Brad and Dan begin by discussing a bombshell report at the New York Times outlining Trump's plans to completely transform the executive branch if he becomes president again. Brad analyzes how the playbook he and his team are using comes right from Orban's takeover of Hungary's government from within.
In the second segment Dan analyzes the reports that Ron DeSantis is trying to create his own personal militia in Florida that would answer only to him and be deployed in matters of border security, violent crime, and other issues. Brad likens this to Mussolini's Black Shirts.
In the final segment both hosts discuss the horrific story that border security in Texas were ordered to push nursing children into the Rio Grande River.
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AXIS MUNDY AXIS MUNDY You're listening to an Irreverent Podcast.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
I'm here today with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Nice to be with you as always, Brad.
I think you just moved, which is awesome.
Everybody who's moved knows what a pleasant experience it is, and I'm glad to see that you have not been bothered by the process at all.
It's been smooth and seamless and problem-free.
It's, it's amazing.
Like over the last six months, there's been, there's been weeks where I've worked so much and then taking care of my little daughter and everything where like, I've been so tired, but I, I, I can't think of a week where I thought, you know, I'm going to email Dan and just say, I can't do weekly roundup this week because I'm so exhausted and I'm so overwhelmed.
This week I worked not enough because I was moving the whole week and dealing with some other stuff related to, The move, and I wanted to email you, Dan, on Wednesday and be like, I'm giving up.
I give up.
I'm not working for the next two weeks because I am so exhausted and so flabbergasted and so over it.
I'm so over being an adult.
You know what I mean?
Retirement accounts, taxes, moving.
I don't want to do any of it.
Does that make sense?
Oh, that makes total sense.
Opt out, but whatever.
Well, you could.
All you have to do is become a wealthy billionaire and run for president and stuff.
And then you don't have to do any of the adulting stuff, apparently, as we'll see.
I spent one summer back in our younger days, in my 20s, traveling around Europe.
And I was at one point in Croatia in July.
And then I was in a small town in Bohemia.
And in both cases, This tiny town like in the Czech Republic near a river and also in Croatia, beautiful little town near the Adriatic.
In both cases, Dan, I thought, what am I doing?
I'm just going to quit.
I'm going to be a bartender in this tiny village, like get my bread every day, get some cheese, write really bad novels no one will ever want to read and just kind of hang out and like, just let it happen.
And don't get me wrong.
Life is good.
I appreciate everything I have, but weeks like this, I'm like, you know, Yeah, Bohemia, tiny little village, a river, maybe get a kayak, drink beer every night with the locals, just write bad novels.
That sounds pretty good.
All right.
Enough midlife crisis.
Most people have turned this off by now.
They're no longer listening to this show and they've wondered what happened to the two of us.
Okay.
I feel like over the last month, Dan, we have We've kind of covered some stories that are really specific to our beat.
You know, Christian nationalism, the religious right.
We've really dug into some things that most people don't dig into.
Today's one of those weeks where I think we just have to kind of dig into some of the big national headlines and figures and do it from our own angle because we're going to talk about Trump.
We're going to talk about DeSantis.
We're going to talk about a report out of Texas that there were orders for border security Push children into the Rio Grande River and others in the cases of border crossings and so on.
So these are all big federal headlines, but it feels like one of those weeks we got to talk about them and they link up with a lot of things we've discussed in this show previously.
Let's talk about a piece that the New York Times came out this week.
It's by Jonathan Swan.
Jonathan Swan, many of you remember, is the Axios reporter who really gave that interview with Trump that held his feet to the fire.
Anyway, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman.
They talk about how Trump is gearing up, if he wins next election cycle, to Alter the balance of power of the executive branch historically.
So here's, according to the authors of this piece, what Trump and his associates are looking to do.
By increasing the president's authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.
So the broad goal, Dan, is just increase the president's authority over every part of the federal government.
Trump intends to bring independent agencies like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses under direct presidential control.
So he wants to take these independent agencies and basically say, They don't operate independently.
They don't have their own directors or overseers.
They don't have an independence from the executive.
Their decision making, their policies, they will all be directed straight from the White House, top down.
And you might be thinking, all right, is that a scary, do we need to be talking about this?
Is that scary?
Well, that's That's not it.
it.
I mean, that's not the end of the plan.
He wants to revive the practice of impounding funds, refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs a president doesn't like.
So there's this longstanding practice since Nixon, who also tried this, of the president not being able to basically impound funds, basically hold funds and not spend them because Congress has given those basically hold funds and not spend them because Congress has given those funds to a program that the president
So basically, one theory of our government is that the Congress has an independence such that when it passes a budget and it appropriates money to certain funds, it has the independence to administer those funds and assign those funds.
And the president can't be like, nope, sorry, we're not spending that money because I don't like this program.
And you can name the program, whatever it may be, right?
Okay?
Now, Trump also plans to strip employment from tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to replace them if they are deemed obstacles to his agenda.
So he wants to go through, Dan, all the intelligence agencies, the FBI and the CIA.
He wants to go through the State Department and the defense bureaucracies.
And he wants to be able to remove anybody who he thinks of as antithetical to his agenda.
So there's no protections in place.
And I've lived in D.C., Dan.
I have a partner who's worked closely with the State Department and just been kind of inside some of those buildings at times.
I can tell you that that is an underappreciated part of our federal government.
The civil servants who wake up every day, thousands of them, tens of thousands of them, and who go into work and they work at a desk and they just administer all kinds of different programs across our government.
