Weekly Roundup: The City Banning Gay People and Trump's Vermin Comments
Brad begins by discussing the history of Murfreesboro, TN, where a city ordinance banned homosexuality in public. As Brad recounts, this isn't the first time the city has been in the news. A decade ago, citizens tried to prevent the construction of a mosque on the grounds that Islam isn't a religion. Brad draws on scholarship to outline how Christian nationalists employ a framework wherein the USA should be a place of limitless freedom for them, and limited life for everyone else.
In the second segment he dissects Trump's vermin comments - and how they connect to Nazi rhetoric. For Brad the local and the national collide in the Murfreesboro ordinance and Trump's dangerous rhetoric. It is a mater of little fires everywhere preparing little fascists everywhere to accept fascism everywhere.
In the final segment, Brad offers a positive story - the faith of the UAW boss Sean Fain and what it means for "branding" faith in the Midwest and beyond.
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- Axis Mundi. - Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, and I am rolling solo today because Dan Miller is at the American Academy of Religion conference in San Antonio, meeting with colleagues, having a great time, and generally just, I don't know, leaving me behind to do the weekly roundup.
I didn't go this year because my A newborn and just needed to stay home.
So, you know, I hope Dan's having a great time today.
I want to talk about Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
I want to talk about the local and how it connects to the national.
I want to talk about little fires everywhere that make little fascists everywhere that really portend what might be ahead for us.
So I want to get to some good news and some things that I think are really hopeful coming from the United Auto Workers strike.
and a different iteration of faith in the public square that demands more attention and hopefully will break through some of the political barriers that have been put up over the last decades.
In 2012, a woman named Issa was asked about her experience as a Muslim in Tennessee.
At that point, she'd lived in Tennessee for almost 40 years.
And she said, it's like one big family.
When people meet you, they don't shake hands, they try to hug you.
This is what she told the Associated Press in a piece by Travis Lawler.
However, the piece reflects on what had happened in the previous years.
In 2010, about two years before this piece was written, a huge controversy broke out when a mosque was proposed to be built in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
These were, of course, the years when Barack Obama was in his first term as president.
They were the years when one of the barbs or slurs used against him by conservative media, talking heads, and eventual President Donald Trump was that he was a secret Muslim.
The charge that Obama was a Muslim linked up with the Islamophobia that pervaded the USA after 9-11.
The two joined, in essence, two tributaries.
One, a reaction to the country's worst terrorist attack since Pearl Harbor.
The other, the white backlash to a black president with a black family, a black father, a mixed race heritage, a name, Barack, and a middle name, Hussein.
What happened in 2010 in Murfreesboro goes like this.
A group of landowners in Rutherford County filed suit against the county of Rutherford to protest against the county's planning commission giving permission for the construction of an Islamic community center.
The official reasons were that they had missed permits and deadlines and it was all bureaucratic and this shouldn't be allowed because of red tape.
But as the suit went on, the reasons became more clear.
Pascual Anakino and Nadia Marzouki put it this way in an academic article.
One of the biggest arguments was that Islam is not a religion and thus Muslims are not entitled to First Amendment protections.
This reasoning echoed in other cases of the time, particularly the quote unquote 9-11 mosque or the Park 51 mosque that was supposed to be built in Manhattan.
Kevin Fisher, who initiated the trial against the county and his attorney, Joe Brandon Jr., did not refute the relevance of constitutional rights, but sought to demonstrate that Muslims do not deserve to be protected by these rights so long as they refuse to engage into theological reform of their faith.
There were many others who claimed that Islam is not a religion.
There was a candidate, Tea Party candidate, named Luanne Zelenik, who says that Muslim Americans are not to be considered religious until they separate spiritual Islam and radical Islam.
All of this, according to the authors, bring up an important question.
It's not a question of whether or not religion should be protected, or whether or not religious people have the freedom to practice their religion.
It's a question of who gets to be deemed religious, and therefore who gets to be protected.
Who is seen as deserving of protection under the law, of rights, and who is not?
The question is, what should a religion be?
And if it doesn't fit the mold of certain people in a county or a city in Murfreesboro, then maybe they shouldn't get the protections that religions are afforded in this country.
You might be wondering, why are we talking about a mosque in 2010 or 2012, going all the way back a decade to the Obama era?
The reason we're talking about it is because Murfreesboro is back in the news.
There was an ordinance passed in the recent months that was aimed at public indecency and sexuality in public.
And ultimately, it had a goal of removing books from the library that were deemed to be inappropriate.
Here's Tory Otten writing at the New Republic.
Murfreesboro passed an ordinance in June banning indecent behavior, including indecent exposure, public indecency, lewd behavior, nudity, or sexual conduct.
All right.
So here's an ordinance that says, hey, don't be nude in public.
