Brad and Dan begin with first reactions to the late breaking news that Donald Trump will be indicted next week. They discuss the details of the case, the reactions from the GOP, and what the future might hold.
They then turn their attention to Nashville, where the community continues to mourn the victims of the mass shooting at a private school. Dan discusses the numbness that lawmakers and everyday Americans feel in the context of ubiquituous gun violence. Brad links the unwillingness to address the problem to Christian nationalist's understanding of order, violence, and the need to have the power to put "others" in line.
In the second segment, Brad outlines the high stakes of the Wisconsin Supreme Court election - and how it will effect abortion rights, voting rights, and the viability of free and fair elections in the state - and beyond.
In the final segment, Dan breaks down the new law in Kentucky that bans gender affirming care.
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Axis Mundy You're listening to an irreverent podcast.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
I'm 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.
One of those weeks that, goodness gracious, how do you talk about everything?
You don't, but we're going to do our best.
Before we talk about anything, though, we're going to talk about The newest and next Straight White American Jesus Seminar, and that is going to be starting April 27th with Dr. Sarah Mosliner, and it is on purity culture, white supremacy, and embodiment.
And so if you're somebody who lived through purity culture or somebody, you're somebody who is trying to figure out where and how purity culture appeared in the world and why it's related to race and embodiment and so many other things.
This is really the seminar for you.
We've had, we've done this in the past and everyone who participated has just kind of testified to how much they learned, how much it changed their thinking of what they experienced.
And even if you didn't go through Purity Culture, still, please sign up.
I guarantee you're going to learn a lot about Christian nationalism.
About evangelicalism, about the history of religion in the United States.
So, Sarah's a world expert on this.
Many of you know Sarah from her work here on Straight White American Jesus.
So, the registration link is available.
Go to straightwhiteamericanjesus.com and click on the seminar tab.
If you have any questions, send us an email at straightwhiteamericanjesus at gmail.com, but we would love for you to be there.
These seminars are limited to a handful of people.
They include four weekly meetings, uh, online with Sarah and the rest of the class.
They include readings and, uh, videos and a one-on-one meeting with Sarah.
So if you sign up, that's what you can look forward to.
A lot of folks who've signed up in the past have ended up meeting new friends and new colleagues and staying in touch.
So it's, it's a really good thing.
We're going to talk about Trump's indictment briefly, and then we'll, we'll talk about Nashville and what happened there.
And then we'll get to two really kind of important state level things.
One in Wisconsin and the Supreme court election that's happening this Tuesday and Kentucky, where there was a, an override of the governor's veto on gender affirming here.
So let's start with Trump.
And his indictment last night.
This is one of those situations, Dan, where you and I, I think it kind of worked out what we wanted to do today.
And then you look up and your phone is like, Trump indicted.
And we can't, you know, just like everyone, we're sorting out details.
We're never been a show that just wants to talk to talk.
We want to talk with analysis and research.
Uh, Dan was very good at pointing out to me last night that there will be a lot more to say next week because he'll actually be arraigned and all this stuff will happen.
So, but I do think we want to just do a couple of minutes here on initial thoughts.
I have a bunch, but Dan, I'll throw it to you first.
We've had a night to, you know, by the time the news hit on the East coast, it was like midnight.
So I know you were sort of just catching up this morning, but you know, quick initial thoughts and reactions to Trump's indictment.
Well, I think the first is that he was indicted.
We talked about whether or not that was going to happen, and it seemed like it would, and so forth.
I think initial reactions, it strikes me, and I think I shared this with you last night, it's a little bit like the documents issue, where there's a lot of noise and we know certain things have happened, but as of right now, less than an exchange in the last hour while I was in class, we don't know what the specific charges are yet, and we don't know Exactly what the prosecutors are arguing, but things so far that we do know are really, really predictable.
The GOP is rallying behind Trump.
The Trump world is capitalizing on this.
There have been some good articles coming out about how they were ready for this.
We know that Trump predicted this a while back.
And that this will likely just embolden, this will be a badge of honor for him among MAGA world.
And they're already capitalizing, fundraising off of this, demonizing the state, the weaponization of the, you know, of the DA's office.
It's politically motivated on and on and on.
DeSantis right now is saying things to help Trump, which is significant because he's, you know, arguably Trump's biggest political rival in the GOP at present.
So I would say right now a lot of really predictable responses I'm still interested in the significance of this as opposed to some other things that are out there.
I said a few episodes ago that for my money, the stuff going on in Georgia is arguably maybe more significant.
And one of the things that I think we'll devote some real time to this after we've had some time to digest it.
But one of the things I'm thinking about is, you know, why this charge?
Why this specific issue of all the things that Trump's under investigation for?
And what implications will that have moving forward?
So yeah, a lot of kind of open questions right now, and we'll be looking over this week as things sort and we begin to see more of those responses, hear more of the specifics.
Yeah, to be able to do more than just react to it, but those are some of my initial reactions.
Yeah, mine are similar.
I just, I have a few thoughts.
One is, I think Alvin Bragg did something that Trump tries to do, and that is he took back the media narrative in the sense that no one, I mean, Maggie Haberman wrote for the New York Times last night that Trump World did not see this coming.
