Weekly Roundup: Klanned Karenhood (Moms for Liberty)
Brad begins with a long discussion of the Moms for Liberty conference in Philadephia. He centers his comments on the long history of "housewife populism" that goes back to the 1950s. Drawing on work from Gill Frank and Melissa Deckman, Brad argues that Moms for Liberty stands in a long lineage of grassroots movements led by women using the mantle of motherhood to advance an anti-LGBTQ and often White supremacist agenda.
Piece by Gillian Frank: https://wearethemeteor.com/moms-for-liberty-history-white-supremacy/
He also does a close reading of Dennis Prager's comments from the conference - showing how the drive for "order" is the sacred value in Christian nationalist and right-wing spaces.
In the final segment he considers the category of Whiteness in relationship to the "color-blind" approach to race and racism that we are hearing about in the wake of the SCOTUS decision on college admission.
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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 alone.
Dan Miller is away with his family, and so I am solo today on the Weekly Roundup, but there's a lot to talk about, and I think some things that are worth our attention.
So, I want to talk about a couple things today.
One is the Moms4Liberty conference that happened in Philadelphia about a week ago, and some of the dynamics of that and how it links up with a history of what some folks call housewife populism.
That comes from Melissa Deckman from PRRI.
I want to talk about whiteness as a category and how it plays into recent events in our country and this idea of a collective group identity.
I also just want to talk about some happenings in the Southern Baptist Convention and the United Methodist denomination and just take a pulse of those splintering denominations and how it really tells us something about the state of American Christianity.
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All right.
Let's talk about Moms4Liberty.
Moms4Liberty had its national conference this past week in Philadelphia.
And Moms4Liberty is a group that started in Florida.
And I want to just rely on a piece right now from my friend and colleague, Gil Frank, who wrote about this at the Meteor.
And I also want to stop and say, I have an interview on Moms4Liberty coming.
This Monday with Annika Brockschmidt, who attended the conference in Philadelphia and is going to give us a kind of insider look at what it was like, how it went down, how the crowd responded to people like Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump and other people.
So stay tuned for that.
Today, we're going to talk about some of the things related to the conference, but on Monday, I'll have an interview that will go into even greater depth on this.
All right, so Gil Frank, writing on July 1, 2023, notes that Fox News recently ran a segment with Nikki Haley, and the cry on that was across the screen during that was this.
Moms aren't extremists, and they know what's best for their kids.
And there's just a lot here.
But I think what Gil points out with this, and it's actually really, really insightful, is the whole shtick behind Moms4Liberty.
Moms4Liberty starts in Florida.
It's three women who have deep ties to the Republican Party in the state.
And they start in 2021.
And the reason they start is because of COVID and the Mandates for children to wear masks and other measures that we're trying to keep people safe So they were like, hey, we want our kids to go to school We want them to not have to wear masks and their slogan was we do not co-parent with the government And this caught on and it really is a good slogan because it really sort of very succinctly puts the emphasis on the idea that parents are the ones who have the control over their children and they have the right to determine these things.
And it was all in the context of schools where there's other students, not just your own, and where measures are needed to keep people safe.
So, nonetheless, it really catches on.
Now, after COVID, When all this is past, they pivoted.
So Moms for Liberty really starts to get into the business of targeting textbooks.
Library books and classroom curricula.
This is where you really start to see the headlines and the movements and the PTA and school board meetings where people are upset about books that are in the library.
Books about LGBTQ characters, books about the history of enslavement or Jim Crow or redlining or any other aspect of American history that supposedly makes white students feel guilty.
Moms for Liberty are the ones that would tell you that they don't want woke indoctrination at schools.
They just want the basics.
They just want education, not politics.
So if you're seeing, and I'm sure you are, I'm sure you are.
All of the headlines related to the desires and the approaches and the movements and the organizing and the elections to get certain people on school boards to censor books, to fire teachers, to get rid of principles that you don't like.
This is Moms for Liberty.
And Moms for Liberty has really become this nationwide movement that...
That has attracted thousands and tens of thousands of people.
And so therefore, they had their big national conference in Philadelphia.
And I think you can see the connection they're trying to do.
Philadelphia, the place of liberty, the place of America's founding kind of freedom, a city that supposedly represents that.
So here they are in Philadelphia having this conference.
Now, I note this in my upcoming interview with Annika, but I just think it's worth noting here again, There were a bunch of headline speakers at Moms for Liberty in Philadelphia.
There was Trump and DeSantis.
There was Nikki Haley.
There was Dennis Prager.
There was all kinds of folks.
Even before the conference got started, there was some kind of controversy, shall we say, because one of the local heads of a Moms4Liberty chapter quoted Hitler in Moms4Liberty materials.
And that, of course, Brought some unwanted attention, I shall say, to the to the group.
But at the conference, everybody seemed to double down.
So one of the founders of Moms for Liberty said, if you know that that mom who quoted Hitler, I'm with her and she's she's a mom for liberty.
