On the first segment Dan and Brad begrudgingly discuss Lauren Boebrert's Beetlejuice scandal - and what it reveals about the Christian nationalist persona she's cultivated.
In the second segment, they discuss a myriad of issues - from the firing of a teacher for teaching the Diary of Anne Frank to supposed discrimination against Whites at West Point to the charge that Merrick Garland thinks all Catholics are religious extremists.
In the final segment they discuss the Alabama redistricting case - and what it we now know about the dark money network funding the state's defiance of the federal government. Spoiler alert: it's an attempt to once and for all nullify the Voting Rights Act.
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My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, and I'm here today with my co-host.
Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Nice to see you, Brad, as always.
You too.
So, personal note, I'm on Baby Watch.
My partner's due soon, and We'll have the baby one way or another next week, just because of things.
And so, Dan, this will be probably my last Weekly Roundup for a couple of weeks here.
And I just want to tell you that regardless of the gender of the baby, we're going to name it Daniel Miller Onishi.
So just want you to know that.
Sweet.
Good.
I appreciate it.
I mean, it's about time.
You blew it with that first kid.
So it's like, you know, it's your chance to correct.
No, and if I see you like check your phone and suddenly disappear from my screen while we're recording, I'll know that I need to finish up on my own.
Yeah.
So anyway, friends, I will be off for a couple of weeks, and that is why.
But I'll see you on the flip side.
A couple of announcements.
If you've not already, you need to go subscribe to two shows that we're producing, and that is Inform Your Resistance from Political Research Associates and also Andrew Whitehead's American Idols, which is out now.
So both of those shows are amazing.
Andrew's is about resisting Christian nationalism.
Inform Your Resistance is from a research center that has been working on the American right and the extremism they're in for four decades, and they have deep expertise.
So we'll have those in the show notes, but Inform Your Resistance is out now, and so is American Idols.
All right, Dan.
We need to talk about three things that are big.
And we're going to start with Lauren Boebert because we just have to and Beetlejuice.
We'll then talk about various.
We're going to go to a second segment.
It's going to include like sort of various iterations of so-called censorship and prejudice and bigotry.
And we'll unpack that.
But we're going to go from West Point all the way to Anne Frank, all the way to To a number of other places, including Merrick Garland.
And then we will end up on Alabama and redistricting.
Now, I know, friends, you might be listening and thinking, there is a absolute dumpster fire happening in the House right now.
The U.S.
House of Representatives and the Republican Party are a mess.
And they are.
And we're not going to necessarily spend a ton of time on that today just because we're not.
But yes, in typical fashion, Kevin McCarthy is trying to hold together His party and his group in the House, the far right Republicans are saying, no, we're not going to fund the government.
They've all been sent home.
And it's a huge mess.
There's also happening, Dan, just labor and just a ton of strikes and We can go from Hollywood all the way to the automakers and their expanded strike.
So we probably need to reflect on this sort of moment of American labor here on a show soon, but we're going to focus on a couple of other things before we get there.
All right, let's start with Lauren Bovert.
Dan, I know if you're watching this on YouTube, both of our faces are just like, yeah, I guess we have to talk about it.
And I actually think there's important things to talk about here.
So here's what happened.
About a week ago, Lauren Boebert was back home in Colorado, apparently went to a showing of Beetlejuice, the sort of live action version of Beetlejuice.
Some of you who are old like Dan and I will remember Beetlejuice as a favorite kids movie, Tim Burton.
You know, this was pretty amazing stuff, right?
Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder.
I was just going to say, Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder.
I don't know about you, Dan.
Well, I'll ask you.
Let me just stop.
Dan, in my house, my brothers and I watched Beetlejuice probably 100 times.
Were you guys a Beetlejuice family?
Maybe not 100 times, but we were like the 50 times category.
Lightweights compared to your household.
It was like a staple.
In one of those movies, it was like a I don't think I really understood it if I'm honest, but it was, you know, it was fun.
Anyway, what's the point?
and ghosts and like creepy stuff so let's watch that movie along with the other stuff we watch so yeah it's hell it's hella weird too it's a hella weird movie like it's not you know as a kid i'm not i don't think i really understood it if i'm honest but it was you know it was fun anyway what's the point it's recommended for this live showing this whole beetlejuice production is recommended for children so So it's a place where you would have to it's not like they were showing like a totally grown up adult kind of show.
This was not an 18 and over venue.
But Lauren Bober goes there on a first date apparently.
That's what we've been told with a guy who owns a bar and other businesses.
He's apparently a Democrat.
His bar has apparently hosted drag events and so on.
And she was removed, and all the initial reporting kind of focused on this.
She was removed for vaping.
She wouldn't stop vaping, and there was a pregnant woman behind her, and there was people who were upset, and she kept saying, I don't care.
Eventually, she told the staff at the theater, like, do you know who I am?
Gave them the bird, and they did escort her out, okay?
What we know now is that there's video footage of her and her date groping each other, Over the clothes and, you know, in a very sexual manner.
OK, now.
In one sense, I don't really want to talk about this because it's kind of nonsense and I don't really care about Lauren Bovert that much outside of Congress.
However, I think it is.
Here's what is worth talking about, Dan, and let's just give this five minutes before we go on to things that are more significant.
Lauren Bover is somebody who is willing to call other people groomers and pedophiles and so on, simply by dint of existing.
If you are gay or if you're trans, oh, you're a pedophile, you're a groomer.
That's what we've heard from that wing of the Republican Party so many times over the last however many years, okay?
And then we get to a place where she's supposed to be representing the family values Christian wing of the party.
I mean, we have the tape on Andrew Whitehead's podcast where she says that the church is supposed to be in control of the government.
That is how she sold herself.
The church is supposed to be in front of the government.
I'm a Christian.
I think Christians should be in charge.
I'm a person of faith.
Jesus has my heart, okay?
So the thing that we could talk about just the easiest is just hypocrisy, hypocrisy, hypocrisy, right?
And that's an easy thing to point out.
It should be clear from anyone listening or watching.
That's just completely hypocritical to talk about all the family values and all the supposed grooming that's happening and then to go to a venue, Dan.
