Brad and Dan begin by discussing the two massacres in one day that happened in Texas last weekend. They borrow from work by Umar Haique who summarizes the state of the USA as a country experiencing "ultraviolence" as a form of societal collapse.
https://medium.com/eudaimonia-co/why-cnns-trump-town-hall-was-a-disgrace-and-an-insult-to-democracy-320738e60147
Brad links this to the Trump town hall hosted by CNN. He makes the case that this was the platforming of a fascist leader who has no interest in truth or policy, much less persuading voters. His motive is power and it flows from his worldview: the strong deserve to rule and the weak deserve dehumanization and punishment.
Dan relates all of this to the verdict in the E. Jean Carroll civil suit and what it means now and moving forward.
In the final segment, Dan explains how Senator Tommy Tuberville (AL) called White nationalists "real Americans" and what this reveals about the state of the GOP.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
I'm here today with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Always nice to see you, Brad, as you sort of return home from your jet-setting ways around SoCal.
Yes, jet-setting.
I got to sleep in a yurt, which was very cool, and last week I gave a talk, and so that was pretty fun, and I think both of us are feeling a little Light at the end of the tunnel here.
Classes are finished.
We're going to grade.
And then it's summer, which this time of year is always... I've said this before.
I always feel like this year I'm like a sea creature emerging from the lagoon, just trying to get all the barnacles off me to like fully enter human society again.
Like I'm so tired at this point in terms of like teaching and forms and grading and administer.
I don't know, blah, blah.
Nobody wants to listen to me complain.
I'm just saying.
For college professors, May is this time of like, oh, I'm going to...
Like do normal adult things again and just actually function in a way I should because the semester is over.
So anyway.
All right.
So one announcement at the top here, friends had a listener named Amanda.
Tell us about the Gayly Dose live show where she will be sharing her experience, her strength, her hope with the community of trans parents.
They're going to be taping this this week, and it's it's really pretty neat.
And so if this interests you, it's actually May 17th at 7 p.m.
I'll post all the details in the show notes, but I think it's pretty cool.
I told Amanda I wanted to announce this.
So anyway, I think this is something That's needed and amazing and I just also I just love to see like families uh that that have trans kids in public talking about how much they love each other care for each other and the more that happens the more a lot of folks out there just realize oh they're families of human beings who care about each other as parents and kids huh who knew it's not rocket science so anyway uh we'll put that in the show notes
Other than that, Dan, we have a lot to talk about today, like a lot.
We're not going to get to the border discussions.
We haven't even, in probably the most Biden fashion ever, I'm curious what you think of this, we haven't even talked about the fact that Joe Biden is running for president again, which I don't know if that's me trying to ignore that or if that's just because it's Joe Biden.
I don't know.
Do you have any reason?
Do you have?
Can you explain why we just haven't even gotten there?
Is it?
Yeah, it's kind of weird.
I think his strategy is kind of what it was last time around, which is to be the normal guy in the room, to be the boring guy in the room when boring is like Maybe good, right?
Like, you know, the boring regular guy that you actually want to take home to meet your family versus, like, the crazy person.
That's my guess, is that the GOP is kind of on fire in a number of ways right now, and I think he's just kind of... I think sitting back and keeping the proverbial powder dry and waiting until...
Until that settles a little bit.
I think there's also the piece of just waiting more and more for things to settle.
It's hard to know who you're even taking aim at in the GOP politically if you're a Democratic candidate right now.
It looks like it'll probably be Trump, but maybe not.
But it is weird.
It is the most kind of understated thing ever.
And it's also worth noting is like horrific poll numbers right now.
And so I think that's another reason to just keep a low profile.
I'm not convinced the poll numbers at this point in 2023, you know, almost a year and a half out from an election tell us that much.
As you said, the debt limit stuff is looming and we'll probably end up talking about it next week.
But for now, let's focus in on three things.
Let's talk about what happened in Texas last week in terms of two massacres in one day.
We're going to get to the Trump Town Hall and the Eugene Carroll verdict, defamation lawsuit results.
And then we'll get to end of end sexual abuse trial.
And then we'll get to some other things in the GOP, including tubbies, flubbies, Tommy Tuberville, one of our least favorite senators, talking about white nationalists in the military as like they were his favorite people.
I want to start, Dan.
I spent, it's AAPI month, and I want to talk about a family who believed in the American dream.
So it's a family of four who walked into Eddie's diner the morning of May 6th.
Two kids, one six years old, one three.
They colored, they ate chocolate chip pancakes, and then they drove up the road to return a shirt at an outlet mall.
The parents of that family are Cindy and Q. Q was born in Korea and came to the United States when he was very young.
Got a degree at UMass Amherst and right up the road from you.
Became a lawyer, somebody who was learning Spanish in order to help His law clients with immigration issues, asylum issues, so on and so forth.
Quote, he had a deep pride, respect, and appreciation for the American dream.
They had two kids, and when they went to the Allentown Mall that day, they were both shot and killed, Cindy and Q, and as well as their younger son.
They left behind a six-year-old son.
