Weekly Roundup: Moms for Book Bans, Dads for Dictators
Brad begins by offering a metaphor for understanding how Christian nationalists and others view the United States: A complementarian marriage. The role of the cishet dad-husband as protector and the mom-wife as innocent homemaker provides a window into why so many conservatives want to ban books and are calling for dictators.
In the following segments Brad and Dan examine the ways this metaphor is playing out in the work of Moms for Liberty, Matt Walsh, and others across the country. Brad explains why he thinks that the Right will not flinch when their leaders suggest setting up camps for trans people. Dan unpacks the ways that Moms for Liberty is using a micro minority to take over schools. Brad relates their efforts to the Daughters of the Confederacy.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
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All right.
I want to talk today about the fact that there are people who are openly calling for a dictator in this country, namely white Christian nationalist men who are leaders.
There's also just an overwhelming, like what feels like an onslaught on our public schools.
I know that I don't have to tell many of you that, but that onslaught is really related to book banning.
And I want to talk about Moms for Liberty and how Moms for Liberty is really a kind of offshoot of the Daughters of the Confederacy.
Let me start here though.
I think one of the ways that if you are trying to understand our country at the moment, and it just none of it makes sense, I would invite you to think about the United States in the eyes of the white Christian nationalists and many conservative folks who may or may not be Christian nationalists, I'm not sure, but nonetheless I think this metaphor is very helpful.
So stick with me for a second.
I want you to think of the United States as a cis heterosexual marriage between a man and a woman who are, who have agreed to enter into what is known as a complementarian marriage.
Now in evangelical circles and some other circles, complementarian marriages mean this.
It means you have a straight het man who is the authority in the house and his role is to protect the family from outside invaders and internal disorder.
His role is not really to nurture the children.
It's not to take care of the house.
It is not to cultivate the house.
It is not even really to build things.
The man's job is really as protector, enforcer, and unquestioned authority.
So if you have a complimentary marriage, that is what the man is going to do.
That is what he is expected to be.
He is the authority who enforces and protects internal and external.
The woman is, as you would imagine, submissive to this man and his authority, but she's also seen as this kind of innocent figure.
She's a mother, or ideally a mother.
She is also something or someone who should be protected alongside her children.
Women are seen as that which represents some kind of innocence.
Now, as soon as I say that, I know some of you are thinking about Eve and all those things, and you really get to the heart of kind of many interpretations of women in the Christian tradition, right?
Many of them envision women as either Eve, the temptress, or as the loving, innocent, caring mother, such as Mary.
Now, the woman is the heart of the family.
She's the caretaker, the homemaker, the nurturer.
And she's innocent for a number of reasons, but here's one of them.
It's because she was a virgin up until marriage.
She was a chased wall against male aggression and sexuality.
She is someone who has desire only for her husband.
So her innocence extends to her sexual purity, her sexual loyalty, and her sexual innocence.
Now, of course, this stretches out into race.
And so for many people, the complementarian couple is a white couple.
So we have a straight, white, married, heterosexual couple.
Now, my thesis for today is this.
It's that Christian nationalists and many conservatives view the nation as a complementarian marriage.
They view the United States as ideally a complementarian marriage.
And you're like, well, what does that mean?
And what I mean is that If you think about that marriage, there's a certain structure to the relationship.
There's a certain understanding of how the house and the family are supposed to work.
The man is having authority, the woman who is submissive, but the woman who also represents, as I said, this nurturer, this innocent, chaste homemaker.
And for the people we're talking about today, the United States is a homeland, a virginal homeland that demands protection.
The United States is the greatest country on earth.
It's chosen by God.
It's a place that should be protected and loved and cared for.
And in order to do that, you need the right husband, the right father, the right head of household to make sure that that all takes place.
So, the other part that we can't miss here is that this can only be a cis-straight relationship.
That part of the reason it works, and complementarian adherents will tell you this, people that practice these kinds of theologies in marriages will tell you, they only work because men have a certain role, women have a certain role, there are two genders, and there's no departing from this structure.
A straight cis man and a straight cis woman.
That's it.
Now, when it comes to foreign threats, the man is the one who has to protect the family, the woman, the children.
And when it comes to internal disorder, The man also has to make sure that the structure of the household remains intact.
If you have children who are disobedient, if you have children who talk back, if you have a wife who does not submit to your authority, it is your job as a man to enforce those boundaries, to make sure that you are keeping your household in order, as they say.
Now you, as the man, are going to do that by brutalizing enemies, using force and strong words, strong actions.
Now, when it comes to the domestic affairs, when it comes to the domestic side of things, the innocent white Christian mother cares for the children.
She makes a home.
She builds a life.
And in this structure, any perception of danger is a threat against her and those children.
So the main job of the father-husband is protection and enforcement.
He's not necessarily going to be nice to the kids.
He's not necessarily always going to be gentle or kind.
He's not always going to be meek or empathetic, and that's not his job.
And in fact, if he does show those qualities, he might not be the kind of guy that is up for the job.
