Weekly Roundup: Vigilantism - So Wrong, yet so Right
Brad and Dan begin by analyzing the surge in vigilantism on the American Right. Brad discusses how vigilantism often rises in times when there is a question of who belongs in the community - and what it means to have a working social order. Dan discusses the ways that vigilantism rises when law and order no longer work - and the perceived need for violence beyond the law takes hold.
In the second segment they argue that the bevy of far-right laws passed in Florida represent the attempt to make the vigilante's myopic vision of social order the law. From taking trans kids from their parent, to banning books, to destabilizing higher education, and investigating fifth grade teachers for showing a film with a queer character . . .
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Mansfield ISD:
Here's a link to a petition ANYONE can sign:
https://www.fightforthefirst.org/petitions/free-to-read-in-misd
Invite to the school board meeting to Speak for Freedom
https://fb.me/e/L1l3FFpb?mibextid=Gg3lNB
Fort Worth article siting ACLU letter
https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/education/article275474821.html
There's some great sound bytes from LGBTQIA+ students in this video from our board meeting for some on air material. It is 17 minutes long.
https://fb.watch/kDqaCoxGug/?mibextid=irwG9G
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, here today with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Nice to see you, Brad.
You too.
And we're recording later than usual, which I think, I don't know.
I never know if that's good or bad because we've had more time to like stew in what we want to say a little bit.
Maybe, you know, read a little more.
I don't know.
Sometimes it feels like I'm a little more like, I left dinner on the boiler a little too long and I'm kind of boiling to the point of burnt, but we'll see what happens.
Since I go to bed at like eight every night and it's later here, so I'm past my early bird special, so it's like 5.30 my time, so I'm ready to brush my teeth and curl up with a book in my cargo shorts.
So I just wanted to ask you a question, Dan.
I saw recently that some new materials from Studs Terkel, the 20th century commentator, had been released.
And you've never joined Twitter, and I wondered if you did join Twitter, would you ever consider joining under the name Studs Terkel?
Any consideration to that?
You've been talking to my kids, haven't you?
My entertaining self that I am.
No, yeah, I don't know.
I will say this.
My daughter asked the other day what my drag name would be.
And I've been kind of pondering that.
I don't have any great reveal to do here, but at some point in the future, I might.
And I'll keep that in the back top pocket for the inevitability of getting on Twitter.
Well, I think that's something people should write in and tell us.
So that's a good thing for people to send over.
Yeah, people want to submit, you know, what Dan Miller's drag name should be when I'm reading books at libraries or like not allowed to read books at libraries or whatever you can or can't do in drag now.
Yeah, they can bring those up.
Yeah, that sounds good.
First thing, I want to announce something, and that is that I got some information from a listener that I want to pass on.
So if you're in the Dallas area, there is a school district, Mansfield ISD, and it's not alone, but it is happening here.
Where there's an attempt to ban books.
And so I'm going to put in the show notes a petition you can sign and some more information about what's happening.
It's been covered by the ACLU.
There's a lot of parents organizing against it and people fighting back.
So if you're anywhere near Dallas, you can check this out and you can perhaps attend the next meeting and so on and so forth.
So look for that in the show notes and definitely I think about that as something you can do to contribute.
Anyone can sign the petition.
So it doesn't matter where you are in the country.
You can think about signing this petition and again, look forward in the show notes.
All right, Dan, today, I think we're going to talk about vigilantism and the rise of the kind of vigilante hero in the American right.
It's nothing new.
It goes back a long, long time in this country, but we're seeing it surge here in the last month.
I want to talk about.
What's happening in Florida?
I know we do Florida almost every other week, but once again, what we're seeing out of Florida, I think, portends the kind of future that lays ahead of us if we have a Republican president, if we have just the ongoing ascendance of Christian nationalism and proto-fascism in the country.
So we're going to talk about a bunch of issues related to School to education to curricula to LGBTQ rights to so many different things and relate that back.
I think it will also get into Stand Your Ground stuff and some other issues there.
So, Dan, let's start with vigilantism, okay?
By now, I think most of you have heard about Daniel Penney.
Daniel Penney's the man who killed Jordan Neely on the New York subway by way of a chokehold, and he has been hailed as a hero on the right.
So, Ron DeSantis tweeted this a week ago.
We must defeat the Soros-funded DAs, stop the left's pro-criminal agenda, and take back the streets for law-abiding citizens.
We stand with good Samaritans like Daniel Penny.
Let's show this Marine America's got his back.
So I got a lot to say, but the teacher in me wants to stop and do a close reading here, Dan.
So let's do that real quick because I think it's actually worth it.
So let's do the close reading.
I'll throw it to you in like 30 seconds.
Defeat Soros-funded DAs, stop pro-criminal agenda, take back streets for law-abiding citizens.
So here's what I'm hearing.
Here's a sitting governor talking about a man who just choked another man on the subway.
And he's saying that if you are that kind of person who is a vigilante that chokes people on the subway and ends their life, you are the kind of person who is helping to defeat Soros-funded DAs.
