On the Weekly Roundup Brad and Dan begin by going through the litany of Trump's attempts to thwart NY DA Alvin Bragg's case against him and his call for supporters to protest if/when he is arrested. This, in their mind, portends the kind of violence we saw at January 6th. They also note the complicity of GOP leadership in Trump's attacks on the DA and the ways the GOP has tied itself to Trumpism regardless of who is running for office.
In the second segment the hosts check in on a number of cases in Mississippi, Texas, and Pennsylvania where state-level officials have taken over local school districts, police forces, and other agencies when Black officials are in charge. It is a state takeover of local agencies targeting POC communities.
In the final segment Brad geeks out over new revelations of meddling in the 1980 election - by way of Iran. It's a story you won't believe until you hear it.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, here today with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Nice to see you, Brad, as always.
You too, Dan.
I am beat.
Like, I am beyond tired this week.
Yeah, that'll probably come through.
Whenever I'm, like, tired and I teach, and this is what happened yesterday, I get, like, wildly demonstrative, and the kids, like, think I have way too much coffee.
I tend to, like, stand on tables and lay on the ground and wave my hands, and so I was trying to teach things.
Actually, yesterday I was teaching about Christian nationalism, but in another class I was teaching about David Hume's arguments against Uh, Thomas Aquinas' Arguments for God.
And it got very dramatic.
And I think the kids were like, hey, no one, no one really cares that much, man.
It's David Hume.
We're just, we're just here because we want to graduate.
So just calm down.
You know what I mean?
Well, I don't know.
I feel like every student evaluation I've ever gotten is usually like, I wish we could talk about David Hume more.
Like that's what would have made the class stronger.
But yeah, I think it's better than me.
I just get cranky.
Like I'll even tell students, I'm like, I'm in the cranky part of the semester.
So like, Just tread lightly, but they take it usually in good spirit.
So I will say, just for people who listen, that whole thing about there's no such thing as a dumb question, it's just not true.
I'm just going to put that out there and leave it there and we can move on.
But that's cranky end of the semester Dan Miller thing there is.
And the real issue is the student who comes in like, you know, and people know this from meetings, whatever, 10 minutes after you start and you've been talking about something and you get the person who waltzes in like two minutes after that and then raises their hand is like, so are we going to talk about, you know, whatever?
So maybe it's not a stupid question.
Maybe it's just ill-timed, but anyway, yeah.
So you can like spin around on the floor and, and like jump on tables and I'll be cranky and students will probably just be glad they don't have to take classes with both of us.
I appreciate that your reviews say more Hume.
You know, there used to be this skit with Will Ferrell, this is showing how old I am, but it said more Cowbell, like it was all about more Cowbell.
I need more Cowbell.
So I'd like a shirt that says I need more David Hume.
And anyway, whatever.
All right.
Speaking of shirts, look at that segue.
Look at that segue, Dan.
Speaking of shirts.
We just dropped a new Swedge set of merch that, like, I'm super excited about.
We have been sort of working for a long time to try to get our merch stuff in order and basically we have new merch now and we're gonna have a bunch of new stuff dropping in the next couple of weeks.
Our friend of the show, somebody who was my student at Skidmore, someone who's an amazing person, Isaiah Perkins, helped us with this.
I'm going to thank Isaiah.
But if you go to our website, or I'm sorry, you go to our link tree in our website, you will see a link to our spring catalog.
And there you'll see a really cool set of shirts, stickers, mugs that say Election Affirmer.
So I just think that's brilliant.
I'm waiting for mine.
Dan, once we get our shirts and stuff in, we will like take pictures and do a full on Instagram, you know, modeling situation so people can see the Election Affirmer shirt.
But I just want to say, Some of you out there, if you want to like, if you're not a Patreon person or you're not the kind of person who wants to like, you know, send in donations or something, but you still appreciate the show, go, go buy a mug, go buy a sweatshirt that says election affirmer.
And it's got our little name on there and we're pretty proud of it.
And, um, I think it's pretty cool.
So that's happening.
Um, want to say we're also still looking for an intern.
So, um, we've got some applications and.
We have about another week if you'd like to send something in, and we'll be in touch.
So let us know if you're interested, and I'll send you the form to fill out.
So you can email us at straightwhiteamericanjesus at gmail.com.
All right?
Okay.
Dan, we did the announcements.
I did.
I did.
I got it, I think, all correct.
So I'm pretty excited about these election affirmer shirts and mugs and stuff.
I think it's pretty awesome.
We're going to talk about Trump and just a lot of craziness this week, including potential arrest.
We're going to talk about some local stories in Philadelphia and in Vermont and in Texas.
But some of them really center on kind of state control of local entities where African-Americans are in charge.
Kind of war against black people having authority in government, and we'll say more in a minute.
And we're also going to talk about a 40 year old story going back to the Carter Reagan election, a momentous election in the nation's history and one that has Obviously, deep ties to the kinds of Christian nationalist themes we talk about all the time on the show.
So, gonna get there.
I'm gonna throw it to you, Dan, first, to take us through Trump's wild week, even for Trump.
Seems like a wild week, and it all began, at least in some way, with him calling his supporters to protest if he got arrested.
So, what's that about and what else is happening?
Yeah.
So, you know, we couldn't possibly go with a week without, you know, having to talk about Trump.
So a few things to sort of set this up.
Trump, as everybody probably recognizes, increasingly faces legal peril on more fronts than I'll even remember.
We got classified documents, the investigation in New York about potential hush money, the alleged hush money paid to Stormy Daniels, the Georgia election interference case.
There are also civil lawsuits against Trump about January 6th.
Brought by members of Congress and the Capitol Police saying that he incited violence and so forth.
And so this week we sort of mix most of those together, especially the stuff in New York and Georgia and the J6 stuff.
We get this like this microcosm of like the Trump strategy, which is always to throw as many different responses at stuff as you can.
And see what sticks, see if anything works, number one.
And then number two, the escalation of it, right?
