Brad and Dan begin by discussing some of the terrible reactions to the situation in Israel on the part of American politicians and the deadly consequences we've already seen throughout the country. This leads to a discussion of the Biden administration's approach to aid in Israel and the worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
In the final segment, the hosts analyze the debacle in the House by way of a deep dive into the history of Jim Jordan's career in Congress.
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My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Dan, good to see you.
Nice to see you, Brad.
I'm Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Always nice to be with you, as always, on the Weekly Roundup.
It's usually kind of a bad reason that we're together, because there's always stuff to talk about, but it is nice to see you.
Yeah it's good to be back.
Last week I was officiating a funeral for a family member and so that was a big week and just still something that's lingering in my family and so on and also you might hear a baby crying because we have a newborn and right before I started recording Dan I handed the newborn from the carrying pouch I had her in back to my partner so we're We're just doing that whole thing.
I have to say, Dan, that I yesterday did something that I've never done before.
And that is buy a minivan.
Oh, yeah.
That's like the cargo shorts you drive.
That's all I'm saying.
I hope somebody sends that to Chrysler or Honda and is like, hey, here's your new slogan for your new minivan.
Yeah, so I bought a minivan.
And I just feel like I want to say that, you know, fatherhood and middle age, they change you spiritually.
Because when driving the minivan, I was like, you know, This kind of drives like an SUV.
I kind of feel like I'm just in a big SUV and I just felt like I was still still got it a little bit, you know, maybe I was drinking a Diet Coke and driving and yeah, and and you know, I I might've gone to Costco the other day and thought, hey, that hooded sweatshirt looks pretty nice.
I might now start buying my clothes at Costco.
I don't know.
I mean, why not, Dan?
I go there.
Two things.
Number one, are you saying everybody doesn't buy clothes at Costco?
I guess that's just me.
And number two, you can share with us all the best Black Friday sales on rechargeable car backs and stuff, because that's what comes next, to get all the Cheerios and stuff out from between the seats.
Well, and if you looked at my bank account, am I wealthy?
No, I am not.
But if you looked at my Kohl's account, do you know how much Kohl's cash I have, Dan?
I am an alpha Kohl's cash person.
I walk into Kohl's and I swagger.
You know what I'm saying?
Do they put the red carpet out?
Yeah.
All the sales associates come over and- The amount of finger guns I give at Kohl's, just like, yo, what's up, Johnny?
Hey, Jeanette.
You know what I mean?
To all the salespeople, yeah, I'm going to get that new- fleece I was looking at or like the swim cap that's on sale.
I don't need a swim cap, but it's on sale and I have so much Kohl's cash.
I do what I want.
All right.
You can just burn it.
Yeah.
All right.
Here we go.
A lot to talk about.
And that includes talking about what continues to happen in Israel and Palestine and the reactions to it.
So we're going to get into some of the things that are really grounded here, Dan, more domestically, but that will take us into talking about the issues.
They're really, really, really difficult things to talk about here.
There are human stories that are just overwhelmingly sorrowful.
There are political issues that are very tense and difficult.
So we're going to do our best to navigate them and just give our view on everything that's happening.
Also want to talk about the debacle in the House with Jim Jordan and the House Republicans trying to elect a Speaker of the House.
And we'll get into some other things as well, including some people pleading guilty in everything that's happening down in Georgia and that whole conspiracy ring of criminals who tried to overturn the election.
All right.
Let's start here, Dan.
Usually you are the Florida Desk correspondent, but I'm going to take that this week.
I'm going to talk about Ron DeSantis and his reaction to everything that has happened in Israel-Palestine over the last couple weeks.
This is from the New York Times.
In an appearance on the CBS morning show Face the Nation, Mr. DeSantis, the Florida governor, doubled down on remarks he had made one day earlier in Iowa, espousing a hardline opposition towards helping civilians who have been thrust in the middle of the conflict.
They teach kids to hate Jews, he said, The textbooks do not have Israel even on the map.
They prepare very young kids to commit terrorist acts.
So I think it's a toxic culture.
This is Ron DeSantis, Dan talking about, in essence, all Palestinians.
He is basically giving a blanket statement on every Palestinian person and talking about how they all Teach kids to hate Jews, and the textbooks do not have Israel on the map, and so on.
I want to come back.
I think it's very rich.
He's talking about textbooks, and I don't want to forget that.
Let me continue.
If you look at how they behave, not all of them are Hamas, but they are all anti-Semitic.
None of them believe in Israel's right to exist.
There was a lot of celebrating of those attacks in the Gaza Strip by a lot of those folks who were not Hamas.
So, DeSantis, Dan, if everybody goes and reads up on what he said, he basically says that there should be no admittance of Palestinian refugees to the United States because of all the reasons I just read about.
Now, there is so much to say here.
Dan, I'm going to try my best to concentrate.
I'm going to start with the effects, though.
I have so much to say analytically here.
I have so much I want to talk about in terms of textbooks.
Dehumanization.
Stereotyping.
He's using words like they and all.
I mean, these are classic words you circle when somebody's making these kinds of statements to say, that is racism.
That is dehumanization.
That is something that is really dangerous.
But I want to talk about the real world effects.
The Tampa Bay Times, Says this this week.
Leali Shalabi, 22, a University of South Florida graduate who spoke during a pro-Palestinian rally last week in Tampa, said misinformation can easily breed hatred.
Hatred.
The Palestinian community here in Tampa is diverse and strong.
There are teachers, engineers, businessmen, students.
We have built a strong community of kindness to contribute to our society.
