Weekly Roundup: Target Temper Tantrums & Dominionists Take Over Election Canvassing
Brad is joined by guest co-host Annika Brockschmidt. They begin by dissecting the Target boycott staged by the American Right. Brad analyzes it by explaining how "culture wars" are conflicts over the identity of a nation - and how the celebration of Pride has led to harassment and vandalism in Target stores as a result. He also breaks down why Pride themed products have garnered these reactions, but gun violence has not.
In the second segment Annika zooms in on Lance Wallnau's attempts to take over election canvassing in key counties - places he claims there are demonic strongholds and that need to be freed from Satan.
In the final segment Brad goes through the new alien land laws in Florida, Alabama, and maybe Texas, explaining the long history of such laws and how they lead to racism and marginalization of Asian And Asian American people.
Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus episodes, ad-free listening, access to the entire 500-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/
To Donate: venmo - @straightwhitejc
Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/BradleyOnishi
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
Order Brad's new book: https://www.amazon.com/Preparing-War-Extremist-Christian-Nationalism/dp/1506482163
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Axis Mundy You're listening to an irreverent podcast.
Oh, oh.
Visit irreverent.fm for more content from our amazing lineup of creators.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
I'm here today with a guest co-host, somebody that most of you know, because Dan Miller is on vacation.
I don't know what's with that guy.
He thinks it's fine to just go with his wife and celebrate their wedding anniversary and blah, blah, blah.
So whatever.
So I get to be here today with Annika Brockschmidt.
How are you, Annika?
Oh, I'm doing really great, and I'm back here, so I'm good.
Okay.
Well, we're always so thankful to have you.
As many of you know, Annika is a German reporter, journalist, somebody who's written an amazing book on the religious right and Christian nationalism in the United States, somebody with whom I've written articles and is just a great voice on all the things we cover.
As Dan always says, and as I always appreciate, you have a perspective from outside the United States, which sometimes is just really needed because we're so stuck in the mire here that we don't often see things that are right in front of our face.
So we're going to get in today to, I think, three pretty big stories.
One of them is the Target boycott that's coming out of, like, right-wing spaces.
There was also briefly a Chick-fil-A boycott.
I'm not sure how that is going yet or There are Christian nationalists and people on the American right jonesing for Chick-fil-A and breaking the line and going to order chicken nuggets.
Who knows?
But we'll get into that.
We're going to get into Christian Dominionists who are trying to take over elections by way of spiritual warfare.
And our old friend Lance Wallnau is part of that.
And so it's a kind of warning for 2024 about what will be ahead of us in terms of voting, elections, and the rhetoric we're going to hear.
And then we're going to talk about what I would take to be a new land law in Florida, Alabama, and Texas that bars Chinese people from buying property there, along with a few other groups.
And we'll just get into some of that history and why it's so dangerous.
Anika, if all that sounds good, let's jump in.
Yeah, let's dive into the deep end.
Here we go.
So many of you know by now that there has been this boycott of Target.
You might have seen the tweets.
You might have seen the Instagram posts.
I don't know.
So basically, there's been a widespread call by people in the American right and in Christian nationalist circles to boycott Target over their Pride merchandise.
Target has, for Pride month, I've been displaying various products that celebrate pride, and those are shirts, those are flags, those are towels, those are all kinds of things.
Now, the stated reason, the stated reason for the boycott is that the idea that Target is sexualizing children by displaying products aimed at children.
So, the idea that you would have a pride shirt that fits a nine-year-old.
Okay.
This is sexualizing children.
And so there have been these folks walking into Targets, tearing up displays, harassing employees, yelling at people.
There's just been a lot of, like, really, you know, amazing displays of Target temper tantrums.
Now, I want to talk about what's behind this and how this works.
Have you been seeing this way over in Germany, Annika?
And does it look as ridiculous to you as it does to me?
Or what, how does it, how does this look through your eyes?
It is quite something.
I will say it seems to have kind of become its own genre of right-wingers making videos of themselves targeting companies who basically do corporate LGBTQ affirmations, which, let's be real, they don't do out of the goodness of their own hearts.
But for profit, but visibility is visibility.
And so it's always quite bizarre to me because of course this is performative.
You see these people with their pre-prepared statements that they then harass employees with to try to get a gotcha moment.
There's a great video.
I think this was also of a Target employee, I think two months ago, who just very, very coolly handled somebody who I think accused her of selling Satanism or something.
So this fits into the same vein, but yeah, it is quite something.
So there was the Bud Light boycott.
They've turned their attention to Target now.
And then, as I mentioned, Chick-fil-A has been the most recent one because of its DEI program.
Somebody discovered Chick-fil-A has a DEI program.
So let's talk about what's behind this.
And I think for me, I want to talk about three points.
So number one, if we went back to like 2010 or 2005, To me, a lot of the discussion surrounding LGBTQ rights and representation centered on one side saying that this is a matter of identity, and in my view, rightly so.
