How does a racially fueled tragedy tie into the policies of a state governor? And what sinister patterns can we uncover when we trace the origins of the 'lone gunman' phenomenon? Brad and Dan investigate the chilling Jacksonville shootings, the disturbing racial motivations behind the crime, and the ways these events echo the policies of Florida's Governor, Ron DeSantis. .
We then shift our focus to the Christian homeschooling movement, helmed by Michael Farris, and its possible impact on public education. Discover how a group of devout millionaires are bent on uprooting the education system, alleging that schools teaching about gender identity and race are unconstitutional.
Finally, we wade into the murky intersection of Christian and Hindu nationalism, and the ways Vivek Ramaswamy is transposing the latter onto the former.
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Axis Mundi Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, here today on an early September pre-Labor Day Friday with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Nice to see you, Brad.
It feels like sort of an endless summer to me, these late Labor Days.
But, you know, I'm a fall person, so I've been ready for summer to be done since like July 4th.
I know we are in different places when it comes to that.
How many pumpkin spice lattes have you had already?
You know, I declined to respond.
I'm going to plead the fifth.
But I may or may not have the little pumpkin spice thing in my cabinet at home and just basically eat it on cereal at this point.
That's totally on brand because I can totally see you being like, what?
$6 for a pumpkin spice latte?
That's ridiculous.
But I'm going to be a middle-aged dad and I'm going to have the pumpkin spice at home.
And like, so when the kids are like, can we get a pumpkin spice?
He's like, no, we're going to go home and make it ourself.
That's like classic.
And it's going to be something terrible.
It's going to be like chocolate milk with like pumpkin spice, like sprinkled on top and be like, there it is.
You'll drink it and you'll like it.
Yeah.
Shout out to all the parents who don't let their kids buy stuff and you're like, we can make it at home!
And it's kind of the same and it's kind of not.
I've been doing my exciting thing this week, Dan, just really glamorous, is I've been doing Duolingo again.
Which is fun and enjoy it.
But I was thinking like when I was growing up, my family is Japanese American from Hawaii, my dad's side.
So we, you know, so much of our culture and our food and our slang comes from Hawaii.
You know, it's been, they went to Hawaii four or five generations ago from Japan.
I don't speak Japanese, but we learned a lot of Japanese bad words growing up.
That's kind of how it works sometimes.
That's how my mom was with German, right?
Like with her grandparents, exact same thing, like knew nothing but So I'm thinking, look, you know, you've heard of Duolingo.
Why not you and I launch an app called Doodoolingo where you just learn bad words and horrific insults in like 50 languages.
Like I have a Finnish friend who's taught me some of the most horrific insults.
It's not like, hey, You know, go screw yourself.
It's like something like ridiculously bad about your mother and this body part and it's all like in a very succinct phrase, right?
I mean, why not just doodoo lingo, five bucks a month and you and I'll be billionaires and we can get that Lamborghini and Camry we talked about like a month ago.
I don't know.
That'll be awesome.
And then when I get the teacher emails from my kids saying stuff at school, I'll be like, do you know it was bad?
Prove it was bad.
How do you know what it was?
You don't even know what he said.
If you want to know what he said, subscribe to Doodoo Lingo.
Here's the link.
It's $5 a month.
Yeah, litigious nature in me.
Serves me well.
All right.
I'm glad we're having dad jokes because we're going to talk about some heavy stuff.
So today we're talking about...
Uh, what happened in Jacksonville, which is just another horrific shooting.
Um, and it happened a couple of days ago.
Um, and obviously racist, uh, racially motivated, as it says in the, uh, the newspapers.
So we'll talk about that.
We're then going to talk about, um, parental rights.
It's back to school time.
A lot of you are in school district where you have been dealing with school choice and School parental rights amendments and Bill of Rights and all this kind of stuff.
What am I trying to say?
We're going to get to the bottom of that through a bombshell report from WAPO this week that featured some friends of the show and other things.
So we're going to really dig out the origins of the parental rights movement and we'll finish with a segment on Vivek Ramaswamy and his attempt to promote Christian nationalists as a Hindu nationalist.
He's a practicing Hindu, but he is trying to appeal to Christian nationalists in the country.
So we'll get there too.
All right, Dan, I'll throw it to you to take us through what happened in Jacksonville and yet just another unimaginable event that somehow keeps happening in our country.
Yeah, so a lot of people will be familiar with this and, you know, after we'd aired the episode last week and, you know, shortly after, so it's been a few days, but feels like, I don't know, one of many that just sort of never goes away, right?
Because they happen all the time.
Yeah, so a masked white man went into a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida.
He shot and killed three people, I think two men and one woman.
All three were black.
He also took his own life.
The FBI is investigating this as a civil rights investigation and coordinating with the U.S.
Department of Justice Civil Rights Division.
And the reason that they're doing this is that he was clearly, it was clearly racially motivated.
One of his weapons, at least one of his weapons, was emblazoned with a swastika on it.
He left behind sort of manifestos and statements explicitly detailing his hatred of black people.
Right before the shooting he apparently texted his father and said you need to check your computer or something like he had sent something to his dad.
His father notified the authorities but it was it was too late the guy obviously waited until you know right before he committed the act so he couldn't be stopped.
So yeah another just unfortunately not uncommon story in the U.S.
of a racially motivated killing of a white man killing black people in one of the largest cities in Florida.
City with a large black population and district.
We'll get to this in just a minute.
A Florida district that has the majority of African-American.
And in Ironda, Santa, our friend, Ron, who, this week, it's been interesting watching, because he's had these kind of dual crises, right?
You've had Hurricane Adelia, like, bearing down on Florida and causing damage at the same time that this was going there.
And everybody was watching and saying, let's see how he does.
Because, like, if you're a Florida governor, yeah, you get pretty good at dealing with and really capitalizing on natural disasters, because they happen all the time in Florida.
And people were like, how's he going to handle a racially motivated shooting because of his background and the things that he said and all this sort of stuff?
