Brad and Dan begin by discussing the utterly confusing rulings from several judges on legality and availability of mifepristone, commonly known as the abortion pill. Dan takes us through the complicated web of rulings and Brad analyzes how creating this mess was an intentional strategy by Christian nationalists to get the case kicked up to the Supreme Court.
In the second segment the hosts discuss a case from Texas where Greg Abbott has promised to pardon a man recently convicted of murdering a protester at a Black Lives Matter Rally. Brad concludes that this is not about law and order - but about a certain White Christian order that, at least in this case, negates a foundational tenet of American democracy: a jury by your peers.
In the final segment, Dan takes us through the just-passed abortion trafficking law out of Idaho - a first of its kind in the nation and one that portends even darker days ahead in the fight for reproductive rights.
Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus episodes, ad-free listening, access to the entire 500-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/
SWAJ Seminar: https://www.straightwhiteamericanjesus.com/seminars/
Merch: BUY OUR NEW Come and Take It and Election Affirmer ! https://straight-white-american-jesus.creator-spring.com/
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
Order Brad's new book: https://www.amazon.com/Preparing-War-Extremist-Christian-Nationalism/dp/1506482163
To Donate: venmo @straightwhitejc
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/BradleyOnishi
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Axis Mundy You're listening to an irreverent podcast.
*Oooooh* Visit irreverent.fm for more content from our amazing lineup of creators.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad Onishi, faculty, University of San Francisco, here today with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
It's nice to see you, Brad.
I'm out here in like New England where it'll be 90 degrees today.
So I don't know how the weather is in California, but I feel like the world has like flipped or something.
I am down in Los Angeles.
I gave a talk last night at Occidental, thanks to a bunch of folks who came out.
And it rained.
It was like, you know, 50 degrees and it rained.
So I have no idea either what's going on.
And so down in L.A.
this week, recording the audio version of my book, which is fun and I'm super excited to share with everybody.
But reading your own writing is hard, it turns out, because you're It's pretty easy to critique yourself, uh, when you read your own writing for like six hours a day.
And yeah, I'll just leave it there.
It's, it's not easy to think of yourself as a good writer when you're like reading and thinking, Oh, that could have been better.
Yeah.
I always struggle too.
Cause I, if I'm writing to speak, I write differently than if I'm writing a book.
So reading a written book for me.
Yeah.
I just feel like, like everybody knows I'm a dork.
Like everybody who listens already knows that.
I feel it more when I have to read my own writing out loud, like you're saying.
All right.
A couple announcements here.
One, I still have signups going on for our Straight White American Jesus seminar starting April 27 with Sarah Mosiner.
That's on purity culture, race, and embodiment.
And you can find all the information at straightwideamericanjesus.com under the seminars tab.
So check that out.
Number two, a week from Sunday.
So the third weekend in April, I will be at the Summer for Religious Freedom in Washington, D.C.
And I'm going to do a special live episode with our friend Andrew Seidel and Catherine Stewart.
So if you'd like to tune in, I'm going to post all the details here in a couple days.
But just be aware, a week from Sunday, we're going to have a live episode of the show, and that's going to be really, really fun.
All right, we got more stuff to say, more stuff to announce here in a minute, but let's get going, Dan.
We've got a really convoluted... There's just so much going on with this.
It's hard to pull the strings apart, but that's why we've got you.
Dueling rulings, I practiced that last night, dueling rulings on the abortion pill.
And I think people have probably heard about it.
I think people have probably kind of seen headlines, but I think very few people actually know the very complex details of the Fifth Circuit in Texas and a judge in Texas and then a judge in D.C.
and then back to Texas and all that.
So, what is going on with abortion pills, the FDA, and these rulings?
So, the first thing is, if you had to practice saying dueling rulings, I'm trying to consistently say methepristone, right?
I think that's the drug.
So, I will often say the abortion pill.
Knowing full well that most medical abortion treatments involve two medications, not one, and there are two pills.
But it's like my nightmare having to talk about medical medication names in front of people.
I have a hard enough time when I go to CVS to pick up prescriptions.
So as you say, kind of a flurry of legal challenges.
So people will know already that a wide range of abortion opponents went to court and basically sued the FDA to say that the abortion pill, which has been legal for decades at this point, that the FDA should not have legalized it, that they didn't follow proper procedures, that it's dangerous and so forth and so on.
And they specifically wanted to limit access to it.
And they sought to place the challenge for this before a very conservative, very, a judge who would sort of see things their way.
And they ended up presenting this to a Trump-appointed judge, Matthew Kaczmarek in Texas, who has a long history of being an anti-abortion activist.
If you read what he actually wrote in his opinion, he's just sort of seething with, you know, anger about abortion and at the FDA and so forth.
Surprising exactly nobody, he issued a ruling banning the abortion pill.
So just a flat-out ban, can't use it anymore, and so forth, which would, of course, impact not just states and municipalities that don't allow abortion or that restrict abortion, but lots of places where abortion is legal as well.
As we've talked about, and anybody who follows the abortion debates knows, the majority of abortions in the U.S.
are now medical abortions.
They're non-surgical procedures.
And so drugs like this figure prominently.
So that's one thing.
That's one ruling.
I think not really surprising to anybody.
I think a lot of people probably think it won't stand on appeal because it was sort of so it just feels like a like a big sort of overreach.
However, in anticipation of this, 16 Democratic states and the District of Columbia had also sued the FDA To prevent them from adding new restrictions to the abortion pill.
