Brad and Dan begin by discussing the fact that Trump may be kept off the ballot in some states. The 14th amendment prohibits those who have "engaged in insurrection" from holding office. Dan breaks down the case and what may happen going forward.
In the second segment Brad analyzes Project 2025, a program from the Heritage Foundation that lays out a frightening totalitarian vision for a 2nd Trump Term. He also outlines why he won't support a third party candidate this election.
In the final segment the hosts discuss the federal rulings that AL and FL need to rewrite their congressional maps - and their resistance to doing so.
Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus episodes, ad-free listening, access to the entire 500-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/
To Donate: venmo - @straightwhitejc
Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/BradleyOnishi
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
SWAJ Book Recommendations - September 2023: https://bookshop.org/lists/swaj-recommends-september-2023/edit
Order Brad's new book: https://www.amazon.com/Preparing-War-Extremist-Christian-Nationalism/dp/1506482163
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Brad here with the biggest news we've ever shared as Straight White American Jesus.
We are starting our own podcast network called Axis Mundi Media.
Axis Mundi is going to be a network that showcases research-based podcasts.
We're going to connect the ivory tower to the grassroots.
We want to work with our colleagues, with our friends, with other researchers at think tanks and universities in order to share research that will help us understand the threats to our democracy, The threats coming from religious nationalisms, extremist movements, and authoritarians rising in our midst.
And we want to share those series in order to imagine a better world.
Everything we do at Axis Moody Media is going to be reliable.
The kinds of things you can trust in terms of their rigor and their veracity.
But they're also going to be relevant.
The kinds of things you want to listen to.
The kinds of stories and narratives and interviews that compel you to keep listening.
To keep learning.
And guess what?
You don't have to wait long to see what we've been up to.
On September 14th, we'll publish the first episode of Inform Your Resistance, hosted by Cokie Mendes.
Inform Your Resistance comes from Political Research Associates, a think tank that has been analyzing and researching the threats of the far right for 40 years.
Now their research will be transposed into 30 and 60 minute interviews.
This is the place where you'll learn about abortion abolitionists and Christian homeschooling extremists.
Not to mention fascists organizing to take over state legislatures and so much more.
And then on September 18th, we're dropping American Idols.
A series written and created by Dr. Andrew Whitehead, a world-renowned sociologist who uses his own faith journey to understand white Christian nationalism and why it is a threat both to the United States and to the American church.
In the upcoming months, we'll share a series about the tax-exempt status of religious universities and colleges and how they use that status to discriminate against queer people.
We'll learn about the connections between white supremacy and evangelical purity culture.
And we'll even take a look at how conspiracy theories and misinformation infiltrate Christian spaces and wellness communities, essentially tying together yoga moms and Sunday school moms.
Here's the bottom line.
Everything at Access Moondi is going to be research-based.
It'll be reliable and also relevant.
We want to cover the stories at the center of our world so that all of us can imagine a better one.
I can't wait to share all the content that we are developing here at Axis Mundi with you.
We're thankful for your support, and until we meet next time, keep your eyes open and feet on the ground.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty, University of San Francisco, here today with my co-host.
I am Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Nice to see you, Brad, as always.
You too.
Yeah, I wish people could see the behind the scenes footage of this podcast because I just destroyed a picture frame while getting ready and Dan laughed at me, so that was fun.
A laugh out of solidarity, clearly.
I was clearly laughing with you because I know inside somewhere you probably thought it was hilarious.
I wanted to share something with you, Dan, that I interviewed Catherine Cramer Brownell from the University of Purdue this week, and a book about cable news.
It's a great book.
Excited for the interview to come out.
But in the course of reading the book, which focuses in some places on the 1992 presidential race, we're talking Bill Clinton, George H.W.
Bush, and none other than Ross Perot.
And if you're of certain age, you will remember Ross Perot as a third party candidate.
And guess what, Dan, that I had forgotten and just remembered and I'm going to share with you right now.
I, in fifth grade, dressed up as Ross Perot for Halloween.
You did not.
I did.
Like I was that weird of a kid that I went home and was like all my friends were like for Halloween I'm gonna be like Freddy Krueger or a pirate and I was like mom I would like to be Ross Perot and like in ways that are totally not appropriate I asked her to buy me big ears cuz Ross Perot had huge ears if you remember so I wore these fake ears and a suit and everyone when I opened the door to like for trick-or-treating everyone looked at me like so I was like Ross Perot and they're like Yeah.
Cool, man.
Okay.
Good for you.
Happy Halloween.
Did you like powder your hair or something?
Like a gray hair?
I don't know.
I don't remember.
I don't remember.
But anyway.
I'm just going to say a Halloween photo from that would be solid gold.
I have not seen one.
I've seen other Halloweens from my childhood, but not that one.
And I hope that no pictures are uncovered because the internet would go wild.
I'm sure a lot of people would care.
I say that facetiously.
At least 50 people would care, like, you know, a huge internet audience.
Several dozens of people would really care.
All right.
Let's talk about the 14th Amendment today.
Let's talk about Project 25 from the Heritage Foundation.
Let's talk about congressional maps.
So I think today, Dan, has a lot to do with Governance, the maintenance of democracy, and the attempts by a lot of people to, in essence, try to weaken our democracy.
We talk about that a lot, but I think we're going to see that from numerous angles this week.
We're going to see that from a call to keep Trump off of the ballot for really, in my view, legitimate reasons.
We're going to see a goal To totally revolutionize the presidency if a GOP president wins in 2024.
We're also going to see debates over congressional maps and gerrymandering happening in several states.
So let's get into it.
Tell me about the 14th Amendment.
Yeah, so everybody can buckle up for, you know, the amendment that we're all excited to talk about all the time, which is not the 14th Amendment.