And the answer is probably not very well.
So, excuse me.
He, the day after the shooting, he attends a vigil for the victims and he was booed.
He was actively booed.
Organizers had to basically ask people to stop booing him and sort of channel their anger in different ways.
He referred to the shooter as a, quote, scumbag, said the killings were totally unacceptable, which is true.
But kind of the general GOP pablum that we get every time that there's a shooting and it rang hollow.
But I think for DeSantis in Florida, in Jacksonville, it was even more pronounced, right?
I think on one hand, it's a microcosm of Why I don't think anybody can in good conscience take the GOP seriously when they, you know, send their thoughts and prayers or call people scumbags or whatever after these shootings.
Because it raised, for DeSantis in particular, obvious accusations of hypocrisy and a lot of, you know, this is just way too little, too late, or you know, oh now, now you've got all this sympathy for the Black community and what they face and so forth.
So, I want to just spend a minute here and walk through why that is.
Why did it raise the ire of so many people?
I think DeSantis' mere presence, but again, because I know I can hear the emails now, it's like, man, Dan, you really got it in for DeSantis.
DeSantis, to me, is such a concentrated point of general trends in the GOP right now.
We've been talking about that for a long time.
But not that long ago, he downplayed Nazis that rallied to his cause.
There were Nazi and neo-Nazi groups in Florida that were sort of all pro-DeSantis, and he did.
It's a page right out of Trump's playbook, right?
Remember back when people like the Proud Boys and others would support Trump?
You'd be like, well, I don't know anything about them, but you know they like me, so that's pretty good.
It was DeSantis not wanting to come out and just straightforwardly denounce them because, you know, you'll take support wherever you can get it.
Gerrymandering Florida districts.
There had been specifically a court order, I think from the Supreme Court in Florida, that had demanded that they redraw their districts because things were gerrymandered.
On MLK Day, DeSantis submitted a map that chopped a Florida district, an African-American majority district in Florida, as I understand it, and people can correct me if I'm wrong, I think it was the only district that was majority black in Florida.
He chopped it into four pieces, actively tried to break it up.
Guess what city is located in that district, right?
Jacksonville.
Lawmakers in Florida—black lawmakers, white lawmakers, Democratic lawmakers, and GOP lawmakers—acknowledged that he was actively targeting black voters when he did this, right?
He also used law enforcement to pursue charges of voter fraud, and we know how big the GOP is in trying to create charges of voter fraud and track these down.
Overwhelmingly targeted who, Brad?
Wait for it.
Black voters.
So DeSantis has been accused of actively working to disenfranchise black voters, to take away their political power, to marginalize them as political actors in Florida.
He also I worked with Florida legislators.
People might remember a number of years ago, Florida enacted through a constitutional amendment, one of the biggest pieces of, I would consider, both voting reform and prison reform amendments in the country by allowing most felons, non-violent felons, to be able to vote.
The Florida legislature, with DeSantis, worked to radically weaken that.
And the way that they did it was, as folks might remember, the technicalities of you get out of prison, but you still owe like a lot of money, because that's how the prison system works.
And they said that people weren't technically finished or hadn't completed their sentences until they'd paid back all this money.
A majority of them, or a lot of them disproportionately, are people of color and African-Americans, especially African-American men.
And then everybody's familiar, we've talked about it, everybody's talked about it with the AP history issues, the battles in school districts that we're going to get into in a few minutes here about, you know, the parental rights things and fighting so-called critical race theory and just banning books and making it harder and harder and harder, not just to really get into the nuances of racism or systemic injustices or things like that, to even raise the possibility.
So you have all of this stuff together, So when it comes to a vigil for three black people murdered out of hate by a white person and in walks DeSantis to tell us what a scumbag this is and how unacceptable it is, it's no surprise.
It shouldn't be a surprise to him, it shouldn't be a surprise to anybody, and it shouldn't be a surprise to, I think, the GOP, if you're thinking on a national scale of the same patterns.
That nobody wants him there, and nobody believes what he says.
Because at best, like the best you could say I think about DeSantis in Florida, which again I see as this kind of lab, this GOP lab trying to do what they would do nationally if they could, the best you can say is that they want to keep race and racial issues and racial hatred out of sight, out of mind, right?
Just pretend that it doesn't exist.
Pretend it's not there, which means things like this will happen.
You can't stop this kind of violence without, among other things, being able to talk about things like race and being able to talk about things like attitudes of white people, radicalized or otherwise, to people of color and so forth.
That's the best you can say about DeSantis and his policies?
The worst you can say, and a lot of activists have said this, a lot of people at The Vigil said this, there were people that yelled out that your policies cause this, is that all of those policies are more than just keeping it out of sight, out of mind.
They're dog whistles.
They're codes.
They're code, the wink and nod that says, we don't value these people.
We're not going to protect these people.
And it's a very thin line from saying things like that to telling somebody, if you have a problem with these people, Well, you know, you ought to take it in your own hands and go and try to do that.
We talk about the metaphor of the national body a lot and how it needs to be purified.
It needs to have elements expunged from it that are viewed as a threat.
If you're a white person who really truly believes that black people are a threat to this country inherently, And you want to undertake these acts of violence, they're going to be reinforced when you see districts drawn to make sure that Black people can't change things legislatively, when you can't teach about it in schools, when you can't talk about ethnic identity as a category of part of being American.
On and on and on.
I could go on all day, but I shouldn't.
So I'll throw it over to you for your thoughts or reflections on any of those points or other thoughts that you had with, like, again, as you say, it's another shocking event, but it's entirely predictable in the U.S.
at this point.
So back in May, you raised this on this show.
People can go look it up, but you raised this and obviously many other people did too, because the NAACP issued a travel warning for Florida.
And in part, it says this, the travel advisory comes in direct response to Governor Ron DeSantis' aggressive attempts to erase black history and to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in Florida schools.
The formal travel notice states, So this is what the travel notice actually reads.
Florida is openly hostile toward African Americans, people of color, and LGBTQ individuals.