So these two cases are kind of going on at the same time in parallel.
Texas, Trump-appointed judge issues this wide-ranging ruling saying, nope, no more abortion pill.
It's done.
A couple days later, the U.S.
District Court Judge Thomas Rice issued an order preventing the FDA from limiting access to the abortion drug in the 18 jurisdictions or whatever it was that were suing that.
So you had the, as you say, dueling rulings of these two courts, one saying No, no more abortion pill.
The other one saying you can't ban it, at least in municipalities where it's legal.
And lots and lots and lots of confusion from all kinds of people about what is that going to mean?
How does that work?
Issues related to mail order stuff, issues related to telehealth, all kinds of complicated issues.
And then a couple nights later, just to add to the confusion, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals weighs in on the issue.
And they added to it.
They blocked the Texas judge's ruling in one hand, and they ruled that the abortion drug can remain on the market.
So that, I guess, is the good news.
However, in a two-to-one ruling, because it's a three-person panel that makes these judgments, they also Uh, put severe restrictions on the availability of the drug.
People who have followed the history of so-called medical abortion or the abortion pill and so forth know that from like the, you know, the mid-2010s, so 2016 or so, the FDA had sort of broadened access and so you could get it from a wider range of providers.
People go to their doctors and you know that maybe you'll see a nurse practitioner who can prescribe a medication even though that person's not a doctor, right?
Things like that.
Telehealth, all of which sort of picked up as it did for all of us in COVID, issues of mail order and so forth.
So the Fifth Circuit said you can't block the sale of it, but basically rolled it back to like 2016 and the restrictions that were on the use of it then.
So here's a description of what that means.
And I'm reading here from an article in Politico that summed this up really well, said, should that ruling stand, retail pharmacies will no longer be authorized to dispense the drug.
So you can't just go to a pharmacy and get it.
Physicians will not be able to prescribe the drug via telemedicine.
Instead, patients will have to make multiple in-person office visits to get a prescription.
Additionally, non-physicians, such as nurse practitioners, will not be able to prescribe or administer the drug, and prescribers will have to resume reporting, quote, non-fatal adverse events, end quote, related to the drug to the federal government.
So that just highlights that where we stand now, you had these sort of rival rulings.
The Fifth Circuit comes in.
puts a hold on the Trump-appointed judge's ruling, but also rolls things back.
Nobody's sure exactly where this is going, except most people are pretty positive it will wind up eventually before the Supreme Court because it is still a shakeout from their decision on Roe v. Wade last year.
A couple takeaways, and then I'll stop talking and get your thoughts on this.
The first thing is all of us who for years and years and years heard people on the right say that they're all about states' rights and it was always about states' rights and so forth.
All BS on that lots of times.
This is a great case in point.
Even Kavanaugh in the Supreme Court ruling about Roe v. Wade said this is a decision for states and so forth.
And the GOP, of course, is deciding to try to bypass that, make this into a federal ban.
Same thing with their logic of activist judges.
For years and years and years, we heard from the right that the enemy of the state was activist judges who would insert themselves into political debates and subvert the will of the people and so forth.
A majority of Americans want access to these drugs.
They believe that women should have access to these drugs, that people who have children should have access to these drugs.
The right set out to find judges who would make these decisions and to make sure they wound up on the bench so that they could go to them and have them basically ratify these decisions.
So got a lot of things here, big government stuff, efforts to functionally ban abortion nationally, if not through legislation, activist judges, and so on.
Yeah, I think the last part is what I want to hit on.
So I was actually down in Phoenix last weekend at the American Atheist Convention, and I was talking with a couple of constitutional lawyers about this like hours after it happened, and they were just befuddled.
They were just like, we've never been in this.
Um, situation before we have these dueling rulings as we're calling it today, and they were just like, who knows now what they what they both said and I think it lines up with exactly what you just said is this probably ends up with the Supreme Court.
But guess what?
That's what they want, right?
Because they've worked for a decade for a generation to stack the Supreme Court, right?
Y'all, I mean, this is just one of those examples where, yes, Trump's no longer in office, but his legacy just lives on.
We talked about it with Scott Walker a couple weeks ago in Wisconsin, and here we have a situation where they're like, great.
Yeah, we can't decide.
We got dueling rulings.
We got a whole mess.
Sure, kick it to the Supreme Court.
Let's have them talk about abortion.
Because guess what?
We feel really good about our odds there.
I just want to point to a piece by Andrew Seidel, friend of the show at Religion Dispatches this week, and I can put it in the show notes, and he writes that Mepheprostone... I didn't practice, Dan.
I practiced a lot of other things.
Is it Mepheprostone?
Yes.
That's close.
That's close.
It's safer than aspirin, much safer.
The FDA approved the drug for early abortions in 2000.
So after you, just like you, right, he says, hey, this is decades and decades and decades of legality, and it's been carefully vetted, right?
And yet this judge overruled the longstanding decision.
But here's what really caught my eye about what Andrew wrote.
The opinion mentions conspiracy theories and eugenics slander and says things like Mephisto to kill the unborn human.
Slate's Mark Stern put it this way, the judge essentially copied and pasted the arguments from right-wing legal advocacy group ADF's Brief.
rephrasing them as analysis.
He bought into every conspiracy theory and line butchered logic ADF gave him, right down to comparing reproductive rights to eugenics.
So Andrew calls this judge a Christian nationalist judge in the piece, and he goes on to point out that the case was argued by Aaron Holly, wife of Josh Holly, And if y'all are keeping score at home, the Hawleys are some of the most openly Christian nationalist members of Congress there are.