But the governor refers to us as terrorists and anti-Semitic.
I think he's going to incite a lot of hate in Floridians and Americans toward the Palestinians.
I'm just going to stay on effects here, Dan, and I want to stay on what this activist said.
She says, I think he's going to incite a lot of hate in Floridians and Americans.
One of the things, Dan, that I cannot get away from is that when you have someone like Ron DeSantis saying they are all anti-Semitic, they all hate Jewish people.
When you put a whole people group, a whole group of folks who live in Palestine, right?
In Gaza, the West Bank, wherever.
And you say they all are anti-semitic.
You are going to get downstream from those statements people that just say, OK, he said that.
That must be true.
And I need to act on it.
We've chronicled this when Trump says things.
We've chronicled this when others say things.
Well, I'm not drawing a direct line, but I am going to say, right, in the next example, that people learn things from places.
They have sources, they look to leaders, they look to outlets, and then they act on them.
In Illinois, many of you have probably heard the story already this week, An Illinois landlord, this is from AP, accused of fatally stabbing a six-year-old Muslim boy and seriously wounding his mother, was charged with a hate crime after police and relatives said he singled out the victims because of their faith and as a response to the war between Israel and Hamas.
So the reports talk about this man in Illinois who was helping this boy who lived in one of his properties, something like build a tree house or something like that, and then he turns and suddenly he stabs him.
A six-year-old boy, okay?
So, we can dig into this landlord.
Was he mentally ill?
I don't know.
But I do know this is not a coincidence that when you have rhetoric after what has happened over the last two weeks that dehumanizes and blanket a whole people group with characteristics such as they are all anti-Semitic Then you're going to get acts like this.
Here is some more examples.
You say, well, that's isolated.
Well, here's USA Today.
In Dearborn, Michigan, police arrested a man last week for saying in a Facebook post that he wanted to gather people to, quote, hunt Palestinians, according to a screenshot of the post Dearborn police shared with the Detroit News.
On Tuesday, the Council on American Islamic Relations in Los Angeles called on UCLA to open an investigation after a group of people intruded on a webinar, threatened to tear the heads off of Palestinian supporters, and called them terrorists.
On Sunday morning, a person approached a sick teen Sick meaning S I K H wearing a turban on a New York City bus and said, quote, We don't wear that in this country and take that mask off.
The suspect then punched the 19 year old on the back of his head, face and back multiple times.
In Oregon, the Islamic Society of Greater Portland said community members have faced threats in recent days which have been reported to law enforcement.
Dan.
A month ago, Unlike September 14th on this show, we recounted the history of what happened after 9-11.
We talked about Islamophobia.
We talked about violence.
We talked about the ways you tell the story of nations inspires people to think about themselves playing one role and others having another role.
The good guy, the bad guy, the force of right and the force of evil and so on and so on and so on.
I want to talk more about Biden, the response to Israel's Attempted or planned, I should probably say, ground war in Gaza and so on.
But right now what I want to point out is that when you have leaders like Ron DeSantis, who we've chronicled all of his dehumanizing tactics, whether it's flying migrants to Martha's Vineyard, whether it's the ways that he has twisted American history to rule out a next size, things like slavery, Whether it's the new alien land laws that he has passed, saying that Chinese and others cannot buy land, right?
If you are of a Chinese descent, you cannot buy property in certain places in Florida.
I've chronicled that on this show.
You can listen to it.
I interviewed Russell Jung, and you can listen to that interview.
Those things are domestic things that we've chronicled.
And guess what, Dan?
When things happen, Globally, international, foreign policy and so on comes into play.
Guess what?
Those people don't change.
The Ron DeSantis of the world, they just keep being Ron DeSantis.
So he's now saying every Palestinian is anti-Semitic.
They should not be let in the country.
They teach everybody to hate Jews, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And guess what?
When leaders talk like that downstream, Downstream, you get all of these examples of anti-Palestinian, Islamophobic, other forms of violent and really anti-social behavior.
I got more to say.
Throw it to you now for some thoughts.
Yeah, so I agree with everything that you said and some pieces of that.
And again, people just have to listen to it.
Like, just listen.
Like, we're not, I don't know, we're not making this up.
Listen to the way that he talks, right?
We, most of us probably teach our kids that you don't say all people of any kind.
Anytime you make any statement that starts with all people of whatever, like, it's never going to be true, right?
And I think Ron DeSantis does this.
I think a piece that I want to pick up here is A couple pieces.
One is, no doubt, DeSantis and those like him, everybody else who says this, when they are confronted, and they are, with events like what happened in Illinois, that said, no, of course we didn't say anything about violence against these people.
Of course we don't condone this.
And this is my question, right?
Why use the rhetoric, if you're just going to turn around later and say it doesn't do anything?
Like, that it has no effect, that your words don't matter at all, right?
It does, as you say.
It's that sort of downstream effect.
Another piece of this, this takes us beyond what we would have time to do today.
It takes us beyond probably what we could show.
But I look at this and when I see the language that's used of groups that are more recognizably other, like Palestinians, right?
What I think it does is it also lifts the screen and says, by the way, this all or nothing language, this everybody who, this is what they think about a lot of people in this country, too.
This is what they think about people of color.
They hide it under all kinds of language about parental freedom.
They hide it about under language of, quote, you know, urban crime or poverty or whatever.
But what they mean is all black people, dot, dot, dot, fill in the blank.
All queer people dot dot dot fill in the blank.