So you would have folks who would say, look, to be a queer person, to be gay, bisexual, to be somebody who feels as if they're Not at home in their own body, in the gender they've been assigned, in the way that they've been enculturated, and they want to be a trans person, so on and so forth.
This is a matter of identity.
So it's not a matter of choice.
It's not a quote-unquote lifestyle.
It is a matter of who one is.
And therefore, it should be protected, such as when you are protected for being a black person or a woman or other forms of identity in the workplace and in society and so on.
Now, the other side would say, oh, no, no, no, it's a choice.
You choose to be gay.
You choose to be bi.
You choose to be non-binary.
Fill in the blank.
And so, therefore, you can stop that at any time.
And we don't need to give you the rights that are protected under the law for race or for sex, biological sex in this case.
And you already mentioned this, Annika.
To me, the change is this.
We're now seeing open, basically, attacks on the LGBTQ community that are like, you're a groomer, you're a pedophile, and you're demonic.
Like, the amount of social media posts I have seen that call folks who are not straight demonic and pedophiles, just straight up.
And that is a change in the discourse.
Like, if you go back to the Obama era, it was, you're choosing to be gay, and the rest of us saying, no, it's identity should be protected, that's not how it works.
And those were the kind of grounds of the quote-unquote culture war.
To me, this is a change, and it's a very dangerous... Don't get me wrong, that debate was tired before, and it was tiresome.
This is more dangerous because it seems to, it literally demonizes people who are not straight.
And it says, we don't want to share society with you.
We don't want to be in a space where you are.
So that, go ahead.
Yeah.
Yeah, and it basically uses this smear of using the myth of social contagion, essentially, to put people, because this all goes back to the old lie that being LGBTQ is somehow the same as being a pedophile or is inherently connected to being a pedophile, to target children because in their minds
You cannot be gay, trans or queer in general, but you have to be, quote unquote, indoctrinated into it.
So you have to be recruited into it.
So in their mind, this, you know, sounds ludicrous because it is ludicrous to us, but in their mind, a kid could turn gay, queer, whatever, if they wear a pride shirt that their mum or dad bought them at Target.
And I think what this really shows is sort of the The violence of the normal.
So the violence of the norm.
All of these right-wingers talk about just let kids be kids, just let kids be normal, but what they mean by normal is basically enforcing this heterosexual cis Norm because they can't fathom that some kids just are queer, just are gay, just are trans.
So, again, this goes back to the idea of the social contagion because, you know, in their mind, if you wear a tote bag with a rainbow flag on it, That means you could turn, and I'm speaking in big air quotes, you could turn your neighbor's kid gay.
And that also makes LGBTQ people the target of what these people see as justified vigilante violence, because who doesn't want to protect the kids, you know?
All of that, I agree with completely.
And I think what you're pointing to here is an idea that is really important to point out.
If you are labeling folks a social contagion, then there is no appropriate place for them to be.
It's not a, well, just wait till the kids grow up.
What you're saying is, you've disrupted the social order, and therefore we don't want you in our society.
So there's been some great videos and some great kind of mockery that says, look, when kids are killed in a school, when we have rampant gun violence, none of this temper tantrums, none of these, none of these like storming into the public square and demanding things change.
And why are you storming into Target?
And my answer would be this.
Here's the internal logic.
If you if you don't understand that, it's this.
To be, as you just articulated, Annika, to be trans, to be non-binary, to be in some cases queer in any case, is to be outside of the accepted order.
And therefore, you are to be either erased, excised, whatever.
Guns and gun violence are accepted as part of the order.
And so there's a sense of kind of collateral damage.
There's going to be error in the in the system.
There's going to be hiccups in the system, but the system has to keep working.
Guns and gun violence in this country are part of the system.
Yes, it's bad.
We should try to Tighten up our system.
We should try to tighten up the cogs and the wheels and the belts and make sure it works better because we don't want that kind of aberration in the system, that misfire.
The queer person is not part of the accepted order or system.
Therefore, it's not that we can tighten up the system.
It's we need to go through a temper tantrum until this is not part of what we take to be our social space.
And Target, as you all know, is like a suburban mainstay.
It's like the kind of place that people in Montana and Georgia and California and Maine all go to.
A classic kind of middle-class suburban place, and I'm a dad of a young child.
I go to Target way more than I would like.
Not because I have any temper tantrum to throw, just because I don't want to go there as much as I do to buy things like wipes and diapers and other stuff.
So, okay, one more point here, Annika, and then I'll throw it to you, and that is that A lot of this boils down to what people talk about as a culture war, and I'm not sure that's a great term, and I don't always love it, but there's a great definition of culture war from Julia Murau Permisso, a scholar who says that culture wars are about the symbolic importance in the public image of the nation.