And even if that was whatever, she's she's somebody that I'm proud to call one of us.
Nikki Haley, who is running for president, said that if the Moms for Liberty group is a terrorist organization, which they've been called, they've also been labeled by the Southern Law Poverty Center as an extremist organization, then here's what Nikki Haley said, well then, count me as a mom for liberty because that's what I am.
So basically, it's a take or a twist on the, if these folks are domestic terrorists, then call me a domestic terrorist, right?
We've heard that before at CPAC.
And now we're hearing it from Nikki Haley at Moms4Liberty.
Secretary of State, excuse me, not Secretary of State, the Lieutenant Governor of North Carolina said that it is time to start looking to the wisdom of people like Adolf Hitler and Mao and Stalin.
So Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson spoke at the Moms for Liberty event and he said that it's time to get back and start reading some of those quotes.
Quotes from whom?
Well, he named these people.
Hitler, Stalin, Mao.
He talked about Pol Pot.
He talked about a few others, Castro, and so on.
So he's basically saying, hey, they might have some wisdom for us.
Let me just stop and say this.
Let's just take a minute and hover.
The Lieutenant Governor of North Carolina told a group of people called Moms for Liberty that they should go back and read Hitler.
Because he might have something to teach them about politics and leadership and how to organize our country.
Did you hear what I just said?
This is not a fringe figure.
This is not somebody on a podcast.
This is the Lieutenant Governor of North Carolina, who happens to be a black man.
So that's the setting.
That's a tone.
You might hopefully get the picture of what Moms for Liberty is about and what they're up to.
They are Thoroughly against COVID masks?
Then they are the ones who are just organizing en masse from California to Florida to Oregon to Kansas and everywhere else to rage against woke indoctrination and books about LGBTQ people and teaching about slavery and Jim Crow and redlining and Chinese exclusion and everything else that might be unpleasant.
This is who they are.
Now, I go into all of this in more detail with Annika, so look for that interview in a couple days.
I want to focus on one aspect, though, of the conference that didn't get as much attention as you might imagine, given the fact that there were people saying we should, I don't know, go back and look to Hitler for wisdom on how to run our country.
But that was the awarding of what the Moms for Liberty called the Liberty Sword to a man named Morton Blackwell.
So one of the events at the conference was awarding this Liberty Sword, and this is the way that the Moms for Liberty have an annual award, right?
And they call it the Liberty Sword, and they actually give out this blue sword.
This year they gave it to Morton Blackwell.
So let's just use this as a way into a bunch of things today.
Morton Blackwell is the founder of the Leadership Institute.
The Leadership Institute is an organization that's been around for four decades and it basically trains young conservative operatives and politicos to enter into government and organizing.
It's really a kind of pipeline.
So if you want to be somebody, Who emerges into prime time as a conservative, the Leadership Institute is the place that often you'll get the training, you'll make the connections, you'll form the networks.
Now, you might have heard the name Morton Blackwell on this show or in other places before, because Morton Blackwell was also one of the three men who helped to found the Council for National Policy.
The Council for National Policy was founded by Richard Vigery, Paul Weyrich, and Morton Blackwell.
And this happened in the In the early 70s.
Now, the Council for National Policy is covered in depth by Anne Nelson in her book, Shadow Network, and I would highly encourage you to read that book.
I also covered in my book, Preparing for War.
But the Council for National Policy is really like an organization that holds together the network of very influential right-wing entities.
That have a large effect on our politics.
So the Council for National Policy is a place that if you look at the list of people who are part of the Council for National Policy throughout the last five decades, it is a who's who of conservative politics.
And these days, people like Kellyanne Conway or Steve Bannon or Mike Pence are the names you're going to see.
And you're going to go down the list and go, oh, wow.
And what the Council for National Policy does, among other things, is it really coordinates among groups like the NRA or ALEC or the Heritage Foundation or the Susan B. Anthony List.
Right.
And it really works with them to form a kind of nexus or cosmos of right wing think tanks and activist groups and and so on that are able to coordinate messages.
And they have been doing this for a long time.
And I want to talk about that in a minute.
Now, Blackwell, of the three of Vigery and Weirich, who really organized the Council for National Policy, Blackwell's gifts were really in training leaders.
So what they wanted to do was basically have a pipeline in place that would take young stars from the conservative spaces and train them up so that they could become people who work on Capitol Hill, people who become Congress people, people who are influential in media, in politics, people who are influential in media, in politics, behind the scenes, in front of the cameras, everywhere.
Now, the first thing I want to note about this is you might be wondering, well, how did Moms for Liberty take off?
And one of the easy assumptions that you'll see in the media and other places is that, well, it's just an organic movement.
They just were able to tap into the anger and the ire of conservative moms all over the country.
Of course, this took off like like crazy because people are upset and they want to join with other moms and voice their opinions.
