Brad and Dan begin by discussing the arrest of the FBI agent who was in charge of the NY bureau in the lead up to the 2016 election. He was arrested for working for Oleg Deripaska, a man who was at the center of the Trump-Russia scandal.
In the second segment they transition to the book banning policy in place under Ron DeSantis in Florida. They then compare the respective agendas of the Dems and the GOP by looking at how Red States in the Midwest are about to benefit from a renewed manufacturing sector as a result of the CHIPS Act.
In the final segment they discuss Kevin McCarthy's approach in the House and the way Michigan might be a model moving forward.
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Just wanted to say at the top here that it's been a very heavy week for Asian Americans in the United States.
And there was a mass shooting in Monterey Park over the Lunar New Year.
And then another one in Half Moon Bay, which is just up the road for me.
So I just want to say I'm thinking of everyone in Monterey Park, in Los Angeles, in Southern California.
Hard to state how Important Lunar New Year is for many Asian American communities in the United States and what it means.
Monterey Park is a kind of symbolic center for many people of Chinese American culture and life and Asian American culture and life in Southern California.
All that to say, thinking of all of you, thinking of just the ways that Lunar New Year will be changed forever for many people, and the ways that these kinds of senseless acts of violence continue to take place in our country in ways that could be different.
You're listening to an Irreverent Podcast.
Visit irreverent.fm for more content from our amazing lineup of creators.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center UCSB, and I'm here today with my co-host.
Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Nice to be with you, Brad.
It's even earlier for you than normal.
Brad's got the even cooler, like, Barry White-ish kind of voice going because it's early, so thanks for making the effort to get here so early.
It's when the time zones don't work is when we have to record early on Fridays.
I don't.
That is the first and last time I will be described in that manner.
But I do appreciate it.
So anyway.
All right.
Well, good to see you too, Dan.
And just always, you know, always.
I feel like we have some heavy topics every Friday, but it's always just good to be on the mic.
Good to be, you know, talking this stuff up with you.
All right, so today we're going to return to a story that never dies.
I heard Sarah Kinsey or say the other day that 2016 was the year that never ended.
And I actually think we may like get books someday, Dan, that are like the long, the long 2000s, like 2016, the longue duree.
You know what I mean?
The like, 2016, the year that lasted 16 years, you know?
Yeah, or like I teach a, you know, just intro level global history class and I'll talk about the long 20th century where we're still sort of in it.
It's that kind of thing where it's like the 2016 that lasted like 15 years, it feels like already.
No, and so we'll talk about some new developments in the Trump-Russia scandals, and this is not sort of grabbing at straws, this is an actual real-life arrest that I think some of you probably know what I'm talking about, but we'll get there in a minute.
We'll also get to just the very stark contrast between what's happening with the Democrats trying to basically persuade voters by way of helping people, whether that is enough or whether that is working is one thing, but that's the strategy at least, and the GOP taking power in the House and really
Once again trying to rule via culture war and also down in Florida to rule via draconian measures and just truly authoritarian approaches to schooling and other issues.
So we'll talk about all of that as well.
All right, so Dan, let's go to something we haven't talked about in a while, something that a lot of people are going to be like, I can't believe that that's still a thing, but it is.
And that is the fact that this week, a former senior FBI official from the New York Bureau office was arrested.
It's something that I think a bunch of you may have seen, but this FBI agent named McGonagall, and Dan, I don't know about you, but do you feel like this is a movie?
This guy's name is, I don't know, McGonagall sounds like a name that you would see.
Do you know what I mean?
It does.
Outside of Harry Potter, it sounds like, it needs to be either Harry Potter, where it's already there, or yeah, like some really cheesy spy thing where the editor would be like, You've got to change the name.
This is like a stereotype.
You can't have an agent with the name McGonagall in a book.
That's just too much of a giveaway.
That probably is what tipped them off, actually.
They were probably like, there has to be something wrong with this person because their name is too perfect for what they do.
Yeah, and if your name is McGonagall out there, nothing wrong with the name.
Okay, all we're saying is in terms of the context, to be named McGonagall in this context is really something.
Okay, so he's arrested, Dan, and he's arrested because he broke the law.
Okay, good start.
How did he break the law?
Well, he was helping.
He was providing aid to a Russian oligarch named Oleg Deripaska.
And Deripaska is somebody that some of you out there will remember, but Has really been sort of at the center of some of the Trump-Russia scandals.
Someone that Sarah Kensior and Andrei Chalupa over on their podcast, Gaslit Nation, talk about is kind of the face or the head of the octopus that is the kind of transnational network of Mafiosos, oligarchs, money launderers and so on.
Deripaska is just a kind of a big player in connecting Russian money, Russian oligarchy, Russian mafia to places like New York and including in the past Donald Trump.
So McGonigal was basically working for Deripaska.
He took $225,000 in secret cash payments.
Let's just break this down.
And he did this, Dan, while he was working for the FBI and supposed to be investigating McGonagall.
So let's just break this down, okay?
A week before the 2016 election between Trump and Clinton, the New York Times comes out with this article that's now infamous.
And I know it's easy to forget and there's just everything happens all at once these days and we don't remember things like this.
But a week before the election, article in the New York Times that basically says there's no link between Trump and Russia.
Just, there's nothing.
And it was this really kind of moment where that happened.
If you remember, Dan, this is the time when James Comey was getting on TV and telling everybody that we should be worried about Trump.
Hillary Clinton's emails.
So all of this is happening right before that fateful election.
And so the New York Times has been told by somebody at the FBI, let's say, that there's no link between Trump and Russia.