I think there is a sense in which the more scorched earth Trump goes, the more threatened he feels about something.
So starting with sort of like the most basic of these, right?
The sort of different strategies, the most straightforward, probably what most people would do strategy is his response this week.
In response to those three, I think it's three civil lawsuits about January 6th, Trump's team argued that he has immunity and so is not, you know, can't be sued.
The DOJ, Department of Justice, argued that he incited violence and so it's not protected by what's called absolute immunity or different kinds of presidential or executive immunity.
The plaintiffs, the people that are suing him, go a little bit further than that and say that the immunity question doesn't even matter because he was acting outside his official capacity as president.
You and I aren't legal experts, but as we understand it, if the president does things as a part of their like normal routine job requirements, They're not open to suit.
Same thing with senators and congresspeople.
Remember, senators trying to avoid having to testify about things because of this and so forth.
So the people suing him are saying he wasn't acting in that capacity.
He was out there, it was basically, he was trying to subvert an election.
He was trying to win re-election.
However you want to couch that, that's not a thing a president would do.
Trump's lawyers argue that he was giving a speech, quote, on a matter of public concern, end quote, and so was acting in his official capacity, right?
Don't need to say a lot more about that, we'll see where it goes, but it's a really straightforward legal response, right?
He's being sued, his legal team says, nope, he's protected because of this or this or this, or he was, the way we might say it is, he was doing something in the normal course of doing his job, therefore he's legally protected in doing it and whatever.
Straightforward, most basic response, whatever.
Let's go down to Georgia though, right?
And in Georgia, as people know, there's been a grand jury meeting for a long time, looking at information related to whether or not Trump was involved in trying to interfere in the election in Georgia.
And there, his legal team sought to throw out the entire special grand jury report on the 2020 election interference.
And they are also seeking to disqualify the DA.
So here we get an escalation, right?
And this is like, it's a clear move to make really, really extreme claims and try to derail the whole thing.
No charges have been filed yet.
No indictments have been handed down.
And as one legal analyst I was looking at described, said this is a really aggressive approach.
They argue first that there was an unconstitutional statute that is being used to go after Trump.
So the law, in other words, they're saying the law that people are saying he broke and the way that he did it and the way they're doing it is unconstitutional.
They're saying the process itself has been illegal and unconstitutional.
And they're also saying that it's carried out by a disqualified DA's office.
We've seen this too.
This is like another legal option we've seen with Trump where you don't go with like little things or nitpicking about little policy things.
You just make these kind of grandiose claims.
The whole thing is flawed.
They're out to get me.
It's all political.
The whole thing should be thrown out.
And I think again, the reason they adopt this super aggressive approach as a legal strategy is maybe something will stick, right?
Like maybe there'll be questions about some procedural thing that the DA's office did that can like slow this down or whatever.
So we get an escalation.
So those two things, again, standard Trump strategies.
The first one, a really standard legal strategy.
The second one, getting more Trumpy with these like kind of grandiose claims about it.
But the third one is the one that you alluded to.
It's the one that's really in the news.
And I just think it's important to see it as part and parcel with these other things.
In New York, they have the hush money case going on, right?
The investigations into whether or not Trump paid Hush money to stop Stormy Daniels from saying certain things or to keep the story about her quiet and whether it was a campaign finance violation, all of this.
We've talked about this before, but I think it represents the most immediate legal peril to Trump.
This is the one where I think he feels like he's kind of backed into a corner and it's where he feels the most threatened.
And this is where he took the strongest steps.
So last Saturday, Trump on Truth Social sent out a message that said that he expected to be arrested on Tuesday, this past Tuesday.
Didn't happen, but that's what he said.
And more importantly, probably more significantly for everybody involved, he said, he called for his supporters to protest and quote, take our nation back, right?
And this is the part that gets everybody's attention because here we find Trump, as I say, going scorched earth when he feels the most threatened.
His team said they've received no notification that he was going to be indicted or arrested on Tuesday.
He was not arrested on Tuesday.
There were protesters.
It wasn't very effective.
There were like a handful of Trump protesters outside the DA's office on Tuesday.
There were more anti-Trump protesters, and it was all kind of embarrassing and so forth.
But the point is that observers look at this and be like, see, here he is, backed into a corner again.
And what does he do?
He doubles down on exactly what he did on J6, right?
When he feels the most threatened, the legal defenses go out the window.
Legal arguments are gone.
There's no pretense that his attorneys are doing what attorneys do.
And advocating for him and making sure that the rule of law is followed and that he has representation in court the way that we're supposed to have in our system or on and on and on.
No, this is Trump the autocrat calling for his his followers to subvert a process And make sure that it comes out the way he wants it to come out.
And the final point on this, and I'll throw it over to you, is the GOP hopped right on board with this, right?
So you get three committee chairs in the GOP House sending a letter requesting the DA, Alvin Bragg, in New York to come and testify before Congress and talk about this investigation, which they accused, or they say, quote, plainly appears to be a politically motivated prosecutorial decision, end quote.
First of all, there is no prosecution currently going on, right?
There's still a grand jury meeting.
No indictments have been made.
No charges have been filed.
There has not, in a formal legal sense, there is no prosecutorial decision.
What does it mean?
It means that the GOP, for all of the talk we hear about going a different way and wanting a third way and distancing from Trump and wanting to stop talking about J6 and whatever, here's Trump taking the same move that he made before, receiving cover from the GOP again, which to me implicates them in this, right?
I don't think that they get to very well turn around and say, Oh, nope, it's bad.
Trump shouldn't call for his followers to protest and quote, take back our nation.
We know what that's code for because we saw it happen on J6.
Oh, but hey, DA, come and talk to us.
And finally, of course, the DA's office has pushed back on this, says this is unprecedented to have this federal congressional involvement in a criminal case that has nothing to do with them, that it's obstructionist and so forth.
So all kinds of things.
Just to sum it up for me, it's, again, the full display of the ways that Trump responds from really straightforward legal arguments All the way over to the Scorched Earth policies, it's all part of the same game for him, which is to win at any cost with the backing of the GOP, the supposed party of law and order.