They were surprised.
So they were surprised.
The media was surprised.
None of us were expecting this on a Thursday night.
So that's something I think that's interesting about all this.
In the previous week, Trump had taken control of the media narrative by saying, I'm going to be arrested Tuesday, protest, all this stuff.
So I think that's one.
I think two, CNN reported last night that it's 34 counts.
And obviously we don't know what the counts are.
So I think what that leads us to sort of wonder is, is this just, you know, is this beyond Stormy Daniels?
Or what's going on?
And I'll just admit, we don't know.
I'm not going to sit here and act like I do know.
You and I have wondered aloud, you just did it, we did it a few weeks ago, why the Stormy Daniels case?
Why did you get rid of the other case that was happening in New York, Alvin Bragg, when you took over?
Why did you kill that case and resurrect this one?
So I guess I'm intrigued, because if this is 34 counts, that seems to be like, does he have way more than Stormy Daniels?
And is that what's happening here?
So we'll just have to wait and see on that.
The other thing that I think is interesting is that this will, and other people have said this, but it's worth saying, I think it's going to be easier for someone like Fannie Willett in Georgia to indict Trump now because it's not the first.
And I, you know, maybe Alvin Bragg, part of this is like clearing the way for others.
Even if this case is not the strongest, maybe history will tell us that, well, he did the hard thing, breaking the seal.
And now those those folks in Georgia or maybe the folks working on the Mar-a-Lago case, whatever, may not have as much fear to indict because he's been indicted.
And this will just be another kind of addition to to what's happening with Trump.
I think a couple more things.
You mentioned GOP.
So last night, McConnell was silent.
So that's that's notable.
McCarthy wasn't.
McCarthy was tweeting typical McCarthy Trump, you know, support and calling this as he has in the past week.
Politically motivated, as you said.
People like Lindsey Graham, Lindsey Graham was almost crying on Fox News last night.
I don't know why he was so emotional, but he was.
He was telling people to go to DonaldTrump.com and donate.
It was, it was bizarre.
Honestly, it was bizarre.
I'll leave it there.
If you had, you know, Dan, if I had had three or four Diet Cokes before this, This podcast, I might say more about why I think Lindsey Graham was emotional, but I'm not going to do it.
I'm not going to do it.
So catch me at a party later and give me a Diet Coke and see what happens.
The one that caught me though, Dan, is DeSantis.
DeSantis said that Florida will not help extradite Trump.
And obviously that's just like some sort of symbolic gesture because Trump is expected to turn himself in.
And there's no sense that Trump is like, I'm staying at Mar-a-Lago, come and get me dudes.
It's like this man's running for president and he's basically saying, I won't follow the constitution as governor by helping to, you know, or allowing for the extradition of Trump from Florida.
And I'm doing that to gain points to be president.
Uh, the person who's meant to uphold the constitution above, above all else.
So I think that's worth noting.
It's symbolic, but that's drip, drip, drip.
A man who may be president saying, I will not uphold the constitution.
In essence.
I just think that's worth holding on to.
One more thing, Dan, and that is the fact that Going back to like our fourth episode ever, you and I talked about why so many folks voted for Trump, even though they were evangelical.
And you pulled out these great deep dives from the nineties, and I'm going to read them back.
And these are ones you found, but this is from an episode that we did like way back in 2018.
You ready?
James Dobson.
How foolish to believe that a person who lacks honesty and moral integrity is qualified to lead a nation and the world.
That's him talking about none other than Bill Clinton.
So there you go, James Dobson.
Franklin Graham, the God of the Bible, says that what one does in private does matter.
Mr. Clinton's months-long extramarital sexual behavior in the Oval Office now concerns him and the rest of the world, not just immediate family.
If he will lie to or mislead his wife and daughter, those with whom he is most intimate What will prevent him from doing the same to the American public?
So just a little reminder out there, friends, of where some of these folks you're going to hear from this week have been and where they are now.
So any other things, Dan on Trump, again, we'll probably spend a bunch of time on this next week.
There'll be more to say, but anything else?
I think out of all the things you talked about, just something that's interesting to watch is the DeSantis piece, because obviously he hasn't declared that he's going to run for president.
I think everybody knows that he is, and he's going to be the primary rival to Trump.
But a pattern that's beginning to emerge is he's taking shots from Trump.
Trump has been badmouthing him, but he never actually badmouths Trump.
He just puts forward these policies to try to build his credentials.
So I'm curious to see over time Again, if I tried to get the emotion out of it, just the analytic hat of how he tries to harness this to be able to say, you know, I've got nothing but love for Trump, nothing but support for Trump.
Look at everything I did for Donald Trump, but here's why you should vote for me.
And I think this, I think it'll be interesting to see later on how both he and Trump try to play this into their respective hands as we move forward.
I think right now DeSantis is thinking, You know, this is a rally rally around Trump in the short term.
And then I'm betting that he's going to fall in the long term and I will just be there.
And as you just said, I won't be the guy who bad mouthed him.
I won't be the guy that called him.
I'll just be like, well, no more Trump.
I'm here, y'all.
You might as well take me, you know, and I think I think that's part of the game.