What we're seeing is the same logic that we see here from, you know, the American Christian Nationalists every day, applied to a group that is perceived by many to be even more foreign, right?
Even less capable of sort of fitting that sort of image of the prototypical white Christian American, right?
Not just Muslims, but Arabs.
Not just Arabs, but people who live in a different place, in a different location, who are far away.
I think it shows us, again, the consistency of this.
It shows us everything we need to see about this.
And we can teach our four and five and six-year-olds not to say things like that about people.
That it's just not true that all people of X, Y, or Z type always think anything.
But you can't teach the contemporary GOP, you can't teach the contemporary Ron DeSantis that that's how this works.
So again, I think it's the point that for me, Ron DeSantis, he's not exceptional in this.
He says the quiet part out loud, but I think it matters.
But you're hitting on something that seems really important here.
Ron DeSantis is telling you that he's the kind of guy When it comes to certain people groups, he thinks, I'm going to just go make sure I got it in front of me, right?
He thinks that if you look at how they behave, not all of them are Hamas, but they are all anti-Semitic.
All.
Right?
He, he thinks, I mean, this is a quote, I think it's a toxic culture, just talking about Palestine.
So, right?
So two, two things.
One, he's telling you that in certain cases, Ron DeSantis is willing to conclude That all people of a group have these characteristics.
That's what he just told you.
So you just made a really good point.
So if we transfer that and we ask, so what are other cases in which Ron DeSantis thinks all of them blank, the entire culture blank?
As you said, is that queer folks?
Is that black people?
Is that immigrants?
He just told you that he's the kind of guy that is totally like concludes at certain times, all people of this culture are like this, right?
That is textbook racism.
That is textbook dehumanization, right?
I mean, where does racism come from?
Racism comes from every person who is fill in the blank has these characteristics and they're negative, right?
And even when they're positive, they can be used in ways that are really hurtful.
The model minority myth is very hurtful.
That's number one.
Let's not miss what Ron DeSantis just told us about Ron DeSantis, okay?
Number two, again, just think yourself into The shoes of somebody who is now in Tampa, who is now in LA, who is now in Kansas City.
And if they are Palestinian, if they are Muslim, if they are of Arab descent, I want you to think of what it looks like for them on the ground.
They are now going to be in situations where leaders make these kinds of comments, So people at school, people at work, people on the street, people online are going to now say, well, you are just one of those and you are like this.
This is what happened after 9-11 in this country in terms of rampant Islamophobia.
And I think we see the basis for it again.
I want to get into Biden and the response.
So any final thoughts on DeSantis and these comments before we do some of that?
Just again, listen to the rhetoric people use, right?
This is what we talk about in It's In The Code all the time, right?
It's looking at the rhetoric and there's the level of what does it mean, but then there's the what work does it do?
What this work does, the work it does is to dehumanize, right?
To classify entire categories of people and to license violence against them, right?
And I know that not everybody who hears that is going to go out and commit acts of violence, I know the people who talk that way will say that that's not what they intend, but I think that that's an effect and we just cannot ignore or miss that.
All right.
Let's take a break.
We'll talk more about this and some other stuff in a minute.
Be right back.
All right, Dan.
You know, we are a show where we comment on the actions of our government and what we see there.
And this is really hard to do in these cases because it's hard to think of issues that are as tense and are as It's going to be difficult to talk about with nuance and detail as this one, OK?
But I'm going to give my my view on this.
I know that some of you are going to turn this off and you don't you're just going to not listen.
Others of you are going to appreciate what I say.
I feel like I got to give you what I see because that's what we do on this show.
And not to do that would be cowardly.
So here is Here are some thoughts, Dan, on the last week or so with Biden and the U.S.' 's response to what's unfolded.
I generally think that I share the perspective of Daniel Levy.
Daniel Levy is the president of the U.S.
Middle East Project.
He previously served as an Israeli peace negotiator during the Oslo B Talks under Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
He was also part of the Taba Peace Talks under Minister Barak.
He was also somebody who's just been involved in these things for decades.
But since the October 7 attack by Hamas about two weeks ago, Levi has been vocal about the response of the Israeli state and the death it is causing in Gaza.
So, Levi Dan is somebody who is saying, hey, I have a really personal perspective on these things as a Jewish person.
I'm embedded in the histories of these talks and the politics involved.
And he and his co-author Zaha Hassan, who's a human rights lawyer, they wrote this in the Irish Times.
They had an op-ed a while back.
And they, according to Mother Jones and other outlets, I mean, I'm summarizing a whole lot of stuff here, but they had three main points, okay?
Number one, Hamas's attack on Israeli civilians was unconscionable.
You said that last week, and so did I. What Hamas did, unconscionable.
There's no way to, like, justify it.
People at nightclubs, people at the bus station, taking hostages, hurting hostages, no.
Just no.
Not okay.
Like, don't wanna talk about it, don't wanna think about it.
This is anti-everything that you could think of in terms of a humane society, okay?
Not good.
Here's the next part, though.
Israel's collective punishment of people in Gaza, cutting off water, food, electricity, is also not okay.
And I agree there, to think that cutting off the water to children, to pregnant women, to old people, to think that providing, excuse me, creating a situation where there is no water, food or electricity for an entire population is a way to somehow respond to the terrorist attacks that is going to lead to a better world in some way.
I think it's not okay.
Now, Levy also says that one must address the context of occupation and apartheid in which is unfolding.
Now, I agree.
Now, listen up for a minute, please, before, right, some of you are just getting your blood boiling.
Paying attention to the context of apartheid is not justifying Hamas attacking civilians, children, people at bus stops.