You laid it out perfectly.
One thing I want to hit on first is the way you provided a window into the legal and the extra legal.
If you've listened to this show over the last two years, you know we've been talking about that quite a bit.
As you say, Dan, the first ones are legal, legal measures.
And then when it seems that those may not work or may not be effective, it is extra legal.
And we've talked about this ad nauseum on this show, like, and we're going to talk about other legal ways today.
that the GOP is trying to just wrestle power and they will, you know, and we've we've tried to lay this out.
You can use democracy against itself.
You can use democratic processes and institutions in order to weaken democracy.
We the best example right now is Orban's Hungary, and we've laid that out and I'm sure we'll do it again in the future as as events call for.
However, there's also the extra legal.
And I just want to say, right, this is one of those moments where I don't want to be right, Dan, but I think you and I have been on this beat for years now and certainly since J6 that, you know, I, my line has been, it's pretty much the last line in my book.
I can, I'm not going to read my book right now, but the last line in my book is something like this.
January 6th was not the end.
It was the beginning because we have not adjudicated January 6th in the public square, meaning we have not held those who incited the insurrection like Trump and his high level cohorts accountable.
So what then what happens when Trump is thinking he's going to get arrested?
He calls for people to protest again.
Now, You know, we can say, well, yeah, there was like seven people outside of Trump Tower.
So who cares?
Right.
But he didn't actually get arrested.
And if he does, and I have a question for you about that in a minute, but let's say if he does in the next week and there's a perp walk of Trump walking in handcuffs somewhere or, you know, being booked into a facility in New York to for processing and so on.
What happens then?
Because, you know, that's a different set of images and a different set of events.
I think you're incredibly right on to say what you said about the GOP and their complicity.
That's what this, Dan, I mean, once again, and I say it in my book, you and I have said it on this show a thousand times, after J6, The Republican leadership and the Fox News universe and all the conservative cosmos of media could have just had a steady line that said the insurrection is wrong.
It was not a stolen election.
Cut it out.
We're not going to play the game.
And guess what happened this week?
Kevin McCarthy and Jim Jordan and everyone else decided that they were going to be complicit in just, and again, as you say, going after Alvin Bragg.
And if you turned on Fox News this week, and unfortunately I'm the kind of person who checks in on these things and subjects himself to this kind of stuff.
All they talked about was Alvin Bragg is a Soros funded blah blah blah blah blah right?
I mean it was just like just prototypical playbook of this era.
Discredit Bragg, call it a political witch hunt, and then Everything is delegitimated and all this is is like they hate Trump and they can't stand him and they're so afraid.
I just want to mention one thing and I want to ask you a question about this and that is that I interviewed Sam Perry and Andrew Whitehead this week and they talked about their testimony before Congress and we discussed the fact that Christian nationalism did not show up in the J6 Select Committee.
And Sam Perry said something I thought was actually really insightful.
He said, you know, W. W. Dubois pointed out that there were so many northern historians and intellectuals who seem to allow for the rationale coming from the South after the Civil War, that the Civil War was not about slavery, but was about economics and land and power and all this stuff.
And Du Bois said, you know, those Northerners were complicit in the Southern myth-making and the Southern violence of the Lost Cause mythology that appears after the Civil War.
And Sam Perry was like, you know, the J6 Select Committee does not mention religion, and that's a problem.
And when people study these documents 10 years from now, 20 years from now, unless they really go hunting for the testimony of two sociologists, Perry and Whitehead, or Andrew Seidel, or others who gave written testimony, They're going to see a report that never mentions religion or Christian nationalism as part of J6.
Why do I bring that up?
I bring that up because this is another act of complicity.
This is another act of the highest GOP leadership being complicit in these rhetorical advances of potential violence.
We had J6.
I just want to remind everybody, J6 happened.
It happened two years and a couple months ago.
And here is a former president saying, take your country back, protest when I get arrested.
And the GOP leadership being like, yeah, what is this?
Let's go after a DA in public with no knowledge of the of the case.
We don't actually know the inner workings.
We don't know what evidence is there.
The dossiers, the grand jury, blah, blah, blah.
We're just going to do this for on pure political grounds.
And nothing's changed.
Sorry.
And I have two questions for you, Dan.
We were pretty skeptical that Trump was going to get indicted.
I mean, you know, if people listen to the show, I think both of us were pretty.
We're pretty skeptical, and yet it seems like he might.
So that's question number one.
Do you think he will get it, get indicted?
Are you going to be surprised when it happens at this point?
And number two, you mentioned something that I think we should discuss, which is the third lane in the GOP.
Like Trump, we have all this Trump stuff happen.
McCarthy and the leadership are backing Trump.
If you're a GOP presidential candidate, how can you carve out any kind of lane that's not Trumpism?
If the highest forms of your party's leadership Or backing the former president, uh, in his call for protesting and taking the country back.
Like how could you in any realistic way run on a non-Trumpian platform?
It seems like once again, the GOP is locked into Trumpism, even if Trump is in jail, even if Trump is not the guy, even if it's DeSantis, even if it's whoever.
The lane has been set.
There's only one lane, even if the guy we're used to isn't the one driving the car through it.
So I'll leave those to you.
What do you think?
Yeah, so again, we don't have a crystal ball and you don't either.
And it sounds like, I don't know, it's hard to imagine Trump saying this, there aren't rumblings of something coming down from this New York office.
I think the bigger push, I guess I wouldn't be surprised if he's indicted there.
I think the bigger thing, we talked about this, I think it was just last week, it feels like weeks ago because the news is always happening.
But that I also think that that is actually sort of the lowest hanging fruit thing against him and not the most significant.
And we were critical of the New York DA being like, you know, say he wanted to accuse him of weaponizing, like why this case and not some of the bigger things that that he put on a back burner when he came when he came into office.
So I guess there could be.
I'm much more interested.
We've talked about this to see what eventually happens in Georgia.
