Brad and Dan begin with a thorough breakdown of why the Texas bill to post the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms is unconstitutional and un-American. They discuss parental rights, hypocrisy, and the dangerous escalation of religious supremacists - and where we are headed next.
Rep. Talarico: https://youtu.be/we0b04Qbbvc
In the second segment, Dan discusses all things Florida - from the fight with Disney, to the 1st Amendment implications of banning books, to the way DeSantis is flaming out as a presidential candidate before he even gets started.
In the third segment both hosts discuss the oversight issues at SCOTUS and why it's a longstanding problem that needs addressing.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Been one of those mornings, Dan.
Wasn't sure I was going to make it.
Kid wasn't feeling good and you had some stuff going on.
So anyway, here's my co-host.
How are you?
I think, I think my name is Dan Miller and I'm professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
But as you say, it's been one of those days where like everything's thrown off and I kind of don't know what day it is or who I am, so I'm glad that you're here and everybody can buckle in for the smooth ride ahead for the next hour or so.
Yeah, I am going to get in the car after this and drive three hours south to San Luis Obispo to give a talk at Cal Poly, which I'm really excited about.
I'm wearing our swadge come and take it shirt with the free little library in there because I gave a radio interview earlier this week in San Luis Obispo and let's just say a lot of conservative people seem to be upset given the calls that came in.
I'm probably going to wear this shirt while I give my talk just because that's how I roll.
You know what I mean?
Just we got people coming to the talk to be I don't know, contrarian, then they'll get to see our shirt.
So that's how it goes.
All right.
We're going to start today in Texas, and then we're going to go over to Florida.
And then we're going to talk about the Supreme Court, which we have not talked about yet.
And there's like a million things to talk about the Supreme Court.
And then at the end, we'll get to the Proud Boys as well.
So.
I'm going to talk about Texas Tan and basically what's happened very quickly and very rapidly is a movement to get the Ten Commandments posted in classrooms.
And this, of course, is an infringement on religious freedom.
So I'm just going to stop right now and say we have a new series on religious freedom called One Nation, All Beliefs.
The first episode is on our feed right now.
And we did it with Americans United.
And there's a whole separate feed, like you can hit subscribe on episodes related to religious freedom.
And we have trans pastors, queer, black ministers, secular rabbis, student organizers, all talking about religious freedoms.
You should check that out now.
And like I said, the first episode is in our feed and anywhere you get podcasts, search for One Nation All Beliefs and you'll find that.
So Dan, I'm going to stop and just play a clip.
This is from Texas.
It's from the Texas State Legislature.
There's a bill from the Senate that was sent over to the House, and it was up for debate in the House.
And James Tallarico, who is a state rep there, really grilled down on the bill.
So this is him grilling the sponsor of the bill.
And the part of this you're going to hear is really about parental rights, but I'm going to post the whole clip in the show notes.
It's 12 minutes, and I'm not going to lie, friends, it's 12 minutes that is worth your time today.
So go check that out later.
But here's two minutes of, of Tallarico talking about parental rights and why having a Ten Commandments in a classroom was, is unconstitutional and un-American.
Tell me about, because every time on this committee that we try to teach students values like empathy or kindness, we're told we can't because that's the parent's role.
Every time on this committee that we try to teach basic sex education to keep our kids safe, we're told that's the parent's role.
But now you're putting religious commandments, literal commandments, in our classrooms and you're saying that's the state's role.
Why is that not the parent's role?
That's really an interesting rabbit trail that you've gone on with that.
Because really, what we're talking about here is a historical, foundational document to our nation's education history and our judicial history.
Those other things are great and interesting, but they're not foundational to us educationally and judicially.
Would you be comfortable with adding language to receive parental consent from all the parents of students in the classroom before putting it up?
I would not.
I am, again, going to keep it clean as it came over.
So you don't want parental consent when it comes to students receiving religious commandments?
I don't believe that, again, I think that these are foundational to being a good citizen and being a good member of a classroom.
And I know that our teachers are more and more and more having to fight for classroom management over the behavior of students, and I don't think that these commandments would in any way I think these commandments would help with that classroom management need.
Alright, so there's so many things here Dan that I just want to make sure we get into.
One is, we have been covering school stuff for over a year now.
It's all over the news.
It's all over the country.
It's a mess.
It's honestly one of the scariest things I think happening in the country right now.
One of the things, Dan, that we hear all the time, parental rights, parental rights, parental rights.
I want to make sure that I have a say in what my kid reads and what's going on in the classroom and no woke propaganda, no ideology, right?
And then Tallarico asked, well, okay, shouldn't this be a matter of parental rights?
I mean, wouldn't you want your kid to have to have a permission slip if they're going to have religious ideology posted in their classroom?
And the answer is simply no.
And it's silence and it's like also befuddlement, right?
Like, uh, I'm not sure.
Deep rabbit hole.
And the thing that continues to be called back on in order to justify placing the Ten Commandments in the classroom is the idea that this is foundational to American history.
And if you listen to the rest of the clip, Tallarico does a great job and says, well, if this is foundational to American history, why don't we have other things that are foundational to American history?
Why don't we add those to the bill right now?
You know, why don't we add things like Hammer Rabbi's Code or the Magna Carta?
Why don't we add things that are also foundational?
We could have, I don't know, uh, Frederick Douglass, right?
And his writing about how the 4th of July is not the same for an enslaved person as it is for everyone else.
I mean, there's a lot of quote unquote foundational things to our history, right, Dan?
But that never clicks here.
It never clicks at all.
So parental rights is out.
The idea that this is based on history and it's not about religious indoctrination at all is a hard claim to make when this is the only one you want to put in.
And finally, and this is in the clip as well, and I'll throw it to you after this, Dan, is Tallarico walks through how the legislature itself doesn't obey the Ten Commandments.
And one of the most damning, if you if you all watch the clip, is he's like, so one of the Ten Commandments is do not kill.
And yet this legislature refuses to outlaw the death penalty.
And it's like befuddlement.
And then the retort to something about the translation from the original text and how it says this.
And Tallarico is like, this legislature is willing to have state-sanctioned killing.