Okay?
So a culture war is a symbolic battle.
It's a battle over the symbols.
What a lot of people are saying, unfortunately, and in many ways tragically, is that Target, the suburban nationwide mainstay of a store, is displaying things designed for pride, to celebrate pride.
That is sending forth an image of the nation that is unacceptable.
Christina Stoeckl and Dimitri Uslener talk about culture wars as the question of who we are.
And to me, there's a fear from the American right that if a corporate mainstream like Bud Light or Target is putting their capital, their money behind pride and the LGBTQ plus community, not out of the goodness of their hearts, as you say, but out of simply The the idea that this is going to be most profitable, then they will have lost the culture or they will have lost the question of who we are because the money will go one way.
So what do you think?
Final thoughts here on Target and these boycotts and all this business.
Yeah, I think those two definitions are really insightful because, as you said, I also have problems with the term cultural, but I think it's to frame it as the question of who is allowed to be included in the usage of certain symbols?
What symbols are connected to a national identity that is construed?
Who is permitted to be visible in the public square?
Who has the say of who gets to speak?
All of those things, I think, are connected.
And you really see that in the desolation, especially of the protests and, you know, the vandalism against Target.
Because, as you said, Target is the place where, if you follow any sort of suburban momfluencer Instagram account, Target is the place where sort of suburban America goes to feel good, to have a stroll.
And so if that space then is quote-unquote invaded, as these people would see it, by the existence of people whose very existence seems in their mind to threaten the very worldview that they see as fundamental to their own identity, then that becomes what they perceive as an existential threat.
And that then is reason for them to throw around pride cups and make a tantrum and then post that on the internet to be also celebrated as a warrior against LGBTQ people.
One of the things that...
Speaking in big air quotes.
I just want to add that.
I just remembered that we're on audio.
Yes, yes.
No, no, no.
All of that is you rehearsing the voice of the right-wing influencer.
Now, a lot of people will say this is an American phenomenon, but you have a European perspective, and I think that you're going to tell me that this kind of rhetoric is not isolated to this country.
Yeah, so, and this has been really worrying for, I think, me and people in the LGBTQ community, but also for colleagues who are writing and researching the European right wing.
So, and first of all, I think it's important to say anti-LGBTQ, anti-queer hatred has a long history in Europe and especially in Germany.
So there is no need to import anti-LGBTQ sentiment.
There's plenty here already.
But what I think is notable is that recently we have seen the specific playbook that we've now talked about used by the American Right to target, and I know that Dan and you yourself have covered this extensively, to target drag readings for kids.
And anything that sort of even alludes to LGBTQ acceptance when it comes to kids or teenagers has come under attack by conservatives in Europe.
And it does sound eerily familiar to what's happening in the US, albeit on a slightly smaller scale and without the sort of Massive legislative backing.
And I'll just give you a couple of examples.
I collected some from German-speaking countries in Europe.
So this is not only, this isn't just happening in the countries that I'm going to name now, but this is just an example.
So in Zurich, for example, Switzerland, A drag reading for children recently, so this is the same as Drag Queen Story Hour basically, same kind of event, had to be held under police protection due to threats that the organizers received.
Also in Switzerland, in a different part of the country, students had organized what was called a gender day on May 15th in their school.
And the school received such massive threats after right-wingers had incited an online shitstorm, essentially, that the event was cancelled in consultation with the police due to security concerns for the educators and the students involved.
This wasn't a new thing.
This wasn't a new thing.
The Gender Day, quote-unquote, had been held annually at this school for 10 years, until this year death threats against organizers, teachers, etc., had forced the school to withdraw.
Right-wingers, in this case, accused the school of pushing the, quote-unquote, sexualization of school lessons, and right-wing politicians joined this crusade.
For example, SVP national councillor Andreas Glarner demanded on Twitter that the school's management should be fired.
Another drag reading for children in Zurich was also attacked by right-wingers this month.
At the forefront of mobilizing these anti-LGBTQ protests against this drag reading was a conspiracy theorist with contacts into the German sovereign citizen scene.
And no, this isn't just happening in Switzerland.
Back in October 2022, a neo-Nazi group – this is another Swiss example – lit smoke flares and chanted slogans on the way to the venue of Drag Story Time at an event for children at the Tanzhaus Zürich.
They then stormed the event and began chanting radical right-wing slogans in front of the children.
But we also hear this from conservatives in Germany.
So, another example.
You can hear similar tones these days from the ranks of the CSU.
That is the abbreviation for the Christian Social Union.
That's the sister party of former Chancellor Angela Merkel's CDU, which you can only elect in Bavaria.
Don't ask why, it makes no sense.
CSU City Councillor Hans Theis.
Who is also, incidentally, the LGBTQ spokesman for his faction, said this, a red line is crossed here when clearly sexualized topics are placed in front of four-year-olds.