Uh, then I am and I, I don't, I don't have any idea and it doesn't sound like anybody really has an idea of exactly what's coming from there.
So if he's indicted in the New York case, I wouldn't be terribly surprised.
I don't think, and I think it'll have the effects you talk about, but I don't think it's the most significant case against him.
I think things are moving fast with the Mar-a-Lago classified document stuff too.
So I think George, George is big and I think, you know, Mar-a-Lago and classified documents are happening too.
So we'll see.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And with regard to the third lane, I just, I still remain skeptical that there's like a realistic possibility.
The only way I see it working is if somebody who was like not Trump and DeSantis, right, as we talked about DeSantis is out Trumping Trump, that's his strategy.
And so somebody like Nikki Haley or maybe Mike Pence or somebody trying to find that.
The only way I see them dislodging the GOP leadership from support of Trump or trying to still sit on the fence for either Trump or DeSantis is if they got enough popular support.
That those people made a calculation that they could do this.
And the core GOP voters, not the undecided people, not suburban women they're trying to win over, but like the core that they need is full on MAGA nation.
And I just don't see a way of dislodging that, you know, realistically.
Now, who knows?
We get into election cycles and, uh, you start having state conventions and voting things and, you know, maybe somebody has a big upset somewhere, gains some momentum.
You get that kind of thing.
It's kind of like the March Madness of like politics, right?
Where somebody has some success early on those so-called Cinderella victories, maybe it can build momentum and maybe that'll change.
But I still, right now, I just, I don't believe that there's enough appetite Yeah, I agree.
Anyway, there's a big thing in the Times this week about, you know, can you have a GOP alternative lane?
It seems really hard.
I will say, and I don't have a crystal ball either.
It strikes me that the only way that might happen is if someone came out of nowhere and garnered that popular support.
So in ways that Trump did in 2016, but bringing it back to something kind of like a moderate platform.
And what I'm talking about here is a celebrity.
I don't see anyone in the GOP ecosystem as it stands in terms of politicians who could do that.
Like they're all either, you know, they're giving fealty to Trump, like Carrie Lake or someone like that is just totally in Trump's kind of service.
And yet, so is, you know, in terms of lanes, Pence and DeSantis and Haley, they have no other choice except for to run in the lane Trump has made.
The point here is like, if someone came out of the blue, it would have to be some celebrity with overwhelming charisma that could like kind of convince suburban moms to go back to normal and all this kind of stuff.
The GOP, and I think this is true more than it is for the Democrats, is a cult of personality.
They're not about platforms.
They're not about policies.
It's a cult of personality.
So I think that's to reiterate the point you're making.
Unless there's another personality who could suddenly burst in with enough gravity, as it were, to sort of pull people from Trump, I think you're exactly right.
I think it just doesn't work.
All right, let's take a break.
We're going to come back and check in, uh, in, uh, in a bunch of different places and talk about, uh, GOP takeover, uh, and power grabbing.
So be right back.
Okay, Dan, I want to zero in on a story from the Philadelphia Inquirer this week.
It's an opinion piece by Juan Lozano, excuse me, not by Juan Lozano, by Will Bunch.
Sorry, Will Bunch, if you're listening.
And it really, the through line of this piece, and I think it's really well done, is that all over the country we see situations in which GOP officials who have elected power are taking From other people who have democratically elected power, jurisdiction and control.
So let me, let me just read a bit here and then I'll give, I'll go through some of the examples that Will Bunch provides in the piece.
Republicans are using their control of state houses in red America to simply override election results in blue dot localities that they don't like, but especially when the ballot box winners are the choice of black and brown voters.
So the thesis that Bunch puts forth is that if you look around the country, places where Republicans are controlling the state legislatures, the state houses, what they're doing on a state level Is zooming into cities, which are kind of blue dots in a largely red state.
Okay.
And we've said it before.
Well, I'll say it again.
I don't really like the blue state red state kind of characterization, but nonetheless, if you're in a place like Texas.
You have a number of cities that are kind of blue dots.
One of them, one of the best example being Houston, right?
Houston is either our third or fourth biggest city, depending on where you look.
And Houston is a city that is just full of people of color.
Black folks, Latinx folks, large Asian American communities in Houston.
Well, the first example that Bunch gives in the piece is the fact that Texas, the state of Texas, has taken over the Houston School District, okay?
And so what you have is a kind of wresting from the elected school board officials any control or jurisdiction and placing those in the hands of the state officials.
I can give you some statistics about Houston ISD.
Houston ISD is 68 percent Latinx students.
It's 22 percent African-American and the elected officials in this case are people of color.
Majority black and this is not a A school district whose leadership is white.
Now, what Bunch points out is, yes, Houston ISD is facing issues as a school district, but so are many inner city school districts across the country.
And so, according to him, the move is outrageous, right?
He says, despite facing the same struggles as most large urban school districts around poverty and disinvestment, topped by the double whammy of COVID, and the hurricane disaster, Hurricane Harvey, Houston schools have been improving under metrics up by the state.
However, it doesn't matter.
Abbott and other state legislatures have nonetheless taken over the school district.
Let me give you another example from Bunch's piece.
He says, but nationwide, this isn't even the worst example of predominantly white Republicans establishing a new cancel culture against black and brown democracy.
That would be in Jackson, Mississippi, where what critics call a Jim Crow bill.
Would take at least some of the judicial system in the black majority capital city and control of the police away from elected officials and put it into the hands of the heavily GOP statehouse.
Although the latest version of the bill has been moderated, perhaps under the sunlight of bad publicity, the measure is still opposed by officials like Jackson Mayor Choke Antar Lumumba, who calls it plantation politics.
There's other examples, Dan, and I'll get to those in a second.
One of those examples being the impeachment of Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner.
If you're familiar with Larry Krasner, he's a progressive DA who has, among other things, called for accountability when it comes to policing.
So here's the overall point, Dan, is you have a situation, and we've talked about this a lot on the show, Where Republicans really dominate state legislatures and state houses.