And let's just break it down.
Let's just be adults about this, okay?
Adults can do whatever they want.
Lauren Boebert just got divorced.
Okay.
Maybe she's out there dating again and, you know, she wants to like sort of have a good time.
Whatever.
I don't care.
I literally, I do not care.
I'm not going to shame Lauren Boebert for being an adult who wants to have fun.
Just got divorced.
Whatever.
Okay.
I really don't care.
All right.
Go do whatever you want.
You're an adult.
You're a grownup.
That's allowed.
I just can't imagine what would be happening right now if we had a lawmaker who was openly gay or openly trans, if we had anyone else who was even not Republican, just part of the Democratic Party, and they went to a show designed for children and were escorted out because they wouldn't stop smoking, one, but two, they were engaged in sexual acts in public.
Now, again, I don't... Whatever.
Do whatever you want.
But Dan, this was a place where children were supposed to be present.
OK?
And I'll just say one thing and I'll throw it to you and then I don't really want to talk about this the rest of the day, which is.
We talked last week about how when black Christians or Asian-American Christians or others do things in the as as people in the United States, they're often coded as people of color rather than people of faith.
What I see happening here is, this thing is basically over, right?
Bobert got some backlash, there were some people in her own party that came for her, and there is some criticism here.
And it's not gonna help her, okay?
I don't think.
But there's been no sort of sense of she should resign, there's been no, like, strike or boycott or anything that says this is a massive big deal whatever.
Because you know what?
We saw this with Hershel Walker too.
In the Republican Party and in Christian nationalist circles, you can tout family values and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all you want.
And as long as you sell that to the people, it doesn't actually matter that much if you live it or uphold it when it comes to your own life.
And even when there are children present and you are engaging in sexual acts, right?
Whereas if a gay person, a trans person, or anyone else was engaged in this kind of behavior, it would be pure outrage, stoked forever, never let go, and we can't function as a society according to Fox News or Newsmax until this is resolved.
That's what we would hear, right?
Okay, what do you got on this?
Because I don't really want to talk about it that much.
I just want to hammer away a bit more at the broader hypocrisy piece, right?
Because again, this is on the right, it's all about the supposed purity of American culture and demonizing everybody, everybody who's queer, everybody who's a person of color, liberals, loose media, like what have you.
And so like, all kinds of things about this.
There have also been articles coming out about how she has toned down the MAGA stuff when she's back in her district because She won the last election by, what, 500 and something votes, and she's not pulling as well.
She has to tone it down because it turns out people aren't as crazy about it.
But I look at it and I'm like, oh, here's Bovert the Culture Warrior.
Oh, she's in Denver.
Oh, she's in, like, the liberal bastion city of, like, Colorado, right?
Oh, she's at a theatrical production, right?
We don't want to promote the gay agenda.
There's, like, no bigger, like, monolith in the Republican Party mind than, like, theater people, right?
Or, like, drama or pop culture or whatever.
And so there she is with that.
She's First of all, if this guy that she's dating is like, I don't understand why you would date Bovert, that's just me, whatever, but I'm not on the market, so fine.
But, you know, I guess it's just, it's all about purity.
It's all about principles, supposedly, and so forth.
And if I'm looking at it, she just shows how much she's just, she's a creation of the MAGA world.
She knew what she needed to do to get elected.
She can stay in front of cameras.
She can yell at people on the floor of the house and so forth.
And there's no real substance there, because if she actually was committed to all the things that she says real America should be committed to, There's so many levels of this that I think are ridiculous.
The Christian morality piece, but also just everything about the culture war.
It all matters, unless it's Lauren Boebert who wants to go out and enjoy a show and, you know, make out with somebody or whatever, and then she somehow is protected from all that.
It doesn't apply to her.
And as you say, it's a non-story at this point for people on the right who, as you say, would exhoriate anybody on the left who was in a similar position.
Well, and I just wonder if the first question to any Republican lawmaker, any talking head on the right who wants to bring up children and grooming and they're not ready for sexual content, they're not ready to be exposed to this kind of stuff.
The first question from the interviewer should be, OK, are you for expelling Lauren Boebert from the House?
And will you bring that forward for a vote?
Will you put that forth?
Right.
In terms of the internal dynamics of your party, blah, blah, blah.
Right.
If you're not willing to do that, then why are you talking about this elsewhere?
Because, Dan, I have young children.
You have you have children who are older than me, than mine.
Right.
You know, you take kids into public.
Things happen.
I don't know, Dan.
People are going to be exposed to the world.
But I will say that if like I went to a two-year-old birthday party.
And there were people, like, groping each other's crotches.
I'd be like, what kind of two-year-old party is this?
This is weird.
Now, if I went to some, like, party, you know, for adults and people were drinking and it was a big celebration and that kind of stuff happened, I don't know.
People do stuff.
Whatever.
I don't care.
Do whatever you want.
You're not hurting anyone.
It's a little different if I'm at, like, the two-year-old birthday.
Like, my daughter's two-year-old birthday and, like, the people I invite decide to get drunk.
And start groping each other.
That's a little weird.
I'm just saying, like, is the first question about grooming and exposure to sexual content saying, all right, are you good to expel Lauren Boebert from the from the House, even if that means a Democrat takes her seat or no, right?
Because that should be the first question.
I don't know.
Final thought before we jump, because I'm talking more about this, even though I said I didn't want to.
And here we are.
Just the keyword of hypocrisy.
I mean, I think that's it.
That's the big takeaway.
But for me, again, just the multiple levels of it.
Final thing I'll say is what I do not want to dip into on this show is a gendered analysis that treats Boebert differently than if this were a man or a male-identifying congressperson or whatever.
There's great work out there, and if you haven't read it, you should, by Leslie Dorough Smith.
It's a book called Compromising Positions that shows that men, straight, white men, Usually survive sex scandals and others don't, including women and men of color.
So I don't want to go down that road in terms of like a gendered approach here that that treats Bogart differently than a 39 year old, you know, male congressperson.
But nonetheless, the hypocrisy is rife and so on.
All right, we're done.
We're taking a break because I got to cleanse my palate.