You're stopping the left who has a pro-criminal agenda, okay, and you're taking back the streets.
That's what you're doing.
There's another part to the second part of the tweet I want to get to and hang on that, but let's do our close reading, Dan.
What do you think or what do you what do you take away from the first sentence here?
First thing that stands out for me like number one are the dog whistles of the Soros-funded P's and again, Mainstream sitting governor, as of next week, probably officially a presidential candidate.
So that stands out.
The other one is the contradiction of law abiding vigilantism.
Vigilantism, by definition, is against the law.
Like it means that you're operating outside the law.
And people can say there are places where, you know, you need good Samaritans.
They use the language of the good Samaritan there.
That's true.
True, but it was a death sentence.
And that's the thing that always comes out with these kind of things is like, let's talk about, let's imagine within a judicial framework what this would be.
It's a death sentence for something that shouldn't have been.
You can defend vigilantism all you want, but you cannot claim to be the party of quote-unquote law and order or be defending law and order and affirming vigilantism at the same time.
It's not possible.
So this is my exact thesis for today.
And that is that what we're seeing emerge is these celebrations of vigilantism in the face of law and order.
And basically what's being said is, look, the laws are not helping us with the order we want.
We were all about law and order when the laws gave us the order we wanted.
And now the laws are not giving us the order we want.
So now we're going to celebrate those outside of the law, creating the order we want.
Let me say that again.
Law and order, when the laws get us the order we want.
Vigilantism, when the laws don't and we still need that order.
Well, vigilantes.
Those outside the law doing what we think is justice.
Okay?
Now, you said Good Samaritan.
I'm going to come back on the Good Samaritan because from the time this dude tweeted that, I have been so angry and been waiting to talk about it.
Okay, so who else is celebrating vigilantes?
Marjorie Taylor Greene?
Hailed Penny as a hero.
Matt Gaetz suggested Penny is being persecuted for standing up to anarcho-tyranny or tyranny.
The Wall Street Journal editorial page said that Penny is the Subway Samaritan.
Uh, yeah.
Now, could give you more examples.
The day that DeSantis is tweeting this is the one year anniversary, Dan, of the Buffalo shooting.
So, one year ago today, or one year ago a week from today, we have 10 black people killed in a supermarket by a shooter who is echoing white supremacist, and in some cases white Christian nationalist, tropes.
Talking about Great Replacement.
Talking about, if you remember, I'm not a Christian by practice, but I wear it as a cultural identity.
One year, and this is what DeSantis decides to tweet.
Now, Trump, the other presumed, you know, the two presumed GOP presidential candidates, the day of the Buffalo shooting, what does he do?
He participates remotely in the Reawaken America tour.
Some of you know that we participated in a protest of the Reawaken America tour, and that happened down in Miami.
So we have a one-year anniversary of Buffalo.
DeSantis is tweeting praise for Penny.
Trump is at a Reawaken America tour.
So this is a good chance to pause and say, well, what happened to the Reawaken America tour?
A lot of things happened.
There's a lot of preachers and MAGA superstars saying it's time for battle, it's time for war, it's time to get ready to take America back again.
You know who was there too?
Mike Flynn.
And I want to play you just a little clip of Mike Flynn talking about people who are not Republicans and who don't agree with the MAGA worldview.
Here's what he said.
The other side is an ideology that they don't have faith, they don't believe in God, they have no soul, they have no consciousness.
When we think about something and we go, you know, black and white, right and wrong, good and evil, they don't see things like that.
They don't see in those terms.
So in that short clip, Mike Flynn says this, if you are a Democrat, if you are not a Republican, if you're not with him and Trump, you have no faith, you have no God, you have no soul, you have no consciousness.
That is dehumanizing rhetoric, Dan.
I'm not being hyperbolic.
This is not a professor using big words.
He's telling you, if you're a Democrat, if you're a leftist, if you're not with him, you don't have a soul.
You don't have a spirit.
You don't have consciousness.
Trump then calls Flynn while he's at the conference and he says that he's bringing him back.
When I'm president again, you're back in the administration.
You're there.
Think about this turn of events.
One year anniversary of the Buffalo shooting.
Reawaken America tour.
Trump is participating.
Mike Flynn says, you don't have a soul if you're not with us.
And Trump's like, if I'm back in the White House, you're back in the White House.
The Reawaken America Tour is instilling the kinds of myths that lead to so much of the violence we've talked about for the last however many years on the day of an anniversary of a mass shooting.
There's so many more commentators.
Let me give you like two more, Dan, and then I'll let you jump in.
This is from Media Matters who had a great piece this week on vigilantism.
You start going crazy in a subway car and attack people for the umpteenth time.
We don't know if he was attacking, but we know that people felt attacked.
Let's just stop for a minute.
We know that people felt attacked.
And we do know that he attacked people before in the sub.
So, what happens?
You forfeit your right to live.
That was Steven Crowder, right-wing commentator who we've talked about on the show before.