And, you know, who was the FBI agent who was heading up that investigation?
Who was the one at the New York Bureau who might have, I don't know, provided some intel for that New York Times article?
It was McGonagall.
Okay.
And so what we have here, Dan, is something that truly is out of a spy movie.
It truly is out of a somebody working as a double agent, somebody who took money.
I mean, can you imagine, Dan, you're hired to investigate someone and then you agree to take money from that person to do some of their side work and There is no way that you can actually be a legitimate investigator or somebody with any integrity in that situation.
And yet that's what's happening here.
So I have a bunch of thoughts.
I want to say one more thing about this.
It comes from Timothy Snyder over at Yale.
But anyway, you have any initial thoughts on this one?
Just a couple things that'll come up a little bit later is obviously Trump was not president yet when all that was going on in 2016, the New York Times article and things like that.
But it's going to come up later where we've got the GOP trying to make sure that investigations like that don't happen, don't continue to happen because they say that they target, you know, conservatives.
So there's a concerted effort to make sure things like that don't come to light.
And just the other one is, I'll be interested as this goes forward to see what kind of defense he mounts, but I'm pretty sure I've never been an FBI agent.
I think the ship has sailed on that.
I don't think that'll ever happen.
But I'm pretty sure if it's like every other workplace, you've got an employee handbook somewhere that's like, if you're an FBI agent, you're not allowed to say, make, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars.
from people you're supposed to investigate.
So I think I think that's it's a real key to put that into perspective for people.
You and I teach students if it turns out I've got a student who just so happens to you know pay me 50k a year you know on the side and they also seem to get A's in class and are never there it'll raise eyebrows and it'll be worth looking into.
So I mean it's definitely A really terrible look, and it raises all those questions of, yeah, this person was intimately involved in this.
What role, if anything, did they have in the public-facing piece of this, which is where the New York Times comes in?
So yeah, really telling a story, as you say, about a year, an election that seems to never go away.
And I'll just say, this is not really our wheelhouse.
Like, I am not somebody who lives in the details of the kind of Russian oligarchy and its various tentacles across the world, the various ways that Trump has been connected to the Russian oligarchy and to Russian mafiosos, the ways that Manafort... So this really brings back... So the name we have not brought up yet today, Dan, is Paul Manafort.
Paul Manafort was somebody who worked for Deripaska.
He actually owed Deripaska money.
So if some of this is jogging your memory, friends, Manafort owed Deripaska $19 million.
I believe it is.
Have to look up the figure.
And in this world of Russian mobsters and Russian oligarchs, owing someone $19 million usually means you're not around very long.
Manafort, by all accounts, was able to avoid that fate by basically promising to get Donald Trump elected.
And so if you remember, Manafort became Trump's campaign manager for a short time.
And this led to a meeting at Trump Tower with Don Jr.
and others where there was the supposed dirt on Hillary Clinton and blah, blah, blah.
So This brings, I mean, this is not just limited to Deripaska and McGonigal.
This brings in Manafort, which brings in Trump, which brings in the whole campaign, and so on and so forth.
So, all right, let me just, let me say two things.
One, if you do want details on this, like you want to be in the weeds and you really are like, oh my god, I want to get, I need to scoop, I need to understand this, go listen to Gaslit Nation by Sarah Kinsey or Andrea Chalupa.
We, I don't get anything saying that.
We have no, we're not partners.
There's no sponsorship.
I'm just saying I listened to their show when I need to know about this stuff and I listened to it this week and it really does help.
So I would say if you want people who are like, you know, can do it's in the code, but for like Russian mob and dirty money, that's them.
So they're going to give you the version that Dan gives on Wednesdays for, you know, white conservative Christianity.
Let me just finish by saying this, Dan, that Tim Snyder, the history professor over at Yale, points out some key details.
He says, the FBI investigation, Crossfire Hurricane.
It's really, it was really called Crossfire Hurricane, Dan.
McGonigal led Crossfire Hurricane.
I put that in my novel.
I sent it in and they sent it back.
I'm like, nope, that's not, we're not publishing that.
So anyway, all right.
Crossfire Hurricane, also like my favorite tiki bar in, you know, Tampa Bay, Florida.
So if, anyway, say my name for two-for-one drinks.
Okay, none of that's true.
I have, I've never been to Tampa Bay, Florida.
Here we go.
I'm going to concentrate, Dan.
I apologize.
Here we go.
Crossfire Hurricane focused on the narrow issue of personal connections between the Trump campaign and Russians.
It missed Russia's cyber attacks and the social media campaign, which according to Kathleen Halt Jamieson, won the election for Trump.
So if you listen to kind of Russia experts and people who have followed what Russia's Tactics were in places like Uzbekistan and Ukraine and former Soviet satellites.
What they will say is that the way they hold power there is through various means, but one of them is like cyber control and soft attacks by way of social media.
And of course, this is what happened in this country.
We know ahead of the 2016 election that's what happened.
So Snyder continues, once the issue of Russian soft control was framed narrowly as personal contact, Obama missed the big picture and Trump had an easy defense.
So what he's saying is the investigation got narrowed down to, well, does Trump know Deripaska?
Have they ever like hung out?
Do they, you know, smoke cigars together?
Did Don Jr.
like hang out with these mafiosos?
Where's your pictures of these guys, you know, having steaks together?
So they narrowed it to personal contact.
And so Snyder says Trump knew that Russia was working for him, but the standard of guilt was placed so high that he could defend himself.
The FBI did investigate cyber What's up, y'all?
Just wanted to say at the top here that it's been a very heavy week for Asian Americans in the United States.