They also hold a majority of governorships.
Republicans have done a much better job on a state level and state level politics than Democrats.
So they've realized, all right, that's where our power is.
We have these places in our states, places like Houston, places like Jackson, Mississippi, that are a couple of things.
They're Democrat, uh, democratically controlled in terms of the Democratic Party.
And, uh, they're largely, uh, officials who are people of color and constituents who are people of color.
The play, according to Bunch's piece, is to say, well, we're going to use the state house and the state jurisdiction to basically take away any control, any jurisdiction you have in those locales.
I just want to point out, okay, and for me, this is, we talked, I just mentioned Orban like 20 minutes ago.
This is how you use democracy against itself, right?
This is how you weaken democratic institutions.
This is how you make it so that power is conglomerated in only a certain amount of hands.
You take something like a state legislature or a governorship and you use that to basically say, I have the authority To come into a place like Jackson, Mississippi, or a place like Houston, Texas, and to radically change things as they relate to police or schools or so on.
This is how Orban has worked in Hungary, Dan, and I think it's a snapshot of what could happen If someone like DeSantis is elected president and has eight years to basically run a roughshod over democracy in the country.
I'll just say one more time and I'll throw it to you.
To me, this is an example of illiberal liberalism.
We do have elected people.
I'm not saying Greg Abbott wasn't elected fairly.
I'm not saying, right?
That what's going on at the state level in Mississippi is somehow foul play.
And there was like, no, the election was a fraud.
Not saying any of that.
I'm saying those people were democratically elected.
But they're using their democratically elected power to take democratically elected power from others in a way that does not bode well for every person in the country having a voice, especially those who are historically marginalized, black Americans and people of color.
So what do you think about this story?
I think whether we want to call it, as people will, illiberal liberalism, illiberal democracy, or, you know, democratic anti-democracy, right?
Or, you know, democracy as anti-democracy.
It's exactly that pattern.
The classic one people always cite, you know, Hitler and the Nazis, and it's maybe like, oh, that's too extreme.
You shouldn't.
All right.
So we'll talk about Orban, as you're highlighting, or we can just look in the U.S.
at what's going on.
Things that stand out to me, we've already seen this, like, first of all, is that it's a pattern, right, of taking control of, as you say, as people describe it, the blue dots and the red areas.
I was discussing this with my students the other day.
We talked about this a long time ago on this show, when places like Texas made it illegal for municipalities to pass laws prohibiting certain kinds of discrimination.
It wasn't enough that you didn't have a state law prohibiting it when municipalities would say, for example, that trans folks should be able to use bathrooms that correspond to their their sense of identity.
The state came down and cracked down on that.
So we've seen this before.
Here, I think there is that added dimension of not only, as you say, and as others note, right, are these Democratic strongholds.
They're strongholds where people of color are predominant, where their voice is the majority voice, right?
Where the leadership are people of color.
And we've talked about this a lot.
For a Christian nationalist, and that for me at this point, frankly, that's just that shorthand for the GOP.
The GOP in America is largely a Christian nationalist political party.
People of color have a place that they should occupy in this country, and it is not a position of leadership.
That ideology can play out in those soft ways where you're just more critical of policies that the people of color come from.
You look a little harder at the data from a school district with a lot of minority students than you might look at a rural school district that might have the same numbers and same percentages, but it's predominantly white.
But you certainly don't stand for an African-American school superintendent or a school board that's predominantly people of color or a school curriculum that addresses the issues of a majority of their students or things like that.
And so you step in and you take that control where you have not won it democratically.
The last piece I'll just throw to this, and we harp on this all the time, I think this is important when people are talking to the Uncle Rons of the world, Don't give me the BS about the GOP being the party of small government, the party of local governance, the fact that we don't like departments of education.
It should be down to local communities to determine what their kids learn and how and so forth.
Unless you're a local community of color.
Nope.
Then we're all about state power.
Right?
Unless you are teaching college courses we don't like, and then we're going to swap out your boards of trustees and things as they're doing in Florida.
So I think it has a very distinctive racial component when we look at it in this dimension.
And I also think that it is part of a broader pattern that we've seen in the GOP that is sometimes racially coded this way, sometimes not as clearly racially coded this way, but it's all part of the same set of mechanisms And it's that vision of, like, what a real America should look like.
And it simply should not be an America where people of color are in control or call the shots or determine what's taught in schools.
And white Christian nationalists are going to use every mechanism they can to stop that from happening, including the anti-democratic ones.
Well, and I just want to point out, I know some of you listening are already thinking this as you're driving and you're like, please say it.
And, you know, you're waiting for it.
There's a long process here.
Divest from communities of color.
Divest resources.
Divest from the school departments.
Divest from the communities.
Have police that do not live anywhere near the communities that they serve.
And then complain that those communities are somehow not, quote unquote, performing well, according to your metrics, when it comes to schools, when it comes to, you know, crime, when it comes to anything else, and then say, well, we better take these over, right?
So you set communities up to fail and then use their failure to legitimate furthering your policies of failure for them.
Yeah, no, there's a sign off here from Will Bunch in the piece I think is worth reading.
He says, but helping the children isn't really the point here, just as curbing crime isn't really the point in going after DAs like Krasner.
The great Medgar Evers must be spinning in his grave right now because what's happening in Jackson and in Houston is all about race power.
And the oppressive social control that he died fighting.
And the worst part is that the anti-democratic thrust of the Republican Party has only just begun.
So Bunch agrees with you, Dan.
And sometimes nice to see other people saying things you say all the time, so you don't feel like you're the only one.
Real quick, you want to go talk?
In similar terms, I think there's some kind of interesting things happening on a state level in two places.
One is very close to your backyard, and that is Vermont.
And another is a place we talk about quite often on the show, and that is Idaho.
So we just talked about, you know, small government and You know, Uncle Ron saying that they're in a small government and education should be local unless, you know, that includes people of color and leadership and so on and so forth.
There's another issue surrounding government and extra governmental powers and that is militias.