And you want to put up commandments for our kids that says, do not murder.
That seems like a problem.
He also walks through how they sometimes meet on the Sabbath on Saturday, which is the Sabbath in the original version, the Ten Commandments.
And it's just a blatant contradiction, right?
He finally says, and this is a point I appreciate, Dan, and I'll throw it to you after this, that he says, look, I'm a devout Christian.
I'm saying this to you as somebody who seeks to follow Jesus and the Ten Commandments.
This is on American for all the reasons I've just talked about, and it's also on Christian.
That you are ramming down the throats of all school children a set of commandments that is particular to one Christian tradition, Jewish tradition as well.
Isn't it God's job to convert people and to spread his message?
Why do we need this?
And he turns the tide on her and he says, this feels like an idol to me.
It feels like you're making an idol out of this rather than following the words of Christ.
I think it's a fascinating line of argumentation.
I think you did a great job bringing out every last aspect of why this is a problem.
And one more, I'm sorry, I'm on a roll, but one more I'll mention is just he mentions Hindu students and he mentions Buddhist students.
He mentions students that are not Christian, and there are Hindu and Buddhist students in Texas.
We talk all the time, don't talk about deep red Texas.
Yes, the elections go that way, but there are people of all stripes and worldviews and backgrounds in Texas.
If you're a Hindu kid and you show up and the Ten Commandments are there in your classroom, what does that tell you about what you're supposed to be?
What it means to be a real good citizen of your classroom, a real good citizen of the country, a real good citizen of your school or your community?
What if it says in the first commandment, love the Lord your God, there's only one God.
And you're a Hindu who says, well, actually, I think there's a lot of gods.
Or if you're a Buddhist who says, I don't think there's any God.
Or you're a secular person who's like, yeah, I don't think there's any God either.
This is all basic, right, Dan?
We all know this, but it's really good to bring it out in the open and to have the language ready to point out why it's so un-American and so unconstitutional.
Throw it to you.
What are your thoughts?
So, a lot of the same thoughts as you, and it's a great takedown, as you say, just kind of point by point, and a great takedown to take what I think are really, really substantive points that were clearly well Like, well-suited for a regular conversation.
If people want to have the Uncle Ron rehearsal sort of practice, that's how you do it.
So, one of the things I've brought up before is, if I want to put on my, hey, I'm from a traditional Baptist background, and the history piece of this, again, and I say this
And I know some people know it, and they're probably like, Dan, you say this all the time, but I say it to enough people in enough contexts, enough students and others who are shocked by it, that the reason why we have what Thomas Jefferson called a wall of separation was partly because of Baptists in America who wanted religious freedom, and they meant things like not Having state-sanctioned enforcement of religious views.
They didn't just mean religion not telling, or excuse me, the state not telling religion what to do.
They meant religion not being able to tell the state what to do.
And the reasons are many.
The reasons are their historical background and stuff.
But here's the sort of theological piece, and I think you sort of touched on that, is I've talked about this in the Code series.
One of the pieces of rhetoric we hear all the time from Christian nationalists, other Christian conservatives, and others is this kind of triumphalist, we're not afraid of anything, God is all-powerful.
And yet everything they do is have this sort of constant state of fear.
And One of the theological arguments behind this was whatever God is, if God is what we as Christians think God is, God doesn't need our help to win converts, right?
God will do that.
If God is omnipotent and all-knowing and all the omnis that people have, It doesn't need human laws, doesn't need human persuasion, doesn't need the state to come along and try to coerce people into particular beliefs and so forth.
This is the conversation I've had with people before is that, to me, this is a pretty insecure God that they worship.
And it may not be productive, but if you really want to get under somebody's skin coming at it this way, try out that line.
When they have this vision of this omnipotent, kind of hyper-masculine God, he doesn't seem to be really good at much because he needs legislatures in like Idaho and Texas and Florida and places like that to do everything.
So, I mean, that's sort of one piece of it, as you say, as the clip showed, taking out the sort of historical, but I think also the theological heart of it.
And I think also this myth That somehow or another the Ten Commandments, like all American laws, are really expressions of the Ten Commandments in some way.
It's just silly.
There are not lots of laws about honoring parents or, you know, lots of things in the Hebrew Bible.
But the line about killing is great.
I think the Sabbath observance one is another one that's really important.
Historians and constitutional law experts, Andrew Seidel, who we talk to a lot, good friend of the show, will do this.
It's just not true.
It is just simply religious indoctrination.
The last point for me is when they talk about parental rights and stuff, when you bring up that issue about what about parents who don't believe in this, and they're sort of It's like they're at a complete loss of how to sort of compute with that.
It's because, like so many other things in Christian nationalism, it's not really about parents.
It's about the right kind of parents.
It's about Christian parents.
It's about white Christian parents, in particular, who should be able to enforce white Christian values as a kind of norm.
And so there is neither A willingness or I think an ability to even conceive of, as you say, the parents of the Hindu student or the Buddhist student or the secular parents or the card-carrying Christian parents who say, I think God's big enough and tough enough and whatever that if God's going to win people over, God's going to win people over and I don't need the school to do it for me.
So yeah, just a lot of the same thoughts.
Encourage people to listen to the clip because it is, it's a great kind of point-by-point takedown, which again reveals what's really going on here, right?
Maybe the last point, I think I've had three last points, but the last point is people ask us oftentimes, why argue?
Why do the fact-checking if that's not really what changes things and so forth?
I think there is value to bringing out into the open what is really going on, and this does that.
Yeah, and I think there's a difference between, like, you're citing statistics from the Daily Wire, I'm citing statistics from the New York Times.
Like, that's one game.
Another game is basically what Telerico is doing here, which is drawing out the logic of an argument.
And showing how, on logical terms, according to certain principles like separation of church and state and so on, that this doesn't make any sense.
And I think that's why this is so effective.
He's not just saying 50% versus you said 12% and you have your source and I have my source, so I think that's there.
There's one last, sorry, one last point on that that occurs to me.
When people talk about arguments and rhetorical strategies, one that they'll talk about is what's called internal critique, right?
Which is sort of, you criticize something from within the perspective of the person advancing it.