And there was a mass shooting in Monterey Park over the Lunar New Year.
And then another one in Half Moon Bay, which is just up the road for me.
So I guess I just want to say I'm thinking of everyone in Monterey Park, in Los Angeles, in Southern California.
Hard to state how important Lunar New Year is for many Asian American communities in the United States and what it means.
Monterey Park is a kind of symbolic center for many people of Chinese American culture and life and Asian American culture and life in Southern California.
All that to say, thinking of all of you, thinking of just the ways that Lunar New Year will be changed forever for many people and the ways that these kinds of senseless acts of violence continue to take place in our country in ways that could be different.
All right, here's the show.
the cyber issues later and came to some correct conclusions, but this was after the election and it missed the Russia influence operations entirely.
What's the takeaway?
Well, here's what Snyder says.
This sort of thing was supposed to go through the FBI counterintelligence section in New York.
All of the cyber information, all of the tips, all of the kind of working to understand the grand strategy that Putin and Russia were putting in place.
But none of that happened, and the FBI counterintelligence section in New York missed it.
And guess what, Dan?
That's where McGonigal was in charge.
So I feel like as I was reading and learning about this this week, I was going down a conspiracy hole like, wait, this can't be real.
You're telling me the guy that was in charge of the FBI desk as it came to counterintelligence and cyber attacks took money from Oleg Deripaska, the guy that who basically was able to leverage Manafort into the Trump campaign.
And now you start putting up the charts on your whiteboard, and you're drawing the lines from this guy to that guy, and you feel like, what am I doing?
There's just so much conspiracy here.
And yet here it is.
I mean, it's pretty simple.
The FBI agent that we learned just took about a quarter million dollars from a Russian oligarch who happened to be the one that put Manafort in the place to be Trump's campaign manager, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Also looked the other way when it came to this whole cyber attack strategy that really was, and if you ask a lot of Russia experts and cybersecurity experts, media studies people, they're like, that is what won Trump the election.
The Facebook attacks, the bots, all of the ways that they infiltrated people's screens, this is what happened.
Snyder finishes, the cyber element is what McGonigal should have been making everyone aware of in 2016.
In 2016, McGonigal was chief of the FBI's Cyber Counterintelligence Coordination Section.
That October, he was put in charge of the Counterintelligence Division of the FBI's New York office.
So we need to understand, Snyder says, why the FBI failed in 2016 to address the essence of an ongoing Russia influence operation.
I'll stop there and just say this is a real scandal.
This is honestly...
I don't think that the Democrats or anyone else are going to reopen the Russia issue because I think what they're going to get is, come on, just let it go.
It was six years ago.
I understand that fear.
I understand why Adam Schiff just can't get on all the Sunday shows perhaps and talk about this.
He has other concerns.
This is, I don't know what else to say, Dan.
I'm not an expert in this, and yet I can sort of put together enough pieces to see that this is a real problem.
So anyway, last thoughts before we come back to the domestic side.
Yeah, just a couple.
One is, it brings up, it's the same thing that you're bringing up with, excuse me, the Obama administration and the notion of no personal contacts, right?
Because It's not the claim that Trump masterminded all of this.
And I'm still firmly of the opinion that Trump would take help anywhere and everywhere he could get it, no holds barred, whatever.
But I don't think Trump is a strategic genius.
I think, you know, he didn't.
This is not the claim that he put together this entire Russian plan and put it in place and whatever.
It is the claim that he benefited from it.
That he probably had some sense that the Russians were helping him or the Russians were pulling for him or they wanted him to be president and was sort of like, they'll take whatever they can get.
And I think that's important.
I think that's another thing that people missed along with the Obama administration was the notion that if Trump's not a puppet master pulling the strings at this, then there's no connection between Trump and Russia, right?
And it shows the complexities of that.
And you raised the question of the conspiracy.
I've got conspiracy on my mind.
I'm teaching about conspiracy this semester and students will ask, others will ask, what's the difference between a conspiracy theory and a real conspiracy?
Because there are cases where people conspire to do things and they act in secret and evidence is hard to find because they're trying to hide it and so forth.
And the best you can do is say when you eventually find evidence, can you find evidence of it as it comes to light and so forth, rather than the sort of endless deferral of evidence and so on.
And that's what this is.
It does look like there was I don't know.
I'm with you.
I'm not in the weeds of like how FBI investigations work and things like that.
of that in like a legal sense, but somebody who was conspiring to hide something.
And the other thing is, I don't know.
I'm with you.
I'm not in the weeds of like how FBI investigations work and things like that.
But given his role, we regular people hear FBI investigation and it sounds grandiose and I suspect that like lots and lots of jobs in the world running the cybersecurity thing is a hell of a lot of pushing around paper and shuttling emails and triaging and deciding what email gets forwarded and what gets prioritized by this working group and what gets kind of shelved.
And if you're the person in charge of that, that's exactly the kind of bottleneck you get to play.
So my suspicion is it would be a rather simple matter when you've got 15 possible leads to say, you know what, I've looked at this, I've talked to my team, we're going to focus on these five.
And to make sure that one of those that could derail things for you is put into the, you know, the inbox that'll be sorted out later.
So it's not as outlandish as people might think.
To hear that one person could play a significant role in this, given his role and given what I think are the real machinery of what goes on in any kind of administrative bureaucratic system like the FBI or any other large institution.
You know, and he took $225,000.
That's reported.
So here's, here's, I have just one thought on this.
Either he really got shortchanged because he's dealing with a billionaire, somebody with like $50 billion.
I don't have to look up Deripaska's net worth, but it's like $50 billion.