So that's from NAACP.org.
So Dan, when that came out, Ron DeSantis called it a stunt.
He shrugged it off.
And now you have this happening in Florida.
Michael Harriet, who's a writer and just a voice that I always appreciate, wrote this on August 29.
If you believe a lone racist gunman killed three people in Jacksonville, it's probably because you only learned a whitewashed version of history.
But there's a reason why a white supremacist chose this specific location.
And what Harriet gets to there is this myth of the lone gunman.
One of the things I read almost immediately after the shooting was that The shooter belonged to no groups, right?
So it wasn't like, hey, I'm doing this in the name of, I'm doing this for this group, right?
And I'm doing this for the KKK or for something else.
That's not true.
And one of the things that researchers of radicalization and extremism like Cynthia Idris Miller at American University will tell you is that that is one of the things that is true of the internet age and internet terrorism these days is that you have this Very tragic, perfect storm where somebody can be radicalized online.
And then when they commit an act of unspeakable violence, it's like, well, there's no one to blame.
They were just acting because they were alone, individual, no group.
And it's really hard to connect the individual's actions directly to whether it's an elected political official, whether it's a hate group, whether it's a church and so on.
And so I just want to add to the voices that are saying, Black people knew that Florida was unsafe.
LGBTQ people have talking about Florida as unsafe.
Many people have been fleeing the state because it is unsafe.
And now we see this happen and DeSantis shows up at a vigil.
And I think a lot of people have probably seen the meme of the black woman standing behind him, basically giving him a really dirty look for taking over the mic.
And so I'll throw it back to you for final thoughts on this one.
But those are some things that come to mind for me.
Just one of the things that you started to touch on there and that other analysts have touched on is that I think that whole notion of being alone and not being a part of a group, that's like a pre-internet notion, right?
When you needed to somehow like show up at a meeting and have a little laminated card or something that said you're a member of a group.
All of us, probably everybody listening here has some online cohort that they consider their community.
I mean, people who listen to this podcast form a kind of community, right?
Like-minded podcasters and people that we talk to and so like you form this kind of community like that's how group identity takes shape in a kind of virtual format and so this notion that they were I don't know alone or just sitting alone in a room all the time like I don't know drinking beer and thinking about hurting people and like
That's the piece that I think is willfully overlooked by those who want and need this to be a quote-unquote lone gunman.
We've talked about that before, too.
Every time there's a white shooter, you're gonna hear the same It doesn't matter that he's got a swastika.
It doesn't matter that that situates you within a community of hate.
I'm sure that as they go through these manifestos and things, they're going to find internet links, they're going to find chat rooms and podcasts and all different kinds of things that this person was part of, a community to which he felt he belonged.
Probably community members who are going to now quietly try to delete, you know, every post that they ever had from this guy.
But yeah, I think that that's just a piece that can't be overlooked, is that the internet and other social media, excuse me, social media create these communities, and that that's a piece that I think is really convenient for those who want and need this to be a lone gunman, because it's a completely predictable part of these analyses on the right.
Well, and you know, I think that the gunman did.
Make homage to the Buffalo Shooter and to others.
I mean, he's basically instantiating himself in a tradition of violence and hate.
And so that's there.
I think that, you know, officials have already uncovered some of the materials you're talking about.
I also, just before we go to break, we would be remiss to not mention what happened at the University of North Carolina, where a faculty member was killed during the first weeks of class.
And Dan, I just have to say, I was in Texas last week.
I was kind of on the run.
You're in airports, you're in hotels, you're trying to kind of keep up with news on the go and you sign on and there's kids jumping out of a window, right?
And honestly, Dan, it's like, this is what it is like to live in the United States.
You go to the grocery store and you might encounter somebody with a gun who is terrorizing people and choosing to intentionally terrorize black people.
You go to school at University of North Carolina, one of the top four or five public universities in the country.
UNC is a great school.
And what is the images of the first day of school like?
And I know some of you have seen these.
If you go around the world, you see little like collages of like, here's what it's like when kids go to kindergarten in Japan.
Here's what kindergarten looks like in Germany.
Here's what it looks like in Australia, right?
I saw some pictures earlier today, Dan, of a friend in the UK and they were just starting school and their little kids had the uniform you wear in the UK, the tie.
Little kids in the UK learn how to wear a tie at school like when they're six years old.
What's the point?
The first day of university in America might just include jumping out of a window running from a gunman.
That may be the best representation of what school is like in this country, hiding under a desk because you're being terrorized by handheld killing machines.
So, all right, let's take a break.
We'll come back and jump into what dropped this week at WAPO concerning parental rights, homeschooling, and all of that.
Be right back.
Okay, Dan, let's jump into something that kind of has a long history, but it is very much an issue of the present.
So, some of you are going to be very familiar with this name, and that's the name Michael Ferris.
Michael Ferris is one of the, if not the, progenitor of the Christian homeschooling movement in this country.
He's from Washington State.
He sent his kids to school, and when his six-year-old daughter came home and he felt like she had been influenced by other six-year-olds, he started on a journey that led him to basically become a champion of homeschooling.
Now, back in the 80s, homeschooling was not really as big of a deal as it is now, but thanks to Michael Ferris and the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, Homeschooling has become something that millions and millions and millions of American children experience, and many of them are in Christian fundamentalist or Christian evangelical settings.
The vast majority of homeschoolers are religious in this country.
Now, why do I bring that up now, Dan?
And it's a nice segue.
Nice is the wrong word.
It is a natural segue from what we just talked about in Florida, because the homeschooling world and Michael Farris have a lot to do with what is happening right now in schools all over the country as it pertains to parental rights, the Parents' Bill of Rights, a lot of the things you're seeing at school boards.
I just saw a post this morning from my home district where I went K through 12 about a new law that would, a new policy from the district that would out trans kids and queer kids to their parents and the lawsuits that will ensue from that.
So let me just go to something that dropped this week at WAPO.
It was written by Emma Brown and Peter Jameson.