The second that you're engaging in an activity where someone else is forced to make a decision to save their life or a life of their loved one, completely by the way, not of their own volition, you've put them in that scenario, you forfeit your right to live.
This is all being said in a scenario where it's not clear that Jordan Ely was acting in that way.
There's no sense here of the presumed innocence of Jordan Ely in terms of actually putting people's lives in danger, but there is on the part of Of Daniel Penny.
All of the kind of benefit of the doubt seems to go one way.
Many others praised Penny.
So Heather McDonald is part of a conservative think tank, and she was effusive in her praise of Penny.
And she suggested what?
That he was carrying out the law, the role of law enforcement.
So there it is, Dan.
The vigilante is doing what the law should do.
The vigilante is enforcing the order that should be.
Here's McDonald.
For these activists now to be playing the race card here is preposterous.
But if the government is unwilling to protect its citizens, you're going to have a certain degree of vigilante justice.
So there it is.
Government won't do the order we want.
Therefore, we will start having to kill people in order to give us that order.
Laura Ingram.
This guy, as far as I'm concerned, is an urban hero.
Fox and Friends co-host, Rachel Campos Duffy.
I think it's really important as a culture, we need to send very clear messages about how we, what we feel about heroes who step in and protect people in need.
Now imagine being in that car, you know we raise our boys to step in and protect those who are vulnerable.
And she goes on to just basically say, this is why we need folks who will choke people on subways.
Okay.
Leo Terrell, also Fox News.
Jordan was an erratic person who had a history of erratic behavior.
But you also have other individuals restraining this individual.
There is no intent and that Marine is a hero.
A hero.
So we could go on and on.
Charlie Kirk, Mike Cernovich, Scott Adams, there's Dennis Prager.
Dan, I could give you all of them.
I'll stop.
This also just brings up really quick the ghost of Kyle Rittenhouse.
Rittenhouse being celebrated as a MAGA celebrity after murdering two people.
It's not like this has just happened in the last month, but it is surging.
All right.
That was a lot.
I got more to say.
What do you think?
Yeah.
Stick with me here.
I like Batman.
Batman's a vigilante.
I like watching old Westerns, you know, with a reluctant hero who's going to step in because the law won't do what it's supposed to do and take justice into their own hands and so forth.
You know, part of why I like those is because they're a fantasy, right?
It's fiction.
It's fun to imagine.
If you live in a society that actually works that way, it's terrifying.
And this is what we have, is this society with, you know, you talked about vigilantism being sort of a long American Tradition, it's part of the American mythos, this notion of the kind of reluctant hero that will take the law into their own hands and so on.
The problem is, exactly as you say, it's about like what kind of social order?
Because I'm going to draw a line between things like somebody shooting black people in Buffalo and somebody choking somebody out on the subway.
And say it's a thin line between the two, right?
Because when the right people or the wrong people, as it were, come into power and have a particular vision of what social order is, that line between criminality and vigilantism shifts.
And how long is it before it's somebody, you know, who decides that the wrong social order is having black people in the wrong place at the at the wrong time?
Oh, wait, sorry.
We already have that with the doorstep shootings.
Every time somebody talks about vigilantism or stand your ground, right, which again, I find them really, really closely related.
We see this line on the right shifting and shifting and shifting, encompassing more and more and more people in segments of the population.
Who are legitimate targets of vigilante justice.
And I think your model of law and order, of law enforcing a particular order, is right on, right?
It's about having a society that's perceived to be the right society, structured the right way, with the right people doing the right kinds of things.
And so, for me, the problem with vigilantism, there are a lot of them, but one is that that line is always going to shift.
And so when people come into power, whose whole policy is not having an organized structure of power, but vigilantism, it opens the door for violence against anybody or anything deemed undesirable.
And that's why we have Different kinds of protections and presumptions of innocence and things like that.
Our system is built to be cumbersome and to be difficult to prosecute people and things like that.
But that's why is so that those lines have to be laid out clearly and have to pass, you know, judicial review and things like that.
And vigilantism bypasses all of that.
And when it's your vision of the social order, that might seem fine.
But when you are now the person who's targeted, where does this go?
I realize some will say it's a slippery slope, but I put it forward as a hypothetical, right?
What happens when somebody on the right targets a doctor for administering gender-affirming care to a trans minor?
And the same people on the right in states who say, well, you know what?
We made that illegal now.
This person was a criminal and it's just, you know, it's just somebody going out and, and doing what needed to be done.
Right.
And that kind of demonizing and you put it together with the rhetoric of not having a soul and not being a real American and on and on.
It just, it spirals quickly.
And I think we see this unfolding right in front of us.
And I think it's, I think it's really alarming.
That example is so, I think, poignant because I think that is where we're headed.
And we saw that we have seen this.
We continue to see it with abortion doctors.
I mean, there were murders of abortion doctors in the late 20th century.
This is something that's not out of the realm of possibility by any means.
Let's talk about vigilantism.