OK, no lewd behavior.
All right.
I think we can all get on board.
The ordinance, however, specifically mentions Section 2172 of the City Code, which states that sexual conduct includes homosexuality.
So now we are in a place where the banning of lewd behavior or Public exposure or sexual conduct includes homosexuality.
And you may have seen the headlines.
A town in Tennessee bans being gay.
A town in Tennessee says homosexuals not allowed.
And this is what they're talking about.
It's a very carefully worded and in many ways sly strategy.
Pass an ordinance that really targets indecent behavior.
And who's not against indecent behavior?
You have kids, you want to walk down the street without being bothered.
Yeah, I don't want people being lewd.
But when you associate homosexuality with sexual conduct or lewdness, now you're in a place where to be a gay person feels like You're a target.
You're under threat.
You are part of the law that is banning certain behavior, certain expressions of being human, so on and so forth.
Now, if we go back to the mosque in 2010 and 2012, it was eventually opened after protests, after lawsuits, after people had continually spray painted on its doors and threatened its members and its leaders.
The mosque was built and the community has continued to meet there and to thrive in the best way possible.
Ten years later, the same city, not far from Nashville, has attempted to ban homosexuality and any books in its library that somehow portray or express homosexuality in any form.
Those two are linked to me because they are expressions of two things.
One, the little fires everywhere that are popping up all over the nation.
I get asked all the time, hey, are we going to have a new civil war?
Hey, are the Christian nationalists going to take over the federal government?
And those are questions I've talked about.
Those are questions Dan and I discuss all the time.
But I always want the chance to zero in on localities like Murfreesboro.
Murfreesboro is not a town of 300.
It is not a town of 10,000.
Over 100,000 people live in the Murfreesboro area.
As I said, it is not a place that is three or four or five hours from the nearest metro area.
You can get into the Nashville suburbs pretty quickly from Murfreesboro if you try.
This is not a place that's isolated.
A far-flung corner of the nation that can only be reached with a half a day's drive and packing a lunch.
This is a place that has over 100,000 people.
It is connected by highways to places like Nashville and Chattanooga, which are within a short distance drive.
Murfreesboro is the kind of place that makes up America.
The kind of town that is big enough to have Immigrant and religious minority and ethnic minority communities like the one that opened the mosque.
It's also a place where those who don't see non-white, non-Christian people as real Americans are fighting on the front lines to prevent those communities from thriving.
Surprise, surprise, to me, this is how Christian nationalism works in this country, on the ground, all over the place.
If I go to an article by Sam Perry and Josh Davis and Josh Grubbs, I think it's really helpful framework for understanding what I'm talking about.
The article is called Liberty for Us, Limits for Them, Christian Nationalism and Americans' Views on Citizens' Rights.
Here's a passage I think is particularly helpful.
Christian nationalism itself reflects a contradiction in that its adherence would insist that the government cannot limit the free exercise of Christians.
Yet it is powerfully associated with Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and anti-atheist sentiment.
Similarly, it seeks to elevate and institutionalize Christian identity above others while also sacralizing the founding documents that clearly forbid Congress from passing laws respecting an establishment of religion.
Thank you.
The authors go on to point out that Christian nationalists talk about a number of things.
And a number of priorities when they outline their cultural identity, the freedom of speech, the freedom of religion and protection against unlawful searches or seizures, among other things, guns and et cetera.
Now, I want to come back and I want to link the Murfreesboro Mosque with Murfreesboro's anti-gay ordinance, the one that bans homosexuality in public.
To me, this is a classic example of what Perry and Grubbs and Davis are arguing.
Liberty for us, limits for them.
Think about that phrase for just one second.
Liberty for us, limits for them.
We are all familiar with the Supreme Court cases that have argued that religious liberty should be unfettered, that if I'm a football coach in Washington, I should be able to pray at the 50-yard line after games because that is my right, even though I'm acting as a school official, even though I'm acting as an employee of a public district.
Funded by tax dollars.
I should be able to go pray with my team and so on and so forth.
We have the famous instances of people not wanting to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple.
People who are graphic designers not wanting to make websites for gay couples and others.
We've talked about this on the show many times.
Liberty for us.
Hey, I'm a Christian.
I should have the unfettered ability, the limitless ability, the uninfringed ability to exercise my religion.
So when I walk in public, I'm a Christian.
Do not tell me to limit my Christianity.
And yet, if you are a Muslim community in Tennessee, in a mid-sized city in Tennessee, it might be the case That someone is going to argue that Islam is not a religion at all.
And think about what they're doing there.
They're saying, because you're not a religion, we can't give you those rights.
Think about the incredulous argument that that is.
That you would call Christianity or Judaism or Buddhism or something else a religion and And not as long.
That you would say it's a radical ideology.