And it's really hard to even read that and to think about that, but I want to highlight it because There were people here who believed in the American dream.
They believed that the United States was a place where one could flourish, one could prosper, and that included everyone.
If we zoom out, I'm of course talking about the Alan Moll shooting, excuse me, Alan Moll shooting that happened in Texas this past weekend that saw over a half dozen people killed at the hands of a neo-nazi, somebody at least with neo-nazi sympathies, shooter, somebody who posted neo-nazi propaganda and memes and other things on the internet, had tattoos that reflected these beliefs.
And later, only hours later, someone else drove intentionally through a crowd of migrants in Brownsville, Texas, killing, again, over half a dozen and injuring more in what was an intentional massacre.
So here's some statistics, Dan.
This has been making the rounds.
Eric Garcia posted this on Twitter.
In Vietnam War, you had about 53,000 Americans die.
Korean War, 36,000.
The Iraq Wars during the Bush years, 4,000.
Afghanistan, 2,400.
And in U.S.
gun deaths, just 2019 to 2021.
So I'm not talking about 50 years of gun deaths.
I'm talking 2019 to 2021.
gun deaths just to 2019 to 2021.
So I'm not talking about 50 years of gun deaths.
I'm talking 2019 to 2021, 133,759 gun deaths.
What that means is that in 51 years of the United States going to war, this, and this is a country that loves going to war, there were about 119,000,000 In three years, there were 133,000 or 134,000 deaths at the hands of handheld killing machines in the country.
133,000 or 134,000 deaths at the hands of handheld killing machines in the country.
More deaths in three years domestically than there were 51 years of war by a lot.
So I want to reflect on some material from the economist Umar Haik, who did a lot of writing about what happened last week and I think is helpful.
Thankful to my friend, Jason, who sent me, who alerted my eyes to a couple of really good pieces on this.
Haque says, there were not one, but two massacres in America yesterday.
In Allen, Texas, a man opened fire at a shopping mall in Brownsville.
Meanwhile, a man drove an SUV into a crowd.
Both appear to be intentional.
They are not random acts of violence.
Now, one of the things that Hank asked is, like, does that mean anything?
I mean, you know, Dan, and he's right.
He really put into words what I was thinking is, within hours of each other, you have in the same state two incidents of mass killing.
And the country didn't stop.
The country didn't halt.
And we can't, honestly, and I'm not blaming anyone, because this happens so often.
But, you know, the Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, none of them just had round the clock like, hey, these two are linked.
Hey, we're in crisis.
What is happening to our country?
Haig puts it this way.
Imagine I told you that there was a country where all the following was true.
Massacres, sectarian ones, carried out by militants, were becoming commonplace.
They had political motivations to cleanse the promised, the homeland of the impure, the invaders, the subhumans.
The president had led a bloody coup against the seat of government, which, through sheer chance, failed, marching an army of said militants down the streets of the Capitol.
His party was focused on annihilating people politically, taking away the rights of whole social groups, and goaded, encouraged, and incited militants to take matters into their own hands.
That's our country.
That's the country we live in.
Massacres are regular occurrences in the United States.
There were two in one day in the same state.
The folks who are committing these massacres, not always Dan, but in many cases, share motivations.
They have politics that cross sort of ideological bounds and link up in a kind of sense of xenophobia and racism.
And they want, and this is where I think Hake really hits it on the head, They want to kill those who have been dehumanized by the rhetoric we've seen cultivated over the last seven, eight years.
The dehumanized, those who are supposedly animals or not truly human.
I think this is just exactly how we should think about what's happening in this country.
And it is immensely, immensely frightening.
It was hard for me to, you know, Dan, before we started recording, to get it together because I was reading about the Cho family and thinking about these people who had chocolate chip pancakes and woke up to return a shirt with their little family.
And now there's a little boy who doesn't have a brother or parents, and that's normal in this country.
That's how this country works now.
I have a lot more to say, but I'm going to stop myself and let you jump in here before I really get Yeah, just a couple things.
One is the standard response by now.
So, you know, we and everybody have criticized the whole thoughts, you know, thoughts and prayers kind of line that comes out.
And we don't hear that as much now.
The new, like, go-to move for especially the GOP is not, obviously, it's not gun control.
It's not stricter gun measures and things like that.
No, it's not that.
It's mental illness.
We need to address mental illness.
So, first of all, Being a fascist or a bigot or a xenophobe doesn't make you mentally ill.
People can be in their right mental mind and be racists or bigots or whatever.
So it gives cover to allow that not to be addressed.
Do we have a mental health crisis in the U.S.?
Of course we do.
Is mental health a contributing factor to lots of acts of gun violence?
Absolutely it is.
But I think it's ridiculous when the GOP will trot that out, because number one, part of the reason you're like, well, why do we have this crisis?
Oh, wait, it's GOP policies that have done away with all kinds of federal programs that they don't want insurance coverage for mental health issues.
They are always defunding those kinds of things.
And so it's part of a larger pattern of the GOP defunding stuff, not supporting stuff, not believing in the reality of it.