And that's another piece that's here and that's really effective, is to say things like, Isn't this idolatry, right?
Are you elevating this above God?
If you say, and your theology says that for one to really be a Christian, you have to freely, willfully choose to make Jesus your personal Lord and Savior—it has to be this personal, individual decision and so forth—that rules out Compulsion in that decision.
So that's another piece of it as well that I think that can be really effective is when you can enter into somebody else's framework and then show how the argument doesn't work from within their own sets of premises.
And that's another piece of what he's doing.
Well, and I used to do this all the time.
People would come at me on, like, Facebook or Twitter or whatever, and they would use all this Christian language, evangelical language, and I would, like, I speak fluent evangelical, as you would, Dan, so do you.
And so I would just use all of their words and concepts and phrases against them, and then at the end, my last comment would be, look, it's very clear your relationship with God isn't going well.
I'm going to pray for you.
And they just melt down at that point.
And then it became, no, I'm going to pray for you.
And I'd be like, no, no, I'm praying for you.
And then I'd be like, no, I'm praying for you.
I'd be like, well, I'm praying already.
So what are you, you're typing, I'm praying.
It was fun.
I don't know if it changed any hearts and minds, but it was fun for me.
All right.
I want to make one more point about this.
Let me give you a quote.
We think there can be a restoration of faith in America, and we think getting 10 commandments on these walls is a great way to do that.
That's former state representative Matt Krause.
We think we can really set a trend for the rest of the country.
This scares me for a number of reasons, but there's one that may not be apparent on first reading.
And that is this, Dan.
You mentioned how this is based on fear.
It's an insecure God and an insecure people.
And they're trying everything they can to feel safe and protected.
And so they're like, yeah, let's get the Ten Commandments up there.
All right.
Well, all right, we got the Ten Commandments, nothing's changing.
Still got school shootings and this and that and people are still gay.
What should we do?
All right, let's have prayer now.
Let's do prayer in school.
All right, we're gonna have 15 minutes of prayer.
And they're always looking to scratch the itch of safety and security.
and they're not going to find it.
Putting the Ten Commandments up is not going to scratch the itch.
So then they're going to turn to prayer.
Then they're going to turn to this.
And what scares me, Dan, is that until you recognize that this is a fear-based, sad attempt to secure something in a way that is not effective and not constitutional and not, in many ways, humane, you're not going to back off from the strategy. humane, you're not going to back off from the strategy.
You're going to keep going.
That's what scares me.
It's one thing to put the Ten Commandments up.
I think it's unconstitutional, and yes, I think it's terrible if a Hindu student, a secular student, whatever, has to walk in and have that on their classroom and basically think, I'm a second-class citizen or I'm not doing something correctly.
Okay?
Or a second grader has to go home and ask their mom, why is that there, mom?
How come we don't obey the Ten Commandments?
Jeff and Jennifer at school say that's what you're supposed to do.
That's terrible.
There's something behind it that might even be more tragic, which is the continual like escalation of the tactic to something that just gets really dangerous and really scary.
And it's not like we're not seeing that already in attacks on trans kids and so on.
So, all right, let's leave that there.
Let's take a break and come back and talk about, we skipped Florida last week, so now we got to just catch up and there's a lot.
So we'll be right back.
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All right.
Dan Miller, I'm starting to think that you're one of those people from the Northeast.
Like my, my wife is from Massachusetts and like whole, like her people from her town, when they get old, they all moved to the same part of Florida.
So like, if you go to one part of Florida, you just see everyone from her town, but they're just in Florida.
I'm starting to think you're one of those guys who lives in the Northeast.
It's like cold all the time and you just wish you were in Florida.
And so you're always, you're our Florida desk man.
Like whenever we need to know about Florida, you're the guy.
Cause you.
You live there like all the other folks who are from the Northeast and getting on planes all the time to Fort Myers and Tallahassee and Pensacola.
Is that fair?
I don't know.
I think the real mission is to try to make Florida purple again before my retirement age.
So before I flee there for winter, we need to try to kind of win it back.
But yeah, I am sort of like, I feel like the straight white American Jesus Florida desk.
We were sharing with folks the newsletter with all the links and stuff, and people were probably like, everything that Dan Miller sends is about Governor DeSantis.
And it's kind of true, but just to contextualize, right?
To be serious about Florida, we've talked about places like Florida, In Texas, but I think Florida preeminently as significant, not because it's Florida, not because it's a state that I think some people still somehow think is a swing state.
I think it's very red at this point.
But because it is, for me, this kind of MAGA lab, right?
It's the lab where what has become mainstream in the GOP of trying to, we've talked about this for months, trying to out MAGA Trump, Trying to double and triple down on policies that proved very, very effective in winning over the GOP grassroots.
And people raise these questions.
Our guest co-host a couple of weeks ago, Annika Brockschmidt, I think brought this up really effectively.
People sort of bring up, well, what would happen if you had this as a national policy?
We're like, well, look, you'd be Florida.
That's the dream of the GOP.
So we bring it up and I'm drawn to it because you have somebody in Ron DeSantis who clearly wants to run for president.
wants to show that he can be even more of a culture warrior than Trump was, and has been on a mission for months since he won re-election in Florida, to show and say, this is what America could look like if we got real MAGA people in political this is what America could look like if we got real So that's why it's significant.
I think a number of things have happened this week, though, that highlight not just that, that's the story I've been telling, but also elements that might illustrate pushback, possible limits of this, what this could look like.
So a few things that have gone on.
Everybody knows, we talked about this when it happened, that you've had this spat between the DeSantis administration and Disney.
Quick recap, years and years ago, decades ago, Disney got this weird special dispensation from the state of Florida to run their own Little community had to provide fire and police and stuff like that, but basically didn't have state regulation.
Don't Say Gay comes out in Florida.
Disney, the chairperson of Disney, or CEO rather, kind of reluctantly comes out and says, this is a bad policy.
DeSantis' administration goes crazy, starts accusing them of being woke and so forth, and says, we're going to take away all those special privileges you have, creates this commission to do that.