We got to get this out of our out of our minds and then we're going to move on to something else.
All right.
Be right back.
Anyway, my name is Peter and I'm a prophet.
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You can find my story on Amazon, Audible, or iTunes.
Just look for American Profit by Jeff Fulmer.
That's American Profit by Jeff Fulmer.
All right, Dan, this segment is really about the idea of the government being prejudice and what it is that we sort of think is appropriate for the public square.
So we've got a story on West Point, a story on Anne Frank, and a story on Merrick Garland and traditional Catholics.
So I'm going to throw it to you.
Let's start with West Point and we'll go from there.
So what happened at West Point this week?
So if I was going to name all the segments, this is like make West Point white again, right, is basically like what it is.
So everybody's going to remember, right, that a few weeks ago SCOTUS made a ruling about affirmative action in Harvard and North Carolina, but it applies more broadly and so forth.
And the group that opposed the use of so-called race-based decisions in admissions won that case and so on.
Same group, Students for Fair Admissions is the name of the organization.
They are now taking on West Point.
And so lawyers for them have filed suit against the U.S.
Military Academy on Tuesday.
Other defendants they also named, you know, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, the U.S.
Defense Department, the Army Secretary, The USMA, U.S.
Military Academy Superintendent, Director of Admissions, all those folks, saying that they're opposed to the use of so-called race-based admissions again, right?
So it's the same kind of thing that we've seen before.
What they said was this.
This is a quote from the lawsuit.
It said, Instead of admitting future cadets based on objective metrics and leadership potential, West Point focuses on race.
In fact, it openly publishes its racial composition goals—goals there is in scare quotes—and its director of admissions brags that race is wholly determinative for hundreds, if not thousands, of applicants.
That's the statement from the suit.
Here's why it's significant.
This year's SCOTUS decision—and we talked about this, right?
We talked about this a lot—explicitly exempted the military academies from its decision about using race, stating that, quote, race-based admissions programs further compelling interests of our nation's military academies.
We said at the time that number one, that's true of the military academies, it seems like it'd be true of higher ed generally, and number two, that it's only a matter of time before this is challenged, and that's what this is.
This directly takes aim at that.
Just want to throw out some takeaways here and throw it over for your thought that just sort of brings us up to where we are.
The first is that I think just like with abortion, if the justices, and in this case really Roberts, I think this was Roberts' decision.
He wrote it, I think, This exemption for the military academies was, I don't know, some sort of weird, like, half-measure kind of thing.
They thought that they were gonna, you know, be done with this, just like abortion.
Here it is, right back before them, and they're gonna have to deal with it.
But I also want to return to that statement.
Uh, from the lawsuit.
And I want to spend a couple minutes sort of thinking about this and talking about this, because I'll read it again.
This is what it said.
Instead of admitting future cadets based on objective metrics and leadership, uh, leadership potential, West Point focuses on race.
It openly publishes its racial composition goals.
That's what they said.
So here's the issue as I see it, and I'll be interested in your thoughts on this.
When I talk about this with students, this is how I think about it.
Years and years and years ago, when I was an evangelical pastor, kind of wrestling with what I now call social justice issues, not having that language, and I would hear this kind of argument, that it was wrong to try to have a certain percentage of this or that ethnicity, and I would say, well, here's the thing, right?
If the general U.S.
population has some demographic makeup, certain percentage of the people are African American, certain percentage of the people might be Native American, Pacific Islander, White, whatever you have, right?
And you look at things like the U.S.
Military Academy, all things being equal should reflect the demographics of the nation, right?
If everything was equal, Then in principle, they should have the same percentage of things.
If it doesn't look like that, then it means all things aren't equal.
There are other things at work, right, making this.
And that's why these programs, imperfect as they are, try to do this.
This is why they have so-called composition goals, because they're going to say, you know what?
I'm going to get the numbers wrong.
If 15 or 17 percent of the U.S.
population is African-American and 5 percent of our incoming class is African-American, it seems problematic.
It seems like somehow there ought to be a higher percentage there.
Let's figure out what's going on, right?
Students for Fair Admissions denies this, right?
That's what these people deny.
They say, you know, there's nothing to it.
It's just the way it is.
If it doesn't match society, that's just how it is.
It's just, you know, what are you going to do?
But here's the problem, right?
The way that they set it up and say, you know, they're making this about race instead of, quote, again, sorry, I got to find it, objective metrics and leadership potential, right?
That's the contrast that they set up.
What they're really saying is, if academies are disproportionately white, or not reflective of society, and if that doesn't reflect anything weird going on, the logic is, well, they have more white people because more white people are just, they're just better on objective metrics, and they're just naturally better leaders.
And that to me sounds like a pretty obvious definition of a racist thing to say, right?
A racist position to hold.
And I've talked with people who say this, and you're like, okay, I'll have this discussion, I'll lay out my logic, I'll say this is how I understand it, right?
If you don't acknowledge that there's something at work there that's making it so that groups are not represented in these institutions to the same degree they are in broader society, you are saying Implicitly at least, explicitly if you got a couple drinks in you, you are saying, yeah, white people are just better leaders.
They're better suited to be military leaders, to lead men and women into combat and so forth.
The ironic thing about this, of course, is that we live in this Orwellian context where to say that is then spun as the truly racist thing because, hey, Dan, you're making everything about race.
There you go, talking about race again, right?
All I'm saying is white people are better leaders.
That's what goes on.
I mean, that's why I say it's about making West Point white again.
And those are the things that I see.
I obviously get really worked up about this.
But that's the simple logic.
I mean, people say, why should we try to have certain percentage?
I say, because that's what our society looks like.
And the logic is that it should look like that.
And if it doesn't, it means there's something that is disadvantaging particular people.
Well, and West Point, you know, in the minds of so many Americans, especially those who have a military affiliation.
It represents kind of the pinnacle of the armed forces in some way.
I mean, it really, West Point has this place in the American imagination.
So if West Point is not white enough, then it's scary for a lot of white Americans because like, well, what do you mean?
Like I went to West Point and there was all of these officers in training who were black and Latinx and Asian and so on, right?
And so what does that mean?
That's kind of weird.
