Brad and Dan begin by gauging the right-wing reactions to the death of Henry Kissinger. They then compare these, and the hallmarks of Kissinger's life, to those of Rosalynn Carter, who was buried this week in Plains, Ga.
In the second segment, Dan unpacks a knot of issues related to no-fault divorce, abortion, and the ways that the GOP continues to try to control women's bodies.
In the final segment, the hosts look to Ga, where local election officials refused to certify results for spurious reasons. What does it mean for 2024?
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My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Back today after two weeks missing with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Nice to see you, Brad.
I'm almost back to human after my second bout of COVID, so it's nice to mostly be back.
Last week was Thanksgiving.
You were down with COVID, and the week before that, you were at the American Academy of Religion conference.
Getting to see all of our colleagues.
I did not go this year.
So, it's been a while since we've been together on a Friday, but there's, as always, a ton to talk about, and we're going to jump right in.
So, I want to talk about some notable deaths this week, and I think you all know who I'm talking about.
We want to talk about a whole kind of matrix of things related to health care, reproductive rights and divorce, surprisingly.
But they're all connected and they are all connected to people like Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Mike Johnson and others.
And then we want to talk about a refusal on the part of local Republicans in an election to certify the results of that election and how that is in many ways a foreshadowing of what might be to come.
In 2024 in local, state, and national locales.
So, let's jump in.
Let's do it.
Let's talk about Henry Kissinger.
All right, Dan?
Kissinger died this week at the very old age of 100, and many of you have seen the headlines and know that there has been some kind of, I'll say, Mixed coverage of his legacy.
Dan, I want to just ask you this.
You're like a couple years older than me.
I am 42.
I was born in 1980.
I have always heard about Henry Kissinger.
I don't feel like when I was growing up, he was somebody I could just tell you.
When I was 18, I couldn't tell you the Henry Kissinger bio.
By contrast, the life of Karl Rove or Dick Cheney in the Bush administration, those are people I could just sit down over coffee and be like, oh, remember when this happened?
Are you old enough to remember Kissinger personally, or did you learn about Kissinger Still more through history books and things like that.
I was thinking about that as you were saying it, and it's interesting, I think, how much The internet changed the world on that like you know when I'm sort of like you probably I came to like I grew up you know hearing about politics but I think I sort of came to my adult political awareness or whatever really during like you know late Clinton early Bush but like when you had questions about Dick Cheney or somebody would ask something or Donald Rumsfeld
Like that's an era where you'd be like, Oh, here's this article about it online.
And Oh, here's this hyperlink.
And it's weird as it may sound to a lot of our listeners, there was a time when there wasn't an online and there weren't hyperlinks.
And so I think that, uh, you know, in those days, if you weren't reading like physical newspapers and who was when we're like kids or teens or, you know, whatever, you're not, you'd have to go to the library to read those things.
So, yeah, I think Kissinger was always this figure, which was in the history books, which just to throw it back to you in a second here is probably part of why You could have, I think, a more selective or, I don't know, heroic presentation of some of these people in higher office, which I think we're seeing some.
You get that a lot when people die.
You get these retrospectives that are kind of glossy and varnished.
But yeah, but he wasn't a household figure the way that, as you say, Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld was.
You also didn't have the 24-hour cable news cycle, so you didn't have these officials standing in front of cameras daily trying to win over public opinion.
Yeah, I bring it up because I think for most people listening, there's obviously people older than us who are listening, but But for a lot of folks, they're just not.
They weren't of age during a time when Kissinger was kind of in his heyday.
So let me talk about Kissinger here in a second.
But before we do that, Dan, I want to just point out who is praising Kissinger.
So I'm going to tell you all about Kissinger in a sec.
Don't panic if you're like, I don't even know what he did.
Who is this guy?
Why is he a war criminal?
We're going to get there.
But he was praised quite a bit this week on conservative media.
So Stephen Miller, Trump's former senior adviser, declared on Wednesday, may God bless Henry Kissinger, who devoted his life to the pursuit of peace and comfort his family during this time of pain and loss.
Kristi Noem, governor of South Dakota.
Encouraged viewers on Fox News to go learn a little bit more about him.
Around your dinner table or when you're driving in the car with your kids.
Tell them a few Kissinger quotes that were used in strategic times.
Mike Johnson, Secretary of State, excuse me, Speaker of the House.
Kissinger was a statesman who devoted his life and service to the United States and should be remembered for his efforts to ensure global peace and freedom abroad.
A lot of praise here.
From the American right.
And yet someone else died this week who, you know, is somewhat notable, I would say.
And that's somebody who was a little different, Dan.
You know, Henry Kissinger hung out in Manhattan a lot.
There's been some really cringy pieces written about his surprising dating life.
He was somebody who could show up at any restaurant in New York or at a Knicks game or a Yankees game and get the red carpet treatment.
He was from a place known as Gotham.
Big.
Liberal, out of control, metropolitan.