And it begins like this.
Speaking on a confidential conference call to a secretive group of Christian millionaires seeking, in the words of one member, to take down the education system as we know it today, Ferris, Michael Ferris, the man I just talked about, made the same points he had made in courtrooms since the 1980s.
Public schools were indoctrinating children with a secular worldview that amounted to a godless religion.
So I'm going to come back to that point, Dan.
I'm going to come back to this indoctrination language and secular worldview language, because I know a lot of parents are hearing that all the time as they try to weave their way through public school education at the moment.
But the piece at WAPO continues.
The solution, according to Ferris, lawsuits alleging that schools teaching about gender identity and race are unconstitutional, leading to a Supreme Court decision that would mandate the right of parents to claim billions of tax dollars for private education or homeschooling.
So here's the play, and I think some of you listening already know this play.
You may know it way better than me, but many of you are probably not sure of how the logic works.
Here's how the logic works.
If you sue school districts around the country on the grounds of race, i.e.
critical race theory, i.e.
DEI, i.e.
talking about systemic racism and making white kids feel uncomfortable, okay?
All the stuff we've talked about on the show.
And gender identity.
If you sue for those reasons, which you're going to hopefully get at the very end, is a Supreme Court decision that would mandate the right of parents to claim billions of tax dollars for private education or homeschooling.
This is in essence school choice and it's also voucher.
All right, if you're a parent, and this is happening in Arizona already and other places, we're going to give each parent a voucher and you can just use that like Uh, it may mean nothing to you because you're just going to send your kid to the same public school that's up the up the block from where you live.
This voucher may change nothing for you, but you might use that voucher as a tuition payment at the charter school over here or the The private school over there, or to homeschool your children.
So in essence, Dan, people are going to pay tax dollars, and then the government is going to give parents a voucher, and that voucher can be used at schools that might be private schools that teach Catholicism.
It might be charter schools, right, that have an approach to schooling that follows a classical education model that really Kind of excludes people, you know, voices of color, authors of color, anything like that, blah, blah, blah, or it could mean homeschooling, okay?
And so here's the thing, Dan, is there are a lot of school districts around the country that are willfully enacting policies they know will lead to lawsuits.
This is what I took to be happening in my own home district as I read the news this morning.
Hey, we're going to enact a policy that says we're going to out trans kids.
If we think a kid is queer or trans, we're going to call the parents without even asking the kid.
And then, in my home state of California, Governor Newsom steps in and is like, that's not okay, or someone else in the state.
The school district is sued.
The school district loses the case and it loses, say, $30 million, okay?
And you're like, well, that backfired, you idiots.
You just lost $30 million.
But guess what, Dan?
It didn't backfire.
You know why?
Because that's $30 million of less money for public education.
If you have your goal, as I'm quoting from the WAPO piece now, to take down the education system as we know it today, if that is your goal, Then sucking all the money you can away from public schools is your strategy.
So in one sick, twisted sense of logic, it goes like this.
Let's do things to get ourselves sued as a school board and a school district will lose money.
And if that happens all over the country, public education will collapse.
In addition, let's hope that the Supreme Court will side with us and we can get to a point where vouchers and school choice are really how things work in the country.
And that will again, funnel money into private education and totally undermine public education.
OK, I have one more big thing to say, but I'll throw it to you just because I've been ranting here for a minute on thoughts about this so far.
And, you know, what you see from your perspective.
Yes.
I mean, we're just on that first on that latter point that you made about basically funneling or channeling funds away, right?
We're coming into football season, so I've been thinking about football, but one thing that'll happen, it happens in lots of other sports, right?
Lots of team sports.
Let's say you've got the receiver who's just all-world, just better than everybody on the field, tears teams up.
And so what does the defense do?
They decide they're going to double-team him, maybe triple-team him.
But if you're the offense, you know that's going to happen, and you use that player as a decoy to pull all the other players that direction, and everybody else on the team gets the ball, and you end up doing a lot of damage that they didn't plan on.
It's the same thing.
It's like a diversion tactic.
That's exactly what you're talking about, right?
Of, we're going to go over here and we're going to do this.
We know it's probably going to lose in court, whatever, but you're going to have to spend a lot of time and a lot of resources and a lot of effort doing that.
And there's a finite amount of money that your system has to do all the things it has to do, and so we're going to weaken the system that way.
So that's the first point, just as like, if people want like a simple illustration of how that works, that's what we're talking about.
The other, the second point is, and you know, I'll plug the series, it's in the code, right?
We all know at this point that the, or if we don't know we should, The parental rights language, it's code for Christian nationalism.
That's what it is at this point.
You don't hear folks Who are, you know, they want their kids to have comprehensive sex education in schools using the language of parental rights.
If we were really talking about parental rights, we would be talking about things like that.
Or we would be talking about things like, I don't know, maybe your kid has a discipline issue in school and the school resource officer is in, and you're like, you know what?
I don't feel comfortable with my kid having to talk to a school resource officer if, like, the parent's not present.
Something like that.
Legitimate issues of parental rights.
It's code, it's a dog whistle, and the reason it's a dog whistle is because it sounds like something everybody would be in support of, right?
People who don't immerse themselves in these issues, who don't know what these are, people who are well-intentioned and they don't want to harm trans kids or they don't want to harm anybody and they fall prey to the language of parental rights because who's going to be opposed to parental rights?
Right, Brad?
You're a parent.
I'm a parent.
We care about our kids.
We want to be involved with them.
We would do anything to defend them, to protect them.
So, when somebody says, well, we need to strengthen parental rights, I think a lot of well-meaning people jump on board or at least don't realize that it's something as pernicious as it is.
And just the last point that I want to make tied into that, I was having a conversation with somebody today and I was reminded because I just want to bring this up.
Religiously motivated bigotry is still bigotry, right?
One truth about education is that to be educated at any level in any way is to be shaped as the kind of person that you are, right?
The question of values is inseparable in my mind from questions of knowledge and learning and so forth.