But, so there's been this, this theory, I think it started out as kind of, I think was dismissed probably as kind of a fringe, highly partisan, you know, long shot theory, essentially arguing that the 14th Amendment could bar Trump from taking office.
And over time, I think this has gained the ground.
It's begun showing up in more and more mainstream circles.
We'll talk about that in a few minutes.
I think part of the reason is that I think when these ideas first flooded, nobody kind of knew where all the stuff on January 6 was going.
But now we've seen people going to prison for January 6.
We've seen Trump facing indictments, right?
We've seen the legal process playing out and saying this was a really serious event that he and others were involved in.
So I think it's added sort of credibility or legitimacy to this.
This, this theory outside of the circles where it first started, but start by giving a little background in case people, you know, don't have the 14th Amendment just right on the front of their mind all the time.
After the Civil War, the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, and it's probably most familiar to people because it provides, you know, equal protection under the law.
And things like that.
That's been interpreted to mean that state laws have to abide by the federal constitution and stuff like that.
But Section 3 also bars current or former officials from public office if they, quote, engage in insurrection or rebellion.
And it's that phrase in Section 3 that is the focus here.
And the argument, obviously, here is that Trump's actions related to J6 and election interference and the whole thing, right?
Again, I see January 6th as like the culmination of All of that other stuff that was going on, that they should disqualify him from office on these terms.
And again, it was originally written in the aftermath of the Civil War.
Obviously, former Confederate officials were sort of the immediate target.
But legal ass will be like this is on the like it's a it's a it's a constitutional amendment.
It's there.
It's on the books.
It applies.
It's it's still binding.
So as I say, it started out as an argument that could easily be dismissed by Trump supporters, let's say, or a lot of other people as being sort of a fringe theory, but it sort of gained steam.
So much so that this week, an organization filed suit in Colorado, I think on behalf of six voters, to remove Trump from the ballot.
And in August, there was a Florida lawyer, actually a lawyer in Florida, I don't know if he's actually a Florida lawyer, A lawyer filed a suit in federal court in Florida to keep Trunk from running there as well.
And so these are our pending suits.
So obviously it's a serious thing.
It's like coming before the courts now.
And then recently, people might have seen this, two conservative law professors, William, I don't know how you pronounce his last name.
If it's bowed, it's B-A-U-D-E.
And Michael Paulson, two conservative law professors, right?
Politically conservative, pretty conservative in their interpretations and so forth.
They authored a legal paper arguing that the 14th Amendment blocks Trump from office.
And they did so on the grounds of, as they said, participation in attempts to overthrow the 2020 presidential election.
And I believe that's their phrase, overthrow the 2020 presidential election.
Trump, of course, dismisses this and, you know, has his social media posts about how all the legal experts say that this is, you know, whatever.
It's not true.
Not all the legal experts do.
But nobody's quite sure where this will go because while this has been on the books for a long time, it's not a commonly applied section or part of the Constitution, at least not certainly in the 20th century and 21st century.
It doesn't specify, for example, what constitutes insurrection, right?
So that's one of the questions that people have of, you know, what does that mean exactly?
Section 3 also doesn't say who can enforce this or exactly what the mechanism for enforcement is.
So these are questions that people just aren't sure.
It hasn't been tried.
It certainly has not been tried with a former president and somebody of that status.
Have been a couple times.
It's been before the courts recently with sort of mixed results.
Last year, in 2022, a New Mexico County Commissioner was removed from his position on 14th Amendment grounds because he participated in January 6th, and he was removed from his position on the grounds that he was barred from holding office.
However, somebody filed suit against Marjorie Taylor Greene in 2022, arguing that she should be barred from seeking re-election on 14th Amendment grounds.
That was dismissed by a Georgia judge.
So, it's hard to know.
And obviously, differences there.
Marjorie Taylor Greene was not sort of storming the Capitol and so forth.
She didn't have the same role that somebody like Trump did.
But all of that sort of background, right?
So that's what we're talking about with the 14th Amendment.
That's why, very unsettled.
Where we're at right now is a lot of folks, that question of who determines what insurrection is, who enforces this.
A lot of people say that it's probably state election officials, like secretaries of state are the ones who will be sort of the front line of this, right?
They're the ones who can remove Trump from state ballots.
That's who's considering this in Colorado, right?
Or thinking about it or cognizant of it.
And there was an article in Politico this week that said that state election officials apparently in multiple states have been talking about this for months.
So like, well, people like us who said this is this fringe thing, it sounds like behind the scenes election officials who, you know, know their constitutional stuff on elections have said this is a thing that could come up.
They've been talking about it.
The Colorado Secretary of State Jenna Griswold.
I'm just going to throw out the props for Griswold.
Have to do it.
The name Griswold.
She... Jenna Griswold.
I'm going to talk about Jenna Griswold in a minute.
Jenna Griswold.
Yeah, she is another person that is like now one of my spirit animals, right, is Jennifer as well.
She said that they've been expecting this to play out and they've been having discussions since last year, so before 2023.
And also said that there have been discussions and conversations, quote, among secretaries, meaning secretaries of state.
So this is a real thing that's been going on.
So my thoughts, I say this all the time, the standard caveat, right?
I'm not a constitutional law expert.
I'm not a legal expert.
I think it has legs.
It has more legs than I thought maybe a few months ago that it might.
Number two, I think it's going to be the standard strategy by the Trump campaign.
Let's say that a secretary of state somewhere bars Trump, says he can't appear on the ballot in state X, Y, or Z. He's going to file suit.
I think almost certainly a court is going to put a hold on barring him.
And it's just going to gum things up.