CSU Secretary General Martin Huber agreed and said, quote, let children just be children.
Four-year-olds should play with building blocks or other stuff and not be indoctrinated with woke early sexualizations.
So, again, here you already see how not just the playbook is copied, the narrative, but even the vocabulary.
I would imagine if you asked Martin Huber what he means by woke, he wouldn't be able to define it.
But so you see how certain issues here are copied.
And all of this, the quotes that I just read to you, were in response to a reading, a drag reading For children at the city library in Munich.
And there was a lot of warnings from conservatives, but also from sort of libertarian types, that this was age inappropriate and that there would be sexualized clothing.
You had Hubert Aiwanger.
So these are not just like random names.
Hubert Aiwanger is the Bavarian Minister of Economic Affairs and the sort of deputy, he's called a Minister-President, which is sort of the deputy head of the state.
He belongs to the Free Voters Party and he really went in hard.
He came up with a classic trope of anti-queer hatred.
And he said, this is child endangerment and a case for the Youth Welfare Office, not cosmopolitanism as the Greens trivialize it.
So it's just, you know, you know, an all around copying of the playbook of the right wing to play up and to incite a moral panic on already existing anti-queer and anti-LGBTQ tropes. an all around copying of the playbook of the right We also see here the use of drag and trans being used synonymously.
This is also a thing that's similar in sort of anti-LGBTQ moral panics, as we see them at the moment, that this is being conflated.
But, you know, we also see in Europe in some cases that these harassment tactics seem to work.
And this is the last thing, the last example I'm going to give, and then I'm going to throw it back Throw it back to you.
So this is not a specific example of a drag reading, but an example of how a prominent conservative politician in Germany harassed an institution for trying to be LGBTQ inclusive.
So it's not quite at the level yet of bomb threats being called into hospitals who offer gender affirming care for teenagers but the methods are similar.
Because a Catholic daycare had informed parents that they wouldn't be crafting for Mother's Day, one due to staffing shortages but also in order to not exclude those children with families with a different makeup than father and mother.
By the way that doesn't even have to be At UBTQ inclusive, it could also just be sensitive towards children who don't have a mother, who live in single dad households, whose mother died.
So it didn't even go into detail.
But Tilman Kuban, who is a CDU representative, former head of the youth organization of the CDU, posted the daycare's letter, including its contact info in the letterhead, onto Twitter and said, oh, this is insanity.
You can't even celebrate Mother's Day anymore.
And two days after Kuban's tweet, the party's official account of the CDU Hessen posted, quote, banning children in a daycare center to maintain Mother's Day gifts and other traditions, to not maintain Mother's Day gifts and other traditions because of the constellation of mother, to not maintain Mother's Day gifts and other traditions because of the constellation of mother, father, child and children, no longer the norm in today's families, is like a ban on thinking and added a share pick with the statement of the Hessian
Now we already see wokeness in Catholic daycares.
And it worked.
The daycare was harassed.
They had to disconnect their phones for a couple of days and the daycare had to publish a public apology.
So what does that sound like to you?
They say that we don't make things anymore in this country.
And unfortunately, I think what we do make and export is this kind of rhetoric, and it definitely is bought and spread in other places.
And all those examples really show us that this is not limited.
And I think one thing, I think a takeaway from that is that You can take vulnerable communities and target them in global contexts.
You can do that in Germany.
You can do that in the United States.
You can do that in Switzerland.
You can do that in Brazil.
And it works.
Okay?
It works.
It gets you support.
It gets you momentum.
It gets you dynamism.
And so that is why the playbook is spreading.
It's because it works.
If you target vulnerable people, You will gain followers.
You will gain traction.
You will gain votes.
And that's the sad part.
One more example, and then we'll take a break.
In Montana, a trans author had their book reading canceled under the new drag law.
So basically, there's a drag law in Montana that says you can't do drag in certain places.
This person is trans.
They were not doing drag.
They are different things.
And yet they were not allowed to do their book signing and book reading because of this new law.
That was the stated purpose.
So we see that.
We see what's happening here.
If you're a trans author, you don't get to do a signing at a library because of a drag law.
Anyway, so on and so forth.
All right.
Let's take a break and come back and talk about voting and elections and spiritual warfare.
All just really delightful topics.
All right.
We'll be right back.
All right, so we need to kind of turn to, I think, a specialized story, the kind of story that we do here.
I think there's always a temptation to just talk about these big headlines, but one of the things we try to do on the show is really dig into Christian nationalism and the religious right in ways that are really specific.
And so, Annika, this week there's been just a lot of new kind of reporting about plans by way of some of our old friends, Dominionists, such as Lance Wallnau, when it comes to spiritual warfare, when it comes to voting, there's a whole thing.
So I'm going to throw it to you.
What is happening and how does this how does this look for 2024?