When there are huge holes there, when there are unfilled vacancies and people not doing those jobs, it has an effect.
I mean, we see this We saw this in the Trump presidency when there were ambassadors who were not appointed, there were empty desks, he basically assigned Jared Kushner to do everything.
So, the sort of theory behind this is of a unitary executive branch, a unitary executive power, okay?
And here's the rationale.
One of Trump's aides, John McEntee, says it this way.
Okay.
I want to stop because I don't want to spend all day on this.
for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies.
There's no way to make the existing structure function in a conservative manner.
It's not enough to get the personnel right.
What's necessary is a complete system overhaul." Okay, I wanna stop because I don't wanna spend all day on this.
I wanna just sum up what I think is happening here and point to a comparison that I think will help us understand why this is so dangerous.
The Trump approach here is to say, when I become president again, I'm going to do a couple of things.
I'm going to take all of these independent agencies that have their own directors and their own ecosystems, and I'm going to make it such that I can, on a whim, decide what happens at those agencies.
I can decide what happens at the Federal Trade Commission.
I can decide what happens.
When we think about internet or television.
So if you start to think through this, you're talking about the internet, you're talking about censorship, you're talking about what's allowed right on the airwaves, who is getting attacked, which networks.
I mean, start to let those things churn in your mind.
Okay?
A Trump presidency where there's power directly from the White House.
Just say, I don't know, go after Rachel Maddow because MSNBC and her show are saying things that he doesn't like.
You start to sort of see what he wants here, right?
You have power over the airwaves and the internet.
You can kind of just make a phone call and tell somebody to do this when it comes to this network, this show, this figure, this whatever.
And then the Federal Trade Commission.
I mean, you think about a career criminal like Trump and the just absolutely shady ways that he will want to manipulate things like that.
And then you think about the fact that he's going to bring in all of these state workers, these bureaucrats and civil servants and basically say, unless you're a loyalist, you're fired.
Unless you're a loyalist and you do what I want, you're fired.
I don't want to hear about you gumming up my process.
I don't want to hear about the fact that I'm sorry, sir, we can't do it that way because it's against the rules or that doesn't work or we have a process for this or Here's why we can't do that this way, because it will totally collapse this part of our program or our relationship with this country or, you know, our policy on this or whatever.
And you can see on the other end of the line, the president saying, I don't care, do it.
Otherwise you're fired.
It's your choice.
Okay.
This is not good news, Dan.
This is basically them saying if Trump is elected, he will see his executive power as unchecked by Congress when it comes to money.
That if there are programs he doesn't like, Even if Congress has passed laws, appropriated funds in a budget, whatever, he can just say, sorry, we're not spending the money.
He can be the one that says, yeah, I know I promised you kids that we would do this, but I'm the dad and I'm not spending the money, so too bad.
I know everybody agreed on this and we promised it and it was the plan, but you know what?
I'm saying no.
This is the vision of an autocratic executive branch.
So I have a comparison I want to make, but I'll just throw it to you for initial thoughts on this vision for Trump's next term.
Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing is right where you picked up at the end, which we saw pieces of this, right?
We've seen Trump argue, like he's made the argument that there is no limit on presidential power.
He has suggested, after he was out of office, suspending the Constitution.
Because he and anybody who's serious knows that, yes, the Constitution is kind of an arcane document in lots of ways.
And we've got Almost three centuries of jurisprudence at this point to show that as we try to make sense of it, but it's pretty clear that it doesn't, it's not a monarchy or an autocracy or something like that.
I think we've talked about this last couple of weeks and about the way that you get this kind of this, this view into the right wing psyche and like what it is that they think things are.
And that notion that A unified executive was created by liberals, basically, and there's no way to make it conservative or, you know, that kind of thing.
Like, again, just beaver dream stuff there.
And I will just refer people to a long history of presidents, but let's just, if we wanted to, we could look at George W. Bush and everything post 9-11 and so forth.
That's some stuff.
I think the other thing that stands out is, again, it's the saying the quiet parts out loud, right?
That statement to just come out and say, eh, just getting a bunch of conservatives in, even the right people, that's not enough.
We need to, what was it, a complete system overhaul.
That's the kind of thing that critics of conservatives have been saying they want for, like, decades.
And you're told all the time by conservatives, no, no, no, that's not us.
We want Small government and defunding these agencies isn't about, you know, political control.
It's just good conservative principles and letting people live their lives and, you know, whatever.
And here it is out loud.
No, actually it is about all of this.
I think the other thing is, I think one of the things that we've seen since the last election, When you had this slew of state agencies and states and others passing all of these laws and so forth, is eventually they make their way through the court system and we're seeing some setbacks on those things, right?
You would see the same thing here.
And I don't know constitutional law well enough to have any idea how this is going to play out.
A lot of it would depend on whether Congress is controlled by Democrats or Republicans or whatever.
But obviously, if Some of these people are fired or terminated in ways that violate federal employment law, or different kinds of things, or unions, or all kinds of stuff like that.
It'll be challenged in court.
But we've seen that takes years, right?
So let's say that Trump wins in 2024 and starts doing these things.
You're looking at what?
2026?
2027?
Before some of these cases start coming through.
And then you've also got the issue Is he going to listen?
If courts say things, is Trump going to respond to that if he's got this sort of unitary executive kind of idea at work?
So I think there's a lot of stuff.
I think you're right that it's agencies that you and I don't think about a lot, that regular people don't think about a lot, like the Federal Trade Commission, the FCC.
Kind of boring stuff to talk about, right?
