Weekly Roundup: Trump Indicted, Robertson Dead, + Catholic Public Schools?
Brad and Dan being by discussing Trump's indictment on federal charges. They then break down the life and death of Pat Robertson - an architect of the Religious Right and someone whose influence resounds in American Christian nationalism today, from media, to spiritual warfare, to queerphobia, and more. They finish the episode with a discussion of SCOTUS' surprising decision to defend voting rights and Oklahoma's move to create a Catholic public school.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, and I'm here today, back after some time off, is the one and only Dan Miller.
The one and only.
Yes, I am back.
Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Glad to be with you, Brad, and everybody else.
Got a lot of cool emails from people wishing me well on my little break.
I was in Greece, have never been there, so that was really nice.
I'm a little jet-lagged, so we'll see how fun and loose things can be today.
And then we also just, you know, we don't talk about global warming all the time, but it's like Canada is burning like where I live.
It's gray and smoky and like bad air quality at present.
As a Californian, I know what that air feels like, and I hope that everyone is staying safe.
It's just really not fun, and it really does bring home global warming in ways that are seemingly undeniable, unless you're Fox News.
As always, you're dedicated.
You flew home from Greece last night.
You have barely slept, but you know, we got to do the weekly roundup and you're here.
This was your first trip with like no kids, you know, which gives me hope that someday I'll go on a trip again.
Yeah, so you've got in 14 years, you'll be fine.
It's like no, no problem.
Another decade plus.
It was our first kid-free trip since having kids, so that was really cool.
And it was good timing, I guess, because I was standing in passport control, which took like an hour, because the U.S.
takes longer to let its own citizens back in when you travel than, like, any country I've ever been to.
And I'm checking, and, like, news was dropping like crazy.
We had SCOTUS decisions, we had a Trump indictment, we had all kinds of things that we'll get to here.
So the time in customs served me well.
Well, let's do it.
So we've got three things today.
We're going to talk Trump and the indictment just briefly.
We'll then get into Pat Robertson, who died.
And I want to kind of go over how, here's my thesis on Pat Robertson, Dan, is that Pat Robertson really prefigured A lot of what we see today in contemporary Christian nationalism and the American right, it's easy to think of him as kind of a silly old man, which he was at the end of his life.
But Pat Robertson really built a lot of what we see today and what we talk about in this show.
So we'll get into that.
I think we also want to talk about Oklahoma and what is looking like.
Unfortunately, a private Catholic school funded by taxpayers opening the door for private schools to be funded by taxpayer money all over the nation.
We'll see about that.
And then also a surprise from SCOTUS regarding voting rights and what that means.
Dan, let's start where everybody is, and that's with Trump and the indictment.
Let me just run through some things before I throw it to you.
We've learned at the time of recording that it's 37 counts, 31 counts of willful retention of national security information, a count on conspiracy to obstruct justice, a count on withholding a document or record, corruptly concealing a document or record, concealing a document in a federal investigation.
And so on.
This is from Politico.
A federal indictment unsealed Friday charges former President Donald Trump with 37 felony counts stemming from an investigation into the presence of a trove of classified information at his Florida state.
Prosecutors led by special counsel Jack Smith alleged that Trump arranged to remove a massive collection of highly sensitive classified material, much of which consists of intelligence about the defense and weapons capabilities of the U.S., and foreign countries, to his private residence as he left the White House in January 2021.
His aides stacked records in boxes, they stored them in closets near the pool, he showed classified records to visitors who did not have security clearances, and on and on and on.
Now his aide, Walt Nauta, who's sort of considered to be his, almost like a new Michael Cohen, but perhaps with even closer access, somebody who He's talked about as his body man is also charged and it seems as if he was the one trusted with moving boxes and obscuring them from investigators.
So he was the trusted confidant who Trump said, you're the one who's going to move these things for me when they come looking for them and lie when they ask about them and so on and so forth.
One commentator puts it this way, the evidence arrayed by the Justice Department paints a devastating picture of an ex-president intent on squirreling away national military secrets at his homes, irrespective of potential consequences.
The indictment lists 31 specific documents, though there are dozens more.
These are only the ones that it lists, and these are the ones that he withheld, and 21 of the documents are described as top secret, nine as secret, and one is lacking any classification marking but involving military contingency planning of the United States.
The indictment notes that in June 2022, I got more here, Dan.
There's a lot to talk about.
We're not going to make the entire day about this.
from rooms that the DOJ was likely to inquire about, he delayed his trip from Mar-a-Lago to Bedminster in order to greet investigators at his home and pledged to be in, quote, "open book." I got more here, Dan.
There's a lot to talk about.
We're not gonna make the entire day about this.
There's of course gonna be plenty of time for this to unfold and there'll be developments and all kinds of business happening.
I wanna get into how the GOP has reacted.
I wanna get into what this means, but I'll throw it to you.
What are some first thoughts?
Yeah, so we said a while ago when he was indicted, 'cause the second time he's been indicted, right, on criminal charges since leaving office.
You had the Manhattan case that is still ongoing and whatever.
And we said then, at least I said, and I think you agreed, and we both felt that there were other cases upcoming that would be more significant than that to see how they played out, this and the Georgia grand jury investigation into election interference.
And I think that this, so I think it's a big deal that this happened.
It's interesting to see a few things here.