Now, that that whole assumption misses the fact That the Leadership Institute, an entity that has existed, as I have said, for four decades, that has been training hundreds of thousands of conservative operatives, basically saw in the Moms for Liberty an opportunity to cultivate a message that could really infiltrate school boards, PTA meetings, local politics, and be a national kind of organization.
So the Moms for Liberty starts with people who are already connected to the Republican Party.
And then it's taken under its wing by Morton Blackwell and the Leadership Institute and really sort of given the tools, given the networking, given all that it needs to become this national machine.
So I think one of the takeaways from this is just realizing that.
It's really easy to see Christian nationalists and groups like Moms for Liberty, which have again been labeled extremist by the Southern Law Poverty Center and others, as fringe, as crazy, as whatever you want to label them.
What I think is more helpful is to realize that they are part of an incredibly networked, organized, and funded movement that intentionally takes something like this message, we don't co-parent with the government, and it says, yes, that'll work.
That'll not only work in Florida, but that'll work in California.
That'll work in Texas.
That'll work in parts of Massachusetts.
That'll work in Idaho.
And they start to reproduce and replicate it.
And the reason that these things take off so quickly is that there is already money waiting for them.
One of the things Annika talks about in our interview is that the conference was much cheaper than she expected.
Both of us sort of are guessing it's because it was subsidized by sponsors like the Leadership Institute.
This follows on what I talked about with Tim Whitaker of the New Evangelicals when he went to Turning Point USA's Pastors Conference.
The Pastors Conference was free.
Why?
Because there's money waiting.
For these organizations to bring people in, pastors, moms, potential school board folks, potential mayors, right?
And to say, hey, come in, come on in here.
Here's our conference.
Here's all these other great people that want to support you.
Here's all the messaging.
If you look at the Moms4Liberty agenda and schedule for the conference, there was media training, right?
There was ways that you become coached and you very quickly can become somebody who goes back to your hometown and has a ready-made message, has resources, has people who will help fund you and help you organize, set up websites, set up whatever you need, right?
So please notice that.
You can laugh away, you can dismiss folks as fringe or crazy or whatever, but what you're missing is that they have machinery ready to go.
And I want to take a break, but when I come back, I want to talk about how this is not a new phenomenon.
The figure of Morton Blackwell is actually a figure that's really helpful for getting into the history of groups like this because Morton Blackwell and the Council for National Policy and Paul Weyrich and Richard Vigery and others have been at this since the 1970s.
So I'll talk about that in a minute.
We'll be right back.
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All right, so Morton Blackwell receives the Sword for Liberty, and Morton Blackwell is a really interesting figure to think about because Morton Blackwell, going back for decades, has been training conservative leaders to enter into organizations like Moms for Liberty.
This provides us an opportunity to think about the history of this kind of activism.
And one of the things that many smart people have been recounting for us over the last couple of weeks is that this kind of activism is not new.
That since basically the 1950s, there have been movements by conservative women that have been formed in the grassroots and then helped along and subsidized and funded by bigger groups, but have been formed in the grassroots and allowed women to take a leadership and central role in the movement in order to vie for what
Are in essence, hardcore right wing policies and approaches to everything from education, to electoral politics, to immigration, and so on, and so on, and so on.
So again, I'm going to go back to Gil Frank's piece at the Meteor and look at some of this history.
What Gil points out is something that is local to Florida and basically says, look, these women, these three women started Moms for Liberty in Florida in 2021.
As I just said, they're helped along by the Liberty Leadership Institute.
But this is not new.
Gill quotes historian Michelle Nickerson, who says this, Mothers have put themselves forward as representatives of local interests who battled bureaucrats for the sake of family, community, and God.
And talks about how this has happened since the middle 20th century.
Such conservative mothers' groups, Nickerson explains, launched, quote, local crusades and often successfully overpowered school administrators, boards of education, and teachers by anointing themselves spokespeople.
And what Gil does is explain how this happened in Florida.
So Gil talks about how in Florida, since the 1950s, conservative opposition to the LGBTQ rights in Florida has been intertwined with its opposition to African American rights.
And the language used to oppose both the full inclusion of African Americans and LGBTQ folks was, and remains, protecting white children and white parents' rights.
Gil notes that just two years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, and against this backdrop, he calls it, of resistance to integrating schools in Florida, a committee known as the Johns Committee worked to, as Gil says, neutralize African American civil rights organizations and the ongoing attempts to integrate Florida's schools.
Let me break down what I just said.
In the 1950s, when schools were set to be integrated, there was this group that basically organized and was officially part of the Florida legislature, and it worked to neutralize African American civil rights organization.
In essence, it was trying to halt or slow down or in some case even stop the integration of schools.
Now, what kind of language did that group use in the 1950s?
Well, Gill does a great job of pointing out that they used the kinds of jargon that we use today.
They talked about grooming.
They talked about indoctrination.
They argued that homosexual teachers were dangerous because of their desire to recruit them and bring them into the gay lifestyle or something like this.
One of the points that Gil's making is that the anti-civil rights, the anti-integration, and the anti-LGBTQ sentiments were all tied together in these movements in the 50s.