He might be the kind of guy that isn't able to carry out his duties.
Now, one of the things that I think is really important to notice, and this might sound strange at the start, is that there's no history to this ideal complementarian marriage that symbolizes the American nation.
It's not particular.
It is universal and ideal.
The complementarian marriage is the original symbolic couple of the American Garden of Eden.
This is not a couple that has a history.
This is not a couple that has thought about divorce here or there or where there's been infidelity or other things.
This is a couple, this imagined couple, is one that is universal and it's eternal, okay?
And this is why history, and this is what Timothy Snyder argues in The Road to Unfreedom, History is only welcome when it provides a set of symbols of innocence, a set of symbols that illustrate the harmony of the homeland.
You know, when we think of this country, Through the lens of this metaphorical marriage, you don't want particularity.
You don't want scars and hurt and trauma.
You don't want to talk about the struggles to become a really great family or the things you needed to work out as a couple in order to be functional and loving and flourishing.
You don't want to talk about the things in the history of your relationship or family that are difficult and not easy to discuss that include hurt and exclusion.
History is supposed to only illustrate the harmony of the homeland.
History should be a set of events and wars and victories that illustrate how the man has protected the country, protected the home, protected the marriage, the protecting husband and the virginal, chaste, innocent wife, untouched by foreign invaders or domestic strife.
The man who's made sure that no one penetrates his home, that no one touches his life partner.
This is what Snyder in The Road to Unfreedom calls the politics of eternity.
An image of the nation not as a body going through time, not a body with history and all of our bodies Have a history.
All of our bodies have scars and things that we're working through.
Instead, this is a body that is uninjured.
It's unscathed.
It doesn't have a trauma on it.
So we have a politics of eternity.
We have an understanding of the country, not as a historical element, but as something that has always existed, as chosen by God, as something that has always been existed in perfect harmony and in perfect setup.
Okay.
This is very much, if you listen to white Christian nationalists, how they talk about the United States.
They talk about it as a place that God chose and that God wanted to exist forever and so on and so forth.
So who threatens this?
Who are the threats to this kind of harmony?
The threats come from abroad, of course.
There are potential threats to the American homeland.
And those threats come from the outside.
And it's very easy to see this throughout American history.
People demonizing foreigners, demonizing immigrants.
And now we see all of the spectacles that play out at the border with Republican officials.
Now one of the threats is history.
History becomes a threat because it can upset this harmony, right?
History is a set of inconvenient facts about what happened.
It can change the imagined ideal, the eternal symbol of the nation.
The past can reveal that the country is not a white straight Christian complementarian union, but a union, a more perfect union, as Abraham Lincoln said, that has never been achieved because of inequality and brutality and exclusion and Jim Crow and Japanese incarceration and slavery.
It can make the perfect marriage and the happy home into something much more nuanced and most importantly, something far from innocent.
The other thing that can be threatening is sexuality.
The women and the kids in complementarian marriage are supposed to be protected at all costs.
including from those that would threaten the structure of the home.
Remember, this is a heterosexual structure.
And if you upset that, you upset the entire program.
So if you say that a household does not have a cishet couple, but it's a queer family with two moms or two dads, a non-binary person, a trans person, you've upset the structure of family.
And by just existing, your gender, your sexuality, your body, It becomes a foreign invader.
It is something that preys on kids, changing their minds about right and wrong.
It exposes them to things that are inappropriate just by existing.
There's never a time when they'll be appropriate, when the queer literature, the queer character, the queer person will be appropriate in grade school or high school or college because they're deemed perverted just by being.
And that is what I want to talk about today.
And it's perfect timing because my co-host Dan is here and we're going to get into it.
So Dan, just talking about the nation as a complementarian marriage.
And we talk on this show a lot about the nation as a body, and that comes from your work.
And I was saying that today I've been thinking about the nation as a complimentary in marriage where you have a man who's supposed to protect from invaders and from internal strife and a woman who is seen as a virgin up until she got married, a white, innocent mother who nurtures and who needs to be protected along with the children at all costs.
For me, this is a way to think about all of our issues for today.
One of them is about diversity and DEI.
One of them is about books being scary and schools indoctrinating people.
And the other one is about a lot of men calling for a dictator.
So, welcome Dan.
How are you?
Good Brad, technical issues and things like that, but glad to be with you as always.
I said we had to record late again and again, it's past the early bird special time.
So yeah, my, my blood sugar's low, but no, I'm good.
Love all the themes, the, this notion we have all the time about society having kind of the right shape, the right form, the right setup of families as a microcosm of what society is supposed to be.
So the family is supposed to be properly ordered.
All of that stuff's the stuff you're talking about with this notion of who plays what role, what roles are appropriate, having a disordered society, or family, or individuals in the family.
All those things, I think, as you say, tie together all the things that we're looking at this week.
Well, let's start by talking about these calls for a dictator, because I think they really connect to last week's discussion of vigilantism.
So, this week we had a Florida Republican, a state lawmaker, who called for, didn't call for, but basically quoted Franco and said that Franco was somebody who Had some good ideas about how the country might be run.
