Brad and Dan discuss three main stories from the week:
The GOP debate, where Trump was somehow both absent and present.
The killing of a shop owner in CA over her display of the Pride flag.
The appearannce of Spokane mayor Nadine Woodward at a Christian nationalist rally with Sean Feucht and Matth Shea
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Ornishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Here today, coming from Dallas, Texas.
Actually, no, let me back up, Dan.
I'm going to get a lot of emails.
I'm actually here from Fort Worth, Texas, but in one big Metroplex these days, they, they connect and they're just, there's no more in between.
So coming to you from Fort Worth, Texas, along with my co-host.
I am Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
I am not in Fort Worth.
I am in Massachusetts.
And yeah, people will remember I went to college in Oklahoma, and so there were a lot of DFW area students.
And like, yeah, it can get pretty territorial if you misstate it.
So don't get it wrong, Brad.
I want to see you back happy and not have people hold you hostage because, you know, They demand that you make reparations for wrong pronunciation of like which state you're in or which part of the state.
So, yeah.
Last night at dinner I made the mistake of asking the waiter if they had Ice tea and everyone at the table laughed at me and told me, honey, you're in Texas.
Sweet tea comes out of the faucet sometimes.
So, uh, so that was good by me.
So that's happening.
And anyway, so that is, that's a thing.
And, uh.
Here to talk with the Metroplex Atheists and about keeping God out of public schools.
And there's a lawsuit and the whole thing.
So it's a really fun event, but it should be a good day.
So that's why I'm here and doing what I'm doing.
I want to point out to you one more thing, Dan, and that is that I'm staying at a Radisson.
It's a nice place.
It has its own disco.
Like I'm talking about its own nightclub, Dan.
It's incredible.
Have you ever been to a Radisson with its own nightclub?
Like people were in there cutting a rug.
Like, and I don't even know who says cutting a rug other than my grandma.
I don't even know why I just said that, but people were in there dancing when I got back from dinner and, you know, having a great time dancing to Beyonce and all kinds of stuff.
It was amazing.
I don't know.
I've never been to a Radisson that had its own disco.
So I just kind of feel like this is one of those moments when I know I've made it.
Like, you know what I mean?
Like I can tell my children someday, like, yes, I had this podcast and I stayed at a Radisson with a disco.
Those were the days I was really rolling.
You know what I mean?
I don't know.
Is that, what do you think?
So, you know me and the nightclub scene, I'm pretty tight with it.
So, I think you're right.
No, I've never been in a Radisson with it.
So, this is true.
You're talking to somebody who, like, in two weeks is going to a concert to see, like, Rob Zombie and Alice Cooper.
So, yeah, the nightclub thing, it doesn't, I'm not a nightclub star.
But no, actually, I've never been, I don't think I've ever been in any hotel as, like, It's own nightclub, so I think you have made it.
I think we I guess we just need to close up shop.
There's nowhere to go but down from here as Brad does his like tour of Texas Radisons.
I just feel like what I hope someday is you and I are at a Radisson with a disco together someday and we go in and while everyone's dancing to like Beyonce and everything else, you request Rob Zombie and the DJ looks at you like, what did you just say?
That is something I hope will happen.
Will it go over well if I try to start like a mosh pit like in a nightclub or is that, that's probably going to get me in trouble, I think.
And I will also do that thing where like middle-aged guys forget that they're middle-aged guys and you jump in there and like immediately like, I won't even break anything.
I'll just like pull a hamstring.
And people be like, well, how'd you pull your hammy?
I'm like, yeah, I was trying to mosh and I can't now because I'm old.
That's what I'll do.
And all we have to do to have another live event is tell people that I'm in a nightclub.
I think people would come just to watch.
I think that's a good plan.
We did a live event in Denver last November, and I think next year we're going to do a live event in Fort Worth at this Radisson at a disco.
So everybody, details coming soon.
Get your hotel reservations.
We'll block it off.
You'll need to reserve a room under the code Robzombie, and it'll be good.
All right.
If Robzombie's listening, please don't sue us.
We're just having fun.
I don't know if that's it.
We're going to get emails from Robzombie's lawyer right now, but I hope not.
Okay, let's focus this.
Just promoting his music, yeah.
All right, we want to talk about, I think, three things today.
One is the GOP debate of Trump not being there, as well as what happened there.
Something we're going to call trickle-down Trumpism.
I think we'll also get into just horrific news this week out of California, my home state.
Of a woman who was shot, allegedly over the display of a pride flag at one of the stores that she owns.
And then at the end, we'll talk about something up in Spokane, which is the mayor, Nadine Woodward, who appeared on stage with none other than Sean Foyt, who I know most of you listening know about, but also Matt Shea, who's an infamous former legislature, legislator and pastor in the area.
And we'll talk about why that's such a big deal.
So Dan, let me jump in here and talk about the GOP debate and let's get into some of that.
So do you want to, well, First of all, let me just, Paul, I'm going to throw it to you, but I just want to say about the GOP debate, when I turned it on, you know, you and I do this kind of every week.
We're pretty, pretty saturated with politics and I turned it on and even I was like, Who is that again?
Wait, who is that guy?
Bergen?
Okay, good.
Oh yeah, that's Asa Hutchinson.
Yep.
I remember him from Arkansas.
Okay.
That's that guy.
Is Scott Baio here?
All right.
No, no Scott Baio.
All right.
Maybe Kevin Sorvo.
Who are these people?
So it was one of those nights.
Anyway.
So I'll let, I'll take it to you.
What are some thoughts on the debate?
We both have things.
Trump was not there.
Trump was talking to Tucker Carlson.
So we'll get into that, but off to you.
What's up?