Well, I want to talk about somebody real quick before we get to Kissinger, who is a little different.
This is a person who worshipped for going on seven decades in the same church in her hometown.
She was somebody who, despite having all the ability and opportunity to venture far from home, and actually did by visiting 122 countries in her lifetime, Was somebody who always found her way back to rural Georgia in the deep south, in a place that is far from the highway, does not have any stoplights per se, and is generally the kind of place you don't see on the big screen very often, much less where the Yankees play.
This is a person who devoted their life to service, trying to end the discrimination against older adults, wanted people with developmental disabilities to have various opportunities in the world, including education, advanced women's equality.
And did all kinds of other things.
Drew the world's attention to relief for refugees escaping genocide in Cambodia.
I'm from California.
In Southern California, there are many folks who were refugees from that political nightmare.
Wanted to help children with curable diseases find cures all over the world.
Was an advocate for mental health when many people didn't even know what that was.
And so on and so forth.
I'm of course talking about Rosalind Carter.
I bring up Rosalind Carter because she's a First Lady who passed away and her funeral was this week.
She was, by all accounts, Dan, a formidable person.
If you don't know about Rosalind Carter, it's worth going to read about her.
You know, her kids all said at the funeral that, you know, Jimmy Carter, her husband, got used to her disagreeing with him, and that was kind of the basis of their marriage and their political life, that she was not the kind of person to take a backseat.
She had an East Wing office in the White House because she was doing so much work as a First Lady.
Now, I want to talk about Carter just for a second, Dan, because she was not praised on the likes of Fox News like Henry Kissinger was.
And I find that striking for these reasons.
Rosalind Carter and Jimmy Carter both are lifelong Christians.
Rosalind Carter married her high school sweetheart, her teenage sweetheart, Jimmy Carter.
70 years of marriage, Dan.
Her husband was a military officer.
That's kind of like, I don't know, what you hear a lot about on Fox News, right?
Support the military and military wives.
She was the mother of four.
Grandchildren, great-grandchildren.
And guess what?
When she got old, what did she do?
She moved to Manhattan and go to Yankee games?
No, she moved home to Plains, Georgia, where her and her husband's families had been farmers for generations.
They went back to the place that didn't even have a stoplight in order to worship at their church and continue to fill out their family tree.
Why the sort of outline of Rosalind Carter's life?
I have made this case so many times, Dan, but I'm going to make it one more time.
You would think that Jimmy and Rosalind Carter were made in a lab for white Christians in this country to just fall all over thinking they're the people we should emulate.
These are folks from the rural South.
I mean, this is not Atlanta.
This is rural Georgia.
These are farmers, for God's sake, Dan.
Farmers.
Not remote workers.
Not like people working internet jobs, whatever those are.
Recording podcasts, like professors.
Okay?
These are military people.
These are people who raised, they didn't have one child.
They had four children, tons of grandchildren.
They never left the house without a Bible.
Spent their latter years building homes with people all over the world and the country.
Lived and died by their faith.
And you know what the Carters are to the American right?
A punching bag.
Not something to remember.
So let's talk about Henry Kissinger.
Somebody who I've just pointed out is somebody that Christy Noem says, hey, when you're driving in the car with your kids, you're picking up from soccer, go ahead and remind them of some Kissinger quotes.
Like it's like, she's like shaking her arm, you know, like it's like a good old, like we're somehow we're in the good old days of America.
Yeah, just when you make their lunches in the morning, write out a little Kissinger quote.
That way when they eat lunch that day, they can just read up on somebody who they really should know.
You know what I mean?
Okay, America.
God bless it.
All right.
Who was Henry Kissinger?
I don't know.
Let me look at my notes.
Let me, I got to look it up.
Hold on.
Who was, who was he again?
Let me think.
Ah, yes.
Yale University historian, Greg Grandin.
Author of the biography, Kissinger's Shadow, estimates that Kissinger's actions in from 1969 through 1976, a period of eight years when he was Nixon's and Ford's foreign policy advisor and secretary of state, meant the end of between three and four million people.
That includes, quote, crimes of commission, As in Cambodia and Chile, and crimes of omission, like green lighting Indonesia's bloodshed in East Timor, Pakistan's bloodshed in Bangladesh, and the inauguration of an American tradition of using and then abandoning the Kurds.
This is from Rolling Stone by Spencer Ackerman.
Dan, Henry Kissinger was somebody who basically Pursued and achieved war in Cambodia and Laos when those countries were neutral during the wars in Vietnam.
Somebody who Anthony Bourdain of all people said, if you've ever been to Cambodia, you will leave there wanting to strangle Henry Kissinger for what he did.
Somebody, Barack Obama said that when he came into office, he was still helping to clean up the mess that had been made in Southeast Asia as a result of Kissinger's actions because of what he had done in terms of bombing, what he had done in terms of innocent bystanders and neutral countries.
I'm going to continue reading a little bit more.
The Cubans say there's no evil that lasts a hundred years, and Kissinger is making a run to prove them wrong, Grandin told Rolling Stone.