Josh Hawley famously held up his fist to the insurrectionist on January 6th.
So, uh, that's just worth pointing out.
I'll just make one more point here, Dan, about the mechanics.
The case was brought in Amarillo in Northern Texas strategically.
And I think you kind of referenced this, but basically if they bring the case there, they know that 100% of the federal cases are going to get bumped up to this certain judge, right?
And so it's a strategy, right?
Think about the strategy.
And I want you all to think about like fairness and justice and democracy right now.
They know that if we bring the case in this location, The judge that will hear it, right, is going to be Kazimarek, this Christian nationalist judge, okay?
And so, if we bring it here, and this is what Andrew, I mean, just if you don't believe me, here's what Andrew writes in the Religion Dispatcher's piece.
Things have gotten so out of hand that now, in the Amarillo Division of the Northern District of Texas, 100% of the cases go to Kazimarek.
This is why several legal experts have correctly referred to Kazimarek as, quote, the most powerful man in America.
So here's what they're doing.
Let's set up shop not in New York City or Washington D.C.
or Nashville.
Let's set up shop in Amarillo.
Let's bring the case there.
It goes to this judge.
We get this big morass of a kind of dueling ruling situation.
Then it goes to the Supreme Court.
But guess what?
We already gamed the Supreme Court.
We did everything we could for a generation to stack the Supreme Court, as I've talked about with Andrew Seidel on this show, and it's all chronicled in his book, American Crusade.
There was $1.6 billion spent over the last generation to stack the court.
So they're like, all right, we got that.
Now, if we just bring the case in Amarillo, we're good.
We're going to kick it upstairs and upstairs is is friendly to our stuff on abortion.
So let's go.
It's it just really hurts, Dan.
I mean, you know, we're old enough to be.
You know, so disillusioned about how these systems work and what they do.
And then yet every time you discover something like this, you're like, God, this is just, you know, the, the, the judiciary is supposed to be this place where like arguments and fairness went out.
And, and, you know, you end up with these situations like this where the system's being gamed.
Andrew goes into much more detail about the judge than I am right now.
So if you don't believe me, sort of about the judge's background and, The ways that he frames things in the brief, you know, read Andrew's piece because you'll get a lot more detail there.
I'll throw back to you.
Final thoughts on this one.
Just one that the only thing if I'm looking for, you know, fissures in this this certainty about the Supreme Court, it is the fact that the one if I if I was an abortion opponent here, the one reason I would be concerned about this going to the Supreme Court, maybe two is even the conservative justice, justices maybe two is even the conservative justice, justices rather explicitly said, we're making this a state issue.
So, So it'll be interesting to see if any of them feel constrained by their own earlier rulings.
And the other one is that this, and this is the trick for people to understand, right?
Yes, it's about abortion.
Yes, the people who brought the case were trying to ban abortion.
The legal argument isn't actually about abortion.
It's about the FDA, and it's about the process of how they go through approving drugs and all this.
So the point is, this goes to the Supreme Court.
It's going to have impact for everything the FDA does, the whole process of drug trials and all that sort of stuff.
It's going to get bogged down in lots of science-y stuff, and it's going to carry the weight of maybe sort of bogging down the entire process of getting drugs to consumers who need them and so forth.
And I think that that could be a complicating factor when it comes to the Supreme Court.
And when it comes to any set of judges who are not just, you know, reading right wing conspiracy theories and cutting and pasting them into a decision, a decision that they had made before they ever took the bench.
So that that's something that bears watching.
And it's something that I hope can at least be a speed bump to some of this.
Well, and it's one of those places where you can see, right, that somebody may not agree with abortion, but they may say, well, legally, there's nothing I can do here, right?
This drug was approved by the FDA.
It's been vetted.
It is shown to be safe.
I just can't out, I mean, I essentially can't change the law or change what is legislation here.
But, you know, once again, that's not what's happening.
All right, let's take a break.
We'll come back.
I will stay in Texas, talk a little bit about Governor Greg Abbott right back.
All right, y'all.
So this week, Governor Greg Abbott weighed in on a case that in a way that was just enraging, Dan.
So I'll just read a little bit from The New York Times, Eduardo Medina's piece from a couple of days ago.
Governor Greg Abbott of Texas said on Saturday that he would pardon a man who was convicted on Friday of murdering a protester in Austin as long as a state board brought such a request to his desk.
The announcement from the governor directly places the fate of Daniel S. Perry, who was found guilty of killing Garrett Foster, 28, at a Black Lives Matter demonstration in 2020, in the hands of the Board of Pardons and Paroles.
The board's members, who are appointed by the governor, determine who should be granted a pardon.
Mr. Perry faces a sentence of life in prison.
So basically, Dan, Abbott, almost as soon as this guy Perry is convicted, Abbott weighs in and says, I'll pardon him.
And it's just worth sort of pointing out that Perry was convicted of murdering Garrett Foster at protests.
So basically, Let me read it.
These cases, man.
I'm sorry.
Sometimes you're just so angry.
All right, here we go.
MSNBC.
Police said Perry, based at the time 70 miles north of Fort Hood, was driving in downtown Austin on the evening of July 25, 2020, when he encountered demonstrators in the street and came to a stop.
Foster was legally carrying a semiotic rifle when he approached the intersection where protesters had gathered, police said, and was fatally shot by Perry, who stayed in the vehicle and used a handgun.