Disney somehow, through mechanisms that nobody seems to be able to explain how the DeSantis administration missed it, just outmaneuvers them and gets his hand-chosen group of people to give them all their rights back, and then somehow the DeSantis administration finds out and they come back after Disney and nullify that.
So, Last week, I think it was, Disney files a lawsuit against the DeSantis administration, and this brings us to the real thing, saying, this is a violation of our First Amendment rights, right?
We said we didn't like this policy that came out, and this is retaliation by the state of Florida.
Florida has argued, of course, that this is just about business and that they shouldn't have this special privilege or whatever, But as we always say, I'm not a legal expert, you're not a legal expert, so we read people who are.
And all the legal experts I've read have said, you know what?
Disney's on a really firm footing here because...
The DeSantis administration kind of bragged about this forever.
Like forever they said, this is because they're woke, so we're going to go and we're going to retaliate against them.
Why is that significant?
One of the things we're starting to see, and I think we're going to see over time, is the unfolding of the pushback on some of these policies and states.
And there's a lag.
You can do these big flashy things if you're a governor or some other leader through executive action.
If you have a legislature that will kind of give you a blank check to do whatever you want.
And there's that lag time of the pushback, but we're beginning to see it and we're beginning to see that it seems to have real legs.
And in some cases, it's going to work against conservatives because guess what conservatives?
Conservatives argued for a long time.
They argued in court in one that, guess what?
Corporations count as people, and corporations, that means they have the same rights as people, including speech rights.
So this is one thing to sort of watch and see what happens with this over time, because this issue of Free speech, I think, is going to come up in the medical fields.
I think it's going to come up in education.
I think it's going to come up in businesses.
Another one that we've talked about, and this isn't just Florida, we've seen this in Texas, we've seen this in Idaho, are all of these laws that allow people to challenge books in like School library, public library, school classroom, whatever it is.
Well, Illinois just became apparently, this is the first law of its kind, passed a bill that's going to the governor's desk that would make it illegal to censor or ban books in public spaces.
So libraries, schools, classrooms that remove books Could lose state funding.
And this is really, really interesting.
And this is what the governor said when the bill was first presented, reading from a Politico article.
He said, in Illinois, we don't hide from the truth.
We embrace it and lead with it.
Banning books is a devastating attempt to erase our history and the authentic stories of many.
And then the newly elected secretary of state, who, of course, is part of this, said that he couldn't, when he sort of was running for office, he couldn't fathom the book banning was happening in 2023.
He said, it is so blatant and so dangerous, I was blown away.
We're beginning to see other places that are like, okay, we can play this game.
If you want to try to be the thought police and tell everybody what they can think, we are going to protect Freedom of speech.
We're going to protect freedom of information, I guess, is a way to describe this.
And then another piece of this is, is DeSantis flaming out?
We've talked about this some.
He went to Washington, didn't win the endorsements that he wanted.
He took this big international trip recently and it ended with a conference of business leaders in the UK.
They sounded like Trump describing him.
They described him as very low energy and not very interested.
It didn't go well.
He didn't put his best foot forward.
Polls show that these policies, these radical policies in states like Florida and Texas, they are out of step with most Americans.
And this is part of what we're starting to see.
We've also seen all of these, the quote-unquote anti-woke policies in Florida.
I've read analyses that say that Florida is really worried that their university enrollment is going to drop because of this.
They've done polls of current students.
They've done polls of graduating high school seniors and juniors who say something like 10 to 20 percent are not very confident that they're going to stay in Florida because of this.
And we've also seen that for DeSantis, despite the fact that he's doing all of this, he's now starting to really lag behind Trump.
Uh, in the GOP, so it's not working.
So what's my takeaway from all of this?
Why revisit Florida?
Number one, I think it is this MAGA lab and it really, really shows what the GOP wants for America.
But I think it's been going on long enough now that we're beginning to see how the rest of America responds to this.
And I think that these kinds of trend lines are going to be really, really important as we go into next year and an election cycle and the rest of this year, as we begin to see some of these people try to, we'll go through the primaries, the MAGA candidates will win, they'll have that grassroots support, but what will it look like
When moderates or the suburban women or the others are having to think about abortion again, or having to think about laws like in Illinois, where they'll protect freedom of speech and freedom of information.
What kind of country do they want to live in?
So a lot of things going on there, and I just see it as such a kind of battleground or lab of what's going on nationally.
So I've been talking for a long time.
I will step away from my Florida desk and let you take the mic.
So I want to get to DeSantis flaming out, and I think that's something to talk about.
But the first two things you mentioned are really free speech issues, right?
So on one hand, we have the Disney case.
And I'm not necessarily one who wakes up in the morning thinking, I want to defend the rights of the corporation Disney.
That's not something I think usually.
However, you're right here in the sense that they seem to have a good case about the First Amendment and them being retaliated against in some way for speaking out against a policy.
Then there's the book banning.
And I really think that we need, and this could take so many forms, but I really think that we need a campaign that Brings us back to the First Amendment and the freedom of speech because the freedom of speech, let me read the First Amendment to everybody.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press or the right of people to peaceably assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
I think one of the things that's happened, Dan, is we talk about the Second Amendment all the time and guns and that whole business, but in the First Amendment, it almost is like Clause 1A.
First Amendment A, about religion, is the one that gets talked about all the time now.
That Christians are always arguing, certain kinds of Christians at least, that they need religious freedom so they can deny people who are gay cakes at their bakery.
So that they can, as football coaches, make their teams pray at the 50-yard line.
That's all religious freedom.
Let me have my freedom.
And I think what we need is a return to 1B.
Hashtag Amendment 1B.
Because Amendment 1B is the freedom of speech.
So when you talk about banning books, Okay.
You're talking about freedom of speech.
Now, there's already so much precedent about pornography, right?
So that's the first thing your uncle Ron's going to tell you.
Well, you want pornography in the school library?
Nope.
Talked about pornography a lot in the Supreme Court.
That's there, right?
That can all be looked up.
We're talking about the banning of books that express ideas about race, about gender, about history, right?
Because you are scared of what it says, okay?
Drag queens speaking in libraries.
Jon Stewart in that infamous interview said this.
He's like, if a drag queen wants to read to children, should that be illegal?