And don't get me wrong, Dan, if you gave me $225,000 right now, that would change my life in some sense.
You know, that's a lot of money for me.
That would, I mean, I would be going to Chipotle today and I would get guacamole on my burrito, okay?
I'm going to tell you that's the first thing I would do.
I would get guacamole on the house.
Everyone in line behind me would get guacamole.
That's how I would roll if you gave me $225k right now.
But if you got $225k from a guy with like tens of billions of dollars, it's like you're going down for that.
So here's my thought.
I don't think that's it.
Like, $225k from a guy like that is like getting a $5 tip.
My guess is this is just not the total amount of money that McGonagall pocketed.
But, you know, anyway, that doesn't, that's neither here nor there.
All right, let's take a break.
We'll come back.
And once again, Dan, back to Florida.
Be right back.
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It's not like I asked for the job.
Actually, no one would ask for this job.
At least half the people will hate whatever I say and almost everyone thinks I'm a little crazy.
Getting a date is next to impossible.
I've got a radio host who is making up conspiracies about me, a dude actually shooting at me, and an unhinged president threatening me.
But the job isn't all that bad.
I've gotten to see the country, and meet some really interesting people, and hopefully do some good along the way.
You can find my story on Amazon, Audible, or iTunes.
Just look for American Profit by Jeff Fulmer.
That's American Profit by Jeff Fulmer.
Okay, so we are not the Uncle Ron DeSantis Show, I promise.
I know some of you are like, I don't want to talk about that guy.
He's annoying, and this and that.
But one of the things I think that is shaping up for us, Dan, is that as we sort of are in this period between the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential election, What we're watching are people jockeying and trying to make a name for themselves as viable candidates, especially viable candidates as opposed to Donald Trump.
And DeSantis is doing the most.
And as a result, Florida is really becoming the kind of like epicenter for how this radical faction or this radical party, I should say, that is now the GOP, is sort of Projecting the society it wants to create if it was in power.
So, if it were in power.
And so, anyway, we'll go back to Florida and we're going to contrast this with some Biden stuff and some Michigan stuff and other things.
But what is going on in Florida now?
Yeah, so the first thing is you say like Florida.
I think Florida is like a lab right now.
That's what it is.
So we talk about Biden.
Biden's like a, or excuse me, not Biden, DeSantis.
He's like a placeholder.
We keep talking about Trumpism beyond Trump or after Trump or beyond Trump.
And the figure of that in a lot of ways right now is DeSantis.
But for me, he's much more sort of symbolic of these kind of movements and developments within the GOP.
So it's not even about DeSantis.
He's the one who's sort of embodying this right now.
It could be somebody else later.
It's not about the state of Florida, except insofar as Florida is becoming like a laboratory for this.
And we could look at places like Texas, right, with some really similar things and proposals in other places.
But what is this?
We've talked about this, that one of the things that the GOP has clearly sort of settled on and picked up on as a way of continuing the wave of kind of culture war stuff that really heightened in 2016 and beyond, is around education.
And we've been talking about this for a long time, right?
Banning critical race theory, banning topics that make students, quote unquote, uncomfortable, you know, about racial or ethnic history, and so on and so forth.
So we talked last episode about the AP board, which are the ones that come up with the college board, the AP courses, advanced placement, history courses, and things like that, that a lot of people probably took in high school.
Get college credit before you start college, all of that.
I had an African American Studies course I've been working on for like 10 years.
They're ready to release it.
Florida blocked it, said it was contrary to Florida law, and so forth.
This week that continues, first of all, when reports come out that they're going to modify the course and everybody in the DeSantis administration in Florida is sort of crowing about how this is because of them and they've saved America from this radical course and so forth.
The AP people have come out and said this had nothing to do with Florida, they're not capitulating, whatever.
Leave that aside, that's part of the ongoing story.
But related to this was this story that has been coming out this week about a new law that was passed by the DeSantis administration, I guess in March, that went into effect early this year, that is really chilling.
And ironically, or I guess fittingly, if you're DeSantis or somebody, it came out during Literacy Week, excuse me, National Literacy Week and all this other stuff.
Where in Florida now, there is a law that says that non-curriculum books, so like in like classrooms, so I've got a kid who's in grade school, you go into a grade school classroom, there's you know the corner with the little carpets and chairs and stuff and shelves full of books or school libraries or media centers or whatever, That any non-curriculum text to be there has to be approved by a media specialist.
That's in quotes that some certification they get to make sure that it's not running afoul of Florida rules about race and ethnicity and gender and sexuality and all these other things that came up with the thing with the AP course that have come up with other things.
And so we've had these stories of people, you know, teachers who Have to clear these books out until they're approved.
Couple things about this, right?
First of all, if a teacher presents something, or I guess if a student goes home with a book from their classroom media center that their parents don't like, they think that it's too radical or it's too progressive or, you know, Timmy has two moms or whatever, and they complain to the school or they complain to the state, the teacher can be confronted with felony charges and lose their teaching license.
Right?
So this is a criminalization of anything that the DeSantis administration thinks runs afoul of what they want.
And what do we know what that is?
We know what that is because we've seen for the last half decade or more that it's anything that for us, in the language we use all the time, basically isn't white, Christian, straight, nationalist, anything that doesn't fit that narrative.
Is going to be silenced and sort of cast out.
That's the first point, right?
Which is chilling enough.
The other thing I think is worth noting is that I, as I understand it, caveat that I'm not a legal expert.
I haven't like read the law.
I've been reading accounts about it.
I'm reading from other attorneys and things like that.
These books have to be approved on the list to be used.