You and I know within conservative Religious circles, within conservative social circles, the...
Mental health is not even taken seriously as something that's real.
It's a character flaw, or it's a sign of a lack of willpower, or whatever else it is.
So I see that.
That's one of the things that stands out.
And so when it is talked about, it turns into the, oh, we need to do more in this country to address the mental health crisis by a party that's not interested at all in addressing the mental health crisis because they don't see it as a real thing.
That's just something I would urge people to sort of listen for, right?
Like, that's the new sort of code in the GOP is to appeal to mental health.
And then the other thing is this, because people will say, well, this happens everywhere.
Governor of Texas.
And I have to say, like, the shootings and the massacres are so much, I don't even remember which shooting it was in the context of when this was said.
But made the statement that shootings happen in blue states too.
They do.
The data shows that it's more common in red states by a wide margin.
But here's what I would do.
It's like six or seven times more in places that have gun laws like Texas rather than other places.
Yeah.
It's like the tobacco industry once upon a time being like, well, you know, people who don't smoke also get lung cancer.
Well, they do very, very occasionally at minuscule rates compared to smokers.
It's that kind of logic.
But the other piece of that that I would say is, somebody said, well, you can't blame the GOP, but your point about dehumanizing and others who pointed this out, this is what I would say.
The people who are often attacked, What major political party in the U.S.
is constantly rhetorically attacking those people?
Trans folk, queer folk, people who weren't born in the United States, migrants, racial and religious minorities, just sort of on and on and on.
Which political party is busy demonizing those all of the time?
It's the GOP.
And so I think that is one of those things where rhetoric matters.
And I think one piece of what we see are a lot of people saw this on J6.
It brought it into the light.
It made it into courtrooms.
The fact that people see that rhetoric as a green light to do what it is that they're going to do.
They hear that rhetoric as a call to action, and for them, the action isn't just rhetorical, it's going out and actually killing people.
And again, for people who want to say, well, I don't know if anybody really reasons that way, look at the defenses that were put forward in J6, and it's the same thing.
So those are some of the things that just immediately jump out to me when I look at these and hear about these.
Well, and so let's just pick up right where you left off.
As all this was happening, what was the GOP doing?
Well, a lot of major players in the GOP, a lot of movers and shakers, influencers and would-be elected officials and elected officials were in Hungary.
Hanging out with Viktor Orban at CPAC Hungary, and Heather Cox Richardson wrote about this this week in her newsletter, and she talks about the ways that Trumpism offered people what?
It gave them all of these things that said, hey, we're going to brutalize, we're going to bully the people that you think are hurting you.
You feel unsafe.
You feel like you don't live the life you want.
Well, I'm going to get the people that are making it such that your life isn't completely as you hoped.
And in exchange, people had to give him utter commitment, right, to his leadership.
He lies.
He's hypocritical.
I don't know.
He gets found to be a sexual abuser in court.
He has to pay $5 million because he abused someone years ago.
Doesn't matter.
And this is why Hungary is such an exemplar for the modern day GOP.
Everything you just said about dehumanization, about othering, about teaching people a way of thinking.
Well, Viktor Orban is one of the leaders of that worldwide.
He is an illiberal liberal.
He tries to use democracy against itself.
He limits free speech, freedom to go to church or academic inquiry, free press, immigration.
I can go down the line.
He limits all of those things.
And yet, CPAC is there for its now yearly installment in Budapest.
Okay?
Now, one of the things that Orban said is, come back, Mr. President, talking about Donald Trump, OK?
Make America great again and bring us peace.
Paul Gosar, Mr. Arizona rep, said that Hungary is, quote, a beacon.
It is a beacon for the rest of the world.
Trump said this, and I'm going to come back to this quote.
He said that conservatives, the kind that go to CPAC, are freedom-loving patriots who are fighting against barbarians.
Barbarians, Dan.
Okay?
Not political opponents, not people we disagree with, not folks who we hope we can persuade, not folks that we hope will listen to our better policies and ideas for our country.
Nope.
Barbarians.
What do they believe in?
What does Trump and CPAC and the folks that he's talking to believe in?
Trump says it this way.
We believe in tradition, the rule of law, freedom of speech, and a God-given dignity of every human life.
These bind together our movement.
We should stand together to defend our borders, our Judeo-Christian values, and our way of life.
One reporter who watched this concluded that for these folks at CPAC Hungary, liberalism Liberalism, not meaning like the Democratic Party or the Green Party, but liberalism as an ideal, meaning a free society, is synonymous with tyranny, okay?
So the ideology, Dan, that you talked about, the ideology that fuels so many of these right-wing attacks that lead somebody to, I don't know, drive an SUV through just a crowd of migrants, people who are here from other countries, someone who has neo-Nazi paraphernalia on their body to go to a mall, there is ideology behind all that.
And I'm not trying to draw a direct line from one to the other, but this has been spread and cultivated in our ether for going on years now.
All right.
I'll just give you one example and then we can take a break.
I'll throw it back to you.