The similarities don't stop there.
In 1957, there was an attempt to guess, to do guess what?
Purge books from school libraries in Florida.
They wanted to get books out of libraries, books containing the works of African American artists, books that had things regarding segregation and other things, right?
So there were citizen councils, there were PTAs, there were a lot of organizations saying that all of these books are, what are they doing?
They're quote, brainwashing the children and are teaching that white and negro students should mix socially.
This is not new, friends.
Moms4Liberty is using a playbook that goes back a long time.
It goes back to the Jim Crow era.
It goes back to a time when people were resisting the integration of schools.
Now, this brings up something for me that's a little bit closer to home when it comes to my own research and my own work.
If you've listened to the show, if you've read my book, or if you've listened to our special series, The Orange Wave, which just go to the show notes and you can find The Orange Wave, you know that this also happened in California in the 1950s and 60s during the heart of the Cold War.
There was a widespread movement to organize how suburban housewives For political causes and for political campaigns.
So Gil points out how this worked in Florida.
Others have certainly pointed out, and if you've listened to the show you know this, how this worked across the South in trying to keep schools segregated and trying to stop the integration of schools.
But in California, you had the widespread organization of women into a grassroots movement, largely at the hands of the John Birch Society, which is a conspiratorial organization that was supposedly pro-capitalism and pro-America and anti-communist, but was responsible for spreading some of the most ridiculous and hurtful conspiracies of the time.
Well, women joined in home groups, and this is what's really important about, I think, the Moms for Liberty organization and how it connects with the groups that Gil talks about from the 1950s and then I see in the 60s in California and in other places.
The goal is saying, hey, why don't you come over for coffee on Wednesday and we're going to have a group of about eight women and we're going to talk about what they're doing to our kids.
We're going to talk about what they're doing in these schools.
We're going to talk about what they're doing and what they're teaching and how they're trying to hurt them.
We're going to talk about how these teachers are gay and they're predators, they're groomers, they're perverts.
We're going to get in here and talk about how, you know, these schools are so full of politics that they're making our kids feel guilty just for existing and so on.
Well, in the 1960s, this happened through John Birch Society small groups, what historians have noted are coffee clutches.
Basically, come over for coffee once or two, three times a week, and we're going to look at these pamphlets.
We're going to look at these videos.
We're going to look at these materials, these books, and we're going to see what's really going on.
I don't know.
We're going to do our own research, and then we're going to organize.
And that happens and alongside them comes money and resources to organize by way of the John Birch Society or eventually the Leadership Institute, the Council for National Policy, and all the various tentacles of those organizations.
In the 1960s, this is what helped get Barry Goldwater the GOP presidential nomination.
Barry Goldwater, as I've said many times and I talked about in my book, is a senator from Arizona who is an extremist in the eyes of many.
Somebody who supposedly had no chance of becoming the Republican presidential nominee.
Well, he wins California and he wins other states largely on the backs of grassroots women who are organizing on his behalf.
That is the power of groups like Moms for Liberty.
That is the power of groups of women who organize in these ways.
They have an opportunity to change local politics and also change national politics.
I mean, Moms for Liberty, you can see the dozens and hundreds of videos of them harassing school officials, harassing teachers, calling librarians, perverts and pedophiles, saying they're going to come for them.
They're going to get rid of them.
They're going to take them out.
This is happening.
This is happening across the country.
They are vicious.
One of the things that Annika talks about in our interview is that they label themselves as bulldogs or mama bears, meaning don't mess with a mom, don't mess with a mama bear.
This links up, of course, with Sarah Palin's whole shtick about the difference between a hockey mom and a bulldog is lipstick.
Now, I want to stop in a second and really talk about why Donning the role of mother is so effective.
Why it's such an effective role to play.
But before that, I want to point out that, okay, we've talked about 1950s Florida.
I just mentioned in brief the kind of movement in 1960s California.
And again, you can read all about that in my book or just go down to the show notes and click on the orange wave.
And I go in on that in depth.
I mean, hours and hours of content about education, about organizing, about how all of this started.
I have interviews in that series with Ann Nelson and Sarah Posner and Chrissy Stroop and so many other great people.
So check that out.
This also was a big part of the Tea Party and Melissa Deckman who is the CEO of PRRI and a scholar of these movements has really done a great job of pointing this out.
Deckman's book from NYU Press is called Tea Party Women.
And what Deckman points out in that book is that in the Tea Party, right, from the years of the Obama administration, the years when Sarah Palin was sort of the figurehead of a GOP woman, a mom, a hockey mom, somebody who spoke plainly and really performed femininity in what was considered a kind of quote-unquote traditional way, had long hair and wore lipstick and presented herself as somewhat of a fashion icon in a certain sense.
What Deckman argues is that in the Tea Party, women found a grassroots, decentralized kind of structure, and it allowed them to be leaders, right?
They didn't have to fight for a kind of place in a hierarchy that was dominated by men.