This is Anthony Sabatini.
He's a member of the Florida House of Representatives.
And he says, I answer only to God in history.
And that was a quote from Franco.
People got all over him and he didn't back down about it.
Okay, so that's one.
Great.
How about another one?
A lot of folks saying that DeSantis, if he ran, would be like a dictator.
And we're not going to do a lot of DeSantis today.
But here's one thing DeSantis said he would do.
If he were president, he would dispel what the longstanding tradition that government institutions like the DOJ operate independently from the president.
So here's a quote from DeSantis.
Republican presidents have accepted the canard that the DOJ and FBI are independent.
They are not independent agencies.
They are part of the executive branch.
They answer only to the elected president of the United States, meaning that the president could basically wield the Department of Justice and FBI as his personal investigative forces, his personal justice arm, whatever he wanted.
There would be no separation between them, which sounds not like a democracy with checks and balances.
Now, here's some others who have talked about dictators.
Josh Abatoy, who is a Texas-based member of the New Founding Org, which is about restoring American civilization, a conservative kind of think tank, tweeted this.
Basically, America is going to need a Protestant Franco.
Now, Franco is a Spanish leader.
Dan, some of us out there don't maybe not remember our history.
This is a man who was brutal, who had hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of people murdered, was someone that is seen as a dictator and as someone who used force in order to stay in power.
Okay?
Let's go to someone else.
Let's go to Jesse Kelly.
We've talked about Jesse Kelly.
Jesse Kelly is a kind of wannabe Matt Walsh.
He has about 650,000 Twitter followers.
He hosts the I'm Right, Jesse Kelly show.
And he says, this country needs a dictator.
As the great John Adams said, a free country only works for moral people.
We are not worthy of freedom.
A dictator is coming.
We have a 19-year-old who drove a rented box truck into the White House barrier this week, and he told authorities that he admired Nazis and wanted to seize power and kill the president.
Now, is that a call for a dictator?
I don't know.
But when you openly admire Nazis, to me, that signals your sympathies there.
Okay?
I could go on.
There are others.
Let me stop and just say, what do I think is happening here?
What I think is happening here, Dan, is we talked about vigilantism as a desire for order and vigilantism saying, well, if the law won't give us the order we want, then we will enforce the order we want without the law.
The calls for a dictator, Dan, to me are an extension of that line of thinking, but they're also an extension of this metaphor of complementarianism that I've been talking about today.
The metaphor says that men are supposed to be protectors and enforcers.
It says that no matter what happens, their role in the family is not a nurturer, it's not an empathizer, it's not a cultivator, it's not a listener.
The role of the man is to protect and enforce.
So if the threats get so bad, If the internal struggles, if the internal strife in the house gets so bad, you don't need a dad who waits to listen to what the kids have to say or his wife's opinion or working it out as a couple.
He turns into an authoritarian.
He turns into a dictator.
This has long been the criticism of complementarian theology.
You as the man take control.
You don't listen.
It's not a democracy.
It's not a reciprocity.
It is a I decide.
I think what is happening here is a sense that the foreign invaders are so strong and the internal strife so strong in the United States that these men are like, we have no other choice except a dictator.
We don't have time for democracy and listening and voting and we don't have time for elections.
What we have time for is one strong man who will enforce the order that we need and we will be extensions of that strongman.
We will be his proxies.
We will bow to his authority, but we will carry out his orders in the street.
The call for dictatorships to me is the ways that fascism has always been tied into masculinity, it's always been tied into a certain misogyny, and it's always been tied into a certain sense that order is the most important thing.
Now, one thing that Timothy Snyder says in The Road to Unfreedom, a book I've been referencing today, is that sexuality itself can become the foreign threat that leads to a dictatorship, because what you can say is that queerness, that homosexuality, trans folks, bi folks, non-binary folks, that they are such a threat internally to the country, that you know what we should do?
We should get a dictator who will take care of that problem once and for all.
You know what we should do?
We should make sure that you can't legally exist because your pronouns aren't allowed.
What we should do is take you from your parents.
And make sure that they realize you can't give them this kind of gender affirming care.
What goes from this, what follows from this Dan, and I'll just be really honest because we're at the end of AAPI month, what follows from this are camps.
Some of you are listening and you're like, OK, you sure?
And I'm you know what I am?
I am sure I am.
I have no doubt that if you're going to take children from their parents because their parents are giving them gender affirming care, that it is not far from that to saying, hey, we built this camp or we built this children's home or we built this place where we can take children who are confused about their identity and we can fix them.
We might not call it a camp, we might call it a retreat center or a therapy house or something else.
But when you're taking kids from their parents in order to fix them, that's called a camp.
My relatives were put in camps during World War II, Dan.
So anytime Uncle Ron wants to say, well, not in America.
We don't do camps in America.
We do actually.
We do.
Okay.
I've been to many of them.
I have taken pilgrimages to places where my great, uh, you know, aunts, uncles, third cousins, other people were, uh, were incarcerated in a camp as American citizens.