I thought, you know, and this is a totally different conversation, but it's like, They're being white and black quarterbacks in football.
You know, it's the same thing when the quarterback is white.
It's like there's this feeling among a lot of football fans that well, okay, that's a good thing because the guy in charge is the white guy, right?
And he's directing the show.
I just want to make one comment about this before we go to some of the other parts of the segment and that is that I think these composition goals are aimed at protecting against A situation where legacy, which is not an objective standard, is used to admit people.
And what I mean by that is legacy and social networks often play a determinative role, or at least a substantial role, in how people have been admitted places.
And I'll just say that Anecdotally, we all know what it's like when you're building something, when you're creating something, when you're putting together a team or whatever.
You reach out to people in your networks, right?
You reach out to people who you know and are part of your kind of circles.
And if you're not careful, what you're going to end up with is a set of people on your team that are a lot like you because those are the people in your circles.
I'll never forget I used to fly out of Albany Airport all the time when I when I lived in upstate New York.
And there was this prominent car dealership that had a huge advertisement in the Albany Airport.
And it was like, you know, our family and I can't remember the name of the dealership are Johnson family are, you know, Uh, Smith family of Honda, whatever, blah blah blah.
And it was like 30 people all in the same shirt standing there looking at you like, hey, come buy a car from us, right?
We're a big family.
And they all looked the same, Dan.
To a person, right?
They were like a white person with brown hair.
And to me, that's what the composition goals do, is they prevent the likeness and the sameness and the legacy from taking over a place like West Point.
And going right to your point, if the country is 13% African-American, if the country is 9% Asian-American, should that not be represented, right, in the people who we are training to be the leaders of our armed forces?
It only makes sense.
Nonetheless, you have these charges.
All right.
You have any last comments on West Point, or should we go to Merrick Garland?
Because I want to talk about another sort of dynamic of quote-unquote Discrimination, shall we say.
Just the last point I'll make, because I agree with everything you say, is that also if you look at the enlisted ranks, right, in the military, they're very disproportionately people of color, people of lower income, and so forth.
So those imbalanced dynamics become even more pronounced, I think, when you've got this implicit sense that it should be white people at the top, And people of color and people who are poor are the ones on the front lines fighting and dying and so forth.
I think all of that is wrapped up in this, and I think that's what we have to see with this so-called sort of discomfort about quote-unquote race-based initiatives in higher ed.
So we have this instance where the concern is that by having a standard that says, hey, we should make it our goal as an organization, in this case, West Point, That we admit officers and training that represent the the dynamics of the American electorate.
Right.
You have this group that you're you're highlighting saying, well, that's racism.
That's racism against white people.
That's discrimination against white people.
And what we're saying is.
It's just trying to protect against white people being the only ones who are represented there.
And if you look through our history, that's kind of how it's worked.
Now, we have a totally different area of our culture and politics here, but I think there's some similar dynamics in terms of the issues involved.
Some of you, I'm sure, followed along, but Merrick Garland was in Congress on Wednesday talking and being grilled by various representatives about all kinds of issues.
But one thing that came up that really caught my attention was Representative Jeff Van Drew questioned Garland about a memo that was part of the FBI a while back.
And this memo was basically outlining concern about traditional Catholics Trad Catholics and various parishes across the country where there might be an infiltration of white ethnonationalism and other forms of white supremacy.
Okay.
And so Van Drew asks this to Garland.
Do you agree that traditional Catholics are violent extremists?
Garland responds, I have no idea what traditional means here.
The idea that someone with my family background would discriminate against any religion is so outrageous, so absurd.
And if you watch the video, Garland is near tears and he is so upset by this question.
And he's upset because he's Jewish and he has spoken openly about his family escaping persecution in Europe.
Uh, and he's talked about his grandmother being one of five children and she escaped, uh, religious persecution before World War One, but that two of her siblings remained in Europe and were ultimately killed during the Holocaust.
So Van Drew then follows up and is like, well, your FBI was sending undercover agents in the Catholic churches.
Okay.
So what Drew is basically saying with no context is like, You the FBI did this.
Does that mean that you think all Catholics are violent extremists?
Right.
He just reduces it to this to this sort of either or situation, which we talk about all the time.
Now, what was in this memo?
The memo was eventually rescinded after it was discovered.
It has been condemned by Cardinal Dolan and others in the Catholic community.
Catholic Bishop of Richmond, Barry Nestow and others have been unhappy with it.
20 Republican state attorneys general, including Virginia's, wrote to Merrick Garland and Chris Wray and said, we don't like this.
And they talked about anti-Catholic bigotry festering in the FBI.
OK, so on the surface, you might be like, well, what's going on here?
And what I would say is let's dig a little deeper.
And on this show, I have interviewed various people about trad Catholics.
I would tell you to go listen to my interview with Rebecca Bratton Weiss, who talks about the trad Catholic movement.
The trad Catholic movement, Dan, is a movement that has been, according to researchers, according to people who investigate these things, infiltrated by white ethno-nationalists.
Trad Catholicism is a certain form of Catholicism that often Executes the liturgy in Latin.
It returns, in some cases, to what they want as a pre-Vatican II Catholic Church, or at least gestures towards that.
It really sees modernity as the enemy.
But here's what Catherine Joyce and Ben Lorber, Ben Lorber from PRA, who will be on Inform Your Resistance in a couple of weeks, write.
The activist wing of Church Militant is called the Resistance Network.
As of 2020, the outlet boasted more than 5,000 members and claimed to have launch groups in almost every diocese in the U.S.
Last June, the group claimed that its protests of a church vaccine drive in Southern California forced the drive to end three hours early.
The same month, members of the Resistant Network hosted an affidavit-signing drive at church militant headquarters outside Detroit, joining with other right-wing Michigan groups in demanding a forensic audit of 2020 election and holding a protest rally.
If you read the rest of the article, Dan, and you read anything about trad Catholicism, there are deep concerns about trad Catholicism having a strong presence of ethno nationalists, people who are far right actors, people with extreme politics.
So in this case, Like, when Merrick Garland gets asked about this, I am totally in agreement that an FBI memo needs to be up to the right standards and it needs to be clear about its objectives.