And so, if your model is, we're threatened if you have to learn about other kinds of people.
We are threatened if you have to learn that there are people who are different from you, but hey, guess what?
There's still people.
And that like, yeah, maybe you're a straight white guy and you like, you know, straight women and that's who you are.
Cool, but there are people who aren't wired that way.
There are men who like men, and women who like women, and there are people who have a penis, but they feel like they're female, or they don't feel like gender fits them, or whatever, and you know what?
Who cares?
In the best possible sense, let them be them, and you can be you, and we can all go around being a society, if that's what's threatening to you.
It is not that your kids are being indoctrinated in some way at school, it's that you want to indoctrinate them at home, Into a bigoted mindset.
And I feel like we just have to keep that in front of us, because I think there is still, we've talked about it before, other people that you've interviewed have talked about it, right?
This deference to religious identity in the U.S., to Christian identity in the U.S., that somehow says, you know, wow, that sounds really kind of racist or homophobic.
Well, you know, the Bible, I just believe in the Bible, and it says, oh, okay, cool.
I guess if you believe in the Bible, then You know, maybe it's not, no, it's still racist.
It's still homophobic.
It doesn't change just because it's religiously motivated.
So those are just some rants of my own to throw back your direction.
No, well, I, I, everything you just talked about, I want to like basically dig in deeper.
So you said one thing, you said, all right, parental rights is a code word for Christian nationalism.
So I want to unpack, I want to decode that, a la Dan Miller, the decoder in chief on this show.
And then I want to kind of show Why the bigotry that you're discussing has been seen as legitimate.
I want to show everybody the logic.
So if you're listening today, I'll be honest.
I know some of you might be driving and you're distracted.
Some of you might be washing dishes.
The next two minutes are really, I think, what I'm hoping for me to get across to you today.
So let me just explain, okay?
So let me read a little bit more from the WAPO piece to get into this.
Ferris, Michael Ferris, his most famous confrontation with public school officials came in 1986.
His clients were born-again Christians who argued their children should not be required to read Rumpelstiltskin, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and other material that they said undermined their religious beliefs.
Now, initially, Dan, he won, but then it was overturned, and Michael Ferris was crushed by this, okay?
In the same year, actually a year later, excuse me, in 1987, he gave a speech where he said public schools are very, very dangerous and, quote-unquote, unconstitutional.
Why?
Because the worldview they convey to students, okay, is something that he thinks of as religious.
Now this is the whole game, everybody, and I need you to hear me on this.
The rhetorical game goes like this.
We have to paint Any teaching of values in school, not saying what values you should have, but exposure to different worldviews, exposure to different values, we're going to call that the religion of secular humanism.
Okay?
So hang with me.
If you read Rumpelstiltskin or Wizard of Oz, or if you read Romeo and Juliet, or you read Toni Morrison, okay, beloved, Values there, what Ferris and his cohorts are going to do is they're going to say, you're teaching the religion of secular humanism.
Here's a quote from Michael Ferris, inculcation of values is inherently a religious act.
Okay?
Inculcation of values is inherently a religious act.
What the public schools are doing is indoctrinating your children in religion No matter what.
So here's the thing, Dan.
Here's the game.
If you are teaching children anything, if you are teaching them about the fact that this is how life works in modern-day India, if you're exposing them to ancient Greek mythology by reading various texts, whether it's Homer or Sophocles or anything else, if you're doing any of those things,
The takeaway is, you are doing something that is indoctrinating children into religion.
So then when you get to teaching literature that has gay characters, or talking about people in history who were trans, well then it gets even more blatant that this is a religion.
If you didn't think it was then, look what they're teaching your kids now, okay?
So I have two points on this, Dan, okay?
One is this.
This is what I talked about in Texas last weekend.
Public schools are meant to be an embodiment of the American experiment.
Public schools are supposed to be the place where we ritualize and implement the idea of American democracy.
And what is that experiment?
It's not one we've ever been successful at.
We've never lived up to it.
But the experiment is a society with no kings, no queens.
No people groups that are above others.
No ethnicities.
No races that are superior.
No religions that are superior.
No birthright.
Or you were born a Kennedy.
Or you were born a Bush.
Doesn't matter.
The experiment is everyone's equal.
Have never lived up to it.
That's the experiment.
What you're going to see in public schools is an attempt to carry out that experiment.
Therefore, Dan, a public school is a universal public institution.
Where you are going to teach all students, right, in a way that exposes them to the inherent pluralism, multi-ethnicity, multi-religiosity of the American public landscape.
When you come to public school, you're going to learn what it means to live in America.
And that means a history where we don't have one ethnicity or one people group.
We have people who have come here from all over the world, people from various religions who have various identities, and when your language arts and history, much less science and chemistry and biology, whatever, that public school is going to teach that.
Now here is the thing.
That means exposure to a pluralistic set of worldviews and characters and histories and events.
What Ferris and all the other folks he's working with are saying is my kids should not have to be exposed to Rumpelstiltskin or the Wonderful Wizard of Oz because that is inherently a religious act.
It's not that you're teaching them to be Hindu or Muslim or Atheist.
You're just exposing them to these things and by just exposing them, you're indoctrinating them.
Right?
They have turned teaching, they have turned exposure, they have turned lessons about different worldviews, different ways of life, different cultures into indoctrination.
Okay?
Now, I'll say one more thing, Dan, and I'll shut up and I'll throw it to you for one final thought on this.
I was on a panel with Reverend Dr. Katie Hayes from Galileo Church last week in Fort Worth, and Reverend Dr. Hayes had something so inspiring to say, and I just want to reiterate it here and give full credit to her for saying it.
Her response to these parents, and some of you might have these kinds of parents in your life, was this.
You are parents who are committed to family values.
Am I right?
Cool.
You want to be the best parents.
You want to sit around the dinner table at night with your kids and discuss their lives and their days.
You want to help them with homework.
You want to help them with their extracurricular activities.
Good for you.
You also attend church regularly.