But the Alan Shooter talked about right-wing death squads.
And this comes right from the Chilean dictator, Pinochet, who, and I know a lot of you out there know this history, but his regime murdered his political opponents.
And they often threw people from helicopters, right?
A lot of people in this movement, this MAGA movement, have shirts that say free helicopter rides.
If you go to a Trump rally, you'll see that, and that's what they're talking about.
So, when you say, well, what's the direct line from, I don't know, Trump, and MAGA, and CPAC, and, you know, the people you talk about all the time, to someone like the Alan Shooter?
I don't know.
Why are people wearing free helicopter rides at Trump rallies all the time?
And oh, just by coincidence, the man who massacred people at a mall this week, including the family I talked about earlier, has this whole idea of a right-wing death squad, which is a direct reference to that exact thing.
So anyway, there's more to say here.
Let's take a quick break.
We'll come back and we'll just, we'll keep at it.
We'll be right back.
Alright Dan, so if I go back to Umar Haque who wrote about this this week, he talks about how the United States has entered a stage of ultra-violence.
He says this is a country, and he's right, and I really appreciate how he says it, this is a country where scarcely a week goes by where someone doesn't die in a gruesome, extreme, shocking way.
Massacres have become commonplace.
Brutality is regular.
Dan, you and Annika talked about this.
I mean, it's hard to even line these up in your mind's eye.
A man was strangled to death on the subway, and that is being adjudicated.
Jordan Neely, okay?
We're talking today about the massacre at the mall near Dallas.
We're talking about migrants being run over.
Dan, you and Annika talked about the doorstep killings.
People ringing a doorbell in the United States and being shot, right?
There have been 190 shootings in like 130 days in the country, right?
What Hake talks about here is that the idea that America is undergoing a very specific textbook facet of social collapse.
And I know some of you are like, whoa, okay, that's a lot.
But it is a lot, isn't it?
133,000 gun deaths in three years.
Way more than 51 years of war?
The idea that we have a massacre, I don't know, every day?
The idea that you could have two in one day and it doesn't even sort of cause the country to stop and mourn collectively?
There does seem to be a sense here where brutality and massacre are just part of our American experience.
I mean, Megyn Kelly, Dan, said on Twitter that we should just stop with the whole idea of gun legislation that we've lost, meaning those who want some sort of check on the Second Amendment.
And we need to find other ways to find solutions because there's no way that we're ever going to curb guns in the country.
This is what somebody said.
After a massacre at a mall, after the 190th shooting, a mass shooting in 130 days in the country, right?
Now, part of the ultra-violence, and this is the link that I appreciate Hake making, and then I'll throw it to you.
Part of the ultra-violence is dehumanizing so many groups in the country, which justifies violence against them.
If you call everyone who's LGBT A pedophile.
If you call teachers groomers, if you call migrants invaders, if you call them barbarians, then if someone hurts them, there is justification for that.
That is, in itself, an incitement to violence.
I got, again, way more to say.
I need to stop.
Off to you.
Thoughts on the ultra-violent landscape of the United States.
I want to tie that notion of the ultra-violent landscape, which I think is correct, back to that statement that Trump made at CPAC, that recorded statement, right?
And again, he said, we believe in tradition, the rule of law, freedom of speech, and a God-given dignity of every human life.
It's, the GOP is so defined by doublespeak at this point, it's unreal, right?
So like, whose tradition and which tradition?
Well, only the right kind of white Christian traditions.
Everybody else is, they're not part of the real America and it's now sort of open season on them.
The rule of law We're on the guy who dismissed the legal, he lost the legal case and dismissed it as a disgrace.
The GOP dismisses it.
They refuse to take any action on gun legislation or anything else.
You've got, we talked about this before, the governor of Texas promising to pardon a man convicted for shooting a Black Lives Matter activist.
So just don't give me the whole rule of law thing.
The freedom of speech, we've talked about Disney, we've talked about all these library laws, we've talked about schools, we've talked about censorship, about what people can say about pronouns and different things like this, medical advice that can be given, and the God-given dignity of every human life.
No, just the right human lives.
You've talked about this a million times, right?
That, you know, if we talk about the abortion issue, people Fetuses are of value to the GOP until they're born, and then you're on your own.
And we've seen what they think about the value of every human life.
If they valued human life, they would want to do something to actually curb gun violence.
I mentioned a few minutes ago the appeals to mental health.
Somebody show me, email us, let us see the flood of GOP bills that have come out to beef up mental health treatment in the U.S.
to try to curb gun violence, right?
On and on and on it does, and this is where it goes.
It builds into an ultra-violent society.
And again, you've had the rhetoric of the GOP for decades at this point that has pointed in this direction.
It seeps its way down.
It gets into the marrow, as it were, of people who listen to them.
And this is how they put it into action, right?
Not by voting, not by protesting, not by lobbying, but by shooting people or running over people or any other number of things.
This is what you see.
So for me, it's It's directly at odds with all of the rhetoric that they still will throw around about being the party of law and freedom of speech and so forth.
It's nationalism at its absolute worst, right?