It's like if you've got, like, I don't know, you get a landfall of money somehow, right?
Like maybe you win a lottery ticket for a few hundred bucks or something.
You're like, you know what?
Cool to go on that little trip we were going to go on.
Or we could, like, patch the roof.
Patching the roof sucks.
Nobody wants to talk about doing that.
That's not cool.
That's not fun.
It's how the FCC is.
It's how the Federal Trade Commission is.
But those are the ones that you put all those together.
You put a bunch of loyalists in there, as you say, that are going to investigate certain things, not investigate other things, enforce certain policies, not enforce other policies, target opponents of the president.
Uh, anybody who can be viewed as an opponent of the president, you see real force here.
And I think, again, for people who want to say, no, this is about, you know, just being a conservative.
This isn't.
We've got to stop the GOP, especially because they're going to enable this.
If it's a GOP-controlled Congress, they're not going to push back on this.
We could sit here all we want and say, well, what if it was a Democratic president?
You wouldn't be in favor of it.
No, they wouldn't.
But we know how Mitch McConnell works.
Like, he'll support it if Trump does it, and he'll oppose it when a Democrat does it.
That's how it works.
So yeah, it is, I think, authoritarian, a kind of totalitarian vision of making everything into a lever of the state.
That's part of what totalitarianism is.
And that's what it is.
The T words, the A words, the words that I know you hear sometimes, I hear sometimes, we're being too alarmist that we're not using these words right, that we shouldn't say this about a major political party in the U.S.
I think it's a real thing.
So here's another line going on, everything you just said.
Here's another line from the New York Times.
The legal theory rejects the idea that the government is composed of three separate branches with overlapping powers to check and balance each other.
Instead, the theory's adherents argue that Article 2 of the Constitution gives the president complete control of the executive branch.
Here is how the head of the Heritage Foundation explains it.
The notion of independent federal agencies or federal employees who don't answer to the president violates the very foundation of our democratic republic.
Okay, so I just want to close this by noting a couple of things.
You asked, you know, is Trump going to listen?
And these cases take a while.
So I want to point out that we are in a place this week where we're getting word that Fannie Willis out of Georgia is perhaps going to charge Trump with racketeering.
And so that seems like that's coming down the pipeline.
This week, we got the news that Trump's trial down in Florida will be in May.
Now, we've talked at length about that case.
We've talked about Alvin Bragg up in New York.
We've talked about the possibility of Georgia.
Dan, it is 2023.
It is years since those things happened.
The 2020 election happened in 2020.
Here's my point.
It's so much easier in our system for someone like Trump to get in there and break everything, bowl it over, mess it up.
I have a little kid and I know you've had little kids.
Do you know how long it takes to set up the house and then how easy it is for the two-year-old to tear up the house?
It's like you look up and you're like, there are toys and cards and stuff everywhere.
It took you 60 seconds to like turn this living room into an absolute, you know, I just took a step and I Like my foot is in deep pain right now because I stepped on a plastic dinosaur.
Whatever may be, okay?
That is how this works.
He can break everything and it takes years.
The lawsuits, the cases, the investigations.
If, if, if they're still in place by the time Trump is president again and if he ever leaves the presidency to actually prosecute him.
That's why this is so scary, okay?
Let me make one comparison and then I'll just, we'll take a break and we'll move on.
We have said, Dan, for years that the two exemplars, the two people that Many in the GOP are enamored with are Putin and Orban.
And Putin, I've laid this out in my book.
If you don't believe me, it's all in the book and I provide the receipts there.
Orban is very clear.
If you don't believe that, I don't know where you've been because they're holding CPAC in Hungary every year now.
Tucker Carlson has been like enamored and infatuated with Orban for years and Trump as well, okay?
The reason that Orban is important here, and we've covered this, if you go to our website and search for this, you'll find episodes on Orban and the illiberalism that he has brought to Hungary.
Orban is a guy who many saw as moderate.
He lost an election early in the millennium and he came back and he vowed that if he could ever get power again, He would rule in such a way that he could consolidate his hold over the government and essentially never leave.
And that is what he did.
And the reason I bring up Orban today is because Orban did that all from within the government.
He used the levers of government against itself to create a situation where there were no effective checks and balances in Hungary, where the parliament was totally in his pocket, where the media totally in his pocket, where the judges in many cases totally in his pocket, such that no one could really stop him.
And so I'm reading from the New Republic here, a piece from about a year ago that says this, within a few short years, the system of checks and balances that would protect the integrity of the democratic system was gone.
Through very deliberate choices, the governing party captured the once independent state institutions, which became the pillars of the one party regime.
Hungary reached a level of concentration of power that Europe had not seen for decades.
Dan, that's the dream.
I mean, reading that paragraph is eerie because it sounds exactly like what I just read about Trump's plan for the executive branch from the New York Times.
Within a few short years, the system of checks and balances that would protect the integrity of the democratic system was gone.
Orban is not leaving.
Orban, I think, will be in power in Hungary until Orban dies or something revolutionary happens.
That is the aim, I think, for Trump.
I think the goal is, as you say, this fever dream of complete power.
And I just want to point out, before we go to a break, That this claim that no conservative could use the existing system, well, I don't know.
Ronald Reagan did.
A lot of folks' heroes, like George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and George H.W.
Bush and so on, seems to me like they used the system and they were able to do whatever conservative things they felt like they needed to do without having to completely overhaul the entire thing.
Any final comments, Dan?
We haven't commented on the fact that the case down in Florida will be in May.
I think that's significant.