I'm also very sensitive to the fact that anti-Catholic bigotry has been part of the United States history.
You know what I don't like here?
And this is why I'm bringing it up today is because it feels like when Representative Van Drew brings this up in Congress and when the Catholic bishops and other leaders respond to it, it's like this.
We're Catholic.
How dare you?
Dare you suggest that we could have extremists in our midst?
I cannot believe I am clutching pearls.
I am upset.
I want to talk to the manager because I cannot believe you would suggest that my church Has extremists potential terrorists in its midst?
I cannot believe you suggest that.
And my response is, and a lot of folks aren't going to like this, that's Christian privilege.
We talked last week, Dan, about 9-11, Islamophobia, the very idea that if you were Muslim in the United States in 2005 or 7, you were just thought of as a terrorist.
You were thought of as a person of suspect.
There is an office cold open from those years where the new IT guy walks into the room and he is of Arab descent and, you know, Michael Scott hides under the desk because he thinks he's a terrorist.
And it's so funny, isn't it?
Right?
Totally willing to engage in Islamophobia, to think of brown folks and Muslim folks as people who could be suspected of violence.
But if you dare, dare, dare investigate the real and credible threats of extremism, ethno-nationalism, and white supremacy in a Christian space, then you're going to get asked by a representative in Congress, do you think all Catholics are violent extremists?
No, I don't.
I don't think that at all.
I just think that there's a lot of research that tells me I should be worried about traditional Catholics.
Because their communities have been infiltrated by white supremacists and ethno-nationalists.
The same way I think that that's true about so many evangelical spaces.
The same way I think that if you look at the statistics, the people most likely to commit domestic acts of terrorism in this country are white men.
So does that mean I think all white men, including Dan Miller and blah blah blah, are violent extremists?
Nope.
It just means that, I don't know, if you're a Christian church, I'll shut up, Dan, I'm gonna throw this to you, I'll shut up.
If you're a Christian church and you have white supremacists among you, if you have ethno-nationalists among you, instead of like crying and whining and asking Merrick Garland if you think all Christians and Catholics are violent or extreme, you know what you should do?
Confront your church and community and maybe root them out, I don't know, maybe that's Maybe that's a good idea.
Maybe look at your community in the mirror and ask, why are we sort of home for these folks?
Why does this ideology seem to grow in this garden?
That might be a good question to ask.
But hey, why don't you just whine about it, claim the victim, and then play the part on TV like Representative Andrew did so you can get the clicks and the likes and you can claim that Joe Biden, the man that goes to mass, I don't know, You ever watch Joe Biden, Dan?
He goes to mass like 17 times a week.
But Joe Biden's administration hates religion and Christianity, right?
OK, off to you.
I'm going to lose it.
Go ahead.
Did you like that?
That was like a lot of voices I did.
Anybody who doesn't see this should see it.
Yeah, that's a reason enough to subscribe to our YouTube channels, just to see me doing all the voices and the gesture.
Friends, go subscribe to YouTube right now, because if you haven't, you're missing out.
You really are.
OK.
Yeah, so I mean, a number of things.
First is, I think what resonates with me is when people say, well, you know, of course I think the women should be treated equally, but not all men are blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Of course I think racism is bad, but not all white people are, like, the thing that always stops short of actually getting to the problem, because we're always worried about us, or, you know, whoever the us is, right?
It's the men who are worried that somehow or another, if they're really critical of misogyny, it's somehow a threat to them.
It's the white people who think that if they really become anti-racist, somehow it's a threat to them.
Like, there's that, and all that does is protect Those pockets of those things where they exist in those communities.
That's the first part.
Second is, and this is just to reinforce some of the things you're saying, gets at the very willful misrepresentation of this, right?
Most Catholics aren't radical traditionalist Catholics.
Like, they're not.
A lot of them are, they don't like that way of being Catholic.
It freaks them out.
They're not comfortable with it.
So there was never a claim about quote-unquote all Catholics or Catholic churches full stop or whatever.
And also, I think it's worth pointing out, this wasn't saying radical traditional Catholics or traditional Catholics are all extremists.
It was saying these groups may be targeted for infiltration by extremists, which brings up your point of, if they are, it's worth, if you're a member of those communities, saying, wow, why do we draw this kind of people?
Why do we feel like easy targets for them?
Like, why do they view us that way?
But it wasn't the claim that they're all, you know, radicals and so forth.
And the other one, the obvious other thing to get to this point of Christian privilege, as you're saying, is I didn't hear these same people yelling quite so much or clutching the pearls or freaking out so much when the FBI was, in fact, infiltrating mosques, right, post 9-11.
Again, so often I think there's value to looking at like the imaginary, you know, what philosophers would call the counterfactual of this, right?
What would it look like if this was a black church issue that was there?
What would this look like or what would it sound like if they were Muslims?
Would GOP senators and congresspeople be jumping on the boat?
I doubt it.
And so, yeah, I think everything you say makes sense, especially the Christian privilege piece, the understanding the history of anti-Catholicism in the U.S., but recognizing that for a long time now, being Catholic has been a very American thing to do, right?
It has been very much part of the American mainstream, and I think that notion that to question that is somehow threatening.
All right.
So in the first part of this, I think we talked about how there is a need to kind of work on the part of West Point to make sure that it's representative of the United States.
So it's not discriminatory to try to do that, as some groups have claimed.
In the second part, we're talking about Trad Catholics and Merrick Garland and all this stuff.
And I think we're saying, you know, it's not discriminatory to investigate groups where there's credible threats of ethnonationalism and violent extremism.
It doesn't mean you're implicating the entire group.
So we're saying no again.
Let's talk about Anne Frank.
This one's a little different, in fact, and I think it might be a little further afield than the other two.
But some people might have heard about this this week.
week, but what happened with the diary of Anne Frank and the firing of a teacher?
So yeah, if we were talking about make West Point white again, this is, you know, canceling Anne Frank is now the thing.
What happened, a Texas middle school teacher, an eighth grade middle school teacher, was fired for teaching from, I think it's like sort of an illustrated, or I've heard it described as a graphic novel version, I think that's not quite a fair, like an illustrated version of Anne Frank's Diary.