And the state rep there from Oklahoma is like, yes.
And John Stewart, isn't that freedom of speech?
And the guy says, well, the government has a responsibility to protect kids, but it's free speech.
Again, we hear a militant defense of guns all the time.
Why not have a campaign 1B, amendment 1B, hashtag amendment 1B that says there is freedom of speech.
And that includes books.
That includes political speech.
That includes being someone who dresses any way they want and getting to speak.
Just because you wear certain clothes doesn't mean you don't get to speak and have the freedom of speech in the country.
So to me, this is one way, if we talk about drawing out the logic and we talk about drawing out the implications in the first segment.
Related to Texas and Ten Commandments, this is another way to draw out the logic of what's happening and to battle it and say, we have the freedom of speech in this country.
That means books.
That means expression.
That means political expression.
That means even if you're a business like Disney Corporation, who I will not recognize as a person, I don't care what the Supreme Court says, but if you're a business and you come out against the policy, you don't get to just get retaliated against.
Because you're against the policy.
That's the freedom of speech too.
So anyway, I want to come back to DeSantis flaming out.
Any more thoughts on the free speech angles of this whole thing?
Just one.
I mean, everything you say is right.
And that is the serious piece of this.
I think the flip side of it is, and I've talked about this before, we talk about campaigns I would love to see happen.
I would love for people in a concerted effort in these areas that have these, because remember that a lot of these rules now are, if you tell me as a teacher or a librarian that you have a concern with a book, I have to pull it until somebody looks at it and approves it, right?
It's not, it's now on a list to be considered or that we put a little star on it or something so people can know that somebody's registered a concern about it.
I encourage people then go into your libraries, go into your schools and flag the Bibles and say that you're really upset about that.
Be ridiculous.
Go into the gardening section and talk about how you're just personally, morally upset about, I don't know, the way that they talk about perennials or whatever.
Go into the science fiction section because it's full of all kinds of stuff that isn't like white Christian America stuff or scientific views that are not accurate or whatever.
And show how ridiculous this is when they're put in the position of having to close down entire sections of libraries and put those legislators into the position of having to explain why it is that those aren't being removed, but only the things that target queer folk are.
Or only the things that talk about America being too black or too much a nation of culture or a nation with too many indigenous people to start with or whatever, why only those things are targeted.
And I think that, again, that brings into view what's really at work here, which is the delimitation of freedom of speech from those we don't want to hear from if we're the white Christian nationalists.
So, Second Kings, 223.
Then he went up from there to Bethel.
And as he was going up by the way, young lads came out from the city and mocked him and said to him, go up, you bald head, go up, you bald head.
When he looked, this is a hard, is this a hard one for you to hear Dan?
I know.
No.
I'm looking at, I'm looking at my lack of hair and thinking, I know where this passage goes.
I feel afraid and they should remove it from the library.
Yeah.
That's why I chose it.
When he looked behind him and saw them, he cursed them in the name of the Lord.
Then two female bears came out of the woods and tore up 42 lads of their number.
Uh, I have a kid.
I don't want that kid learning about...
People getting tore up by bears?
That's scary.
Get it out of the library.
That's what I think you're saying.
All right, let's talk about DeSantis.
There's a piece at Mother Jones, and this is in our research link.
So if you haven't signed up for a Substack, Dan mentioned it.
We have a great team member, Mark Kurth, who is helping us compile all of our research links every week.
And he sends those out on Thursday night or Friday morning.
So if you sign up for our Substack, Which is in our link tree.
You're gonna get all these links in your inbox.
You don't need to go to the show notes.
You don't need to worry about it.
One of the pieces from this week is at Mother Jones, and it's about DeSantis flaming out.
It's by Dan Freeman.
And he says this.
In truth, Trump's appeal is, or was, probably based less on just being an asshole than in getting America's large share of angry, aging, conservative, mostly white people to feel, this asshole is on my side.
Now, I partly agree.
I think he's right.
It was more about just policies and things.
I interviewed Jeff Charlotte recently, and what Jeff said there in that interview, and I fully agree, is that when he was at Trump rallies in 2016 and 2020, the way that Trump was able to build MAGA Nation was through emotion and incarnation.
Meaning, when you were there, you felt lust.
You felt desire, you felt revenge, you felt resentment, scorn, you felt eroticism.
I mean, in a weird way, this magnetism.
And Dana, it makes me feel like I'm a really emotional person.
I'm like, I cry all the time and I'm just very sensitive.
And I, like when I go to movies or like, for me, this is usually at sports games that I care a lot about.
Like I'm that person who's yelling and then like, he's like, has his hands in his, You know, he's holding his head in his hands because he's like, down, because we're losing, and then I'm yelling again.
What's the point?
It's like, I feel stuff so deeply, like at a sports game that I really care about, or like at a concert, you know what I mean?
Or at a movie.
That's a lot of what Trump did.
In a weird way, the billionaire with the gold toilet was able to get these folks to feel all of the, I mean, as you always say, to be the id that brought them into their desire, their rage, their lust.
Ron DeSantis cannot do that.
And what we've said for months is that Ron DeSantis is way better at policy and government than Trump, and he is.
The Disney case notwithstanding.
But what's happening is that you just can't show up with inhumane policies and think everyone's going to be drawn to you like they were to Trump.
It feels like one of those things where he did an equation But when he actually got on the ground, right?
It's like you're supposed to like someone.
You ever have this situation?
You're young and everyone's like, Hey, I think you'd really like this person.
And then they tell that to the other person and both of you kind of size up the situation.
And you're like, I think they're right.
We're a pretty good match.
And then you actually try to talk and there's just no chemistry and it doesn't work.
And you're like, it should work.
We both like the same things and have the same interests and it doesn't work.
There's no chemistry.
There's no nothing.
Ron DeSantis has that problem.
And that's, to me, one of the reasons that he can't just create a Tramaga policies and become president.
He's going to have to find a way, if he wants to, to connect with people.
And I'm just not sure he can.
There's implications here that I don't like, which means that Trump may and looks like he may actually be the nominee in the face of the DeSantis challenge.
But anyway, that's that's down the road.
What do you think about all that?