Yeah, so with 2024 coming up and the religious right always playing the long game as you and Dan also always, you never get tired of repeating that on this podcast because I think it's such an important point to keep in mind it's never just about the next election cycle and I think this story really shows that.
And so you, Dan, and I, we like to keep an eye on Lance Wallnau, just in case for new listeners.
If you don't know who Lance Wallnau is, congratulations.
I'm happy for the personal choices that you have made, and yet you're listening to this podcast, so you're going to have to listen to this now.
He is part of the New Apostolic Reformation.
He's a Dominionist, And he had previously already announced that he would go on a sort of tour, on an event tour, in the run-up of the 2024 elections and that he would go into what he called demonic strongholds.
So he would hold events in places where, according to him, Republicans are allegedly being stopped from winning elections.
So he's very much still onto the big lie.
He's still peddling that.
And the goal of this tour is, as he has now said, to awaken quote-unquote grassroots saints, especially in swing states, and to kind of take over the GOP from the base level up in these states.
And it basically looks like Walno is moving forward with his plan, or at least he still says that he has big plans.
I haven't seen any specific dates or tour events announced yet, but again, we only have June 2023, so he still has time.
In a livestream he said, and I'm just gonna read you this quote, We're going to mobilize.
Before we're done, the states are going to be mobilized.
Out of 3,143 counties in the United States, we've identified 17 where demonic strongholds have corrupt control over the voting and over the machinery.
We're actually going to focus our precinct strategy on those 17 counties.
We're going to go with the Revival Tent, we're going to go with Signs, Wonders, Miracles, Deliverance, Holy Ghost, Anointing and the Fire of God into 7 swing states hitting 17 counties.
He then published a list.
I'll be honest, I didn't know this group before I saw this story on Right Wing Watch.
who's been making headlines because, and I'll be honest, I didn't know this group before I saw this story on Right Wing Watch.
I've done a bit of digging into them since.
We've been hearing similar things from another dominionist minded group, even though, hilariously, they call themselves nonpartisan and I'm guessing that's for tax purposes.
It's a political consulting business called Kingdom in Politics, which, you know, gives you the first hint of what this is all about.
The story was reported by Right Wing Watch.
It's led by a guy called Ammon Ross, who says he felt called by God to enter politics in 2016 to help his friend Kevin Stitt Run for governor of Oklahoma.
Remember him?
He's the guy who claimed every square inch of Oklahoma for God.
I think you guys talked about the video when it went viral a couple of months ago.
And now Amon Ross doesn't call himself a Dominionist, but he did say that his goal was to put, quote, godly leaders in positions of authority in the political sphere, which I would say is a pretty clear reference to Seven Mountains Dominionism.
So they're definitely keeping busy.
And I think this is yet another warning shot that we should keep our eyes open as 2024 approaches.
What's your view on this?
What's the inkling that you've gotten from sort of watching these circus from afar?
So I think it's so easy to treat this as, oh, what a bunch of French people doing French things.
You're telling me there's 17 counties and there's spiritual demonic strongholds.
And that's obviously ridiculous.
Oh, my God.
These people are crazy.
OK.
All right.
I'm going to go on with my day.
Um, if you as Annika said, if you don't know who Lance Wallnau is, congratulations, your life choices are good ones.
But now you now you do know.
And so you get to you should know more.
We covered Lance Wallnau extensively in our Charismatic Revival Fury series with Matt Taylor and Lance Wallnau.
Is one of the people that not only came up with the idea that Trump was anointed by God, if you've heard that before, he's one of the very first people who said that.
He's also somebody who was at the forefront, if not the kind of principle purveyor of the Seven Mountains Mandate, the idea that Christians should take over every mountain of society, the economy, politics, culture.
So if you've heard of the Seven Mountains, Lance Wallnau is behind that as well.
So here's my point.
This is not something to laugh off.
As we documented in Charismatic Revival Fury, folks from the New Apostolic Reformation like Lance Wallnau are some of the most ardent and influential Trumpists in the Christian world.
They are folks who fought tooth and nail for Trump, whether it was symbolically, whether it was politically, whether it was on the ground on January 6th in the Capitol.
What I think this portends is the idea that spiritual warfare is happening in certain parts of the country, and they are going to mobilize and send armies to those places.
And if we talk about tantrums in Target just a minute ago, there are going to be counties and neighborhoods that are overrun by people who are trying to get you to vote and are going to do so By praying in your neighborhoods, having canvassing armies that are holding prayer vigils and speaking in tongues and coming to your door and all of that.
And again, you can say, ridiculous, so stupid, who would ever, blah, blah, blah.
The New Apostolic Reformation is the only segment of American Christianity that is growing.
If you look at the Southern Baptists, if you look at the Methodists, they're losing people.
You know who's gaining people?
Lance Wallnau and his cohorts, Che'on and all these others that we talk about in the series.
