Christian, but God anointed this man to restore the country.
You see that it is all about power, because what they can do is they can just find whoever is the next King Cyrus.
And so, in some sense, it is not about Trump himself, but whoever has the ability to do their bidding and whoever the king is that will help them restore their kingdom.
That's how they see it.
If that's not Trump, in terms of his electability or his like friendliness to them, then sure, they're going to move on.
I think it's just about power.
And it has been, we've said that consistently.
I'll say one more thing in that you mentioned electability.
And I think that that's an interesting thing, because if you're saying electability, unless you're an idiot, sorry, you know, Dan, we're just being we're just being real friendly today.
I'm sure Mark Lilla is going to write in with some friendly comments later.
So if you're listening.
You know, about Dan's take on his book.
And I'm saying to whoever thinks that Mike... So, if you're an idiot, sorry, I think that you can't be referring to Mike Pence as elect... I mean, are you really saying, well, someone's a little more electable.
Mike Pence.
I don't know who that is.
And I'm sorry if you think that.
I just, I'm not sure you have a good view.
Ted Cruz?
No.
Christy?
No.
Maybe.
But like, is there that much of a profile there?
Are we really talking about someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene?
I hope not.
Glenn Youngkin seems way not MAGA enough at least with his, but who knows?
Here's what I'm getting at, Dan.
It all leads back to Uncle Ron DeSantis.
Like if you're talking about electable, you're talking about Uncle Ron.
And I'll mention just something with that is Uncle Ron is a Catholic.
And if Donald Trump's going to get wishy-washy on abortion, he needs to be worried about losing white evangelical support.
He also needs to be worried about some of those white Catholics.
And, you know, I think people always leave out the white Catholics who voted for Trump in majority both times.
And reproductive rights, preventing access to abortion for many Catholics, not all by any means, and Dan and I are very aware of the large and vociferous and amazing Catholic communities that are fighting for reproductive rights and believe in those things as well as racial justice and gender equality and so on.
But there are many Catholics who don't, many of them happen to be white in the United States, And so if Trump is going to waiver there, it's an easy pivot to DeSantis as that Catholic candidate that you know is a strategist, is going to know exactly what to say, will not just blow his horn because someone's disloyal, and will come out and say all the right things about abortion and pushing the agenda as far as he can way past Roe, way past Dobbs.
So, you know, the electability comment makes me think that's got to be a DeSantis reference, and then DeSantis reference as a Catholic, And a strategist makes me think he might try to really capitalize on Trump's temper tantrum here.
So anyway, those are my thoughts there.
Any more on Trump and the evangelical rift and what might be brewing?
Just to that last point, I think you hit it on the head with DeSantis.
Who are people writing about as the prophet to the white evangelicals now?
They're writing about DeSantis.
They're not talking about Trump.
And we've talked about this before, of a kind of Trumpism beyond Trump, and how states like Florida and Texas with the anti-trans laws and different things like this have gone even beyond what Trump called for.
You have noted lots of times that DeSantis is much savvier than Trump when it comes to politics and to playing that game.
And we see that, because we see DeSantis building that, not looking backwards.
Because the other part of this, of course, is that Trump just wants to not be blamed for the midterms going poorly, and so he's going to blame somebody else.
He is, for the narcissistic reasons you highlight, I think, He's constitutionally incapable of putting something behind him and moving forward.
And DeSantis is like, you know what?
We're going to take this for granted and we're not going to talk about stacking the court and stuff because we already did that.
We're not going to try to rally supporters around issues that we won on and that can now become a liability.
We're going to create new issues.
We're going to perpetuate a new sense of crisis.
We're going to create new fears for white Christians in America so that they will continue to look to us to have the answers to these fears that we created.
That's how it works.
And so I think DeSantis is the other side of this, the one to really watch as the potential beneficiary of this.
All right.
All right, let's take a break and get to gas stoves because, you know, Jim Jordan tweeted to one point, God guns and gas stoves, which.
Bad.
All right.
Thank you.
Should we make a swad shirt that says that Dan?
I don't know.