We just had a former president call for protests.
We've seen the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys be charged with things like seditious conspiracy in the wake of January 6th.
We have tens of millions of guns in the hands of civilians in the country.
So militias are a thing, and I think they're a thing that are worth talking about.
Some states are kind of trying to reckon with the overwhelming and growing presence of militias in their presence, and that is one of them is Idaho, one of them is Vermont.
So how are they dealing with these things, Dan, locally in those places?
Yes, this thing comes out.
It's interesting, again, if you're talking about the whole universe of Christian nationalism, white nationalism and so forth, You have those places where they'll seize the mechanisms of state control through democratic means and then try to take it that way, and they're suddenly big state advocates, so to speak.
And then you get the militia world, which is anti-state, is how they play.
So what we mean by militias Basically sort of, you know, paramilitary organizations that are not regulated by the state and people have a sense of what these are.
They are overwhelmingly white phenomena in the U.S.
and lots of states have militias.
And as you say, Vermont is, for those who don't know, is kind of a weird state in that it always fits solidly in that blue state category.
Whenever there's an election like five minutes after the polls close they can tell you who who won all the elections because it's very blue but it's also super rural and has like a really strong gun culture and so it's just this kind of interesting place.
Vermont for a long time has had some militia laws on the books but they're vague they're hard to enforce and so there are some new legislation coming through Basically, to better enforce and crack down on the formation of militias, recruiting for militias, having militias show up at protests and things like this.
Vermont's not alone.
New Mexico and Oregon also have some legislation pending to do this.
And what a deal shows is states grappling with this kind of unregulated paramilitary force and everything that it means.
But it stands in contrast to where?
To Idaho, right?
A place that we have been talking to quite a bit or talking about quite a bit.
And for me, this is significant because I think we think about we, big we, Americans, tend to think about a lot of these things.
And I think they often still think of them as like a north-south axis or something like that, as if these are southern things versus northern things.
They're not, right?
They're national things.
And Idaho has a law on the books regulating militia activity, but everything I've read says it's not really very enforced.
And they're actually repealing it and rolling it back and basically further deregulating militias in Idaho.
And critics, of course, for the move say it will embolden mobilization and recruitment and all these different kinds of things.
What else have we seen in Idaho, right?
We've seen the issue with libraries and library books.
You've talked a lot about the demographic and migratory American shifts that we are going to have seen as a result of COVID and the MAGA years and just sort of all these things together.
One place that I think this manifests is parts of the Pacific Northwest and the Mountain West.
For people who think of Oregon, for example, or Washington as progressive states, their population centers are, but they have the Cascade Mountains that run right down the middle, and over on the eastern side of those states, which border on Idaho, it's a different world.
And so you have another geographical region where this takes root, and it's another tool within the GOP-controlled legislative toolbox To say, you know what?
We'll hyper-regulate where we need to.
We'll go into those school districts and take away their autonomy and override their elections and their decisions.
But where we think it's in our interest to not regulate and to be able to have these organizations that recruit, that often run on white supremacist ideologies, that show up and intimidate and frighten people and different things like this, We'll do that, too.
And I think it's worth noting, as you note about parts of California, right?
We often think of the West Coast, the left coast, as being blue.
It's not.
You get parts of Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Idaho, on and on and on.
And I think it's an important piece of that as well.
So, yeah, your thoughts on these really, really radically divergent responses to militias from some states to say, we need to rein this in.
This is frightening.
This is scary.
This is dangerous.
Other states are like, nope, we need more of it.
Well, I just appreciate your point that here we are talking about the Houston School District or the Philadelphia DA or Jackson, Mississippi, and it's regulate, it's take over, it's control.
And, you know, when it comes to militias in Idaho, it's, oh, no, no, no, repeal a law, a law that's rarely used and rarely enforced, but repeal it nonetheless in a kind of show of we really want no regulation on paramilitary groups in our state.
I just want to point out something this what this brings back for me is last summer Patriot Front showed up at a Corridor Lane Pride event and were intent on I mean I don't I can't speak to intent so I'm just gonna say they had a lot of guns they had weapons and they were Three dozen of them ready to descend upon the Pride event, okay?
That's what we know.
I interviewed Alicia Abbott, who's a local activist there, and her words to me were that we were seconds away from a massacre, okay?
So that's what Alicia told me.
Someone on the ground, somebody who's in the thick of Coeur d'Alene politics and culture every day.
And here is a state saying, yeah, we need less control of militias who might do such things.
What Alicia told me and Chad Schobert as well that day is that even before Patriot Front showed up, the Pride event perimeter, so the perimeter of the place where it was happening, was surrounded by men in fatigues holding guns.
So if you had gone to Pride that day, the Pride event, You would have been, uh, running into, um, a set of men standing menacingly holding, uh, guns, uh, sort of staring at the pride event and, you know, it kind of sets the tenor a little bit.
I don't know if that's the case.
What's the point, Dan?
The point is here's Idaho saying, yeah, we need less.
Right.
And, and anyway, I just appreciate your point about control and, uh, when it, when it seems like it's needed, when it seems like it's.
Not needed.
And I just think that's a fantastic point.
So just a final point about this that we've talked about as well is it's less regulation of white men with guns.
Right.
Again, I throw this out.
It's counterfactual.
There's no way to prove it.
But I am positive if you had the same event in Coeur d'Alene and you had Black Lives Matter show up and everybody had a sidearm and an AR-15, the response would not be the same.
And you absolutely would not have the legislature in Idaho saying that what we need is less regulation of people with guns in paramilitary units and so forth.
To me, it's an absolutely transparent piece of this that is often not You know, you know how many times, like as, so like, I, you know, I'm a mixed race person, you know, I was hanging out with my dad a couple weeks ago when we were at a family reunion and it just brought back all these memories of like white people telling me, Oh, you're, everyone's welcome.
And they're telling you that from a place where there's like a hundred white people and like one person of color.
And they're like, yeah, it's okay.
Everyone can be here.
Right.