Number one, and I know we'll talk more about the GOP response, but one part of the GOP response is, well, Biden had documents and this person had documents and that, and it's sort of the everybody does it kind of thing.
And as I understand, there are two things.
One, we have heard that they found some, Biden's people found some documents that I guess have been his residence for a long time, notified The proper authorities and so on and so forth.
I think it's important then because this notion of willful retention of documents.
I'm not a legal expert, but I think that's one of the keys.
We've also heard these things about Trump ordering people to move things around.
This is one of the reasons why his aide, I think, has been indicted is he was involved in like, like literally moving things around.
I read today, I think this was on CNN.
And again, this is evolving and developing and lots of new pieces coming out.
That Trump apparently, when first presented with a subpoena for this, suggested to his attorneys that they just not respond or that they just lie and say that they had no documents.
So I think that's the difference between... I can't imagine the reams of paper that come out of these administrations when they leave and you find out that something got shuffled in and it's like, oh, Shit, we have this thing.
We need to do that.
Versus willful retention, concealing the documents, the careless nature of how they were stored.
It's weird.
I think another piece is it also bears out, I think we suggested when this first happened, that Trump's the kind of person who would want this Among other things, just for bragging rights, just to show off, just to be like, Hey, look at what I know and like what I had.
And it sounds like that's literally what he did is would be like, uh, I just, I just went to Greece.
That was cool.
If, if you were in a position to come over, I'm going to be like, Hey, look at this thing I got in Greece or look what we got to see.
And it's just, it's that, but with top secret documents.
So I think all of that is there.
I think this will get into some of the responses from the GOP, but I think one piece.
To watch as this plays out is, number one, this is going to, again, further solidify his status with MAGA Nation, right?
At this point, anything that happens to Trump negatively on the legal grounds is a benefit for him with his constituency.
Why?
Because they will say, see the shows that they were out to get him, they were going to go after him, so the more trouble he gets in legally, For them, the more it shows that he's not guilty of anything, we're to that level of kind of inverted thinking.
I am interested over time to see how this plays out with so-called undecided voters, with people aren't sure like if that, if the fatigue sets in of even if people think he did it or didn't, of Wanting to say, you know, how much is too much?
How many indictments does your presidential candidate need to have before you decide that maybe they just have too much baggage for this?
And the last thing I'll throw out there, maybe this will lead us into the GOP response, is I'm really interested in the response, not just of GOP leadership, but of the GOP candidates running against Trump.
For the GOP nomination.
That's weird to me.
I'm just going to say it.
It's weird that on the one hand, they have to try to convince people to vote for them and not Trump.
And yet when this comes out, they're still deferential.
They're afraid to criticize him.
And I'm curious when and if that's going to change.
If it doesn't change, nobody but Trump is going to win the GOP nomination.
There's no chance.
But I'm curious if it's ever going to get to the point where his opponents in the GOP have to come out and say something.
Those are some broad takeaways.
Throw it back to you for any additional ones you had as well as if you want to take us into some of the responses from the GOP and how GOP leadership and others have been responding to this.
Yeah, so I think a couple things here.
I think you're right.
It is worth watching what, you know, the other GOP candidates do.
I think DeSantis has already come out and called this a travesty and he's basically siding with Trump.
I do think someone like Chris Christie is going to use this to attack Trump.
Is Chris Christie relevant?
Maybe, maybe not.
But nonetheless, this is a place where he will attack.
Yeah, we'll see.
Let me give you two examples of people who have been convicted of these kinds of crimes.
So Sheldon Whitehouse, the senator, We have an officer with one document seemingly, and he is sentenced to three years.
US Air Force officer was sentenced to three years in federal prison for keeping classified documents at his home and other unauthorized locations.
So we have an officer with one document seemingly, and he is sentenced to three years.
Reality Winner, if you all remember, Reality Winner was given five years for one document.
And this is Malcolm Nance is reminding us of this.
So this president, this former president has, Dan, dozens up to over a hundred documents that we're talking about.
Some of them are about national security.
And I'll just point out, it's worthless at this point, but it is worth pointing out.
If you really care that much about the military, This is a man who is holding military secrets and intelligence secrets on the U.S.
and on allies.
If you really care about the people who fight in our armed forces, who serve in our armed forces, this is traitorous.
This is not okay.
To keep their secrets, the secrets of those people serving, intelligence and otherwise, In a storage closet next to the pool at your golf club.
I'm sorry, but there's just no one who can seemingly think that that's conscionable.
Now, let's talk about some reactions.
Harry Lake condemns the political persecution of President Donald J. Trump, she says in a press release.
Calls it political persecution and says it goes everything against what our nation was founded on.
Jack Poso Beach tweeted, put on the full armor of God that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil.
The good old Ephesians 5 reference.
We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of darkness of this world.
So, he went that way and basically encouraged his followers to think about this as a battle, spiritual or otherwise.
And then there's Josh Hawley, Mr., as Brian Kaler calls him, Mr. Bump and Run.
He says, if the people in power can jail their political opponents at will, we don't have a republic.
I want to point out that most of the attacks from Fox News and the talking heads and the Josh Hawleys have all been basically like Joe Biden just jailed his political opponent.
Okay.
And what this reveals to me is something we've talked about over and over again on the show, but I'll just say it again.