It was a quote-unquote unapproved version of the diary that she taught from.
She's a teacher in the Hampshire-Fennett Independent School District in Texas.
And the reason that she was removed from the classroom is it's an unabridged version of Anne Frank's diary, right?
So most of us, probably all of us, I hope all of us growing up, At some point, we're exposed to the diary of Anne Frank, right?
This Jewish girl whose family were hiding in an attic to avoid the Nazis.
She ultimately was captured and executed by the Nazis.
But her father first published her diary in 1947.
The first versions that were ever published, including the first ones, edited out materials where she talked about her attraction to other girls.
She also talked about attraction to a young man as well, but she talks about that.
She talks about wanting to touch girls' breasts and different kinds of things like this.
And this is what got this teacher in trouble under all the laws that we talk about and these school board things about inappropriate content and so forth.
This is a statement that one parent said about this, who said that her twin eighth grade sons told her about what the teacher was doing in class with the book.
She said, quote, I mean, it's bad enough.
She's having them read this for an assignment, but then she's also making them read it aloud and making a little girl talk about feeling each other's breasts.
And when she sees a female, she goes into ecstasy.
That's not OK, right?
And this is what sort of kicked this thing off.
It's not the first time.
District officials said the version of the diary was not approved.
That's in dispute.
The diary was on a reading list that was sent to parents at the beginning of the year, so somebody approved it.
The teacher claims that the school principal had approved her course syllabus.
The principal, when I was looking around at this, has kept quiet about this, has directed comments to the superintendent.
The superintendent just says, there's a substitute in there, it'll be inappropriate, and so on and so forth.
It's not the first time this has happened.
As I was reminded, it sort of dug around about 10 years ago in Michigan.
Again, one of the first, you know, stories about the unabridged diary being taught, and there were parent groups and others who opposed it, said it was inappropriate.
The National Coalition Against Censorship at the time fought this.
The same unabridged version has caused controversy in a school district north of Fort Worth, Texas.
In a school district—wait for it, Brad—in Florida, right, where this has happened.
I'll throw it over in a minute.
The last point that I'll make about this, though, is that some of the players we talk about are figuring prominently, including Moms for Liberty, right?
We know this group.
This is the group that has really gained prominence for fighting so many of these things related to books and book banning and censorship and stacking school boards and so forth.
They were involved in the banning of the book in Florida.
A lot of takeaways from this that I have.
One is just to note that the American Library Association says that book banning challenges in the U.S.
have hit a two-decade high in the last year, and Texas leads the way.
I think the bigger issue for me, or the really central thing, and I think this is part of what relates to things at West Point, This is part of what relates to, as you say, the pearl clutching about perceived anti-Catholic bias where there isn't any and so forth, is the choosing of what and how to remember historical figures, right?
Of valorizing Anne Frank as a tragic hero, as long as she's not queer.
If she's queer, that's a bridge too far.
That needs to be something that's kept private and separate and so forth, right?
Queer activists will call this the straightwashing of history, right?
And it's very much part of that.
I think that's very much front and center with this, this construction of somebody as white and straight and, again, a tragic hero, but when she becomes queer, it becomes somehow threatening, it becomes somehow scary.
I also know we can talk about this.
There are real questions about age appropriateness of these kinds of things.
But with the impulse we see toward book banning, censorship, and so forth, I think this is a really chilling example, right?
It's okay to talk about the Holocaust as long as we just keep it straight and pretend that there weren't queer people involved.
So I agree.
I agree that there are the need to contextualize things you share in a middle school classroom.
I get it.
And I get that it's it's hard.
It's hard to to have a set of materials that may include, you know, scenes or diary entries that are about sexual situations.
OK, fine.
But.
The larger point for me about this country Is that we would rather just say, nope, never talk about it, never discuss it than have a comprehensive approach that says, yes, we are going to have a curriculum that includes health.
It's going to include literature.
It's going to include history.
It's going to include physiology.
Right.
And human development in a way that instead of something being off limits, Taboo.
Prohibited.
Forbidden.
We're just gonna admit that sexuality is part of the human experience, part of the human condition, and we're gonna just teach people how to understand it.
How to be equipped with the categories to know, like, how things work.
Okay.
That's one.
Number two is this for me, is, okay, This is the Diary of Anne Frank.
This is not fiction.
This is not a 32-year-old author who wrote queer YA lit, okay?
This is not somebody who said, I'm going to write literature for 14-year-olds that includes same-sex relationships or attraction.
This is literally just somebody who is the age of the people in the class writing in her diary Reflecting on her feelings about her body and other people and her attractions and just trying to work through those.
I'm going to say the same thing I just said about the Catholic example and the trad Catholic communities.
As I would in this case about the parents and those who are upset.
This was a 13 year old girl like the 13 year old sitting in the class trying to figure out her own sexuality.
Wouldn't it be great?
If we just were able as adults and people that are trusted in those children's lives, those teenagers' lives, to find places, ways, avenues, vehicles, resources for them to like, I don't know, not have to do that alone, like seemingly Anne Frank did under the most stressing conditions of hiding in the midst of the Holocaust.
Why is our reaction always, I can't believe that they would expose our children to this?
And why is the thought not, you know, I have a 13 year old too.
I don't want to admit that they're getting to this age because I still want them to be my little kid who's at home holding my hand.
But it's probably time to admit that they're like 13.
And I don't know, we need to like be really open and honest and try to build avenues and channels of trust so they don't feel alone when they try to figure all this stuff out.
But that is how this country works.
It's how it's always worked when it's come to sex ed.
And everything else.
So, final thoughts on this before we take a break and go to one last thing.
Yeah, so, you know, I was struck by this, came across this, that the founder of Moms for Liberty claims that they want, quote, transparency and accountability, right?
And what you're describing is exactly the opposite, right?
They don't want transparency, they want censorship, they want erasure.
And I'll go like, I agree with everything you said.
Wouldn't it be great if kids who are this age, who are struggling with these things, including same-sex desire, if like maybe that's not something they've seen modeled or their parents haven't talked about or whatever, could read something like this.