It's a radical political movement.
Now, I'm not going to get into that.
I'm not going to dissect that.
It's honestly ludicrous.
And if you feel like that's an important argument to dissect, I would encourage you to undertake that on your own.
Or you could email me and if I have the time that day, I might engage.
Because I don't think the argument is worth even mentioning.
What does it do?
That's what I want to know.
Well, what it does is say, you over there.
You over there, Muslims, who claim to worship one God, like me, a Christian, worships one God.
You over there, Muslims, who have an idea that following one God is the most important thing in life, who pray five times a day, who, in many ways, have values and morals that might be resonant with mine.
Things about, I don't know, adultery or theft or lying or worshiping other gods.
You're actually not a religion.
This brings me back to the article by Perry Grubbs and Davis.
Here's what they say.
It's a great phrase.
is fundamentally about American cultural membership and who rightfully deserves access to citizenship and civic participation.
It's a great phrase.
Christian nationalism is about American cultural membership.
Christian nationalism is a club that wants to limit who can be a member.
If you need a shorthand for today, Christian nationalism is a club about who gets to be a member of the United States.
Most often, Christian nationalists see Christians as the ones who should be members.
And as I've argued and many others before me, Many of them feel that it is white Christians and everyone else can hang around.
Maybe they get a visitor pass.
Maybe they get a day pass.
Maybe they can come be to the club and if they're with another member, but if they're all alone, if they're not those things, if they're a Muslim community in a mid-sized town in Tennessee, then, you know, we're just not sure that you should get access to citizenship and civic participation.
Murfreesboro did this 10 years ago with the Islamic community and this brings me to today and the banning of homosexuality in public.
I want to think about that because it's frightening on the surface and it's frightening when you dig deep into it.
The idea that you could say that homosexuality is linked to sexual conduct or lewdness is basically saying to anyone who is gay, look, when you walk down the street, And you have certain clothes, you have a certain haircut, you have a certain way of being in the world.
If I perceive you to be a man and you have painted fingernails, if you have mascara, if you have colored your hair, if you are wearing a dress, if you are two men, two women holding hands.
I could go on.
I mean, I can give a million examples.
I am basically saying that I can approach you and tell you, you cannot be in the Civic Square.
You cannot participate in the American Square, the Murfreesboro Square, because you are lewd.
You are indecent.
So cut it out.
Many of you may know, some of you may know, and there's been great reporting on this by Aaron Reid, who I want to shout out and thank for for their work, as well as Torian at the New Republic, that a court order has said that this has to be changed and the city has changed it.
OK, great.
So you're like, well, oh, good.
We don't have to talk about it.
I mean, hey, Murfreesboro, eventually the mosque got built and eventually the gay part of the ordinance got taken away.
And OK, you know, whatever.
Here's what I want to notice, friends.
You know, Dan and I can spend every Friday talking about Donald Trump.
We could spend every Friday talking about Joe Biden or Congress or Mike Johnson, and I'm going to get to Donald Trump today.
Don't worry.
But when people ask me about the state of this country and why, for me, the coming months will be just absolutely crucial for the extension of anything like democracy here, it's because of Murfreesboro.
And the hundreds of other cities around the country like it.
It's because of the places where people are willing to say, you know, this is not a town of 300.
It's not a town of 30,000.
It's a town of 150,000.
And you know, if you are a Muslim community with a couple of hundred members, we're just not going to let you build your house of worship here.
Yeah, freedom of religion is great.
Freedom for, yes, Christians, freedom of religion.
Yes.
You're not a religion, so no.
OK, what do you mean we're not a religion?
Can you make that argument?
It's ridiculous.
Yeah, it is.
But it's the one we're going to make because it's the one that means you don't get to participate.
Oh, and then 10 years later, guess what?
If you're gay, you're lewd and sexually explicit.
And so if you come into public that way, you might get attacked.
You might.
And if you don't get attacked, you might, I don't know, get approached by a police officer.
Think about what this does, and I want to stop just for one more second and just figure out what this does.
We can look at the surface, we can post the outrage, we can say how ridiculous it is, and it is.
But I want you to think about what it does.
What it does is it prepares the ground.
It gets people ready for politicians, for leaders, for pastors who will propose things like this in the future.
It gets a whole group ready that is still in support of homosexuality being part of that ordinance, who still think there should be no books in the library that mention anything like same-sex relationships, queer relationships, queer characters, whatever.
Folks who do not want a rainbow flag flown In their city, anywhere.
And if they see it, they're going to complain to the police and say, hey, that is a lewd, sexually explicit flag.
Get that down.
Preparing the ground for people that will say, you know, I own this hair salon.
We don't do gay haircuts here.
So if you're a man and you come in and ask for this haircut, you're a woman and you come in and ask for this haircut.