Now I'm thinking we need like a swad stickers.
I don't know.
Anyway, we'll, we'll work on it.
We'll get our team on it.
Meaning my one-year-old daughter and me, we'll talk about it in the car later.
All right.
We'll be right back.
Okay.
Let's talk about gas stoves.
So you've probably heard a lot about this over the last couple of weeks.
Thought it might be time to talk about it.
What you're probably hearing is that there's this proposal to ban gas stoves.
And if you're watching Fox News, you've probably learned that Joe Biden is coming to your house tonight to rip out your gas stove or put you in jail.
What really happened is Representative Don Beyer of Virginia and Cory Booker asked the Consumer Product Safety Commission a couple months ago to look at the health risks posed by gas stoves and their methane emissions.
There was a five-person commission that kind of met.
Anyway, I'm not going to get into the details, but basically There's a, there's a kind of growing scientific consensus that gas stoves are a health risk.
They, they are bad for respiratory health.
They're bad for infants and newborns.
They, they may contribute to worsening asthma and other respiratory conditions.
That's the kind of lowdown here.
Okay.
But when the news broke about the idea that one future suggestion, one future incentive Uh, that might be part of Biden's climate bill would be to incentivize people to replace their gas stoves.
It really turned into a culture war issue, Dan, like, like these things always do now.
Like we just live in a country where you have scientists and politicians that are like, Hey, you know what might help people according to the science?
Moving away from gas stoves.
So if we incentivize people like we do with electric cars, maybe that would be a good thing.
And we could just encourage people not to use so much gas.
And it also, by the way, is really helpful because we would use less natural gas and move, you know, to more sustainable forms of energy while we cook our food and blah, blah, blah.
Okay, great.
That's kind of the suggestion, right?
In a vacuum, you're like, oh, OK, well, yeah, maybe it's something good to think about.
I don't know.
I mean, Dan, you know, you're in the Northeast.
It's cold there.
Can you really at this moment just replace everybody, you know, everybody's gas heating with with something else?
Probably not.
You know, there's a lot to talk about, but that's not what we're doing.
We're saying, hey, should you just sort of move away from gas stoves?
Because it's really kind of looking like they're a little bit unhealthy and they contribute to climate change.
We can do better.
All right.
So what did this lead to, Dan?
It led to complete freak out.
So God Guns Gas Stoves.
That's the tweet.
Beats Bears Battlestar Galactica.
So Jim Jordan tweeted God Guns Gas Stoves and I'm going to respond Beats Bears Battlestar Galactica.
Joe Manchin, oil baron, supposed member of the Democratic Party.
And a nice yacht said that the federal government has no business telling American families how to cook their dinner.
Okay, great.
Thank you, Joe Manchin.
Wonderful.
Let me pull up a couple of others here.
Just some really great stuff coming out of our Just country's leadership.
Prominent right-wing account Cat Turd, which is a real thing and very, very prominent, bragged about pointlessly running their gas stove to own the libs.
Mike Garcia wrote, imagine a world where all tortillas are heated in the microwave.
Going back to Joe Manchin, the last thing that would ever leave my house is the gas stove that we cook on.
So, you know, the New Republic is asking, why are things leaving Joe's house?
Does he actually cook?
What's going on?
Why is Joe Manchin hugging his Gas stove.
Okay, enough.
Why are we talking about this?
I think it's worth talking about, Dan, because this is what we call a culture war issue.
So I think this is a chance to talk about what culture wars are.
We hear culture wars a lot.
And I think I really take the idea from James Davison Hunter's book from the early 1990s on culture wars and others who've written about this, that culture wars seem silly.
And in many cases, they kind of are.
Some of you will remember the Potato Head controversy and Potato Head's gender.
You'll remember Eminem's being too woke, according to Ted Cruz.
You'll remember Sesame Street being, I guess, a source of left-wing radicalism.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Culture wars, according to Hunter and others, are issues that people see as defining us as a country.
They're about a communal self-identity, collective self-identity.
And so in some cases, their import is obvious.
Abortion, okay?