Sounds like it.
Okay.
So at Sunday school, Wednesday night Bible study, summer camp, I imagine they're learning things all about the Bible.
All about your Christian worldview.
You have to be kidding me when you say that you're such a bad parent and such a bad church that you don't have the influence?
You don't have the capability?
You don't have the resiliency to teach your kid your values?
Such that when they go to school and they learn about Rumpelstiltskin or anything else, that they can say, you know, I see how this works according to what these people are talking about, but my family and my church, we have our own beliefs.
Are you that bad of a parent?
Are you just not that good at teaching your kids your values?
Because if you are, here's what I'm guessing.
You could send them anywhere.
You could send them all over the place and they would know that their North Star is what your church and your family taught them around the dinner table, in the pews, and at summer camp.
And why should we, who are part of the American experiment, have to change our public schools For your unwillingness and weakness to instill the values you want to instill in your kids.
What you're doing is exactly what, Dan, you just talked about.
You're trying to make your singular worldview the only one that can exist at a public school, therefore imposing it on all of us, and that sounds a lot like Christian nationalism.
You're a Christian nationalist, you think the world should look like this, and you want to privilege your values over anyone else's in a public school.
If you think that exposing kids to different events, histories, and worldviews is indoctrination, A. you have a sick understanding of education, and B. you need to figure out how to instill in your kids the values you want them to have without being so afraid that watching one video from Cocomelon or listening to one reading of The Wizard of Oz is going to tear them away from whatever faith and values you tried to give them.
Okay.
All right, Dan.
Vein is popping.
I am sweating.
Off to you, and then we'll take a break.
Just the first point is, yeah, this is an old argument that's sort of come back into fashion, right?
This whole secular humanism is a religion thing.
So we're coming into Labor Day.
You go to the Labor Day cookout.
Let's talk about how you talk to talk about this with Uncle Ron, because here's the issue, right?
It's a super, super, super Christian argument with a very, very traditionally Christian understanding of what religion is, right?
Starting with this notion that if you're going to be ethical, you have to be religious.
That's just false.
There are lots of non-religious people who have ethics.
Ethics has lots of sources that aren't religious, so religion is not the same as ethics.
And oh, by the way, Uncle Ron, Your church argues the same thing.
Your church says that if you're a good person and you do ethical stuff, that doesn't make you a Christian.
That doesn't make you right with God, right?
You say religion isn't just ethics, so just because they're saying ethical stuff or talking about values, that doesn't make it a religion.
But let's also think about this, Uncle Ron, Because this is how Uncle Ron thinks about religion.
Where's the church of secular humanism?
If I wanted to go visit that on a Sunday or a Thursday, where do I go?
It turns out there isn't any place to go.
What are their unified beliefs?
Because on that mindset, that's what religion is all about, right?
It's about key doctrine, it's about religious figures like Jesus, and it's about sacred texts.
There's a checklist of what you have to have if you're going to be a religious.
What are the sacred doctrines?
What's the religious text?
Who's the interpretive authority?
Who are the pastors of so-called secular humanism?
And the point is, it can't hold up.
And I had an emailer recently who reached out and said, you say all the time, this isn't about reasons and rationality.
What's the point of arguing with these people?
The point is that if nothing else, it brings the real issues to the fore.
Because you can get to the point where somebody does this and this is what they're doing.
Well, I don't know about any of that, but... And then they reiterate their point.
And what you've at least done is bring it out in the open and say, this isn't about religion versus, you know, one religion versus another.
This isn't about parental rights.
This is about you wanting to impose your worldview on everybody else.
I love that argument about You know, your parenting must not be great, or your religion's not so strong, or this god that you say is all-powerful and whatever, like, seems to not be really great at their job either, if, like, they need you to do it for them all the time through school boards.
I think, just, like, on the ground, those are the ways to just sort of at least highlight to people, get them to the point of having to say, well, yeah, I guess it's really just that I don't like gay people, and I'm nervous about my kids talking about black people too much, and I don't understand how racism works, so I'm afraid that if I talk about racism and I'm white, that somehow, like, makes me guilty or something.
Cool!
Legitimate things.
Let's talk about that instead of hiding behind Christian identity to try to say that there's something bigger or deeper or more meaningful going on.
And what happens if public schools collapse is you have a society, right, let's say you have just total public choice, or excuse me, school choice, right?
So now all of a sudden kids are sectioned off, right, into these schools that are self-selecting.
And everything I talked about with pluralism, multi-ethnic, multi-racial democracy is weakened because people are sort of segmenting off as they already do into these corners of education.
And we have a weaker public square as a result of it, right?
So we could go on and on about this.
We won't today.
Let's take a break so we can get to Vivek Ramaswamy and his religious nationalism on the campaign trail.
Be right back.
Okay, Dan, let's talk about Vivek Ramaswamy.
We should notice, and I think it's easy to miss, but the Republican field at the moment does have a number of people of color.
There's Nikki Haley, there is Tim Scott, and there is Vivek Ramaswamy.
And Ramaswamy is making waves because Ramaswamy is a Hindu.
He has been very open about that.
Unlike Haley, who is a Christian person with a Sikh background, with family members and heritage that goes back to the Sikh tradition, Haley is now Christian.
Ramaswamy is very open about being a Hindu.
Now, Hindus only represent about 1% of the US population.
Now, one of the ways that Ramaswamy is trying to basically sell himself to the GOP field, GOP voter, is by translating Hindu nationalism into Christian nationalism.
Okay.
So, you know, excuse me, the prime minister of India, Modi, came to the United States a while back and he, quote, talked unapologetically about Indian national identity.
Okay.
And as Molly Olmstead reports at Slate, Vivek Ramaswamy loved this, right?
He loved how Modi quoted the Vedas, ancient Indian scriptures.
Yet, according to Ramaswamy, here in the United States, we have now gotten in the habit of apologizing for our own national history.
That's what I think we need to learn here from Modi's visit, is that we in this country are at our best when we too do not apologize for who we are.