In other words, there's a kind of a burden of proof, if you like, that a book is guilty until proven acceptable to the DeSantis administration.
Why does that matter?
It matters because it's not that students get to have these books on the shelves.
And use them.
And if somebody has a concern, there's some process they can go through to voice that and have them vetted.
They have to be vetted first before anybody can use them.
That's my understanding of the law.
So it's really, really chilling.
It's, as you, I think, used the language of authoritarian earlier, it's a kind of fascistic authoritarian sort of model.
It fits the culture war effort that the GOP is all about now, so much so that Trump is now running to catch up on this.
He released some campaign video where he's talking about his education policy and basically trying to now gain the momentum that people like DeSantis has.
It shows the weaponization of the education system, but it also shows, I think, that I don't even know what the right word is.
Cynical isn't enough, right?
Effort to just simply silence anything that doesn't imagine America the way that this wing of the GOP and American conservatism wants to imagine America.
Anything that challenges their narrative of who and what America is, who and what the real Americans are, whether it does with faith or gender or sexuality.
This is very much at the forefront, ties in with the so-called Don't Say Gay and so many other things.
And again, I see Florida as a lab where this is playing out.
It's like the testing ground of what the GOP is going to roll out in more and more places, and I think more and more visibly and nationally as we get closer to 2024.
So, one thing I remember so clearly, Dan, from grad school was a professor who, we were going over the syllabus, and you know, if you've been in grad school for the humanities, you know that you'll sit down and it'll be like a seminar on Foucault.
I don't know.
I'm just picking something, Dan.
And you're like, oh, we're going to just read nothing but Foucault.
Holy moly, right?
And even when you do, you read nothing but Foucault for a whole semester.
The professor will start by saying like, well, you know, we had to make some choices, right?
Because you can't read all of Foucault, even though that's all we're doing for the whole semester.
We're going to read this book and that article and this thing and that one.
And then we're going to read this book about Foucault.
And what that professor said way back when was every syllabus is already a set of choices.
Like if you could be teaching you I mean I have so many friends who teach like U.S.
American history and it's like what do I teach?
Do I teach the know nothings?
How much of the Whigs do we know about?
The second great awakening?
Prohibition?
Temperance movements?
I mean you have to choose what you talk about right?
So what's my point?
Every time the DeSantis administration is asked about education, they say, I don't want somebody pushing an agenda on our kids.
That's their take.
I just want the education.
Leave the politics out of it.
Leave the other stuff out of it.
Okay?
And I think anybody, Dan, coming from our training is going to say, there is no leaving any agenda out of it.
There is no not making choices for the kids in terms of what they're going to learn.
And in essence, The books you are willing to assign, allow in your classroom, in the little third grade corner, whatever it is, they reflect your agenda.
They reflect the choices you've made.
Okay?
There's no neutrality here.
There's always choices made by humans who are choosing what they want to focus on when it comes to children.
and what they're going to learn or grad students or undergrads or anyone else high school students blah blah blah okay so when he says you have to approve every book so that we make sure there's no agenda what he's saying is my agenda And my very narrow view of the choices, educationally, that children can be exposed to in Florida public schools is the only one that matters.
There is no room for debate.
There's no room for context.
There's no room for things that I'm not aware of that maybe would be really good for people to learn and be aware of.
None of that.
So I just want people to see that.
I'll just bring up this part.
He was asked this week about the Black History course, the AP course we talked about last week.
And he says, and I'm quoting now, this course on black history, what's one of the lessons about?
Queer theory.
Now, who would say that an important part of black history is queer theory?
So I'll just stop and say narrator voice.
A lot of people would say that.
A lot.
Many, many people, Dan, who study these things would say yes.
I'm just also going to throw in, if he doesn't know the answer, maybe he could take the course and it would explain why queer theory matters for understanding African American history, African American studies.
Like, maybe what he needs to do is not shut down the course, maybe he needs to take it.
There it is.
Touche.
So, he continues.
Okay, so who would say queer theory is part of black history?
That is somebody pushing an agenda on our kids.
And so, when you look to see they have stuff about intersectionality, abolishing prisons, that's a political agenda.
And so, that's the wrong side of the line for Florida standards.
What he's really saying is, that's the wrong side of the line for Florida's conception of the past, the present, and the future.
The standard here, the word standard is a stand-in for here's my vision of the past, here's what I want to happen now, and here's how I see the future going, and talking about intersectionality, queer theory, and abolishing prisons threatens that, and so I don't want it anywhere near anyone.
I'll just say very clearly, I think it's helpful to break things down.
If you live in a society where the schools have to go to the central government for permission on what books to read, if books are, and you said it so perfectly, and you said this, not me, I'll just repeat it.
If books are presumed guilty before they are deemed innocent, You're living in an authoritarian situation, okay?
And do not ever tell me, Uncle Ron.
Do not ever tell me, Libertarian.
Do not ever tell me, GOP person, about small government.
Don't even let those words come out of your mouth, pal.
You want to tell me there's small government and third grade teachers could face a felony for having a book that makes somebody uncomfortable.
I'll give you one example of a book, Dan, and then I'll shut up.
I read my, my 16 year old, 16 month daughter books all the, every day.
And some of them include, uh, many characters and themes that I'm sure Uncle Ron DeSantis would, would not like and approve of about, uh, trans children and about queer families and about all kinds of things.
But I'm, I'm going to think of one.
Okay.
And one of them is about food.
And it's about this little girl who eats pizza every night.
And she's essentially convinced that she should go out and try other other things.
So she goes down the hall and she eats tagine and she goes down the hall to another place and she eats bimbab and she's If I'm a third grade teacher, am I going to put that in?