There's a part of the country that's convinced that abortion means that we are the kind of nation that allows for the murder of children.
I mean, that's the reductionistic approach.
There's many others that would say, Access to reproductive rights means that we're a nation that gives women autonomy over their body and their sexual lives and so on.
So it's a matter of defining who we are as a country.
Are we the kind of country that does this?
Are we the kind of people that does that?
That's what culture wars are.
But in many cases you can see how that would be really important.
Whether that's the death penalty, okay?
whether that is in the 70s and 80s, debates about women in the workforce and women like being working mothers and so on.
Those are really important debates that like we needed to be a country.
And I think we can just say this openly, Dan, that says, yes, women, you know, have the right and the freedom and the ability to be whatever, working mothers, working people, not mothers, career, family, whatever they want.
And those debates happen.
They're still happening.
They are still happening because one American state just passed a law that says women in the state legislature have to cover their arms.
So anyway, we're not going to get to that today, but look it up.
Culture wars in many cases seem important on the surface, those kinds of debates.
But what's happened in our country, Dan, is that like anything, Right?
That suggests any change, any sense of like evolving, any sense of like maybe doing things a little better, is not just something that is annoying and you might have to get used to, even though it might be better, it turns into this self-identity.
Right?
Why?
Because I feel like on the American right, and especially with the white Christian nationals we talk about so often, their identity they feel is so threatened at every turn, that every little suggestion that comes out, is taken as I'm not that kind of person.
This is this country is not that kind of country, and I will not stand for this.
And you're like, OK, ma'am, this is a Wendy's.
I don't know why you're getting so upset.
Like it's a gas stove.
Do you remember when seatbelts came out?
It was like, I'm not wearing a seatbelt.
And then everyone was like, well, yeah, it's safer.
All right.
I guess we got to wear the seatbelts.
I don't know about you, Dan.
When I was a kid, they made a law where we had to wear helmets in California to ride a bike.
And I remember all of my friends, we were like 12, and we were like, we'll never do that.
We're rebels.
We're not wearing a helmet.
Are you serious?
It's so dorky, helmets.
A year later, everyone's wearing a helmet.
It's just because we did, right?
Anyway, this is my take on this.
It is silly and it's sad, but if you're wondering why we have these controversies over potato head or M&Ms or gas stoves, it's because there's a sense of victimization and threat to the American right where they're like, no, I will not stand for this.
This is not happening.
I am not the kind of country.
Where really important things to my identity like gas stoves are going to be regulated.
Go ahead.
Come and take it.
I mean, I don't know.
Has anyone bought a come and take it flag now with a stove on it?
I mean, I'm sure they're out there.
I don't even want to look because I'm actually sure you could probably buy one of those.
So anyway, Dan, curious to what you think about the gas stove situation, the culture war situation, and just how we've gotten to a place where a simple suggestion, a simple idea of like incentivizing people to maybe use a different method of cooking has turned into like, you will not take my identity and my way of life.
Yeah, so I start with like the level of reality, right?
And then get down into the culture war piece, right?
Because that's where it becomes fantasy.
It becomes a political fantasy, not reality.
So, in case I haven't been geeky enough and wonky enough today, I feel like that's my brand.
I wear the cargo shorts and I say geeky things.
Somebody was talking to me the other day, they're like, why in the world would you ban these?
I'm like, well, it's just stuff about asthma and everything.
But like, basically I'm like, it's an unvented gas appliance.
That's what, that's what it is.
If you have a furnace, say you've got a gas furnace, what do you do?
You've got like an exhaust vent that runs out of your house and you've got all kinds of Concerns about, you know, impurities and all this stuff.
Why?
Because it's a fossil fuel burning inside your house and fossil fuels release things.
If you have a gas grill, liquid propane works the same way as natural gas and there are parts of the country, like where I live, where some houses use propane instead of natural gas.
It's the same thing.
Same appliance, same hookup, same everything else.
You need to go grill some burgers in the summer, you know, for your uncle Ron coming over.
Do you roll the grill into your living room and fire it up?
No, you do it outside.
Why?