Anyway, before we go to a break, anything else you want to say?
I was just going to pick up on that and say May, of course, will be 2024, right?
So you'll be four years after this whole thing started.
So let's imagine that Trump does some of this stuff.
We have that legal lag.
The other thing that's going to happen is it could push past A Trump presidency.
Let's say that he goes 2024 to 2028 and he's gone.
What'll happen then, I promise you, is regardless of who's running the House and the Senate, the GOP line then will be, that was bad, he shouldn't have done that, but he's gone now.
I don't understand why we're still talking about this.
We need to stop looking backward.
We need to look forward.
You Democrats are always talking about, like, it'll turn into a way of trying to preserve the gains that have been made, that they see as gains, by Playing on the fact that it took so long to be able to do anything about it.
That's just like another thing to think about.
It's another piece that that lag does.
We've seen it with 9-11.
We've seen it with January 6.
We've seen it with all different kinds of things where the further you get from the event, the more the people who benefit from us not looking at the event tell us we should put it behind us and move forward.
So it's just another dimension to this.
I just, real quick, I think the May date for the trial, I think, is not great news.
I think that by this time next May, there's a chance that Trump is fully in place as the GOP frontrunner, that Trump is fully, like, just, you know, headed toward a showdown with Joe Biden.
And there's going to be a lot of people claiming by that time, like, how can you put this man on trial?
80 million Americans voted for him.
This is ridiculous.
I can't believe they're going ahead with this.
This is terrible.
You really want to put this man on trial while he's running for president?
I mean, that's what you're going to hear.
Now, some people are saying it's a victory because it's before the election.
I don't necessarily see it that way.
I think that the trial should have been in December.
But Nonetheless, we'll see what happens.
All right, let's take a break.
Just one quick thought on that before the break is, I think you're right.
I think it would have been better in December.
My fear was that if it got pushed past, that it wouldn't be after the election, and if he gets elected, it's not going to be for four or five years.
So, I'll take it as at least not the worst case scenario, but definitely not the best.
Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it, for sure.
All right, let's take a break.
We'll come back and we'll talk about how Trump is not the only one who seems to have these fever dreams of autocracy.
Be right back.
Hi, my name is Peter and I'm a prophet in the new novel, American Prophet.
I was the one who dreamed about the natural disaster just before it happened.
Oh, and the pandemic and that crazy election.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not bragging.
It's not like I asked for the job.
Actually, no one would ask for this job.
At least half the people will hate whatever I say, and almost everyone thinks I'm a little crazy.
Getting a date is next to impossible.
I've got a radio host who is making up conspiracies about me, a dude actually shooting at me, and an unhinged president threatening me.
But the job isn't all that bad.
I've gotten to see the country, and meet some really interesting people, and hopefully do some good along the way.
You can find my story on Amazon, Audible, or iTunes.
Just look for American Profit by Jeff Fulmer.
That's American Profit by Jeff Fulmer.
All right, Dan, we got to do it.
We haven't done it in a while.
You are our Florida.
You're, you're the man on the Florida beat in this, in this shop.
So we haven't talked about Uncle Ron in a while, but let's do it.
What's Uncle Ron up to?
What have we learned this week?
I know I've had to quit my DeSantis habit for a while.
Too many people are like, like, Oh, it's the Ron DeSantis weekly roundup, but we're back to Ron DeSantis.
Story that came out of a few different places this week.
Is that DeSantis revived, there had been a like a Florida state guard, kind of a model of the National Guard, but like at the state level that I think had been fairly defunct and he started, I don't know, I guess a couple years ago, sort of talking about reviving this.
I want to say this is not unique to Florida.
There are a lot of states that have these kind of state guards.
Sort of thing.
But he wanted to revive this, and they just had their first recruiting class last month in June, and they did this.
And 30 days in June, mostly young people who have high school diplomas but are, you know, so fairly young, late teens, early 20s, and a lot of military vets, retired military vets and others, were brought to a National Guard base near Jacksonville.
And the mission, the stated mission of this, the rationale that was originally given for this, was to train This group, the Florida Guard, to help Floridians in times of disasters.
It was a disaster relief kind of thing, right?
The National Guard there has been, I think, sort of understaffed and underfunded, not all of which will be Florida's fault.
And we know that Florida has lots of natural disasters.
All the news about increasing hurricanes and insurance companies pulling out and things like that, right?
People understand this is Straightforward rationale, kind of makes sense.
However, and I'm drawing a lot of this from a sort of a story in the Miami Herald that sort of broke a lot of this and sort of teased this out.
What happened was that there was a lot of sort of combat training instead.
People got there and they were assigned camo uniforms.
People with facial hair had to shave and like, you know, maintain a certain appearance.
They were drilled in things like rappelling and wilderness navigation and responding to military commands and so forth.
And when asked about this, and we'll get to this in a minute, but a lot of people opted out of this.
A lot of the people, especially the military vets who had been in the military were like, this is not what I signed up for.
This is not what I was told this was going to be.
They left, right?
Which is a sort of key piece of this.
But the DeSantis administration, when asked about this, they deferred questions to Major General John D. Haas, who oversees the state guard, right?
So they pass it off to them.
Again, DeSantis is not directly talking about much in Florida right now, right?
He's busy traveling the country and trying to run for president.
But this is what Major General Haas said.
He said it was a, quote, military organization, end quote.
He said that it will also aid in, quote, law enforcement, quelling riots, And illegal immigration, counter illegal immigration.