Perry claimed to police that Foster, an Air Force veteran, had pointed the weapon at him, inspiring him to shoot in self-defense.
Foster was pronounced dead at a hospital.
All right.
So I'm going to try to sort of just contain my emotion here, but we have a situation where a jury convicts this man of murder.
Okay.
And this is like, it's just so parallel to the FDA approval of a pill.
But a jury convicts this man of murder and says, what you did was not self-defense.
What you did was not okay.
What you did was murder.
That's what you did.
And you should go to jail for that.
And as soon as that comes down, Dan, and I think some people probably missed this part of the story, Tucker Carlson goes on his show and he talks about the case and he shames Greg Abbott.
I mean, Sawyer Hackett tweeted this out the other night that Tucker Carlson is shaming Greg Abbott.
Like, what's wrong with you?
You need to pardon this man.
You know, this man was convicted by woke juries and it was at a Black Lives Matter event and blah, blah, blah, you know.
Carlson shames Abbott and then less than 24 hours later Abbott weighs in and is like, yeah, I'll pardon him.
Yep.
As soon as, as soon as that comes down, you got it.
I'll pardon him.
Right.
Okay.
Like it's crazy.
Now what happened last night is that The defense team, or the prosecuting team, excuse me, released some of Perry's tweets and texts.
It's actually texts that kind of show who he really is.
So here's some of the things he said.
Well, he's texted and posted, right?
So here's a post.
It is official.
I am a racist because I do not agree with people acting like animals at the zoo.
That was on Facebook in June 2020.
Here's another post from that day.
So that's the man we're talking about.
and from Facebook by comparing the Black Lives Matter movement to a zoo full of monkeys that are freaking out and flinging their SHIT.
Okay.
So that's the man we're talking about.
That's the man that Abbott was like, yeah, totally.
I will definitely be pardoning that guy.
Here are some text messages that he sent to friends near the time that this happened, like when he knew demonstrations were happening and he knew he might encounter demonstrators.
Perry, I might have to kill a few people on my way to work.
They are riding outside my apartment complex.
Justin Smith, his friend, can you legally do so?
Daniel Perry, if they attack me or try to pull me out of my car, then yes.
If I just do it because I'm driving, then no.
Yeah, right, his friend says.
Then he says, I will only shoot the ones in front and push the pedal to the metal.
So, you know, Greg Abbott didn't have those texts and posts when he said he'd pardon him, but that's who he said, I will pardon.
Now, I just want to make like a comment here, Dan, and I'll throw it to you.
This feels very much like the case we just talked about and Amarillo and the abortion pill in the sense that.
What's the point of having processes?
What's the point of having like things in place?
Including one of the most sacred things we have in this democracy, which is a trial by jury, a trial by your peers.
What's the point of having that?
If Greg Abbott, like, you know, a day and a half after this man is convicted, without knowing any of the details of the case, fresh off of the jury convicting him, this is not a 20 year old case, Dan.
This is not a case where there's like, hey, there's new evidence.
This was clearly like a mistake.
This is not one of those cases where like 18 years later, you know, a president or governor is like, you know, clearly there's new circumstances that show us this was not okay.
This is like a day and a half after it happens.
After getting shamed by Tucker Carlson and Abbott steps in and is like, I'll pardon this man.
So like, there's just so many, like, there's a juror here, one of the, one of the people who was an alternate, right?
On the jury.
And, you know, she was, or they were interviewed by AP and they said, this is a travesty.
Like what's, in essence, they said, what's the point?
Of having a trial by jury.
If a governor can just walk in and say, no, he's pardoned.
Sorry.
You don't matter.
Jury of your peers.
You don't matter.
American democracy.
You don't matter.
American judiciary system and process.
Okay.
The other thing I'll say, and then I'll throw it to you is just think about the message he's sending, right?
You show up at a Black Lives Matter protest.
You open fire on people and kill them.
You claim self-defense, but a jury's like, no, that was cold-blooded murder.
You actually texted people ahead of time.
You might have to go kill people.
And then a governor's like, no, you're pardoned.
What does that say about violence?
What does that say about who's allowed to use violence in society?
What does that say about who's allowed to end the lives of other people because they feel like things are out of order?
Took all the time on this show and in my classes about white Christian nationalism as wanting order, as wanting the right to Quell the chaos and make sure everybody falls in line.
Well, Black Lives Matter represents the least following in line, the most out of line thing that a lot of white Christian nationalists can think of.
It gets under their skin so much.
So this guy shows up at a protest, opens fire, and then the governor's like, yeah, you're good.
That's totally fine.
What does that tell you about the kind of society, right, that is being created there?
All right, I got more to say.
What do you think?
So a few thoughts.
One is, and you can correct me if I'm wrong or I'm misstating this, but I think part of what the defense tried to argue is that, you know, he sort of stumbled into this protest, didn't know it was there, you know, or whatever, was caught off guard by this.
He's driving along and, of course, his tweets and posts and things like that are, you know, just show that that was completely false.
Sort of a general thing that I have too is the role of stand your ground laws.
So like Abbott appeals to these and they're not unique to Texas, but they're just stupid laws.
I'm a philosopher at heart.
You're a philosopher at heart.
And The logic of stand your ground laws is that somebody dies.
Like that's how they work.
Because it's the basic, the idea that if you feel threatened by somebody, you're allowed to stand your ground and do whatever you need to do that.
Which means.
Brad, we're walking down the street and you look at me weird, or I feel like you're bowing up to me or whatever.