But I think that's exactly the fear, right?
That is the fear of groups like this.
That's the fear of the kind of religious extremism driving this.
Because for lots of Christian nationalists and evangelical and theologically conservative parents, and I really am not trying to overstate this, but I think it's true, there is almost nothing worse that could happen Then your kid coming out as queer.
It is seen as as sort of the worst thing that could happen.
And so what do we do?
We just erase them.
They just don't exist.
And so again, it's about how we're going to remember history.
It's about who gets to be present as a historical figure and who gets who gets erased from that.
Right.
And the same right wingers that want to use the word, you don't cry about everybody canceling everything all the time.
The reason they're so familiar with that way of describing things is that's what this is.
And so I think there are so many, so many ways that schools and other places could deal with these kinds of issues that would be transparent and accountable and could be sensitive to different parental views and so forth.
Simply censoring it is not the way.
And the claim is always, oh, they're not ready for that yet.
And the question we've asked on the show over and over is like, well, when are people ready for that when they're 14, 16, 18?
When are they ready to encounter gay characters in literature or in history?
When are they ready to talk about sexual situations?
And the answer is always never.
You're never ready.
Right.
I mean, this country is a It's a eternal infantilized country, right?
We want to be the young country forever.
We're the young democracy, we're the young republic, and we're always too young to deal with the hard stuff.
That's how it feels.
We're not old enough to deal with our original sin and slavery.
Don't tell me about it.
I'm not old enough to deal with all of the complications of our economic system and how it favors certain people and the histories involved with that.
I'm not old enough to learn about redlining and Chinese exclusion, right?
And we're just never old enough to learn about sex in this country.
It's just never appropriate.
And I guess the final question I'll ask on this segment about Anne Frank is like, when was Anne Frank old enough?
Like, you want to teach kids that Anne Frank was this person to look up to because Anne Frank had this kind of courage in the midst of the worst human tragedy.
Was Anne Frank ready for that?
No, no one is ever ready for that.
Right?
None of us will ever be ready for that.
And I don't wish that on anyone.
But you want to teach kids to revere a figure that was courageous in the face of the most atrocious circumstances.
And then you want to turn around and say, but my kid's not ready to deal with this.
Right.
They're not ready to talk about things of this nature yet.
And it's such mixed messaging.
It's such, again, hypocrisy.
Right.
Let's valorize those who reckoned with the human condition in its in its most brute And then let's turn around and say, I can't believe you would suggest to my 14-year-old kid, right, that they should start thinking about sexuality and what's appropriate and how that works and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
That's just not going to fly here.
And it's like, OK, whatever you say.
But the last thing, right, they are like everybody knows this, right?
Think back when you're 14.
They are thinking about their sexuality.
That's the other just ridiculous part about it is that It's like when you hear people, they're like, well, back in my day, there weren't gay people.
I guess there were.
You may not have known it, but they were there.
Yeah, I'm sorry.
Your 14 year old is thinking about sex like that's that's part of being 14.
That's just what we thought.
How many 14?
Whatever.
I'm not.
All right.
Let's take a break.
I'm just it's we can't.
We'll be right back.
All right, Dan, I just want to touch on this because it's something I think is, a lot of people probably not on their radar, but I think it is worth keeping an eye on.
So, we have brought this up on the show.
If you're a follower of politics, you know that this is happening.
But basically, there's been a years-long argument in Alabama about districts being redrawn.
And there's a group of federal judges that ordered Alabama to redraw their congressional districts, and it would essentially add or create a second-majority black district in Alabama.
And basically, Alabama just looked at the federal government and was like, nah, not doing it.
And a lot of us were like, what's going on?
Are they just flouting the government?
Are they just giving the middle finger?
Do they not care?
And there's a new report out from the Alabama Political Reporter and from others, and Politico really helped to break the story, so I should give them credit, that really shows how this is not a grassroots movement.
This is not Alabama just being like, no, we're not going to do that, or state officials or people on the ground in Alabama saying, no, we're rising up and we refuse to recognize the federal government and we're not going to redraw the districts.
What's been uncovered is that, and I'll quote now from the Alabama political reporter, Alabama's calculations to defy the Supreme Court was made not simply by state legislatures in Alabama, but has been driven by nationally connected political operatives at the center of the well-documented right-wing effort to reshape the composition and jurisprudence of the Supreme Court and to overturn the remaining key protections established by the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
So in essence, this was not born in Alabama, but it was shaped by a federal or excuse me, a national group that wants to basically, Dan, overturn what's left of the Voting Rights Act.
Now, this is a group that's connected to Leonard Leo.
And if you know anything about Leonard Leo, He's been called the hidden architect of the Supreme Court.
Andrew Seidel has documented this.
But he and the Federalist Society have, quote unquote, picked judges.
Right.
All six Republican appointed Supreme Court justices were, quote, seated with major help from Leonard Leo.
OK.
So the Federalist Society and Leo have been basically the shadow architects of what is now the Republican or conservative dominated Supreme Court.
And it seems as if they're behind what's going on in Alabama.
Additionally, just to do this very quickly at the end of the show here, additionally, It seems as if Brett Kavanaugh is willing to hear the case and kind of rehearse it in order to see where it might go once it reaches the Supreme Court.
So it seems like we have a couple of things happening.
Alabama giving the middle finger to the federal government on redistricting and gerrymandering.
The Leonard Leo shadow network basically funding and driving it and them knowing that they have Brett Kavanaugh waiting there as a favorable voice to listen and kind of contour the case so that they can sort of get it through and they can overturn key protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Let me just read one more bit here, Dan, and then I'll throw it to you.
As Alabama Political Reporter reported in July, Alabama lawmakers working in conjunction with State Attorney General Steve Marshall's office and Washington, D.C.
lawyers had, quote, intelligence that Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who voted with the majority in Milligan just weeks ago to order the new maps under the statutory language, is open to rehearsing the case as a constitutional challenge to the validity of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
So this is not this is what you would call an astroturfed case, right?
It wasn't grassroots.
It was created by a group of national political operatives.
They knew they had Kavanaugh as a friendly voice.