So I just think this is a really good reminder of the fact that 2024 is going to be a monumental set of elections.
And it's easy to say that every time.
But what I mean by that is just We have a twice impeached man who was hiding documents, classified documents at his golf club and incited an insurrection, who's running for president.
If he and his Christian Trumpist army are successful, I don't know what the future of American democracy looks like, just like I didn't know in 2020 when he ran against Biden.
And so anyway, that's my that's my final thought here.
Just this is easy to laugh off, but we shouldn't and we are definitely going to keep an eye on it.
Anything to wrap that up, Annika, or anything that you want to just close with on this whole idea?
Yeah.
Just one thing, because it kind of stuck with me, because the quotes from both Walner and the other guy that we talked about, is how central this, what they call generational thinking and planning, is to what these people have in mind for the US.
I think this on the one hand, of course, makes it exhausting to follow all of this to know, oh God, it's not just 2024.
It's sort of, they're planning for decades.
But I think it is important to keep this time frame in mind and to really just not underestimate this because yes, they might appear as fringe figures, but as you said, they have a really outsized influence.
Yeah, I think that's right.
And yeah, we'll just keep an eye on it.
And I think this is also just a really, for me, this story is one that kind of reminds me of why we do this show.
And it's to keep an eye on things like this that you're not going to see on CNN, you're not going to see in other outlets, and that we absolutely need to keep an eye on because they're having a decisive influence on our democracy.
I mean, Lance Wallnau was one of the main spiritual advisors behind Doug Mastriano, who almost won the governorship in PA.
He is seemingly everywhere in Pennsylvania politics.
He's also everywhere in national politics.
He has a kind of tie to former President Trump and Paula White Cain.
So this is not an isolated thing.
And if you think that this is something to laugh off, go listen to Charismatic Revival.
Fury, our series, and if you don't want to listen to the whole thing, listen to the Lance Wallnau episode and you will get a picture into the millions of people that he has influence over and what it means when he's organizing this kind of campaign.
So, all right, let's take a break and come back and talk about one more thing.
We'll be right back.
All right, so this happened about a month ago, maybe five weeks ago, and I've been thinking about it since then, trying to figure out what I want to say.
There's been a lot of folks emailing me and DMing me and asking me what I think, so it's time to talk about it.
So in Florida, Ron DeSantis signed a bill that basically would make it very, well, let me just say it this way, make it difficult for immigrants from Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Syria And Venezuela to buy land in Florida, and they would specifically not be able to buy land near military bases.
It would also specifically target folks from China and make it almost impossible if you are not a citizen or a permanent resident to buy land in China, real estate.
And this has also been debated in Texas and Alabama.
So it's on the docket in a number of states in the southeast.
And let me just start by reading some testimony from Alice Yee, who represents Asian Texans for Justice and the Asian American Leadership Council, who talked about this in front of the state legislature in Texas.
It would put all the people who look like me, any Asians, into a third-class citizenship because we would have to prove our current immigration status and where we come from when we want to purchase any land or a house.
Another person, an eight-year-old, Zhao Jingchen, asked the Florida House State Affairs Committee during a public hearing in April, did Chinese people do something bad to Florida?
It's a heartbreaking quote from an eight-year-old.
And I think for me, that really sums something up about this.
Now, I want to be clear, and I've really tried to figure out how to articulate this.
I think there are two debates that are legitimate to have.
One is the ways that real estate is handled in the United States as a whole.
We have a lot of corporate entities buying up a lot of private houses, making it difficult for individuals who are just working nine to five jobs to go out and buy a house.
So in a city near me, Atherton, which is a very rich city in Silicon Valley, 70% of the homes are owned by trusts or LLCs.
So I'm totally here.
Yes.
OK.
And this is it's an outlier.
I mean, it's this is where Steph Curry lives and other types like that.
But it proves the point that we have a problem with corporations and others sort of stepping in to take over entire neighborhoods when it comes to private property.
Friends, I'm totally here for a nuanced and complex debate about real estate law in the country.
I'm also here for a debate about second homes, about people buying homes and not living in them, and how we tax those.
I'm totally here for that.
I'll give you one example.
I went to graduate school in Santa Barbara.
It's incredibly hard for a graduate student to find a place to rent in Santa Barbara because there are very few homes there.
And most of them that are available to rent are Airbnbs because the people who own them can make much more money Airbnbing them.
So if you want to talk about rentals and laws around like who can buy property and how it works and where we tax it and how we don't.
Okay.
Here to talk about it.
The other conversation that's worth having is.
Military and reconnaissance intelligence, like the CIA?
Has Ron DeSantis been in contact with the CIA, with Joe Biden, with the DOJ?
Have they talked about threats to national security coming from Chinese nationals?
Is there any other operation in Florida happening that is supposedly working to curb the infiltration of foreign threats by way of folks who are trying to come to the country under certain auspices, whether that is from China, whether that is from Russia, whether that is from anywhere else?