And that is that in their worldview, there can be no reason to do something unless it is to defeat or hurt or annihilate someone else.
The following the law following due process looking at evidence and making a decision never factors.
It's never like maybe he's there's never a look at the facts.
There's never a look at the innocence like none of these statements are like Donald Trump is clearly innocent.
There's no reason for you to do this all of them say.
That it's a travesty that you would persecute a former president, and that the only reason you would do that is because of political vengeance and political will to power.
That's them telling on themselves.
That's the only way they can see our public square.
We'll talk more about that later today, but I think that's really important to keep in mind.
Let me give you one clear example of that.
Eric Erickson.
I've given up trying to explain to the left why burning the world down to obtain justice is a bad idea.
I'll just say if Biden loses in 2024, he, Hunter, and many others better have lawyers ASAP.
The Rubicon has been crossed.
Guilt won't matter.
The pain of litigation will.
Eric Erickson just summed up what I just argued.
He's like, look.
It's not about justice.
I don't care about what's right and wrong.
I'm saying don't go after Trump because if you go after Trump, we will go after Biden and his whole family.
And he says it in the tweet, guilt won't matter.
It's I don't even care if Hunter or Biden have done anything.
I don't care if Joe committed a crime.
We're going to litigate him.
Why?
For pain.
Our goal is pain.
Our goal is to brutalize.
Jeff Charlotte said this last night on Twitter about Pat Robertson, and I'll come back to it, but he said, Christian nationalism and the religious right is no longer about piety.
It's about punity.
It's about punishing.
It's no longer about religion.
It's no longer about justice.
It's about punishment of those who are your opponents.
That's the religion.
That's the politics.
That's what matters.
Other thoughts on Trump, Dan, before we jump over to Pat Robertson?
Well, it'll be feeding more into that segue.
That's exactly the point that I was going to make is two things about the GOP.
They pride themselves on being the party of God, the grand old party, God's own party.
You look at the demographics and how many are professing Christians and so forth, and that's what their religion is.
Religion can be that.
And if somebody wants to take parts of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian scriptures and find a God who's really focused a lot on just doing really nasty things to people that God doesn't like, you can find that.
And that's very much their religion, is That.
So the good Christians who are busy patting themselves on the back all the time about their piety, this is what they're about.
They're about hurting opponents.
They're about hurting anybody they can, whether that's queer people, whether it's Biden and his son, whether it is black people or women or whomever.
That's what their so-called piety is.
And the other one, I'll throw it out again, is the party of law and order.
And this goes to your point that The rhetoric of Biden's jailing, like Trump hasn't been jailed, Biden didn't jail, I'm just going to throw this out there, that the chief executive does not have the authority to jail people.
That's not something that can happen in that way.
But it doesn't matter if Trump's president or Biden or whomever.
It's not something they can do.
But Trump is still a free person and is experiencing due process right now.
But this language of law and order, they've been spinning this around and saying, you know, the Biden administration has weaponized the Department of Justice.
If you believe in the law and order, you need to oppose this.
It's again, this kind of Orwellian doublespeak of exactly the point that you're making that it's not about law and order.
It's about avoiding any kind of legal obligation, legal consequences and so forth.
And the last point I'll just make is the nihilism of it all, right?
The senseless exercise of power as an exercise of power.
To what end?
To exercise power.
Why do we do things to hurt others?
Because we can do things to hurt others.
Again, I can't get over the articulation of religion as nihilism.
At the hands of those who somehow profess and tell the rest of us that they are the real pietists.
They are the ones who are exercising some sort of divine mandate.
But it's a religion of nihilism within Christian nationalism at this point.
So there's some points that I think bring us right into Robertson, among other things.
Well, and I'll just say real quick, what was the chant?
What was the chant in 2015, 2016 about Hillary Clinton?
She had things on her email server and therefore lock her up.
So, Dan, you know, it's all come full circle.
This guy took classified information.
And the goal back then was lock her up.
And he's going to have a chance to be locked up because he did exactly what he was saying his political opponent had done.
So I just think that's interesting and worth noting.
All right, let's take a break.
We'll come back and talk about the death of Pat Robertson.
All right, Dan.
So Pat Robertson dies yesterday.
He was 93 years old.
And I want to just talk about how His life really, I think, sets the stage for what we're seeing a lot of today.
So, many of you will know Robertson.
If you're not familiar with Robertson, if you're not somebody who grew up watching him on television, you have a passing knowledge of Pat Robertson.
Here is your impression, most likely.
You probably think that by the time he was on your television, he was an old guy.
He was in his 70s or his 80s.
He looked frail, and he often just kind of seemed Unhinged.
Like, nobody would ever take this guy seriously.
He was from the generation of Jerry Falwell, and Jerry Falwell died before him.
He stuck around the longest of these scions of the religious right in many ways.
Paul Weyrich died 15 years ago, and Billy Graham is gone, and, you know, it was really a matter of Robertson sticking around longer than them, and therefore he had the benefit and the unfortunate kind of Privilege or non-privilege of being in front of us when he was not, not looking that, uh, not that healthy.
Here's, here's where I'm going with this.
If you let that underestimate what his life meant, it's a big mistake.
Okay.
So let me go through some of like Robertson and what he did and how he, he, he impacted things today.
Um, Robertson is a son of a Senator.
His dad is a, is a Senator in Virginia.
And Robertson has it.