We're just not going to be doing that here.
So don't do it.
Don't ask for it.
And don't think that you're welcome.
We may have a situation where Murfreesboro ordinance got reversed right now, right?
But we also now have.
So many people in the city who are prepared to get behind something like that.
And guess what?
The next time they're senator, the next time they're state representative, the next time they're congressional representative, the next time their mayor has a chance to do it, they will.
And those folks will be ready and primed.
They know the game.
They know the feelings.
They know the sentiment.
They know what side to get on.
And they're looking for someone, right, who will express that and lead them down that road.
I have talked for a long time on this podcast about how there are little fires everywhere that are creating little fascists everywhere.
That's what I see here.
If you are trying to ban homosexuality in public, you are doing things right out of the playbook of Putin.
Right out of the playbook of other dictators and autocrats in history and right out of the playbook of the Nazis.
And guess what?
I just said it.
I just said the N-word.
Because the attack, the public outlawing of queer people is frightening for so many reasons.
If you are a queer person, to walk in your town in the country right now to have this kind of sentiment expressed in law is terrifying.
And then to think that it matches up with those who prepared the masses, prepared their followers, to follow an anti-democratic impulse, to say, you know what?
What if we put democracy aside?
Because democracy is getting in the way of what?
It's getting in the way of us, I don't know, getting rid of this mosque, having all these gay people in town, all these books that present ideas that scare us.
If we got rid of democracy, guess what?
I think some of those ordinances and laws, we could put in effect.
Some of those judges and some of those, the process and the deep state, that would go away.
And you could have the pure Christian nation you want, right?
No gays, no Muslims, no brown people, no folks speaking a different language, nobody who prays to a different God than you, nobody who tells a different American story than yours.
What do you say?
Does that sound good?
Murfreesboro is about 40 minutes from Nashville.
And about 40 minutes in the other direction from Murfreesboro is Franklin.
Now, Franklin is only 20 miles south of Nashville.
So if you want to get your map out, if you're a Tennessean, maybe you know what this looks like in your head, but it's kind of a triangle.
You go from Nashville and you can get to Franklin in about 35 minutes, maybe sooner.
And then if you go from Nashville in another direction, southeast, you can get to Murfreesboro, and then you can draw a line from Murfreesboro to Franklin, and that would take you 40-45 minutes.
That's where we are.
We can get to Nashville pretty quickly from here.
Well, some of you might be thinking, Brad just said the N-word, the Nazi word, and I can't believe he did that.
He's an alarmist.
What's going on around here?
Come on, man.
Get it together.
Well, 40 minutes down the road from Murfreesboro, the place that tried to ban a mosque from being built and is trying to ban homosexuality from its city, is a town called Franklin.
Franklin is a place that is a kind of a wealthy suburb of Nashville, and it is a place where there was just a mayoral race.
Now, some of you might have heard about this.
Gabriel Hansen ran for mayor there.
Gabriel Hansen is somebody who's been in local politics for some time.
But she created quite a stir, not only because she's a conspiracy theorist, but because she showed up to a forum in October under the protection of white supremacists.
Phil Williams, who's a veteran reporter in the Nashville area, reports about how she is running an anti-LGBTQ campaign.
She has spread conspiracy theories all over the place.
But on October 2nd, she showed up with the Tennessee Active Club, which some people call a Nazi Fight Club.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has identified it as a white power hate group.
So she shows up under the protection.
Of white nationalists, white power activists, or what some people have called Nazis.
Literal Nazis.
A Nazi-affiliated group.
Now, she said later, well, I didn't ask them to come, they just did, and they kind of just stood by me and protected me.
Uh, okay.
And then after the forum, she got on social media, and she reposted something from the Tennessee Active Club, the club of white nationalists, Nazi affiliates I just talked about.
And that post accused her opponent in the race of being linked with Antifa.
It also stated, there is no political solution, which is terrifying.
If there's not a political solution, what kind of solution is there?
A violent one?
A genocidal one?
A non-democratic one?
What are we supposed to think?
Now, Hanson lost.
She lost the race.
And I'm not going to spend a ton of time on this and I'm not going to protract this out for the next 20 minutes.
She got about 20% of the vote.
She got about 3,300 votes and her opponent got something like 16,000 something.
So out of, you know, 18, 19,000 folks, she gets 3,000.
And you're like, wow, great.
I'm so glad.
Relief.
This lady didn't win.
The Nazi affiliated candidate got, got totally thumped.
Guess what I see there?
And you can accuse me of being half glass empty.
What I see is this.
This is a country.