If you are not an American that these Americans think is real or authentic or true or belongs here or whatever, if you've been dehumanized in this consistent systemic way by the GOP for long enough, This is what we get, and you're right.
This is where we are.
I think it's a valid insight.
All right, so let's connect all this to the Trump Town Hall.
I know some of you are like, all right, CNN has this abominable Trump Town Hall.
Why was it abominable?
Anderson Cooper tried to defend it last night and saying, well, if you want to like get out of your silo, then you got to, sorry about this, but what do you want to do?
Just stay with people who agree with you?
The CEO of CNN tried to justify it saying, oh, there's a lot of Americans who feel this way and all these things.
When you're at a barbecue this weekend and Uncle Ron's like, what's the big deal?
He used to be president.
Shouldn't he have a CNN town hall?
Here's my response.
And I'm curious what you think, Dan.
He's been doing this for seven years now.
We know what he was going to say.
There was going to be nothing new.
We could have told you the lines before the town hall about how the election was stolen, about how he was a victim in the E. Gene Carroll lawsuit, how he has been totally mistreated and yet he's also the best ever.
And lie, lie, lie, lie, lie about the election, about January 6th, about everything.
Caitlin Collins tried to kind of do anything possible to correct the record, but it's Trump.
And the thing is, he does not care about truth or dialogue.
And this is what brings me to, I think, the point that we need to make today.
We've been talking about ultra-violence, we've been talking about massacres, we've been talking about a society that simply lives with brutality and handheld killing machines terrorizing our public square.
And all of that coming from a number of places at the top of a political party.
And the word that I think I'm going to use today, Dan, is fascism.
And you're like, okay, that's a lot, but that's where we are.
Talked to Jeff Charlotte recently.
That's the word he uses.
So many other folks have noticed this.
One facet, and we could talk, Dan, for four hours and define fascism and do a whole grad seminar.
One thing that Hank points out that I really appreciated this week is that to the fascist mind, politics is just a conflict between strong and weak, right?
And if you're weak, you should be assaulted.
You should be annihilated.
You should be abused.
You should be somebody who is subservient.
When Donald Trump talks about barbarians, when they talk about groomers and pedophiles, when they talk about invaders, They're saying that you should be subservient or annihilated.
That the goal is power.
Wait, Dan, how many times have we said that on this show?
Okay?
The goal is power.
The reason that Trump Town Hall, to me, was always going to be a disaster is because when he gets on the stage, his goal is not to outline policy positions.
It is not to persuade voters.
It is not to explain to people why he's the best candidate.
It is to enact his power and his will over anyone in his way, including the moderator and including the audience.
So I'll throw it to you.
This happened right in the wake of the E. Jean Carroll verdict.
It ties in.
I think it's important to note the two things happening basically within 24 hours of each other.
What did you see in terms of the town hall?
What did you take away and how does it link into the sexual abuse verdict?
I had a number of issues with it.
I think it was in our last episode, you know, said, shame on you, CNN, for lining this up and for having this happen.
That was before the E. Jean Carroll verdict came out and so forth.
Things that I did not realize at the time is that apparently this town hall was initiated by CNN.
I didn't know that.
There was all the talk about how for Trump, this is a shot at Fox.
Absolutely is.
He's angry at Fox.
He lost Tucker Carlson as a mouthpiece there, etc., etc., etc.
But this was CNN reaching out.
Clearly, what I think is sensing an opportunity, trying to take advantage of the fact that Fox ratings are down right now, that they can try to get back into the ratings and make some money and get some, you know, some publicity out of this.
So that was pretty ridiculous.
It's also the CNN that I think somehow thought this was a kind of coup.
Trump famously refused to do interviews with CNN journalists.
Call them all fake news and so forth.
So that was one thing that just sort of made it even more shameful.
The other thing, though, was this pro-Trump audience, right?
That the audience was almost all entirely Trump supporters or people who are at least sympathetic to Trump.
And I think it's unclear.
I haven't seen anything yet that's been able to settle on whether that was something that was negotiated with the Trump camp, whether that was a condition of doing this, like sort of who initiated that.
They've done a town hall of, let's say, people who say they were undecided voters or, you know, a 50-50 split of registered Republicans and registered Democrats or Trump voters and Biden voters or something.
Any number of ways that you could have said and played this game to try to show that this was some sort of legitimate journalistic act of saying, let's ask Trump hard questions in front of an audience of real voters or whatever.
Okay.
Instead, they just turned it into a MAGA rally in the CNN studios.
And I think Caitlin Collins widely is being praised for trying to kind of do the most that could be done in the context, but there was no reining that in.
That was a piece of it.
Another piece for me is the way that the audience responded.
This was everything that you are saying about ultra-violence and fascism and this vision of the strong preying on the weak and so forth.
And the audience loved it.
They cheered.
They clapped.
When he mocked E. Jean Carroll and imitated her voice, they thought it was great.
When he was asked about the Access Hollywood tapes, right?
Everybody remembers this from the 2016 election.