When does vigilantism rise?
I'm talking about it surging.
I'm talking about it kind of having a moment.
There's a book by Nicholas Rush Smith called Contradictions of Democracy.
And Smith argues that one of the times when vigilantism seems to surge is when who belongs to a particular community is up for debate.
Let me say that again.
Who belongs to a particular community is up for debate.
So vigilantism seems to rise when there's a question in a country, in a state, in a community about who's part of the group, who's included.
Vigilantism is often about trying to establish power rather than a reflection of preexisting hierarchies.
Vigilantism is like, look, we're going to establish power here and dominance by threat of violence.
If you get out of line, The police, the DA, the pro-criminal, whatever you're going to call them, police, the Biden administration, they may not punish you, but we will.
So let's think about vigilantism, Dan, in the history of the United States.
Right after the Civil War, I mean, after a short period of reconstruction, the KKK rises.
Vigilantism.
Who belongs?
Oh, black people can vote now?
You have South Carolina with a majority black legislature?
Guess what we need?
We need a KKK that will enforce hierarchies, excuse me, will establish power by way of threats of violence.
What happens in 1915?
The rise of the KKK again.
That's a time of what?
The time of mass migration to the United States.
Eastern Europeans by way of Ellis Island.
It's a time of growing Asian immigration.
Chinese and Japanese immigrants in California and the West Coast.
There's this sense of women are going to vote.
Black people are free.
Vigilantes arise.
The KKK has 5 million members right in the mid 1920s.
Okay.
The sense of we are going to show power and we're going to do it by threat of violence.
That's vigilantism.
The law won't do what we need it to do to create the order and society we want.
So here comes the vigilantes.
That is what's happening now.
Who belongs to a particular community?
Who gets to be a real American?
Whose voice counts?
Trans people?
Non-binary people?
Mixed race people?
Black people?
We have a minority-majority country coming in like a decade and a half.
The demographics of the country are changing.
We have more and more people of color.
More and more folks are identifying as queer.
Guess what?
The order is out of control.
We need to show our power.
We need to establish power.
The law won't do it for us anymore.
So, we need to praise vigilantes as heroes.
Let's take a break because I want to actually pause on the Good Samaritan thing.
So, let's take a break.
We'll come back and we'll do the Good Samaritan.
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All right, Dan.
Let's talk about the Good Samaritan.
You ready?
I know you know your Bible.
I know you very well.
So, Book of Luke, Good Samaritan.
In the story, we have a guy who's traveling and he gets assaulted.
Some thieves rob him.
They beat him and it looks like he's going to be left for dead on the side of the road.
Now, some people pass by.
The first is a priest.
The person you think would help.
The religious leader.
The clergy.
Doesn't do it.
The second, a Levite.
Also, nope.
No dice.
But then the third, a Samaritan.
Now the Samaritan is what, Dan?
The Samaritan is an outsider who's part of the community.
If y'all went to Sunday school, you know the Samaritans were thought of as on the fringe.
They were outsiders within the community.
And it's the Samaritan.
And what the story's teaching us is the person that you would least expect, the outsider, the one who's often looked down upon, who's thought of as not moral, not upstanding, not virtuous, is the one who actually stops.
And what does he do?
He binds the wounds, helps him recover, and he pays an innkeeper to house him.
He tends to the wounds, and then he says, I don't need anything in return.
I didn't do this for money.
I didn't do this for points, for status, for anything else.
Okay?
Dan, I'm going to throw this to you.
Ron DeSantis equates Daniel Penny, a man who choked another person to death, as a good Samaritan, a la the story that I just recounted.
As an American, as a dad, as a human being, why does that scare you?
The reasons that you talk about, one of the things I remember preaching once upon a time about this passage, and like the broader context, there's this divine command to love your neighbor as yourself.
And so the religious leaders come to Jesus and they say, yeah, but who's our neighbor?
And the reason they're asking that is because they're trying to define who they're allowed to exclude.
When they say who's our neighbor, they don't really mean who's our neighbor.
They're asking who isn't?
What are the limits of having to accept people, having to help people?
Who can we be justified in marginalizing?
So then Jesus, in typical Jesus fashion, doesn't answer the question.
He tells this story, and he chooses, as you say, this person who's a marginalized figure in Jewish society who winds up being the hero.
If DeSantis wants to tell the story, it would be like a trans person who shielded the people from this predator, not the big, muscly, like, former military or military person who kills the person.
The Good Samaritan is the outsider.
The Good Samaritan is everybody of good conscience and ethics that the GOP is attacking all the time.
It's the Black Lives Matter activist who's trying to fight for equal rights.
It's the parents of a trans kid who is just trying to help their kid live a happy life.
Everything about it is exactly backwards.
The undocumented migrant.
Yeah, and this is the thing.
It's not a preaching podcast, but that language of loving the neighbor, that's the most ironic thing to me, is that's the whole the Jesus-y message is always like, oh, let me tell you a story about an outcast and the people that you, my listeners, are not going to view as a neighbor.