And it would certainly gum things up, I would think, past the 2024 election.
And no doubt Were he to win the election and somehow be ready to go into office and then some court ruling said that he can't hold office, it would turn into a real mess.
And I think that's part of part of Trump's strategy, right, is to make things so messy that you kind of can't undo it.
And we've talked about, you talked about, did a great job talking about the Trump campaign trying to do this.
With SCOTUS with the 2020 election.
So I think that's part of it to think about.
It's also not clear when it says somebody can't hold office if they're barred from running.
It's not clear if they're barred from being elected.
There are a lot of people that say that it's in principle conceivable that somebody could run for office, be elected for office, but then not be allowed to take office or hold office.
Again, that would just be messy.
I also think, and this is where I'm interested in, you know, if folks listening know more about this than I do, I'd love to hear more about this, but what the status would be if Trump's actually convicted in, say, the Georgia case or if he's convicted in the special prosecutor case, right?
Because I think that's another piece of it is there will always be the question of, are we presumed innocent until, you know, until we're found guilty?
If you can just, you know, can you just declare somebody to have been involved in insurrection?
Were he to be found guilty of one of these things, I think that I have to think that this would then become a really pressing issue, if not just, you know, the question of a convicted felon or this or that or whatever, but the question of somebody who was convicted for trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.
So that's where we're at.
The stuff in Colorado, I think, is really, really interesting this week, and it was kind of a An eye-opener for a lot of people to hear that secretaries of state have been actively discussing this.
And I think that's all it is.
They're discussing it.
I think I get the impression they're all like, we don't know what the status of this is either, but we think it's a thing that's coming.
So I'll throw it your way for your thoughts and reflections on this, this week and before this week.
Yeah.
So I think we can say this plainly, and sometimes I think it's best to cut through the noise and just reduce things to their essential parts.
If you try to overthrow an election, if you try to stop the peaceful transfer of power, should you be allowed to run for office?
Right?
So if you do something that is an illegal, extra-judicial, beyond the scope of our institutions and processes as a democracy, At the highest level, right?
Not just any election.
This isn't a congressional election.
It's not a Senate election.
This is the most significant election that the United States has.
We're not talking about mayor of a town of 5,000.
We're not talking about a school board seat.
We're talking, you try through ways that are illegal to stop or overthrow an election.
Should you get to run for office again?
The Constitution, for all of the talk about the Constitution, for all of the talk about let's get back to the Constitution, says no.
OK, now, as you say, Dan.
Right now, it's a little murky.
But if Trump is convicted of this in any way, then there is just very firm ground to say, from a legal perspective, you've been convicted by a jury of your peers of trying to do this.
As a result, you are not allowed to be a candidate for this position during the 2024 campaign or any campaign going forward.
I think that's pretty simple.
Now, the complicated thing to me is this.
This is why truth and facts and, let's just be honest, media narratives matter a lot.
Because for you and I, After examining the J6 Select Committee's evidence, after looking at all of the things that happened on that day, going through the timeline, reading the books that have been written, writing my own book about what happened, and so on and so forth, I think you and I can say, right, that there is a very solid factual basis for Trump's deep involvement in January 6th and his incitement of that riot.
He's being charged right now for a conspiracy to stop that election, whether that was through finding votes in Georgia or through other things with Jack Smith and so on.
It's pretty simple.
But if you live in a world where half the country thinks that J6 was no big deal, or that they kind of sympathize with the J6ers, Then you're in trouble because you say, well, how can you run again if you are treasonous or inciting riots or stopping elections?
And half the country's like, no, that's not what happened.
That's not what happened.
And in fact, I think Trump's getting a bad rap or that was Antifa or that right.
And all of a sudden then you can see why democracy relies on truth and facts.
You can see why it's so anti-democratic to have a world where disinformation is being spread rampantly through social media and knowingly through media outlets.
Because if you have no basis for agreement on what has happened, then you cannot have a basis for deciding really important things like this.
So I think that's a major part of what is going on in my mind right now.
Yeah, I mean, I'll throw it back to you.
Do you have final thoughts?
And I probably have one more thing, but you go ahead and then I'll pick it up.
I think to tie into something that you bring up, which is, and this is the thing, right?
Again, the Uncle Ron at the barbecue says it's all political.
Like, this is the piece for me, right?
So we say, oh, it was just, they were touring the Capitol building.
Remember that one?
It was just like a tour or whatever.
How many regular Americans have been involved now in these juries who have heard these cases, who have convicted people, right?
How many regular Americans were on these grand juries looking at this evidence and reaching these conclusions?
And that's what I would ask somebody, like, cool, you say it's a conspiracy, it's political, cool, like, how do they stack that many juries?
Like, how do they, at every level, the federal government that you say can't do anything right, ever, it's Joe Biden, for God's sake, he can't do anything, he's, so they'll say, he's on his last legs, he's not mentally competent and so forth, but they can orchestrate this wide-ranging conspiracy at different judicial levels and so forth.
Why do I think that matters?
I think it matters because it lends a lot of weight to this.
And again, I think this is part of why, for me, this has gained more credibility.
The last piece of that, I mean, we just saw another one of the Proud Boys sentenced to, what, 22 years, I think it was?
The other thing is news that came out, I just saw it today, maybe it was yesterday, that the Georgia grand jury recommended charges against a lot more people than were charged, including some senators like Lindsey Graham.
They weren't indicted, and I think the reason is, and I don't know this, but I assume the reason is the case against the indicted co-conspirators is stronger, that there is better evidence against them Then there was against the people who weren't indicted.
So if someone would say, oh, it's just cool.
Why not target Lindsey Graham?
Why not target other GOP political figures?