Is that happening?
Or, as I suspect, is this simply a symbolic law meant to show Ron DeSantis as this guy who's standing up to what he takes to be a foreign threat and foreign invader of Asian people, namely Chinese people?
OK, so let me give you a few more a few more details about this.
Since we are only two days, AAPI month ended like two days ago, so it's a good wrap to this.
Under these measures, somebody who moved to the United States from Iran at a young age and grew up in the country would be ineligible to purchase certain property in Texas or Florida without a green card or citizenship.
A refugee from North Korea who fled from an oppressive government and resettled in Dallas or Miami would be unable to purchase certain property.
Chinese immigrants would also face further scrutiny and discriminatory treatment as they would be required to prove their eligibility to acquire property in these states.
So, and this is all from a great piece at Slate, which is in our Substack this week, and so subscribe to our Substack and you'll see this great reporting in Slate about all of this.
David Chen, a nine-year-old U.S.
citizen of Chinese heritage, explained that, if this bill passes, when I grow up, people may assume houses cannot be sold to Chinese individuals.
A law that targets only one country can lead to discrimination and hate.
Jari Chen said it this way, whether people are Chinese, Japanese, Korean, they'll be judged by their Asian face.
And I don't want my future or anyone else's future to look like that here in America.
So one of the things we hear often, Annika, and this goes back to the whole culture war idea, is that politics is downstream from culture.
That if you have culture and culture wars like Target and LGBTQ persecution, then eventually politicians will be like, OK, I need to get on board with that and make that part of my platform or my policies.
Right.
So politics is downstream from culture.
But sometimes we need to recognize that politics can set the tone for culture.
And I've seen this happen as an Asian-American and many other people have, too, as BIPOC folks in this country.
When you have an official policy or law that makes it illegal for Chinese folks to buy property, okay, what happens is downstream from that, when there is a realtor walking an Asian family around a suburban neighborhood that is predominantly white in Fort Myers or in Jacksonville or in outside of Dallas, I want to know what happens culturally in those cases.
Are there people who approach them and say, are you allowed to buy this house?
Where are you from?
Show me your passport.
OK, are there what happens when those kids go out to ride bikes in front of the house and that family moves in?
Do people ask them if they're spies?
Do people ask them if they're allowed to be here?
Do kids say, go back to your own country?
This really sets the stage.
OK, now there's so much more to say.
I'm going to run out of time and I'll probably talk about this more in the future.
But one of the things that one of the testimonies pointed out in Florida is the bill grants legislatures the power to brand any immigrant group as a security threat in the future.
So if you think about this kind of law, any group that you wanna say cannot buy property, you can just say they cannot buy property in the future, okay?
This is absolutely terrifying.
What are you?
Do you?
Sorry, I just had a moment where just the my brain was just buffering trying to trying to work through all of this.
What do you think?
So I'm guessing this law will be challenged or already is being challenged.
What is your estimate of if this even goes up to the Supreme Court, how they will react to this?
Because this to me, again, I'm not a legal scholar, so I might be wrong, but this sounds blatantly unconstitutional.
Now, again, the Supreme Court doesn't have to take every case they can pick and choose.
How do you think this current Supreme Court would try to deal with this?
I'm glad you asked, because I'm very much afraid of that.
Oh, God.
So the 14th Amendment, as the Slate piece points out, provides equal protection under the law for every person.
So you cannot have laws based on characteristics such as national origin.
So the 14th Amendment seemingly would be a stopgap to this.
There's also the Fair Housing Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of national origin in transactions related to housing.
We've seen this before and we've seen the Supreme Court do this before.
So here's my quick and dirty history because we're going to run out of time.
In 1913, California, my home state, enacted the Alien Land Law, barring Asian immigrants from owning land.
This law was restricted even further in the 1920s, and it barred the leasing of land and land ownership by American-born children of Asian immigrants.
So if you are a citizen of the United States born here, but your parents are Asian immigrants, those laws said you cannot lease or buy land.
Now, a lot of this was in order to curb Asian labor, Chinese labor throughout the state and Chinese, labor's the wrong word, Chinese families and immigrants from leasing or buying land and also Japanese communities.
And many of you don't know this history if you're not Japanese American, but all up and down, The California coast, there were deep and expansive Japanese farming communities from Gilroy to L.A.
to Marin, and they were making huge incursions on white property owners play in the market.
So a lot of these big white property owners didn't want them around.
And so these laws were really helpful for their cause.
And there was a Japanese and Korean Exclusion League.
There was the anti-Jap laundry leak.
Sorry for the slur there.
There were a lot of Hollywood types that were very much in favor of this.
OK.
What did President Woodrow Wilson say at the time in the matter of Chinese and Japanese coolie immigration?
I stand for the national policy of exclusion.
