Dan and Brad begin by recounting the melting of the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville - and the right-wing reactions to it. This leads to a lengthy discussion of the efforts to keep Trump off the ballot in CO and MN via the 14th amendment. In the conclusion, the hosts discuss how the Lost Cause and MAGA Myths have real-world effects on our public square - and the potential dangers ahead.
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My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, here today with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Good to see you, Brad.
Good to see you, too.
Hope you're well.
It has been, I will not lie, it has been one of those weeks that's lasted a year, and so if I sound tired, everyone, or like, Something.
Yeah, part of the reason I'm dragging down is my baby isn't really sleeping.
Part of the reason is things keep happening, like Mike Johnson, the new speaker, is part of the New Apostolic Reformation, so I had to interview Matt Taylor about that.
There's a huge scandal at IHOPKC, which is a massive outpost for charismatic Christianity in the Midwest in this country.
So I did an emergency episode with some of those folks and survivors.
And if you haven't listened to that, you should.
It is powerful.
Anyway, there's a lot happening and I am tired from doing all of that, but I'm tired in a good way because it's all really important stuff to do.
So, yeah.
All right.
Here's what we do today.
We're going to talk about Robert E. Lee's statue being melted down.
That's going to lead to a conversation about Trump and the 14th Amendment and Trump perhaps not being on the ballot in some states.
And those two are linked in our minds, Robert E. Lee and Donald Trump, and we'll explain why.
And then we'll get into some new numbers and just perspectives that kind of reveal just how much The GOP is now the party of MAGA, and the GOP is the party of the religious right, and the religious right is MAGA, and how all of those three seem to be X equals Y equals Z, and why that's terrifying.
And Dan has been really good about reminding me of just how terrifying that is.
All right, Dan.
Just an amazing piece in the New York Times last weekend about the melting down of Robert E. Lee's statue.
The piece is by Aaron Thompson, and it focuses on an organization called Swords into Plowshares, led by Andrea Douglas and Jelaine Schmitt.
And friends, I have an interview scheduled with Dr. Jelaine Schmitt coming up here in about a week and a half, so you'll be hearing me in conversation with her very soon.
But they started this back when everything happened in Charlottesville, Dan, if everybody remembers, 2017 Charlottesville, the, you know, famous Trump words of good people, fine people on both sides.
And And that led to students and others starting a petition to have the Lee statue removed.
One of those students was a high school person named Zana Bryant.
And she said in her petition, I am offended every time I pass it.
I'm reminded over and over again of the pain of my ancestors.
The Charlottesville City Council voted to get rid of the statue, Dan.
And yet there was a lawsuit filed by a coalition of Confederate heritage supporters to keep it in place.
There were rallies by Klan members, white nationalists, others who wanted to protect, quote, the world of gods and heroes like Robert E. Lee.
And those are the words of Richard Spencer, famous alt-right white nationalist.
Okay.
Now, in August 2017, these demonstrations culminated in the Unite the Right rally.
So, the Robert E. Lee debate is what set the stage for that infamous rally and so on.
In the time since, Aaron Thompson writes, more than 100 Confederate monuments came off their pedestals, and there's been somewhat of a racial reckoning, however, incomplete.
Now, there's a big question, Dan, about these statues.
Robert E. Lee was, of course, the leader of the Confederate Army, and there's these Confederate statues up.
Every time one of them comes down, there are people that complain about heritage, about history, about this being something that will mean we don't remember the past.
Aaron Thompson writes in the piece, what should we do with them, the statues?
Just leaving them there for future generations to deal with this Let me back up.
Just leaving them there for some future generation to deal with dishonors the intensity of emotions for all involved.
But each possible outcome has costs and consequences.
Each carries important symbolic weight.
And no, we can't just give them all to the Smithsonian.
The way our communities dispose of these artifacts may influence America's racial dynamic over the next century, just as erecting them did for a hundred year period now ending.
Three years after George Floyd's death, seven years after Ms.
Bryant's petition, 99 years after the monument's installation, and 158 years after the end of the Civil War, it's high time we start figuring this out.
So, Dan, I just want to say a couple things, and then I'll throw it to you.
One is, I want to give you some reactions from people when the Lee statue came down.
So, Joel Berry, who's quite a popular commentator on the American right, said this on X slash Twitter.
Robert E. Lee was a far better man than any of these small, depraved mediocrities trying to erase him.
You owe it to yourself to learn about Robert E. Lee and learn from him.
So there's a pretty open endorsement that Robert E. Lee was a great man that people should remember.
Let's look at another one.
I don't know.
Yesterday, Marjorie Taylor Greene talked about the travesty Of removing statues of our founding fathers, which she said included Robert E. Lee.
She was corrected on the House floor that he was not in fact a founding father and that the monument to him is not a national statue.
Nonetheless, that happened.
So others have said things about Robert E. Lee being part of their namesake.
So there are folks who have said, look, Robert E. Lee is someone who was my ancestor, so I'll just read this one.
Literally my ancestor.
We carry the Lee name as a first middle in my family.
While I didn't need a directly insulting gesture to tell me that my kind is hated and many seek our extinction, I appreciate this image making it absolutely clear.
So just to be 100% lucid here, this guy on X is saying, you melted down the Lee statue, which equates to, my kind is hated, and many seek our extinction.