One last thing is I think, Dan, just a reminder that things like this will test our democracy.
I don't know what's going to happen this week, but, uh, you know, I don't think most Americans woke up on January 6th and expected there to be a riot at the Capitol.
I don't think most people thought, uh, there'd be, you know, wide scale protests and conspiracy theories about a stolen election.
So the arrest of Donald Trump, it could be.
Something that is theater and nothing else.
It could be something that ends up with sort of violence, protests, whatever.
So we'll just keep an eye on it.
All right.
Let's turn, and it's just always hard to do these turns, but we'll give it our best shot because that's what we got to do.
Let's turn to what was going to be the thing that led off the show, and that is what happened in Nashville this week.
I talk about this on Monday, the day it happened.
I gave a kind of solo episode on Nashville, but there's more to say, and so because I went and did that on Monday, I'll let you have the first crack and Just your responses to Nashville, the mass shooting where three children and three adults were killed at a Christian school.
There are reports and and.
I'll just say large-scale discussions about the identity of the shooter as a trans person and so on.
So I'll just leave it there for you.
What do you think, Dan, about Nashville and what's going on in your mind?
So I think the biggest thing is a couple things.
One is, and it's sad to recognize this, but the difference in the police response in Nashville versus Uvalde.
Lots of people have talked about this, but the police Went in, took out the suspect.
There's been a lot more transparency there.
Relatively intense, like, body cam video of the police confronting the suspect.
Unfortunately, that's the society that you and I live in, where we have to have discussions about, like, the best response with school shootings or mass shootings.
So that was one thing, is that the count of victims was much lower than it probably would have been if they had just sort of hunkered down the way that they did in Uvalde.
I think the biggest takeaway and I don't mean to trivialize with this any of the actual lives that were taken and you know the actual violence was perpetuated but is that it just it happened again it's not surprising unfortunately it's to be expected at this point we live in this society where the question is not if there will be massive shootings but when or excuse me mass shootings but when and they happen all the time I think
Perhaps the most notable, most predictable thing, of course, is the response on the right.
I think it was McCarthy or somebody who's pressed and says, I want to wait to have all the facts before we jump to conclusions.
You've got the standard things about, well, you know, you can't fix sin through the passage of laws.
You have to just.
Change people's hearts.
I'm going to revisit that a little bit later on when we get to stuff in Kentucky, but third claptrap that we get from the right every time these things happen.
So some thoughts and prayers thrown out.
No discussion of, you know, actual reforms and so forth.
I think what's more striking to me is how quiet, relatively speaking, advocates of gun reform have been because it just feels like There's no point in sort of advocating for that.
You don't get the kind of vocal outcry we've had with prior shootings, partly because I think it is just obvious at this point that that cannot happen with a contemporary GOP in power.
Unless you had super majorities of Democrats and a Democratic president and everything else, there will not be any kind of meaningful federal gun legislation that happens.
And I think that that reality has just settled in on folks and has muted some of the response And I think the other part is the normalization of this has had a muting effect.
It is so common now that lots of mass shootings are just not even national news anymore.
You can read these articles and you'll have the people who track this that will say, this is the, you know, whatever hundredth mass shooting in the country this year.
And yes, there are debates about what qualifies as a mass shooting and so forth.
But the point is, the vast majority of those don't even make national headlines anymore.
And so I think there's this kind of numbing effect.
Which, frankly, plays into the hands of the right.
They've held off gun reform long enough that this has become enough of an epidemic in our country that it sometimes doesn't even garner that discussion anymore.
So, unfortunately, those are some of my immediate takeaways on, say, the political context of this.
Throw it to you for those issues about the identity and the same thing that always happens.
The complexities of if it's a white guy who does a mass shooting, he's a lone actor.
If it's somebody besides a white guy, we're going to find some way to implicate an entire community, an entire way of life and paint them with it.
So those issues come up as well.
Well, that did happen because there were calls, I believe it was Josh Hawley, I'd have to go, yeah, I'm 95% sure it was Josh Hawley, I don't have this right in front of me, I'll be honest, but who said that this needs to be looked at as a hate crime, meaning that this was a crime, right, perpetuated against Christians specifically, that was his idea, and it's not necessarily talking about the identity of the shooter as much as those who were Victims, but that doesn't happen.
Anyway, I'll just, I don't need to elaborate on that.
It was just incredibly striking to see that headline.
I gave a lot of specific thoughts Monday.
I want to give a kind of more philosophical, theoretical thought right now.
And that is, I was talking to my class yesterday about gun violence and Christian nationalism.
And one of the things we talked about is that For white Christian nationalists, there really is the belief that they have the authority to put the social square in the alignment they want it to be in.
That if the social square is in alignment, then everything is fine.
Even if that means God-ordained inequalities.
You know, you may not be very high on the social hierarchy, but God puts you there, so as long as you stay there, everything will be You know, all good.
God ordained your inequality.
You might be third or fourth class citizen, but God did that.
Just stay there.
We're going to be here top and then everyone will be happy and tranquil.
Don't worry about it.
OK.
With that in mind, they also feel the sole authority to use violence to put that social alignment back in order.
That's what Gorski and Perry say in The Flag and the Cross.