I think it's all true.
I talk in my book, right, in Queer Democracy about how it's the sort of visceral emotional level is what I think moves politics and ethics and morality and so forth.
And I'm not an evolutionary psychologist.
I'm not somebody who studies emotions like that.
But the reality is what we typically describe as kind of negative emotions, they're really powerful.
And they feel Good.
As much as it sounds weird, right?
We have all known those people in our lives who seem to feel better if they're angry.
They, like, like, the ironic thing, like, they're not happy unless they're pissed off about something.
They're not happy unless they're yelling at somebody.
They're not happy unless they're unhappy.
And I think, I think there are reasons why those emotions work the way that they do.
I think there are reasons why they're as powerful as they are.
And I think you're right that Trump has this kind of, call it a dark charisma.
You don't want to be around him because I don't know.
He's an effervescent person who makes you feel good about yourself, whatever.
He just taps into those emotions in a way that lots of other people don't.
And we've talked about this for a long time.
That's what populist leaders do.
They are able to embody that emotion, embody that rage in a way that their followers then sort of link into.
And I think you're right.
DeSantis doesn't have that.
And so what it partly shows is that cruelty isn't enough.
Because all these MAGA policies are about cruelty.
They are about being cruel To those that we don't like, or those who scare us, or those who we don't think are real Americans, or aren't good enough, or whatever.
It has to also tap into the kind of emotional level that somehow that cruelty really benefits me, and I don't know that DeSantis is tapping into that.
element the way that he does.
And that's what he lacks when he speaks.
That's what he lacks when he leaves Florida.
That's what he lacks when he goes other places.
So I'm with you.
I think it's going to be really interesting to watch and see how this plays out.
The last thing I'll say is I think to me it says a lot of what we need to say about the contemporary GOP, that the other thing DeSantis lacks right now is indictments.
We have seen the rally around Trump once he's indicted for crimes and his fundraising goes up, his popularity goes up, his polling goes up.
I'm going to I think that also tells us an awful lot about the state of the contemporary GOP grassroots.
Yeah, there's a couple things related to this that we should just at least mention.
Coming up this week, and we'll probably talk about it next week, is a CNN town hall with Donald Trump.
And I just want to say something to CNN.
Shame on you.
Have you learned nothing?
It's been almost seven years of this, and you're just putting the man right back on the town hall.
He is being indicted for how many things right now?
He incited an insurrection and you've learned nothing.
This is as we've talked about fascism and authoritarianism for years now.
This is how you enable that.
You normalize it and CNN.
I don't, I just don't see any excuse for this.
If I'm, if I'm honest, I, somebody can write in and try and convince me if you want, but There's also CPAC Hungary, and CPAC Hungary is happening, and Kerry Lake is there, others are there, so we'll get to that, but that's just one more signal that CPAC now has a yearly Hungary edition.
It just shows you the way that they're They see Orban as an ally and they see him as an exemplar of what they want.
So anyway, I just wanted to mention those because they are happening and I think they tie in to all this discussion.
So all right, let's take a break.
We'll come back and talk about the Supreme Court and that whole mess.
Be right back.
All right, y'all, let's talk about the Supreme Court.
So there's been a lot about the Supreme Court.
We did talk about Clarence Thomas probably a month ago, but there's been more, and I'm sure some of you have been like, hey, one of these guys is going to talk about that.
So today's the day.
Here's Philip Bump at WaPo writing this week.
On Thursday, ProPublica reported that wealthy investor Harlan Crowe paid the private school tuition of Mark Martin, a grandnephew of the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who Thomas has said he's raising as a son.
It's not clear how much tuition Crowe paid but if you run the numbers it seems that it would be about $150,000.
This comes on top of other reporting from ProPublica that in 2014 Harlan Crowe bought properties belonging to Thomas to the tune of more than $133,000.
Thomas has been treated to luxury trips by Crowe and so on and so on and so on.
Now, there's more on Thomas.
So this is also from the Washington Post.
Conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo arranged for the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be paid tens of thousands of dollars for consulting work just over a decade ago, specifying that her name be left off billing paperwork, according to documents revealed by Waho.
In January 2012, Leo instructed the GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway, Kellyanne Alternative Facts Conway, to bill a non-profit group he advises and use that money to pay Jenny Thomas the documents show.
Okay.
So, Leonard Leo, if that name rings a bell, it should.
He's the man that basically, through the Federalist Society, stacked a court over the last generation.
If you need a resource on that, Andrew Seidel's new book, American Crusade, will tell you all about it.
So, go look that up.
Now, there's more.
Clarence Thomas is not the only justice.
Let's talk about Gorsuch.
This is from Politico.
For nearly two years, beginning in 2015, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch sought a buyer for a 40-acre tract of property he co-owned in rural Granby, Colorado.
Nine days after he was confirmed by the Senate for a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, he got a note.
The chief executive of Greenberg Trug, one of the nation's biggest law firms with a robust practice before the high court, would be buying it.
On April 16, 2017, Greenberg's Brian Duffy put under contract the 3,000-square-foot log home on the Colorado River.
He and his wife closed on the house a month later, paying $1.8 million, according to a deed in the county records system.
Gorsuch made between 250 and $500,000 on the deal.
And this is on, sorry, it's coming from his disclosure forms.
Anyway, now Greenberg-Torig has been involved in at least 22 cases before presented to the court.
Okay.
So the people that bought the cabin from Gorsuch have had 22 cases before presented to the court in recent years.
Now, Now, there's been efforts, Dan, to sort of like, hey, should we maybe talk about this?
Like, I don't know, Supreme Court, you all are wilding out, should we maybe Have a little discussion.
And that's what Dick Durbin wanted to do.
And he invited Chief Roberts to testify early this month about judicial ethics rules and potential reforms.
And Chief Justice Roberts declined the invitation and said he didn't want to be there.
Now, this comes also on the heels, and we talked about this a little bit, Dan, of Samuel Alito giving an interview where he basically whines and says he can't believe the persecution they're facing.
This is the first time the court's been an object of scorn and of criticism.
And that's blatantly not true.
Samuel Alito needs to read some history.
But Alito's very upset that people would be criticizing the courts.