We don't have time today, but I will say if you don't know about this, the Hindu nationalism of Modi is cruel and violent and there is so much happening in India that is so worrisome.
I was on a panel a few months ago at Georgetown University with two journalists who are from India and who are covering Hindu nationalism and they just shared with all of us on the ground reporting of just the violence there.
So that's one thing we're not going to have A chance to get into it today.
But as Olmstead says at Slate, Ramaswamy has all but explicitly supported Christian nationalism on the campaign trail.
Our country was founded on Judeo-Christian values, there's no doubt about it, the candidate told NBC News in July.
In an interview with News Nation, he declared, I believe I live by those values more so than many self-proclaimed Christian politicians.
So Ramaswamy's trying to do two things.
He's trying to say that he lives by Judeo-Christian values, even though he's Hindu, and that the Hindu nationalism Modi is really not all that different, that the logic is the same.
In the United States, it's just that the values in history here are those of Judeo-Christian history.
Writing at Daily Beast, Manisha Sunil says, Faith, patriotism, belief in God, nation.
Oh, excuse me.
This is, let me back up.
This is Ramaswami being quoted at the Daily Beast.
Faith, patriotism, belief in God, nation.
Those have disappeared.
That leaves a moral vacuum in its wake.
According to Sunil, this kind of rhetoric has been long a fixture of Republican politics, so it's not a surprise that Ramaswamy expressed it.
What is surprising, however, is that he's a millennial Hindu-American whose parents immigrated to this country.
When he's campaigning, Dan, he talks about the Ten Commandments.
He says God is real.
But even more importantly into that, if you ask me, he says things like this, there are two genders.
The nuclear family is the greatest form of governance known to mankind.
Yeah.
Anyway, sorry.
There's so much I could say there as well.
What else is he says?
He says, quote, the culture of fear that I worry is increasingly eroding our culture of free speech.
This new church of inclusion has actually created this new culture of exclusion.
A bunch more to say here.
Let me just stop and give a little bit of analysis.
I'll throw it to you.
I think this is a really good example of how religious nationalisms might involve different religious traditions, but are very resonant with each other.
That if you highlight, right, that the real people of your country are this religion, they have this identity, that they answer to the transcendence of the God or gods who you worship or adhere to, that what you can do through that kind of nationalism is mark out who belongs and who doesn't.
And Ramaswamy is basically saying, I may not be Christian, but I recognize that in the United States, It's Christianity that really marks out who belongs and who doesn't.
So even if I'm not Christian, I am in America, I live by Christian values, and I recognize that we need to get back to faith in God and country if we want to honor our history and live up to our identity as the United States of America.
So, this is Ramaswamy making the case for Christian nationalism as a Hindu, because their logics in many ways are resonant.
They overlap, okay?
So, I think that's one thing that he's doing.
I want to touch on another big thing I think he's doing in a second, but once again, I'll throw it to you.
Thoughts on Ramaswamy and his transposition of Hindu nationalism to Christian nationalism in this country.
So, a number of thoughts here.
One, I think you hit it on the head when you said that, you know, That these religious nationalisms are sort of transposable, or can be?
I'll plug it, you know, in Queer Democracy, I've got a chapter on American Christian nationalism, but before that I've got a chapter on just, like, nationalism and populism, because those are sort of formal categories, right?
In other words, there are nationalisms and populisms that I would argue fit the same general logic, right?
They deploy the same rules, the same structures, the same thought forms, And then they're sort of filled in in different ways in different countries in different national contexts.
So there are huge parallels between Hindu nationalism in India and Christian nationalism in the United States.
So I think you're right and that's exactly what he's doing.
I teach a class called God Country Nation and look at how these concepts of nationalist identity, racial identity, religious identity sort of coalesce in different forms of religious nationalisms in different places.
Just throw out there, if I'm going to put my religious studies hat on, and this goes way beyond what we can talk about here, but one of the great ironies is that Hindu nationalism actually was heavily influenced by Christianity in the colonial period.
Hinduism was always—it was never an ism.
It was never a unified movement.
It was polytheistic and pluralistic, and some of it was super ritualistic, and some of it is what we might call pietistic or very individually focused.
And when Christian missionaries and the British and others came in and colonized the area, they wanted it to look more like Christianity, so they started privileging certain texts.
They're like, look, you've got the Bible, and we've got the Vedas, or we've got the Gita, or we've got whatever.
They kind of articulated their religion in a way that historically was not faithful to itself, and then used that Off of a model of the monolith that was American, you know, Protestantism in the U.S.
as a way of sort of envisioning Indian identity.
So there's a lot of ironies there and complexities there.
All of which is to say, yeah, they transpose and they work well and Ramaswami is trying to make that transition and that shift.
One point that I'll just make is it's interesting though that it doesn't have the resonance with folks that somebody like say Victor Orban has, right?
Modi, the right likes Modi.
They love Modi and they like Hindu nationalism because it's nationalist and because it's very authoritarian and because basically Modi and others view Muslims, the Muslim minority in India is primarily what we're talking about.
The same way that so many people, Christian nationalists in America view people like black folk or the queer community.
But notice, they're not all jumping on board with Modi and Ramaswamy.
And I wonder why.
I wonder why that is, Brad.
The reason is because at the end of the day, they're going to run into the wall that Ramaswamy's brown.
He's not wide enough.
Modi's not wide enough.
The racism built into American Christian nationalism may be the sort of rock on which this wave just ultimately crashes, right?
The limits of transposing Hindu nationalism to an American context is that he's not wide enough.
And that's why CPAC goes not to India, but they go to hang out with Orban and people like that, because they still view the truth of nationalism As basically a white European phenomenon and people of white European descent.
This is another piece of this that's affecting GOP folks like Haley and Ramaswamy and Scott and others.
So, colleague Yati Joshi made this exact point, Dan, at Religion News Service, and basically gave the examples of the politicians and leaders who have almost come out and said, look, he's not Christian, so you can't vote for him, right?