We cannot make a homogeneous population of people who do not blend with the Caucasian race.
Now, this spread as it does, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Minnesota, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming, all followed suit with their own land laws, okay?
Now, what this did is it led to intense racism.
Now, the two were tied.
I'm not sure if it was a cause effect situation, but it deepened the racism that Asian people faced when they were leasing land, when they were farming land that they had bought legally before this set of laws was passed.
I mean, the intense racism was bad.
There were articles written about how the Japanese are unassimilable and they're a foreign horde, and so are the Chinese, OK?
If you go back to the 19th century, mobs ran Chinese communities out of American cities in L.A.
and in Washington State.
If we fast forward, and I know this history is overwhelming, friends, and I apologize, I'll talk more about this in the future.
If we fast forward to World War II, the bombing of Pearl Harbor deepened, of course, anti-Asian and specifically anti-Japanese sentiment.
But what it did was give a reason for all those white farm owners to finally get rid of their Asian neighbors.
So when my grandfather signed up for the military during World War II as a Japanese man, He was part of a translation service called the MIS based in San Francisco.
Those guys couldn't leave their quarters because if they went into San Francisco, people tried to hurt them.
OK, that's how this worked back then.
Now, after the war.
OK.
All of the places where Asian folks had gathered, Chinatowns and Japantowns, had been in many cases overrun.
So I live in San Jose.
We have one of the three remaining Japantowns in the country.
We have a Japantown in San Francisco.
We have one in San Jose and we have one in L.A.
We used to have dozens of them.
We used to have one in Seattle and in Long Beach.
We used to have one in almost every West Coast city you can imagine, from Washington to California and so on.
Why are they not there anymore?
It's because after the war, when Japanese folks went to camp, they were taken away.
They were destroyed and rebuilt and leased to other people and blah blah, and they're no longer there.
What's my point?
When you pass this kind of law in Florida, Texas, Alabama, you're setting the stage for this kind of racism, this kind of discrimination, this kind of hate.
And we've done this before.
And you asked about the Supreme Court?
The Supreme Court upheld those alien land laws.
And guess when Florida finally repealed theirs?
Guess when it was?
2018.
So don't tell me this doesn't have a long legacy, okay?
All right.
We got to go.
Any thoughts?
I apologize for that.
Just a really fast history.
But any thoughts on that?
And then what is your reason for hope today?
I mean, there's just one thing that popped into my mind when you spoke about the 14th Amendment, is that Trump also, I think a couple of days ago, said that on his first day in office, if he gets elected for a second term, he would end the 14th Amendment's birthright citizenship provision via executive order.
So, you know, I think that adds on to everything that you've said, and it paints a really, Bleak picture should the GOP and Trump ever come to power in the next general election again, or in the one after that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
My reason for hope, if we make, as we always do, a big turn, is the Minnesota legislature this season has done a really pretty amazing thing in terms of the laws it's passed.
So Minnesota, Michigan, these are now progressive strongholds in this country when it comes to state legislatures.
And it shows what happens when state legislatures are controlled by progressives.
So in Minnesota, just this legislative session, they protected reproductive rights.
They protected Uh, contraception and other other aspects of reproductive rights and health.
They protected trans folks and passed laws along those lines and they also passed laws protecting workers and employees and giving people paid time off.
Which is laughable in a place like Germany, because you assume that's there for everybody.
But Minnesota passed that, up to 12 weeks off, and it shows you what can happen.
And I hope that we start to see Minnesota and Michigan as places where we can learn some things in this country.
So, all right, off to you.
What's your reason for hope?
If you have one.
If you don't have one, I understand.
No, no, no.
I'm even going to be sneaky.
I've got two.
So I'm actually going to name two.
So one is Illinois Governor J.B.
Pritzker, who will sign a bill that will require schools and libraries to adopt a prohibition on book removals for political reasons, a sort of a measure against the attempts of censorship of books who deal with structural racism with American history based on facts.
And with LGBTQ issues that right-wing groups and GOP politicians have tried to get off the shelves of the libraries of public schools.
And there was another, there was an article in the Washington Post about parents, teachers and students in a deep, deep red Florida county fighting back against attempts of right-wingers to push through their agenda on the school board level.
And that, I think, shows that even in places that, you know, are deep red on the map, these so-called culture war issues do not necessarily have a majority and that we should pay attention to that and not automatically assume that, you know, the country is divided 50-50 because that is just not the case.
Yeah, so true.
I read that article.
It's a great reminder.
All right, friends, we got to go.
Sign up for our Substack if you want to read all these things we're talking about.
Check out our series with Americans United, One Nation, All Beliefs, where we talk a lot about people in deep red areas organizing and fighting back.
And we'll be back next week with the Weekly Roundup and with a great interview and so on.
But for now, we'll say, Annika, thanks for being here all the way from Germany.