We are at a place, Dan, where the idea of a dictatorship, of order, of internal strife, and sexuality as a foreign threat, gender identity, gender that is not following the cishet norm, as such a threat, that we will put you in a camp.
We will make you disappear.
And the calls for the dictator follow along that logic to me.
And I think it's really, really, really, really frightening.
All right.
That was a long lot of talking for me.
What do you got?
So some thoughts about that.
Like first, I've said this for a few weeks.
It kind of came up in the, it's in the code series, but the bad theology hurts people.
This kind of model of authoritarianism is, it is the logical outflow of the kind of patriarchal complementarianism that you're talking about.
And we, you grew up hearing, I grew up hearing this model that it's not that, that the man in charge and all this other stuff, it's not authoritarian, but it is, right?
It's not, or it doesn't feel that way, maybe, as long as everybody's on board, as long as everybody accepts those positions.
But if one doesn't, or they question that patriarchy, then it's ineluctably authoritarian.
I think also it's worth noting, like, this isn't a new idea, right?
There was a sort of 18th century political theory of enlightened despotism, right?
That the best way to rule is to have a despotic ruler who is quote-unquote enlightened, right?
And by that they meant, you know, kind of Christian, part of Christendom and so forth.
Guess what?
The people who don't feel like they can win a democratic battle are now calling for the same thing, right?
Except that enlightenment, quote unquote, is that vision of the American body that they want, right?
Cis, hetero, white, patriarchal, all of those kinds of things.
Kind of another point to throw in here about your point on camps, because I agree with you, is if we just use the trans or queer people as an example, the camps already exist, right?
We've had reparative therapy camps for people for a long time.
It's just that they've been voluntary, so people would check themselves into the retreat center to try to not be gay anymore, or their parents would send them there.
It's not a big leap to say, oh, well, now we're going to force you to turn your kids over to that.
So I'm with you.
I think it's a logical outflow.
And I think one of the ways to criticize ideas is to say, let's game this out.
Like, where does this go?
Let's take this rhetoric and follow it through.
To where it would end.
And when you've got people openly saying, let's give up this whole democracy thing.
We can't do it.
We can't win it.
It takes too long.
We don't have time for this.
And I've said this all the time, too.
Democracies are horrifically, problematically sort of not very economic or efficient form of government.
And that's why it's good, because it makes us all talk to each other and argue and listen and rethink things and negotiate.
And it's a lot of work.
And it's tiring and it's frustrating when you get people to say, you know what?
Yeah, we're just done with all that because we know we're not going to win anyway.
I think you're right.
I think it's a straight line to all of these other things.
There's so many ways that you can see a democracy in peril.
One of them is if people think elections don't matter.
So one side of that, Dan, is like, it doesn't matter if I vote, my people won't win.
Another one is it doesn't matter if I vote because my side doesn't have enough votes.
So we should just screw democracy and go for something else.
Like both of those attitudes are dangerous because if you think your vote doesn't count, That's a problem.
But if you think voting is just not worth it because you think we should just take over by force, that's also like really a good indicator that your democracy is in peril.
Let me say one more thing before we take a break and go to something else is.
So let's think about let's think about these calls for a dictator and the way that they are thoroughly un-American in terms of an America that stands for democracy and free and fair elections and and processes without bias and so on and so forth.
This week, and I don't want to get into DeSantis a lot, but DeSantis launched his campaign on Twitter spaces.
A lot of people made fun of it.
It didn't seem to go well.
A lot of people saying DeSantis is going to flame out.
He just doesn't have the charisma, whatever.
Okay, fine.
You want to game something out, Dan, let's game out a Trump second presidency.
Let's game out Trump beating Biden.
And I know a lot of you don't even want to think about it, but let's do it.
I'm sorry.
Let's do it.
The man, Dan, was impeached twice.
The man had troves of documents at Mar-a-Lago.
All of the things that happened with January 6th.
I mean, the leader of the Oath Keepers was just convicted of seditious conspiracy and is going to go to jail for 18 years.
And the man who incited him to do a lot of that is running for president.
Do you think that there's any sense that Donald Trump will have any respect for any law, any norm, any process, including running for a third term, including doing whatever he wants if he's elected?
Can you imagine the kind of ways that he will just run roughshod over anything like democracy in the United States if he is elected again, elected?
A lot of you are listening and you're going to watch the secession final this Sunday.
I'm watching that too.
And one of the things that comes through in that show, Dan, it's a show about the ultra-rich, is they don't care.
They don't ever expect to be punished.
When you watch the secession and you see all these billionaires, they never expect anyone to actually punish them.
Like that they'll ever actually have anything happen to them that's bad or negative.
That is going to be the Donald Trump second presidency.
It will be the presidency of just ignoring democracy.
It will be the presidency of brute force in ways that will far, far outshine the first one.
It will be the presidency of camps.
And I firmly believe that.
So I think all those things are connected.
All right, let's take a break.
We'll come back and talk about.