Where in a town that is 20 miles from Nashville, a major urban metro, one of the fastest growing and most affluent places in the South, 20 miles from Nashville, not 200, 20 miles from Nashville, where there are Whole Foods and Upper Crust places to eat and really expensive big old houses and McMansions, somebody who is showing up in public
with Nazi affiliates is able to convince 3,300 of her fellow city members to vote for her.
To me, this is little fires everywhere with little fascists everywhere.
The Nazi affiliate didn't get 5%, didn't get half a percent.
She got 20 percent of the vote.
One out of five people was like, yeah, not sure about that other guy.
And this woman saying some stuff I appreciate might have been Nazis, but not a big deal.
So, yeah, I'm going to go with her.
One out of five.
If we lined up everybody in the town, one out of five was was like, I'll go with the woman who showed up the other night with Nazis.
Friends, when we think about the erosion of democracy and we think about the little fires everywhere, what those little fires do is not torch the country so that we all look up one day and it's North versus South.
It's California and Massachusetts versus...
The Deep South and the Dakotas plus Idaho.
It's a whole regional conflict.
There's going to be four or five different United States after this and they'll all be broken up into no nation states, blah, blah.
That might happen.
It might happen.
I don't know.
We can think about that.
You know what I'm thinking about?
I'm thinking about 3,300 people voting for a lady who showed up with the Nazis.
That is how you get a situation.
Where when Donald Trump says about his political opponent, says about the people that he is seeing as his political enemies, that they are vermin, that you get those folks in Murfreesboro and Franklin and in so many cities like it across the country nodding their head and being like, yeah, I'm with that guy.
Be right back and we'll talk more about that.
In February 1933, shortly after Hitler was made Chancellor of Germany, Wilhelm Kuba, a Nazi politician, wrote in a propaganda publication, The Jews, like vermin, form a line from Potsdamer Platz until Anhalter Bahnhof.
The only way to smoke out the vermin is to expel them.
1936, Oswald Mosley's British fascists were harassing Jews in London.
They referred to them as rats and vermin from the gutters of Whitechapel.
Hitler also referred to people as vermins.
If I can send the flower of the German nation into the hell of war without the smallest pity, then surely I have the right to remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin.
In his recent post on Substack from this week, Robert P. Jones gives us a helpful list of things that happened during the Nazi regime.
Mein Kampf uses the term vermin three times and rats four times.
Here's one iteration.
The time seemed to have arrived for proceeding against the whole Jewish gang of public pests.
Now that the German worker had rediscovered the road to nationhood, it ought to have been the duty of any government, which had the care of the people in its keeping, to take this opportunity of mercilessly rooting out everything that was opposed to the national spirit.
While the flower of the nation's manhood was dying at the front, there was time enough at home, at least, to exterminate this vermin.
Jones goes on to note that Mein Kampf references the word blood 150 times, mostly in the context of notions of purity versus contamination.
It also references ethnicity and culture in relation to this idea of blood and purity.
In one passage, Hitler puts it this way, people of the same blood should be in the same Reich.
Here's Hitler railing against what he saw as a Jewish controlled press, something that Charlie Kirk has talked about this week and many others.
And so this poison was allowed to enter the national bloodstream and infect public life without the government taking any effectual measures to master the course of the disease.
The ridiculous half measures that were taken themselves, an indication of the process of disintegration that was already threatened to break up the empire.
All the great civilizations of the past became decadent because the originally creative race died out as a result of the contamination of blood.
Mein Kampf, as Jones notes, also characterizes the real threat to Germany as enemies within the country.
Mein Kampf talks about not just the strength of outside enemies, but the enemy in our own camp.
Now, I'm bringing all this up, probably no, because this week Donald Trump referred to his political enemies as vermin.
Jones goes on to provide us with a really haunting passage from a 1940 review of Mein Kampf by none other than George Orwell.
Orwell wrote about Hitler and talks about him in ways that are really quite Foreshadowing, I guess, is a word.
This is 1940, just as things were getting really, really bad in Poland and other places.
But he talks in this passage in a way that I just think is really, really worth hovering on.
One feels, as with Napoleon, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can't win, and yet that he somehow deserves to.
The attraction of such a pose is, of course, enormous.
Think about that, friends.
Orwell is saying here that just like with Napoleon, Hitler's fighting against destiny, that he can't win and yet he somehow deserves to.
I don't know if I've ever heard a better summation of MAGA than that.
They're the minority.
They can't win and yet they somehow deserve to.
That's how they feel.
That's how they sell themselves.
And that is exactly how Donald Trump sells himself.
When this week Trump was talking about the people that he sees as vermin, when in other times he has talked about people coming from other countries, when he's talking about a Muslim ban, when he's talking about the infection of the country, when he's talked about people coming from places on the Asian continent or the African continent rather than from, say, Norway or Sweden or any of the Nordic or Scandinavian locales, he's talking about people who They don't deserve to be here.