I'm sorry, I just gotta, I just gotta, like, his kind?
Like, what kind is this?
Like, the Lees of the world?
Or like, yeah, anyway, like, I don't even, yeah, there's so many directions to go, but that one is just kind of bizarro land, right?
Yeah, sorry.
It gets better.
So you might be thinking, Brad, why are you reading the random tweet of a random Libro?
Not a Libra, a Libro.
Hey, horoscope joke.
I'm exhausted.
Sorry, we now need to come up with a Christian nationalist zodiac, and Libro is in.
We've just got to come up with 11 more.
Well, yeah.
You know you're thinking of the shirt already.
I have a lot of things in my head right now that I'm not going to talk about.
Why, Dan?
Why would I mention this random Libro who's saying that he's a Lee and he is hated?
Because guess who responded to him by saying they absolutely want your extinction?
None other than Elon Musk.
So, the reactions to the Lee statue coming down have brought out people saying everything from, you should learn from Robert E. Lee, who's a greater man than anyone trying to take the statue down, all the way to, I'm a Lee, and you taking the statue down and melting it, and melting it in the furnace means that you are trying to make me extinct, and none other than Elon Musk coming out of the woodwork to say, yep, that's exactly what is happening here.
All right, I want to say one thing and then I'll throw it to you.
Here's what Aaron Thompson writes in one section of the piece.
Confederate monuments bear what the anthropological theorist Michael Taussig would call a public secret, something that is privately known but collectively denied.
Hang with me now on that.
You ready?
Privately known, collectively denied.
I want to come back to that when we talk about Trump and the 14th Amendment, Dan, okay?
But what I want to say right now is When these statues come down, and I've talked about it, I've been at the dinner parties that blow up because somebody inevitably says, a good-meaning liberal who shops at Whole Foods, uses a disposable bag when they get those groceries at Whole Foods, does yoga twice a week, and voted for Hillary Clinton.
That person at the table will say, well, I don't know, there's a lot of people who Um, you know, consider Lee and, um, maybe their, maybe their great, great, great granddad was a soldier in that army.
He didn't own slaves.
He was just fighting.
He was 20 years old and he died.
What happens if you take these statues down?
Who remembers him?
I've said it on the show before.
I'll say it one more time.
And that's this.
People have so many ways to commemorate their ancestors, their heritage, the people they venerate.
In the privacy of their own homes or in their communities, their churches, their temples, wherever they want to do that.
If you have people you want to commemorate, revere, you want to put up a statue, you want to put up a shrine, images, whatever you want to do.
No one's saying you can't.
I'm not going to lie.
If I walk into your house and there's a shrine to Robert E. Lee, I'm going to wonder why I'm in that house.
Sure.
But are you allowed to do that as an American?
Go for it.
If your great-great-granddad fought in the Civil War, on the Confederate side, as a 19-year-old or a 26-year-old or whatever, and he died, and you don't want to forget him, even though he fought for the Confederacy, I get it.
Okay.
I understand.
Okay.
There's a lot there.
I'm just saying the impulse not to forget your family on a bare minimum, I can understand.
Guess what?
None of that means that we should publicly commemorate those people.
Because when you put up a monument in public, it means that we as the public, whether the United States, Virginia, California, the city of Charlottesville, we should all commemorate and revere them.
That's what that means.
It means that it's a public commemoration.
And so when you have that statue up in public, you're saying these are people as a community we should revere.
I used to live in DC, Dan.
When people would come visit me, you know what they wanted to do?
Go to Washington Monument.
Go to the Lincoln Monument.
Go to the Roosevelt Monument.
And I would tour people around.
I knew how to get there.
I knew where to park.
It was a whole deal.
Why do we have those monuments?
Because the country considers those to be heroes.
For better or for worse, whatever, we can debate it another time.
If you have a statue of Robert E. Lee in public, that's what you're saying.
Melting down that statue, It means that what you're saying, and I'm going to go one more step further, and then I'll throw it to you.
I've been talking a lot.
When you melt it down, you go a step further.
You say, we should not publicly remember this person.
We're not going to do anything but say, putting up the statue in the first place was a mistake.
And I'll just say in this case, somebody who led a rebellion against the United States in the name of, right, owning slaves and enslaving other humans, we should have never put that statue up in the first place and it should have never been there.
So melting it down makes total sense to me.
And if you want to have something privately, commemoratingly, you do whatever you want.
But that's where I stand on this.
What are your thoughts?
So first is I think we need an episode on Libros and Muskbrats and just see where it goes.
There it is.
That's the best idea that I'll have for like the next year, so I hope everybody enjoyed it.
So that and the cargo shorts you drive, like that's it.
Serious thoughts about this.
One is this whole, like, they're erasing the past.
They don't want to remember the past.
We've heard this rhetoric over and over and over.
I'm just going to remind everybody, these are the same people who don't want us teaching about African-American history.
These are the same people who don't want us teaching about slavery.
They don't want to know that piece of history.
So that's a piece.
This is about commemorating white history, and a particular kind of white history, a white history that was built on enslaving People of color and people of African descent.
That's what this is about.
And I feel like that's, you know, when you're with Uncle Ron, got Thanksgiving coming up here in what, two, like three weeks, I guess?