What's up with you and the GOP debate?
I'll just pick up with that, you know, and I'm not the first one to say this.
Lots of people have said it, you know, they always do the who won the debate kind of thing.
And as much as debates are debates now, like regardless of where they are on the political spectrum, right, it's just people trying to kind of score points on each other.
Like, everybody kind of agrees, and I think they're right, too, that, like, the sort of looming presence in the debate was the person who wasn't there, right?
It was Trump.
It was everybody.
I've never seen a presidential primary like this where everybody's afraid to criticize, like, the candidate that they want people to vote against, right?
Like you had Chris Christie, who's the only one who really sort of consciously or vocally said something anti-Trump or was taken as anti-Trump, gets booed.
Everybody sort of says that they'd support, you know, ongoing support for Trump and so forth.
And like a lot of other people have said, Trump was kind of the big winner in this, right?
In any debate, everybody knows the person who's leading has the least to gain from being in a debate.
And Trump's not unique in being in the position of deciding not to participate or doing that.
Most candidates end up doing it because they kind of feel like they have to.
Of course, that doesn't hold to Trump.
And that was the big one, is just how present Trump was, despite the fact that he's absent.
I still can't fully get my head around why in the world people would vote for you if you won't say That your opponent is somebody that, like, you're gonna do a better job than or something?
Like, I just... I don't know.
I don't know if they're just running down the clock and hoping that he tanks because of legal stuff or what, but...
That was a piece.
And then I think the other one, I'll throw it over to you to lead us on it, is the trickle-down Trumpism, excuse me, trickle-down Trumpism, like you're talking about.
Again, he was present there because so many of, I think not just the policies or the positions or the attitudes in the GOP, but the articulation of it and the rhetoric of it and the kind of militaristic Hyper-masculine, just whatever kind of rhetoric is so prevalent and so common in the GOP now, and I think that that is a Trump effect.
Yeah, let's talk about that.
So, we have this situation where Trump doesn't attend.
And Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who wrote Strongmen, many of you will know who Ruth is, had a great tweet and explanation of that.
She says, Trump's not there because dictators don't debate.
If you want to be an autocrat, you don't debate.
You are just supposed to be the leader.
You have authority Inherently.
It comes from heaven, it comes from the divine, it is whatever.
But you don't need to debate because you're not there to show that you're one of the best candidates.
You are the candidate.
And I think that's something we should take away from Trump not being there.
How can you be a viable presidential candidate if you won't debate the issues?
That seems like a fair question.
Well, the answer is I am the candidate who is chosen by God as an inherent right to be the leader because that's who I am.
And he even said it in his interview with Tucker Carlson, why would I get on stage with a bunch of people who have no business running for president?
And you're like, dude, you've been indicted four times.
A judge decided that you sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll.
You are the only president to be impeached twice and you incited an insurrection.
What right do you have to run for president?
And yet he's turning it around on everyone else.
So I think that's something to keep in mind.
The very fact that Trump would not debate is not normal.
Just don't don't lose sight of that.
OK, that's one.
Two, as you said, Dan, most of the folks, Christie and a little bit of Hutchinson aside, would say nothing negative about him.
When asked, would you vote for Donald Trump, even if he's convicted for crimes?
The majority of the stage raised their hand and said yes.
So there was this fealty to Trump.
And as you said, Dan, there was this lack of desire to criticize him.
And it almost just felt like a group of people thinking, well, if he gets arrested and put away or if he just flames out or something happens and Then hopefully they'll pick me, right?
I mean, it almost felt like there's no way for me to beat him.
There's no way for us to actually usurp him.
So let's just hope that he's out of the picture.
And if he's out of the picture, hopefully I'll be the guy who they pick.
I'll give you an example of this.
I'm a surfer, and when you're out there surfing, there's a very delicate and ritualized order of who gets what wave, okay?
And I won't go into it.
But if you're surfing and you know the rules, you know that when a good wave comes, you know that somebody in a certain position has the right of way.
And you better not like take the wave if they're already on it because they're going to be pretty upset and you're going to break surfer code and it's a whole thing, right?
Fist fights happen, blah, blah, blah.
All right.
Why do I say that?
I say that because one strategy that you can use as a surfer is like sit in a certain position, hope that the person with the right of way Wipes out, doesn't get the wave, messes up, and then you jump on and you take the wave when they are no longer available to get it because they wiped out or messed up or something else.
I felt like that's what was going on at the Republican debate is they're just waiting for Trump to kind of wipe out and then maybe they'll ride the wave of GOP support.
All right, I want to talk about two more things related to this and I'll throw it back to you.
The Trumpism was there not only in their fealty to him, but also in the ways that a lot of the candidates discuss the issue.
So, I'll just go over a couple so that we don't spend all day on this.
One is Ron DeSantis says on day one he will use troops in Mexico, not at the border, in Mexico.
If you go back to 2016, Dan, Trump really, if you go back to that terrible year of 2016 that I know none of you listening want to do, and I'm not asking you to, but if you did, you would find that Trump's meteoric rise in the GOP primary came when he started talking about the border.
I mean, he said all the time in 2016, you guys weren't even talking about this until I came on.
You guys weren't even talking about this until I showed up.
What happens years later, two cycles later?
His leading rival is talking about invading Mexico in an act of war on the first day of his, you know, imagined presidential term.
Dan, this is what happens when you platform a radical.
It trickles down.
Ron DeSantis, I will invade Mexico.
That's an act of war.
What are you talking about?
OK, second, Number of the candidates, including Mike Pence and Ron DeSantis said they would get rid of the Department of Education.
Now we've heard this before, but I just want to reiterate this is an extreme position.
So you're telling me you're going to get rid of the Department of Education?