And I think what you're pointing out is something The flip side of it is, look, none of what I'm saying should be taken as, Ramaswamy's not a good candidate because he is Hindu, right?
What I'm saying is, he's trying to overlay his Hindu nationalism, which if you look at what Modi's doing is violent and exclusionary and a really bad, bad, bad, bad example for a democracy.
On to American Christian nationalism.
That's my issue.
But there are people who are basically saying you can't vote for this guy because he's Hindu and because he's brown and you're hitting the nail on the head there.
Okay, so we got to wrap this up.
We're going to run out of time today.
I just want to make one more point and that's this.
Dan, I don't think there's any way in hell Ramaswamy becomes president in 2024.
I just don't.
And David Lurie writing at Public Notice has said a couple of things.
He notices that Ramaswamy has made it his singular goal to appear as unhinged and extreme as he can be on many hot button topics.
So he said that basically he blamed Jacksonville essentially on trans people.
He said that climate change is a hoax.
There's two genders, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
Now, what Laurie says at the end is that Ramaswamy never crosses Trump.
Unlike Haley, unlike Christie, unlike Hutchinson, unlike DeSantis, he's not even sniffed at criticizing Trump.
He seems to just be praising Trump in hopes that If Trump bows out or is unavailable or whatever, Ramaswamy can slip in.
My read is Ramaswamy will not slip into the presidency.
His best bet is something like a Mayor Pete trajectory, okay?
That is, run for president, not get anywhere near close to it, but maybe get to be Secretary of Transportation, maybe get to be something else, and then Six, eight, ten, twelve years later, if you're still hanging around, right, you kind of keep just moving up.
The reason that's important is another aspect of Ramaswamy's candidacy that I'll close on and that's this.
There is a world, Dan, where we say to ourselves, we're not going to talk about Ramaswamy because he's nothing but a spectacle and a showman who believes in nothing and is just doing this to get rich and attention.
He did not vote in 2008.
He did not vote in 2012.
He did not vote in 2016.
This is not a man who seems to care.
About politics, right?
He does not have a long track record of organizing and being involved.
He's not been somebody on the ground trying to figure out how to represent, you know, various communities or whomever.
Okay?
So why even talk about him?
Because Donald Trump was the same thing in 2016.
And we unfortunately live in a society now where if Ramaswamy gets up there and says, right, that Jacksonville is in essence the result of trans people or that climate change is a hoax, he's going to get support and he's going to get more dollars even if it's not going to lead him to the White House.
We have to talk about him because, Dan, this is trickle-down Trumpism.
Hey, I'm Rama Swamy.
I'm an Ivy League rich guy.
I watched Trump do this in 2016.
I'm just going to copy the playbook.
And then what will that get me?
It might get me the presidency.
It might not.
But look at him.
He's front and center.
He's rapping Eminem.
He's on the debate stage.
He's next to Mike Pence.
Who was Ramaswamy a year ago?
Did any of us know who he was?
He didn't even vote in like four of the last five elections.
And now he's standing next to Mike Pence and Chris Christie on a Republican debate stage.
So we have to talk about him.
All right.
Any final thoughts, Dan, or give us your reason for hope as we make our transition into a beautiful weekend and everyone celebrates Labor Day.
I'll just do one last thought and then my reason for hope.
You hit it on the head.
I'm not going to vote for Ramaswamy, and it's because he's a climate denier.
It's because he's a nationalist.
It's because he's a conspiracist.
It's because he's a transphobe.
I could not possibly care less about his religious identity if he wasn't all those other things.
I mean, I feel like that's worth saying, right?
It's not just about being partisan.
It's about these other sort of deeper issues.
My reason for Hope tied in with that is Again, just looking to Georgia and watching how these things play out, waiting to hear about Mark Meadows and his effort to remove his trial.
But a couple of rulings that came out.
One is that the trial is slated to start in March of 2024.
Folks might remember the prosecutors wanted to start in January.
The Trump campaign wanted to push it to April of 2026.
I'll take March 2024.
I think that's really significant.
And then related to that was a ruling that the election interference trial of Trump will be televised.
And I think that that speaks to visibility, accountability, publicity, not just trying to create a spectacle of Trump, but like, I think the right, we talk about democracy and transparency all the time, to be able to see this And see how it unfolds.
A lot of us, I think, have gotten used to things like SCOTUS, where nothing can ever be sort of publicly visible and so forth.
So I view those two things as hopeful of the wheels of justice slowly turning and not just deferring to Trump because he's a big name and because he's a former president and because he wants to be president again.
My reason for hope is twofold.
One is I got to hang out with just a bunch of amazing people last weekend in Dallas and Fort Worth, and it was really inspiring to see the way they're fighting and organizing.
Shout out to Will Judy.
Shout out to everyone at Metroplex Atheist, to Reverend Dr. Katie Hayes.
It's really amazing that in the places in this country that are hardest hit by some of the things we talk about all the time in the show, people are working for democracy.
The other is that the Proud Boys and some of the others were really given big sentences.
Now, Jeff Charlotte noticed on Twitter, hey, Biggs probably should have gotten more than 17 years, but at least he got 17 years and not 17 months.
I think that's a win.
But yeah, he should be in jail for life if you ask me, but that at least is some good news.
Before we go down, I want to make some shout-outs.
I want to congratulate Mark Kurth, who helps us with our substack.
If you've not subscribed to our substack, please do so.
We send out research links every Friday, along with other stuff that is really great.
And Mark Kurth has been helping us with that for the last couple of months, and he graduated with his MDiv this last couple weeks, so I just want to say congrats to Mark.
I want to thank Emma Hulbert, who helps me at times with the research for the show.
And I want to say how thankful I am to Emma for her work and everything she does here.
Sign up for our Substack.
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If you join Patreon, you're part of our Discord server where we talk about these things and other folks are in there discussing and posting articles and all kinds of great stuff.
So it's worth it just to join the community.
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So be on the lookout for that.
With all that said, I want to say thanks for being here.