Might bring that up.
This is not about erasing history.
It's about what history we're going to remember.
And that's the piece that has to be, I think, sort of born in mind here.
And I think that that's shown with like the the emotion of this.
These are not statues that most of these people have ever seen.
Most people will never have seen whatever individual statue it is and whether it's Charlottesville or wherever, some news story that in some local paper that gets linked on Twitter or X and like somebody else picks it up and they were They weren't traveling to, like, whatever town that was to see that statue, nor, quite frankly, did they have to have the statue to know the history.
I like going to D.C., I don't get to go there often enough, so when I do, I do all that stuff where I go to, like, the different monuments and things, but guess what?
We go to the monuments because we already know the history.
I don't think there's probably anybody who's like, wow, the Lincoln Monument, who is this Lincoln guy?
If I hadn't seen that statue, I don't think I'd know who he was.
Wait, is that the same dude on the penny?
Can I just say as somebody who's lived, like I've lived in many obscure places in the world.
Like I, Dan, I have wandered around the city of Brno, Czech Republic, the second biggest.
It's not an obscure place.
It's the second biggest city in the Czech Republic.
But I wandered around there alone in winter for three months because I lived there.
I'm not going to go into why.
And I would see so many statues and the writing was in Czech.
And you know what, Dan?
I did not know the history.
So, to me, they were just statues that I walked by every day, and some of them I went and learned about, most of them I didn't, but I'm making your point.
When you make a point to go visit a statue, it's because you already know the story and you want to make sure that you don't miss it.
Yeah, this notion that it's erasing history is just nonsense.
I mean, to your point, we walk into, like, I don't know, the town courthouse and they have the paintings of the last, like, 12 mayors.
Or you go somewhere like the state capitol and they've got, like, the portraits of the different governors.
You immediately run out and be like, oh, well, there's a painting there.
I'd better go learn that history.
I'm going to un-erase the history of the governors of this state because I saw the painting.
No, of course not.
It's absurd.
As always, what I'm interested in, what does the absurdity tell us?
It tells us that it's not about history.
It's about white pride.
It's about white identity.
For me, these things are completely linked.
This effort to save Confederate statues of people who Who revolted against the United States, who undertook a rebellion.
We're going to talk about the 14th Amendment.
It's why it was produced and ratified and included in the Constitution.
It's about elevating those people above People of African descent and other communities of color and all the things that are under erasure in much more effective ways.
In banning books in libraries.
In prohibiting the teaching in classrooms.
Nobody is talking about prohibiting the teaching about who Robert E. Lee was in a classroom.
I'm not aware of anybody on the left who's like, you know what, we need to go to the local library and remove all the books about Robert E. Lee.
Maybe that person exists.
Somebody can email me and be like, ah, so here's this, you know, small town and wherever where somebody's doing that.
But you get my point.
It's all, it's all a red herring.
And when, when Uncle Ron says you're erasing history, It's not about erasing history.
It's never about erasing history.
It's about which history is going to count, which narrative of this country is the one that we're going to celebrate, which people in this country we are going to celebrate and revere.
And I think what that says about us, and I think it says everything in the world about the Marjorie Taylor Greens and the Elon Musks and the, I don't know, people with the last name Lee who feel like they're being, you know, culturally erased.
I think it says everything we need to know.
I just, last comment on this is just, so the question is when things like this happen, you know, when you lose something, now let's just take, could be you moved house, misplaced the box and you lost some pictures or you lost a memento from your grandmother or a loved one.
When for me, as somebody whose family history goes back to Maui and Lahaina, So, my question to the person who's like, I can't believe you would do this.
You would take down the statue and basically destroy it, burn it, melt it down.
I'm asking you, what do you lose about your identity when Robert E. Lee dies?
And I've been around the ringer with this.
I had somebody on Facebook tell me a lot of the Confederate monuments are up because the men who those statues and monuments are dedicated to and are of were great businessmen.
So that is why they got a statue.
Or they were great, you know, Robert E. Lee was great on a horse or a great military tactician, okay?
And so that, you know, so you ask your friend, so are you scared that your identity is wrapped up in this military tactician or horse?
You know, this man who's skilled on a horse or something?
And of course, that's not it.
It's everything you said.
So, all right, let's go to break.
Let's come back and talk about Trump and the 14th Amendment.
Be right back.
All right, Dan, this ties in and I'm going to come back to my little saying.
I'm going to throw it to you.
This is from what we just talked about in the last segment.
Privately known, publicly denied.
We're going to come back to that.
But before we do, tell us what's happening with Trump and the 14th Amendment.
Yeah, so a lot of people will know there's a trial, actually sort of two.
There's one before the Minnesota Supreme Court with hearings, but there's been like a full trial unfolding in Colorado to determine if Trump is disqualified from appearing on the presidential ballot in 2024.
And the reason is, it's kind of a convoluted case for those of us who are not legal minds.
I think for probably a lot of legal people it is as well, for a lot of lawyers and attorneys, because it appeals to a rarely used part of the Constitution, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
And this is what it says.
So I'm going to actually read Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, because I know everybody out there probably has other things to do besides looking up Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
But as we just talked about, and we've talked about it before, and people probably know this, the 14th Amendment added to the Constitution after the Civil War It's best known, probably, for things like providing equal protection under the law, so-called birthright citizenship, different things like that.