So those are the kinds of things I think just just add plausibility to the sense that this was a real thing and undermine those conspiratorial claims that it's just political.
It's just, you know, whatever.
All of us who've ever gotten a notice to serve on a jury, That's what these people were.
Regular American people who sit on juries and came to these conclusions.
And that's whose hands it'll be in again.
So, I just want to make one more comment about democracy as a system.
Okay?
So, let's just imagine we all come together.
Let's imagine, Dan, we got a group of 100 people and we say, we're going to have a democracy.
Cool.
So democracy means the dilution of power, as you say, right?
Meaning the power is diluted into all 100 people.
Everybody gets a voice.
Everybody gets a vote.
Okay.
There's no king, no queen.
No, none of that.
Great.
So we got a hundred people.
We got a democracy.
Wonderful.
And we say, okay, everyone gets a voice.
Everyone gets a vote and everybody can run for office.
But if you try to do something that is against democracy itself, if you say, hey, you're going to try to be in charge of the group by way of force, by way of violence, by way of lies and manipulation and threats.
Well, you don't get to be somebody who is running for office or trying to be in charge of our democracy, at least as an elected official, because you did something that is undemocratic.
It's it's anti-democratic.
OK.
What I see happening here is us as the United States saying, you tried to do something.
That was totally anti-democratic in the sense that you tried to stay the leader of the country, its executive branch, by inciting a riot, by trying to overthrow elections in Georgia and other places, by doing so many things that made it that everyone's voice and everyone's vote and everyone's tallying up who the majority says they want to be in charge didn't count so that you could be in charge in a different way.
What we're saying is, if you go outside the system, Then there is a right to bar you from being part of the system.
I want to just remind everybody, okay, because Uncle Ron might give you this.
Well, doesn't everyone have a right to vote?
Right?
Say yes.
So, Democrats, you're always saying that felons should have their voting rights, you know, not infringed because everyone gets the right to vote.
Yes.
18 years old, you get to vote, right?
It's a right.
Okay, good.
It's not a privilege.
Right?
Voting is not a privilege.
Voting is not a thing that is a privilege.
It's not like you get to do it if you live up to certain things.
If you're a citizen of the country, you get to vote.
Guess what's not a right?
Guess what is a privilege?
Running to be an elected official in a democracy.
So if you're not going to be somebody who abides by the laws and the paradigm of democracy, It makes total sense to say you don't get to run for office, right?
I don't know, Dan.
In some ways, I know that this is so complicated and it's going to get so murky and mucked up and there's going to be courts and there's going to be Jenna Griswold, who is amazing and really fighting the good fight, if you ask me.
And then there's just going to be this really simple truth.
This guy tried to stop the election.
Why should he get to run again?
It doesn't make any sense.
You can just kind of get to that pretty quickly.
So, all right, let's take a break.
We'll come back and we'll talk about something along similar lines that is actually pretty frightening, and that's Project 2025 from the Heritage Foundation.
We'll be right back.
Okay, Dan, we mentioned this about two months ago, but we did so in passing.
Some people have sent it to me.
It's been on my radar, so I thought, all right, today's the day.
Let's talk about it, okay?
So, the Heritage Foundation, many of you know the Heritage Foundation is this really powerful and influential right-wing think tank.
I mean, I used to live like two blocks from the Heritage Foundation headquarters, and it's got enormous influence in our politics.
It was started by Paul Weyrich, leader of the new right in the 60s, 70s, and 80s.
And it's just something that it's hard to overstate how much the Heritage Foundation has a hold on politics in this country, especially conservative politics.
Well, they have a new book out and I call it a book because it's a thousand pages long.
Okay.
And it is called Project 2025.
And this is really an outline of what the Heritage Foundation wants to happen If a Republican president is elected in 2024.
And in my mind, Dan, this is really targeted toward a Trump second term.
The Heritage Foundation are conservative elites.
I think if you gave them truth serum, they would admit to you that they don't really want Donald Trump to be president.
I think they would also admit to you that Donald Trump's first term was a lot of bumbling and fumbling and giving Jared Kushner like 82 jobs and a lot of other clowns jobs that they didn't know how to do.
It was infrastructure week for like three and a half years straight, the whole thing.
In my mind, the Heritage Foundation is like, all right, we're not going to do that again.
So this guy, Trump, who we kind of think is a clown, gets into office.
We're going to give him a handbook.
And we're going to make it such that he just has to follow the book.
And we're going to help him get what we think are adults in the room to actually accomplish these things rather than Scaramucci and Jared Kushner and Don Jr.
and Navarro and all the other jokers that were hanging around the first time.
OK?
So here's MSNBC on Project 2025.
Project 2025 published a book of policy proposals titled Mandate for Leadership the Conservative Promise for the Next Republican Administration.
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts opens the book by prioritizing, you guessed it Dan, the securing of our God-given individual rights to live freely against a woke threat.
Today, the left is threatening the tax-exempt status of churches and charities that reject woke progressivism, he claims, without evidence.
They will soon turn to Christian schools and clubs with the same totalitarian intent.
Robert's view that progressives are out to get Christians sets the tone for individual chapters on various federal agencies.
While anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ policies run throughout the book, several policy areas stand out.
So I'll get into those in a minute, but let's just be clear.
It starts with a pretty Christian nationalist-like thing here.
Our God-given rights, and they're coming for Christians, and we're going to play on that whole trope.
All right?
PBS says it this way.
The goal of Project 2025 is to avoid the pitfalls of Trump's first years in office when the Republican president's team was ill-prepared, his cabinet nominees had trouble winning Senate confirmation, and policies were met with resistance.
Okay?
The president, day one, will be a wrecking ball for the administrative state, said Russ Vought, a former Trump administration official involved in the effort, who is now president of the Conservative Center for Renewing America.