None of that.
We can do things with both hands, both sides of our brains.
We can be complex thinkers.
We can say that the way Hamas is treating hostages, the way that they went about any of these interactions is absolutely unacceptable, inhumane, and disgusting.
We can also say, as an international community, that it is necessary to address occupation and apartheid, right?
When it comes to Gaza, when it comes to the West Bank, when it comes to Palestine as a whole.
It's really hard in these cases, Dan, to get that point across because the Temptation, as we said last week, is to reduce these things to either or.
I want to just say one more thing that I think will touch on something that you have mentioned when it comes to the Bush administration's response to 9-11 and the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq.
So I'll leave that for you.
Levi was talking on the BBC.
And he says, do you think terrorist organizations embedded in populations who are denied their most basic rights are ended once and for all in a military campaign?
Right.
So what Levy's pointing out is like, is it possible to end Hamas's reign through an all out ground offensive, through basically a complete takeover of Gaza?
When you're telling every Palestinian, whether they're a two-year-old or a 98-year-old, get out or we're coming and you may not survive.
Is that the way, Levy says, to disentangle and unstick the grip that Hamas has, right, in those regions?
Is that how you do that with terrorist organizations, okay?
I think that leads us into what you and I have said maybe a hundred times on the show about the ways that Bush and his administration responded to what happened after 9-11.
So there's a whole lot to respond to there.
I'll leave that to you.
And then I want to talk about one more thing as it relates to this before we move on.
So I want to think about, it's going to sound like maybe a strange segue, but I want people to hold with me, right?
Because it came up a lot after the context of 9-11.
And it's this old Christian theological idea called Just War Theory, right?
And it was early Christians, the early Christian community were pacifists.
They believed that you couldn't be in the military and kill people and so forth and be a good Christian.
But then all the Roman leaders and others became Christian, and the Roman Empire was big into military action and so forth, and Christianity had to rethink that.
And you had thinkers who developed what was called the Just War Theory, which was basically a way of trying to say, when can war be just or justified?
And one of the key tenants of just war theory has always been proportionality, right?
That the response has to be proportionate to the offense.
And I would sort of update that and say that you hold the people that are responsible, responsible.
That's what you do, right?
And the reason I bring all that up, after 9-11, that came up a lot.
And a lot of people, critics of the Bush administration would say, We're going into whole countries.
Most data shows hundreds of thousands of people, folks, have died as a result of US actions in those theaters.
And that's not a proportionate response.
There were many civilians that were killed, and yet there were rules against that, right?
Here, what we have, we've had the language of collective punishment.
We've had the language of war as retribution.
It is simply not a proportionate sort of response.
And you get into the real question.
It's hard.
How do you be proportionate when they're hiding among the population?
And so we have tough questions, real questions, real questions to deal with.
Punishing civilians is not something we're supposed to do.
And folks, this isn't weird.
This isn't controversial.
It's against international law.
This is, like, well established.
This is not what countries that claim to be democratic, you know, leading powers in the world are supposed to do.
I think it highlights a lot of other things.
If we wanted to get sort of theological about it, there's a theologian Walter Wink, a long time ago, wrote about what he called the myth of redemptive violence.
And I think it's a myth that is very much alive and well here, which is that you can stop violence with violence.
That if you repay violence with more violence, you will somehow quell it.
That was the logic behind the so-called War on Terror.
Years and years and years ago talked about this, right?
You can't commit war, quote-unquote, against an idea or an affect.
It drives me crazy now when people call it the war against terrorism because that's not what it was called.
That is not what the Bush administration went with.
I think it's the same thing here.
You will not stop violent acts.
I am with you.
These were violent acts.
There is no justification for the actions that Hamas undertook.
You can contextualize it.
I think we should contextualize it.
Contextualization is not justification.
I think related to this, the last point that I'll just make is you've had, and people know this, I think that they pay much attention, you have had a strong rightward movement of the Israeli government over recent years, much like you've had in the U.S.
You've had the formation of coalition governments that have had to include further and further right-wing parties within the Israeli government for Benjamin Netanyahu to remain in power, and that has been normalized over time.
You have had people in Israel, you've had lots of U.S.
observers, you've had international observers who, you know, a few years ago there were parties that they would say, we absolutely cannot have these Israeli parties as part of a coalition government.
What they want to do It's horrific and it's bad and it's going to destabilize the region and so forth.
And as they have been incorporated into coalition governments.
There has been a softening of that stance and a normalization of those positions, much like there has been with Christian nationalism in the U.S.
We also see all of that in this.
And so, to echo your point, this is complex.
It is really complex.
I'm going to say and end with what I said last week, which is, if somebody wants the quote-unquote right side, it's that we don't kill non-combatants.
The non-combatants are not the ones who did this.
Palestinian neighbors in America are not the ones who did this.
If you're pro-Palestinian, your Jewish neighbors in the U.S.
are not the ones who did this.
The perpetrators of the violence, they should be caught.
They should be brought to justice.
And I don't mean some sort of summary execution.
I mean justice, an actual approved system of justice.
That should happen.
But if we're talking about punishing entire civilians, you say women, children, elderly people, the most vulnerable to do that, I just don't think there's a place for that.
And there shouldn't be a place for that, I think, for the U.S.
to give kind of a blank check for that to happen.
I want to make two more points.
One is just to sort of echo what you've talked about and what I've talked about in the The voices of others who've been talking about this this week.
So, there was a big protest at the United States Capitol this week.