That's who I'm going to tell you you have to value.
That's who I'm going to tell you the kingdom of God is.
That's who I'm going to tell you that that's where God's kicking around is with the poor, the oppressed, the people in prison, the marginalized, the widow, the orphan, what have you.
It's exactly backwards of everything in the GOP.
And that's what the right has done with religion.
It takes it It takes a message of radical inclusion, a certain message of the power of social weakness, the power of the socially weak and marginalized to change society, and turns it into a story of the strong being stronger, of oppression, of the use of force, of violence, redemptive violence, as the sort of model.
Everything about it is backwards.
And so whenever people use that language of the so-called the Good Samaritan, for me, they've got it exactly backwards.
And it's the irony, and I'll throw it out there, and if anybody has their own Uncle Ron's coming up and, you know, Memorial Day cookouts and whatever, don't come at me, Christians, who are like, I read the Bible and I know all about it, and then start talking about people like killing other people on the subway as Good Samaritans.
Yeah, it just doesn't fit.
But it does show to me the kind of Orwellian dimension of what the Christianity of the right and the Christianity of Christian nationalism is, as it can take any message that's intended to be the opposite of what they do and try to spin it into a story about themselves.
You preached.
I'm going to preach now.
Here we go.
This man got beat up.
Social order, something not going right.
He shouldn't be getting beat up and left on the side of the road and robbed.
That's no good.
So, is the reaction to the social order being out of whack?
Is it, well, I'm going to enforce the social order by way of violence.
It's, I'm going to change the social order by way of redemptive love and self-sacrifice.
I'm going to take care of this person.
For nothing in return so that we might build a society where that is actually true and normal.
Everything you said I agree with.
Dan, I just want to hone in on the point you made because it's the exact thought I had when I saw the DeSantis tweet.
If you are a Christian, if you are an American citizen who thinks that the Good Samaritan parable applies to somebody who ended another person's life.
That is a truly terrifying worldview.
Don't get me wrong.
There's a lot of different cases out there.
There's a lot of different things that happen.
We can't weigh on every instance of what happens on every subway and in every situation.
But what I'm saying is, in this case, to call somebody who choked another person to death a good Samaritan is an Complete revelation of the kind of Christianity you practice.
The idea that Jesus asks in this parable, who is my neighbor?
And I don't know about you, Dan, but what I've always taken away from this is like, my neighbor is everyone.
The kingdom of God is a kingdom in which every human is my neighbor.
And therefore, when it says to love your neighbor as yourself, I'm supposed to love all people.
But we see increasingly the idea that the neighbor is the one who's like me.
The neighbor is the one who shares my characteristics and wants the order of society that I want.
And if you don't, you don't have a soul.
And if you don't, you don't deserve to live.
And if you don't, I don't want to share society with you.
The gospel, the Good Samaritan parable, the idea of a neighbor has been twisted to that logic.
It's all over Stephen Wolf's book, The Case for Christian Nationalism.
You can find it elsewhere.
So, all right.
Any final thoughts just on vigilantism, on the Good Samaritan?
Anything else before we move on?
Just the last thought on that, you know, I said in the Code series, I think a couple episodes ago, that, you know, bad theology hurts people.
Like, why does it matter?
Why get into these kind of, I think, to the uninitiated, these arcane discussions about, you know, things like biblical interpretation or theology.
This is a dominant theology of millions of white Christians in this country, and it hurts people.
In this case, I don't know that this theology killed people.
I don't know that he was like, I'm going to be a good Samaritan and kill somebody.
But the legitimation of it that comes after the fact, the literal baptizing of it, of Christianizing of it, with this, it celebrates the death of another person and paints it as a kind of Christian act.
And we would be remiss not to mention the fact that this is the same week that Democratic Congressman Jerry Conley had somebody show up at his office with a baseball bat and was trying to find him to hurt him.
When they couldn't find him, they attacked two of his staffers with the baseball bat.
And I have not seen every Republican congressperson condemning this.
I haven't seen a United Congress saying this is not acceptable.
I haven't seen that at all.
So just one more example of how all this is going down this week.
All right, let's take a break.
We'll come back and get into a veritable buffet of Florida issues.
Be right back.
All right, Dan.
Every other week, we got to go to Dan Miller, Florida desk.
So, there's a lot this week, and I think it's indicative of larger things in the country.
What do we got?
Yeah, so again, just to reiterate, people are like, why Florida all the time?
It's because for me, it is this kind of MAGA lab.
It has become this lab of, number one, what a MAGA presidency would look like.
We've talked for months about DeSantis basically trying to out-Trump Trump, and I think he's doing all this stuff in Florida to be able to run for president and say, hey, look, look, this is what I did in Florida is what I will do in the country.
Uh, and we anticipate, uh, everything I've read says that next week he's probably going to announce his, uh, his presidential run.
But we also are starting to see the pushback to that, and potential limits to that, and issues arising to that, and I think that's also part of the story of what the attempts to kind of MAGA-ize America, uh, would be.