DEI and why some folks think it is anti-white.
We are back.
All right, Dan.
So one of the things I said at the top is that if you think of the country as a complementarian marriage, it's an ideal marriage.
It's an ideal couple.
It's like the Garden of Eden.
It's like Adam and Eve, right?
When people picture Adam and Eve, they never picture Adam and Eve as like, you know, Adam has like a bum knee and like Eve has a birthmark.
Because Adam and Eve aren't historical figures.
They're like ideal figures.
They're symbolic figures.
They're perfect, eternal characters.
Now, that is why when you introduce history to people who envision our country as a complementarian marriage, it scares them.
Because they're like, you're bringing in the particularities here.
You're bringing in things that say we're not perfect.
We're not symbolic.
We're not ideal.
In fact, we have a history that goes back to, I don't know, the Middle Passage.
We have a history of attempted genocide when it comes to Native Americans.
We have a history of slavery.
So this leads to something that Matt Walsh said this week, and I'll throw it to you now, about DEI and whiteness.
So what's going on?
Yeah, so Matt Walsh made some statements on the Matt Walsh Show about diversity, and this is what he said, and I'm quoting here.
He says, I'm concerned, and my concern is this, that if you still have any confusion about what these diversity initiatives actually are.
So just to pause, when people say DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion, These are initiatives to basically say, we're going to try to have policies that don't marginalize people because of aspects of their identity.
We're going to make sure buildings are accessible to people who are differently abled in different ways.
We are not going to discriminate, right?
That's what DEI is, in a nutshell.
So he says, if there's any confusion about what these diversity initiatives actually are, well, this should clear it up.
Diversity absolutely means anti-white.
That's what it means.
All diversity initiatives are anti-white initiatives.
Anytime you hear about any kind, listen to that, like any kind of diversity initiative anywhere, whether it's in government, in corporations, in any institution at all, it is an anti-white initiative.
Diversity is an anti-white conspiracy.
And you can clip that and cut it and post it on Twitter, because I know you will, because that's what it is.
And if you ever doubted it, well, here you go.
That's the quote.
That's the statement.
And what I wanted to do to think about this, because the quote's pretty straightforward, is this.
And I think, Brad, it gets into some of the metaphor about this marriage.
It's like, say, okay, What would the world have to be like for this to be true?
For what Matt Wall says to make sense, what would it have to be like?
What would have to actually be happening in your schools or your colleges or your workplace or the public courthouse in your town or whatever?
It would mean like, and I've got two big ones here, two things like how the world would actually have to be, what it would have to look like for Matt Walsh and what he says to be true.
The first is that minorities and marginalized people of all kinds, right, and I want people to think here, right, this is everything from ethnic minorities to sexual and gender minorities, to people who can't walk upstairs unaided, to people who need the Braille menu at McDonald's, to like Everything, right?
All of these people.
It would mean that all of them have to be demanding rights that they want to deny to white people.
That's what it would have to mean, right?
Rights to marry.
Anybody in favor of marriage equality saying that white people shouldn't be allowed to be married anymore?
Not that I know of.
I haven't heard anybody say that.
They would have to be demanding rights to medically appropriate care and saying that white people shouldn't have that.
I don't think any trans person, movement, group that I've ever encountered is like, you know what?
You know who shouldn't have medically appropriate care?
White people.
They would have to say that the only people who don't have a right to not be discriminated against are white people.
Doesn't hold.
They would have to say that everybody but white people should have equal protection under the law, right?
Guaranteed in the 14th Amendment.
Haven't heard anybody make that argument, Brad.
They would have to say that parents should have the right to make medically informed decisions for their kids unless they're white.
White parents can't.
That's the first thing of, like, what the world would have to be like.
The second one is this.
They would have to have evidence that systemic patterns of discrimination and marginalization on the basis of physical ability or sex or gender or race or religion or political creed or whatever, that they don't actually occur.
And they do.
And here's the thing, and I make this point all the time, and I've had students who, you kind of question this, and I'll say, there would not be anti-discrimination laws if there had not been patterns of discrimination.
Right?
If they weren't discernible, if they weren't clear, the laws wouldn't exist.
You don't even have to know the history to just do the logic and say, you know what, people don't pass laws typically for things unless they're things that they think are really going on.
What does all of that mean?
It means that the world doesn't look the way that it would have to look for somebody like Matt Walsh, for what he says to be true.
So here's what I would say.
They're not anti-white diversity inclusion initiatives.
They are anti-white supremacists, right?
What is disrupted?
Because here's who suffers, right?
Who takes a hit if, I don't know, you've got a wheelchair ramp on a building so somebody in a wheelchair can get into it.
Who does that harm?
I guess maybe it harms the people who benefit by not having people in wheelchairs be able to access the building.
Who benefits by denying medical care to trans kids?
I guess people who benefit in some way by not having trans kids receive medical care.
Who benefits from having companies not be allowed to talk about things like having a corporate environment that isn't Fair to people of color, or talk about, say, wage gaps between men and women in the company and so forth.