And one of the things they did in the Tea Party, one of the things that Sarah Palin did very effectively during the 2010s, was to put on this mantle of mother.
And to approach issues like gun control, or government spending, or immigration, or race relations in the country, and so on, from the perspective of the mother, or from the housewife, or from the homemaker.
And they are supposed to be this unassailable group, right?
Because here's how it works, and I want to link this to Christian nationalism in a second.
If you approach this as a mother, it's really hard to get around that rhetorically in the media and in the coverage of this.
I mean, I started today talking about a cry on that was across Fox News that talked about how mothers are not extremists and they just want what's best for their children.
That is such an effective message if you are a suburban person.
And I have seen this with people who I know personally.
And someone says, yeah, you're a mom.
You know what's best for your kids.
Who's going to argue with that?
You really want the government or a bureaucrat or someone else telling you what to do and how to work, right?
It's a really effective role to play, and it's really hard.
Hear me out.
This is the key.
It's really hard to dislodge the authority of the mom here.
The mom is seen, in this case, as the backbone of the family, who holds it all together, who's invested in her kid's education, her kid's daily life, her kid's safety, her kid's well-being.
How can you ever question the role of mother?
This is why, from 1950s Florida, 1960s California, to the Tea Party Women of the 2010s, to the Moms for Liberty of the 2020s, It is such an effective message and so hard to combat because the assumption is this when you start.
Well, they're just a bunch of moms who wants best for their kids.
Can they really be dangerous?
Can they really be radical?
Can they be really be extremist?
And when they show up at a PTA meeting and they're armed with talking points that are like, we're just moms who want to protect kids.
We just don't think these books or this curricula is appropriate and we're just worried that this teacher is teaching them things that are confusing or out of line or downright dangerous.
How do you combat that if you're not prepared?
Well, you can't, effectively.
This is why Moms for Liberty has had so much success.
This is why the coffee clutches of the John Birch Society and the organizations of 1950s Florida and the Tea Party and Sarah Palin Acolytes of the 2010s were so successful and so influential.
It's really hard to dislodge the role of mother.
And so, if you listen to my interview with Annika, she talks all about how when you go to the conference, yes, you hear people talking about being a mother, and they don this certain performance of femininity that's expected in these conservative circles.
And yet, what's behind it, what's underneath it, just underneath the surface, is hatred, is fear.
Is the sense that there's an other in the United States who's coming for you, an other that wants to dislodge your place, who wants to take what you have, who wants to upset the order.
One of the things that I could not get away from as I read about Moms for Liberty and then talked to people who were there was the sense that the palpable disdain for the other, the palpable disdain
For the people who have different visions of America, who don't fit into how the Moms for Liberty see the way things should be, whether that is the LGBTQ community, whether that's trans people in specific, whether that is immigrants, whether that is those who would want to teach us and teach our children about the travesties of American history.
The palpable disdain, and this is, friends, if you read the history, if you listen to the Orange Wave, you read my book, you read Gil's work at the Meteor, you read any of these other resources I'm talking about, you will see that underneath the veneer of the innocent white woman, the innocent mom in the suburbs, is always a desire to order the country in a way
That their vision, their understanding of America is in place, and that is at the cost of people at the margins.
People of color, people of mixed race, people who are queer, people who have come from another country, and so on and so on and so on.
Let's take a break and come back and talk about one more aspect of Moms4Liberty that I think is worth discussing.
Be right back.
All right, friends.
So one of the keynote speakers at the Moms for Liberty Conference was Dennis Prager.
And Dennis Prager, as some of you will know, unfortunately, is a 75-year-old talk radio host.
And he's the man behind PragerU.
So you've perhaps come across these, or you've maybe had people at barbecues who've said, hey, I learned this at PragerU.
It must be true.
It's an overwhelmingly influential A network of media often packaged in like four minute videos or five minute videos that really tries to sort of provide talking points to the average person on things like socialism or Marxism or tax cuts or whatever may be.
Well, here's what Prager said to the crowd at Moms4Liberty.
He said, basically, America is in a battle where it is, quote, basically the Bible versus the left.
God made order out of chaos, and the left is making chaos out of order.
The notion that there is no such thing as a male or a female human being is chaos.
It is a gigantic lie, but it is more than a lie.
It is chaos.
That's what we are doing.
And why?
Because order reflects God, the Creator.
When I saw this, I immediately just knew we had to talk about it.
Here's my breakdown.
He talks first about God made order out of chaos.
So for Prager, one of the most important things, maybe the most important thing, is for there to be order.
Now, if you've listened to this show, if you've listened to me, you know that this is a hallmark of Christian nationalism.
That Perry and Gorski talk about this in The Cross and the Flag, that Christian nationalism is about order.
Freedom and violence.
And then if you need to use violence to put the social square in order, then you as a white person, namely a white Christian, can do that.
Prager says God made order out of chaos, and the left is making chaos out of order.