Right.
We're talking about like 200,000 federal employees.
We're also just talking about having standards for the ways that our students learn, having an agency that oversees that and does not allow runaway states or runaway actors to kind of go rogue in the most egregious senses.
Again, it's a radical position to say you want to get rid of the Department of Education, especially in a context Well, as we've covered on this show, we have Oklahoma funding with taxpayer money a Catholic school.
We have Texas trying to put the Ten Commandments in schools.
We have Idaho saying that coaches and teachers might be able to pray in front of their students at practice or in the classroom.
When we have books being banned, LGBTQ teachers being run out, the Teacher of the Year in Idaho leaving the state because she feels like she can't teach there anymore.
So the Department of Education, that's a radical position.
And I'll give you one more and then I'll shut up.
Vivek Ramaswamy says full out that climate change is a hoax.
He looks into the camera and says, climate change is a hoax, Dan.
Okay.
This, if you compare the GOP to political parties across the developed world, right?
If you talk about the countries that are supposedly our colleagues or peers on the world stage, right?
We can talk about Japan, we can talk about Germany, we can talk about the UK, France, wherever.
The idea to just come out and say climate change is a hoax is one of the most radical positions a mainstream political party takes in the context of the global developed world.
There are people in Germany that might say that.
And you know what, Dan?
They get very little support compared to the GOP.
And I just want to take a minute and bear with me, Dan, and I promise I'll keep this short.
I wasn't here last week.
I want to thank you.
I didn't thank you at the top for going solo last week.
I really appreciate that.
But what I did not have a chance to say is this.
A couple of weeks ago, the fire hits Maui.
Maui is the place where my family immigrated to from Japan four or five generations ago.
It means an immense amount to us as a family.
Maui is, in essence, the place where our American story began.
That Maui's a place for my dad, who was born and raised there, that, you know, he doesn't live there anymore, but I'm telling you, when he wakes up in the morning, the first thing he thinks about is Maui.
That's what Maui means to him.
It's really hard to explain to y'all who aren't following this every day, what the fire in Maui has, the impact it's going to have on, on that community for not just the next month, not the next year, for the next generation.
In addition, Dan, we are having a baby and that baby's coming soon.
So, some of you didn't know that.
Big news, I know.
Probably going to be trending on Twitter here in a minute.
But we had a baby shower last week, Dan.
So in the wake of the Maui news, my family in Southern California was dealing with a hurricane.
So a lot of the folks who might have made the drive up to where I live now to attend their baby shower did not come.
Because I don't know, there was a hurricane in Southern California.
My dad lives in Palm Springs now.
And he, as many of you may know, lived in an area that was dramatically affected by the hurricane.
And he wasn't there.
You know where he was, Dan?
He was on a road trip to Northern California, trying to see friends at the Oregon-California border.
But guess what?
He couldn't see his friends.
You know why?
Raging wildfires.
So I, you know, you and I on this podcast, we don't usually have choice words.
We don't go on rants full of expletives and things.
And so I'm not going to do that today.
But the things that I feel when Vivek says that on the stage, when Ramaswamy says that on the stage, are immense rage.
Because it is not just an unpopular policy position.
It is not just a clear way for a man who did not vote in the previous elections, trying to kind of do a flash in the pan ride to fame here in his election bid.
It's not just a way for him to get the spotlight.
It is.
It is.
And I'm going to try to stay calm here.
It is really, really cruel when you think about the people in Maui who are still trying to pick up the pieces of a community that vanished in an instant.
When there's a hurricane, when there are fires, when Washington State, when the Midwest is under a heat advisory of 105 for the next week, and this man has the gall to look at the camera and say, Climate change is a hoax.
I'm going to stop.
I'm going to say all the expletives and things I want to say in my head, and I'm going to throw it to you for your thoughts on trickle-down Trumpism before we go to some mess.
Yeah, so I want to just pick up on a couple of those, a couple of things that I think are linked here, right?
Because one is the extremism, and you're right about the, you know, the Department of Education, and of course, The one obvious piece of this is that part of the reason they don't want a Department of Education to stop as you say runaway states is because they're all like governors and leaders and supporters of runaway states like Florida or you rattle off a few things I think Arkansas as well just said that they
We're not going to recognize credit for the AP Black History course, the same course that was targeted by DeSantis in Florida, right?
So that's a piece of it, but part of it, if people are like, why the extremes?
Just a fact to think about is that since 1988, okay, the GOP has won one popular presidential vote, right?
They've won the popular vote for president one time.
It was Not 2000, 2004, when George W. Bush won his second term, right?
That's it.
They're not good.
Bush?
Yeah.
Bush-Carrie.
It was Bush-Carrie.
It was Bush-Carrie.
Thank you.
And the last GOP president to do before him was his father, after Reagan's two terms.
They have to become more and more and more extreme.
And again, I don't see this as Trump invented this.
He didn't invent it.
But he brought it up from the depths.
He brought it out in the open.
And this is why, for me, things like the election denial and everything else, number one, they make sense.
There's a certain logic to this.
We can't win an election if we're the GOP on sort of Even ground in a presidential election.
So we'll say that it was fake, we'll say that it was stolen, whatever.
But it's also going to push us to more and more far extremes.
And we've talked about this for years too, and you see the culmination of it now.
They are so beholden to the far right And a shrinking electorate, right?
An aging white population.
And so they just have to get more and more and more radical to keep those people on board.
They can't lose them because if they lose them, they have really nobody to vote for them.
And so you get this kind of cycle where they're caught In these radical positions, even if they didn't believe them, and people ask you, I know they ask you, they ask me, you know, do they really believe this?
Do they just say it?