There's no doubt he'll be hailed as a geopolitical grand strategist, even though he bungled most crises, leading to escalation.
He'll get credit for opening China, but that was de Gaulle's original idea and initiative.
He'll be praised for détente, and that was a success, but he undermined his own legacy by aligning with the neocons.
And of course, he'll get off scot-free from Watergate, even though his obsession with Daniel Ellsberg really drove the crime.
Again, this is a Yale historian who wrote a whole biography on Kissinger.
This is not just me teeing off.
If you want more details, Dan, on what happened in Southeast Asia, let me read a little bit from Mike Ives at the New York Times.
The fighting between North Vietnam and US-backed South Vietnam did not end until the Norse victory in 1975.
Some observers have said that that was inevitable result of a cynical American policy intended to create space, a decent interval, as Kissinger put it, between the American withdrawal from the country in 73 and the fall of Saigon two years later.
But he has also been accused of needlessly prolonging the war when a framework for peace had been available years later.
The bombing of Cambodia in 69 and 70, which Kissinger authorized, fueled years of debate about whether the United States had violated international law by expanding the conflict into an ostensibly neutral nation.
I bring all this up, Dan, because I think it's good for people to sort of have a frame of reference for Kissinger, just because as I mentioned at the top, not all of us were old enough to remember his legacy by living through it.
But second, I think it's worth noting who the American right mourned this week.
It was not Rosalind Carter, the lifelong Christian, who died peacefully at her farm in rural Georgia.
It was the man that palled around with celebrities and rich folks in Manhattan.
Who was responsible for green lighting bombing in Southeast Asia may have led to the breaking of international law.
A man many consider a war criminal and who by all accounts certainly was one of the most influential figures in American foreign policy of the late 20th century.
But influential does not mean peaceful nor benevolent.
And yet he's the one that the governor and the Speaker of the House and many others on the right are saying, yeah, teach your kids about him.
Not the lifelong Southern Baptist I devoted to her family.
All right, off to you.
Thoughts on Kissinger, Carter, the whole thing?
I think I want to sort of zoom out and tie together what I think is circulating and what you're talking about, right?
Which is, so you got all of these Cold War myths, right, of peace and stability and so forth.
Those of us who lived through at least the latter portions of the Cold War, remember all that.
But a few things here.
One is, as you say, these same people that are lauding Kissinger as this sort of model, these are the Christian America people, right?
And so I think it's telling to say, what is Christian America?
What is Christian for these people?
And I think it merges so many things together, right?
This kind of, again, like these Cold War myths of the benevolence of America, right?
America as a benevolent global actor, tied in with these theological visions that predate that by hundreds of years, right?
Of America as this light on the hill, the promised nation, a kind of new Israel, Christian nation, etc.
Which also means that, you know, you get these conflation of things that Arguably, somebody like Kissinger increased American security.
Security and peace aren't the same thing, right?
The Cold War was one of the most violent global periods of time in world history, right?
To call it peace is ridiculous.
It's completely focused on the perspective of America and parts of Western Europe and ignores lots of other things.
I think we all know that now, but I think it's telling that this vision of Christian America, we need to be a Christian nation, what is it?
It's wrapped up in What has been a certain kind of Christianity, again it predates Christian Nationalists, but there's a theologian years ago named Walter Wink who talked about what he called the myth of redemptive violence, right?
That violence could be redemptive, and on a certain telling, a very dominant, historically dominant telling of Christianity, that's what Christianity is, right?
It's this violent story of a God who creates people, punishes them because they're sinful, has no way to rescue them other than to kill his own child, and like, You know, it's just, it's a really, really dark sort of story, but you have that same story that transposes itself in this American mythology of the Cold War, right?
that endless conflict and proxy wars and propping up anti-democratic governments and allowing all kinds of slaughter against civilians, whether we're talking about Cambodia or other places and things that go beyond Kissinger, certainly violations of whether we're talking about Cambodia or other places and things that go beyond Kissinger, certainly violations of laws about war crimes and so forth, that all of that is somehow not violent and is peaceable because somehow
So I feel like there are deep sort of cultural theological currents that circulate there.
And it shows us to me how much they're still alive because the Christian nation Americans, they don't want a Christian nation that focuses on, I don't know, Jesus of Nazareth and helping the poor and turning the other cheek and working to fight poverty or, you know, all of those kinds of things that I think is embodied in somebody all of those kinds of things that I think is embodied in somebody And I think it just, I think everything that you're describing about this maps onto a kind of deep
Cultural kind of very selective Christian identity, right?
That is still very much with us, which is why you can get these people lifting Kissinger up as a moral model and somebody to be lauded.
I just want to point out, right?
These aren't all boomers who like, you know, went through the Cold War and served in Vietnam or, you know, other things like that.
These are not people who are contemporaries who had a particular perspective.
These are much younger Americans lauding this As this ideal, right?
So we talk about, I'll close with this, like, we're going to make America great again?