Oh, I feel threatened.
So I'm going to escalate it.
Cause I can stand my ground.
And then you can say, Hey, I was just walking down the street.
He freaked me out.
So like now I'm going to escalate it.
And like the logical conclusion of stand your ground laws is that somebody gets killed.
With impunity on the person that does it.
And this is what Abbott appealed to.
So we got really strong stand your ground laws and so forth.
The jury still rejected that.
Like, to your point, the stand your ground laws are there.
And even with that, they said, we're not buying it.
Folks, I'm not an expert on this, but let's just think about the mechanics of shooting somebody from inside a car.
If somebody points a weapon at you from outside a vehicle and you're sitting in the driver's seat, you had to have the gun ready.
It had to be ready.
It's not like it was in your glove box or under the front seat or if you're wearing it in a holster or something like that.
Anybody ever try to get your car keys out of your pocket when you're sitting in the car?
It's not quick to do.
The fact that he could, if this gun was pointed at him, if a protester was going to use it, whatever, They drew down on him.
They'd had him dead to rights, and they didn't.
All of which tells me, in inference, that this was not happenstance.
This wasn't threatening.
This was looking to provoke somebody to do something that you could then credibly say was a threat, so you could justify these premeditated actions that are already out.
A couple final things on this.
If I'm anybody in Texas running against Republicans and against Abbott, I am putting those tweets and those Facebook things all over the ads.
I mean, like, here's Abbott.
Here's what he says Texas is about, is this.
Old racist tropes.
The monkey references and the zoo references.
The guy can't even come up with, like, A new novel sounding way to be racist.
He's got to go way back.
So I'm with you.
It's infuriating.
He has an appeals process that hasn't been exhausted.
That's how these kinds of things usually work, right?
You go through the legal process.
It's basically an extrajudicial killing of a Black Lives Matter protester if this goes through.
That's what it will turn out to have been, to communicate to all the white nationalists out there that just go out and shoot some black people.
The governor's got your back.
And the last point is that Tucker Carlson is just a peddler of white nationalism.
It's not even mask.
It's not hidden.
That's what it is.
And it's, it's very evident in this and one of the most sort of tragic and infuriating stories to come out on a long time.
But what you described is the wild, wild west.
Two people like who are just like rolling up on each other, one in a car, one on foot with guns pointed at each other.
And this is what I always come back to when we talk about gun legislation and the second amendment is like one of the things that I, I just want to tell everyone right now who's listening.
I don't want to live in the Wild Wild West.
I don't want to live in a situation where like I'm walking and I'm at 7-11 and like somebody bumps into me and I'm wondering if we're both gonna just draw our weapons because somebody like bumped into me and they're what are they scared or are they upset so now we're in the Wild Wild West and it's like who's gonna draw first and it's like Do I want to live in that situation?
Do I want to live in that society?
I don't.
I don't.
I don't want to live in a society where I'm wondering if the person who like cut me off on the freeway or I cut off on the freeway is like, oh yeah, I got my gun, right?
Let's do it.
So that's, that's one.
Two, I want to just go back to what Abbott actually said.
Here's his post.
Here's here's part of it.
At least Texas has one of the strongest stand your ground laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or progressive district attorney.
So this goes to what you just said about standard ground law.
I agree with everything you just said about it.
It's and we could get into the perception of fear and we talk about this all the time with like police and law enforcement.
If you perceive yourself to be afraid is that Does that mean you should be afraid?
Are you afraid just because a person is black or is brown or is right from another culture or from another context than you?
Anyway, that's a whole nother conversation.
But I want to get back to Abbott.
The stand your ground law can't be nullified by a jury.
Let's just stop there, right?
Let's just take a little sentence.
Stand your ground cannot be nullified by a jury.
Here's what I'm hearing.
If I think I'm afraid and I stand my ground and I end the life of a Black Lives Matter protester, no jury can nullify my right to do that.
Well, what's a jury, Dan?
A jury is the backbone of democracy.
Because if you commit a crime, you're presumed innocent until guilty, right?
Until proven guilty.
And then you have a jury of your peers who decide.
Now we know there's flaws.
We know there's issues.
We know that the legal system is not perfect.
But in essence, the idea of having a free society comes down to, well, if you commit a crime, we're going to think you're innocent, and then we'll see what your peers say.
And that's what will happen.
And you can appeal after that, even if it doesn't go your way, until the process is done.
Abbott's saying, juries don't matter.
That process doesn't matter.
You go ahead and kill people and I'll set you free.
This is not just extrajudicial, Dan.
This is, like, I am the law.
I am the only authority because I am the governor.
None of the tried and true sacred principles of American democracy, like a jury of your peers in a trial where you are presumed innocent until proven guilty, matters.
And that is what is overwhelmingly frightening here.
So anyway, all right, final thoughts on this one, and then we'll move on.
I think just again, all of those points about this notion that the governor is the law.
And I just keep highlighting the hypocrisies that come out all the time.
I don't want to hear any more from anybody about how conservatives are just the party of law and order.
They just care about law and order.
They care about, you know, keeping order, as you say.
When it suits them, that's fine.
When they feel like, you know, some white person has been somehow wronged by it, they set it aside.
The final thing is that the jury didn't nullify Stand Your Ground law.
They felt that it didn't hold or that it had been violated.
It's not that they nullify it.
You go to trial for like, I don't know, shoplifting or something, and the jury decides that, yeah, there's not really evidence that you stole anything.