And he basically said, women, let me grab them there without the permission, because I was a star, like, you know, just completely dismissive.
This wasn't an audience that was outraged by this or upset about this.
This was an audience that ate it up, that loved it, that thought it was fantastic.
I think this backfired hugely for CNN.
I think they've been exhoriated by every major news media source.
Their own employees have come out against this.
You mentioned this, but the CEO, Chris Light, Just said this, and I'm reading now from an excerpt of what he said, but the point is he had to have like this internal kind of call with everybody and try to legitimize this.
He says, I'm aware that there have been people with opinions slash backlash, and that is absolutely expected.
And I will say this as clearly as I possibly can.
You do not have to like the former president's answers, but you can't say we didn't get them.
I'm going to pause right here and say, we didn't need you to ask the questions.
We already said this.
Somebody could have written us.
They could have written any other observer and said, how would Trump answer these things?
We could have written the script.
It didn't make any new news, right?
Sorry, Anderson Cooper crying, you know, to your audience last night about how we are in our silos.
No, you don't have to be siloed.
Not watching Trump doesn't mean you're siloed.
We know what he's going to say.
None of it is secret.
It's been going on for the better part of a decade by now, right?
And then he goes on to say, back to light here, he says, That I think says the real thing.
What he means there is there were lots of clicks, there were lots of viewers, there were lots of people watching, we made lots of money, and for a little while we felt relevant.
Now they're relevant for all the wrong reasons.
He also said, quoting him again, there's so much that we learned last night about what a second Trump presidency would look like, and that is incredibly important for the country to hear.
Again, we already know.
We already know what a second Trump presidency will look like.
It was nothing new.
All it was was a MAGA platform on a mainstream news network.
He says that is our job, to get those answers, to hold them accountable in a way that no news organization has done in literally years.
CNN, you didn't do it either.
So that was ridiculous.
I want to just give the flip side of this and then throw it back to you.
Some of the responses that people had to this are worth listening to, and a number of them are from CNN contributors.
So Oliver Darcy, CNN journalist, said, quote, it's hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday evening.
He listed the falsehoods Trump repeated yet again during the town hall and added, and CNN aired it all.
On and on it went.
It felt like 2016 all over again.
It was Trump's unhinged social media feed brought to life on a stage.
Absolutely correct.
Jake Tapper said in a discussion with Anderson Cooper on air, quote, he called a black law enforcement officer a thug.
He said people here in Washington, D.C. and Chinatown don't speak English.
He attacked Caitlin Collins as a nasty woman.
He made fun of E. Jean Carroll's sexual assault and men in the audience laughed.
Final one, Michael Fanone, CNN contributor and former police officer who was present on January 6th, has contributed to Rolling Stone about that said, I don't believe for one second that this is about journalistic integrity.
And I'm right with Fanone here.
It's about ratings and money.
Sometimes things are exactly as they appear, and this appeared to be an attempt by a major media outlet struggling with its ratings to attract disenfranchised viewers.
He goes on to say there's no way to fact check this guy in real time.
He's a volcano of bullshit.
It kind of says everything about it.
The whole thing was a debacle, and if you put it against the backdrop of everything we're talking about, about dehumanization, the guy busy, you know, recording things to send to praise Viktor Orban in Hungary, on and on and on.
Other critics said this was like CNN giving a stamp of approval to everything that was said by having this audience, by giving him this platform, and I absolutely agree with all of that.
And people ask me, like, isn't it a good thing the Proud Boys Oath Keepers are getting convicted?
Oh, seditious conspiracy.
This is a win for democracy.
And they put the guy who incited the insurrection on CNN and were like, yeah, tell everyone all your lies, all your BS, all of your fascist talk.
Go for it.
Let's do it.
We've learned nothing.
Right, everything you just said, Dan, I agree with.
Let's spend like five minutes on something that just I think is really important today and then we'll take a break and go to our last thing.
Back to that quote from Trump.
Okay, so you've mentioned it, I mentioned it.
Let's read it again.
This is Trump delivering a recorded message to CPAC Hungary.
We believe in tradition, the rule of law, freedom of speech, and a God-given dignity of every human life.
These bind together our movement.
We call for everyone to stand together to defend our borders, Judeo-Christian values, our identity, and our way of life.
There's a very famous article by Umberto Eco.
Some of you know Eco as this great writer, novelist, and somebody who grew up under Mussolini in Italy.
And he wrote this in 1995.
So this is way before the rise of Trump.
It's way before MAGA Nation.
And it's simply called Ur-Fascism, okay?
And there's 14 characteristics of fascism he lists, and we don't have time.
I'm looking at the clock and I know we're not going to make it, but I want to go through just a couple of these, okay?
So, number 11.
In such a perspective, talking about fascism, everybody is educated to become a hero.
In every mythology, The hero is an exceptional being, but in ur-fascist ideology, heroism is the norm, because the cult of heroism is linked with a cult of death.
The ur-fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for heroic life.