But Section 3 deals with disqualifications from holding office.
And this is what it says.
Okay, it's kind of long, but I'm just going to read it.
It says, No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress or Elector of President and Vice President or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States or under any state
Who, having previously taken an oath as a member of Congress or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.
But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each house, remove such disability.
That's the quote.
There's a lot there.
And what people have argued, they've put forward, the defense has tried to argue, and we've read about this.
We've read other people who say this.
They've tried to argue that it doesn't apply to the president.
It doesn't specify the president.
It names senators, representatives in Congress or Electoral College folks.
That's what it names.
And so it doesn't apply to the president.
Or they've said that it doesn't apply to Trump in particular because he didn't participate in insurrection or rebellion.
Or they've said terms like insurrection, rebellion are too vague and it can't be applied.
These are the kinds of arguments that have been made.
Why do I think all this is interesting?
I think it's interesting because the plaintiffs called an expert witness this week that I think did a great job of explaining what the 14th Amendment, Section 3 is, what it does.
Of course, Trump's attorneys had somebody with written testimony who said something different, but I found all of this to make sense.
I'm going to come back around to this in a minute, but I will say that this issue has sort of GAINED A LOT OF GROUND FOR ME AND SORT OF GROWN LEGS.
I THINK IT'S BECOME MORE, MAYBE EVEN, I DON'T KNOW, SORT OF CONVINCING THAN I THOUGHT IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN BEFORE I STARTED LOOKING INTO IT.
I THINK A LOT OF PEOPLE ARE PROBABLY IN THE SAME BOAT.
BUT THIS IS HOW IT WENT.
SO, INDIANA UNIVERSITY LAW PROFESSOR NAMED JARED MAGLIOCCA, I'M NOT POSITIVE I'M PRONOUNCING HIS NAME RIGHT, MAGLIOCCA, I'M NOT SURE.
BUT HE TESTIFIED THIS WEEK.
And what he's done is he has studied the 14th Amendment in depth for years.
Prior to 2020, had nothing to do with the 2020 election.
He's an academic, and this is what he does as he studies the 14th Amendment.
He has investigated congressional debate over the language.
In other words, debate at the time, when the amendment was formed, when it was wordsmithed, when it's going through congressional committees, before it sort of makes it to the states for ratification.
He looked at all that sort of stuff.
He looked at Justice Department memos about how the ban was applied.
He looked at subsequent court cases about where it's been used.
And what he testified to is he said that the ban applies broadly, that's his term, and that it includes, quote, words of incitement, which is exactly, as everybody knows, the argument that when Trump is there on J6, that he's sort of stirring up the crowd and that he's inciting the crowd to do what they did.
He also argued that it was intended to apply expansively.
I want everybody to hold on to that concept of intent because we're going to come back around to that for all the originalists and others later on.
We're going to circle back to that.
He said it applies to presidents.
He said it was enforced by state courts.
It has been enforced by state courts.
Why is that relevant?
Because it's before a state court in the state of Colorado with plaintiffs arguing that he should be kept off the ticket.
And same question is being raised in Minnesota, other places as well.
But these are the two where it's sort of coming out, right?
So let me just, I'm going to quote some of his testimony.
This is what he said.
He said, quote, one, during Reconstruction, engage in insurrection, the quotation from the Section 3, engage in insurrection was understood broadly to include any voluntary act in furtherance of an insurrection against the Constitution, including words of incitement.
And he cited opinions that were published by the Attorney General at the time, stating this.
He said, quote, it did not apply only to those who took up arms.
In other words, he's saying the fact that Trump didn't storm the Capitol on J6 doesn't mean that he wasn't involved in insurrection.
He said, quote, it included any public use of force or threat of force by a group of people to hinder or prevent the execution of the law.
This is exactly what happened on January 6th.
He also describes this.
He gave an example from 1868, shortly before the amendment was ratified.
So this is before the amendment is in the Constitution, but relevant to it.
When Congress decided that a Kentucky politician was disqualified from serving because he wrote a letter to the editor advocating for violence against Union troops.
Another senator-elect was disqualified from office because he sent $100 to his son who was serving in the Confederate Army.
That's that aid and support piece.
So this has actually been done.
This has actually been enforced.
It has actually been used, right?
So he counters that argument that it doesn't apply to the president.
He says, this is what he says, he goes, it would have been odd to say that people who had broken their oath to the Constitution by engaging in insurrection were ineligible to every office in the land except the highest one.
I'm also going to point out, if you go back to the text, I'm not a legal expert, but I am a textualist.
I'm good at reading text.
That's something I do.
It says, yeah, a Senator, Representative of Congress, Elector of President, but it also says, anyone who having previously taken an oath as an officer of the United States, His interpretation is that when it says taking an oath, it means taking an oath to defend the Constitution, and that certainly the President is an officer of the United States, that this is part of what he is.
So, all of that to say that he did, in my mind, a very effective takedown, written for ordinary people like us, people on a jury, people who are smart, people who are capable, but they're not lawyers, they're not constitutional law experts.
Taking down peg by peg by peg these arguments that are sort of given about why this wouldn't apply.
So here are some takeaways for me, and I want to throw these over to you in a minute, see what you think about this.