So I'm just going to run through, like, several things, sort of a laundry list, like you say, and then I'll throw it to you because, you know, Other things that we added to the list, your reflections on these.
One was just another policy issue that continuing the assaults on trans people in particular.
Santa signed a bill that allows kids to be taken from their families if they receive gender-affirming care.
It defines gender-affirming care as a form of physical harm and basically the kids are treated the same way that they would be if they were an abusive home and Department of Family Services or whatever it's called in Florida could remove them.
This effort to try to exercise state law across state lines.
If you had custody arrangements, say that somebody's divorced and they have a custody arrangement with somebody and there's a chance that the child is receiving gender affirming care in a different state.
Florida can intervene to change the custody arrangement and try to take away custody from the non-state parents.
So that's just policy, more of the same.
You mentioned book bans in Texas right at the outset, and we've talked about these a lot.
The issues of book banning, don't say gay, not teaching about queer issues, all of this.
Lots of people have read about the issue of a Florida elementary school teacher this week under investigation in Florida.
Why is she under investigation?
Because she showed her fifth grade class The 2022 Disney movie Strange World, which has an out gay character.
And so she has been brought up for investigation by their local school board.
She has said that she didn't realize that the law had been expanded to include fifth grade.
The person who on the school board is sort of leading this has said that the school libraries are full of smut and porn and so forth.
Brad, this teacher had a permission slip, like kids had to sign a permission slip or have it signed to come to school to be able to watch this film.
They're now saying that she didn't clear the specific film with the administration.
Her lesson had something to do with science and she felt that the film was relevant to that.
It wasn't even about gender and sexuality.
The Don't Say Gay stuff says you can't teach about that, but it's incredibly vague, so it's not clear what teaching about it is.
She basically allowed a queer character on a screen into her room and is under investigation.
So that's part of like, you know, more of the MAGA carrying out the sort of MAGA of social vision.
DeSantis goes to Iowa, wins something like 30 endorsements from state lawmakers, obviously in a run-up to a presidential election.
So for the people who say DeSantis is too far out, he's not part of the Republican mainstream and so forth, a lot of Republicans in Iowa think that he is.
Well, we've also seen some potential limits to this and some pushback to this.
Two DeSantis-endorsed GOP candidates lost, right?
In Kentucky, he supported or endorsed Kelly Craft for the Kentucky gubernatorial race.
She lost in the primary.
Now, she lost to a Trump-backed candidate, but it shows some limits to To DeSantis and what he's doing.
And then this made a lot of news in Jacksonville.
Democrat Donna Deegan defeated a representative, excuse me, a Republican candidate for the governor or governor mayor of Jacksonville.
So I said, it's past my bedtime.
Again, DeSantis, you know, backs up a couple people and takes a couple sort of prominent black eyes.
We've talked for weeks about whether there are signs of some limits of what DeSantis is doing, whether they come down to his own political acumen, whether they come down to pushback of different things.
On to the issue of the books and pushback again.
Penguin Random House is now suing the DeSantis administration, as well as five of their authors, some parents, an advocacy group.
They're suing a Florida school district over what?
Over the removal of books.
The school district removed 10 books focused primarily on LGBTQ issues and race.
It's the Escambia School District in Pensacola.
And they argued that the school board violated their First Amendment rights.
And what they claim was this, I'm reading it, it says that they claim they violated the First Amendment by, quote, depriving students of access to a wide range of viewpoints and depriving the authors of the removed and restricted books of the opportunity to engage with readers and disseminate their ideas to their intended audiences.
So they're saying that First Amendment rights were violated.
Now, if somebody else came along and said, well, no, people could still go out and buy these books.
They could still access these books.
It's not about the First Amendment.
They also argued that it violated the 14th Amendment.
And this, to me, is the real key here, because they argued that it violated their right to equal protection under the law because it is so obviously targeted at LGBTQ issues.
and issues related to race.
And so just for an example, since last May, here are some of the books that have been removed or indefinitely restricted, right?
So the ones by the authors who are suing.
Uncle Bobby's Wedding, All Boys Aren't Blue, Two Boys Kissing, When Aiden Became a Brother and Out of Darkness.
So if anybody picks up on a theme of some of these books, the themes of race and LGBTQ issues, they're right out front.
Other books that were removed include Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, The Kite Runner, Milo Imagines the World, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, and Push by Sapphire.
So again, anybody looking for the patterns can see these, and so this is now Coming up to a court case.
I think it's significant because the court cases take a long time to come through, but I think this is part of what we see, and we're going to see these suits coming up testing the limits of this.
Last thing I want to say about this suit is the school board has mostly been silent, but a guy named Bill Slayton, a member of the school board, he expressed surprise by this suit.
He said, you know, they're just following state law, that this is policy all over Florida.
He doesn't understand why they're being targeted.
Brad, the school board is just following orders.
That's what it is, right?
That's the just following orders defense for this.