And it's, it's like, there's one person of color, like, yeah, we let Jimmy hang out.
You're, you know.
And what my dad and I were talking about, and we've talked about this so many times over the last couple of years is like, you know, what happens when it's not one person of color?
What happens when 35 show up?
What happens when like seven Korean families, right?
And four Mexican families.
And, uh, and all of a sudden there's a critical mass.
Well, everything changes.
And all of a sudden it's, it's not like, Oh, you're you're, you can come here.
Cause we have a like majority and we can control you.
It's a, All right well you got your stinky foods out here now and you've got your music and you're and we're gonna and there's like it's a threat we got to control it we got to get it under wraps and we got to show you where you belong it's everything you've been talking about today so anyway that just popped into my head as we had this discussion about uh white men with guns and people of color uh having positions of power so on and so forth all right let's take one more break and come back down and
Talk about a kind of weird story, but it's not one I've seen a lot of people talking about, and it definitely has piqued my interest, and I think it's worth talking about.
So, be right back.
All right, Dan.
So, Peter Baker, great scoop in The Times this week, and talking about something that is so, so peculiar.
Let's set the tone here.
I'm going to read from Baker's piece in the New York Times.
It was 1980 and Jimmy Carter was in the White House, bedeviled by a hostage crisis in Iran that had paralyzed his presidency and hampered his effort to win a second term.
Mr. Carter's best chance for victory was to free the 52 Americans held captive before Election Day.
That was something that Mr. Barnes said his mentor was determined to prevent.
All right, y'all, this is like so fun for me because I'm a nerd.
I like history.
And this election in particular is one I spent a lot of time thinking about.
So Dan, it's 1980, Ronald Reagan, Hollywood actor, divorced, former governor of California, or governor of California, actually running against Jimmy Carter, who is the president, Southern Baptist.
I've said this before, made in a lab if you're a white Christian to like vote for.
Southern Baptist by birth, marriage, high school sweetheart, military officer, peanut farmer, rural Georgia, the whole business.
All right.
Everyone is mad at Jimmy Carter, however, from the religious right for a lot of reasons.
One of them is foreign policy.
They say he's soft.
They say he's not enough of a hawk.
He doesn't attack.
He tries to talk too much.
Well, one of the things that's happening like in the run up to the election is there's 52 Americans being held hostage.
That's a big deal.
And I'm not here.
I'll be very honest with you.
I'm not here to defend Jimmy Carter on foreign policy today.
So not something I want to get into.
What I do want to get into, though, is we have 52 hostages.
And the Carter administration is obviously doing everything they can to free those sausages.
But what comes out in this story by Peter Baker is something truly incredible, Dan.
And that is the fact that two men that summer in the run-up to the election went overseas to capital cities in the Middle East.
And told officials in each of these countries to send a message to Iran that they should not release the hostages until after Reagan was elected, because they would get a better deal from Reagan than from Carter.
And if, and the implication, I should have said this and I said it the wrong way.
The implication is, is if you don't release the hostages by election day, Reagan will win and Carter will lose.
And therefore, please wait and, and get a better deal from Reagan than you would Carter.
Okay?
The people involved are interesting folks.
Ben Barnes is one, and I'm going to get to Ben Barnes in a minute.
The other person though, and this is really the person who was driving this ship and was leading this mission, was John B. Conley Jr.
And I know that all of you out there, I mean, if someone out there knows who these people are, bravo.
You're a whiz kid of like Middle 20th century politics and Texas politics.
But John B. Conley Jr.
was actually a really big deal at the time.
He had been governor of Texas.
He'd served three presidents.
He was a nationally known figure, and he was also just like a titan in Texas when it came to politics.
He wanted to be president.
He did not win because Reagan got the nomination.
And so in order to help his party, And according to someone else, make his case to be secretary of state.
He leads this mission, Dan, where he's like, we're going to go overseas.
And it's basically just him and one other guy.
We're going to go overseas and talk to all these officials and convince them not to release the hostages so that Reagan will get elected.
I mean, think about that, Dan.
This is like the equivalent of someone like, you know, Greg Abbott.
Right.
Um, basically saying, well, I'm not governor anymore, so I'm going to take off and go do this sort of rogue mission.
And so he goes with this guy Barnes and Barnes himself was actually a Democrat, which is a little bit strange.
And Barnes sort of claims he didn't actually realize what he was getting into until he had sort of seen these conversations take place all over the Middle East.
Mr. Barnes.
was a prominent figure in Texas himself.
He was at the time had become the youngest speaker of the Texas House of Representatives.
He had also become lieutenant governor.
So Barnes himself is no slouch.
He's actually quite high up in Texas politics.
He was known as a whiz kid.
I mean, he was like head of the legislature when he was like 26.
So I mean, this guy was like on the fast track.
All right.
So we got Conley and Barnes and they're over there.
And Conley is basically telling anyone who will listen all over the Middle East.
Don't release the hostages.
Now, Dan, I know where I, if, if you let me and I can, I know I'm not supposed to do it.
I won't.
This is one of those moments where I would talk for three hours and be very excited and realize that the people who I was talking with were not as excited as me talking about this.
So I'm going to skip to the, I'm going to skip to the takeaway, right?
I'm going to skip to the takeaway.
If you all remember.
Just give you some historical facts real quick.
The hostages were released like minutes after Reagan was inaugurated as president.
Also, there was a whole Iran-Contra scandal where Reagan sold arms to Iran in order, as he explains it, to raise money to support the Contras.
I'm not going to get into the details of all that either, but I will say it's pretty interesting reading the story, thinking about those sausages being released like almost immediately after Reagan is inaugurated and the ensuing Iran-Contra scandal.
Here's my point, Dan.
I, in my book, point to the Reagan-Carter election as a momentous time when Christian nationalists chose power over piety.
Reagan was not one of them, and yet they chose him over Carter.
This points to an even deeper kind of, uh, set of intriguing events in that election in the sense that you have prominent American politicians going to foreign countries to send messages to, uh, to governments to say, please do this and not that.