And here they are going to use this case, this middle finger from Alabama, to try to overturn any future efforts Of redistricting cases that have been decided on race, right?
So let me just break it down.
If this case goes a certain way, you can look at redistricting in any state across the country and say, you guys drew these maps in a totally weird way in order for the Republican Party to win and to basically disenfranchise black voters.
And this case gets set a precedent where it's like, well, nothing we can do.
Right.
Thoughts on this before we go to reasons for hope.
Two thoughts that I've I've I've said before, and I'm sort of a broken record, but one is just stop with the arguments of trying to make it that somehow this isn't about race.
Right.
I just, I've kind of had it with the weird arguments that people try to come up with that these oddly drawn districts that aim to break up African American majority communities or voting districts, that somehow they're not about race.
They obviously are.
And the second one is it's the party of law and order, right?
That's the other thing that we will still hear when it's aimed at black activists, when it's aimed at brown people, when it's about keeping people from crossing the border.
The right likes to say, you know, they're all about the laws, they're all about law and order, they're all about, you know, all of that.
But when it's the federal judiciary telling them what they have to do, it's a shrug and a yawn and a yeah, maybe not, maybe not so much.
So I think those are mine.
It's just it's more of the same.
And it's not surprising to know this.
I think it's also not surprising to hear that it's as orchestrated as it is from sort of a national level, because that's that's how so much of state politics now is.
It's distressing to me, but it also, I think, pulls back the curtain on how these things operate behind the scenes, right?
And if you just think that everybody's acting independently, and we've talked about this on the show endlessly, you should go read Anne Nelson's book, Shadow Network, because that book will convince you more than any book out there of how the Council for National Policy, the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, the National Rifle Association.
They're all interconnected, and there is plan A, B, C, D, E, F to get what they want.
And so this is just a really good example of that.
Okay.
Let's go to Reasons for Hope, Dan, and I'm going to give you mine.
It comes from near you in Maine.
And Maine is a We're going to, in November, vote on something that's actually really important, and that is whether or not to make their utilities public, right?
According to The Nation, there's going to be a referendum in November when voters must decide whether they want to turn the state's two big private electric companies, Central Maine Power and Versant, into Pine Tree Power, a non-profit publicly run utility.
The two corporations involved sent $187 million in profits out of Maine last year.
So those who favor this nonprofit model in Maine argue that if that money was kept in state, that they could lower the rates by an average of $367 per household per year.
And that would mean shutting off fewer household, their energy when things are, when the system is strained or people can't pay so on and so forth.
Dan.
This is good.
I'm sorry.
Some of you listening might not agree, and that's okay.
I'm happy for you not to agree.
I'll just say, if this is socialism, where you have a non-profit that's saying, we are going to run the utilities, not for money-making, but just as a public service, and you're going to save people money, and you're going to do this without sending profits to places far and wide, And the interest is simply in, you know, Mainers having good service at the best possible price.
Sign me up.
Sign me up for for socialism, if that's what this is.
Let me give you one example.
My wife and I have been taking my daughter to a nearby park.
It's kind of a theme park, but it's really built for like five and six-year-old kids and under, right?
So this is the perfect place.
If you have a two-year-old, you take them there on a weekend.
They get to run around.
They go on these rides that are like built for them.
They're not roller coasters.
Okay, what's the point?
When we first got there, damn, the prices were like very fair.
We like went to buy lunch and we were like, oh, $11.
Not $37.
Like, the hot dog at this place does not cost $42.
That's weird.
Okay.
Huh.
Like, what's going on?
We bought tickets for this.
And guess what I found out?
Long story short, it's run by a non-profit.
A big family set up a nonprofit like 50 years ago, and now this park runs as an education center.
And the goal is, right, to keep it going, but it's not to just make a billion dollars.
So what happens?
It's actually kind of affordable.
People can go there.
You can actually take your kid.
You can eat lunch for less than 300 bucks, blah, blah, blah.
What's the point?
I don't know.
Sometimes when things aren't open to the free market and they're designed for the public good, they're better.
That's the point.
Some of you are going to email me.
You're going to be major upset about it.
You're not going to like this.
You're going to turn the show off.
I get it.
But I just think this is good news.
And I'm excited to see what happens in May.
I could actually talk about that a lot, but I won't.
I'll go to mine.
So I think my reason for hope is ProPublica once again.
ProPublica is a dog with a bone at this point, and I mean that in the best possible sense.
More revelations about Justice Clarence Thomas this week come out, that he attended Koch brother donor events.
The donors were basically promised to have dinner with Clarence Thomas if they came to these events.
You know, $100,000 buy-in kind of thing.
The event organizers say that this, and I think a spokesperson for Thomas, Nothing was wrong with this.
I heard one analyst say it this way, people aren't paying to attend these to not have dinner with Clarence Thomas.
There's also the idea that he was flown to these events on a private jet, which may be a violation of federal law.
Not just the ethics code that doesn't exist for the Supreme Court, apparently, but ethics law as well.
All of that, fine.
I don't like Justice Thomas.
I would love it if to see, you know, real consequences to any Supreme Court justices who are doing these things.
But the bigger thing are voices like ProPublica and the fact that they keep digging at this.
They keep it in front of people.
They're not taking the easy answers.
They're not accepting, you know, when Alito writes his angry op-eds or whatever else.
I was excited to see that and glad that, again, it's just they won't let it go away.
They're keeping it in front of people.
All right, y'all.
Need you to go to www.axismoondi.us and check out everything we're putting out.
One of those things is a great series by Andrew Whitehead on Christian nationalism and how to resist it.
Another is Inform Your Resistance, which is all about the far right and deep research into abortion abolitionists and constitutional sheriffs and Christian homeschooling and all kinds of stuff.
We do the show three times a week.
We don't have any big funding or outside sources.
We're not Clarence Thomas, so no one is flying us anywhere, Dan, on private jets or big dinners.
So if you can support us on Patreon, PayPal, Venmo.
We would be so grateful.
We're grateful to all of you who do that.
I will not be here next week, because I will be with, most likely and hopefully, our newborn baby.
But Dan will be here, and we'll also have, it's in the code, and all the other things we do each week.