The last thing that I'll throw out here is Disney, because you can't talk about Florida and DeSantis without talking about Disney.
It's just funny because Bob Iger, CEO of Disney, last week rhetorically asked and said, you know, doesn't Florida want Disney to invest more money and pay taxes and things like this?
We know that Disney's already filed suit on First Amendment grounds against Florida as well, but this week they announced their scrapping plans for a $1 billion like office complex that would create 2000 jobs, probably would have taken a lot of those jobs from California.
The Disney personnel in California would have moved to Florida.
It was part of a great narrative that the GOP had about how, uh, Florida was taking jobs from California and so forth.
Um, but this pulls the rug out from that.
Trump is all over this.
And DeSantis is being attacked from the right and from the left.
Democrats now are in this upside world, upside down world we live in, attacking a Republican for threatening jobs in Florida.
All of that, it's a lot of stuff, but I think my takeaways from this is, number one, we see the policies.
It's not a secret.
What a MAGA country would look like is not a secret.
We've seen this legislation in Florida.
We've seen it all over the country.
We've talked about it over and over and over.
We see teachers who don't know what they can and can't do and are persecuted for, you know, just trying to teach their classes.
But we also see the pushback on this, and there is that sort of delay of challenging these.
But I think this is what we're also going to see, is we've seen DeSantis basically get a rubber stamp from the GOP in Florida for everything that he wants.
Things are starting to come to the courts, and I think they're starting to come into public opinion, and we'll see how they play out over time.
But I think all of this sort of portends what we're going to be looking forward to through the election cycle and beyond if we get another MAGA president.
All right, so I want to stick on the 14th Amendment argument in the case, and I want to think about that as kind of applicable to so much of what you just talked about, whether it's gender-affirming care and taking kids away.
So basically, the state can take your kid away if you provide them gender-affirming care.
The state can kidnap your kid if you not You don't hurt them physically.
You don't abuse them physically.
But if you provide them gender-affirming care, they can take your kid away.
That's big government.
Okay.
We've talked about banning books.
We've talked about don't say gay.
We have a fifth grade teacher who's being investigated for showing a Disney film.
He also has signed a six-week abortion ban, DeSantis.
So we haven't talked about that yet.
The African American Studies course that was, of course, that whole rigmarole.
And so on.
Equal protection under the law.
So let's go back to vigilantism, okay?
Vigilantism arises, according to Nicholas Rush Smith, when there's a question in a country or a community about who belongs.
And it's a desire to establish power.
So vigilantes act outside of the law because the law is not giving the order they want.
In a time when there are people in the community who they don't want to fully belong or have the full rights and protections of the community and of the law.
So this makes total sense.
After the Civil War, if you're a white supremacist, you don't want black people to vote and be citizens like you.
You create the KKK, you terrorize people, and you establish power.
And there you go.
DeSantis, Dan, is an outlier.
We talk about him so much, and I hope some of you out there, you know, aren't like turning off the show because it's just DeSantis all the time.
But to me, what clicked in my mind today is that we have to talk about DeSantis because DeSantis is trying to take the vigilante vision of order and make it law.
What he's trying to do is say, hey, right now the laws won't protect the order we want, but I'm the guy who's going to do it.
That's why he looks like such an outlier.
Is this happening all over the country?
Yes, but in pieces and kind of piecemeal.
Governor does that.
State legislature does this.
DeSantis has basically stepped up and said, I'm going to be the guy that enforces the entire social order as we want it, as white conservative Christian nationalist types.
So, he is basically saying the order I want does not give equal protection under the law to all people.
If you are a gay person, you are not entitled to be represented in a classroom.
If you are a gay author, if you are a queer person, you cannot Show up in any form in a fifth grade classroom.
Otherwise, we will arrest the teacher or sue the teacher or something.
If you're a parent and you want to care for your kids, all the parental rights, parental choice, my family, my choice.
You want to choose what's best for your kid in terms of gender affirming care, and you will have that kid taken by the state.
Okay.
That is the right kind of social order Ron DeSantis wants.
Now, he is doing this while praising a man who ended the life of another person on a subway and calling him a hero and a good Samaritan.
He's somebody who is very much in favor of stand your ground laws.
And Dan, you've talked about this.
There's nothing that exemplifies vigilante justice more than stand your ground.
Because stand your ground laws basically say, if you think you're under threat, you're allowed to act with force and you won't be held liable by the law.
It's almost like the law ceding ground and opening space for the vigilante to do things, right?
It's almost like saying to the vigilante, we're going to subtract ourselves from the situation so you can commit violence and you won't be punished for it.
The perception of threat.
Justifies your actions, your violence.
Okay?
So, that's DeSantis.
I'm going to enforce the social order by law that everybody else feels they can only do by vigilante justice.
I'm going to be the guy that codifies it.
And that means some of you won't get equal protection.
Now, somebody put this on Twitter the other day and I'm going to be totally honest, I cannot find it and I don't know who said this to me.