We want those that are right, that are superior.
And he's saying that there are enemies without and enemies within.
There have been so many pieces this week talking about the ramifications and that the actual just very menacing indicator of Trump using the word vermin.
I mean, and we'll post some of these in the show notes.
But, you know, some of you want to read more about this.
It is not hard to find great pieces by Jamal Bowie and Dahlia Lithwick and many, many others.
But think about this phrase one more time with me.
He can't win, and yet he somehow deserves to.
MAGA and Trump and white Christian nationalists are always saying, we're the victims.
We've been pushed to the side.
We can't win.
You won't let us.
Who's the most persecuted person in America?
The white Christian man?
What happened to the traditional family?
We're just good old people.
There were reports this week that Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House, said that the country is headed to hell because 25% of young people identify as queer somehow.
We've been pushed aside.
Now it's everyone is queer and woke and nobody cares about this country.
They hate it.
We have enemies within.
We have vermin.
Think about what Orwell says next.
And again, I want to thank Robert Jones for posting this in his sub stack.
Whereas socialism and even capitalism in a more grudging way have said to people, I offer you a good time.
I love this line.
Like you, you all have different feelings about socialism and capitalism out there, but they offer people a good time.
It's just like, wow, yeah, we can talk for the next 80 days about socialism, capitalism, but they offer people a good time.
Hey, capitalism, do you want a house?
You want to like a big screen TV?
You want to scroll the internet endlessly at night?
You want to buy stuff that you sometimes need, most of the time don't?
You want to go on a cruise?
You want to like have pleasure and be a consumer?
That's a good time.
And hey, look, I'm not above that.
Come on.
I'm not saying I don't live in that system.
I'm just saying this is such a good line.
Capitalism offers you a good time.
Is it good for the world?
Probably not.
Is it good for all of us?
Just talk about it for the next 80 days, whatever.
What does Hitler say?
I offer you struggle, danger, and death.
And as a result, a whole nation flings itself at his feet.
Trump does not offer a good time.
He does not say, hey if we do this, your life will get better.
If you follow me, you know what we're going to do.
We're going to invest in infrastructure.
We're going to make it so that your kids have safer places to go to school.
We're going to do things in strategic ways that build up the country in terms of its bridges, both physical and social.
We're going to make it so that you have a chance in this economy.
We're going to fight for the worker in a way that's actually real.
Like, let me tell you all the ways I'm going to give you a good time.
Okay?
He doesn't even outline like a sort of idealistic, great society, a la Lyndon B. Johnson or Robert Kennedy's idea, right, of this new kind of America.
It's not even Ronald Reagan.
Morning in America.
Ronald Reagan used to tell everybody, it's morning in America.
It's a new day.
Hey, you got up.
Look, here comes the sun.
Grab a coffee.
Let's take a walk.
Let's see the day dawn and feel like a little hopeful before things get started and we have to go to work.
Let's feel like today is going to be a good day in America.
Trump offers his followers struggle, danger, and death.
And as a result, a whole nation flings itself at his feet.
Perhaps later on they'll get sick of it and change their minds as at the end of the last war.
After a few years of slaughter and starvation, greatest happiness of the greatest number is a good slogan.
But at this moment?
Better an end with horror than a horror without end is a winner.
Think about what Orwell is saying.
Orwell's always been one of the masters of the English language.
But here it is.
Better an end without horror than a horror without end.
MAGA's about death.
It's about danger.
It's about struggle.
And you know what?
If the people of color and the non-Christians and the non-religious and the folks who want to dismantle unequal systems and talk about white supremacy, if they want to bring this country to a different place, well, guess what?
We'd rather end the country with horror than face, I don't know, a nation that doesn't prioritize or privilege us in a way that is unequal compared to everyone else.
That's what we want.
And here's what Orwell says, now that we are fighting against the man who coined it, we ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.
And there it is.
Friends, I talked about Franklin and people getting, a mayoral candidate getting 3,300 votes, a woman who showed up accompanied by Nazis.
Talked about Murfreesboro.
Trying to say to a group of Muslims, you can't build a mosque.
Why?
You're not even a religion, are you?
You're not doing that here.
That's a pretext.
It's a sheen.
It's a cover.
You're not going to build a mosque in our community.
Sorry, we just don't want it.
We don't want you.
Trying to say that if you are gay, just by existing, just by leaving the house, you are lewd.
You're out of order.
You're not allowed here.
And then we come to these words.
Trump calling his political opponents vermin.
And that's not the least of it.
Trump has outlined what he will do if he wins the presidency.
Here's Greg Sargent at the Washington Post.
Donald Trump's advisers have declared that if he regains the presidency he will launch an extraordinarily cruel crackdown on immigration.