Hundreds of people were arrested, and those protests were largely Jewish people calling for a ceasefire in Israel-Palestine.
Here's Wapo.
The arrests occurred after demonstrators, including American Jews and allies, worried about Palestinians in Gaza, rallied on the National Mall.
Protesters held a banner with red writing that said, our blood is the same color, waved Palestinian flags, and raised posters that read, my grief is not your weapon, never again for anyone, and Zionism is racism.
There were Jewish people wearing prayer shawls and kippit, young activists supporting tattoos and nose rings, and people in headscarves and Palestinian checkered black and white scarves.
We are here to say not in our name, Jay Saper said.
We are here as Jews, many descendants of survivors of genocide, to stop a genocide from unfolding in real time.
So, I think that there is a summation, Dan, of some people from a Jewish perspective saying what we are trying to say, what Daniel Levy is trying to say, that is, You know, attempted genocide, a ground war that will basically be directed non-discriminately against non-combatants, right?
I mean, it will be anyone who is there is not the answer.
And I think that leads me to a conclusion about policy, which is that the Biden administration was always going to send support to Israel.
That was what was going to happen, that this is the United States and that was just part of the game.
I do not think that that support has to go there.
If the United States and the Biden administration and Blinken and anyone else knows that that aid will be used for this kind of military action.
Okay.
I'm just going to put that out there.
That does not have to happen.
Biden does not have to do that that way.
I want to say one more big thing on this Dan.
Do you want to respond to that?
Do you have any thought and if not, it's okay.
Okay.
Let me talk now about something that we need to say and that is The last 15 minutes of our discussions have been about Israel, the state of Israel, and the United States as a nation and so on.
All of that is in the context of rising anti-Semitism in this country and other places.
All of that is in the context of the fact that if you are Jewish and you are walking down the street in this country, there is a good chance you are thinking about, are there people here who are going to be hurtful Violent.
Anything in between.
Toward me because I am Jewish.
The Jewish community in this country and many other countries around the world has experienced rising anti-Semitism over the last six or seven years and we cannot ignore that.
Okay?
And nothing we're saying here is trying to ignore the fact that for millennia Jewish people have been persecuted by so many different actors, communities, nations, traditions, and so on.
That is absolutely true.
As people who have studied the history of Christianity for most of their adult lives, Dan and I know just how much antisemitism exists within the Christian tradition.
Not the entirety of it, but you can find the texts and the leaders and the church The fathers, the theologians, who have openly anti-Semitic rhetoric.
It is there.
So we want to be clear.
We recognize that.
We know that our Jewish neighbors often struggle with concerns about safety, concerns about well-being, concerns about identity.
I'll just finish this segment, Dan, by something that occurs to me a lot in my own life, okay?
I'm Japanese-American.
And this country, in terms of my family's history, Asian American history, Japanese American history, means this.
It means that there are people in my life, in my family, who as soon as Pearl Harbor happened, They were pretty certain bad things were going to happen to them, even though they were American citizens, even though they had never been to Japan, even though they had never taken part in anything related to the Japanese military or the emperor.
Nothing.
This country put my relatives in camps with no trial.
With no concern about justice.
It just said, you are all dangerous.
Kind of sounds like Ron DeSantis, right?
You are all dangerous just by dint of your lineage, just by dint of your family.
So we need to put you in camps.
And that's part of my family's history.
I visited those camps in California.
I have visited them in faraway places like Arkansas.
When Japanese Americans get together, Usually, at one point in the dinner, you're going to talk about camp.
Your parents, your grandparents, your uncles, who lost their home because when they got back from camp, somebody had taken it.
When their business was lost because nobody would go to a place where a business was run by Japanese people.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s, Dan.
People called me Jap, and they called me nip.
I have a white mom, for God's sake.
And we still got called that.
Now, was it every day?
No.
Here's what I'm gonna try, here's what I, here's the point I'm trying to make.
That's oppression.
That's oppression.
When your family history involves the government putting your people in camp, that's oppression.
You know what I'm also aware of?
And it's really hard to hold these things in tandem and to make the squared circle and the circle square and everything else is in that same war, World War II, in that same time period, Japan occupied Korea.
Japan was an imperial power that when I meet friends and colleagues who are Korean, and I think about their families in Japan during that same time, my family was in camp.
I think about.
Japan as a nation being an oppressor.
Was I part of that?
No.
Were my family part of it?
Not the ones on the American side?
No.
But you know what?
It's still part of a history.
It's still part of my relationship with a colleague, right?
Who might be from a part of Southeast Asia, might be from the Korean Peninsula, or their family might be.
And what I hold in tandem there is this sense of My family tree, my lineage, my identity, it all includes oppression and it all includes being oppressed.
And it's just hard.
It's just really hard because there are so many times in this country, especially during COVID when Asian Americans, and if you're not Asian American, you didn't do this probably, but like the, all the group texts were like, can you go to the ATM alone now?
If you're a woman, because you might get hit on the head while you're trying to get money out.
If you're a 74 year old man, can you walk down the street or somebody going to attack you because you're Asian, right?
The oppression still there, but also recognizing that like.
When I think about my identity, it includes Japan and imperial power.
What does all that mean, Dan?
It just means complexity, nuance, detail.
It's hard to hold it all in your body.
It's hard to hold it all in your mind.
It's hard to hold it all together.
But that's kind of what it means to be human.
And especially in these times that are so devastating.
I think that's the practice that we have to hold on to.
If we don't want to fall into.
Ron DeSantis saying, they all, the entire culture is, statements like that.