What does that look like?
Oh, it looks like something like Kissinger.
It looks like proxy wars.
It looks like the Cold War.
It looks like endless conflict.
It looks like blowback and collateral damage and all the other fun phrases that we had to, like, develop to talk about the conflict of that period.
Well, let's just go back in history one more time to kind of tie it together.
So, Rosalind Carter and Kissinger are of the same generation.
So, Kissinger is a national security advisor and is really prominent in the, what, early to mid-70s.
Okay.
Vietnam, the Nixon administration leads to Nixon's resignation.
The country is in sort of moral panic.
There's a moral identity crisis.
Why does Jimmy Carter become the guy?
It's in part because he looks like a stabilizer.
Jimmy Carter in 1976 is this good old boy, Bible-toting.
He just seems like a man you can trust.
And he really becomes, you know, president based on a certain moral identity, right?
Now, I'm not here to debate the Carter administration and the presidency.
That's never my intention.
I'm not here to say Jimmy Carter was the greatest president in American history.
None of that, okay?
But what I do want to point out is that during this same time period, 1976, Jerry Falwell is holding I Love America rallies, and he's doing the American Christian nationalism you're talking about, Dan.
And as the 70s go on, as Jimmy Carter is president, And the 70s progress.
The likes of Jerry Falwell become more and more angry at Carter for not being a good American president and a good Christian.
Why?
He was not a war hawk.
When you have the issues in Iran, issues in Panama, Jimmy Carter is not like Baumann.
Send in the bombs.
What am I pointing out here, Dan?
Even in that era, the religious right, the Christian nationalists, they wanted the bomber.
They wanted the war hawk, the brutalizer.
They wanted Henry Kissinger rather than Jimmy Carter.
So people always ask me, how did we get Trump?
It's like I've been asked that question over the last eight years like 100 million times.
One of the reasons is because if you think that Christian America, and as you just said, making America great again, is about more violence against them to ensure the security of us.
If you think that American greatness is measured in the size of your bomb rather than in the way you can negotiate and get along with others diplomatically, if you think that a Christian nation is an enforcing nation, If you think a Christian nation is an empire, then sure, make America great again.
Put Henry Kissinger up in your church, along with Richard Nixon, along with whoever else you might put there, but it's certainly not going to be the faith or the vision for America of Rosalind or Jimmy Carter.
All right, let's take a break, come back, move into the present, talk about things that are swirling in our ether right now.
Be back in a sec.
All right, Dan, so I'm going to let you cook here, because I know you're going to put together three things that seem a little weird, and not weird, but maybe they don't go together.
So, one is renewed attacks on Obamacare, which is like, what, Brad?
There's so much going on.
Why are you guys talking about Obamacare?
Come on, shouldn't you be talking about something else?
We've also got Republicans going after no-fault divorce, which, I don't know, Dan, it seems like a losing issue.
Hey, half the nation, women, we want to make it so you can't get divorced unless something criminal or illegal happens.
You guys with me?
All right, so there's that.
And then there's Mike Johnson doing Mike Johnson stuff.
I don't even have to explain.
I just have to say Mike Johnson stuff.
So how do those three things hang together?
Wait, hold on.
Hold on.
I'm going to show off for a minute.
Hold on.
I was going to say, what is the relationship, not between those things, Dan, what is the relationship among those things?
You know why, Dan?
This is free for everyone listening.
It's free for all of you.
When you have a series of three, we say among.
What is the relationship among the attack on Obamacare?
More than two needs among.
There's a shirt.
I'm gonna make all right you start talking.
I'm gonna make the merch.
I'm gonna make the merch I'm not gonna be listening for a minute because I'm designing a shirt all right grandma merch as long as we defend between and among and like the Oxford comment We're all fine like we're on the we're on the right side of the issues so Yeah, so a few things here.
So yeah, so this week, as you say, Obamacare suddenly comes crashing back into the political world.
And why did that happen?
It happened because in response to a Wall Street Journal op-ed about healthcare, not about Obamacare per se, just healthcare stuff, Trump ...goes on Truth Social and makes some statement about how, you know, it was the big failing of the Republicans not to replace Obamacare.
It's like all of a sudden we're back into repeal and replace Obamacare and so forth, right?
By every account, like, giant misstep by Trump kind of, like, walking along and not seeing where he's walking and steps in something gross and, like, tracks it into the house and walks all over without, like, cleaning off his shoe.
Just a huge, huge mistake.
Why?
Well, Democrats have caught on this idea and have, like, seized on it, right?
Are sort of trying to figure out if they can get traction with it.
Republicans have quietly tried to pretend he didn't say it.
Why?
Because it's a losing issue, right?
And why am I talking about it?
A number of reasons, right?
But one is this.
I want folks to remember that in 2016, of course, Trump wins the election.
The Republicans get control of both houses of Congress.
And I, Brad, like lots and lots of other people, thought that Obamacare was gonna be gone on like day one.