I mean, this is not a guy who comes from the backwoods.
Jerry Falwell came from nothing.
Pat Robertson comes from a home where his dad is in the Senate in Virginia, in the South.
Okay.
Now, Robertson is also a Southern Baptist.
But he's going to do a bunch of things that I think are really worth talking about that really, Lord, expand evangelicalism past what it was in the 60s and the 70s.
So in 1979, the historian Rick Perlstein points out that Robertson said this, we have enough votes to run the country.
When people say we've had enough, We're going to take over.
So, this is right in the Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan horse race, presidential race.
This is right in the time when the moral majority is gaining its name.
But you see the Christian nationalism, Dan.
We're going to take over.
We have enough votes to run the country.
Okay?
Now, what happens over the next couple of years is Robertson and the religious right grow increasingly frustrated with Reagan, the man they'd worked so hard to get into the White House.
So by 1988, Robertson launches his own bid for the presidency.
And he talks about this Christian coalition and this idea that we don't need Ronald Reagan.
One of us could be president.
We could be the one sitting in the Oval Office, not them.
Now, that doesn't work out.
But nonetheless, he continues on with something that he'd been doing in the 1970s all the way through the 1980s and all the way really until his death yesterday with a short retirement there, and that is the Christian Broadcasting Network.
So we have one thing in place already, the Christian nationalism and the desire to take over.
The Christian Broadcasting Network is sometimes a joke today.
People make fun of it, people make fun of the 700 Club, whatever.
But y'all, this was revolutionary.
The Christian Broadcasting Network provided a, we talk about media silos.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the Christian Broadcasting Network provided conservative evangelicals and Catholics a place to go to get all of their media without having to listen to anything secular.
I mean, there are people who will write in to us and say, yeah, I wasn't allowed to watch anything but CBN and maybe a few other like religious videos or content.
So what it provides is this standalone bubble.
This is before Fox News.
This is before Newsmax.
This is before YouTube and the Ben Shapiro's and the Charlie Kirk's.
It provides the model, Dan, that says, look, engulf people's lives so thoroughly that they only get information and truth and fact from you.
And that's what he did.
That's what he provided.
So we have the Christian nationalism.
We also have the media, okay?
Now, he also did something that I think is important to point out.
He's a Southern Baptist, Dan, but unlike Falwell, unlike Billy Graham, he was really into healing and he was really into spiritual warfare, right?
Pat Robertson is really before his time in some sense.
In the regard that he's always talking about supernatural things happening.
He's praying for these, right, miracles.
He's predicting the rapture.
He's talking about spiritual warfare and demons.
This is much more in line with the prosperity gospel folks, the Jim Bakkers, than it is with that old guard kind of religious right, Southern Baptist mainstay.
But Dan, what dominates Christian nationalism today?
Well, spiritual warfare, the New Apostolic Reformation, Sean Foyt, Lance Wallnau talking about counties that are demon-possessed.
In many ways, the spiritual warfare mindset, the apocalyptic expectation of Pat Robertson, is the world we live in now.
Okay?
Christian nationalism, a media bubble that he creates, the spiritual warfare motifs, and what else?
I'm going to give you one more, and that is a thoroughgoing hatred toward gay people, toward feminists, and towards many other minoritized groups.
Our friend Chrissy Strube chronicled some of these.
Before I get into them, I just want to say All of the attacks that we're seeing now on trans people, on queer folks.
I mean, I got an email today that broke my heart from my hometown about somebody being slandered for being open about their support of pride.
Calling people pedophiles, calling people groomers.
Pat Robertson was on that, folks, from the 80s and the 90s, and he never stopped, okay?
The thoroughgoing hatred of gay folks, of trans folks, of queer folks, a lot of this can be traced in some way to Pat Robertson, okay?
So, let me give you some of his best hits, and these are coming from Chrissy Strupe, Dan, and then I'll throw it to you.
Robertson, in 1998, said this about Orlando's Pride Festival.
I would warn Orlando that you're right in the way of some serious hurricanes and I don't think I'd be waving those flag in God's face if I were you.
Okay?
After September 11th, famously, Jerry Falwell came on the 700 Club, and Falwell said that 9-11 was the blame of secularists, humanists, abortionists, gay folks, lesbian folks, and so on, and Robertson agreed.
Okay?
His words exactly were, I totally concur.
He made homophobic insinuations about judges and their clerks.
He talked about and agreed with the idea that homosexual people, that gay folks, are preoccupied with sex and said things of that nature, okay?
He was also deeply Islamophobic.
He claimed that Islam is not a religion, it's a It's a worldview or a political system.
He says that Islam is a violent political system.
It's a violent political system bent on the overthrow of governments of the world and world domination.
Okay.
He, what else did he do?
Sorry, there's a lot here on my list.
Here's his definition of feminism.
The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women.
It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.
So, Dan, feminism, not about equal rights.
And it's about a lot more than I thought.
I mean, this is not just about, hey, maybe get rid of that mediocre husband of yours over there and free yourself from patriarchy.
This is about killing children, practicing witchcraft, destroying capitalism and becoming lesbian.
So, all righty.
He called non-Christians termites who don't belong in government.
And he said that those who are Christian are qualified to lead and those who aren't should not be in the government.
I could go on and on.
He talked about gay men deliberately spreading HIV using rings that cut people.