So he's basically saying I'm on the right.
I'm Dennis Prager.
I'm a Republican or a right-wing person or a conservative or whatever, because we stand for order.
And the left, all they want is chaos.
And that is why we are enemies.
That is why we are opposed.
Now, what does he zero in on when it comes to chaos and order?
He zeroes in on gender.
He says there's no such thing as a male or a female, then we have chaos.
He's like, look, if you upset the binary of man and woman, male and female, feminine and masculine, then there's chaos.
And we can't have that.
It's more than a lie.
It's a descent into a society that is chaotic, that no longer makes sense, where there are no rules, where there are no standards, where there is no order.
Prager's biggest fear is that the binary structure of his worldview would be upset and that that would lead to unsettlement, that there would be in his mind discomfort or at worst chaos.
Now look at the last line and I just could not ignore this.
That's what we are doing and why?
Because order reflects God the Creator.
Order reflects God.
It is almost, and this is the theologian in me and the philosopher who's trying to read text closely, it's almost as if for Prager, who's actually Jewish, it's almost as if for Prager God equals order and order equals God.
Think about what I just said.
God equals order, but it's almost like order equals God.
It's almost as if In Prager's mind, order is what is divine.
Having things in place according to a binary, according to a world that is structured how he wants it, that makes him comfortable, that makes him feel at ease, in the words of Gorski and Perry, that makes him feel free.
That is God.
So the goal is order.
The goal is a society that's ordered how he wants, and in order to get that, Prager's like, you know, we have to fight.
We have to work.
We have to be willing to enter into the political arena.
One of the things that Annika said in our interview, and you can listen on Monday, is that The Moms for Liberty are organizing to enter into politics and into the PTA meetings and school board elections and so on.
And what people have noted for a long time is that the rhetoric they use is vitriolic.
It is hate speech.
Why?
Because as Gorski and Perry say, they're willing to use violence in order to Create the order they want in our social square.
And their guess is if they can create the order that is needed, then they will feel free.
The whole thing works like this.
If there is no woke indoctrination, if there are only two genders, if things just went back to the simplicity of the 1950s, then I would feel free.
I wouldn't be uncomfortable having to call people they-them.
I wouldn't have to be uncomfortable wondering if somebody's Biological sex is not matched with their gender identity.
I wouldn't have to be uncomfortable by learning all the things that are thoroughly uncomfortable about American history.
From enslavement, to redlining, Jim Crow, Chinese exclusion, Japanese internment, so on and so on and so on and so on and so on.
I wouldn't have to worry about my kid's sexual identity.
I wouldn't have to dig into the complexities of the human condition.
You know what I want?
I just want it all to be this or that.
And if it's this or that, I can be comfortable and if I'm comfortable, I'm free.
And you know what that means?
I might have to be full of hate and violence in order to get that.
And so I will bring it.
I will bring that to the school board meeting.
I will bring that to the city hall.
I will use the worst language and I get emails from people from my hometown who are being attacked by folks.
Who are attached to groups like Moms4Liberty, who are being doxxed, who are having their images and pictures of them put alongside just disgusting imagery and claiming that they're part of a perverted pedophile ring or something else.
They will call everybody else a pervert or pedophile.
Why?
Now just hang with me for one more minute on this.
Because by saying that you're a pervert or a pedophile, by saying you're a groomer, they're saying you are creating disorder.
You're teaching the children chaos.
You're teaching the children the thing that is not God, that is not divine.
You're teaching them that there is complexity and nuance and texture to human life, to human sexuality and gender, to the ways that we identify, the stories that are involved in this United States, the stories of people who've come from Southeast Asia and the African continent, the people who have come from everywhere and all over.
The ways that our families are now full of mixed races and mixed ethnicities and inter-religious partnerships.
The ways that we have to reckon with a really audacious experiment of being Americans that it says everyone's included and we all have freedom and liberty and the pursuit of happiness and it's based around those grand ideals rather than some linear narrative.
If you are that person to them, you're creating chaos and therefore you are a chaos agent.
You know what another word for chaos or being out of order is?
Somebody who's perverted.
A pervert is out of order.
A pedophile is attracted to children.
That's the worst chaotic, the worst out of order way you can be.
And so Prager's comments to me are so revelatory.
They're a window into this whole enterprise and how it all works.
All right, that was a lot.
Dan's not here, so we gotta just, you know, collectively here, take a breath.
You ready?
Get some water, you know, wipe your brow, check in with yourself.
All right, you ready?
Let's do one more heavy thing today before we go.
Last week, Dan and I talked about affirmative action and the ways that affirmative action and race conscious decisions in college admissions is something that the Supreme Court ruled against.
And what Dan talked about there was something I wanted to follow up on.
If you listened last week, Dan talked about how, in essence, the Supreme Court is setting a precedent where in educational settings, in perhaps business settings, in philanthropic settings, It is more and more difficult to talk about a corporate identity.
We are seeing this week the attacks on minority scholarships.