Again, I don't know, maybe nobody sent him the memo of what he was supposed to say or what it was supposed to be about, but saying the quiet parts out loud, the aim here.
Some trainees, again, Quit the program.
He described that as them being disgruntled.
They quit the program because they didn't make the cut.
They just weren't good enough.
They're just disgruntled people now.
He decried the fact that they chose to go to the media and so forth.
To counter that, a guy named Brian Newhouse, a retired 20-year Navy vet, he was chosen to lead one of the Guard's three divisions.
He described it as a state-run militia.
And I want to pick up on that point.
This is where I think this connects with the other things that we're seeing, right?
This attempt to kind of build A national autocracy if you're the president, but these kind of regional or state autocracies if you're some of the people on the right.
The State Guard answers only to the governor of Florida, right?
Unlike the National Guard, there's no federal oversight to this.
And the guard was originally stipulated that it could only be mobilized in the emergency and couldn't operate outside of the state, but those stipulations were dropped.
So Brad, I want to think about this for a minute, right?
One of the stipulations that was dropped is that this agency could only work in the state of Florida, not just for disaster relief, but only in the state of Florida.
So now you have this organization doing things that reportedly also include some weapons training.
With those in Florida who are saying that it has a mandate that potentially could be used in other states.
In March, remember this is in June, recruiting class in June, the training and stuff, we're in July now, this is all breaking.
Back in March, the state lawmakers and the governor wanted $89 million to buy the Guard boats, planes, and helicopters.
They wanted a specialized unit within it that had police powers.
They said that members could be sent to any state to, quote, protect and defend the people of Florida from threats to public safety.
So let's just let that sink in for a minute, right?
To protect the people of Florida, you can send this, like, Florida militia to any other state if you somehow feel that something going on in that state is a threat to you.
Can I just say something real quick?
Absolutely.
We on this show talk all the time about how there are so many tactics by folks, Christian nationalists, the religious right, and some of the American right, to basically say, I have to preemptively attack you in order to defend myself.
I mean, I feel like that's what we've been talking about for months when it comes to trans legislation, when it comes to, you know, attacks on marriage equality, not wanting to serve gay peoples and make websites for weddings.
I mean, whatever, whatever we've been talking about in those issues.
And here it is.
Hey, we have a state militia and we will send them anywhere we want in order to protect Florida.
That's the logic in a nutshell.
Anyway, sorry, I'm having a hard time.
I think I want to pick up on that point because I think no doubt it'll be states like Texas requesting them to come in and help police the border and they'll have their photo ops decrying the Biden administration and so forth.
But what happens, Brad, when A state like Florida with restrictive abortion laws decides to send their militia to some other state that people travel to to receive abortions, right?
Because they see it as a threat to Florida citizens or whatever.
What happens when they decide that they're going to try to restrict mail deliveries because they're afraid there are abortion pills in them?
I mean, it just, it gets really dystopian really fast.
What if there's a police brutality case in Atlanta?
And you know, there are, there's an uprising and, and Ron DeSantis is like, send in the militia.
Georgia's our neighbor.
Go ahead, get my militia, send them into Atlanta.
We'll show them.
And it's like all in the name of, well, we can't let this spread to Florida.
So we better get in there now and just send our, send the like Ron DeSantis brown shirts into Atlanta so we can stop the, the uprising.
I mean, that's, that's where my mind went as soon as you said that.
Yeah, exactly.
So those kinds of things.
And a couple of things I just want to highlight.
So I think what you picked up on right there, all of this, this, what would it mean to take seriously the language that they can be deployed to other states to basically protect quote unquote Florida, that this could include helicopters and planes and boats and whatever else.
One of the things, and I think that this is something about, again, the kind of psyche or the mind of people on the right, of the Christian nationalists, of people who are xenophobic, of people who are afraid of queer people and black people and are just afraid of a world where white people are not fully in control and ensconced in power and so forth, is the old saying that when everything looks like a nail, you use a hammer.
That's this, right?
That's the model of immigration control.
Send more people to the border, and if they come out of the river, just push them back.
We'll get to that story next.
But that's the logic, right?
That's the logic of, we feel threatened, we feel insecure.
We're going to create like a paramilitary state organization.
To run this, and it's not even run well, I couldn't even get into that, but they talked to like, you know, people who are real military and so forth and said that like, it's very slapdash, there's no like written instruction for people, there are people being sort of thrown around and kind of manhandled in ways that you're not allowed to do in the military and so forth.
But this first thing, like everything you see, it looks like a hammer, but I think And this is where I think it ties in again on this kind of micro level of what we see nationally with somebody like Trump is this effort of consolidating power.
And in the case of the states, consolidating state power to try to sidestep any kind of federal oversight or federal jurisdiction.
We'll create our own army.
We don't like that the federal government has to authorize the use of the National Guard or has some voice in that.
The Pentagon is part of that.
We don't like that, so we'll just create our own.
And of course, this is one of those selective times when if they're pressed on this, conservatives will suddenly be all for states' rights again.
They'll be for no federal oversight and a small federal government at the same time that they support Trump's authoritarian dreams.
Yeah, a lot that we could say about this, but I think all the scenarios are telling.
I think it's really telling that when pressed, They haven't said that's not what it was supposed to be or there were, you know, people on the ground who weren't doing what they were supposed to do or something like that.
I will point out a ray of sunlight, uh, in this.
I think they wanted this to be like 1,500 people or something like that.
I think their first, like, recruiting class was, like, a net of, like, 120 people or something, so it was not, uh, not highly successful to this point, but a really telling sort of point.