Whatever, we brought this question and posed it to our panelists at our Denver event, and the short answer is it doesn't matter because the effects are the same, right?
I want to bring that up because I think Ramaswamy's statements are the same kind of thing because people also, and I've seen in the wake of that, lots of people posting things and writing, you know, why are people drawn to believe these conspiracy theories and so forth?
And one answer is, and this is going to sound weird, we think of conspiracy theories so often in terms of belief, right?
People get really wrapped up in the how can they believe these things and the data says this and how can they ignore, Brad, all the evidence that you're giving, right?
The hints of like, changing climate patterns and events all over the U.S., not to mention the rest of the globe.
And the answer is it feels good to believe it.
It feels good.
It feels comforting to believe that not that humans screwed up the planet.
It's going to be really hard to try to fix it.
Not we have supported the West, the U.S., countries like this for generations, laissez-faire economic policies that despoil the planet.
And not because that stuff also gets us wrapped up in all kinds of stuff that we also don't want to talk about on the right, about colonialism and race relations and our Arguably, why a response to what's going on in Maui is more muted when it's, you know, it's far away and people don't even realize it's part of the U.S., or there are lots of non-white people who live in Hawaii, including Native Hawaiians, right?
All of these kinds of things, it feels so much better to say, you know, it's a hoax.
And then I can just sleep well at night and I can feel good about it.
And this is what the GOP is pandering to.
And I think this is part of why people have to recognize how potent this is, because there are a lot of Americans that it just feels better To feel all these things.
It feels better to be angry all the time than to be scared.
It feels better to know that, you know, if I'm nervous around people of color, they kind of scare me.
They kind of make me nervous.
My kids are learning stuff in history classes I didn't learn.
It's a lot easier to just be angry about that and shut it out than it is to have to look in a mirror and take a look and say, wow, like, God, what if all the stuff my teachers told me wasn't the way it is?
I obviously I can go on about this forever but I think that that's for me I guess I'm trying to get which is for me the emotion that I think all of this ties into that's on display in the debate, that's on display in the election, that's on display in this kind of ramping up of rhetoric.
I'll go ahead and jump to the next topic, then, if we're talking about emotion here, which is the role of abortion in the debate, I thought was really significant.
And CNN and others have had really good sort of summaries, and they summed it up well.
It would take a while to go through every candidate and try to pin down what they've said, but they're kind of all over the map, right?
Some candidates were like, you know, 15-week federal abortion ban is what we should do.
Some said they were opposed to a nationwide ban.
Some have been in states that have enacted six-week bans, but nobody was really willing to say whether or not they actually support that at a federal level or if they would as president and so forth.
But I think what it highlights, and this is another piece, is where the GOP is still caught between at least kind of three poles here.
One is that same group on the far right who are so adamantly opposed to any form of abortion that they have to take radical positions.
As you hammer all the time, a majority, around two-thirds of Americans in general approve, favor some form of abortion access, right?
And then the ones who don't know whether they support a federal ban or whether all that rhetoric they had about states' rights for decades was true, and they don't know what to do.
And I think that was on full display.
And I was struck this week thinking about that.
There was a CNN article, I want to give them credit for this.
They were interviewing Republican voters in Iowa, right?
People know the Iowa caucuses are early in the election calendar, the primary calendar, really, really important.
You know, sort of frontrunner status can come and things like that if you can win that.
So it's a significant political state.
And this was ahead of the debate, but it highlighted it.
And I'm going to read a couple of things from the CNN interviews.
One person they talked to was a woman named Lisa McGaffey, and they asked her if she'd ever voted for a Democrat.
And her response, they said there was, quote, no pause.
And she said, Oh, heavens, no.
Oh, no.
There's no...
Abortion.
They have to have a chance to grow up.
They have to have the chance.
You never know who that's going to be, right?
Immediately goes into, there can't be abortion.
That's why I won't vote Democratic.
Period.
Full stop.
That's the only issue.
But then they interviewed a suburban woman, right?
And we know, right?
The GOP and the issue of suburban white women, and we've seen the impact that this has since SCOTUS struck down Roe v. Wade.
They interviewed a woman named Betsy Sarcone, and what she said is, I don't believe in abortion.
She's an anti-abortionist.
She said, but she thinks that these other laws are too restrictive.
She says, I agree with the time limit.
I've had three babies grow inside me.
I agree when you feel them kicking, you feel them moving.
That's in my heart is a time when a cutoff to access would be.
Which is around, say, like 18 weeks.
Something like that, typically.
So here's a woman with a much more moderate position.
A position, by the way, I'll just throw out for the heck of it, that there are lots of religious traditions that don't say that life begins at conception.
It begins at what they call quickening, right?
When you begin to feel the baby move and things like that.
That sounds like that.
But then they talked to a businessman in a city in Iowa who basically said, he said, I'm a pro-life guy, but I think it's a losing issue for Republicans.
He wants them not to talk about it.
So you have this muddle.
We've seen what a liability it is for the GOP.
I think a lot of strategists are like, why doesn't the GOP just stop talking about abortion?
But they can't because they have these different constituencies.
And the last thing I'll say about this is that Ronna McDaniel, the head of the National Republican Committee, If I'm getting the name of that right.
I always get that one mixed up with the Democratic one, but whatever.
She tries to spin this model into a positive and says, you know, I think it's great that our candidates are talking about abortion.
We can't win if we don't talk about abortion.
You're like, your candidates aren't talking about abortion.
They're just swimming in circles, trying to see what can resonate with the most people and see where they land.
So this was another issue, but I think it highlights So many things, including the emotion, including the conspiracies, whether it's the notion that everybody who favors abortion access somehow hates babies and small humans and everything else.