If we don't want to fall into easy ways to blame, easy ways to reduce, easy ways to look at neighbors and friends and people walking down the street in our community with suspicion, with blame, if we just want to say, This is complex and we're going to do our best, right, to work towards something that looks like human flourishing rather than human self-destruction.
All right.
Final thoughts on this, Dan, before we jump or go to something else.
One of the only thoughts, I just want to, you know, affirm, reaffirm what you're saying about the sort of anti-Semitism.
I would invite people to do this.
Go back and listen to some of the first episodes we ever did.
And we talked about the tensions of white Christian support for the state of Israel tied in with histories of anti-Semitism.
We have talked numerous times on this show, and lots of other people have too, about MAGA Nation and the anti-Semitism Within it, right?
And rising anti-Semitism and anti-defamation.
Go check out their website if you want to find some stuff about rising anti-Semitism in sort of MAGA America.
These are the same people now who are accusing anybody who has any questions about these responses of being anti-Semitic.
That's part of the thing that's that's maddening to me is how fluid that rhetoric is on the right.
That the same people who now want to say that anybody Who would pose real questions about the humanitarian crisis that is developing in Gaza, right?
That that is inherently anti-semitic from any of the same people who have been unleashing anti-semitism in the U.S.
for years.
And that's just another piece of this that I have no patience for.
And I affirm everything you say about the complexity of identity, the complexity of these issues, and we as a nation have got to figure out How to live with complexity, how to accept it, how to recognize it, how to inhabit it.
I'm so glad you brought up Maganation.
Can I give you one thing and then we'll go to break?
I'm sorry, this is like a bonus.
All right, you ready?
This is from New York Magazine.
Senator Josh Hawley, also a critic of Ukraine.
So Josh Hawley, The guy that, you know, raises the fist to terrorists on J6 and Josh Hawley, along with like some others in MAGA Nation, who says, why are we giving money to Ukraine?
Why does Ukraine need money?
I mean, Ukraine's being invaded, but whatever.
That's why do Americans care about what's happening somewhere else?
Right?
That's Josh Hawley.
Critic of Ukraine.
Who cares about Ukraine?
We should send them money?
I don't think so.
They're only getting overrun by Putin.
Blah blah blah.
Here's what he says.
Israel is facing existential threat.
Any funding for Ukraine should be redirected to Israel immediately.
So Jonathan Chait writing at the New York Magazine says, this is utterly backward.
Hamas has carried out a horrific violence against Israeli civilians.
It has no ability to destroy Israel as a country.
It's not an existential threat.
In other words, Ukraine, on the other hand, actually does face an existential threat.
Now, I don't really want to talk about Ukraine today.
I'm just saying, Dan, that the Christian nationalist sort of logic here is like when something happens in Ukraine, like when Putin invades Ukraine, And basically is like, we're gonna just end Ukraine and subsume that under our jurisdiction.
The response from Hawley is like, okay, who cares?
I mean, whatever, that's their thing.
And then Israel comes up, and I bring this up because Josh Hawley's a Christian nationalist, who's one of those Christian nationalists, like we've chronicled on some of those very first episodes you discussed, who's like, Israel, Israel, Israel, not because he loves Jewish people and wants to defeat antisemitism, but because so many Christian nationalists fetishize Israel in terms of their own theology and see Israel as a place of God's special provision and God's special plan in the world.
So he is jumping on the sort of support Israel at all costs train.
And if you ask me why, it is not because he cares deeply about Israeli civilians or Jewish It is because of a certain Christian nationalist theological framework that causes Christian nationalists to fetishize Israel and place it in an imagined sort of space that causes someone like Doug Mastriano, former candidate for governor of Pennsylvania, to say, I support Israel more than most Jewish people.
Right?
Any thoughts on Holly here, just before we jump?
Just that it reaffirms that point, and the issue I always bring up to highlight this is the fact that most Jewish voters don't vote for Republicans.
Why?
Because they don't agree with all of this.
And so this simplistic, we're pro-Israel, therefore we're the pro-Jewish party, and then it flips into the anti-Semitism of statements like that to say that, oh, we're better Jewish people than Jewish people.
Listen to what that is, right?
We Christians are better at recognizing who you Jewish people are supposed to be than Jewish people are.
Tell me that's not anti-Semitic, and I guess we're done talking if somebody thinks it's not.
That's another thing that's at the heart of this.
It really comes full circle to stuff we've been doing for years.
And if Jewish folks vote for Republicans, they vote for Republicans.
Guess what?
Life's complex.
There's like so many different iterations of people's identities and lives and religion and ethnicities and histories.
Those are the things we unpack on here all the time, right?
So sure, like there are people who vote Republican, vote Democrat, vote whatever.
But as you say, to me, the heart of the matter is if number one, Holly's like, don't support Ukraine, but support Israel because we don't care about other countries in one case, but we do care about other countries in another.
That's incoherent.
Two, Mastriano and others that would say we're more Jewish than Jews is, yeah, that's anti-Semitic.
I'm sorry.
We're just going to say that.
All right.
Let's take a break.
And guess what, Dan?
It's time to talk about Jim Jordan.
Be right back.
All right, Dan.
We've had three, at this point, rounds of Jim Jordan.
Michael Jordan famously won three NBA titles, and then he took some time off to play baseball, and then he won three more.
Jim Jordan is 0 for 3 when it comes to being Speaker of the House.
Tell us all about it.
And tell us specifically, who is Jim?
I mean, I think there's a lot of people out there that are like, I don't like Jim Jordan.