I should also say that from the things I've read, this is not typical of state guards in other states.
This goes far beyond So, I've already said it, but I think for me, this is just like a Ron DeSantis brown shirt situation.
You said it, I don't need to kind of repeat everything you've said, but This is worth highlighting.
This is the attempt to create a state militia that sidesteps every piece of federal oversight, every piece of regulation, every process or institution in place that would prevent it from being abused at the governor's whim.
That's exactly what Trump is trying to do with the executive branch.
It's just we don't like regulation.
We don't like oversight.
When they say we don't like big government, You know what I hear, Dan, is not like, Oh yeah, we just, we're fiscal conservatives.
We just don't, taxes and the government.
That's what I hear is government is often a regulatory, meaning government is often like full of oversight and enforcing policies and standards.
And so if I can create my own militia and do whatever I want with it, and it answers only to me, I don't have to wait for the federal government to authorize.
I don't need any kind of.
other like authority or anyone else to get on board.
Now I just, it's, this is the like, Ron DeSantis vigilante slush fund, which Just pull out the petty cash from the drawer, spend it on whatever you want.
Well, this is just like, well, I got my militia over here.
I'm the governor.
One phone call and I'm going to send them where I want to defend Florida, wherever that may be.
California or Texas or Georgia or anywhere else that I think that that's appropriate.
And I just want to come back to some words you said, so people don't forget them, that this was supposed to be disaster relief, meaning, hey, And I can totally see this, Dan, right?
I can totally see a governor saying, because of the climate crisis, we have more natural disasters in our state.
So what we're offering is a program where you can come train as ex-military or otherwise, and help us when these things manifest themselves.
So you want to help with folks trying to recover from a hurricane.
People rebuilding homes, people who are dealing with flooding and you can't find your loved one and they're trapped or there's so many scenarios.
And instead it turns into like enforcement, vigilante like justice, like send these guys out to do whatever the governor says he wants them to do.
And you can see it.
You can see What this would turn into at DeSantis whim.
So anyway, those are my thoughts on this story.
Anything to wrap this up before we go to something else?
Just a couple final takeaways.
I think to try to like see the broader picture of this, right?
The first thing that I said, when everything looks like a nail, you use a hammer.
Always.
Remember you, you talked a while back about the kind of church camp or the men's camp or whatever.
What is it?
It turns into like paramilitary training and all of this kind of stuff.
Again, the sense that we are threatened and when we are threatened, we can only respond with violence.
We can only respond with force.
Things like empathy or understanding or discussion or for sissies and like so we run around in the woods and and we jump we jump off towers and things like that like I see a link between things like this and broader things like that I think it's a broader culture of this sense of of a kind of violent reaction to a perceived threat and just the last one that's this whole like creating this fiefdom that sidesteps things Some of the anti-trans laws.
We're going to go around the American Medical Association.
We're going to go around the American Academy of Pediatrics.
We're just not going to listen to them.
Back in the COVID days, we're going to just do our own thing.
The CDC, National Institutes of Health, you folks, you can say what you want, but we're going to ignore that.
In Florida, we're going to create our own accrediting agencies.
We're done with crediting institutions of higher education.
College board, you've got these courses we think are too progressive.
We're going to create our own state-sanctioned equivalent, like college equivalency courses and so forth.
We've seen this pattern, especially in Florida, but I think the ways that it plays out in Florida will determine how and to what extent it becomes a pattern that's picked up other places.
Well, this is a good time to mention that out of Florida this week, there were several teachers who were incredibly upset because some of the new curricula that they're supposed to teach this coming school year claims that enslaved people received many benefits from their situation.
So that's kind of what's happening down there, just to remind people.
All right, let's take a break.
We'll come back.
And talk about one more instance of this kind of a hammer and nail approach to national security and governance in this time in Texas.
Be right back.
All right, Dan, the two stories we've talked about today are distressing, I think, because of what they portend for the American rights vision for the future.
The story we're going to talk about now is overwhelmingly distressing because of what it means for human life and the conditions in which many people are finding themselves.
So go ahead, let us have it.
What happened?
What did we learn about what's going on in Texas this week?
Yeah, so this story was covered really well in a lot of places.
The Houston Chronicle, I think, had a story about this.
Independent and other agencies picked this up.
But basically, Texas troopers were apparently instructed to push children into the Rio Grande and deny water to immigrants.
And this included small children.
This included nursing children.
In other words, children who were probably not able to swim in a river.
There was an email that was recovered.
Again, I'm reading from an article in The Independent, and apparently they got this email.
It's from a medic with the Department of Public Safety, so this is part of what was involved here, to his superiors.
And this is what he says, okay?
It says, the trooper described an incident on 25 June in which troopers came across an exhausted group of 120 people, which included several small children and nursing babies, set up along a fence along the river.
Quote, we were given orders to push the people back into the water to go to Mexico.
We decided this was not the correct thing to do with the very real potential of exhausted people drowning.
So good on him.
Good on the troops that were there that they were like, we're not we're not going to do this.
After they voiced their concerns, they were told to quote, tell them to go to Mexico and get into our vehicles and leave.
So they didn't push them in the river, but they were ordered to leave.
So shortly after, other troopers worked with border control to care for the migrants.
So I want to note, this isn't border control that did this, right?
Not the federal agency that did this.
This is the Texas Department of Safety that did this.
The trooper also wrote how officers were told not to provide water to asylum seekers.
We've talked about this before.
Asylum seekers are not Quote-unquote illegal or undocumented immigrants.