I don't know.
It's basically celebrating multiculturalism.
And she goes to the dumpling truck and eats these amazing Chinese dumplings.
And she realizes that she doesn't have to have just one favorite food, that there's a lot of foods that are amazing and that she can have more than one best food.
And it's like this really cute ending.
I don't know, Dan, if I'm a third grade teacher, am I gonna put that in?
I don't know.
It's basically celebrating multiculturalism.
It's basically saying people should eat food or at least try it from all over the place.
It's basically saying that it's really good to have a multicultural society.
I don't know if, maybe, I'm not going to lie.
If I might face a felony and someone's going to go home and say, you know, Mr. Onishi has this book that says I need to eat Egyptian food.
I need to eat Arab food.
And you know, I need to eat food from China.
And some parent's going to be like, this guy, this guy's teaching my kid to love China.
And now all of a sudden I might be facing a felony.
That's what we're getting at.
I mean, it's not, you see what I'm saying?
You see how authoritarianism works?
It just trickles down into those decisions.
Anyway, all right, I'll be quiet.
Final thoughts on this one before we kind of transition into The other side, yeah.
That's fine.
My only final thought is just to pick up on another theme of this is that it's damaging for so many reasons, authoritarian for so many reasons, but one is there are real people involved in this, right?
There are students in that class, I don't care what class it is, who are struggling with gender identity and what it means that they don't feel like a boy like the other boys do or whatever.
There are students who have same-sex parents.
There are students whose Fathers, relatives, mothers have been imprisoned and they wouldn't have been if they were white or had enough money to afford a good attorney or whatever.
All of these really, really real world issues.
And this comes up, for me, this comes up when you get the conversation, well, back in my day, we didn't have kids questioning gender identity or back when I grew up, there were no gay people.
Yeah, there were.
They were there.
You just didn't see it.
You didn't know it.
They might not have known it because there was no way for them to see where they fit, but they're there.
And that's exactly what this kind of law and this kind of rule is trying to ensure, is those people are simply erased.
Eradicated, kept in place, kept on the margins, or whatever else.
And that's the part that I find not just sort of infuriating, but just kind of heartbreaking, right?
To think about the students in those classes who need these kinds of books and resources, and that it is exactly because they need them that they are being denied them by DeSantis and the GOP.
That's what they're about.
And it's, so it's, we're talking about LGBT kids.
We're talking about black studies, African-American studies.
Uh, not an accident.
People ask me, why are shows called Straight White American Jesus?
And some, some Fridays it's pretty clear.
All right.
We'll be back in a minute.
All right, Dan.
So here's the flip side.
And I think one of the things we're arguing right now is that Ron DeSantis really looks like the kind of, um, The frontrunner for not only 2024, but for outlining this kind of like Republican vision.
I mean, I think you said it right.
Donald Trump's trying to keep up with DeSantis now, which I think says something.
Okay.
One of the things that happened this week, and I'll throw this to you for a second here and we can just kind of touch on it quickly is the Republicans took over the House and they basically denied Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell seats on prominent committees.
And this was all in retaliation for not allowing Marjorie Taylor Greene and some others on committees before.
And it brings up the both sides thing.
And it's like, well, you didn't let Marjorie Taylor Greene on a really important committee, so we're not letting Adam Schiff on.
And that's what Fox News will tell you.
That's what Uncle Ron will tell you.
And I just want to say that It's comparing apples and oranges.
You may love or not love Adam Schiff.
Adam Schiff's a very accomplished lawyer who's done a lot of things when it comes to legislation and so on.
Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks there are space lasers controlled by Jewish people.
Marjorie Taylor Greene shows up at white nationalist rallies.
So I'm not going to just accept that they're the same thing.
The Republicans are basically running on culture war.
Three out of four Americans say that Republicans spend too much time, McCarthy spends too much time on just like things like transgender sports and potato head and gas stoves.
And so that's all happening.
Anyway, any comment on just on that before we, there's a point here that we're leading up to, but just want to, if you, if you want to get in here on, you know, McCarthy and all this business.
Just the Orwellian nature of it.
So like, I mean, Speaker of the House, and which means that, and this is just typical, right?
Whatever party controls the House has the most members on these different committees.
So, you know, they control the committees.
So the speaker's discretion can, as I understand it, can block people from being on committees and so forth.
But typically what happens, because Schiff was the chair of the Intelligence Committee.
It's the Intelligence Committee that we're primarily talking about here, though McCarthy is also trying to remove Ilhan Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee.
This is all part of the deal that he made to get the far right of the GOP caucus to support him.
Normally, the outgoing chair of the committee becomes like the ranking member of the minority on the committee.
It's rare for them to simply be removed.
The rationale that was given, because McCarthy wrote this letter to the minority leader saying that, you know, he appreciated, you know, their efforts and this and that and their loyalty, but that he couldn't allow loyalty, partisan loyalty, to threaten national security.
As they form other investigative committees simply aimed at political opponents and intentionally stacked with the most aggressive right-wing members of their party.
So the reason I call it Orwellian is because once again we have this doublespeak in that Orwellian sense where McCarthy will say we can't have exactly what it is that the GOP is doing and has been doing.
They have this new committee or panel The weaponization of the federal government panel that is supposed to do what?
This will bring us back to some of these investigations.
It's supposed to look at how the Democrats have weaponized the Department of Justice and targeted conservatives and so forth.
Again, stacked with the most right-wing, anti-government, anti-democratic people that they can find.
So you have a committee that's going to take aim at things exactly like the Russia investigation and say that it never should have happened, there was nothing to see there, even as you have arrests going on for somebody who looks like, you know, a secret agent working for the Russians.