Like you would have the inauguration, and like six hours later, Obamacare's gone.
Because the GOP had talked for years about getting rid of Obamacare.
And Obamacare was the first of, like, the car that the dog caught and didn't know what to do with with the GOP.
They, of course, and everybody saw this, they had had years and years and years to come up with whatever their proposal was going to be to replace Obamacare.
Turns out they didn't have one.
Turns out, lots of people like their healthcare.
Now, there was lots of confusion.
I remember reading things where somebody would be like, I support the Affordable Care Act, but not Obamacare.
And people would be like, those are the same thing, you know, and on and on and on.
The point is, as you always say, when governments do things to help people, Turns out sometimes the people like those things the government's doing, right?
So it sort of died on the vine.
It never went anywhere.
It's been to SCOTUS a million times.
It's been sort of chipped away at in some ways, but the core of it has held on and on and on.
The point is it's a losing bet for Republicans.
And so Trump sort of brings it out, dusts it off because his ego can't stand that he lost on that issue and brings it out.
And so I think that it's a significant issue and it relates in this way.
I think it further ties in with the abortion issue, right?
We've seen this, everybody's seen this, we've talked about it for years at this point, right?
Or a year, a year and a half or whatever it's been, that abortion is a winning issue for Democrats now.
Why?
Because guess what?
The GOP didn't know what to do when the Dobbs decision came and actually struck down abortion.
Why am I linking those two things?
I'm linking them because Probably, Brad, I'll bet you can remember when you were in, say, high school or, you know, in your evangelical youth group or whatever, and I was, abortion was, even among advocates of abortion access, talked about it differently, right?
That the rhetoric has changed.
Now it's all about health access, right?
It's understood as an issue of the health of people who are able to carry children, right?
And I think that that's right.
I think that that's correct.
I think that that's good.
So you come along critiquing Obamacare.
What are you doing?
You're just reopening this issue of we want to take away health care.
We want to take away access to medical care.
This is a win for Democrats, right?
So they're holding on to that.
Bring up the no-fault divorce.
Why?
Because I guess the GOP this week was like, you know what?
We just scored an own goal on Obamacare and we can't win on abortion.
So how about we bring up another incredibly unpopular idea and start giving it legs?
And it's this notion of doing away with no-fault divorce.
And as people probably know, as the name suggests, right, no-fault divorce is simply the view that people should be able to get divorced without having to prove that somebody was, you know, at fault in the breakdown of the relationship.
And every time somebody hears the language of, you know, irreconcilable differences or something like that, that's an invocation of no-fault divorce.
It's the recognition that two people can choose or recognize that they should not be together or they don't want to be together or whatever and they don't have to be together.
It was first legalized over 50 years ago and is now basically the law of the land.
And conservatives have always hated it, and they have always created it into this sort of monster that is the reason why marriages fail.
It's an assault on marriage.
It's a threat to the family.
I just want to throw this out, by the way, like the logic that what's going to save the family is making sure people who don't like each other or are incompatible or are abusive or things like this have to stay together.
Clearly the way to have happy, healthy families, but... Dan, that's what God wants.
Okay?
So just shut up about it.
Just shut up about it, Dan.
Okay?
I won't.
I won't.
See?
I'm trying to create a situation where you don't want to be at a podcast host anymore, but you have to.
Never mind.
All right.
Bad joke.
I'm sorry.
I got going on the merch thing.
Anyway, all right.
Continue.
Yeah.
So why do I say this?
As you say, it's going to be unpopular.
I did a lot of reading on things about no-fault divorce I hadn't really thought about before.
I was not alive 50 years ago, as it turns out.
I don't remember a time before no-fault divorce.
But some of it had nothing to do, no-fault divorce, with women's rights or equality.
It was like a legal nightmare.
You had weird stories about people who would
Move to a different state because abandonment could be a reason for divorce and like so people would have to like collaboratively strategize steps that they could take to show that one of them was at fault so that they could get divorced and like like I just these these things where people probably had like the most agreeable parts of their marriage were in trying to work together to like figure out how to end their marriage so there were all kinds of legal reasons but it also as everyone right left and center recognizes
No fault divorce was a huge gain for women because women were the losers almost all the time in having to show fault for divorce.
Whether it was because this is a time when women had even less access to the workplace and to economic stability than they have now, Whether it was because they were in abusive relationships and they could not get out of those relationships, right?
Women have benefited from this.
And people on the right know this.
The Charlie Kirks of the world and others who decry no-fault divorce and the disillusion of the family, it's the fault of women.
It's the fault of women that are doing this.
It's women's lib.
I still hear the phrase women's lib being thrown around as like, you know, something to be attacked here.
So this is an attack on women, right?
It's an attack to go to the metaphors that I stick with, right?
This notion of the social body.
It is a way of trying to regulate the social body and keep women in place, keep them in their place, which means subject to male authority, right?
That that's where they belong in marriages, subject to male authority.
Why does it matter?
How does it relate to this?