Every time I see him, I just think I don't like him.
Where did this guy come from, Dan?
What is his political career look like until now?
Yeah, so Jim Jordan and the Speaker mess, right?
He stepped in after Scalise bowed out.
I mentioned this last week, right?
He stepped out of the Speaker race.
Scalise, who described himself one time as David Duke without the baggage.
So I'm just saying their first choice Was a guy that was David Duke without the baggage.
All right.
So when he didn't work out, they went to the guy you're going to tell us about now.
All right.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
And so I think all of this is situated, right?
As you said, they've just had the third vote.
He did worse on the second vote than he did in the first vote.
I think it looks like the preliminaries, he did worse in the third vote than he did the second vote.
He's losing support.
But this is the key.
And we talk about this a lot, right?
When we talk about the GOP, there is a tendency Because we saw what McCarthy did to try to ingratiate himself to the conservatives, and how this empowered them to think that the next person is going to be better almost by default.
We have talked about how the strong right drift of the GOP, the fact that it is, in my view, The mainstream GOP is a Christian nationalist party at this point, so anybody who's not, like, super, you know, wearing the MAGA t-shirt, we look and say, oh, look at that person, how reasonable that is, how moderate that person is, right?
And they're not.
Jim Jordan is not only not moderate, he is arguably much worse than Kevin McCarthy, and Kudos to the actual moderates and others in the GOP who are refusing to support him and do sort of a Kevin McCarthy 2.0.
But I want to remind people who he is.
So this is going to be sort of a lot of laundry list stuff.
I've got it in a few categories.
I'm just going to run down this and then I would welcome any thoughts you have.
But this is just to remind us who is Jim Jordan.
The first thing is He's a founding member of the Freedom Caucus.
Talk about the Freedom Caucus all the time.
The Freedom Caucus is what sort of went full MAGA when Trump emerged.
Jim Jordan was sort of a founding member of this.
He was one of the key players.
He's an evangelical Christian.
He co-sponsored a marriage protection amendment in 2015 to try to make a constitutional amendment to require that marriage be between one man and one woman.
It obviously didn't go anywhere, but he did this.
He has been known for years for the kind of hardball and disruptive tactics that are exactly what booted McCarthy out of the Speaker's chair.
He helped oust John Boehner as Speaker in 2015.
Why, Brad?
For working with Democrats, just like McCarthy.
In 2015, McCarthy's name was floated to succeed John Boehner.
Guess who opposed that and helped get the Freedom Caucus to oppose that?
Oppose that, rather?
Uh, Jim Jordan did.
Uh, he has appeared on Fox News more than anyone in Congress.
He has appeared on Fox News, I came across this 565 times since August of 2017, right?
So, we talk about Fox News, we know what Fox News is, Jim Jordan is Fox News, right?
That's Jim Jordan, Freedom Caucus guy.
What else?
He's an election denier and a Trump surrogate.
He, on the House Select Committee on January 6, found that he was, quote, a significant player, end quote, in Trump's efforts to overturn the election.
He supports the GOP-Biden impeachment inquiry, which is really just sort of about retribution because they impeached Trump.
He chairs the House Judiciary Committee and the Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government.
We've talked about this before, this effort to just try to show that basically any investigation related to Donald Trump was partisan and so forth.
He only supported McCarthy in 2023 in his bid to be chair, as long as McCarthy funded those investigations of the Biden administration and so forth.
He was described as one of Trump's, quote, warriors working to delegitimize Special Counselor Miller's report on the Russia interference investigation.
That feels like a really long time ago, way back in the early days of the Trump administration, when they were investigating whether Russia was involved in this.
He worked hard to delegitimize that.
With who?
Wait for it.
With people like Matt Gaetz, Ron DeSantis, Mark Meadows.
We've heard these names before.
He was a strong defender of Trump during his first impeachment inquiry.
This is one of those things, Brad, too, that I had sort of forgotten about, maybe repressed.
People might remember that there was this secure facility where they were deposing witnesses during this, and he was one of about two dozen Congress members who stormed that facility.
It had to be broken up by the sergeant-at-arms, right?
This is who he is.
He signed on to an amicus brief in an effort to overturn the 2020 election.
He affirmed election denialism on Sean Hannity's show.
He was part of a conference call strategizing how to delay the electoral college certification.
He said in a text to Mark Meadows that Pence should disregard electoral votes that he deemed, quote-unquote, unconstitutional.
He voted against certifying Biden's victory.
And in 2021, of course, he denied that he ever said the election was stolen, right?
So that's Jim Jordan as MAGA surrogate, as election denier.
He is also, we talk about this a lot, right?
What about politicians that actually want to do things for people?
He has been utterly politically ineffective.
He has been nominated to be Speaker of the House before.
His record is 0-2.
It didn't get anywhere.
But here's one, Brad, that the people... I don't think I would have realized this until I was digging into this.
He has never passed a single bill into law as a member of Congress.
He is one of the least effective legislators, according to the Center for Effective Lawmaking.
And he was a key architect of the 2013 government shutdown.
It didn't do anything.
It didn't work.
He is, most analysts would say, is just going to drive the U.S.
into another shutdown.
Last point that I want to make is it's worth noting I'm not trying to do character assassination stuff, but there have been ethical questions around Jordan as well.
In 2018, Ohio State University launched an investigation about sexual abuse of a team doctor for the wrestling team, and there were accusations that Jordan, who was an assistant coach from 87 to 95, that he must have known about this, was that he had knowledge, it wasn't that he participated, it wasn't that he did anything like that.