So the question is this, how are they going to do this, Dan?
What does the handbook say for a potential Trump second term or anyone else?
Well, one of the main foci, and this is something we mentioned a while back, but I'll mention again here, is to reinstate Schedule F. Schedule F was a Trump-era executive order that would reclassify tens of thousands of the two million federal employees as essentially at-will workers who could more easily be fired.
Now, why would you do that, Dan?
Why would you turn tens of thousands of federal workers into at-will employees?
You would do that because, A, they have to be loyalists if they want to keep their job.
If you work for the State Department, if you work for a federal bureau, if you're a federal employee and you're an at-will worker, Then if you criticize the president, or let's just be honest, if the president or his administration tells you to do something that is illegal or is against policy at any federal institution, they can say, you're fired, and we'll get someone who'll do that for us.
Right now, you can't do that.
Right now, we have tens of thousands of federal workers who go to work every day, they do their job, and then they go home.
They live in DC.
They live all over the country.
And those people, Dan, they make democracy go.
Because they implement the policies and the laws.
They process the paperwork.
They process everything to make everything from the Fulbright program at the State Department all the way down to the IRS happen.
Okay?
What they want to do is say, that's the deep state.
So unless you're a Trump loyalist, you're fired.
We'll get rid of you.
And we'll just find someone who will do it.
One of the folks involved in this says, we have a democracy that is at risk of suicide.
Schedule F is just one more bullet in the gun.
That's Mary Gaia, professor at the University of Colorado, Denver.
There's this sense, Dan, that Project 2025 is an attempt to undo democracy from within.
We have talked about that so many times with Viktor Orban in Hungary, that Viktor Orban was elected democratically and he has done everything possible to tear down democracy from within.
And Dan, that's possible with democracy.
Democracy can be undone from within itself.
Some of these visions, they do start to just bleed into some kind of authoritarian fantasies where the president won the election, so he's in charge, so everyone has to do what he says.
And that's just not the system the government we live under, says Philip Wallach, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
I want you to keep that in mind.
The vision for the presidency for Project 2025 is basically this.
Well, we elected a president, now he can do whatever he wants.
I want to go back to my analogy.
You have 100 people, we start a democracy.
We elect you, Dan Miller, you're the head of our 100-person democracy.
You don't get to do whatever you want, you just get to operate within the system that we've set up that leads us, all 100 people, as our democratically elected official.
You're not the law.
You're not a king.
What you say doesn't go.
You have the power to work within a system, okay, to make things go.
If you have a chessboard, right?
Think about chess, Dan.
You can make the pieces go.
You can make the rook and the knight and the queen move how they can move, but they can only move according to how they're allowed to move on the chessboard.
It is not the case that you can just make them move however you want because you are now president.
You have to still operate in the chessboard, right?
In order to maneuver the levers of government.
Well, Project 2025 is like, well, if we get rid of all of these federal workers, we can just kind of do what we want according to whoever is elected, okay?
Now, let me just mention one more thing and then I'll throw it to you and I'll shut up, okay?
So many people warned that in one fell swoop, if this plan is implemented, we're going to lose, as a society, so many of the people who make the government function.
Okay?
We're talking about FBI, DOJ, CIA, IRS, State Department, so on.
There's another part of this that I just can't get away from, given the summer of climate change hell that we just all went through.
The Guardian reports this.
The Guide's chapter on the U.S.
Department of Energy proposes eliminating three agency offices that are crucial for the energy transition and also calls to slash funding to the agency's grid deployment office in an effort to stymie renewable energy deployment, E&E News reported this week.
The plan would expand gas infrastructure.
The plan would basically roll back Environmental Protection Agency policies.
It would basically gut the EPA, Dan, OK?
I'm going to resist the chance here to just get blindingly full of rage.
But this is what's at stake.
If you elect Donald Trump or any other Republican president, they're showing you what they want the executive branch to look like.
They want the executive branch to be basically whatever the executive says goes.
Forget the chessboard.
Forget the democratic processes.
Forget the rules.
Forget any of it.
If you're president, what you say goes.
And what Uncle Ron's going to say, well, you elected him, right?
I mean, we elected him.
Doesn't he get to be president?
And here's the response.
He does get to be president, but the president is not the king.
So even when you're elected, you have to follow the rules of our democratic system.
I have a lot more to say about following the rules of a democratic system and what's at stake here, but off to you.
What do you think?
So what this reminds me of is like, as you say, it's sort of giving a playbook.
It's like a streamlined, like, you know, if we just get somebody in office, here's the script for them.
And what stands out to me is we've seen this before in a different way.
And I'm going to take people back to, you know, the Clinton-Bush election and Bush wins, not the popular vote, as we know, but the Electoral College.
You have 9-11 and so forth.
And there was a group of conservatives at that time who had this document and this program put together called The Project for a New American Century.
And they had put together all these position papers and all this stuff.
And basically, they had argued and said, you know, at the end of the Cold War, basically, The US as the sole global superpower needs kind of a focus.
It needs a common threat.
It needs some external enemy.
And when 9-11 happened, it gave them that.
Please, by the way, everybody hear me, I'm not saying that 9-11 was committed by the U.S.
government or something like that.
I don't think that it was.
But the point is, they had a playbook ready.
And they had a president that people did not see as super effective.
They didn't see him as real determined.
It's weird to remember this now, but back in 2000, a lot of people were like, I don't really know what the difference is between the moderate Republicans and the moderate Democrats.
And George W. Bush's first months in office, it was just like, he's kind of never there.
He's always on vacation.
He's always out like, you know, cutting brush down in Texas and whatever.