And this leads me to gun violence because when you ask Second Amendment purists about gun legislation and restriction, They say, well, the epidemic is really a mental illness or and one of the things they love to talk about is fatherlessness.
Josh Hawley talks about this all the time.
I've talked about Josh Hawley on this show many times.
Fatherlessness is the problem.
And what are they saying there?
Well, it's not guns.
It's if if the family was in the right order with two parents and a dad and a mom and the dad was there in charge disciplining and corporal punishing his kids, then everyone would be in order.
That's what they're saying.
When they say fatherlessness, that's what they're saying.
Patriarchy.
They're saying a dad who is the voice of God who put everything in place.
What's the point?
The point is that white Christian nationalists, and there's data on this, Andrew Whitehead and Perry and Schnabel have written a paper on this, that shows that white Christian nationalists are Totally, as a group, immune to calls for gun restriction or reform.
They do not want that.
And you can control for, like, class or gender, but if you score high as a white Christian nationalist, as a Christian nationalist, I should say, you will score high on somebody who is very, very, very pro-gun.
Okay?
Now, what's the point?
The point, I think, for me, is that if we think about order and alignment and Christian nationalism, the Christian nationalist is their underlying fear.
Is that they will not have the power to put the social order in the alignment they wanted.
What keeps them up at night is fear about others.
Immigrants, refugees, black folks, interracial folks, Asian-American, people from across the border, Latinx, queer.
If you are getting out of place in the social order, they are unnerved and angry.
But you know what their biggest fear is?
How the hell are we going to put it back in order?
And you know what?
One of the ways to do it is guns.
Period.
Okay?
Guns is a way.
If we have the guns, we can be the good guys.
Who are the good guys with the guns?
Us.
We will stop the bad guys.
So I'll, I just want to point this and you kind of referenced this Dan, but I'll point to one example from this week.
Then I'll throw it back to you.
Representative Tim Burchett.
Republican Party says this.
He's from Tennessee.
He says this.
We're not going to fix it.
When asked about the national epidemic of school shootings on Thursday, he clarified, and this is coming from the row from Rolling Stone.
OK, a piece by Ryan Bort.
Repenting of your sins and having some sort of reform in this country seems to be the way we're going to have to turn this way around because we have some sick and evil people doing some very vile things.
Revival seems to be the way to go for me.
Revival.
Now, he since has tempered this a little bit.
He's said, oh, I'm more open now to talking to my Democratic colleagues.
You know, he's kind of rolled this back a fraction.
But Dan, I think in essence you have what you referenced, right?
How do we fix this?
Repent from sins.
How do we fix it?
Revival.
I want to say one more thing because I think it's important.
Joe Rogan, most popular podcaster on earth, said that this is about mental illness, not guns.
And it's one more example of this crossover between kind of celebrity pundits, hyper-masculine talking heads, and Christian nationalists.
And I just think that needs to be called out.
So we have about, I don't know, Dan, one billionth of the reach that Joe Rogan has, so I'm sure no one will care.
But nonetheless, I saw that this week and thought we needed to call it out.
All right.
Thoughts on Nashville before we take a break.
Just one, back to that point about Christian nationalists, excuse me, one of the things I've talked about that defines the Christian nationalist mindset, and it's a sort of geeky academic term, but I'll explain it, is What I call a minority majoritarianism, that is the sense that they are the real Americans, that they are the majority of true authentic Americans.
But the anxiety that you're getting as they know that they're approaching the time of being a numerical minority, there will be more people of color than there will white people.
There will be more people who Christian nationalists don't consider to be real Americans in America than there are Christian nationalists.
And that's where I think what you're picking up on is this is part of where that violence, that impulse to violence comes from.
Because what do you do if you truly, honestly believe you're the real or authentic Americans, but the very existence of people other than you is the threat.
And this is what people have to understand.
I feel all the time I say, why do they feel so threatened by queer people?
Like who cares if somebody has two moms or who cares if I don't know.
It's a Black-owned business down the street or whatever.
Who cares?
They do because, as you say, when those people are experiencing being out of place socially, they are encroaching on what Christian nationalists believe are white spaces.
That is the threat.
Their very existence is the threat.
And when you have that kind of majoritarian mindset, but numerically you're a minority, something like violence becomes the means of re-establishing order and guns are the tool of that means in the United States.
And I think all of that is part of what's in the mix of this.
I think it's often not explicit.
I think it's probably not even conscious on the part of many Americans.
But I think if you were talking to, you know, some of the people that you talk to, we know this, the radical number of guns that are owned in the US and that most people who own guns don't own a gun, they own like a bunch of guns.
And if you were to talk to me like, like what, like why?
Like, what's the difference between having, like, one or two guns and, like, 15?
Like, what are you going to do in a shootout with 15 weapons that you can't, like, walk me through this?
It's about that cultural anxiety.
It's about that fear.
And I think that's what drives this.
And that's what I think is at the root of this.
And that's what makes it so volatile and dangerous.
Yeah.
You know, what I talked about with my class is like, if you are out of order somehow, your existence is a very threat.
So just by being trans, you're out of order.
You're not cisgender.
And so your very existence threatening to the white Christian nationalists.