Because it's like gross and it has chemicals and things.
And it's the same thing with the gas stove.
It's there are parts of the country where people and this is like a whole nother issue that should be addressed.
They use gas stoves to heat their house.
Like you shouldn't do that.
It's not built for that.
It's not clean enough burning for that and so forth.
Could get into the weeds of it and what I imagine may happen someday is there going to be building codes that say if you have a gas stove you have to have an external like hood vent above your your stove and it has to vent it to outside and whatever.
There are also other pieces of this with the gas lobby that's driving this.
I live in a state where where I live right now if I have an electric stove in my house If I wanted to get a gas stove, I can't, because the gas company has a moratorium on new gas appliances.
Why?
Because they were blocked from putting pipelines through, and so their new tack is to say, well, gee, we'd love for more people to have, you know, gas stoves and things, but big bad government won't let us, and so you should go get mad at them.
And so that's another thing driving this, is the corporate interest.
All those people who think that they're owning the libs and whatever, you're like, yeah, you're just doing what the gas companies want you to do anyway.
The reality piece is, yeah, somebody's taking a look at it, and most of us would probably tell our kids not to like, oh, here's like a gas flame.
Just go breathe by it for a while.
Suck that in, right?
We would probably not do that.
So why does it have the force that it does?
And I think that's where we get into the culture war thing.
Like, what happens with that switch?
Why is it we can have all this factual information and it doesn't seem to matter?
Because as you say, it's about culture war.
And for me, it's about not just the sense of victimization, I think that's a piece of it, but creating the sense of victimization.
The people on the right need to have a mass of Americans, lots of regular Americans who feel targeted, who feel victimized.
And when there aren't real victimization, when you are the demographic that has collectively the most social power in the country, You have to create artificial senses of crisis.
You have to create a sense of victimization.
You stacked the Supreme Court.
You got rid of abortion.
You won that fight.
So what now?
Well, hey, let's go after gas stoves.
Because objectively, it's stupid, but subjectively, it can create that sense of crisis.
And it's about maintaining that sense of crisis.
It's the same thing DeSantis is doing with AP history courses or critical race theory or whatever.
You create the mountain out of the molehill so that somebody becomes scared of it and terrified of it.
And then what you do as the leader, the political opportunist, whatever, is you say, hey, I can solve this problem that I created.
And just take a look at me doing it.
And that's what you do.
And so these things that are not objectively anything that make complete sense, you weaponize them.
Whether that's vaccines, or whether that's masks, or whether that's gas stoves, or whether it's AP classes of like all things, you create that and the cumulative effect is you start feeling like you're assailed on all sides.
And that's how lots of White Christian nationalist Americans, the demographic of the GOP now, that's how they feel.
They feel like they've been under assault for years.
You look at it like, well, what is it?
Like wearing a mask, really?
Or like a vaccine that'll save your life?
Or gas stoves?
Which of these terrifying things?
But that's the effect.
I think that's the key, is it feeds on those emotions.
Sorry.
Yeah.
God.
The mask.
Sorry.
Just laughing out loud at the mask.
Like, I can't believe.
Anyway, whatever.
All right.
Reason for hope.
We got to get going.
My reason for hope this week, Dan, is Katie Porter is running for Senate in California and is going to hopefully replace Dianne Feinstein.
And it's out in the open now.
Dianne Feinstein hopefully is going to not run again.
And hopefully Katie Porter will be the person.
So that's my reason for hope.
My reason for hope, I mentioned the trips to Washington and the marches and things like that.
I continue to take hope in the energy of the abortion rights movement.
It was demoralizing in June when it became official.
It was demoralizing when it was leaked.
But there were some great articles about the way that they're rethinking what access is and creative things like funds for people and different kinds of things.
And I don't know, I just continue to find it hopeful, the energy and the momentum.
And I think longer term, better grassroots organizing around an issue that matters that I hope can translate into other things that the people who want a progressive and inclusive society have not been very good at doing a lot of times.
So I take hope in that.
All right, y'all.
We'll be back next week with a great interview that Dan has with a longtime colleague of ours.