So our election will go this way.
It reminds you a lot, Dan, of Trump and Russia.
And it just, it's just, it's, it's just an incredible story.
There's so many takeaways here, but one of them is what matters is power, right?
What matters is power, not 52 hostages, right?
Not anything to do with their safety and everything else, but just, Hey, If you will, uh, just wait a minute.
We might be able to get Reagan elected.
Reagan will come over.
He'll give you a better deal and actually might sell you some arms and just wait and hold on.
Can you imagine?
Right.
Being a, uh, uh, uh, an American politician in an American period when 52 people are, are like being held hostage and going over there and playing politics.
Well, it reminds you of Trump Russia, doesn't it?
Anyway, we're out of time.
I'll throw it to you.
I appreciate you allowing me to talk about this today because I was very excited to do it.
So thank you for indulging me.
Quick thoughts.
If everybody could see Brad is on the table now and like he's, he's throwing his, swinging his coat over his head.
He's really excited.
Oh, captain, my cap.
Okay, go ahead.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
So, I mean, the, the, the 10,000 foot takeaways I think are also interesting.
Like, yeah, the obvious parallel of if people remember of Trump sort of inviting Russia to hack Hillary Clinton's emails and like find out what they were and this and that, man, whatever.
Number one, I think the model hasn't changed.
But there's this weird sense in which it is out in the open now because of things like social media and different things like this.
And so people can put out a tweet or they can put on a, you know, a social media post or whatever sort of calling for this.
And I think it rhetorically plays out the same way as the person who makes like the sexist comment.
And then it's like, oh, what?
It was just a joke.
You're right.
I was just kidding.
Right.
It's like, oh, I was just musing on social media.
But everybody on the globe can read it.
And I think it shows that this issue hasn't gone away, but it has transformed in ways that I think we don't know what to do with yet.
That's the first point.
Another part that sort of stands out to me, because you talk about how momentous that 1980 election is, and it is, is what historically we're going to say about something like 2016.
Because you know who the GOP doesn't talk about right now?
Reagan, right?
Everybody remember a time when that was always the bar?
Like they would create Reagan in their own image, of course, but they would always say, I'm a Reagan conservative.
It's Reaganomics.
It's, you know, trying to appeal to the golden age of Reagan.
It's now explicit Christian nationalism, MAGA world, Trumpism all the time.
And that's just something for people to think about as you go into this election cycle.
Are we standing in the midst of and still in the middle of something that will look as significant in retrospect?
As that 1980 election did, that is that momentous.
And that's like a 10,000 foot sort of takeaway that I have with this.
I just sort of scan backwards and look and say, wow, like what if we're in the middle of a transition like that?
And that's just something that strikes me as we reflect on something like that 1980 election.
The last time I remember, and I know there's been more, but the last time I can remember Reagan being mentioned in the ways you talked about Dan, that glowing affection for Ronald Reagan, you know, Ronald Reagan is my hero, was Marco Rubio in 2016.
And Marco Rubio quickly won nothing in 2016.
He tried to make fun of Donald Trump's hands and You know who my hero is?
and it went horribly wrong.
And since then, Marco Rubio has largely just been seen tweeting Bible verses on Twitter.
That's basically what he does as a senator now.
So I agree that like the whole brand of standing on the debate stage or somewhere prominent and being like, you know who my hero is, Ronald Reagan.
Lower taxes, no government, you know, and it's over.
It's, it's, you know, the model is Trump and it's a good point.
All right.
Reasons for hope.
Let's do it.
I'm going to give you mine.
I'm going to go first.
And that is, uh, this week representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, uh, highlighted a program that's actually been going on for a long time.
That's a nine year program, but, uh, it's a program, excuse me.
The Tries to Interrupt Violence in the Bronx.
So, just reading here from a piece at The Gothamist by Elizabeth Kim.
Now in its ninth year, the initiative called Stand Up to Violence has treated over 1,700 victims of violent trauma and reduced gun violence in the community by 59%.
They recently published their findings in a pediatric medical journal.
Ocasio-Cortez said the results show that the program could be a model for the rest of the country.
I think these programs are so important.
I wish that there were more of them.
I'm really glad that this program is in its ninth year and doing great.
And I'm really glad that Representative Ocasio-Cortez is highlighting it.
I hope that it might become a model for others around the country.
All right, Dan, what's yours?
Mine is that the Florida NAACP called for a travel advisory to Florida this week and basically said that because of the effects that all the policies are having on people of color, that this should be there.
Why do I take this as a reason for hope?
DeSantis mocked it.
DeSantis said, yeah, we'll see how that works.
I don't know that it's going to be effective.
I don't think people are going to stop going to Disney World.
Because of this, what I think it does is I think that it increases the visibility of what these policies in Florida are doing to communities of color, the targeting of communities of color.
And I think it it just puts it into a different register from the rhetoric of parental choice and religious freedom or whatever else it is to the reference of targeting people of color, endangering people of color.
And so I thought that that was really important.
conversation or rhetorical move that was being made and took hope from it.
It's yeah.
Gosh, I just.
Can you imagine watching a movie where a leader from an organization like the NW, NAACP stands up at a press conference?
It's like we're issuing a travel warning for our own state.
And I mean, it sounds like one of those old 80s movies, right?
That's like an absurdist comedy, like I expect Leslie Nielsen or someone or like Police Academy.
Like it's like it's like a scene from the old Police Academy movies, right?
I don't know.
Anyway, it's terrifying.
Absurd.
I don't know.
I don't have words anymore.
All right, we need to stop.
I want to thank you all for listening.
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Dan?
I just need you to know I'm working on cargo shorts.
Okay.
Haven't been able to do it yet, but we're going to, we're going to do it.
We're going to do our best to get election affirmer cargo shorts.
Okay.
I know you've emailed me, I don't know, 70 or 80 times this week about it.
And I just, I'm working on it.
Okay.
So just please, you know, stop with the emails.
All right.
I'm doing my best.
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