If you have a family that is queer, two moms, two dads, if you have a poly family, whatever, poly relationships, out of order, it's a threat.
If you have people who are coming from, uh, other parts of the world, They're a threat, you know, and so just by being out of line, you're a threat.
And so we need a gun to put you back.
So anyway.
All right.
Let's take a break.
We'll come back.
We'll head over to Wisconsin and talk about probably the most important election of 2023.
All right, Dan.
So one of the things that you hear a lot if you take a writing class or a lit class is that the more particular a case or a narrative or a story or a character, the more universal they are.
And I really think that Wisconsin, you know, Wisconsin's a place That doesn't get a lot of headlines.
It's not New York.
It's not California.
It's not Florida.
It's not Massachusetts, whatever it is, but Wisconsin, I think really exemplifies in a kind of distilled form.
A number of the most crucial issues facing the country right now.
And what is happening in Wisconsin, for those of you who don't know, is that there is a Supreme Court election, an election for the Supreme Court of Wisconsin on Tuesday.
Now, the Supreme Court of Wisconsin has seven members, and right now it is three to three, kind of liberal judges and conservative judges.
And so whoever wins this election will be the kind of tie-breaking vote And thus it will swing the the nature of the court as it stands right now.
Well, Dan, all of this whole thing and I'm going to I'm going to tell you about the candidates.
I'm going to tell you about what's going on in Wisconsin in terms of right now.
But I do want to do a little history because, you know, Dan, it's what I do.
I apologize to everybody, but I'm not going to apologize because this is important.
So Wisconsin and this whole 2023 state Supreme Court election.
Actually has ties back to Barack Obama and Scott Walker.
Let me explain.
So Scott Walker was elected governor right after Obama became president.
And he was really kind of one of the emblems of the Tea Party movement.
Scott Walker was this kind of populist white guy who was, you know, he never graduated from college.
He wasn't a Harvard grad.
And he was somebody who was like, we're going to we're going to rein in spending, no more unions, no more Government bloat.
He was one of those austerity candidates from the Tea Party era.
So he basically puts into motion Act 10, which is this anti-union law.
And it was in his mind, and for many others, like a huge blow to the labor movement.
And it really made it hard for unions to operate and for Democrats to win because Democrats had so much invested in unions.
Now, Walker and the GOP really kind of locked up Wisconsin in many ways.
They enact what Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times calls shockingly lopsided electoral maps.
Like Wisconsin has, Dan, some of the most gerrymandered maps in the country.
So if the Democrats wanted To win control of the state legislature in Wisconsin, they would have to win the popular vote in aggregate by like 13 points.
So you just talked about majority, majoritarian, minoritarian.
OK, if you want to win in like Democratic control in Wisconsin of the statehouse, the Democrats have to basically be like, yeah, we got 65 percent of the vote right in aggregate.
Which is near impossible, okay?
So the gerrymandering that Walker was able to send through still plagues Wisconsin today, right?
So that's all there.
He, and I don't have time to go into it.
I'm aware of the time, but he also, as Michelle Goldberg points out at the New York Times, was able to restrict voting rights, pass an anti-union right to work law, cut funding to education.
I mean, the University of Wisconsin system was cut drastically.
And dismantle environmental protections.
All right.
So.
A couple more things about this 2018, you all might remember Tony Evers defeated Walker in the governor's race, and then Tony Evers just won reelection recently.
And Josh Call won the race for attorney general in 2018.
What does that tell you?
It tells you that there are Democratic voters in Wisconsin.
There are people who are voting for Democratic candidates, even though their districts are heavily gerrymandered.
This makes Wisconsin, Dan.
An overwhelmingly purple state, and it's also a swing state.
If you remember in, uh, in 2020, this is one of the states that like Biden won and it really helped solidify his electoral college victory.
You know, he got Arizona and Pennsylvania, but Wisconsin was right there as kind of like, can you get Wisconsin?
Okay.
So that brings us to Tuesday.
And that brings us to a race between Dan Kelly and Janet Protasewicz.
And I want to tell you, Dan, that I practiced Judge Janet's name 100 times last night with my dog.
So I think I got it fairly right.
It's a long Polish last name.
My wife is Polish-American.
We have lots of those names floating around our house.
It reminds me of Coach Krzyzewski or Coach K.
In college basketball.
Do you know Coach K?
Very famous.
I was going to call Judge Janet Protesté, which Judge P on our show today, but it sounded like something you might see on OnlyFans.
So I decided not to.
So it is.
Dan's laughing.
Thank you for laughing at that, Dan.
I appreciate it.
I practiced that 50 times with my dog.
So all right, back to it.
So we have Dan Kelly, who's a former Supreme Court justice.
He was actually appointed to a short term by Walker when another justice retired.
So he's been on the Supreme Court.
He's also a lawyer and most recently he's been representing none other than the Wisconsin GOP.
Dan Kelly went on an election integrity tour, Dan, after 2020 to quote unquote, tell people in Wisconsin about the voting process as if he was just passing out educational pamphlets.
And I heard him say that in an interview last night.
I was, I was sort of doing all this research.
This is probably more notable.
He was an advisor on the fake elector scheme in Wisconsin in 2020.