He also said that Haiti had a deal with the devil and that after the 2010 earthquake, the reason for that was a curse tied to the malevolent spiritual forces that were present in that region.
Here's the point, Dan, is some of that just is so laughable and ridiculous, but it's so, so, so hateful.
And it's easy to say, Pat Robertson, you are irrelevant by the time you died.
Maybe that's true, but I'm telling you right now, folks, you don't have the climate we live in now with the spiritual warfare, the labeling of people demons, the transphobia, the queer phobia, and so on and so forth without Pat Robertson.
And so thoughts on this one, Dan?
Yeah, so I agree with everything that you just said.
I concur with what Robertson said.
No, so like if people were to look at, I know you've talked about this, a lot of good resources talk about this, but people look at the emergence of evangelicalism like after World War II, right?
You had fundamentalists who'd culturally withdrawn, and you had this younger generation of, at the time, they were called neo-evangelicals who wanted to re-engage culture and so forth.
And that's the roots of, like, contemporary evangelicalism.
One of the defining features of it was they used popular media.
They used mass media.
It was radio.
It was pamphlets.
They started their own publishing houses.
They did these kinds of things.
And they laid the groundwork for what emerges as an evangelical subculture, where it is possible To exist completely within that subculture, as a sociologist might say, from cradle to grave, and never have to engage with secular, quote-unquote, secular culture at all.
You can go to Christian schools.
You can read Christian books.
You can listen to Christian music.
You can what?
You can watch Christian TV.
And the 700 Club was pioneering in that.
And I remember, I grew up in a place where, you know, I'd go to certain friends' houses and The TV was on during the daytime, and guess what it was?
It was the 700 Club, just kind of there in the background, putting out these same ideas, as you say, that are very, very mainstream now.
They're just louder in some ways, but they're no, honestly, in my view, no more vitriolic than they were then.
Just in the background, it was just part of the ether that millions of American Christians were hearing.
So the first point is on the media piece of it.
I think the right is still better at media than the left is.
The religious right is certainly better at media than the religious left is.
We've talked about that a lot.
It goes all the way back to there, and I think Robertson was a pioneer in that.
But the other thing that strikes me is we talk about the mainstreaming of all of this, the kind of way that the language of spiritual warfare and divine justice and judgment on places because of Black Lives Matter or the feminist movement or queer groups or whatever, all of that, Brad, a lot of these politicians now who are engaged in these same culture wars, the DeSantis' of the Worlds and others, they're around my age.
They grew up, just like I did, in living rooms where the 700 Club was just on.
Not always because somebody was a hardcore Christian nationalist, but because it was Christian.
And they were good Christians who wanted to be edifying themselves and were told they needed to do that.
So here was this Christian channel, and they're going to watch it, and they're going to hear it.
The way that that soaks in, the way that that absorbs, the way that that becomes just part of someone's background way of thinking about Other people, of thinking about women, of thinking about queer folk, of thinking about people of color, of thinking about natural disasters, of thinking about all these things.
I think there is a sense in which a lot of the seeds were planted and we see them coming to fruition now and have for a number of years.
And so I agree with everything you said.
I think Pat Robertson is absolutely central to that.
Easy to laugh off, as you say, is this kind of, you know, kind of old Dodger, you know, Kind of wandering around by the end.
But if you grew up, if somebody is a middle-aged person like I am, and you grew up with Pat Robertson, it's a name that everybody knew.
He was an authority people would cite.
And I think we see that very much at play now in things that are just part of mainstream American politics are present.
Let me give you one more aspect of this and then we'll jump to our last thing for today.
So let's just play it out, Dan.
You're talking about people watching The 700 Club, watching CBN, and that's what's on the television.
That's happening in ways that now I think for a lot of people it's Fox News, right?
Now for a lot of people it's that right-wing outlet.
When they get in the car, there's no chance they're listening to NPR by accident.
They're going to listen to a Christian radio station or to some podcast by Ben Shapiro or Charlie Kirk or whoever, Benny Johnson, Ted Cruz, okay?
One of the things that this does is it forms people's understanding of the world and the public square, and especially people who live in the suburbs, okay?
So let's just think about this for a minute.
There's a great piece at The Nation this week that I thought was really worth highlighting, and it talks about the way that the suburbs often breed reactionary movements and even fascism, okay?
It's by P.E.
Moshkowitz, and one of the things that is said in this article that I really want to throw at you, Dan, is that The suburbs are places where there's no public square.
So this was certainly very true of where I grew up, that there was some ball fields and some parks, but I didn't grow up in a place where there was a main street.
I didn't grow up in a place where like I would go into the center of town and kind of hang out for the afternoon when I was 13 and come home.
Like we didn't walk into town to get our bread and groceries and then walk back, okay?
The center of town in many ways was like Target.
Like a lot of people in this world, in this country, they go to Walmart.
That's like where people in town hang out.
You go to the strip mall, okay?
Because when you're in the suburbs, things are just, they all kind of look the same.
They're built not to have a central square.
They're built to like maximize space, okay?
And they're really built in order for everything to be the same, okay?
So here's what Tomaszkiewicz says in one paragraph.
The shape of this movement has taken is not coincidental.
It is, in fact, the product of the unique shape of public life in America, or lack thereof.
Suburbanites do not have town squares in which to protest.