The first thing is that a lot of popular discourse about this, and by popular discourse, I just mean like sort of mainstream media accounts, summaries that will read in things, position this as a quote, long shot, as a fringe attempt and so forth.
Of course, MAGA supporters say this, but there've been others that do as well.
But the more I learn about it, the more I hear from experts like this, the more legitimate it seems.
It's a real question.
If January 6th was an insurrection, if Trump incited people to participate in that, It seems like Section 3 is designed to deal with exactly the situation we're in.
And wait, Brad, it was, because there was in fact an insurrection and a rebellion, and it was aimed at making sure that people couldn't hold political or military office after that.
Let's see who that applies to.
Oh, Robert E. Lee would be maybe one person that that would apply to.
That's one.
Another one is that I think a lot of the quote-unquote concerns about the interpretation I think they represent a lack of will, and I think this is significant.
I think more and more the question is, would the courts actually back the, like, if it becomes really clear that this applies, will they have the courage to say, this applies?
It's a political bombshell.
It's got real significant issues.
But would we be so reluctant if it wasn't a former president of the United States that it was applying to?
I think this is going to be heightened if he is found guilty in court of having interfered with the election as well.
I think tying that in with J6 and the stuff that's going on in Georgia, I think for me that removes any of those questions.
I can see somebody now still saying, you're innocent until proven guilty.
Can we say legally that he participated in an insurrection?
I think that if he's found guilty, that is just going to go away, that question.
So I think that that's an issue.
I will also note this, the judge in Colorado, the Trump team tried to just have this dismissed.
She refused.
But she also said, and she raises a real issue, that she wants to hear how this relates to freedom of speech, because there's a tension here.
And I think she's right.
They had the story about somebody who wrote a letter to the editor, and this is applied, right?
That's a speech action and so forth.
I've heard lots of people say this, we can't enforce this, it violates freedom of speech.
But here's the deal, it's in the Constitution.
It's two constitutional pieces.
You can't say that this is somehow unconstitutional when it's there.
There are other things in the Constitution that pit different rights against each other.
The First Amendment and freedom of religion is a great example.
The free exercise clause, the establishment clause.
And I think one of the last things that I might say, a couple things, is that this seems like, this is where I said that notion of intent.
The GOP, the right, all the time, the Alitos and the conservatives on the Supreme Court, and all the way down, like to argue that they are quote-unquote originalists, that we should apply the law as originally intended.
That should be the scope of it.
These legal experts, that's what they're doing.
They're looking at what was the intent?
What did Congress say at the time?
How was it applied?
How was it interpreted to them?
And arguing, it's a straight line.
You draw a straight line to this.
So it fits in there.
I think it also fits with a GOP that likes to interpret the notion of providing, quote, aid or comfort.
To terrorists, for example, very, very broadly.
It's being used right now to target college groups and things like that.
Same language is in there about providing aid or comfort to those who would participate in insurrection or rebellion.
We can just remember times when Trump promised to pay the legal fees of people who'd be prosecuted for J6.
He didn't do that, but he promised to, or said that he would publicly.
So lots of things about this For me, as I say, I think it has more legs than I thought it did originally.
But this was really telling to me.
I think it goes, as you say, right to this question of Confederate monuments and people who would have been disqualified according to the 14th Amendment.
It was written and ratified by the states with an aim of precisely the people that are celebrated there.
It's really relevant to Trump.
And of course, it would be really significant, depending on how this plays out in court.
Now, I've been talking for a while.
I'll throw it over to you for your thoughts on this.
Lots of thoughts.
So I want to come back to the idea of will, and I want to actually ask ourselves what would happen if this were to take place, if Trump is not on the ballot in Colorado or Minnesota or somewhere else.
I want to start, though, with history.
I make the case, I've made the case for years, I do it in my book, I've done it in op-eds, that Trumpism and the memory of January 6th is something comparable to the Lost Cause mythology.
The Lost Cause mythology, and I talk about this in my book, But I think the best book on this is Heather Cox Richardson's How the South Won the Civil War is a mythology that takes place after the war that says the war was not about slavery.
The war was not about, you know, keeping the right to enslave others.
It was about northern aggression.
It was about the North's desire to dominate.
It was they wanted to destroy our way of life.
They wanted to destroy our Christian faith.
They wanted to destroy our culture.
They wanted they were greedy for land.
They were greedy for resources.
And then part of that mythology venerates the leaders of the Confederacy, like Stonewall Jackson, like Robert E. Lee, as saints, as heroes.
And that continues today.
And you see that.
And some of you listening know this very well.
Some of you are shocked.
But I can tell you, there are millions of Americans who, if you ask them, And they tell you the truth.
They think Robert E. Lee should be venerated as a great leader.
Yes, sure, the Civil War, you know, they get kind of, yeah, yeah, the Confederate.
I know.
But Robert E. Lee was a great man.
Robert E. Lee was very skilled.
Robert E. Lee was a man of integrity and Christian faith.
I mean, they will tell you this stuff.
That's a direct result, Dan, of a generations-long attempt to install a myth of the lost cause and the South that paints it in a light that is not damning, that is not about slavery, but is about something else.
This continues all the way to the way we teach about the Confederacy and the Civil War.