So Wisconsin was one of those states where like the Trump team tried to put together fake electors.
Guess who was like, you know, kind of coaching from the sidelines?
Dan Kelly.
He's also anti-abortion in the sense that, you know, even if he's not going to come out and tell you all his policies and everything else, he has the endorsement of the Susan B. Anthony list and other hardcore right wing abortion groups.
He has even campaigned with a pastor who advocates and condones the killing of abortion doctors.
All right.
So that's Dan Kelly.
Janet Protasewicz is a Circuit Judge of Milwaukee.
She has been very open that one of her values is reproductive rights.
And Dan Kelly can't believe she would say that out loud.
And he's so mad at her.
But that's something that she's been very open about and says, that's who I am.
She also says that You know, the the the gerrymandered election maps just aren't fair.
And everybody knows that.
So she's been very open about that.
OK, now, why does this matter?
And I apologize for all the setup, but I do think it really matters.
And if you're in Wisconsin, I think you know this matters.
If you're in Wisconsin and I'm missing stuff, I apologize.
I'm sure if you're on the ground there every day, you you know a lot more about this than we do here.
But just trying to explain the big issues, the issues that face our country as a whole are all distilled here.
Dan, we have abortion.
Wisconsin has an 1849 law that basically bans abortion in almost all cases.
Now, when Roe v. Wade, before Roe v. Wade had been overturned, that law was null.
But now that it hasn't been, there is a huge question.
Will Wisconsin, a Midwestern state, we're not talking about Louisiana or Texas, Wisconsin.
Will there be abortion in Wisconsin?
Well, pretty much the forecast is if Judge Janet wins, yes.
If Dan Kelly wins, no, because there'll be the deciding vote of the Supreme Court when that case is brought to the to the court about the constitutionality of that law.
OK.
Free and fair elections are at stake here.
OK, let me read from Michelle Goldberg.
An even bigger challenge to democracy came in 2020.
Had Karofsky not replaced Kelly, this is the person that beat Kelly before, it's likely that the court would have overturned Wisconsin's presidential vote, plunging the country into chaos.
As it was the state Supreme Court decided by a single vote to toss out the Trump campaign suit seeking to reverse his Wisconsin loss.
And Dan, gerrymandered districts.
It's one of the most gerrymandered states in the country.
And it's a place where one vote does not equal one vote.
Because if you vote in a gerrymandered district, there's a very good chance that your vote for Democrat is like 60% of a vote because the odds are so stacked against you.
Dan, to me, we have an off-season spring 2023 election distilled into almost like pure concentrate all the issues that face us in the 2022 midterms and many of those that will face us in 2024.
So wanted to zoom in on Wisconsin today.
It's happening Tuesday.
Thirty three million dollars and counting has been spent on this off-season election, which is shattering records.
It's bonkers.
What are your thoughts?
I think my my big thought I agree with everything that you said about the significance of it how it distills so many of these things these characters especially you know Dan Kelly you couldn't write like a more kind of like a like a weirder character for this things that stand out to me are number one when despite gerrymandering certain parties are still able to make gains that I think that communicates a lot and it sees that
But I'll take like the 10,000-foot view and talk about something we've talked about before, which goes all the way back to at least the Obama years.
We've talked about this before, that critics of Obama, and this is a place where I'm critical of him as well, talked about ignoring state houses and ignoring state-level politics.
And I would put state Supreme Court justices and things like that on the same level with that.
And we have seen in the last few election cycles growing awareness of this And the necessity and I think Democrats playing catch up for a long time of, you know, having to be better on the ground in different states and 2016 show the significance of those battleground states and then 2020 and so forth.
I think we're beginning to see move past a phase where like that's something people are seeing to like everybody gets it now everybody knows that that's important and it's vital and it's not just about state houses but when we start getting these this kind of new front that opens in that of like well what happens if the state houses throw out the electors of the electoral college that determine a federal election and you know that kind of thing i think the stakes are clear to everybody
and i think that we're starting to see places where democrats and progressives have have sort of caught up or have played catch up long enough that they're starting to be able to make real gains.
And we've seen that in Georgia.
We've seen that in Arizona.
I think we've seen that or are seeing that in Wisconsin.
And I think that that's really significant to watch.
I think it's, again, if I try to take the emotions out of it and just sort of analytically look at it, I think it's a really big Transition in a big shift.
If I do put my emotion into it and say that, you know, I care about things like democracy and I don't mind losing an election.
If I'm actually losing an election, right?
There are more people in my district who on some issue feel differently than me, then fine.
I'm willing to play by the rules.
If I'm being discriminated against and set up so that because of my political identity, you're going to make it so that my vote doesn't count the same as somebody else's.
And that's what this is.
It's discrimination based on political ideology.
Then that's a danger to democracy.
That's a threat for lots of reasons.
And I think that's at stake here as well.
So I feel like, I guess just to reiterate your point then, it does illustrate how Wisconsin sort of distills all of these issues out.
And we see them, including for me, this ongoing, you know, decade long kind of shift now of Democrats playing catch up and recognizing we can't just focus on federal elections.
We need to focus on state houses and state elections as well.
I mean, think about the legacy of Scott Walker.