So, now there are some reforms happening, some other things we'll get into, but let me give you one thought, Dan, to start, okay?
The Trump era showed us that so much of our government is built on norms, not laws, and Trump was willing to just trespass all those norms.
Talked about that for like five years.
The Supreme Court also seems to be a place that works on norms and assumptions that people would just act in an ethical way.
And I think there's been this sense for a long time that if you're a Supreme Court justice, you're sort of this.
It's like you're in Plato's Republic and you're one of the guardians and you're separate from society.
You've given up all your bodily desires and interests.
You're simply a judicial mind that exists in a vat, uh, occasionally eating some lasagna or a nice continental breakfast, but otherwise just a judicial mind in a vat.
No, and this is not true.
I, when I, I've told this story before, when I lived in DC, I almost got upset with Justice Kennedy because he was picking Cantaloupe in front of me at the market and I was going to tap him on the shoulder and then I saw the security guards.
So that's not true.
Here's the point.
I think we assume that these folks don't have any cares in the world about getting ahead.
They just want the best for the country and to decide the right things.
And we know that's not true.
And it's very clear now that they're susceptible to influence.
They're susceptible to favors.
They're susceptible to status bumps.
And we also know, and again, read Andrew Seidel's book, American Crusade, if you don't believe me, that the court has been stacked over the last generation, that there has been a $1.6 billion effort to get the likes of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and Barrett and Roberts on the court.
So these are not minds in a vat.
And I'll give you one more thought, Dan, and that's this.
They're not up for election ever.
And I don't know about you, Dan, but sometimes when you don't have to worry about something and you are under no threat, it's really easy to get complacent.
I think we can all imagine scenarios where we didn't feel as if something was ever going to be threatened or we didn't have to kind of like keep up a certain standard.
We just assumed it was there the whole time.
They were like, well, we're good.
We're not going to actually do our due diligence.
We're not actually going to, right, do our best practice.
We're not actually going to hold ourselves to a standard because no one's looking, no one cares, and I don't have to.
There's a very human tendency there.
And it seems like the Supreme Court, for the first time in a long time, is being looked at and having people say, hey, y'all need to clean up your house.
And they're like, how dare you?
How dare you come over here and tell me that my house is a mess?
How dare you criticize me?
I am a Supreme Court justice and I think that's a problem.
So anyway, what do you think?
I think every, the laundry list you give, the sort of summary of this highlights, you know, sort of all of that.
And a number of things.
So one, yeah, Roberts tried to sidestep it, just be like, no, we're like, we do ethics stuff and it's good.
And it didn't convince anybody.
Here's the thing.
If somebody wants to say, you know what?
Oh yeah, you're right.
I got this, this monetary thing, but it didn't impact anything.
I promise.
Okay.
You know how you try to prove to somebody that the interests that you have in something don't have an impact?
You disclose it.
That's what a potential disclosure is for.
You disclose it, and then somebody can decide No, we think that that's a problem or, yeah, we agree.
We think that, thank you for disclosing that.
We'll keep that in mind.
We'll move forward.
An analogy people might be familiar with, my partner's a real estate agent.
If you go to buy a house, right?
Or if you go to buy a car or something like that, you can look up, say, the Carfax report that tells you like, has it had accidents and stuff?
If you're selling a house, you have to fill out a disclosure form that says, here are problems or issues with the house that I know about.
So that a buyer can go into it with eyes wide open and say, yep, you shared that, we get it, we're willing to go forward or nope, sorry, too much of a red flag, whatever.
When somebody refuses to do that and only tells you about it because they got caught, I think there's reason to be suspicious, right?
And all the elitos of the world who want to cry and whine and somehow act like this is shocking or this shouldn't happen, I think to your point, the point that you just made, is that I think the people of the Supreme Court have known for a long time that they view themselves, they are the final arbiters.
They are the final arbiters of truth.
Truth in the sense, judicial, legal, whatever.
And I think they frankly revel in the fact that there is nobody above them who can hold them accountable or who can force them to do anything.
I think they're also a little terrified about this level of scrutiny, because I like to imagine what would happen if a law ever actually was passed.
To create some sort of oversight of the Supreme Court and then went to the Supreme Court, like what that would look like.
But the point is, I think all of that's there.
And I think it shows that, yeah, they're human like everybody else.
They're partisan like everybody else.
They want to get ahead like everybody else.
I think we can get in the sort of masters of the universe way that we think about this and trivialize how big these sums of money are, because these people live in a realm of financial and professional reality that most of us will never occupy.
But for most of our listeners, for me, for you, half a million dollars is a lot.
130 grand is a lot.
I have never in my life been in a position to drop 130k on a vacation.
And these are the kind of things we're talking about.
So I think it really shows how sordid it can be.
And until and unless the Supreme Court was actually to do the kind of things that they make everybody else do all the time and hold themselves to some sort of standard, a binding enforceable standard, Nobody can take the Supreme Court seriously.
And from now on, I think politicians may say, yes, we're going to abide by the decision of the court.
We're a country of law and order and so forth.
But it's always going to come with an asterisk that it's kind of a foregone conclusion how some of these justices are going to Rule on these issues, and we'll find out later that one of their partners got tens of thousands of dollars, you know, for contracts that they got, or somebody's tuition was paid for, or somebody made half a million dollars on a real estate transaction so that they got money from somebody who, as you say, presented something like two dozen cases, represented two dozen cases before the court.
On and on.
I think it's, it's, if it hasn't been fully discredited, I think it is close and perilously close.
And the only thing that's going to fix it is if Roberts were to actually force something through from the court.
And I just, I don't see that happening.
So here's what we should point out.
Ted Cruz got on his podcast yesterday and was like, well, Clarence Thomas took trips.
Who else took trips?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg took trips.
Here's how many.
Here's how many other people did.
Justice Sotomayor wrote a book and got paid for it.
So what do you think about that?
Now, I want to get to that in a minute.
Here's the difference, though, Ted.
I know you're a debate champion at Harvard and all that stuff.
They disclosed it.
They disclosed it.
They told us on the forum.
When we tried to buy the house, they were like, hey, yeah, pipe up there had a problem with it.