And he had people like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld ready with this.
And this is what shaped The US foreign policy and the quote-unquote nation building and going into Iraq and Afghanistan and so forth with disastrous and in my view very anti-democratic effects because it was it was a very strongly sort of you know strong executive sort of model.
This is the same thing like amped up multiple times because it is at this point.
Just straightforwardly, let's just call it absolutist, right?
I was teaching my students this week about Louis XIV, King of France, and that was absolutism, the model of the monarch who, because he's the monarch, is the law, right?
He said, I am France, right?
I am the nation.
We talk about this with populism, that's what a populist leader does, that's what this is cashing in on, is saying, okay, let's tap into that, let's just fully embrace that, and let's make it so that everything in the federal government Is at the whim of the president.
As you say, that's not democracy, right?
Everybody, you cheat enough in baseball or football or anything else, guess what?
You get banned from the game.
You don't get to play the game.
You don't get to do everything on the field that you might want to do.
It's the same thing, and it comes back around that.
But I feel like we've seen this script before.
We have seen this script where somebody wins the presidency, Not clear that they're all that competent to do so, but they're handed a playbook.
And because of that lack of competence, they just become sort of a pliable figure that the radicals can use.
In this case, I think Trump's as radical as anybody else, but he doesn't know how to do it.
He's not very smart.
He just doesn't know what he's doing.
So that's what this brings back to me, is that this isn't even something we haven't seen before.
We did this a quarter century ago.
You know who the Heritage Foundation made one of these for before?
Ronald Reagan.
And you know, Ronald Reagan had more experience than Trump.
He was governor of California, but he was a really new politician for the most part.
And I think it was the same thing.
Then they're like, all right, we can just make Reagan malleable.
We can just get Reagan to do what we want.
And it was really successful.
Right?
So, all right.
This is a chance for me to talk about why I don't think voting for Cornel West is a good idea.
All right.
And you're like, what?
That came out of nowhere.
What are you doing?
Here's why I'm bringing that up right now.
Dan, you spent the first segment of today talking about should this guy, Donald Trump, even be allowed to run for office given the fact that he tried to turn over the chessboard in order to be control of everything, right?
He didn't want to win the chess match.
He wanted to just overthrow the chessboard and then say, I'm the winner, right?
That's kind of what he wanted to do.
We just spent another 15 minutes talking about how the plan, if they can get into office, Trump or anyone else, is to, in essence, undo the rules of the chessboard and make it so that you can kind of do whatever you want if you are the president, right?
They're trying to undo democracy from within.
They're trying to make it so that it is really, really difficult for the will of the people to be enacted in any way and for us to have anything that looks like A democracy.
Now, I'm very aware that if you're listening to this, there's a chance that you're like, we've never had a democracy.
American democracy has been exclusionary and anti-progressive from the start.
And I could not agree more.
Okay.
But this plan is one that says, let's roll back any progress that has been made since the 14th Amendment that you talked about, Dan, since women gained the right to vote, since the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and so on.
Okay.
Let's go back to the period you just talked about.
A period where it was kind of hard to tell Bill Clinton and George W. Bush apart sometimes.
And if you go back and you examine the Bill Clinton presidency...
That dude did a lot of stuff that is not progressive.
We could talk about incarceration.
We could talk about funding for abstinence-only sex education.
We could talk about a lot of stuff where Bill Clinton was a moderate.
And there was this moment, right, Dan, where it was kind of hard to say, all right, is there a deep chasm between Bill Clinton and George W. Bush or any of the other Republicans on the other side, Bob Dole, okay?
And I know that many of you listening are on this line of thought.
The Democrats and the Republicans are two in the same.
They're just sort of like, they don't have any radical ideas.
And if anyone like a real progressive comes along, it's Bernie Sanders or AOC, the Democratic Party just burns them up so they can never really get to power, right?
So what's the point?
Why not vote for Cornel West or someone else?
And my response is this.
I would be much more willing to entertain the idea of a third-party run, a third-party candidate, in a time that you just talked about where the two parties are really hard to tell apart when it comes to their moderation.
Right now, what we have, by way of Project 2025, by way of Donald Trump's presidency, by way of January 6th and the threats it continues to pose to our country, Is we have one party that is not like, Hey, I'm going to play chess this way.
And another party that's like, Ooh, I'm going to play chess this way.
We have one party that's like, I'm going to play chess.
And another that's like, what can I do to completely overturn the chess board so that it doesn't exist, that its rules don't exist, that its policies don't exist.
And I can just be in charge without having to actually abide by any of those democratic norms or ideals.
What can I do to create, in essence, an authoritarian state that is anti-democratic, and how can I use democracy against itself to do that?
I am totally here to talk about the fact that there are many ways that the Democrats and the Republicans, Dan, they're just playing the same game and that the Democrats have a ton of corporate people in their midst in Congress who are trading stocks and they don't care about poor folks.
I'm here to talk about there's a lot of Democrats that don't care about the climate crisis and are standing in its way.
I'm here for it.
It's true.
And if you don't like that, you think that's not okay.
Email me because I just, I'm happy to have that debate.
But right now, if Donald Trump wins a second presidency, Dan, Project 2025 is the goal.
And there's a very little chance he's going to leave unless he is incapacitated before his second term's over.
There's very little chance.
That we will have something that even looks like the democracy that we've been striving for, for the last 60 years.
They will dismantle, they're telling you they will dismantle it.
So I know voting for Joe Biden or anyone else may feel like just rearranging the chessboard with people that don't actually have any progressive ideals in, in their minds.
But I, this is trite.
It's cliche.
You can say, Oh, I've heard that before.
That's fine.
It doesn't mean it's not true.