Scott Walker, you know, is governor.
And we're, I mean, basically, Wisconsin is still just mired in everything he was able to do along with the Republican-controlled statehouse.
I think, you know, a couple things here to note in passing, just as we conclude on this, is that Wisconsin's also one of those states that has a kind of rural-urban divide.
I mean, you have Milwaukee, which is a major American city.
It is one that's often overlooked.
But it's a it's one that has a large African-American population.
And it's one of those cities that the Trump campaign was like, well, there's got to be like too many people voting shenanigans.
Why?
I mean, just like they did in Detroit and just like they talked about in other cities that were that are that have a large black population.
It was, well, yeah, got to be something going on there.
So Milwaukee is is Milwaukee and the kind of rural parts of the state is one Uh, is one axis here.
There's Madison, Wisconsin.
Madison is a huge college town and often seen as a blue dot and a blue kind of a part of the state.
So all of those dynamics are present.
And there's just a huge outreach right now to young women, uh, on those college campuses and other places in Wisconsin saying, look, this is a, you know, you may not care about politics.
This is about abortion in this state.
If you, if, if Janet doesn't win, There's a good chance abortion will be all but outlawed in Wisconsin, period.
Is that what you want?
So, uh, anyway, something to keep an eye on.
I'll definitely be watching to see what happens on Tuesday.
And, uh, if you're on the ground there, if you're organizing, if you're calling, if you're sending postcards, we, uh, we wish you all the best there and, uh, hope that you have the energy to kind of get over the finish line and just want to encourage everyone.
This is one of those places.
Get involved.
Uh, you know, you may not be in Wisconsin, but what is it in your state, your city, your town that you can do?
All right, let's take a break, come back, and we'll shift over to Kentucky.
Be right back.
All right, Dan, let's talk about Kentucky.
What happened there this week?
Yeah, so Kentucky was another state where we talked about the spate of anti-LGBTQ legislation, especially aimed at trans and gender non-conforming people in different states.
Texas, or excuse me, the Kentucky legislature put forward a bill All kinds of stuff.
I mean, like a sort of massive slate of anti-LGBTQ things.
Targeting issues of gender-affirming care in bathroom use.
Also, you know, saying that you can't teach sexuality and gender in classrooms.
Sort of, you know, taking the script from lots of other states, including Texas and Florida, putting it in.
Governor vetoes it, but there are super majorities in both houses, Republicans in both state houses.
So they overrode that veto.
And so it will become law now in Kentucky.
It's the same thing that we've talked about in lots of other states, right?
In the sense of the what's and how's of it.
One of the things that I saw in this one, and you know, I honestly have to say I hadn't considered this, and this may be a piece of all that other legislation as well, and maybe I've just missed it, it hadn't occurred to me, but this even has provisions for setting a timeline to quote, de-transition youth.
So in other words, youths that are already undergoing medical care for gender confirming care, of stopping that and halting what that is.
And it's the same rhetoric we've seen before.
The rights say that, you know, this is just about affirming quote-unquote biological sex, that they don't want kids to make decisions now or to have decisions made for them or have their parents force them to do things that they're going to regret.
10 and 20 and 30 years later is what I think one of the sponsors of the bills, the way that he said it, the rhetoric of parental rights and so forth.
On the left, and among the medical community, it's the standard thing, and I agree with these, that this is dangerous, right?
That one of the biggest risks for youth who can't access gender-affirming care is depression, is suicidality.
Teens are going to die as a result of this.
To say nothing of adults who will be impacted to this.
To say nothing of other people who can't use bathrooms where they're safe.
Or, you know, sort of on and on and on and on.
So we've heard this story before, but what I think what I want to keep in front of people again is the larger pattern in this.
I was reading in USA, I think it was USA Today, that there have been over 650 anti-LGBTQ bills introduced in 46 states in 2023.
And that sounds familiar.
We said something similar in 2022 and 2021, and it just keeps accelerating.
It highlights this, what we were talking about earlier, I think this, this anxiety, this fear among straight, particularly straight white, hetero people that, and cisgender people, that they are not the norm now.
And so there's this perceived threat.
Again, when people say who, you know, who cares?
Like, like, it's not your kid.
It's if you don't want your kid to have that care.
You don't have to.
And let me be clear, I think kids should have access to gender-affirming care regardless of who they are, but they can't if parents don't accede to that.
Who cares if society, the queer folk in society, become more visible?
Well, it matters if you don't think that they're real Americans, that this is not what America really is.
It's this effort to erase LGBTQ identity entirely, to remove it from public space, as you say, and as I say in my book about the social body, right?
Of having a body that looks the right way, that's shaped the right way.
That means that these people need to be out of sight.
They need to be closeted.
They need to be put away.
And I'm going to be really, really honest here and say, That a lot of these people that push this, when they hear about a trans youth who takes their own life, they're not going to shed a tear for that person.
And I'm sorry that may sound harsh and judgmental, and it is.
I'm judging that because they don't value those lives the way that they value the lives of straight kids and cis kids.
I think a last point to look at is when you invite people, you know, I spend a lot of my time looking at the rhetoric that people use and kind of what's going on with it.