But that was another piece of the debate that really stuck with me.
Is that this long after the SCOTUS decision, I don't feel like the GOP has made any substantive progress in being able to talk about this.
And as somebody who's really opposed to the contemporary GOP, I think that that's a good thing.
And I think it also shows how much they've never had a plan for what they would do or what they wanted.
They've just been opposed to an abstraction that they could call abortion or abortion on demand without any of the nuances that they now have to deal with.
You know, I have a two-year-old and she has moments when she's overwhelmed like toddlers and throws a tantrum.
And she often will.
I'm trying to figure out why are you crying?
Why are you yelling?
What do you want?
Do you want, you know, your stuffed animal?
Do you want your milk?
Do you want, you know, what do you want?
And she often just pointed stuff wildly.
And I think in her mind, Not even in her mind, in her body, her overwhelmed system.
She's just like, oh, if we go over there, you give me that thing, I'll actually calm down and be happy.
And guess what, Dan?
When I give her that thing, she's still upset because they didn't fix it.
And I just think the GOP has been throwing a temper tantrum for a long time.
Somebody actually gave them the stuffed animal that they thought would fix it, which was overturning Roe.
And now they're, A, not happy.
It feels a lot better to be angry than it does to be content.
And they're still like, Oh, what do we do now?
We don't know.
We have no idea.
All right, let's take a break.
We'll come back and talk about the just really tragic news out of California this week when it comes to a shop owner being killed.
Be right back.
All right, Dan, I'm going to throw it to you to take us through the details here.
But this is something that comes directly from the GOP debate, if you ask me, because you have people on that stage like Ron DeSantis and others who are spending their political careers demonizing the LGBTQ community.
When it comes to a rhetoric in our ethos that says, That if you are LGBTQ, if you are a gay person, you are inherently a groomer.
If you are a bisexual person, a lesbian person, a pansexual person, a trans person, you're a pedophile, you're gross, you're something.
When we have that kind of rhetoric in our midst, coming not only from Tucker Carlson and Matt Walsh, but from Ron DeSantis and other politicians who are running to be leaders in our country.
You're going to get things that happen that are tragic because people are going to take you up on it.
So I'll throw it to you to take us through that.
Yeah.
So a lot of people will be familiar with this, as you say, really upsetting story.
Also illustrates a point that you make all the time, right?
Living in a big state like California that, you know, people see California, blue state, everybody in California is a bunch of liberals.
And of course, that's not how it works.
And this was a case that illustrated this.
And people know that it was a woman who was killed for displaying a pride flag.
Her name was Lori Carlton.
She was 66, and she was killed outside a boutique.
It was her boutique.
It was her store.
And she would display a pride flag.
And the motive seems very, very straightforward here.
There was a young man, I think 27 years old, who tore down the flag.
And this was not a first-time event.
Family members and others have said that the flags were torn down repeatedly, and she always would come back with a bigger flag.
And she was adamant that she was not going to remove her flag or stop flying the pride flag at her business.
So she comes out, she confronts this guy, and he yells, according to deputies who responded, quote, many homophobic slurs at her, made, quote, several disparaging remarks about the flag, and ultimately shot her.
He shot her, fled, had a shootout with deputies, and died as a result of that.
So, really, really tragic.
Things that I think were notable, a lot of things that are notable about this, but one is that she, by all accounts, was not a queer person herself.
She was an ally.
She was married to a guy for 28 years, and I understand, obviously, two bi people can be married and still be queer, right?
Being married to a guy, if you're a woman, doesn't make you not gay.
But according to family members and friends, that wasn't her.
She was just an ally who believed strongly in equality for the LGBTQ plus community and was doing what she could to stand up for that.
And I was really struck by this because one of the realities is if you're not queer or you can pass as not queer, you can hide yourself or you can choose not to be visible as an ally in a way and sort of protect yourself.
If you're a queer person that people can read as a queer person, you're a risk, right?
You're always there on display and you can't turn it off.
Just like if you're a person of color and you can't pass as white, You're marked as a person of color.
And if somebody has animus toward you, there's nothing you can do to like not be black or not be Pacific Islander or whatever your ethnicity is.
This was a person who I think stuck to her convictions and it ultimately led to her death.
And I'm not suggesting that people should go out, should have to be willing to die to do these things.
But I think, I don't know, it feels heroic to me to note this about her, right?
That this person, she took allyship so seriously.
But then the point I want to go to is the same point that you've made, that you introduced a minute ago, which is, you know, we'll hear the news, this is shocking, this is appalling, this is all true, it's not surprising.
This is part of mainstream rhetoric on the right and has been for decades.
The flag itself, the very existence of the pride flag, which first sort of took shape I think in 1978, so it's been around for a long time, it's long been a target by people on the right And the trope of queer people as groomers, as sexual predators, has been reinvigorated, focused primarily on trans and non-binary folks, but it carries to the whole community, right?
And so when we hear this, again, My response, sadly, is, well, yeah, it was going to happen.
You cannot say that these people are a threat to children, that they're going to overthrow America, that they're going to do all of these things and be surprised when somebody takes action against them, right?
And one of the things that struck me about this, I talked about conspiracy theories a minute ago.
As I said before, I did some teaching on conspiracy theories last term, so they're kind of in my head.
But one of the interesting things I came across that I think absolutely makes sense is when people say, like, why do people buy into conspiracy theories?
How do they stick, right?
Some do and some don't.
One of the things that some people say is it helps if you attack something sacred, right?
Or if you create a threat of somebody who's attacking something sacred.
The children is a kind of secular sacred in America, right?
Nobody wants to be obviously opposed to children or threaten children, and so you hear this all the time, right?