If this election goes to Trump or DeSantis, we're going to look more like Orbán's Hungary by 2028 than we will a democratic republic like the one we hope to have.
So, final thoughts on this, Dan.
I sprung Cornel West on you.
I did not prepare you for that, but go ahead.
I'll tag on with this.
There's only one person in the history of the American presidency who has ever gotten more votes than Trump did in the last election, and it was Joe Biden.
Why do I say that?
Not because I care about Joe Biden, not because I think Biden's the ideal president, but because if there'd been a third party candidate on the left, we would be in a second Trump term right now.
And it is it's it's cliche, especially for people who call themselves progressives to look at the pragmatics of it.
But that's that's the pragmatics of it.
Right.
And I think it's worth remembering that, you know, and Trump likes to say that he received more votes than any presidential candidate in history.
It's true.
Except for Biden, which you won't acknowledge.
Right.
So, yeah, if you shave off One or two percentage points to a third party candidate in 2020.
We're in the second term right now, and it'll be the same thing in 2024.
And I wish that wasn't how it is, but I think that's how it is.
And I think everything you're highlighting tells us what's at stake with that.
I got one more comment.
Okay, Dan, and I forgot to say this earlier.
I got one more comment before we take a break.
There's a good piece at PBS that I quoted about Project 2025.
Okay.
And this goes along with everything we just, we just talked about with, with Trump and all that stuff.
But at the end of the PBS piece on Project 2025, here's the line.
It, meaning Project 2025, is an image of what conservatives have long desired, a smaller federal government.
And when I read that, I just about just, I almost, yeah, I had to get up from my desk and take a walk.
You know why?
This is not about a smaller federal government.
It's not.
It's about a huge federal government where anything the government says goes.
And that government just happens to be run by one person, right, who has an autocratic vision and an outsized narcissist understanding of who he is.
Do not let anyone tell you that conservatism in this country is about smaller government.
It is not.
It's about a huge government that will do things, and we talked about this, Dan, a little bit, you and I did, about, I don't know, policing women on Texas highways and pulling them over to ask them if they're going to have an abortion.
Does that sound like a small effing government to you?
Does a small government report like women's reproductive health?
Does it mandate that doctors report reproductive health to the government?
Is a small government one in which, as Project 2025 says, Christians are allowed to legislate, rest on the Sabbath, their Sabbath, not anyone else's Sabbath?
No, I could go on about this forever.
I just could not stand that comment.
It's an image of smaller government.
What is small about this government?
Nothing.
It's just a government filled with somebody with absolute power.
It's a government of absolute power rather than deluded power, which is democracy is supposed to be.
Do you want to jump in on this?
Otherwise, we can go to break.
Just to say that I agree, and I wish journalists would stop being lazy with stuff like that.
And this is what I criticize all the time with that.
This notion that somehow this is still just conservatism from 20 years ago or 30 years ago when they would say that.
I don't think the conservatives have ever really been about a smaller government, as you say, but I'm with you.
It drives me crazy when they just trot out these lazy lines from decades ago and can't look at what's right in front of them.
All right, take a break.
We'll be back and we'll talk about Florida and Alabama and maybe Louisiana and their gerrymandered congressional maps.
Be right back.
All right, Dan, what do we got?
What's going on with these maps and the courts?
Yeah, so in particular, I do have Florida and Alabama on my mind.
Last week, we talked about DeSantis' redrawn Florida congressional map that was clearly aimed at breaking up a majority black district.
And like the day after we recorded, A judge ruled that his map was unconstitutional and ordered the Florida legislature to redraw it, which the legislature had already done.
They already had a redrawn map because this isn't new and DeSantis had vetoed that and like dismantled this district and so forth.
So, in other words, the court ruled against gerrymandered districts in Florida.
But this week, a federal court also struck down Alabama's congressional map.
And this was after state GOP lawmakers basically refused to draw a court-mandated second-majority black district.
Again, last year, I think it was, they had been ordered by a court to redraw their districts, and they didn't do it.
And so they were ordered to do that.
This is where it gets interesting, though, and there was a great piece, I think, in CNN about this.
Other people noted this, but people might remember.
So that ruling by that court last year was upheld by SCOTUS, which is why then when it comes to the court this year, they basically issued the same ruling and said, you have to do this.
It was significant because last year SCOTUS upheld the ruling that the court had made when it struck down this map, and that surprised a lot of people.
Most observers had thought, I had thought, you had probably thought, There's rumors that the liberal court justices thought that the conservative majority of the court was going to side with the Alabama GOP.
They had already, a number of years ago, really, really weakened the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
And a lot of people thought they were just going to basically eviscerate it this time.
And they didn't.
Instead, the conservative majority, it was small, it was 5-4, but a conservative majority with the liberals voted to really strengthen the existing Voting Rights Act.
And this is what we see playing out in Alabama now and in Florida.
It's in the background of Florida as well.
Other places, there are gerrymandering issues before courts all over.
But that was a really big thing, very timely as we were talking about that, obviously timely as we come into 2024.
But it is significant how surprising, and it sort of brings it back full circle, that ruling by SCOTUS was in 2022.
Another time, and we've seen other ones, where it looks like the GOP, who kind of thought they had an ace in the hole in the Supreme Court, that it would kind of go anywhere they wanted, whenever they wanted, was taken aback by that.
So I'll be interested to see where this goes, partly because the other thing we're seeing is we're seeing these state legislatures trying to just disregard these court orders, right?
The thing gets bounced back to them and says, nope, You got to do this.
You got to submit it and fix it.
And then they submit the same thing.
It's like, send a paper back to a student.
They're like, how am I doing?
I'm like, yeah, this is a C minus.
Here's all the corrections you're going to need to make if you're going to do better on that.