The camera footage is too grainy or something.
They didn't nullify a law against shoplifting.
They didn't say shoplifting is fine.
They said, we don't think this is an instance where the law holds.
That's what it is.
That's how the legal process works.
That's the very definition of it.
To your point, Abbott just circumvents all of that.
All right, let's take a break.
We'll come back and go to Idaho.
Talk about abortion once again.
Be right back.
All right, Dan, we've been working together on this show five years.
Many times we've made mistakes.
I made one today.
So Dan and I got together before today and we're like, hey, here's what we're going to do.
We're going to talk about the abortion pill situation first.
Then a really good segue will be to go to Idaho and talk about an abortion trafficking law.
And then we'll finish by talking about Greg Abbott.
Well, guess what I did?
For the second part of our show, I went to Greg Abbott.
So Dan, I want to publicly apologize.
I messed that up.
And that was my bad.
So I'm sorry.
About once every six months, Brad Onishi makes a mistake of some sort.
So this is it.
So you're good until the latter half of 2023.
If you could let my wife and child know that it's only every six months, that would help me a lot, because they seem to disagree with that.
All right.
I apologize for that mistake, Dan, but let's nonetheless go to Idaho.
So something happened in Idaho this week that's actually pretty monumental.
And I think it portends future events in the country and is just kind of a sign of things to come, unfortunately.
So I'll throw it to you to give us the facts here.
What happened in Idaho this week?
Yeah, so Idaho passed, I guess, a first-of-its-kind abortion anti-trafficking law, right?
This is what they're calling it.
And basically, it's a law that makes it a felony to assist a teen or a minor, right, a pregnant minor who's typically going to be a teen, in obtaining an abortion without Parents or guardian consent.
So one of the things that happened, high court strikes down Roe v. Wade, lots of states enact restrictive abortion laws.
So the obvious thing that lots of people will do if they have the means to do so is to cross the border into a state that doesn't.
If you're in Idaho, maybe you go to Washington state, a much more progressive state with more progressive laws and so forth.
So they passed this law seeking to stop pregnant minors from crossing the border.
And that's the real focus.
Presumably, if you're an adult, you can make the decision to cross the border and do this.
The idea is, unless a minor's parents sign off on them crossing the border to get an abortion, we're going to ban this.
It's a felony.
It's punishable by, I think, two to five years in prison.
It is also reading some really interesting stuff in the background of this week.
It's a goal that they've had for years.
They've been working for a really, really long time to get something like this in place without luck, and they finally did.
And as you say, really momentous for lots of reasons.
Number one, it's part of just this broader pattern we've seen of anti-abortion states working to try to find ways to enforce their laws on their people sort of beyond the borders of their state.
That's why you've had the move against the abortion pill and being able to mail it or do telehealth, right?
Being able to meet with a physician in a different state from within one state and get a prescription or something like that that you can't get in your own state and so forth.
It's also cheeky because the law also prohibits the transportation of these people within the state of Idaho.
And lots of people say, well, that's kind of weird.
Idaho is like super, super, super restrictive on abortion.
Where are you going to be transporting them to?
The legal analysts I've read say the reason they're doing this is because it's a really complex and I gather not completely settled legal question about what happens if you try to prohibit interstate travel of your residents.
There has been determined that there's a constitutional right of citizens in the U.S.
or people in the U.S.
To travel between states, right?
I live in Massachusetts.
Massachusetts and Vermont, I don't know, suddenly have a spat.
Vermont cannot require that I have to have like a Vermont passport or something to like come into the state.
This looks like a restriction on interstate travel.
And so they're trying to say, nope, nope, has nothing to do with interstate travel.
We're banning it inside the state as well.
It also brings up really complex legal questions about states that aim to extend their laws beyond their borders and enforcement.
They're also, I say this all the time, I feel like we need to say it again, we're not the legal experts, but we read people who are, right?
There is typically a rule that like what you do in another state, if it's legal in that state, is not something you're prosecuted for in your state.
So let's say I live in a state that doesn't allow legal gambling.
I go to Vegas for the weekend.
I have the time of my life gambling legally in a casino, whatever.
I come back, my state can't have like the state police or somebody waiting for me at the airport to arrest me for legal activities in the state of Nevada, right?
So there are all kinds of complex issues about this.
Of course, there's the issue of will this become a paradigm that is then used in all those other states that are, you know, maybe border on states with more permissive abortion laws to continue trying to do this.
One of the things that we said, everybody said, everybody watching anything with the Supreme Court said last summer when it came down with their ruling is that this opens up Not a can of worms.
It's like a bait store of like worms and legal questions and novel legal theories and legal ideas that have never been fully settled.
And let alone all the things that will come up as states try these novel solutions to either protect abortion access or to ban it.
This is what we've seen.
And so these kinds of questions, it's going to make its way up to other courts on these really complex questions of interstate travel, the extension of laws beyond state borders and so forth.
But the most immediate point is it's another shot clearly aimed at limiting abortion.
Again, that's not how it's phrased.
It's an anti-trafficking law.
We're so concerned about our youth.
We want to protect them from psychological and emotional harm or manipulation by coercive adults or whatever.
It's I did an episode on It's in the Code a long time ago called, you know, Christian health and safety, right?
Protecting the safety of the children.
Again, that's not really the issue.
So we'll see where this goes and how it develops, but it's another really chilling development.
I just want to chime in here and say, like, you know, if a lot of people ask me about civil war, I mean, whenever I go talk, Dan, you know, someone's always asking me and I understand why, you know, like, are we going to have another civil war?