The shape this movement has taken is not coincidental.
It is, in fact, the product of the unique shape of public life in America, or lack thereof.
Suburbanites do not have town squares in which to protest.
They do not have streets to march down.
Target has become the closest thing many have to a public forum.
Thank you.
This relates to Robertson, Dan, because I think Robertson pioneers this thing where you are told what the public is like from television or from the radio.
You don't have a lot of like interaction with your neighbors.
You don't have a lot of interaction in public.
You don't have a lot of interaction with the people who live near you.
So you kind of get the information of it.
From a media source, and then when you go into public, you have a certain vision of what it should look like.
Moskowitz continues.
We often hear that urban areas are more liberal and suburban ones more conservative.
And we're often told that this is because of race.
That may be partly true.
Those cities are wider than ever and suburbs more diverse than ever.
Instead, it may be that suburbanism itself as an ideology breeds reactionary thinking and turns Americans into people constantly scared of a big bad other.
Pat Robertson, Dan, his whole shtick was making people scared of a big bad other, whether it was the rapture, whether it was the communists, whether it was that the gay folks, he always was wanting you to be scared when he went out in public.
And that continues with, like I said, Shapiro or Charlie Kirk or Tucker Carlson, or I could name a dozen other people.
Okay.
I'll just say briefly, I'll throw it to you.
We'll wrap this up.
I remember when I moved to England and then to France, and then I moved to different parts of the United States, and for the first time in my life, there was like a center of the town.
Like, you know, Dan, every tiny village in the UK.
has a center of town where you kind of walk in there and you go get your like groceries and you're like my friends who live in, you know, small towns in France, they're still like the center of town.
And like they walk in there once a day or they drive in, but still there's like a place you go and you sort of interact in public.
And sometimes that's good.
Sometimes that's bad.
I've been in public squares in Europe and many other places that, you know, smell like urine and have a lot of other things happen in.
I'm not saying this is all great.
I am saying, though, that if you are somebody who doesn't have a public square, that the only time you're near your neighbors isn't Target or, you know, when you pick up your kids from school, you may not have a comfort level.
You may not have a sense of Diversity or your nervous system may not be accustomed to different things happening around you.
Noises and actions and foods and the way things smell and the way they look and all the different kinds of neighbors you have around you.
And therefore, someone like Pat Robertson can scare you into thinking the world has lost its mind and you better get out there and protect the children.
So, just wanted to throw that in today.
I thought it was important.
I think it links up with Robertson and his legacy, but any final thoughts before we take a break?
Yeah, just to pick up on that, the first thing about that media square, or excuse me, public square comment, I think it's really good.
And one of the things that I was thinking about is that media becomes the public square, which means that if you think about it, at the time it was the proverbial, you know, quote unquote, housewife at home in the suburbs with the TV on.
It's shifted now to where it's us driving in our cars, but doing what?
Listening to carefully curated podcasts.
Keep listening to our podcast.
We all have our lists of podcasts that we'll listen to, the radio stations we trust, the talk radio, whatever, that shape that.
So as you say, by the time we interact with the public, We've already been shaped by this proxy for the public square.
And I think that that's a really key point that's just evolved over time.
It hasn't fundamentally changed because one of the defining features of suburbs and suburbia in America is time in cars.
It's time commuting.
It's time going from point A to point B. And we live now in a time that has just sort of exemplified and maximized the sense that we can fill that space With whatever information we want to make sure that we get, or better yet, with ideas that confirm to us what we already believe, the proverbial echo chamber and so forth.
And the other point was just this, is that suburbs for me are a place of fear.
They were born out of fear.
In this country, it's a very, very different game how suburbs play out in a lot of European countries and other places.
But in the US, you have the whole story of white flight and inequitable Inequities in income and so forth and white people fleeing from the city.
Why?
Because they're white people and they more or less left the communities of color behind and they took all their money with them and all that.
It's a well-known story.
But I think suburbia is still marked in the U.S.
with a fear of all things non-suburban.
It's a fear of going into the city.
It's a fear of dark streets.
It's a fear of dark people.
It's a fear of too much difference or diversity or whatever.
It's these neighborhoods that have no crime that are always worried about why there isn't more of a police presence where they live or something like that.
And if people live in suburbia and are offended by that, like, email me, let me know, we can talk it out, whatever.
But I've spent my time in suburbia and I've felt those.
You talk about nervous systems that are trained.
I have felt that where I have to rein myself in and be like, why am I nervous right now?
Oh, because I'm a white guy who like doesn't live in a really diverse place or whatever.
I need to do something about that.
That's what I need to fix.
And I think it capitalizes on that.
And again, Robertson and others.
We're really, really good at preying on that, maximizing that, and I think that that is a key piece of white Christian nationalism, is the fear of all things that are not white and Christian and they're different, and suburbia is a huge piece of that.
I remember when I got back one time, I was living in either England or France and I came home and just like any other knucklehead who's ever studied abroad or lived abroad or had a moment where they don't live in the US, I was like, you know what?
I'm going to walk places.
Y'all ever done this?
You know what?
We don't walk enough in this country.
It turns out you live like seven miles from anywhere?
Yeah.
And I actually lived, I think my parents' house, I stayed at my parents' house for a couple of weeks one summer and I think my parents lived like Three quarters of a mile from a coffee shop, which is nothing.