So if you are somebody who is applying for a scholarship for black students, for Latine students, people are saying, well, that's not allowed.
Why should there be scholarships for black students?
Why should there be scholarships for certain groups?
The fallout of the affirmative action decision is going to be an attack on things like scholarships for black students or for philanthropic funds for black organizations.
If you have a fund for black businesses or black non-profits.
Is that allowed?
Is that a place that is next and ripe and open for attack on this basis?
Now, the thing that Dan talked about that I want to follow up on is this idea of corporate identity.
He said, if you want to instill a colorblind approach to the American public square, if you want to just walk into the United States in public and say, I'm colorblind, I don't see race, I don't see black or brown, that's not even on my radar.
At first, it sounds like, well, good for you, I guess.
You don't care about what color people are.
You just want to treat everyone equally.
But what you're doing when you employ that kind of ideology, that kind of worldview, is you're ignoring the ways that the public square has been shaped even before you got there.
So even before you walked into public, even before you arrived on this planet, There was a way that the public square had been organized and it had been cultivated such that if you are black, such that if you are somebody who is Latina, somebody who is Asian American, someone who is Native American, that the odds had been stacked against you by way of measures we talked about last week, right?
Redlining, Jim Crow, alien land laws, the history of enslavement, vigilante violence, so on and so on and so on.
Where am I going with this?
Where I'm going with this is one of the reasons that there's this effort to do away with corporate identity is because whiteness is not a corporate identity.
And I want you to hang with me for a second as we close today.
Whiteness is not a corporate identity in this sense.
What whiteness represents Is power.
If you read people like Ibram X. Kendi, if you read A History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter, if you read books that really look at the history of whiteness, what you see is that whiteness was formed as a category of power.
That if you are white in the 16 or 17 or 18 or 1900s, You have the right to power.
That you have all the privileges of being free to pursue economic or political or cultural or social pursuits in America and its public square.
That there are no limitations on you.
So to be white is to be the one who has power and, and I don't have to explain this to y'all, to be white is in many cases to have the power to subjugate others.
To say that you You are a black person and therefore you are property.
That's power.
It is to say that you are a Chinese person, a person of Chinese descent.
You do not have the right to own property or to lease property.
You are a person who is from this country and so we are going to bar you from the place that is supposedly open to all and so on and so on and so on.
The category of whiteness is not built.
Now, here's what I need you to hear.
It's not built from a shared experience.
It's not built from historical circumstances that united people who are considered white.
People who are from everywhere, spanning Norway to Ireland to Greece and so on.
The category of whiteness is formed as a representation of power.
So if you want to become white, And the history of Italian Americans and Irish Americans shows this.
In many ways, what you want to do is try to rid yourself of the particularities of your ethnicity so that you can become part of this larger category of power called white.
People forget in the late 1800s and the early 1900s that Italians and Irish were not considered white and that the category of whiteness changed.
It's malleable and it has changed over time.
And one of the ways that you become white is that you do away with the particularities of being Polish or being Irish or being Italian.
And you sort of just meld yourself into this category that is based on power.
Now, if you do that, You're going to look around eventually and say, well, what is my culture?
What is my identity?
What is my story?
And one of the effects of joining a group that is based simply on power is that you do not have a shared experiences.
So just hear me out now.
If people say, what is white culture?
I say, there's no such thing as white culture.
Because whiteness is not built on a shared experience or historical set of events or a shared story.
It's just based on power.
To be white is not to be somebody who's Polish.
Now don't get me... I need you to hear me out.
If you're Polish-American, if you are Greek-American, There are ways that you might continue to practice the particularity of your ethnic identity, right?
In terms of the food you eat, and the holidays you celebrate, and the language, and the slang, and the various iterations of your culture in your home or beyond.
Now, when you walk into public, you might just be read as a white person.
But there's a slight difference between being, right, somebody who is Danish-American and eats Danish food and has Danish fairy tales at home that are read to the kids and stories and events that shape a family, and somebody who's white.
Whiteness is not.
A shared identity.
And so the only way to think about a public square for somebody who is on the Supreme Court and getting rid of race conscious admissions is to talk about colorblind approach.
Because there's no other way to do that.
And hear me out.
Here's the flip side.
Those people who have a corporate identity are a threat to the power that is the category of whiteness.
That what you're saying is you have a black identity, you have an Asian American identity, you have a Latina identity, you have a Native American identity.
Well, that's a particularity.
That's something that has a different story.
That's something that has a shared history.
Well, I don't have that as a white person.
So if that is allowed into the consideration of how we organize everything from college admissions to philanthropic dollars, To how we organize our businesses in terms of DEI, etc.
Well, that might upset the power of the category of whiteness.
I'd rather have a colorblind approach where no one has a corporate identity because I don't have a corporate identity as a white person.
Now, some of you are listening, you're like, well, what's the difference between a white identity and a black identity?
Here's what I would say.