Dan, when I think about that, when I think about the way Trump says that you're going to save your country, you won't be safe in Joe Biden's America, when I go back to all of the rhetoric from 2020 and 2016, when I think of the ways that people talk about the Marxists and the globalists and the end of the United States as you know it and our way of life, our identity, I think about a cult of the hero.
And the idea that if you do things like take the lives of migrants, if you stand up for your country by overrunning the Capitol, if you do things by terrorizing gay people trying to have brunch with AR-15s, if you terrorize libraries where there are kids with AR-15s, you are a hero and you're participating in the story.
You're a big main character.
That sticks out to me.
The next thing that Echo says, since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Earth fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters.
This is the origin of machismo.
And again, I just think of the ways that Trump mocked E. Jean Carroll on the stage the other night, and this whole hyper-masculine laughing at abuse that he's done for a better part of a decade.
As you said, he mocked a reporter.
And then 13 is something, this is number 13 for Echo.
Fascism is about a selective populism, telling certain people they're the real people.
Hollywood tape.
And here he is after being found guilty of sexual abuse, mocking the woman who he abused, period.
And then 13 is something, this is number 13 for Echo.
Fascism is about a selective populism, telling certain people they're the real people.
You say this all the time, Dan.
He says in the statement that I just quoted, our way of life, our identity.
What?
Wink, wink, you the real Americans.
Here's what Echo wrote in 1995.
There is in our future a TV personality in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the voice of the people.
I think we've seen that play out pretty clearly.
I'll give you one more, Dan, and then I'll stop, throw it to you.
Ur-fascism speaks news-speak.
And that comes from Orwell, right?
1984.
All the Nazi or fascist school books made use of an impoverished vocabulary and an elementary syntax in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.
The way Trump speaks is exactly that, and what do you hear all the time repeated?
Just the same adages, the same rhetoric, the same lines, whether it's people at Trump rallies, whether it's low-level politicians, or whether it's Trump himself.
I encourage everyone, and I'll post this in the show notes too, to go through the That echoes 14 characteristics of fascism because, and I'm not the first to notice this, people have been noticing this for years, but Trump and Maga Nation fit all of them, they have for a long time, and yet CNN said, hey, let's put them on the television.
That's a good idea.
Alright, any last thoughts?
CNN, Eugene Carroll, Trump, and then we'll go to Tubby's Flubbies.
I think the last thing, just to jump into this piece by Echo, that notion of fascist heroism, if you're going to universalize the category of the hero, right?
Because that's part of what he's describing, right?
It's this notion of the hero.
They're not exceptional individuals now.
It becomes the entire, you know, the folk, the true people, right?
To expand the category of the hero, what do heroes need?
They need villains.
And so you need a lot of villains.
So you have to expand the number of villains so that anything I do as a white nationalist, as a straight white Christian person who believes that only straight white Christian people should be running the country and so forth, if just being that is somehow going to be heroic, I have to create a world full of enemies and villains and demons that threaten that.
And that means people of color, and that means migrants, and that means sexual minorities, and that means women who are just far too concerned about equality or equal pay or their bodies or their sexual autonomy or whatever.
And that's the other dynamic that you see here, is that the two come together.
You cannot have heroes without villains.
You can't universalize the category of heroes without expanding the category of villains.
And that's what you get.
And that's what we saw in Trump.
He used the language of barbarians, but what is it, right?
It's the bifurcation, the splitting of reality into two camps, us and them, and it's an all or nothing battle.
And again, just to close at that point, that as you say, as lots of others observed, I invite people to do the same thing.
Go through this list and look at what not just Trump, but the contemporary GOP says and does, and just sort of it turns into a fascism bingo.
Well, real quick, Dan, think about the men's conferences we've talked about on this show in the last two months.
Men's conferences out of megachurches.
What are they doing?
Bible study and prayer?
A little bit.
A lot of war games.
A lot of fatigues and tanks.
Why?
Myth of the hero.
We're all the hero.
We're all the ones that are going to get the villains.
Men's conferences in 2023, they look like war training.
They look like military drills.
Why?
Because you're telling all the Christian men at these places they're going to be heroes in this story.
Get on this forever.
All right, we'll be right back.
Take a break.
All right, Dan.
We haven't talked about him in a long time, but there was a moment there we talked about him almost every month, and that's Senator Tommy Tuberville, former football coach and now senator in Alabama.
We called the segment Tubbies Flubbies.
We had another one this week, so what do we got as we close out today?
Yeah, so good old Tommy, in an interview with an Alabama radio station, was asked if he believes the white nationalists should be in the military.
People can Google around studies that have found that, you know, there are white nationalists who are drawn to the military for some of the reasons you just highlighted about this kind of valorization of the military and so forth.
And his response was, in part, the part that really stuck out for people as well, I call them Americans.
Created a huge backlash because of course, Brad, I'll throw it over to you for just a second.
He's asked, what do you think of white nationalists in the military?
He says, well, I call them Americans.
Average Joe American Brad Onishi, just in two sentences, what do you think that that means?
What is he saying?
What do you as a regular listener take away from that response?