Now, there are places in the country, Florida and other places, that don't want to teach kids directly that this was about slavery.
I, I know a lot of historians of the Civil War.
I know a lot of historians of the Confederacy, and anyone worth their salt I've met is like, yeah, it was about slavery.
It was.
That's what it was about.
There was other factors.
It's complex.
There's some things.
Slavery.
It was about slavery as well.
That's the center.
That's the thing.
So why do I bring that up now?
We have maintained on this show, I have maintained in my book, that after January 6th, we saw myth-making in real time.
We saw myth-making about January 6th as a normal tourist visit, as a Patriotic Americans standing up for what they believe in.
As no widespread violence.
All the way to, it was Antifa, dressed as MAGA people, blah blah blah blah blah.
Mythmaking.
And what has happened?
Ashley Babbitt has become a martyr.
in that myth.
The J6ers, the people jailed or convicted, have become the patron saints.
They have become the ones that lived out the story.
Donald Trump is not seen as an insurrectionist.
He is seen as a leader who had his country stolen from him, along with all these other patriotic Americans, just like the Confederacy did in the Civil War.
The The comparisons are numerous.
And the reason I bring that up, Dan, is because Donald Trump, like the Statue of Lee, is an emblem of white grievance and white identity politics and white Christian nationalism in this country.
So to tear down Donald Trump Legally, according to his participation in an insurrection, is akin to taking down the Lee statue and destroying it.
Because for many, Donald Trump represents them.
The man who speaks for me.
The white Christian leader.
The man chosen by God.
The guy that says, when you got rid of the Lee statue, you showed me you wanted me extinct.
That's what people think if you don't let Trump be president.
If you don't let Trump get away with everything.
If you try to hold him accountable and indict him for 91 things.
If you keep him off the ballot.
So that's one set.
I want to talk about will because I think that's really important.
I have said also since January 6th, will we have the gall The audacity, the stomach to say, this was an insurrection.
This was an attack on our democracy.
And if you were involved, you should be punished.
And that includes, yes, the guys breaking windows and putting their feet up on the desk of Nancy Pelosi.
It also includes the former president.
And I've said since then, if we don't have the gall to prosecute the former president for this, Just like Hitler did after, and I just made the comparison, just like Hitler did after the Beer Hall Putsch and his time in jail, he rose again to power because the myth took place of Hitler as a patriotic German leader.
If we don't adjudicate this with Trump, we are in danger of a Trump second term, and that second term could end American democracy.
I stand by that.
There is good evidence for that that we have talked about on this show many times.
Will we have the gall to do this?
And so those are my thoughts, Dan.
I'll leave it to you for further thoughts on your end.
One question I will pose to you, and you can get to this whenever you want, is what would happen?
Let's just say Trump's not on the ballot, Dan, in Colorado.
Let's just play it out.
Let's write the movie.
You ready?
It's November 2024.
Trump is not on the ballot in Colorado and Minnesota, and maybe a handful of other states.
Like, I am asking a serious question.
What happened?
So, other thoughts, and then get to that question whenever you feel like.
So, one thing I just, and I know we're sort of like, we've got these two segments colliding here, but one more thing about that notion of slavery, because I did, I wouldn't be able to tell you sort of who, Or exactly when, but I grew up hearing that, well, it wasn't really about slavery.
It was about these other things.
I didn't grow up in the Deep South.
I didn't grow up in, you know, places like that.
It was just, to your point, the pervasiveness of that kind of mythology.
But one of the things to think about is when people say, well, it was about economics and it was about, you know, trade.
It was about Christian faith and ways of life.
All of that's true?
But slavery was a pervasive factor of life that pervaded all of those things.
It was part of the economy.
It was part of the agrarian way of life in the South.
It was part of the Christian faith as it was articulated.
The only way that somebody can play those games and say, well, it was about a lot of other stuff, not really this, is if you think all these things are like segmented and completely separate from each other.
And they weren't.
Slave owning was, as I say, a pervasive cultural, economic, religious class feature of the South, all the way from helping poor white people who could still feel superior over black people because they weren't slaves, and therefore they didn't rise up against the rich landowners To the Christian faith, to everything else.
I mean, I think that that's a piece.
If people want to sort of think about that, or you run into that, or maybe you're like me, you grew up hearing that, and it's hard to figure out, like, why or how did that happen?
Or somebody says, well, that's reductive to just reduce it to one thing.
That one thing was everything.
It was everywhere.
It was like, you know, if you put food coloring into a glass of water or something like that, like, it pervades it all.
You can't sort of then take it out.
See, your other question of what happens, I don't know, but I can see, like, a range.
A range from, like, I don't know, a lot of rhetoric to sort of apocalyptic, and I think they're all possible.
On one end, the more benign end, a lot of noise, and I don't know what happens if people, like, write in candidates for president on a presidential ballot, and I can imagine a mess where, like, all those MAGA people write in Donald Trump, and it gets tied up in court, and it's nasty, and it's, you know, whatever.
I could see states where a court makes a decision and says, maybe that he, they probably won't make a case, I would guess, that he can't appear on the ballot.
I'll bet what they would say is the Secretary of State is authorized or the, whatever, is authorized to make a determination that he can't, right?
Or whatever.
There's a green light that if he's done this, he doesn't have to appear on the ballot.