All the while saying, well, no, we can't have the former chair of the Intelligence Committee on there because he's too partisan.
It's a weaponization.
So it's that, again, cynicism and the, like, just sort of out in the open authoritarianism of this, of decrying what your enemies do in the name of exactly what it is that you do.
And I think that dynamic is one that, again, we've seen play out over and over and over in the past few years.
Yeah, anyway, that's the only muscle memory left in the Republican Party, but anyway.
All right, so what's the point here?
We have McCarthy doing this.
We have DeSantis doing everything we just talked about.
We have the culture wars of gas stoves that we talked about last week.
So on the flip side, we have something that I think is really interesting, Dan, which is that the legislation that was passed in the last session with Biden's approval and Biden's obvious agenda is set to really sort of start to make some inroads.
And one of the ways it's going to do that is through the CHIPS Act and manufacturing.
Another is through Medicaid.
So I want to talk about Abigail Spanberger, a Democratic representative, who is writing at Fox News, Dan.
This is a piece from Fox News by a Democratic congressperson, okay?
She says, I was proud to vote for the Inflation Reduction Act because I'm already hearing stories about Virginians who can now afford the preventative healthcare they need.
We're seeing consequential savings and lower health care costs for families, small business owners, and seniors across our commonwealth.
She goes on to talk about how it has lowered premiums.
It has also lowered the cost of things like prescription drugs, and it limits the cost of insulin.
She says it gives Medicare the power to negotiate for lower prices.
It caps out-of-pocket costs for Medicare beneficiaries at $2,000 a year, and it creates penalties for transnational pharmaceutical companies that raise their prices faster than the rate of inflation.
It caps insulin at $35 a month, and so on and so forth.
Okay.
So what she's saying is that I'm in Virginia, a purple state, I'm writing at Fox News and I'm telling you all of the older and graying folks in my commonwealth who are being helped by this.
People that may actually be inclined to, I don't know, sit at home and watch Fox News and talk about how the country is different than when they grew up and blah, blah, blah.
Okay?
Another front on this, Dan, is manufacturing.
And this is a new report from the Brookings Institute.
One of the most auspicious aspects of the Biden administration's surge in industrial policy legislation is the possibility of creating thousands of new accessible and tech-related blue-collar and new-collar jobs for people without college degrees.
The potential for such work has been most widely championed in the context of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act.
So, infrastructure and inflation reduction.
Less noticed, though, is the potential of last summer's Chips and Science Act, which seeks to reignite domestic semiconductor manufacturing after decades of offshoring.
So, there's some really good pieces in the Washington Post and other places this week that really sort of contextualize this.
What would this look like?
And what it would look like is places like the Rust Belt, Ohio, and other Midwest states that are pretty much red right now, they've been voting red for going on eight years, having manufacturing plants with high paying jobs that are really important, and For which you do not need a college degree.
Okay?
So let's just play it out.
And I have family members who live in towns like this, right?
Places where there used to be factories, where their grandfather worked in a factory.
He was the only guy in the family with a job.
Mom stayed home, three kids, and they were able to have a house and pay the mortgage.
And now everyone in the town is like, that's gone and what do we do?
I have a lot of family members from my wife's side who live in this kind of situation.
Well, what if a manufacturing plant opens up and the semiconductors are being manufactured there and you don't need a college degree and you're good at this sort of work and you can go make money, good money, $75, $80, $100,000 a year.
And yeah, it's kind of, I don't know, doing stuff that might actually be related to green technology.
Maybe, right, you're in a plant that is helping to make parts that are going to go in the Ford truck, the Ford Lightning, the electric truck Ford is making or other green technologies.
And, you know, you're saying, wait a minute, I'm a Republican and is climate change real?
But this plant's offering me a great job.
And it's all because of this CHIPS Act and so on, right?
Here's what people are writing about.
I'll just, we're going to run out of time today, so I'll just summarize.
Can you make inroads as a Biden administration, a Democratic Party in places like Ohio or Wisconsin or other parts of the Midwest?
Through this kind of work, can you basically have a situation where blue collar folks who are largely voting Republican at the moment, but feel left behind, feel like they can't get ahead, they can't get enough money for a mortgage and the kids and everything else.
That if you have these kinds of jobs that are largely related to green technologies, not only will you help people, which is the whole port of government, but you might open the eyes to the fact that all the propaganda they've heard about big government and Biden and the Green New Deal and all this stuff might just fall away because it's like, you guys are offering me a great job.
I don't have a college degree.
I can work locally in my town in Pennsylvania, in central PA or in Ohio or Wisconsin or Michigan.
And this is a really nice thing.
So I want to talk about Michigan a little bit further, but I'll just throw this to you for your initial thoughts on this.
Just real quickly, I think the challenge, right?
Because I agree with everything that you're saying.
You've been saying it for a long time since Biden won and Biden was running, was doing things to actually help people.
That's how one should try to win elections, try to show that you belong there and all of this.
What the GOP has right now is they're the free riders on this.
They get to, in other words, stand up and use all the rhetoric against the Green New Deal and against all of these things and the Biden administration and all this other stuff while their residents and their states benefit from the policies that they're busy grandstanding about, right?
So they're essentially free riders.
They get to have it both ways, or they want to have it both ways, to decry these things but reap the benefits.
And so I think the thing to watch going forward, I think it's awesome that these things are happening.
What I hope Democrats can do is capitalize on it as we move forward into 2024 and beyond.