It's like a different category, and they have rights.
And the country, a country like the U.S., to which an asylum seeker makes a request for asylum has legal and ethical obligations to that person.
So they were told, according to this, to not provide water to asylum seekers despite the extreme heat, prompting the trooper to describe the orders to his superior as inhumane in the email.
Quote, due to the extreme heat, the order to not give people water needs to be immediately reversed as well.
Okay, so this is the story of what's going on.
Other Texas agents recently came under fire for placing razor wire in the river.
Um, which obviously is a hazard.
Uh, those responsible claimed the purpose was to deflect, uh, to defer smugglers, excuse me, to deter smugglers, uh, not to harm migrants, but many reports of injuries are out there, right?
People were injured by this.
And then, uh, Governor Abbott's press secretary was approached with this, this issue of putting razor wire in the river.
And this is what he said.
Andrew Mahleris, I think is how you pronounce his name, Governor Abbott's press secretary, spoke in defense of the razor wire.
He said in an email again to The Independent, quote, Texas is deploying every tool and strategy to deter and repel illegal crossings between ports of entry as President Biden's dangerous open border policies entice migrants from over 150 countries to risk their lives entering the country illegally.
Brad sounds to me like, according to Abbott's press secretary, it was to deter migrants, not smugglers.
DPS spokespeople have denied any policies, right?
They're saying this is not a matter of policy.
Now this is one of those things where these agencies hide behind this.
I'm sure it's not.
I'm sure there is no directive somewhere saying this is the proper protocol when you encounter people who you think of coming to the country illegally to like push them back in the river so that they can either make it back to the other shore or drown.
Somebody gave those orders.
Everybody has a superior officer, a superior overseer, whose job is to look at what they're doing.
These people all have to file reports.
Any of us, you, me, anybody who's lived in any kind of organization or occupation with administration knows you have to file reports.
Any kind of military or government agency, triple that.
Somebody somewhere knew this is happening and didn't put a stop to it.
And now you've got the whistleblowers and you've got the media involved in all of this.
What does it show me again?
If every problem is a nail, you use a hammer.
And more importantly, if other human beings are nails, if that's all they are is an impediment, a threat, if they threaten your national security, they threaten the purity of your country, they need to be kept out at all costs.
And if that means that you're ordering people to put infants or children into a river where they will probably drown, Well, so be it, because what?
The reason really escapes me, but that's the story.
And again, I see it very much in keeping with the logic or the ethos, as it were, the culture of so-called security, of purity, of fear, of power that we see in Trump, that we saw in DeSantis, that we see here in Abbott and these agents in Texas.
I'm going to make a point that I think is really obvious.
I don't think anyone listening is going to think this is absolutely Brilliant or genius or anything like that.
I just think though that it's worth saying, which is in Texas, you have a really restrictive law on abortion.
And if you listen to Texans lawmakers from the GOP, they will tell you all about the sanctity of life.
They will tell you about the fight for unborn children.
They will tell you about the ways that we should protect those who are most vulnerable.
We've said this on the show, Dan, 10 million times.
I'm going to say it again.
There's this idea of a culture of life.
You've done a whole set of episodes on this in the It's in the Code series.
People can go check that out.
We in Texas need to protect every life, every unborn child, the most vulnerable, the most precious, God's angels.
Unless that child is actually born and nursing with its mother, exhausted from a long journey, then it might be the case that we should push that child in a river.
This kind of story just illustrates the absolute hypocrisy and cruelty, right, of this approach.
And I think there's times people think this is hypothetical or theoretical, that, oh yeah, culture of life, except for there's no universal pre-K, or they want to take lunches away from schools for underprivileged children.
Some people can think through the theory of that, I guess.
They can think through, what does that mean for the budget and the school districts?
Do they have enough funds?
And should we really be providing universal pre-K or resources for new mothers?
Whatever.
All right.
Maybe that's a theoretical issue for you.
Here's a real life issue.
In one side of their mouth, Texan lawmakers are like, protect every unborn child, do everything you can not to let another abortion take place in this state.
Even if that's a woman with an ectopic pregnancy or a fetus that is not viable, don't let her have an abortion.
No way, not on our watch.
We're not doing that here.
Oh, you're telling me that there's no chance that this fetus will survive outside of the womb and that the mother or potential mother, the pregnant woman, I should say, is Her life's in danger?
Well, too bad.
We don't do abortion in this state because we want to protect the children.
And if there's children that come from another place across a river that marks a border between two nations, then push them back in that river.
I mean, none of this, Dan, is brilliant.
None of this is like insightful.
None of this is like, this is just a pure hypocrisy of this.
And it seems worth pointing it out at least.
One point I want to make, I'm kind of pushing where I'm going to go with it.
It's in the code in the next episode, but one of the things I hear from people all the time is just the lack of empathy, right?
I think most of us, especially if you've had a child, if you've ever had a nursing child or a little child, or maybe you've had a nephew or a niece or a younger sibling or something, you see little kids and There's some transference of that to them, right?
You see that and you're like, wow, like, God, can you imagine doing that?
Having to do that with your kids?
Can you imagine your kids being this at risk or whatever?
And people ask me, I'm sure they ask you, how can they do this?
Like, how can you like take a kid and Put them back in there.
And they didn't, right?
These troopers didn't.
To their credit, they didn't do this, but somebody ordered them to.
And one of the issues is that for that kind of mindset that is focused on national purity, That can only view it as insiders and outsiders.
Empathy is a liability.
It's not a virtue.
It's a vice.
It's not a strength.