So, I'm again quoting from some other things that summarize some of this, but people might remember that in June, right, you had the Biden administration raising a pride flag, and on Fox News, you had the headline that said, White House Flew Controversial New Transgender Flag That Promotes Grooming and Pedophilia, say critics, right?
It was removed.
And that's the slippery thing, right?
We talk about in the code, code words.
If you want to get away with something, it's the some people say, or I've heard people say that, right?
Say critics, right?
So Fox News could be like, well, we're not the ones saying it.
We're saying that critics say it.
We know that that's bogus.
They said that, or after this event, after this murder, a right-wing activist named Kaya Raychick was asked about her response to this, because she's had nearly 2.5 million TikTok followers that have things to say about the flag.
And this is what she says.
She says, imagine walking in your kid's elementary school, and this is what greets you.
Along with the image of what appear to be teachers and things like that.
This is what greets you.
What do you do?
And they said, well, does that rhetoric incite violence, right?
When she says, what do you do?
The 27-year-old's like, I'm going to go out and kill somebody who flies the pride flag.
She said, why are you comparing anyone who criticizes the progress pride flag being shoved down the throats of children to a violent murderer?
Right?
And here you got it, right?
The children.
The appeal to the children.
What if you go in your kid's school?
They're indoctrinating children.
That rhetoric has real effects of different kinds.
So, terrible incident.
Tragic incident.
Not surprising.
And again, if, you know, I lay it at the feet of the people who've been using this rhetoric, not just now, and queer activists, We'll rightly point out this is like, you know, decades of this kind of trope, but right at the forefront this this past week.
Yeah, it is nothing new.
It is not something that anyone who is part of the community or is paying attention will see as new.
However, this stands out, I think, to us because there's just a direct line here.
Here's a woman who owns a store, puts up a pride flag, and essentially there's a direct line from, I put up a pride flag and I am killed right outside of my store.
That is the America we live in in 2023.
Now, again, these acts of violence have been happening against LGBTQ people and their allies for as long as there's been a United States.
So please know that we understand that and we know that.
What we're trying to do is draw a direct line between the rhetoric being used by leaders and by news outlets, as you highlighted, Dan, and actions.
Everything that I have read about the shooter, whose name we're not going to say, is that he was an incredibly vulnerable man.
He was somebody, and by vulnerable, here's what I mean, he'd experienced some pretty Elevated levels of economic hardship.
One report I read said that he had been living in his car at one point with his mother.
Did not feel like he had any ground to stand on.
At one point, a report I read said he even started a GoFundMe to help him and his mother, like, you know, get a place to live and so on.
Here's my point, Dan.
This is a young man trying to find his identity.
It's a young person who's trying to find a place in America where he fits in.
And what is the sort of imagined group that he understands himself to be part of?
Well, it's an American right that is promoting the idea that if you fly a pride flag, you are advocating for pedophilia.
And you can say, hey, that's not fair.
The whole American right, just tell me where, tell me where that's not true.
Tell me where the moderate Republicans are who are on the debate stage and would, if we just brought this up, if Dan and I could be the moderators and we could get in front of the eight or 80 or however many candidates were up there the other day, Dan, and say, right, does the pride flag mean pedophilia?
Does it mean grooming?
Because the pride flag means that you are simply trying to demonstrate maybe your identity, but also just your support for and advocacy for a group that has been historically marginalized and unrepresented in the United States.
So if you think that the pride flag equals pedophilia, as the Fox News headline that you cited read, and as you say, they're going to get out of it by saying, critics say, Which critics?
Why should we listen to them?
Why do they matter?
You're putting that in a headline and then you're just, it's an out.
It's the same thing when people say, I'm just joking, right?
You state something you think is true and they say, I'm just joking.
And it's your way out, right?
It's the same thing with the TikTok star you talked about.
Oh, what would you do if this was in your kid's preschool?
And yes, there are many people out there that are like, I would take my kid out of that preschool.
Okay.
That's your choice.
There are vulnerable people out there, Dan, who are subject to radicalization.
There are people where you talked about conspiracy theories feel good.
Conspiracy theories are also a way to build an imagined community of people who believe the same thing and are for the same cause and fighting the same enemy.
And I'm not exonerating him.
I'm not saying because he was economically vulnerable that that somehow explains and justifies his act.
I'm not saying that.
What I'm saying is this.
Ron DeSantis from the governor's mansion.
Ron DeSantis, the millionaire.
Ron DeSantis, who is taken around in private jets and in governor's details.
retail, transportation, and so on.
Somebody who lives an overwhelmingly privileged life in an overwhelmingly powerful position.
Can he get up there and say things he thinks will get him votes or help him win support in his presidential bid?
And guess what?
There's going to be people on the margins of society who want to be part of what he's doing.
They're going to take up his cause and they're going to implement that in ways that are tragic and violent and disgusting.
And that's what happened here.
Right?
I've said this since Trump ran.
I wrote this on Facebook.
Dad, I, if you go, I mean, I don't like Facebook very much these days.
I don't hang out there much, but like, if I go back to my Facebook posts from like 2016, 2018, you know what, you know what I wrote over and over again to the like Trumpists who are on my Facebook feed from my hometown and other places?
Character matters.
Rhetoric matters.
And you know what?
You know who knows this the most?
And I'll, I'll throw it to you if you want to wrap this up here in a second.
Christians know this the most because, you know, we heard in church, Dan, every Sunday, hey, the movies you watch, the music you listen to, they're going to influence you.
The people in your life, if, Dan, when you're 13 and you go to youth group and they, if you hang out with kids who cuss, you're going to cuss.
You hang out with kids who blaspheme God's name, that's going to get in your brain and your heart and it's going to influence you.