And then you're going to get other court cases about, did they have the standing to do this?
Did they not?
You're going to have questions, just legal questions, because obviously if Trump, if it's found that he did this, they're going to appeal it.
And so you're going to get the move to say, it should be on hold.
There should be an injunction on this until the appeals are finished, which of course would take us past 2024 or whatever.
I can also see J6 in Denver.
I can see J6 in Minnesota.
I can see J6 anywhere this happens.
I can see January 6th happening again, storming the judge's house.
I can see real violence.
I can see those who have said for years now that we need to rise up and take power and fight the government and all that rhetoric.
Doing exactly that.
We said that there in the run-up to January 6th and we saw it happen.
I could see that and I could see a sort of, you know, armed mobs running around demanding that Trump be included.
I could see intimidation at voting places.
I could see people going in and sort of wrecking voting places, tipping over voting machines, not allowing people to vote.
I could see a full range of options.
And I'm not just trying to be, you know, catastrophic or apocalyptic.
I don't know what would happen.
My guess is If I'm real, it's probably somewhere between those two extremes, but I don't think it's going to be quiet because the MAGA world already doesn't believe in democracy.
They already don't believe in rule of law.
They already don't believe in democratic rule if it doesn't serve their interests, and this would not serve their interests.
It would be the extreme example of not serving their interests.
Yeah, I want to respond to that.
Let's take a break because I want to give you my answer to the question, and then I want to roll that into our last segment about the GOP, MAGA-ism, and the religious right.
And I think that will wrap up this episode really well, so we'll be right back.
Okay Dan, so my answer to the question is, I tend perhaps to be a little less optimistic than you.
So I really think if, let's say Trump is not on the ballot in Colorado and a handful of other states.
If I just think about Colorado.
I think about, yes, Denver.
Okay, that's one place.
And there are a lot of conservative people in Denver, sure.
There's a lot of not conservative people in Denver.
Denver's a place where you have, you know, a lot of white liberals, people who love to smoke weed and, you know, get outdoors and you have that kind of profile for the city.
But I think of like Western Colorado.
I think of rural Colorado.
I think of Colorado Springs.
I think of Littleton.
I think of, you know, those kinds of places.
And I think there would be widespread protest and I think there might be widespread violence.
And the kind of violence would be, does that mean 10,000 militia men marching toward Denver?
It could be.
But I think what you said is actually really poignant.
Trump's not on the ballot.
So, like, if I go to vote in my little town in Colorado, are there, like, a lot of dudes with AR-15s scaring people in the parking lot?
Overrunning the place?
Are there people who are, like, vandalizing?
Are there people, the voting places, are there people scaring election officials?
Are there, are there mayors and, and county officials who are doing weird things?
Like this is, this is where the little fires are what we should pay attention to.
Yes, there could be 10,000 men with militias, you know, and, and buckskin caps marching toward Denver, maybe, but there could be all this local terrorism.
And that's what scares me.
Okay.
And I think that is very much a possibility.
Now, I think this is important because this is why having, and I'm going to throw this to you because you're the one who really gave me this phrasing, and I want to credit you.
This is why having one of two parties in this country being beholden to Christian nationalism and MAGA-ism is terrifying.
We can shake our heads, we can like wince and say, oh my God, I can't believe what this country's come to.
But you know when it really matters?
It matters when a decision like Trump not being on the ballot comes down.
Something that we all privately know, the man incited an insurrection, but communally, you're going to get, well, many Americans think that he was, there's a widespread debate about, nope.
The guy stood up there and he incited people to go be violent and they were violent.
When you don't have the lieutenants and the sergeants and the talking heads in that apparatus, When you don't have Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and Franklin Graham and Robert Jeffress and Paula Kane and Sarah Palin, when none of them in the three years since January 6th have come out and said, like Adam Kinzinger, like Cheney, None of them have come out and said, yep, that was wrong.
This is not going to stand.
They've all gotten back on the Trump train.
This is where it comes back to haunt us.
It comes back when a, and I'm not going to lie.
I think the 14th amendment is clear.
I think Trump should not be on the ballot.
You all want to email me, call me.
I'm saying it publicly right now.
If you read the 14th amendment and you take into account what happened, I am fully of the opinion.
He should not be on the ballot.
He shouldn't.
If you have one party that is beholden to the emblem, the statue of Donald Trump, you end up in a really bad place when that, in my opinion, very straightforward legal decision comes down someday and we are caught in a place with militia dudes and AR-15 dudes and people showing up in voting places terrorizing others and we're wondering what happened to our country, just like we wondered on J6, that's where we get it.
Take us through, you know, any final thoughts on this, but then zoom us out to some thoughts on the GOP basically being a MAGA iteration at this point.
Yeah, you've kind of teed that up, so I'll just go that direction.
So, like, obviously this is the thing we talk about all the time, and I can hear people now being like, oh my gosh, you're talking about this?
Really?
The Christian nationalism stuff?
But here's the thing.
So this is what did it.
I'm going to be my, you know, Old guy on the lawn yelling at everybody for just a minute because this week there was a piece in CNN, and that's great, looking at it, and basically it was like, hey, guess what Mike Johnson being Speaker of the House shows?
It shows that the religious right and MAGA have really sort of coalesced.