It's a weakness, and it has to be eradicated.
And that's where I think the cruelty and hypocrisy of this is really not accidental to this, to maintain the kind of social identity that the GOP and Christian nationalists and people like them need.
They have to prevent people from feeling empathy for others who are not like themselves.
And I think that's what we see in things like this.
And as I say, plug the episode.
I'll be talking about that this week.
But I think that lack of empathy is what just screams out to me when I hear things like this.
I literally can't imagine doing this or feeling this or ordering somebody to do something like this.
Yeah.
Everything we cover on this show is heavy and not easy, but I feel like this week is particularly just tough.
And so if you're listening, yeah, after you listen, go get yourself a cold iced tea and do something fun and enjoyable.
All right, Dan, let's go to reasons for hope.
I'll let you go first.
What is your reason for hope this week?
Actually, Brad, I'm going to defer to you because last week I stole yours.
There's no way you're stealing mine this week.
I can tell you.
Oh, you're confident?
All right, so I will go first.
Mine is something, an article that came out this week.
I think I didn't come across it until yesterday or something, but it's an article in Politico about college towns, quote, decimating the GOP.
And it was just this idea.
Looking at the demographics and politics, the college town, and everybody has an idea of what we mean by college towns.
They've actually a criteria of what a college town is, but I want to point out this is not major cities.
We all know that lots of big urban centers are more democratic.
They're not counting places like New York City or San Francisco or somewhere.
They have lots of colleges, but they've got so many other things that they're not defined by that, right?
They're talking about municipalities, but a college really is kind of the beating heart of the town and the employer and so forth.
It was just an article about the effect that these places are having on the right, mostly in swing states.
That's less pronounced, the effects that they trace in red states, but in swing states and places like Colorado, places like Arizona, places like Virginia, North Carolina.
I took great hope from that, and I think it's interesting that the attacks I've said for years, right-wing attacks on higher ed are not really about budgets and things or about this kind of ideological kinds of issues.
We've seen that playing out explicitly.
We see it here, but I think we see the backlash against the backlash taking shape.
So I had a lot of hope about that.
I hope to dive into the article more thoroughly at some point, but I came across that.
No, it is good news.
I think of a place like Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania is a swing state.
And if you go to Pennsylvania, there are so many colleges in Pennsylvania, just up and down the state, more like east and west throughout the state, because Pennsylvania is an east-west state.
Anyway, so I saw that article too.
It is good news.
And I think that's one of the things that is linked here is reproductive rights.
So if you're a young person at a college campus, you may be voting simply on the basis of reproductive rights.
And so we're going to see that in the next election.
The reason you could not steal my reason for hope this week is because it's very personal.
I moved, which we talked about at the beginning, and it was a terribly unfun process.
However, I'm now recording from a room, Dan.
Not a storage closet.
A room.
I'm sitting in a room.
I will not be exposed to the elements when we are recording this podcast.
I will not be wearing a ski cap and a, like a down jacket because it's 37 degrees outside and I'm in a storage closet that is exposed to the 37 degrees.
So that's fun.
And it leads to something we're hoping to start as soon as next week, which is doing these weekly roundups on.
Video as well as audio and putting them on YouTube with the video available.
So if you are a YouTube person or you have YouTube people in your life, folks who would rather watch or listen to a podcast on YouTube and you want to see more than just a graphic or some headlines, then hopefully by next week we will be up and running and posting these to YouTube.
So that's something that I'm looking forward to and I'm sure Dan that we'll be challenging some of the biggest YouTube influencers out there very soon.
And Mr. Beast, better watch out.
I'm sure we're coming.
We're hot on his heels.
Yeah.
Logan Paul, Mr. Beast, doesn't matter who you are, watch out.
What kind of Lamborghini are you going to get, Dan, when we ascend the ranks of YouTube?
I've always thought the canary yellow ones are the ones that just really scream out about the insecurities of owning a Lamborghini.
So I think that's clearly the direction I'm going to go.
As a fundamentally insecure person, that's the direction I have to go.
It'll offset the cargo shorts.
You're tall, and you tried to bench press 400 pounds when we were at Oxford together.
You're a really big person, just in terms of you're tall and full of muscle.
Can you get into a Lamborghini?
How many times have you ridden in a Lamborghini in your life?
I was going to say, I have no idea.
I've never, I've never actually been in one.
I was in like, I forget what kind.
I was, I was in like a really nice sports car like once.
And yeah, like my knees were up against my chin and like my shins are hitting the like front dash.
So, uh, yeah, not the, not the car for me.
Yeah.
You're going to have to get something else.
I'll probably get the Lamborghini.
You'll have to get.
I'll be rocking the hot new Camry or something like that.
That's.
That's that's the way I'll be going.
That maybe that will be our rap video.
Just it would just us and a Camry.
All right.
We are totally off.
Today was so heavy and depressing.
I feel like we're now losing it a little bit.
So we're going to sign off.
All right, y'all.
A hot new Camry.
That's that's a rap song.
I'm going to think about I'm going to write some I'm going to write some lyrics here.
So I'm going to drop a verse.
Find us at Straight White JC.
Find me at Bradley Onishi.
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I want to say thank you to all our new patrons and the people who've supported us and donated.
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If you're still listening after all of the Lamborghini and Camry talk, if you're still there, I'm going to ask you to go give us a review on Apple Podcasts.
For some reason, Dan, the last month has seen a lot of motivated trolls who've given us a lot of one-star reviews and used language I will not repeat here, slurs and name-calling and things like that.
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