Because not only is the GOP now, they're fighting this front on abortion that we know Democrats are going to exploit.
Trump is potentially opening a new front or reopening a wound, if you like, on Obamacare.
They're now also, as we know, struggling with especially white suburban women.
What is an issue that is not going to be a winning issue with white suburban women?
Working women?
Independent women?
Single mothers?
Divorced women?
Doing away with no-fault divorce.
Which is why mainstream GOP folks are not, you know, they're not coming out and engaging this and embracing it.
But I wonder, given we talk about this, other analysts talk about this, given the nature of GOP primaries and you have to push like, you always have to tack further and further and further to the right to be able to win a primary.
How long is it before somebody has to start cozying up with these right wing figures who are advocating for no fault divorce and say that they support this and it's going to wind its way into GOP platforms, right?
So two big scores, I think, that the Republicans have given to the Democrats this week by opening these things up.
Let me try to tie them all together.
How does it line up?
How does it tie in with mainstream GOP figures?
Wait for it.
His name is Mike Johnson.
Guess who has been a huge opponent of no-fault divorce for a very long time?
Mike Johnson.
Why?
Because as we've talked about, Mike Johnson is a long-standing figure on the religious right.
Okay?
He is also, and this for me is where everything sort of ties together.
Mike Johnson, everybody knows this about me by now, right?
The reason I always talk about Florida is I think Florida is like a microcosm of bigger things, right?
I talk about people like DeSantis or Trump because I think they're a microcosm of bigger things.
I talk about Mike Johnson because I think he is a microcosm of something bigger.
I was, as you say, I was at the American Academy of Religion this week, and I had talks with lots of other people who study religion, and to any of those people who are listening to this, thank you.
I was really sort of humbled by the number of other academics who listen to what we do.
But people would ask me this, Brad, they would say, is there still a religious right?
Like, what happened to that?
That's what we used to talk about.
That's what I grew up with.
And is it gone?
Has it been replaced by MAGA?
And people who listen to our podcast know that that's not our position.
It's certainly not my position.
The MAGA Republicans have incorporated the religious right.
MAGA is, for me, the political ideology of the religious right and has long been.
You do great work on sort of the history of this.
You just invoked Falwell, right?
Falwell would be right in line with everything that Trump and the current crowd are doing now.
Why do I bring all that up?
Because you have Mike Johnson, who supports that.
We know that he supports Trump in his election denialism, right?
Has been doing this.
And then it comes out this week that he wrote the foreword to a book that was published in 2022.
That's not a long time ago, right?
This isn't long before he met Trump.
This isn't before 2016.
This isn't in some time long ago when he was, you know, part of the religious right and then he left that behind for political power or something like that.
He wrote the foreword to a book called The Revivalist Manifesto by a Louisiana politics blogger that is just churning with conspiracy theories, lots of homophobic rhetoric, and so forth.
He also endorsed this book on social media.
He expressed his support for it on podcasts and in interviews.
And I'm reading from a CNN article about this.
This is about the book.
It says, the book gives credence to unfounded conspiracy theories often embraced by the far right, including the Pizzagate hoax, which falsely claimed top Democratic officials were involved in a pedophile ring, among other conspiracies.
The book also propagates baseless and inaccurate claims implying that the Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts Was subjected to blackmail and connected to the disgraced underage sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
Other sections of the book defend podcaster Joe Rogan from racism charges after it was revealed he used the N-word, which Rogan later apologized for.
Rogan himself had to stop denying that he said this.
The book also disparages poor voters as, quote, unsophisticated and susceptible to government dependency, end quote, and says that they are easy to manipulate with, quote, Black Lives Matter defunding police pandering, end quote, right?
So this is the kind of stuff that the book says.
What does Mike Johnson have to say about it in his foreword?
He says, quote, Scott McKay presents a valuable and timely contribution with a revivalist manifesto because he has managed here to articulate well what millions of conscientious, freedom-loving Americans are sensing.
In an interview, he said, I obviously believe in the product or I wouldn't have written the foreword, so I endorse the work.
So when somebody says, Mike Johnson endorsed the book, he literally said, I endorse the work.
Why does all of that matter?
What does it mean?
What it shows for me is, again, this merging.
He is forever a part of the religious right.
The stuff in this book about the homophobia and so forth, that is vintage religious right stuff.
The conspiracy stuff, all of that is vintage MAGA, contemporary racist, contemporary conspiracism stuff.
And once again, in Mike Johnson, they are perfectly merged.
Why do I talk about Mike Johnson?
Because I think he is the figure of the contemporary GOP.
So when you get things like a long-standing animosity toward no-fault divorce on the religious right, Guess what?
There's the contemporary GOP.
When you get the nationalism of contemporary MAGA Republicans, oh, well, there you go.
That's the contemporary GOP.
You talked about that with Kissinger, right?
All of these things flow together, and I feel like somebody like Mike Johnson Absolutely demonstrates that.