He has denied that, but these ethical accusations have dogged him.
All of that, that's who Jim Jordan is.
What are my takeaways?
Why do I think it's worth noting?
Number one, stop with the whole assumption that just because McCarthy's out and he was carrying water for Trump and for the conservatives and so forth, that somehow or another the next person who follows is automatically going to be more moderate or better, right?
Number two, I think it shows again the centrality of MAGA Nation in the GOP.
We talk about this all the time, the effectus of culture wars, right?
He's all about trying to put a constitutional amendment that won't let gay people get married, right?
He's all about denying the election was legitimate.
He's about getting onto Fox News and playing all those cards, but when it comes to actually doing anything as a legislator, not only does he not do it, He castigates those who do, right?
He was involved in ousting former speakers for working with Democrats.
So, all of that is a very fast, very dirty laundry list of who's Jim Jordan.
Thoughts or responses for you as you hear that list?
A couple things.
We spent the first 45 minutes today talking about one of the most devastating and difficult set of events in our world.
We did that in the context of a two weeks that has just been excruciating for those involved, those who are family members of those involved, those who share ethnicity, identity, national identity, heritage, whatever may be with the countries, the people groups involved, and so on.
We see in moments like this, moments in which we are facing really complex, difficult issues, That the GOP has been so primed for disruption and obstruction that there is no coherent vision for governing, for international affairs, for foreign policy, for anything.
They can't even elect some.
I was just going to say, there's not even a vision for what comes next in Speaker.
We're going to blow this thing up and they can't even name who the next person is going to be who's going to lead them in obstruction.
That's how destructive and obstructionist and nihilistic it is.
Well, and so I think it's just...
The point that I want to highlight, and I'll just be really brief, is that Jordan, along with being accused, credibly, of being complicit in this whole sexual assault scandal, is not someone who seems to have ever been interested in actual governance.
And we talked about it a couple weeks ago, we should talk about it again.
Whether you're the chair of a committee, whether you're the director of a center, whether you're the head of a non-profit, The adults in the room know I'm going to have to work with various people.
I'm going to have to negotiate.
I'm going to have to get everyone on board.
I'm going to have to sell my vision.
I'm going to have to compromise here.
I'm going to have to hope that others will come on board there.
It's a lot.
That's how life works.
And you know what?
Let's do it in order to accomplish a goal.
Jordan is of the generation.
You just talked about it.
Freedom Caucus founder, government shutdown 2013, so on and so on, who's been trained to simply obstruct and destroy.
And here's the results, Dan.
Here's the results is when it comes to a new speaker, who's the guy we turn to?
Jim Jordan, who's really more akin to Matt Gaetz or Marjorie Taylor Greene than he is someone we might point to as a Republican who in the past might have gotten things done.
I mean, John McCain was a senator, different House of Congress, but somebody who's willing to get in a room and actually say, OK, we're all adults.
We disagree in a lot.
But what can we do here to actually get something done that will help you?
That's what I see with the Jim Jordan debacle and it's just embarrassing.
I mean this is another instance where the world is watching during a time of crisis and the United States is in a place of limbo all because Matt Gaetz a sort of rich kid playboy who has no interest in like helping anyone.
It was like, yeah, I feel like blowing it up because, because Kevin McCarthy can suck it.
So now the whole world watches as we are kind of just in chaos after chaos after chaos, and there seems to be no end in sight to any of this.
Yeah, I think it highlights just so much, you know, I'll just close with this, that the U.S., we're a laughingstock right now when it comes to political leadership.
It's not political leadership and there's no end in sight.
And I think that's worth noting.
I think it's worth noting this again.
I harp on this all the time, but the next time that somebody says, well, you know, the real GOP are the conservatives and they're principled and whatever.
I'm sorry, folks.
They're not.
That's not what it is.
And I think what we're seeing is what has been the endgame, right?
There's nothing less functional and more obstructed right now than the U.S.
Congress.
All right, let's go to reasons for hope, and mine is a little bit on this topic.
So reason for hope for me is that yesterday, Sidney Powell, the former Trump lawyer, pled guilty down in Georgia in the case that involves 19 different defendants.
Today, Chesbrough did.
And so we now have two people who have seemingly taken deals and are going to cooperate against other defendants, namely Trump and perhaps Giuliani.
Sidney Powell is the release the kraken person.
She knows a lot and she can say a lot and she can connect a lot of the dots.
So if you listen to this show for years, you know, we've been very skeptical that Donald Trump would ever be convicted of anything.
The Sidney Powell thing is a little nudged for me in my mind to think this guy could go down.
This guy might go down in Georgia.
He might.
And he might go down to Mar-a-Lago stuff, he might go down to New York, but this is the thing, and I think it's good news.
I'm just going to tie in with that, that these technicalities of law in Georgia, she was one of the two defendants who requested a speedy trial, so she had to make this decision early.
And this is, you know, I don't know.
Someday we'll know if that was a strategic thing or not, but I mean, they're now sort of in front of Trump and the other defendants.
My reason for hope comes from my hometown where I now live, Amherst, Massachusetts.
Amherst is a town that has a reparation fund for Black residents.
This was voted on a couple years ago.
I think it's a $2 million fund.
And they are now deliberating how to expedite the allocation of that endowment to residents.
This has been in our news lately.
Not unique to us.
There are not a lot of places in the country doing it, but the places that are span sort of the geographic scope of the country, right?
From your neck of the woods in California across other places to here.
That's just something that gives me a lot of hope and it struck close to home, so I was excited about that today.
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