And I was like, I'm going to walk there.
And I did.
And I remember this guy I knew from high school who I hadn't seen in like eight years pulled over and was like, Hey Onishi, is that you?
I was like, yeah, what's up, man?
How's it going?
He's like, are you okay?
What's wrong?
I'm like, nothing.
I'm good.
He's like, dude, what are you out here doing?
You're just walking?
I'm like, yeah, yeah.
I was just going to walk to the coffee shop.
He's like, hey, let me give you a ride.
Like, no, I was, I was going to walk.
He's like, no, no, no.
Hey, get in the car, man.
You can't just be out here walking.
Perfectly safe neighborhood.
Nobody around.
No danger.
Just wanted some exercise.
And here this guy is like, get in the car.
I'm worried about you.
What's going on around here?
Suburbs.
There's so many more stories to tell.
All right, let's take a break.
We'll come back, talk about two more things in Oklahoma and at the Supreme Court.
Be right back.
All right, Dan, let's just go to some good news because we need it and quickly talk about something that was kind of a surprise yesterday.
So the Supreme Court made a ruling about voting districts in Alabama.
What do we got?
Yeah, so, and this doesn't take long to tell, 5-4 ruling, so narrow ruling, by SCOTUS in favor of black voters in Alabama who were challenging the congressional redistricting map that had been developed in that state on the grounds that it intentionally, basically diluted communities of color and carved them up into different districts.
Communities of color tend to vote Democratic, and so effectively saying that they were being more or less disenfranchised.
This was good news, and it was a surprise.
And this is, I think, the big thing.
Why?
Back in 2013 and 2021, the conservatives in the Supreme Court basically eviscerated the Voting Rights Act and made it very, very difficult to enforce it or to use it to challenge precisely this kind of thing.
Additionally, the Supreme Court had allowed the existing Alabama election map to be in effect for the 2022 elections.
And so this telegraphed to a lot of people that when this case was decided before the Supreme Court, it was going to be not in favor of the plaintiffs, the group of voters challenging The map.
Instead, two conservatives, Roberts and Kavanaugh, sided with the liberals and said that the map needed to be redrawn.
So this was huge good news.
Why?
Because it becomes a clear precedent for lower courts.
There are lots of redistricting challenges before courts right now.
It is very possible that these maps are going to have to be redrawn in time for the 2024 election in different places.
But it was just, again, a shock that this went the way that it did.
A couple things here.
Number one, I don't know what conservative justices like Clarence Thomas or Samuel Alito or somebody, what would have to qualify as something that's racially motivated.
Uh for them or or is racist.
I don't think there's any clear bar on like what it would have to actually be And we've we've talked about this before every now and then you'll get Roberts who's like the deciding vote and the court is so stacked to the right now That people sometimes view Roberts as some sort of moderate and he's not a moderate jurist.
I would say this How racist does it have to be?
For Roberts and Kavanaugh to get on board with this.
In other words, this is not a sign that Roberts is some sort of moderate.
We know Kavanaugh is not a moderate jurist.
It's more for those who want to say that, what, redistricting?
No, there's nothing racially motivated about gerrymandering and so forth.
It has to be egregious to win over two conservative justices.
So it was really good news, bodes well.
People will say it bodes well for the Democrats and maybe retaking the House in 2024.
True, fine, whatever.
For me, What matters is, I think it bodes well for an inclusive, pluralistic, democratic space, which is what we think our election should be about.
So it was really good news.
It was surprising.
I was shocked, pleasantly shocked.
I don't think I've been this sort of pleasantly surprised by a Supreme Court ruling probably since the Supreme Court let Obamacare stand years ago.
That's how significant it was for me.
Yeah, no, a lot of people were surprised.
Ellie Mistel, I saw on Twitter, tweeting basically like, this is not what I expected today.
So it is a good thing.
We'll see what effect it has in terms of lower courts.
I mean, you can look at maps in places, like you can look at Jim Jordan's district in Ohio and it's like a Jenga.
It's like such a weirdly shaped duck sort of looking thing.
And so this is important, I guess is my point.
I often don't know why Gorsuch ends up in these places, or Kavanaugh, excuse me, but here he is.
I don't know.
We'll see.
I guess my reaction right now is I'm surprised, I'm happy, and I hope that this has an effect going down the line and down the chain, and we'll see if it does.
There's another thing that will probably end up at the Supreme Court, Dan, and that is what I'm going to talk about next.
On Monday in Oklahoma, The Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board voted to approve an application from the Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma for a publicly funded charter school.
So, let me say that once again, and Catherine Stewart, our friend of the show, wrote a great piece on this at MSNBC.
Monday in Oklahoma, over the objections of the state's Attorney General, So basically Dan, there's going to be a school that is run by the Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma.
It will be a Catholic school that follows the church's teaching and doctrine.
This is going to be a real Catholic school.
However, it will receive publicly funded money as a charter school.
This is not a voucher situation, although those are bad.
Vouchers are when you as a family or a school attending student receive a voucher and you can use that for public school or for a private school.
This is just a direct sending of As you can imagine, this goes against all kinds of precedent and a tradition of the separation of church and state in the country.
Ever since the 19th century, our schools have been secular in the sense that they have not been run by religious institutions Court cases in the early 60s, such as Engle versus Vitale and Abingdon versus Shemp, took prayer and Bible reading out of the curricula of schools, so on and so forth.