Character matters.
Rhetoric matters.
We've been talking all day about a political party where some of its representatives and people running for the highest office in our land are saying, climate change is a hoax.
Let's invade Mexico.
The Department of Education needs to go.
And yeah, if you have a pride flag, you know what that means?
It doesn't mean you're an ally.
It doesn't mean you're gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans.
It doesn't mean, you know what it means?
It means you're a pedophile.
You say that over and over again, and guess what?
It matters, Dan.
And it shows up in the ways that this woman is now no longer with us.
And that doesn't have to be that way.
So, any final thoughts before we take a break and then jump into one other thing?
Just a couple.
One, I can hear the emails I get now being like, what about the Lincoln Project?
And my answer would be, what about the Lincoln Project?
Right?
I think you hit it on the head when you said, not just show me the moderate Republicans, but show me the moderate Republicans who matter at all within contemporary American conservatism.
And that's the issue, right?
I guess where I'm going with that is this is not a fringe minor voice.
This is the American GOP at this point.
If so, I understand the Lincoln Project.
Did anyone from the Lincoln Project go, you know, we've had a lot of success over the last five years battling Trumpism.
Now one of us is running for president.
And does that person on the debate stage, does someone from the Lincoln Project is you want to tell him like who was on the debate stage that represents the modern Republic?
Chris Christie?
Really?
Chris Christie, who's really just running for president as revenge?
He's not going to be president.
And he knows it.
He's just out there trying to take shots at Trump because that's like who was on the debate stage, Dan?
That's the point, right?
the Lincoln Project or any of these other people.
No one, no one.
Don't talk to me about Nikki Haley.
Don't talk to me about Asa Hutchinson or Mike Pence.
I mean, anyway, sorry, go ahead.
I apologize. - Nope, that's the point, right?
Is that when we talk about this, I guess I just, what drives me crazy is still this knee jerk response.
I think, again, it's because it feels good to think it's true that somehow or another most Republicans are still some sort of reasonable moderates, holding on to classical conservative principles and so forth, and there's some minoritarian fringe out there, and I just don't believe it.
And I'll point to the same thing you do and say, just show me.
Show me where that is, if that's how this is.
And how it is that events like this don't follow logically from the mainstream discourse of the American right.
All right, let's take a break, come back, and real quick talk about what's happening up in Spokane, and then we'll go to Reasons for Hope.
Be right back.
All right, y'all, so some of you might have heard this.
Friends in PNW, I know you have, but here's what happened.
A couple of days ago, there was a rally, a worship prayer event in Spokane, Washington.
Spokane, I know many of you know this, but I'll just say it for those of you who don't.
It's in the eastern reaches of Washington State.
It butts up against Idaho.
And Spokane is often a place where you might hear people calling for this part of Washington to join Idaho rather than to stay in a state whose politics is dominated by a city like Seattle.
Nadine Woodward is the mayor in Spokane, and at the moment, Spokane is enduring one of the worst wildfire events in its history.
You've had hundreds of homes burn, you've had people hurt, and it's not a good situation.
Let's just put it that way, okay?
Now, Nadine Woodward gets on the stage of the day at this prayer rally, and guess who's leading that prayer rally?
Sean Foyt.
Okay.
So, Sean Foyt is a notorious Christian nationalist.
He's somebody who has said on the record he thinks only Christians should be in charge, that he is fighting for a United States where Christians have control of the government.
They are implementing the policies.
He has flouted all COVID regulations, shown up at the Capitol in DC many times to lead these worship rallies.
I mean, he is, and I don't think I have to tell anybody, but if you don't believe me, Go listen to Charismatic Revival Fury.
It is on our feed.
You can search for it at straightwhiteamericanjesus.com.
We did whole episodes with Dr. Matt Taylor, and these episodes are some of the best.
I'm just not going to back off from this.
They're some of the best content out there.
When it comes to explaining to you who Sean Foyt is and how he became what he is.
He's an extremist.
He's a Christian nationalist.
So Nadine Woodward, right?
I just want to make clear, there's no way not to know that Sean Foyt was leading this prayer rally or worship rally, whatever it was called.
But when she gets on stage, she's doing so to supposedly pray for Spokane and for the region.
And the one who's leading that prayer is Matt Shea.
Now, if you've read my book or if you've listened to this show in depth, or if you follow Idaho politics, Eastern Washington politics, if you live in the PNW, you will know that Matt Shea is a former state legislator.
Who was one of the most extremist politicians we had in the country.
And I don't say that lightly, Dan.
I'm not saying that just to kind of castigate the GOP.
Matt Shea supported Ayman Bundy in 2016 in the wildlife preserve standoff.
He has extremist views on abortion.
But how did Matt Shea lose his seat in the Washington State Legislature?
It was when it was discovered he had a biblical warfare manifesto that, among other things, said that the plan should be to kill all males who do not succumb to the Christian regime that he envisions as the ideal state for the country.
So even for Spokane, this was too radical and he lost his seat.
Then he became a pastor and he is still a prominent figure, prominent enough that when Sean Foyt went to Spokane, Matt Shea was on stage with him.
So here is the mayor of Spokane appearing with these guys.
Now, after she did it, Extreme backlash and she has tried to back off.
So she has said things like, I didn't know Matt Shea would be there.
I didn't realize that it was Matt Shea who'd be leading the prayer.
I don't condemn, I don't condone his politics.
I was there to pray for my region.
A friend invited me.
I decided to go.
Right?
You knew Sean Foyt was leading.
That's one.
According to Matt Shea and others, you had been invited to this thing for months and I just think, you know, there's no way for you not to have known.
You're the mayor.