If you are in the United States, The black identity is based on a historical set of events related to the Middle Passage and the erasure of your history as somebody from the African continent, someone of African descent.
And so there's a category of blackness in the United States that is based on the trauma of that history of enslavement, that is based on the shared history, the ways that people who are considered black and have been considered black for four centuries Have created solidarity, have created, in essence, a family history and a culture that comes from that.
It's the same with Asian American.
I talked with Janelle Wong last week.
Asian American is a category that spans so much of the world.
If you go, and I do this, I went to a conference on Asian Pacific American religion just a month ago.
If you go to that conference and there are people who are talking about being Asian American, you might meet somebody who is Somebody whose family's history traces back to China, to India, to Pakistan, to Vietnam.
I mean, we're talking about spanning like so much of the globe, right?
So why is there an Asian American category?
Because in many ways, To be Asian American in this country has been shaped by histories of exclusion, histories of, as I've mentioned many times on the show, alien land laws, Chinese Exclusion Acts, laws that labeled women from China as promiscuous and sex workers just by dint of existing, Japanese incarceration, So on and so on and so on and so on and so on.
I mean, not to mention the Vietnam War or wars, not to mention what happened in Korea in the middle 20th century.
And I mean, there's not time today to go into it all.
But there's a shared history.
There's a shared sense of family resemblance because of those histories.
Whiteness does not have that.
Whiteness was created In many ways, as a category, I'm not saying white people, you're a white person listening, I'm not saying this is you, I'm saying as a category, going back spanning centuries, whiteness was created in many ways to exclude those stories, to control those people, to make sure that you have dominance over them.
Whiteness as a category was about power.
So when you ask about what is white food, what is white song, what is white history, what is white dance, what is white whatever, I don't think it exists.
Because I think the category of whiteness is not based on a family resemblance, a shared history, a set of events.
I think it's based on The desire for power.
Now, if you're a white person, I'm not saying that you go to bed at night and just think, well, I'm so glad I'm white.
I just want to have power, right?
I am a mixed race person.
My mother is white.
I am a white person.
I'm saying that one of the reasons that race conscious admissions to college, one of the reasons that scholarships for black people, one of the reasons that the stories The cultures, the celebration of ethnicity when it comes to people of color and black people and indigenous people in the United States is so threatening to others is that they're looking around and going, and I've heard this question so many times in social media, people saying it, what about white people?
And what they're saying is, what is my story?
What is my heritage?
What is my background?
And realizing why I'm not sure what it is, but I'm not sure I want anyone else to have one either.
I'm not sure I want anyone else to get the particularity of a corporate identity.
I'm not sure that that's something that will help me because that might mean that the public square is organized differently when it comes to college or money or corporations or philanthropy.
So I don't want that.
I want that to go away.
And I just want to walk into the public square and pretend like no one has a corporate identity.
No one has any kind of stories they tell of who they are, where they came from.
This is why I'm going to, in many cases, co-opt the American flag, because it's the universal symbol of the country.
If I have the American flag, I have the entire country.
So my corporate identity is America.
And I'll just talk about America, rather than talking about something else.
And if you speak a different language in my country, or you have a different flag or something else, I'm going to tell you, you should get rid of it.
Just like I'm going to tell you, we shouldn't consider race in admissions because, you know, That's unfair.
What would happen if we did that?
I don't know.
We might admit that the public square we've all walked into for the last 20 or 30 or 40 years was shaped before we got here by forces that meant the odds were stacked in favor of many people and against others.
Now, I know, Dan's not here, and I'm just out here talking about things that are way more theoretical and philosophical than usual.
Usually, we focus in on an issue or something can happen this week, but I wanted to talk about this, and you know, Dan's not here.
He's not here to rein me in.
It's my chance to just go for it, and I'm sure I'm going to get emails about this, and I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of folks who are not super happy about it.
I hope, however, that you'll consider what I'm saying.
Not saying that if you're a white person, all you want is power and to subjugate people.
What I'm saying is the category of whiteness.
has been built that way.
And that what's so hard when whiteness is made visible, when it's called out, when it's something that you see and notice, is that you start to realize the foundation and the history of it.
And it's like not one that is super comfortable.
And so one of the reactions is, instead of me noticing whiteness, why don't we just not notice anything else?
And I think that's the whole game.
All right, I'm going to leave it there.
We didn't get to the Methodist, we didn't get to the Baptist, because I just went for it.
I apologize, but we'll do our best to do it next week.
As I said, I got an interview coming on Moms4Liberty with Anika, so check that out on Monday.
Check us out on PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo, or an indie show.
Could really use your support.
And check us out on social media, Straight White JC.
We are now on Threads, so you can check us out on Threads, as well as Twitter and Instagram and Facebook.
You can check me out at Bradley Onishi.
And if you want to know more about the history of these kinds of groups, Moms for Liberty, etc., check out the Orange Wave in our show notes.
It's in our link tree, and it's a series I did a couple years ago.
It's 10 episodes, and it really, really drills down onto all of this.