Given that Trump lost re-election in 2020 after attempting a far tamer agenda, advertising such plans might seem like foolish political malpractice.
But the politics of immigration can be peculiar.
The public tends to turn on the president in power when the situation on the border goes wrong, leading voters to seek a diametrically different approach.
The second term agenda would revolve around what the New York Times calls giant camps.
While detention centers already exist, the Times reports that Trump and adviser Stephen Miller envision a vastly expanded network that would facilitate the deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants, including longtime residents with deep ties to communities.
Those camps would also enable Trump to dramatically scale up detention of people seeking asylum, which would be subject to shocking new limits.
Trump would reinstate his ban on migrants from majority Muslim countries, invoke new legal authorities to pursue mass expulsions, and enlist the military to help carry them out.
This, friends, is in addition to the idea of using the Insurrection Act to call upon the military to say that we have in the country internal enemies, some of whom are vermin.
So I, as the President, am going to invoke an Insurrection Act that gives me the power to crack down on them using the military.
It is all there.
He is forecasting exactly what he will do.
I want you to think about what I talked about at the beginning today.
3,300 people voting for Nazis.
A town 45 minutes from Nashville trying to ban gay folks from being in public.
Banning books all over the country.
Banning the mention of LGBTQ identity in classrooms.
Trans persecution.
Outlawing women driving on highways to get abortions.
I could go on.
I could go on and on and on.
Things we've talked about all over the place.
You can look at the future and say, wow, are we going to have a civil war?
Is there going to be a big conflict?
Is there going to be a United States that's like, you know, California and Washington and Oregon.
And then there'll be like a different country that's like Montana and Wyoming and Idaho and the Dakotas.
And maybe they'll all fight over, I don't know, Kansas and, and the Midwest.
And we'll see which way the Missouri goes and maybe the deep South, you know, succeeds again.
And then we've got that Northeast over there, Massachusetts leading the way with Vermont, New Hampshire.
I don't know what will happen in New York, blah, blah, blah.
Yeah.
I mean, it's fun.
I'm reading sci-fi books right now.
I like it.
Fascinating.
And sometimes it teaches us a lot.
I'm just going to be that guy that says, you know what's happening right now?
Franklin, Tennessee.
Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
And Donald Trump saying, if you make me president again, I'm going to open camps.
I'm going to take retribution on my political enemies who I think are vermin.
I'm going to invoke the Insurrection Act so I can use the military to crack down on, I don't know friends, people who are trans in public?
People who have the wrong phenotype?
The wrong identity?
People who want to be faithful Muslims?
People who want to be proud that they're Palestinian?
Jewish?
What does it look like when what happens in Murfreesboro has national protection and momentum?
Here's Dahlia Lithwick at Slate.
What if the problem is that consumers of media fail to understand the actual stakes of losing democracy?
See.
What if the problem is really that watching this MMA smackdown between fascism and representative democracy is, in fact, the 2023 version of good clean fun?
As Buie, Jamel Buie, puts it in his New York Times piece on the subject this week, the mundane truth of American politics is that much of what we want to know is in plain view.
Friends, much of what we want to know is already here.
We don't need some really compelling creative sci-fi novel or counterfactual history, although those things can be great and helpful and actually really instructive.
One of the hardest things to do is to face a reality that says right now, in our communities, in our school systems, in our municipalities, in our mayoral races, we know all we need to know about America.
Or 20% of the people might vote for somebody who's affiliated with Nazis.
Or a lot of the country might vote for someone who says, hey, if you elect me again, there will be camps.
There will be a ban on anyone coming from a Muslim-majority country.
There will be political retribution against quote-unquote vermin.
There will be an insurrection act that allows me to use the military to crack down on anyone I think is an internal enemy.
The mundane truth of American politics is that much of what we want to know is already there.
It's so much easier to project into the future Project into the past, to think about alternative histories, possible futures, and so on and so forth.
But what if, right now, we need to stop thinking of this as great fun, political theater?
And realize that these are the moments, the decisions, the little fires that create little fascists, that create incredibly scary regimes.
Here's one more section of Lithwick's piece that's late.
Here's hoping that our reflexes start to kick in over the next 12 months.
Lest we're once again reminded of what happens when the snakes have been staring us in the face all along and we choose instead to roll the dice on democracy itself.
I'm hoping our reflexes kick in too.
And I know that some of you are like thinking, man, this is not a, this is a bummer of a weekly roundup.
Dan isn't here and there's no dad jokes and they just let, you know, Brad talk about fascism again.
Ah, this guy.
And I get it.
I'm just saying, when you look at the local and Murfreesboro and then the national and Trump using the words vermin, we have to connect the dots.
Trump is not a reality star that we can just make fun of or revile.
He's not someone we can just hate, watch.