Well, what I take away is that, oh, white nationalists are the real Americans, the default, the standard, and everyone else is just something else.
Everyone else is second class or different.
And these are the real guys.
These, you know, these white boys who just want to worship their God and have the good old country back.
Yeah, and that's how most people, I think, took it, right?
So, Tuberville, as you'd expect, and I'm sure after, you know, a lot of people in his camp freaked out about this, later sought to clarify, I'll do the scare quotes around clarify what he meant, and said that what he was really getting at was the concern that Trump Republicans in the military are unfairly characterized as white nationalists.
And he basically said lots of MAGA Republicans, everybody just treats them all and assumes that they're all white nationalists and it's not fair.
Okay, yeah.
A couple takeaways for me from that.
Number one, I don't believe it.
I think that the initial take was exactly right, that he doesn't see it as a problem because white nationalism is a central part of MAGA Nation.
I feel like we've If somebody doesn't believe that by this point, I don't know what else could be done to show that.
But I think it also shows, I think it's significant that he also doesn't criticize white nationalism.
And I just find that is what's really like the clarification, or at least what I saw of it.
And people can correct me if I'm wrong.
It didn't come out with you.
Like, of course, you know, Senator Tuberville is deeply opposed to any kind of racism, you know, whatever.
It was just like defending MAGA people.
I'm going to say this again, I'll close with this.
If every time somebody says, you know, something about white nationalism, white nationalism is bad, if your first reaction is to have to show that you're not one, It might mean you are, right?
We've talked about this before.
If the first thing somebody has to do when white nationalism or racism is put out there is have to show that they aren't one of those, maybe they're a little bit too close to the flame, at best, or maybe they are at worst.
It was one of a big flub.
We haven't covered him in a while.
So yeah, tubbies, flubbies, and we'll see.
I think the unspoken says everything in this case.
But it makes the point we've been making all day.
The point is, here's a senator, maybe the least qualified senator in the Senate, nonetheless saying, white nationalists?
I call them real Americans.
I mean, we've been trying to make the case all for an hour that this is the country we live in now.
Uh and it's the country on and as soon as I say that I realize right that's the country we've always lived in okay but still Tommy Tupperville saying in 2023 white nationalists are I just call them real Americans that's out of George Wallace 1968 you know stuff that's out of Jim Crow I mean that is It's as American as it gets, and yet it's still like, how can this be American 2023?
Well, we just talked about it for an hour.
This is the country we live in.
All right, we got to stop.
We're out of time.
Let's go to Reasons for Hope.
And I actually have a good one this week, Dan.
This is from The Nation.
It's from Ashley Dawson.
And here's what Ashley Dawson writes.
New York just became the first U.S.
state to pass a major Green New Deal policy.
After four years of organizing, the Build Public Renewables Act is now in the New York State budget.
Passage of the act is a massive challenge to fossil fuel hegemony and a major victory for public power.
And this is in a state, you might think, well, New York's super liberal.
It is in some ways, but we know that the GOP made major headway in the House of Representatives recently.
So there are many conservatives in New York.
The governor is a sort of centrist moderate who, if you ask any progressive in New York, not their favorite person.
All that to say, the article lays out how this is possible in other states too, and I think it's good news.
So, all right, off to you.
My reason for hope was the E. Jean Carroll verdict.
Lots of reasons.
That it was sort of minimized.
The GOP didn't suddenly leave Trump.
Trump didn't, you know, recognize or whatever.
I also am aware it's a civil trial, not a criminal trial.
The statute of limitations was passed.
It means it's a lower burden of proof and so forth.
But a jury of six men and three women still found him liable for defamation and assault.
I took a lot of hope from that for a number of reasons.
One, I think for E. Jean Carroll, like, she deserved this, right?
I think it was real and clear.
I think it does show, I think, bigger issues for Trump legally, that things are beginning to fall down around him.
And I also think, strategically, I have hope of how this plays out with a constituency that largely wasn't present at that town hall, right?
And people have talked a lot about, you know, white suburban women as a demographic that the GOP has been losing out with.
And I can't help but think that not only this verdict, but Trump's response to it, For the most part, the GOP's refusal to condemn Trump for this says a lot.
So, I mean, I found it really, really hopeful.
It has its limitations, obviously, but I took a lot of hope from that verdict.
All right, y'all.
One announcement here and one that I made last week, but I'll make it again.
We have a new series.
It's called One Nation, All Beliefs.
It's with Americans United.
You can see two of the episodes in our feed here at Straight White American Jesus, but you can also subscribe to One Nation, All Beliefs as a separate podcast, and I want to encourage you to do that.
We have incredible voices, student activists.
One of the episodes this week is from a secular rabbi who ran for Congress.
We have black queer clergy and on and on and on.
Everyone talking about the separation of church and state as a way to protect many of the issues we talked about today.
All right.
We'll be back next week with a great interview.
I have an interview with Cynthia Miller Idris, who we talked about last week and who's going to talk to us about extremism and the Alan Shooter and radicalization.
Dan will be back with It's in the Code and we'll be here with the Weekly Roundup.