The people who benefit from that.
What Matt Walsh is giving voice to, to return to your metaphor, is the person who says, no, this isn't, this is a society that's not the right shape.
This is a relationship between different people that doesn't look the way it's supposed to work, doesn't look the way it's supposed to look, doesn't work the way it's supposed to work.
And I, Matt Walsh, as somebody whose identity is built around Making sure the society is structured in such a way that white, straight, male Americans are the ones calling the shots and defining what that shape looks like?
I'm threatened by that.
So I'm going to perceive anything where anybody else could occupy the same position I occupy as a threat.
And it is.
It is no different from the husband who is threatened when his wife says, you know what, maybe I can manage the finances, or maybe I should take that job, even though it means that I'll make more money than you.
Or, I don't know, maybe you should wash the dishes or cook the meals.
Whatever it is.
And if people think that that sounds silly, if they think that that sounds ridiculous, just go look around at the complimentarians and gender essentialists and what they say people should be doing.
So that was Matt Walsh.
I've got things to say about something I think is related in Moms4Liberty, but I want to throw it over to you.
You were aware of Walsh's comments.
What were your thoughts?
And how do you see this playing into this sort of metaphor that we're working on today?
No, everything you said is right on, and Walsh has been at this for a long time.
And I just want to notice, nothing about this is going to be that profound, but I just want to notice where we're at.
We're at a place where at the week of the three-year anniversary of the murder of George Floyd, somebody is saying in America, diversity is anti-white.
So, right, I want to think about the ways that the murder of George Floyd inspired so many uprisings, so many protests, so many different kinds of change.
And yet that anniversary largely went, it largely came and went without much fanfare this week.
And yet this man, Mount Walsh, who has enormous influence, I mean, a million followers, is telling people, and the people he's telling, Dan, and this demands more attention than we can give it to today.
Are the same people who were susceptible to Rush Limbaugh in the 90s, right?
It's straight men, mainly white men.
Most of them are not in their 60s or 70s when they listen to him at Walsh.
They're like in their 30s, right?
They're the 31-year-old dad driving to work.
They're the 39 year old dad, right?
Sitting in traffic or whatever may be.
And they're the ones who are getting their idea of the world shaped by someone like this.
And you're seeing the effects of this.
You're seeing how Matt Walsh led one of the kinds of attacks on Target.
And it just keeps happening.
I just want to notice.
It's less analysis and more observation.
The three year anniversary of George Floyd's death and murder, we have a man saying that literally in 2023, That talking about diversity is anti-white, that you're attacking white people.
And it illustrates everything I mentioned.
So let's get into Moms4Liberty.
How does this connect there?
Yeah, so people may be familiar with Moms for Liberty.
This is the group that's really, really been pushing a lot of the local school board things about book bans, and critical race theory, and not just wanting kids to be able to choose pronouns and things, but making rules—they're typically not laws—policies that prohibit teachers from even asking kids about their pronouns or anything like that.
It was a great article on CNN this week, and I give the credit to L. Reeve and Samantha Gough, if I'm reading my writing right, who had this great article about it.
It was sort of an article about moms, and it typically is.
It's not just moms.
Moms are not the only parents who care about these things, but they are often movements of moms, mothers of children.
And, you know, more liberal or progressive moms sort of, quote-unquote, infiltrating some of these meetings of Moms for Liberty and so forth.
But in this article, they bring out some really great insights into the logic.
And we'll listen to this for a minute or think about this for a minute.
And it sounds a lot like Matt Walsh, right, in the structure of it.
And so they interviewed a woman named Darcy Schoening, who is the chair of Moms for Liberty in, I think it's El Paso County, Colorado, right?
And their latest push was in Colorado Springs to get the District 11 school board to ban teachers from asking kids about pronouns.
So to make it so the teachers can't ask what pronouns somebody use, what pronouns they prefer, and so forth.
Now that move was tabled because of backlash, local backlash against it.
But this woman who is emblematic of Moms4Liberty.
So Schoening has said that asking kids about pronouns is a form of grooming, that it's a form of indoctrinating.
And here are some of the things that she had to say.
And I want folks to just listen to this.
So this is her.
She said, quote, if you ask my children, who are seven and eight, what are your pronouns?
They don't know what that is.
When you ask that, you're planting the seeds in their minds that they maybe should identify as another gender, or that identifying as another gender is hip and cool.
Hey, my teacher's asking me, so maybe this is what I should do.
She goes on to make a series of claims that aren't true, and here are some of the kinds of things that she said, right?
So this is from the article.
It said, for example, Schoening raised the idea that a tomboy, a girl who wore flannel and sneakers, Would be told by a teacher, quote, you know, it might be time to gender transition.
Let's go talk to the school therapist.
Let's go talk to a physician.
Let's do this.
Schoening said that she did not know any tomboys who'd actually transition after social pressure.
I want everybody to hold on to that point because that's going to be important.
But she said, quote, imagine the kids that aren't strong enough to go talk to their parents and say, my teacher is trying to gender transition me.