And my response is like, look, you know, we can't think of civil wars as North versus South.
We have to think about the ways that we're seeing, you know, state legislature, state policies, cultures all develop and so on and so forth.
But think about if this is allowed.
Think about if you're allowed to restrict travel in the ways that you just talked about and persecute and prosecute people for things they do in other states.
And then you have states linking up, right?
And all of a sudden you have just these large swaths of the country where, like, if you travel from, say, Iowa to Michigan, you know, for reproductive rights and health care and perhaps to get an abortion and you can be you can be prosecuted for that.
What we're gonna get are two things.
One, we're gonna get wide-scale migrations.
Like, people who have the means to get out of those states will leave them.
They just will.
They'll stop sending their kids to college in those places.
They'll stop taking jobs.
Like, if you get offered a job, right, as an executive or a leader, and that job happens to be, say, in Idaho or, say, in Florida, and these things are all in place, okay?
You'll see people being like, I'm not doing that.
I'm not going to move there.
I'm a 32 year old woman who got offered this job.
I already have three kids.
I don't want any more kids.
And if we get, if I get pregnant, right, with my partner, with my husband, with anyone else, whatever, like And I'm going to get, like, prosecuted for jail time if I travel to New York, right, to get an abortion.
I'm not going to take the job.
I'm done.
I'm not going to do it.
Why would I go to college there?
Okay, so that's one.
Two will be, we all know, so many people don't have that.
They don't have the means to travel because they live in Georgia or Louisiana or they live in Idaho and they're like, how am I supposed to just every time I need to travel hundreds of miles, perhaps thousands of miles, you know, to get the care I need, whether that is for abortion, whether that is for gender affirming care, whatever.
OK, so we'll see the division and we're already seeing it.
Don't get me wrong, but we'll see the further division of the country into these kinds of These kinds of regions, these kinds of cells where the lived experience is drastically different on the ground, where to be an American in one region is different just in terms of your lived experience than to be an American in another region.
And you're going to see culturally in a de facto way, the kinds of divisions we might associate with a country that yes, is supposedly one country.
But seems to offer its citizens drastically different ways of life depending on which region you live in.
And if this kind of law is allowed, those regions will like those states will link up and they will form right what I'm calling like a Southeast region of the United States where the lived experience is much different than say in Vermont and Massachusetts where you are or in California.
Or I am.
So, you know, that's what comes to mind for me when I think of these trafficking laws and the ways they're going to be sort of used strategically when it comes to abortion, reproductive rights, gender-affirming care, so on, so on, so on.
So, final thoughts on this one before we sneak in one more thing that I think is worth talking about.
Sort of on that point.
I think it could be a useful exercise to sort of game out the extremes of this.
Right.
And sort of imagine what could this like.
So imagine like, how does this look?
Could you have a checkpoint on the interstate as you're leaving the state?
And every time you've got a car that looks like there's a minor in it who could maybe be pregnant, are we, are we going to stop them?
Are we going to test them?
Are we going to question people, look for IDs, make sure that you're really the parent.
And if people say, well, that sounds ridiculous.
Well, it's because it is ridiculous, but I don't know that it doesn't follow from the desire embodied in this law.
And I think that that tells us something about how problematic a law and a practice like this is.
Right.
I get I get images, quite frankly, of, you know, the the former Soviet states where you would have like checkpoints between countries and barbed wire and this and that.
And people will say, well, that's ridiculous.
Maybe.
But if you had told me five years ago that there would be this law saying that you couldn't transport a minor to another state or that if you take somebody to another state to have an abortion, we're going to prosecute you or sue you, I would have said that was ridiculous too.
So I think it can be a useful sort of thought exercise to think about what would the world look like If the impulse behind this law was fully embodied and fully enacted.
And to me, it's, it's a chilling vision.
Talk about freedom, huh?
Talk about freedom.
You get stopped on the border and people are asking you to get out and they're trying to determine if you're pregnant.
Uh, great there.
You come home from, like you said, you come home, live in the American dream here, huh?
You come home to your state and the police show up and they're like, what did you do on your vacation?
Where'd you go?
Oh, you gambled?
Oh, interesting.
Okay.
What else did you do?
Did you see some doctors?
We have footage of you going into a doctor's office.
What was that about?
What did you do in there?
Can you tell us why you went to that doctor?
I mean, talk about freedom, huh?
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Sounds amazing.
Well, let's talk about one more thing.
Not going to cheer anyone up at the end here.
I'm just going to put it out there.
You ready, y'all?
So, we talked about Lance Wallnau in the Charismatic Revival Fury series with Matthew Taylor.
Lance Wallnau is a very, very influential part of the New Apostolic Reformation.
He's a Christian nationalist.
Many of you listening will know who Lance Wallnau is.
He was one of the favorite kind of spiritual directors of Doug Masriano, who Uh, ran for governor and PA and almost won recently.
So Lance Wallnau is, is, I mean, you may not want to admit it if you're listening.
He is incredibly influential.
Millions of people listen to him every week.
Well, this week he said, and this is coming from Right Wing Watch, appreciate y'all.
Lance Wallnau warns that God will soon start killing those who are persecuting Trump.
So here's what it says.
Broadcasting live from Israel, Walnau blamed the devil for Trump's arrest last week on charges of falsifying business records, which prosecutors say he did in 2016.
He also warned that God will start killing American political leaders next month in response to the recent arrest of former President Donald Trump.