And they turn in the same paper and, you know, send it back again.
Trivial example to illustrate something that's really, really important and significant.
And that's that's the worrying side.
I take a lot of talk about reasons for hope, a lot of hope about these court rulings.
And I think we talked about the SCOTUS decision last year.
But concern about the fact that these districts keep coming back the way that they are or that somebody like DeSantis will veto a court mandated district map and come up with his own and have to be told by the court to do it again.
Well, Alabama is basically like, we don't care.
You know, we don't care if you say that what we've done is is not fair.
We're just going to do it.
As you say, they're not going to change anything.
That's it's an open It's an open contestation of the federal government.
I just want to real quick talk about why gerrymandering is anti-democratic.
Why it fits in with everything we've been talking about, with the chessboard and the rules and the processes, okay?
It's easy to sort of like skip over gerrymandering.
What is that?
Why is it a big deal?
So I want you to imagine our democracy of 100 people.
Everybody, if you're listening, if you're watching, imagine you've got 100 people.
That's your democracy.
And they're standing in your front yard, okay?
And we say, all right, instead of just tallying 100 votes, what we're gonna do is...
You know, we're going to, we're going to maybe have five quadrants and everybody in every quadrant is going to vote.
And then we'll just see, you know, what the tally is of the quadrants.
So quadrant run, you know, we've got this many people and we'll take whoever gets the most votes in quadrant one.
And then we're going to add up the quadrants.
So it's five quadrants, three to two, four to one, five to zero.
That's who gets to be the leader.
That's essentially our electoral college, right Dan?
Okay.
So you got a hundred people, five quadrants.
And you're like, okay, well, let's just draw squares and equal squares so that we have five different quadrants in this front lawn of ours.
And whoever's in those squares, they're in that quadrant.
And then you go.
But then somebody comes along and says, well, I'd really like to win this election.
So I'm going to draw really weird shapes around the people I know will vote for me.
And I'm going to make it such that three of the quadrants are just filled with people I know will vote for me.
And two of the quadrants are filled with people that won't.
And so, yeah, when I look at the map of this front lawn and its five quadrants, guess what I see?
Weird snake-like areas where one quadrant is a sliver that goes along the top.
Another is a huge rectangle that goes along the right side of the front lawn.
Another is a very small circle, for some reason, in the middle.
And on and on and on.
That's gerrymandering.
And it's anti-democratic because it's basically saying instead of letting people vote and having a winner according to their voice, we're going to rig the system from the start such that there's no way we can lose from the beginning.
It doesn't matter if a majority of people or whatever.
We know that the quadrants we need to win will get us the votes.
So popular vote be damned.
The voice of the people be damned.
Let's just rig the system from the beginning.
That's why gerrymandering is anti-democratic.
That's why it fits in with everything we've talked about today.
Final thoughts and reasons for hope.
Yeah, so just on the gerrymandering thing, it's basically it's a form of discrimination based on political ideology, right?
That's why it's a form of actively disenfranchising people and making sure that if they don't vote a way that you want them to, you make sure that their vote can never have enough critical mass to affect you.
And because Ethnic identity is often closely aligned with political ideology on certain issues like things like police reform or welfare or different things like that.
That's why the issue specifically around African-American communities becomes so central.
So that's the anti-democratic piece, right?
You're saying everybody should have a vote.
Basically, you're saying we're going to make sure that we're functionally disenfranchising a part of our population by making sure that their vote can't count.
Reasons for hope, shifting into that, I went to your state for my reason of hope, that the legislature in California sent the governor a bill, a bill that he backed, he's going to sign it, he wanted this, but it was fine school districts for rejecting textbooks or library books for discriminatory reasons.
We've seen all the book bans.
We've seen this in other states where you get the other side where states are really coming out and saying, we are not going to ban books.
Even books that, I don't know, Brad, you might disagree with or I might disagree with or, you know, they're too heteronormative or whatever.
Cool.
Fine.
I'm not going to ban them.
I'm not going to burn them.
I'm not going to say people shouldn't be able to read them.
I'm going to use my free speech rights and argue against them and try to get people to read other books and maybe even write some of my own or whatever.
I took a lot of hope from that story in your state of California, also because, as you remind us, California is not all blue, and there are a lot of conservative districts in California that we're looking at some of the same kinds of school board issues and book bans and so forth that we've seen in other places.
My reason for hope comes from Tennessee, where Gloria Johnson is running for Senate.
Gloria Johnson was one of the members of the Tennessee Three.
She stood with the two Justins, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson.
And Marsha Blackburn, one of the worst senators we have.
I mean, truly, I'm sorry.
That's not a very scholarly way to put it, but just Marsha Blackburn is the worst.
You heard it here.
Hopefully, we'll be voted out.
Now, it's a big uphill battle, and Tennessee's a tough place, but I hope Gloria Johnson has at least a chance in that race, and we'll see what happens.
All right, friends.
Big week for us.
You can check out our new podcast network, www.accessmoondi.us.
And really excited to share all that content with you.
We're on YouTube now, so if you're a YouTube person or if you have friends in your life that would rather do podcasts on YouTube, recommend our channel to them.
We do this show three times a week, no big outside funding, no grants, no one bankrolling us.
So if you can support us on Venmo, Patreon, PayPal, it's all in the show notes.
We have merch, we have...
Sorry, Dan, my brain has gone blank.
We have merch and we also have, what am I trying to say right now?
We have, oh, we, my brain just melted down.
We have a recommended book list, uh, from bookshop.org.
So some books we're recommending, and if you buy those books using our link, we get a little bit of support too.
So we'll be back next week with a great interview with, uh, it's in the code with the weekly roundup.