By the way, gender transitioning someone isn't a thing.
I just have to like jump in and say that.
She says, we're speaking for those kids and those parents who aren't made aware.
She also claimed that eight-year-old boys could get surgery to remove their penises.
They can't.
Doesn't happen.
And that she feared that her state would pass a law saying if parents refused to have their boys' penises surgically removed, the state would take them away.
She thought this issue would eventually go to the Supreme Court.
The article goes on to say, CNN asked Schoening if she was saying she believed there was some kind of high-level coordinated effort to make more children trans and gay.
There is, she said.
Who would be directing it, she was asked.
Quote, teachers, unions, and our president, and a lot of funding sources.
Why would they do that, she was asked.
Quote, because it breaks down the family unit.
Right?
Does everybody pick up on that?
Breaking down the family unit, gender complementarianism, the proper structure, which includes cis, heteronormativity, and so forth.
And why would they want to do that?
She answered, so the conservative values are broken down and that we can slowly erode away at constitutional rights.
Right?
So just to say it, because it needs to be said, all of that's ridiculous.
None of that is how any of the stuff with pronouns or children transitioning their gender identity works or happens, nor should it.
I want to be really clear as somebody who's a huge advocate of trans minors, nobody in a school should tell a kid that they need to consider transitioning or that they might be a gender different than they think they are or something like that, right?
It's about opening the space for them to sort of Figure that out.
But here's the key, right?
Because the issue isn't about facts.
It's the same thing with Matt Walsh.
It's not about facts.
What is it about?
It's about fear, and it's about, for me even more, just sort of a fundamental discomfort about the way the society is.
Matt Walsh says it's a conspiracy.
He uses the C-word.
It's a conspiracy to do this.
Shoney here says it's a conspiracy to do this.
What do conspiracies do?
I just spent a semester teaching about conspiracies and one of the things that I think is really insightful that a number of people who study conspiracy theories point out is they say that one of the things that they do is take kind of unshaped anxieties, right?
People who just feel anxious.
So somebody who just doesn't feel like this is the same safe white America that it was in sort of the mythical 1950s or whatever, right?
They take those feelings of insecurity or anxiety that you can't kind of name and you can't put a shape to, and you give them a concrete form.
You identify a group, everything you talked about leading into the show, The what I refer to as the foreigners within, right?
The people who are inside the social body who don't belong there.
You identify those as the threat and you are now able to name your fears and target your fears and have somebody to aim it at instead of having to look at the fact that like maybe you need to deal with the fact that you feel anxious about stuff that you just don't need to feel anxious about.
So that's where I see these things tying together, right?
So much overlap between Matt Walsh on the one side and something like Moms for Liberty on the other.
You're referencing earlier the way that sexuality becomes one of these key sort of forms.
And gender identity becomes one of these key forms that calls into question this fundamental sense of society being the right shape, to say nothing of Moms for Liberty and their advocacy of, you know, quote-unquote, anti-woke legislation, of, you know, being opposed to so-called critical race theory, and their affirmation of, quote-unquote, traditional family values, which includes what, Brad, wait for it, gender complementarianism, authoritarian patriarchy, all of those things.
So there's so much, I want to stay on this track.
So let's take a quick break, come back.
And I want to link, I want to talk more about Moms4Liberty because this is everywhere at the moment.
We'll be right back.
Okay.
So Dan, let's just, let's just draw together some threads and then add in some more, some more content.
Drawing together threads.
What I talked about at the beginning is this gender complementary in marriage as the way to understand the country.
So on one hand, you have the Mount Walshes, the dad, the protector, the enforcer, who needs to go out and intimidate Target and intimidate anyone he can find.
And we need a dictator.
You know, some people are calling for a dictator so we can just get out here and brutalize folks so they'll get in line, get the house in order, get all the foreign enemies away from us and just be strong again.
Make America great.
Yeah.
Okay, great.
But Moms for Liberty is an integral part of this.
They're arguing for what?
The traditional family.
So friends, if you're wondering what they mean when they say grooming or pedophile, what they mean is you are recognizing sexualities, gender identities, ways of being a person that doesn't fit the cis hetero standard.
So if you introduce that idea, or if you even allow a character on a screen like we talked about last week in a fifth grade classroom in a Disney movie, If you allow books, this is why I'm going to get to books in a minute, if you allow books in your library where queer characters who don't fit the mold of traditional family values exist, you're grooming.
You're grooming.
You're grooming my child to think about perverted things and think about the logic.
If you are not cis and straight, you are perverted.
You're a pervert.
Pervert means you're errant.
You're out of line.
You have desire.
You have a way of existing in terms of your body that is out of line.
It is not normal and it's not acceptable.
That's what a pervert is.
So they're saying that you, by existing, are a pervert, and what I wish we could do is pretend you didn't exist.
We're going to write laws and do things so you don't exist.
This is why, Dan, they're always saying, well, it's not appropriate for grade school.
Wait for high school.
Not appropriate for high school.
Wait for college.