And I'll just say, if you have not listened to Charismatic Revival Fury, the series I did with Matt Taylor in December of last year, and you don't know what's going on here, that's your place to turn because you'll learn all about this.
But Dan, I just wanted to bring this up because it's just, this is just frightening, man.
I mean, this guy has influenced over millions of people, millions of people.
And he's saying the political leaders who deserve it will be killed because Trump has been arrested.
I just there's kind of a theme here today of like law doesn't matter.
You know, it's not the party of law and order.
It's the party of white Christian order, right?
As long as the white Christians have the order they want.
It's all good.
But if not, well, I'm Greg Abbott.
I'm going to pardon this guy.
If not, I'm going to like, you know, release a, uh, an opinion in a court case that uses conspiracy theories and all kinds of like, you, you know, ridiculous argumentation.
If not, I'm going to get up on my, you know, live broadcast on social media and say, the political enemies of Trump will be killed.
And God wants that.
This is a movement of fear and a movement of Christian social order.
It is not about law and order.
The only time they want law is when the law reflects the white Christian order they want.
That's it.
If it doesn't, the law means nothing.
The law means nothing.
Democracy means nothing.
I might be exhausted, Dan.
I might be like in a fever dream right now.
I'm just saying.
It's not about law and order.
It's not about democracy.
It's about power and white Christian order.
And as long as those things are in place, they're good and they'll talk to you about law and police and all of that business.
And if it's not?
It's like, oh, yeah, Trump's enemies are going to be killed.
Oh, yeah, I'm going to pardon this guy, even though he drew on somebody and a jury of his peers convicted him.
Oh, yeah, we're going to bypass the FDA's 20 year approval of a drug and just say, nope, sorry, you can't do that.
So anyway, any final thoughts for today on this or anything else?
Just a final thought that that kind of apocalyptic, you know, prophesying of what God will do.
Number one, I just put like the theology hat on for just a minute.
It's really dumb theology.
People buy into it.
But here's the question I always have for people.
It's like, wow, God's really pissed about this.
Why didn't God do anything sooner?
Or why wait till May?
Or why didn't God stop the prosecutor who's doing this from ever being born?
And then it never could have happened or whatever.
So if you're getting ready for some Memorial Day barbecues with Uncle Ron coming up, those are You know, fun little conversation starters that you can play with.
But the other and more serious thing is there's always a thin, thin, thin line in this kind of apocalyptic language between, I'm just saying what God's going to do.
And inciting violence, right?
It becomes a code.
It becomes a dog whistle for the followers of God to say, well, you know what?
Maybe we're God's method of doing this.
We are God's tool.
We are God's soldiers.
We are God's warriors.
We're the means that God is going to use while it gives the preacher calling for this, the room to squeak out of it and say, Hey, I never, I never told anybody to go do anything.
I said, God was going to do it.
I didn't, I didn't say that, you know, people should do it.
And that's part of what really frightens me about this kind of rhetoric is the way that I feel like it is a code, you know, kind of for people to go out and take action.
Yeah, it's hard not to compare this to what happened with the case with Abbott and Perry and so on.
So I'll stop.
I'm just I got to stop.
All right.
Let's go to Reasons for Hope, Dan.
I went first last time.
What is your reason for hope?
I'll just go to Nashville and say that Justin Jones and Justin Pearson are both back as as now they're appointed as interim house members.
They were both appointed, I think, unanimously by the different the relevant organizations that had to identify who the interim would be.
And I think it was Justin Jones and his supporters marched to the Capitol after the unanimous decision to reappoint him.
And the GOP head of the Statehouse there has said that they will seat them as required by the Constitution.
I think it's hopeful for a number of reasons.
I think it highlights the real reasons of why they were expelled.
And I think it also pulls a lot of teeth from that.
We talked when this happened that this has made these two people national figures, and now they're national figures with a seat in the Statehouse again.
Yeah, you kind of took mine, I'm not going to lie, but I have others.
I have other reasons for Hope, Dan.
I'm not just Brad who's full of despair all the time, even though that's what people think.
One of the things that I saw this week, and we didn't have a chance to go over it in detail, was a piece about how there are so many young folks running for office in what we call usually red states, places like Florida and Texas.
People who are, quote unquote, behind enemy lines, who are 28 and 31 and 34 years old and running for county seats, for mayor seats.
I was in Phoenix.
I'm in L.A.
Now, every time I go around the country, I meet people who are just involved on grassroots levels.
There's a great organization run for something and it basically is trying to get young folks to like get involved and run for office.
I just think that's good news and I hope we see more of that.
So there are reasons for hope across the country.
There are people fighting back.
It's tiring work.
It's exhausting work.
I think people often get to a place where they're just like, I'm not sure I can do this anymore.
But the results are palpable and the results are real and they're so, so important because we talk about whether it's reproductive rights, whether it's last week, we talked about obviously the Tennessee 3, the Tennessee 2.
We just are in a time when running for something is a really, really good idea.
Just standing up and not letting things go, you know, not letting people go unopposed in some of these elections.
So anyway, all right.
We got Sarah Basler's seminar.
Please sign up for that.
Check it all out on our website.
We have new merch.
Some of you bought new merch and we're so excited, but like, I'm not going to lie.
We have an election affirmer shirt that I think is awesome.
We also have a come and take it shirt that is a little free library that I'm very proud of.
Check that out.
I'll be live a week from Sunday at the Summit for Religious Freedom, so look for more details there soon.