Because what they need to do when they go and campaign in places like Ohio or Michigan or wherever, where these things are, is say, hey, Senator X, who's busy talking about how climate science isn't real and hates the Green New Deal and whatever, he wants to take your job.
He wants to take away this new factory that's starting up.
He wants to undo what has done.
And I just, as I watch this, I hope the Democrats have learned this lesson that they have to really name what is going on in a way that people can understand and feel.
So I think this is like laying the perfect groundwork for that.
I hope that they don't fumble the ball going forward.
By talking about things like baskets of deplorables or, you know, whatever other missteps they can make.
Because you're right, this is affecting real people.
And I think that people need to connect those dots, to keep connecting those dots and say, the person you think is looking out for you in Washington, every time they're standing up screaming about all this other stuff, They would take away what you have.
And we've seen this.
We saw this with healthcare.
We saw this in 2016 and 2017 when the Republicans won and started wanting to dismantle Obamacare.
And you had places in the country where people were like, all of a sudden, wait a minute, what?
Like, I actually like that I have healthcare now.
The person I voted for, that's what they meant when they talked about Obamacare or the Affordable Care Act?
I remember, I'm spinning out, but I remember somebody who said, I'm opposed to Obamacare, but I get my insurance through the Affordable Care Act, like literally in an interview.
And the interviewer had to say, those are the same thing.
It's that kind of work that has to go forward because we've seen it work before, it can work again.
So that's, I think, just moving forward what we have to see from them to really be able to connect those dots so that the Marjorie Taylor Greene's and others don't get to claim victory on something they opposed.
No, and this is what happened in Michigan.
Michigan was leaning red, and Gretchen Whitmer and others in Michigan have really sort of turned the tide there.
Here's a quote from Washington Post this week.
Republicans really leaned into anti-trans, anti-LGBT issues, Heather Williams, acting head of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee told me.
Democrats hope governing inclusively on those issues can cement a long-term shift.
You will see people's lives changed.
And Democrats will talk to voters about what they did with the power.
Gretchen Whitmer talks about economic fairness and she basically says that, you know, her approach is, look, you can do the culture mongering, you can do the culture wars, you can do all that stuff, but we're just going to do economic fairness.
We're going to make it so that people can have jobs and they can afford their lives People have healthcare and they will have a safety net when they get sick and so on and so forth.
And we're not going to demonize people and just spend all of our time yelling about, you know, how everyone in the world is a pedophile or a groomer or something else.
Now, I will say, Dan, I think you're exactly right.
If you don't message the correct way, you don't get credit.
And people don't realize that voting for the Republican who talks nothing but election denial and serpent DNA is going to try to take all this away.
I think second, and I just want to be clear about this because I think it's important, that economic fairness is good and this is helpful.
Put these jobs in American cities and towns.
It does not guarantee the protection of LGBT people.
It does not guarantee that trans people will be seen and protected.
It does not guarantee... So I don't want to fall into a neoliberal trap that economic fairness means equality and liberty and humanity for all people because that's not true.
However, I think it's worth pointing out today that this is what we've talked about.
If you help people and you give somebody a really good job, even though they don't have a college degree, and they can stay in their hometown and feed their family, maybe you just totally outstrip whatever they heard about how Democrats are trying to destroy their lives.
So, all right, we got to go.
What is your reason for hope this week, Dan Miller?
I channeled my inner Brad Onishi, which means I have a reason for hope with significant caveats.
So, you know, people can do what they want with that, but I was hopeful there was this awful, yet another awful story about an unarmed African American man killed by police, Tyree Nichols, in Memphis.
And I was heartened by the fact that all five of the officers involved had been charged with multiple charges, including murder.
Let me be really, really clear.
Every time an unarmed black man that just everything we know so far does not look like this person deserved to die for whatever it was that he was doing that led to a traffic stop.
Every time there are charges filed and the process works, I think that that's important.
I think it's crucial.
What are my caveats?
The caveats are that all five of the officers are black.
And it makes me wonder if that's why charges were filed more easily.
It concerns me that maybe the reason this investigation took like three weeks and it didn't take six months or eight months and a bunch of people digging it up in the past to get the police to do anything.
is because they're black officers, their union is being pretty silent.
And I wonder if maybe the reason the union's not running lots of interference for them as they often do is because they're not white officers.
So that's the part of me that has concerns about that.
But I am heartened by the fact that not obviously that we had another one of these incidents, but that the criminal justice system has responded in a much more stronger A much stronger, much faster way than it normally does.
We'll watch it going forward, but I took hope in at least that aspect of this story.
We did not plan this.
I was going to talk about this too.
And I'm not sure, you know, I don't know.
I don't know if this is a reason for hope or not.
I'll be really honest.
It may not, in my mind, fit the category.
But, you know, I used to live in Memphis.
I have a lot of friends and colleagues still in Memphis.
I just want to say to Memphis, I'm thinking about you and I know this is going to be a really hard couple weeks and that this brings up a lot of complicated uh issues and themes uh the themes of police brutality the themes of of black death but also the fact that these officers are black people and memphis uh is just it's just it's it's it's a it's obviously a city with a long history of racialized violence police brutality and and so on
so anyway i'm thinking of you in the bluff city all right dan um i've got to say Got a couple events coming up this week.
Six days from now, I'll be at the University of San Francisco giving a lecture.
You can find that on our link tree.
It's absolutely free.
So if you want to come hang out in San Francisco, let us know and come hang out.
You don't actually have to let us know.
You can just come hang out.
23, be at Santa Clara University.
So if you're in or around Santa Clara, come hang out.
And other than that, we'll be back next week with It's in the code with a really great interview on traditional Catholics and the weekly roundup.