So what I see this week, if we stir all of this together, right, the Kissinger stuff, what I see is just strategic missteps by the GOP and the kinds of things that they're advocating.
What I see is a mainstreaming of all of that in somebody like Mike Johnson in the House is just this ongoing Recognition, I guess, or for some a revelation that no, the religious right hasn't gone anywhere.
MAGA is not something new.
MAGA is a trajectory and a movement that the right in America has been moving toward for a very, very long time.
I will also just point out that Mike Johnson now says that he hadn't read the pages that were highlighted by CNN.
So when he said, I obviously believe in the product or I wouldn't have written the foreword, he was either lying then or he's lying now.
So either way, Mike Johnson is a big fat liar.
He's actually not big or fat, but he is a liar.
So with that intelligent closing comment, I'll throw it your way for thoughts on that sort of sprawling just mix of stuff that I think just shows us where we're at.
Well, I want to take it a little bit of a different direction and I want to take it in this direction.
As you recounted, repealing Obamacare was not a popular position and it still is not.
I remember staying up late, I lived in D.C.
at the time, to watch John McCain put his finger down and essentially block that.
That was not a popular thing and it still remains to be unpopular.
Overturning Roe.
Unpopular, right?
Nearly 70% of Americans want there to be abortion of some kind in this country and in their state, okay?
I don't have the numbers in front of me, so I don't.
I'm just disclaimer.
I just kind of think if we polled, the no-fault divorce issue might be unpopular with 70% to 80%, 90%.
I don't know what the numbers are.
I'm just going to say, I focus on women, right?
There are a lot of men in the world, divorced men in the world, They don't want at-fault divorce to be the only option for lots of reasons, right?
People can imagine what some of those reasons might be, but I think you're right.
That's got to be as close to a universal sort of hope to maintain no-fault divorce as I can imagine.
Yeah.
Here's the question that some of you might be thinking, if these things are so unpopular, Why do they support them and why would they think that they're going to get anywhere with them?
And my response would be, I've spent a lot of time recently on this podcast highlighting the fascist impulses in our midst.
And what I've tried to highlight is that there is a group of intellectuals, think tank types, political philosophers, historians, That are openly talking about a post-constitutional America, a Red Caesar who will be a benevolent autocrat who will save the nation from itself.
There are people who are Christian nationalists and gladly welcome that title, like Stephen Wolf, who want there to be a Christian prince.
There are folks who are calling for a new Christendom.
Here's my point, Dan.
If you wonder why there are rising calls for a post-constitutional America, a new Caesar, a Christian prince, it's because they really do want no-fault divorce.
They really do want to abolish abortion.
And they are coming up against the fact that that may not happen ever.
When it comes to a majority that places like Ohio and places like Kansas and places like Wisconsin are going to continue to vote to protect reproductive rights.
I have no, I do.
Do you know who I would never want to be?
And that is a GOP candidate standing on a debate stage with a national audience trying to justify no-fault divorce.
I cannot imagine that uphill climb.
So if you know you can't win by the will of the people, you start to hear the murmurs, you start to hear the whispers, you start to see the white papers, you start to hear the podcasts about what would be better if we just like got rid of democracy and had a prince or a Caesar?
Folks are wondering about Project 2025.
We've talked about Project 2025 numerous times on the show.
Why would Trump take on Project 2025?
Because he would have so much more power as an executive branch.
The deep state, the policies, they would be sidelined and he could do what he wanted.
Well, that's music to the ears of everyone you just talked about.
Christian Nationalists, the Religious Right, MAGA Nation, however you want to talk about them, because they all look the same these days.
That's music to their ears.
So that's my takeaway from the kind of soup that you just mixed up for us.
What do you have in conclusion?
And then we'll go to something else.
Just one more aspect of what you're describing.
All the stuff you say about the post-constitutional America, the fascism, all of that is accurate.
I think the other piece of this is Of why it is that a minority, a numerical, excuse me, I can't spit that out, a numerical minority of Americans, wow that's a hard thing to say, why it is that they can claim to speak for quote-unquote the people is because it's something that I call minority majoritarianism, right?
It's the idea that for them, they're the real Americans.
Like we talk about that all the time.
All those people like you and me and those women who think that they should just be you know so liberated that they don't have to like have a reason to leave a husband or whatever or abortion they're not real americans they don't speak for the real america like the real america becomes this almost mystical reality
In which this numerical minority participates, but because they speak for the real Americans, there's this really convoluted sense in which there is a sense that they view themselves as a kind of majority.
And if there are too many other people who are not real Americans who just can't see that and will stand in the way of it, then we have to find some other means But if you're a minority and you're trying to claim you're the real Americans, guess what you're going to ride around with all the time?
The American flag.
of on-the-ground fascism things that you're highlighting to turn into this really potent and pretty terrifying mix.
But if you're a minority and you're trying to claim you're the real Americans, guess what you're going to ride around with all the time, the American flag.