And I read that, and honestly, I'm just like, well, no shit.
We've been saying that for years.
That's literally why we started this podcast.
If people go back and listen to the very first episodes, it was trying to explain why that happened.
And I think both of us, Brad, we didn't have all the language we have now around Christian nationalism and different things that has developed over time.
But that was there.
And so there was this this article.
We talked about this last week.
We talked about basically the religious right bona fides of of the Speaker of the House, about all the positions he has held on, you know, LGBTQ plus rights on all these different sorts of things.
We also talked about the fact that he's an election denier.
And yes, he is a perfect image of like how these things come together.
But what frustrates me, what makes me go into my old angry old man mode, is that this is still something that I feel like within a lot of mainstream analyses, and I'm not using the word mainstream there in a negative way, I just mean reputable news sources.
News sources that I read, they're not Fox News, I don't think that they're crazy left-wing news sources either, they're still not seeing it.
We both, I talk to scholars who aren't seeing it, I read books that aren't seeing it, That are still reluctant to see this, and here we are years after, you know, the first Trump election, and this is still coming through with this surprise.
What I'm interested in, then, is why?
Why is this still surprising?
And I think this goes to the point that you were just making, and this is the first one for me, is that I think one of the reasons is it's a sort of cultural defense mechanism.
It is scary to have to face up to the fact That we live in a country where one of two parties is a Christian nationalist party.
We read about religio-nationalist parties and populist parties all over the world, and they're in places that a lot of us just wouldn't travel.
We wouldn't feel safe there.
They're unsettled.
If you're not part of that regime, there are problems.
Guess what, folks?
This is America now.
I think it also highlights a certain cultural deference to religion that we just have to get past.
People who just cannot accept That a very mainstream form of religion, because lots of MAGA people, they're just regular church people.
They go to the kinds of churches that, you know, white conservative Christian churches that are viewed as kind of the bread and butter of American identity and have been for a long time.
They can't see those religious traditions as high-control religious traditions.
They can't see those religious traditions as misogynistic traditions.
They can't see them as racist, right, to get back to those connections with the Civil War.
They don't see them as conspiracist.
And why?
It's just because they're so much a part of American culture that it sort of goes unnoticed.
It's unthinkable to most people that they could be all of those kinds of things.
And then I think the last one, and this is one that I know I talk about a lot, but I still think it's there, is this presumption that if something is religious, it's not about politics.
It's not about power.
And so if somebody is about politics and power, if you're a Donald Trump or something, then you're not really being religious.
You're being something else.
And all I'll say is that for most of human history, what we call religions have been completely wrapped up with politics, with power, with punishing enemies, with invoking the gods to, you know, to legitimize whatever we do to those who are our enemies and so forth.
It shouldn't be surprising.
It still is.
And it's that energy Coupled, I think, with still a reluctance to see it, that makes us imagine really scary things that could happen with these court cases or other things.
I agree with everything you said.
Friends, if you just started listening to the show or you're new to the show and you don't know much about Dan or I, Dan is a Christian person.
Dan, you go to church, you identify as a Christian, you said everything that you said as somebody who identifies as religious.
So this is not the show of two angry atheists who just want to say religion is all bad, because I'm sure someone will put that, as they often do, in a review on Apple Podcasts or something.
So, I agree with everything you just said, and it really dovetails on, I think, things we've talked about for years on this show, but it really does pertain, in this case, I think, to this question of Donald Trump, the 14th Amendment, and the ballot.
We will see what happens.
All right, let's go reasons for hope.
I have one, and that is that the Senate is set to subpoena Harlan Crowe and Leonard Leo, two of the key kind of financiers and players in the Clarence Thomas scandals and other scandals surrounding the court and other things happening behind the scenes.
Part of me wants to be a little bit skeptical and say, well, what does this do anyway?
Is this just going to be political theater?
And that could be the case.
I also think that the January 6th hearings were a good reminder that sometimes public hearings can bring certain things into public consciousness in ways that are important.
So maybe dragging Leonard Leo out of the shadows and Harlan Crow out of the shadows as coached and careful as they will be in their answers.
Maybe it will actually bring to light to people like, hey, there's some there's some figures behind the scenes that are really acting like puppet masters that I need to be aware of, because it seems to have a big influence on my government, on my, I don't know, reproductive rights, like Roe v. Wade and other big decisions.
So that's mine.
Dan, what's yours?
So, I realize I'm sort of double-dipping again, but mine is that these cases are making it to court in Colorado and Minnesota.
I don't know where they're gonna go, but if people listened carefully weeks ago, I didn't think it would get to this point.
I thought it would be too easy for people to say, this is this obscure thing, it's outdated, it's whatever.
I don't know where it's gonna go, I don't know.
Again, I'm not a legal expert, but I'm like you, I read it, and I'm like, it seems really straightforward, it's in the Constitution, I don't know why There's this reluctance to take it seriously, but it has made it further than I thought it would.
I feel like it is gaining a lot more sort of credibility.
I think people are seeing that this is a potentially real thing.
Don't know where it's going to go.
I don't know what the consequences will be, but I do take real hope in the fact that it's continuing to progress and it hasn't been dismissed and there hasn't been just a litany of legal experts saying that it doesn't apply or whatever.
So I take real hope in that.
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