It's interesting when you look at the sponsors of these, they'll say, well, you know what?
I just, I believe that the gender is based on biology.
Uh, you know, and, and you, you highlighted a couple of weeks ago, the conversation where somebody goes immediately to the Bible.
Yeah.
Hey, I just believe the logic of just the, I believe as a fill in, in the absence of any kind of evidence of any kind of real argument.
Of being able to say, OK, but like the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychological Association, they all affirm these and say that these are legitimate medical treatments.
What do you think?
Well, you know, I just believe that biology and sex are linked.
Who cares what you believe?
But that's that's the logic that goes through.
It's it's a certain fundamentalist logic of faith that the faith claim is like its own truth.
It's that it's true because you hold it.
People sometimes ask why all these things are linked so much to Christian identity.
I think that's part of it, that there's a strand within a certain kind of Christianity that says, what makes me a Christian, what makes me a person of faith, is that I hold to these things through quote-unquote faith.
And I think that that's there.
So a lot going on there.
But it repeats and carries forward a pattern that I'm very aware of as we look at this.
We're on the, you know, Day of Transgender Visibility as we record this, and this is an issue that's there.
I think one last thing that I would make, so I was going to tie this in with the stuff in Tennessee, is all of this talk about how you can't legislate morality, you can't get rid of sinfulness, they view trans identity as sinfulness and they are trying to legislate it.
So the next time Uncle Ron says, well you know what, you just You can't fix morality with laws.
Let's bring up abortion.
Let's bring up trans identity.
Let's bring up other queer identities and to just unmask that for the power move that it is.
No, you've talked about that on It's in the Code.
I'd encourage people to check that out, you know, and listen to Dan on that at length because you're exactly right.
Just noted, and before we have to go here, that there's, as you talked about, 650 or so bills put forward.
How many bills on gun legislation and gun reform?
Now, you know, we could see, you know, how many in California, how many other places?
Who knows?
I have not looked those numbers up.
I don't know.
But here's my point.
What is the threat?
Well, the threat for the Christian Nationalists, the threat for the gun purists, the threat for the GOP is trans kids getting care, is reproductive rights, and the thing that actually kills more kids in the country Then anything handheld killing machines.
Nope.
We, there's nothing we can do.
Sorry.
We cannot infringe on that.
We cannot, you don't have to register.
You don't have to have a background check.
You don't have to have a permit.
You don't have to have anything you can, and I will just distill this and I know it's, I don't want to be reductive, but I'll just say, you know, to sum it up, they see themselves as the good guys.
And if they have the guns, they feel like they can, uh, have the authority and the fear factor to put the social order, how they want it.
So they want all the guns.
And then they see everyone else when it comes to trans folks, when it comes to queer folks, when it comes to others as out of order.
So it's like, well, legislate the hell out of that.
Like make laws and punish those people.
And that's enough.
If you're looking for an explanation to me, that's like your kind of 30 second explainer of why there's just no way to make any headway on a gun reform conversation.
But as soon as you bring up trans kids or you bring up queer families or you bring up, uh, you know, whatever it is, legislate.
I can't believe this.
My faith says this and the turn to religion.
I'll just say one more thing is a turn to authority.
If I bring in my faith, I'm giving you an authority.
So you might have evidence and you might have the Americans in pediatrics and you have the psychological association.
Guess what?
I have the creator of the universe.
So who wins in that battle?
That's what I'm turning to.
You don't care about my opinion.
Well, how about God's right?
I mean that to me, Dan, and this is why people are like, why Christian nationalism?
Because if you just have white nationalism, if you just have whiteness, if you just have, you know, random, uh, dude's opinion, then it's not as powerful as saying, oh, well, that's actually what God wants.
Religion is always great for that.
So.
All right.
Any final thoughts and what is your reason for hope?
Just that last point about authority, you know, it's something we talk about and it's in the code all the time that so often these rhetorical moves are ultimately about implicit claims to authority.
To make it so that I can't challenge what you say because you have divine authority.
And again, I would just alert people to like, just be aware of when that move is happening to you and don't let yourself be positioned that way.
And it's hard to catch.
My reason for hope?
Does relate again to the Transgender Day of Visibility.
Read an article about 650 United Methodist Church clergy and laity in Texas signing an open letter supporting the International Transgender Day of Visibility.
And as I'm reading these things, I see what Texas has done.
Um, and the moves that they make.
This struck me.
Folks may know United Methodist Church is in the midst of a split right now, uh, largely around, uh, LGBTQ plus issues and inclusion and so forth.
I know sometimes people ask us like, what about the progressive Christians?
What about inclusive Christians?
You talk about Christian nationalists all the time.
I took hope from that in a state like Texas, where the majority of people who identify as religious are very conservative.
Mine is coming from something that most of you probably haven't heard of, but the Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu on Wednesday, according to CNN, won a historic vote at the United Nations that calls on the world's highest court to establish for the first time
Obligations countries have to address the climate crisis and consequences if they don't.
Now that all has to be enforced.
That all has to happen on the ground, but that seems important and we haven't talked about climate much as of late on the show.
It's not a focus of ours, but still that that seemed important to me and thought it was good news.
And I hope we see more of that in the future.
All right.
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