And our local municipalities are not places where we can say, well, at least only one out of five people voted for the Nazi.
Those two are connected.
And I hope that we can see that over the next couple of months as we face down this election cycle and so much more.
Be right back.
Alright, I hope you didn't give up on me.
I got one more thing to say today and it is hope.
This is an extended reason for hope and it goes like this.
Great acts of faith are seldom born out of calm calculation.
It wasn't logic that caused Moses to raise his staff on the bank of the Red Sea.
It wasn't common sense that caused Paul to abandon the law and embrace it grace.
It wasn't a confident committee that prayed in a small room in Jerusalem for Peter's release from prison.
It was a fearful, desperate band of believers that were backed into a corner.
That's Sean Fain talking about his Christian faith.
Sean Fain is the leader of the strike against the Big Three automakers and the president of the United Auto Workers Union.
This is from CNN by John Blake, and it just talks about how Fain is somebody who talks about his Christian faith all the time, who carries his grandmother's Bible.
Here's how the piece goes.
Fain's faith did move a corporate mountain.
Three, to be exact.
After a six-week campaign of strikes, the UAW reached a historic agreement with General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler that would give workers their biggest pay raise in decades.
Fain's sermonette was remarkable because labor leaders don't typically cite the Bible in such detail to justify a strike, but they once did.
Fain's decision to blend scripture with a strike is straight out of the social gospel playbook.
The Social Gospel, friends, is, as many of you know, a movement from the early 20th century that linked social justice with faith.
It really saw the gospel as a matter of systemic reform and creating a society where all were treated with humanity and dignity and equality in the eyes of God rather than individual faith.
Now, as many of you know, that brand of Christianity has taken a back seat in the last 75 years to evangelicalism, to Pentecostalism, and so on and so forth.
What I appreciate about this, and I know that some of you will have a different view, is that what Fain is doing here As a leader of the labor union that is taking on the big three and so on is that he is creating a situation where it's possible for people in places like Michigan, places like Ohio, places like Missouri, places like Indiana, places where folks are saying, hey,
I'm really getting behind the strike and the workers at the automaker plant.
I can really identify with those guys because I haven't had a raise in a long time.
The corporation is making billions and I'm still stuck trying to make my life work paycheck to paycheck.
But you know, how does that work with religion?
Can I square this circle?
Because for so many of them, they've been told, if you're a Democrat, You're somebody who doesn't vote Republican.
If you're not a conservative, then you can't be religious.
And Dan and I have talked over and over about how that's not true.
And we have many friends on the religious left, Christian and non-Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and so on, who are like, there is a religious left in this country.
It is one that's fighting for justice.
For those who are economically disadvantaged, for those who need health care, for those who need well-paying jobs to support their families, for those living in multiracial, multiethnic communities who want interreligious dialogue, who want pluralism, who want democracy.
I was part of the Americans United Summit for Religious Freedom, and I met so many faith leaders there who want those exact things.
And yet what Fain is part of here is expressing something that I think in public just needs to be expressed as often as possible.
And it's possible to be someone who quotes the Bible, who is religious, and who fights for workers.
There's a merging here of two things.
Actually helping people.
Saying to working class people, hey, these policies will help you.
You're gonna get a fair shake when it comes to your paycheck at the end of the day.
But it doesn't mean that you see an incoherence, a disconnect between your identity as a person of faith and somebody who actually sees that, yeah, workers, unions, policies that one might deem liberal or progressive are actually helping me and my family.
You don't have to abandon one to go to the other.
Now, I know many of you are like, yeah, but you know, Christianity isn't, uh, you know, what if you're not a Christian in this labor union?
And what if, you know, this isn't who you are?
And I, I, I hear you.
And my hope is that someone like Sean Fain and others would say, you don't have to be a believer like me to be part of a movement that wants a fair shake for everybody.
That's how I would frame it.
And that's how I hope he does too.
But I see here a glimmer of something bursting forth in the American consciousness among folks who want to bridge a gap between, I'm a person of faith and I think I woke up today and I understand why, I don't know, unions and economic justice and all these stuff that I hear Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and AOC talking about makes sense.
Am I a liberal now?
Oh, God, what am I going to do?
There are people like that.
You might know people like that.
So Sean Fain and his sort of approach to all these things, it actually might be quite helpful in those situations.
And I think that's something to pay attention to and is a reason for hope.
Thanks y'all for being here on this weekly roundup.
Dan Miller is, of course, at the American Academy of Religion conference and busy having a great time visiting with colleagues and friends.
I stayed home this year, didn't go because of my new baby.
So, I want to ask you all a favor.
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So, if you can go give us a review on Apple Podcasts, that would be really helpful and I would really appreciate that.
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Hope you are well.
We'll catch you next week with Within the Code, The Weekly Roundup and great content.