Yep.
Heating system.
Two raccoons died in there.
Who knows what's going on, right?
They disclosed it.
Thomas didn't.
Gorsuch, right?
There's omissions there too, right?
The amount of stuff Thomas left off his form?
Incredible.
Here's what the New York Times editorial board says.
No member of Congress or the executive branch is permitted to accept a single free cruise or flight without disclosing it.
Lower court judges are subject to gift limits.
But Chief Justice John Roberts has repeatedly said the conference's rules do not apply to the Supreme Court.
Why not, John?
You work for us.
Why not?
It remains the least accountable part of our government, as the watchdog organization Fix the Court has been saying for years.
Now there's new rules being proposed, but they're not very strong.
Gabe Roth, Executive Director of FixTheCourt, points out judges are still not required to disclose the dollar amounts of the trips and can wait up to a year to report them.
Members of Congress, by contrast, must report all such trips within a month, okay?
A better solution, and this is introduced by Senator Whitehouse, Sheldon Whitehouse, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Court Subcommittee, would require the court to adopt a code of conduct with disclosure rules that are at least as rigorous as those imposed on members of Congress.
There should be recusal rules.
I mean, I could read on and on and on, but there are ways this could be reformed.
But to this point, Roberts and Alito and others have scoffed at this.
And I just say, if you want the court to be legitimate in a time when many are doubting its status, then do this.
You're not immune.
You're not somebody who just gets to do whatever they want.
You are accountable to the people, even if you're not up for reelection.
And so that seems really important.
Real quick, Dan, before we have to go, what about the Proud Boys?
What's going on with them?
I'll throw this in just for good measure this week.
So the Proud Boys, this just happened yesterday.
Brad, you emailed me about it and I was like, what about the Proud Boys?
And I hadn't had a chance to like look at the news in a couple hours.
I was like, oh, there it is.
Five Proud Boy members were found guilty of crimes related to January 6th.
And the really big part of this is that four of them, including Enrique Atario, who was the leader of the Proud Boys, were convicted of seditious conspiracy.
It's a really big deal.
That's a rare charge, not often brought forward, not often finding conviction.
It is typically reserved for domestic terrorists.
I'm just going to throw that out there for all the people that want to say like, it was just a tour of the Capitol.
It was the same as other, apparently not.
Apparently, a jury of their peers felt that it was equivalent to domestic terrorism.
They could face decades in prison.
We won't know for a long time.
A couple takeaways from this.
One of the things that I've been really glad about watching now these prosecutions unfold, and I think Merrick Garland noted something like more than 600 successful prosecutions of J6 perpetrators at this point.
And that ranges everything from like somebody who gets probation to like, I think the longest sentence so far is 10 years in prison.
But that the, oh, it was just talk.
Defense has not worked, right?
Because this, on a big scale, has worked the way that we've talked about this before.
The way that, like, somebody will make, like, a sexist comment or, like, a racist joke or something, and you call it, like, oh, it's just a joke, you're being oversensitive, of course that's not really what I think.
And it was kind of the same thing.
People were like, oh, we were just talking on social media, or I was just wrapped up in the moment, or I was just making a selfie, or all of these vitriolic, racist things that I said, and all the language of revolution, and firing squads, and hanging people, that was just talk.
I've been relieved, I think, and affirmed to see that those defenses haven't worked, for the most part.
But another takeaway from this, I was reading a transcript of an interview on NPR with Cynthia Miller-Idriss, who runs the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University.
So somebody who studies American radicalization and so forth.
She's made the point that I think is true, but she's an expert.
So she thinks it's true that none of this puts the genie back in the bottle on American political violence.
That all of everything that happened on J6, the lead up to it, and since has normalized political violence in America in a way that it was not before.
And so I think there can also be those that are hoping that this will be a panacea that will somehow sort of fix that in American politics.
I think it's here to stay.
But yeah, so that was the really, really big, probably the biggest, most watched court case related to J6, the perpetrators of J6 to date.
So yeah, five proud boys found guilty, four of seditious conspiracy.
And just for the record, Cynthia Miller Idris is is just a top notch expert on this stuff.
So anything that you see from her, she posted her interview on Twitter.
And if you all follow her, go find it.
It's worth it's worth it.
This is my good news for this is my reason for hope this week is that they were convicted.
And I think it is a big deal.
As you said, this is, as you say, basically labeling them or putting them in the category of domestic terrorists.
So this is a really good news.
And it also illustrates why the May 10th town hall CNN with Donald Trump is really bad news, because he incited a thing that these folks have now been convicted of for seditious conspiracy.
He incited insurrection.
He's incited a seditious conspiracy.
He was part of it.
And yet you're going to put him on the TV while these guys go to jail for 5, 10, 20 years.
So this is my reason for hope.
But as always, it illustrates and brings into relief what is wrong.
With the way that J6 has been adjudicated in our public square.
So, all right.
What's your reason for hope, Dan?
Just briefly on that point about Trump, even the Proud Boys know this, right?
In their trial, they said Trump, lots of people have tried.
They said, we did this because of Trump.
So I'll just throw that out there.
My reason for hope is the WHO declared that COVID-19 is no longer a public health emergency of international concern.
That's a technical definition.
They first declared COVID this international public health emergency in January of 2020.
I don't mean to trivialize the fact that people still deal with COVID, that people have different reactions and experiences of it.
It was significant on a local level.
I was hopeful that I live in Massachusetts.
Northampton Pride events are taking place this weekend.
It's the first time in four years that they've done these in person.
And so I took great hope in that, that while the pandemic's not sort of Fully in the rearview mirror, and it doesn't mean things are gone.
And I think we're going to have to take vaccine boosters probably forever.
It's going to become like the flu shot and politicized and on and on and on.
I think it's very hopeful to think where we've come in the last three years.
Yeah, totally.
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If we get to a thousand, I guess that means something on YouTube.
I don't know.
I'm old and YouTube scares me, but I would really love it if we got to a thousand subscribers.
So if we can get there, that'd be great friends.
Other than that, look us up on social media, Straight White JC on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook.
We'll be back next week with a great interview and it's in the code.