So, I'm going to try to find it again and give you credit.
But somebody said this and I think it's so brilliant.
They said, you know Dan, only some people have the chance to act with bodily autonomy when they are under threat to their person.
Only some people get to stand their ground.
And we know this when it comes to black folks, when it comes to others, standing your ground might not count like it does with other people.
You know who doesn't get to stand their ground against a perceived threat that might kill them?
Pregnant women.
I'm in the 20th week of a pregnancy.
Doctor saying, you might die if this pregnancy goes through.
There's a no chance that the pregnancy is viable, and there's a good chance that you will lose your life if you give birth to this baby.
And you know what Rhonda Santa says?
Sorry.
Six week ban.
You are under threat.
You might lose your life, you don't get to stand your ground.
You don't get to exert your sense of who you are and your safety.
And that to me boils down a lot of this.
Only some people get to defend their perception of threat.
Only some people get to act when they feel like they're unsafe.
Only some people get to decide.
When they're unsafe and who the outsiders are, who the people creating disorder are.
And so I think the pregnancy example is a really good one.
If I'm under threat from a fetus that has no viability, that will not survive outside of the womb, and I'm a woman who might lose her life, I don't get to stand my ground because I don't get equal protection under the law in Ron DeSantis, Florida, and increasingly all over the country.
What do you think?
Final thoughts before we go to Reasons for Hope.
I think that that's all right, all correct.
And I think the trick is this, that where the vigilantism becomes more frightening, or the language of stand your ground, which I think you're right, it's like a codified vigilantism sort of thing, is the problem when that perception of threat comes from the mere existence of other kinds of people.
When the mere existence of queer kids or queer people or people of color Or women who want to do whatever the hell they want to do with their own bodies.
Like, whatever it is, when that's the threat, for me, you just put all these logical pieces together and it fits together into a really, really scary sort of picture.
The last thing I think about when I just did this fifth grade thing is, you know, I remember my first crush when I was in grade school was in fifth grade.
There are queer kids in that fifth grade classroom and I don't just mean like trans kids, I don't mean kids who are gender non-confirming, I mean cis boys who are having their first crush and it's for another boy or cis girls who are having a crush and it's for another girl and just this this chilling sense
That they don't have a space and that anything that shows something that looks like what they're experiencing is a threat, is perversion, is smut, is porn, as this school board person put it.
I think it's horrific, the damage that that does to these children, all the while saying that, you know, they're doing this to protect the children.
These things are sort of I know I use the phrase Orwellian a lot, but I invite people to go and look at 1984 again, if you haven't read it for a while, and see the way that it fits the contemporary GOP.
To me, it's really, really striking.
So this happened yesterday when there was an exchange on the Capitol steps between Marjorie Taylor Greene and Jamal Bowman.
Jamal Bowman's a congressperson from New York, former educator, principal, and so on.
And I watched the video.
They were talking, both of them were smiling.
Bowman was making his point.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is making hers.
And then later she says, "I felt threatened that he was screaming at me." She played the, I was under attack.
There was a black man talking to me and I, the innocent white woman felt like if I was under attack, I mean, she played right into the centuries old trope of the perception of threat.
Dan, this is a woman who literally stands up during our most sacred ceremonies, right?
Like inaugurations and state of the unions and badgers from the peanut gallery.
This is somebody who has no problem following students and claiming that Parkland didn't happen.
And yet here's a black congressman trying to have a conversation and I'm under threat.
It's exactly what you just said.
All right, we gotta go.
Let's go to Reasons for Hope.
My reason for hope this week is out of Jacksonville.
Donna Deegan wins the mayoral race.
That's a big deal.
It's one of the first times a Democrat's been mayor in that city in the last generation.
It's one of the few big cities in the country that did not have a Democratic mayor.
And it also is a blowback on Ron DeSantis Florida.
And I hope that there are people, and I'm sure there are, who are feeling energized in Florida, who are feeling momentum, who are organizing, who are joining up with various causes so that they can live in a Florida that is not under the myopic vision that we've talked about today.
What's yours?
Mine also came out of Florida, but it came out of the New College of Florida.
And for people that remember, Ron DeSantis and the Florida legislature basically like fired or cleared out their president, their board of trustees, putting conservatives, are trying to model this as a conservative The models they've used are private conservative Christian colleges and other places in the country.
Graduates held, a majority of graduates, held an alternative commencement ceremony.
They, as kind of an act of protest, they said they wanted to create a space where they felt everybody could feel safe and included.
Their speaker was Maya Wiley, the president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
It was really cool to see these students doing this, making very clear that they are New College and that they don't support what's going on there.
The contrast, I think, is really pronounced, not just with the ethos of what New College now is, but I kid you not, the commencement speaker for the college commencement was Dr. Scott Atlas of Trump kind of COVID conspiracy fame.
That's the intellectual that New College lined up.
So I took a lot of hope and found it really inspiring what these students did and I think what it represents about higher ed and the state of Florida and everything going on there.
All right, y'all.
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