We don't have a ton of time, but the reason I bring this up is because Catherine Stewart points this out, and so does a good piece at Salon, that there's a very good chance that this, I mean, there's a 100% chance that this will get challenged.
But it will get challenged all the way up to the Supreme Court, Dan.
And then it's a decision by this super right-wing court about whether or not we're going to live in a society where if I'm an atheist, I'm a Buddhist, I'm a Hindu, my taxpayer money is going to go to a school run by the Catholic Church or by, say, I don't know, Off to you because my brain it's got like 80 things it wants to say right now and it can only say one at a time so I'm going to get those in order.
Idaho or Mark Driscoll in Arizona or someone else.
There's so many.
I mean, I don't know.
I'm going to stop.
Off to you because my brain, it's got like 80 things it wants to say right now, and it can only say one at a time.
So I'm going to get those in order.
What do you think about this?
I think everything you just said was...
What I would do, though, is just flip it and say, if we wanted to argue against this in a way that conservatives, like, again, we're, you know, got, I guess, 4th of July is the next cookout where we might see Uncle Ron.
If they come along and say they support this, it's to flip it around and say, oh, cool, so you want your tax money to go to, like, a mosque school.
You're cool with that, right?
This is also the state of Oklahoma that people might remember some time ago passed laws saying that you couldn't practice Sharia law in courts.
Nobody was doing that.
You already can't do that.
There is an actual legal code in the United States and in the States, and it's not based on Sharia law.
But that's how I would do it.
If I was going to try to argue against this in a way that could win over conservatives, I'd be like, cool, so pick the scary liberal place.
Oh, so in New York City or California, if you have a Hindu school, do you think your taxes should support that?
Because of course they don't.
All the arguments about religious freedom that the right makes are never about religious freedom.
They're about Christian supremacy.
Those are two different things.
So I think that's the way to the flip side of this, to think about it, to show again just how sort of the right is speaking out of both sides of their mouth here, where they'll talk about how, you know, whatever the justification for this is that they'll give, if you just flip it and say, cool, so you would support that for a Muslim school, a Hindu school, a Buddhist school, whatever.
They'll say no, and then the question is why.
So, I mean, I think that's the same thing.
It's a really egregious move.
If I just try to be analytic and not emotional about it, it's really sort of fascinating to watch because it's, I don't know, it's a strange decision.
Oklahoma is one of the most politically conservative states in the country, and for their attorney general to oppose this, and then for it to go kind of over, you know, against his opposition, there's all kinds of weird dynamics there that I think are really interesting to think about.
I mean, if you follow the governor of Oklahoma, you know that he is somebody who said that every inch of the state of Oklahoma should be claimed by God's dominion.
The school superintendent in Oklahoma, I believe his name is Ryan Walters, there's just a ton of material out there about his I mean, he called the teachers union terrorists.
He has done a lot to marginalize trans kids.
I mean, he's done a lot of things that are really egregious.
And so it's not a surprise.
But anyway, we'll see what happens with this one.
I will say, Dan, quickly that Your tactic has worked in some sense.
In Utah, some Bibles were pulled from the shelves in schools because people claimed about the pornographic content of lots of stories in the Bible.
So, it is happening.
You called it and I hope that you've been sent your George Soros funded money for that.
How much did he send you this time?
He paid for the grease trip.
So yeah, it was just a direct payment.
I'll disclose it on my forms at some point when that becomes necessary.
The cargo shorts you're wearing today are suspiciously neat and tidy.
I mean, what are those babies made out of, polyester or something?
And I just want to point out that cargo shorts All right.
useful when you're traveling.
So there is Soros funded travel.
I've got a closet full of new cargo shorts, uh, all because yeah, I called it and, um, single-handedly masterminded pulling Bibles from shelves.
All right.
Dan Miller, just always on it.
Um, my reason for hope this week is that school vouchers failed in Texas.
And this is something Greg Abbott wants, but what keeps happening in Texas, and this has happened in other places.
And this actually was part of the Oklahoma, uh, equation as well, is that a lot of rural, uh, folks, including conservative rural folks in states like Texas and Oklahoma don't want vouchers because vouchers will weaken what is already in their mind, a school system that underprivileges them.
You know, Alison Shortall told me in my interview with her that there are schools in rural Oklahoma that are only open four days a week because there's not enough money to keep them open five days a week.
So when you're in a rural place and someone says voucher, a lot of times that doesn't sound good because you don't have any choice.
You live in a town of 2,000 people.
There's one school system and one elementary school and one middle school and one high school.
What is a school voucher going to do for you?
Maybe there's a Christian school in the area, but for the most part, you're not really in favor of it.
Well, it just failed again in Texas and I think that's a good thing.
We may have more on that in the future.
Anyway, what's your reason for hope?
So I don't know if it's double dipping, but mine was the SCOTUS case.
I really couldn't get past how surprised I was.
I think two things.
Number one, what I think and hope will be in effect sort of downstream in courts.
But the other part is that just very frankly, I just sort of dread Supreme Court decisions now.
They're so far to the right.
So nakedly partisan, so nakedly part of Christian nationalism, that it was a big lift to see that and to see that something unexpected can come out of SCOTUS and something that I think actually does mete out justice.
And so I was very hopeful because of that decision.
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