You have a responsibility to know who you're getting on stage with and One of the things, Dan, and I'll just close with this because we really are out of time.
The last line of the prayer was that she, the leader, the mayor, this is Matt Shea talking now, would be able to laugh during times of hardship or tragedy.
Meaning, as Spokane burns in terms of the wildfires.
That she would be able to laugh and have joy.
Now, I don't want to take joy from anyone and we all need to find ways to be somewhat resilient and to find levity in times that are difficult.
I understand that.
But that just felt like a huge slap in the face to a whole city that is facing one of its worst climate change crises.
So, any quick thoughts on this before we go to read?
Just real quick, you know, because you're right, it's scripted by this point.
Somebody shows up, you've got a bunch of crazy people up on stage, there's a backlash and they're like, oh, I didn't know who they were.
I didn't know that they would be there when anybody could have, you know, just done five minute Google searches and found this out.
What I would invite people to think about is what if the reason this keeps happening is because for people like Woodward, it just doesn't seem like a big deal.
Like they really, honest to goodness, don't believe or recognize or know how extreme and how radical the ideas are.
They are so normalized to them.
And within the circles, and we all know the echo chamber that social media can be, and all of us can live in these spaces where we just kind of have our own views reflected back to us all the time.
So it comes to be seen as so normal and so mundane and so whatever that you can get on stage with somebody who, as you say, in a manifesto fantasizes about, let's call it, the murder of all non-Christian men or whatever.
And be able to shrug it off and be like, that's really no big deal until suddenly you have this reality check when everybody outside of that tells you how crazy it is.
I think that's the part that's most disturbing to me is that this happens over and over and over.
And I really think it's because within this kind of ecosystem on the right, There's no recognition that these are extreme positions.
And it brings us back to the debates calling for, you know, dismantling the Department of Education, calling for labeling all LGBTQ plus people pedophiles and groomers and so forth.
These have become mainstream ideas that are so normalized within the right that I think there is shock on their part when they have these reality checks and have to realize that most Americans don't think what they do.
Which is why you don't listen to most Americans, if you're them.
No, you don't.
Let's just be clear.
Here's a closing thought for today.
I don't believe in trickle-down economics.
I don't believe that capitalism works in a way that when you give the CEOs and the executives all the money that they're like, you know what we should do?
Should we take a salary that means I make 500 times more than my lowest paid employee?
Nah, I'm not going to do that.
No way.
I'm going to shove these profits down the pipeline, reward these great folks.
Does that happen?
It doesn't.
And that's, there's, we could talk from 1980 when Reagan got in to right now.
And I can show you all the receipts from how wages have stagnated.
Home prices have gone through the roof compared to income levels and college and everything else is way out of control in terms of price.
I do believe in trickle-down extremism.
When you normalize radical ideas, guess what?
You get 27-year-old men who are on the fringes of society who take up your rhetoric and they shoot store owners.
You also get mayors of cities like Spokane, mid-sized cities in this country, who show up on stage with extremists who fantasize about killing all non-Christian men.
And Sean Foyt.
It's like a joke.
Hey, she got on stage with an extremist, a Christian nationalist.
And Sean Foyt.
Sean Foyt's not even the most extreme person on the stage with her.
That's what that tells you.
All right, Dan, let's go to good reasons for hope.
Ring the bell.
I'm ringing the bell in my head and I have like a nice transition setting here in my head.
That's like ding, ding, ding.
Yay.
There's like happy music playing.
It's a small world.
All right.
So in Maryland this week, a judge rules that you cannot opt out of curriculum that includes LGBTQ folks, histories, characters, and so on.
Cause guess what, Dan?
LGBTQ folks are what?
Human beings.
Part of history, part of American society, part of world society, part of global culture.
So opting out of, I don't know, a curriculum that doesn't include them means opting out of, I don't know, studying human culture, human history, human economies, and human life.
So that's good news.
Mine is, in Georgia, a number of co-conspirators, indicted co-conspirators, starting to turn against Trump, which is, of course, what the prosecutors wanted.
But you keep reading things of people saying, I was doing what Trump told me, I was acting at the hest of the president, and so forth.
In some cases, this is a way to try to shield themselves from state prosecution.
Uh, but I think the bigger thing is that they're starting to form that, that sort of circle where everybody's pointing at Trump in the middle.
Um, and I think that, uh, I think this could be catastrophic for Trump in all of his cases when somebody like a Rudy Giuliani eventually, uh, cuts a deal with somebody to just come clean about what went on.
So I continue to take hope in watching how some of these things unfold.
Yeah.
All right.
I saw somebody say, Dan, on Twitter, that Rudy Giuliani is prepared to fight this all the way to the Supreme Courtyard Marriott.
Ha ha, Four Seasons joke.
Anyway.
And they don't even have a nightclub there, I don't think.
Like, it's no Radisson, so.
Suck it, Rudy.
Suck it.
You're going to go to the Courtyard Marriott?
Guess where I am?
I'm at a Radisson with a disco.
So let's just figure out who's winning.
All right.
I shouldn't have said that.
I apologize to everybody listening.
Okay.
Rudy Giulione, if you're listening, I said that to you.
Everyone else, disregard that statement.
Okay.
As always, find us at Straight White JC, find me at Bradley Onishi, and can always use your help.
We do this show three times a week, no outside funding, no university grant, just me and Dan doing our best.
So PayPal, Patreon, Venmo, we have a bunch of new patrons.
Dan, I want to just say to all of you, thank you.
Every little bit makes it possible for us to keep doing this.
Absolutely.
Thank you so much.
And we will be back next week with a great interview and it's in the code and the weekly roundup.
But for now, we'll just say, as always, thanks for being here.