What did Ron DeSantis just do to the Florida curriculum in college?
Say, we're not doing gender studies here.
It's never appropriate because they never think being queer is appropriate.
They always think it's perverted.
It's a perversion and it is the enemy within.
So, I just want to draw that out.
If you don't understand why they're always talking about grooming, this is why.
All right, let me just quickly draw a connection here with one more thing and that is Moms4Liberty has eerie resonances with another group from history.
So, After the Civil War, there was a little group that formed called the Daughters of the Confederacy.
And the Daughters of the Confederacy, or the United Daughters of the Confederacy, did a lot of things.
But before they really focused energy, Dan, schools.
It was in schools.
Looking at a piece at Book Riot, UDC defended the lost cause so ardently that they knew in order to perpetuate their white history mythos, They needed to do more than have a group dedicated to teaching young people the story.
They needed to get themselves into the classrooms of every school they could to ensure their side of history was presented.
So the moms began to claw their messages into classrooms.
Not only did they advocate for a certain brand of history, but they fought to remove texts which didn't align with their beliefs.
Does that sound familiar?
One of those texts, Dan?
The Ku Klux Klan or Invisible Empire?
That was one of the books that was introduced and guess what?
It was read widely for a long time.
This follows on the fact that today in Tennessee, a conspiracy theorist has been put in charge of some of the state's school curriculum.
Looking at another piece, this is at Medium.
There's another book, Annie Cooper, 1916, a United Daughters of the Confederacy member.
And it suggested that despite murdering black people, the KKK was a great organization that got a bad rep.
Okay.
Here's the point, Dan.
The desire for the moms who are part of the Daughters of Confederacy was to instill a certain history, was to get in those schools and make sure their history was taught, and to not let any other ideas, any other histories, any other analysis in.
That is what Moms for Liberty is doing.
And this is where, and Sarah Mosener, our colleague, is so good on this.
This is where the myth of the innocent white woman is a way to uphold racial white supremacy and to, in many cases, uphold homophobia, queerphobia, transphobia.
Because the myth of the innocent white woman, the virginal mother who protects her children and loves her husband and only has desire for him, well, it leads to this kind of ideology.
So we got to go in a minute, but final thoughts on all this, Moms for Liberty, school curricula, so on.
I guess my last thought sort of tying all these together is the fundamental insecurity of it, because these groups always position themselves as speaking from a position of authority and strength, but the insecurity of it is so palpable to me.
It's like, to stick with the marriage metaphor, it's like people who are in like, you know, let's say a pretty standard, you know, cis, hetero marriage, Who feel like every time somebody's not, it is somehow a criticism of them.
And so they see two guys walking around holding hands or getting married and they freak out.
You're like, why?
Who cares?
If you are as confident and comfortable in the rightness of what you're doing and who you are as you say you are, You don't need to fight to bring everybody else in line.
Just fine, you do you, right?
Let other people do their own thing.
The fundamental insecurity to me is palpable, and I think that we just can't lose sight of the extremes that people will go to when they feel this depth of Fundamental insecurity and fear through, as we've been saying, just the mere existence of difference or departures from their norm.
So here's what we have to say before we go.
There's a piece at the Washington Post, and this is in our Substack this week, so go to the Substack this week, and it's all there.
But Dan, it's like 11 people who have complained about books are responsible for like two-thirds of the books that have been banned across the country.
So that the people who are complaining about books and getting them removed is such a small minority that what we have here is a tyranny of the micro minority.
I mean, it's a few people complaining about books and that's affecting entire schools, entire campuses.
So go read that piece of Washington Post because it will absolutely just destroy any idea that this is the majority.
And I really hope we're getting to a place where people are going to start suing school districts about free speech.
Suing school districts about free speech related to pronouns, related to books, and all those things.
That is what is going to have to happen here because free speech laws will kick in and school districts will be a lot less want to cave to Moms for Liberty.
All right, let's go to reasons for hope.
My reason for hope is that there is a woman in Texas who is suing the state over a life-threatening abortion.
So somebody who Needed an abortion to stay alive, essentially, and was not able to get it in Texas because of the law.
So, Zuraski versus Texas, and we'll see what happens there.
But I really think that's just an incredible way to persist and to fight back.
So, we'll see what happens.
Yeah, I thought about that.
I had a hunch you were going to take that one.
But we've said that, right?
That's what's going to have to happen.
It's going to have to be on health grounds and whatever.
I chose mine, you referenced it already, and it was Stuart Rhodes, the founder of Oath Keepers, being sentenced to 18 years in prison.
Kind of related to that, Richard Barnett, he was the guy that was photographed in Nancy Pelosi's office with his feet up.
You can see a stun gun in the waistband of his jeans.
He was sentenced to four years in prison.
So I continue to take hope from the fact that it's a slow process, but that some of the most notable and visible figures I want to correct myself.
So the Washington Post article says that individuals who filed 10 or more complaints were responsible for two-thirds of all challenges, and that was a very small group of people.
So anyway.
All right, y'all.
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