Why do they, like, I know some of you are out there like, why do these guys with trucks and why go by my neighbor's house He's got a massive American flag and this guy's wearing American flag shorts and what's the deal?
Well, if you're a minority, but you're trying to claim you're the real Americans, You're going to cling to the what?
The nation's symbol is yours and not anyone else's, right?
So you can stake your claim.
That's why the American flag has been co-opted in that way.
All right, let's take a break.
We'll come back and talk about one more story related to elections and their certification.
Be back in a sec.
All right, Dan, I get asked all the time about a new civil war.
I get asked all the time if we're going to have more violence like J6.
And my response is usually to point us to local things that are happening right now that are already not just signs of anti-democratic things to come, but are anti-democratic things happening right now?
Instead of waiting for California to go to war with Texas someday, we should pay attention to the thing I think you're going to explain to us right now about an unwillingness to certify an election.
Yeah, so this got a lot of coverage.
I looked at some local papers and kind of regional news sites and things like that.
But it was also, I think, Rachel Maddow talked about this on MSNBC.
But in particular, in some areas around metro Atlanta, the local elections going on and GOP election board members voted against certifying those local elections, right?
Now, somebody's going to listen to this and be like, Okay, like I don't live around Atlanta, like it didn't impact me, and I live somewhere else, and I don't even know what these elections are.
But the point is, as you say, this is one of these local things that's happening for real.
It becomes sort of a testing ground for the kinds of things that we could see gain ground other places precisely because we don't all live in counties outside Atlanta.
We're not all directly impacted by this.
It's not the kind of place that's going to bring the kind of media scrutiny that the 2024 presidential election will or something like that.
So what happened here was, number one, numerically speaking, the outcome of these elections was not in doubt.
They weren't close.
They weren't contested, right?
But there were technical things that happened.
It happens all the time, right?
Somebody goes to the wrong polling place, right?
And then their name's not on that list or something like that.
Or somebody moved and they didn't update their voter record and so there's paperwork and questions about whether they can vote and this and that.
Uh, one of the machines isn't working.
You know, the machine over there seems to not be working, or you know, something like that.
There were check-in data errors, there were districting mistakes, there were minor machine glitches, right?
Things like this.
But because of those issues that happen in every election, I've seen them happen, right?
If you go in person to a polling place and you get stuck in line behind that person who's in the wrong place, but they're absolutely sure they're in the right place, and 15 minutes later the person's still trying to explain to them, and you're just like, I would just like to cast my vote and go to work today.
Sir, this is a Wendy's.
This is a Wendy's.
You don't vote here, John.
All right, go ahead.
Yep, exactly that.
It's those kind of things, but what they did is they took minor things that impact a few people and used them to cast doubt on the entire election process and used that to justify not certifying the election.
What is that?
It's a small lab test of How do we go about standing in the way of an election result?
And we see the boomerang pattern here, right?
We saw this happen at a national level in 2020.
We're still seeing the unfolding of that and the consequences of that, but it has boomeranged around so that now you have in the GOP a strategy that is drifting down to the grassroots, becoming a strategy used in lots of regular on-the-ground places, which will then become the strategy bringing the boomerang full circle
In 2024, when maybe it's not just outside the Capitol on J6 or, you know, in January trying to do this, when it's not trying to tell a vice president to decertify or whatever it is, it's not false electors, it's county by county.
It's district by district.
It's the elementary school five minutes from where I live, which is my polling place, saying, nope, sorry, you know what, we're not going to send our results in because we just think that there were some irregularities.
And in good conscience, we just can't do that.
Because that guy from the other district didn't realize that he was at the wrong elementary school.
We can't, we can't do it.
We can't certify it.
That's what we see.
That's the concern.
That's why it's getting national attention.
We're not the only ones who have talked about election interference as a strategy that will develop in the GOP and drift down to the grassroots, but it is something we've been talking about since the 2020 election, and we're seeing it unfold.
So, to your point, I think correctly, to point to on-the-ground local issues and say, there it is.
That's where it takes root.
That's where it becomes effective.
We're starting to see that.
I'm going to give you a weird example here, but I promise it connects.
You like to watch football.
I like to watch basketball.
Basketball is my only sport I really watch or care about in terms of major stuff.
And there's always these folks online who, they go back and watch basketball from the 50s or 60s and they're like, these guys stink, look at these guys, I could beat them now, right?
And there's so many things to say about that.
But basketball is one of those games, and I know football is too, and a lot of other sports where one team, one player will kind of Provide an unforeseen strategic breakthrough and then all of a sudden the rest of the league is like copying them.
And you know in basketball they say it's a copycat league.
So about 10 years ago the Golden State Warriors started playing a certain way because they had Steph Curry and Klay Thompson who could shoot in ways that were not seen historically.
They're two of the best shooters in the history of the game.
So when you started watching the Warriors and I remember when I did this in like 2015-16 in those in those years.
I remember thinking to myself, somebody who's played basketball his whole life, watched so many basketball games, I've never seen the game played this way.
Like, this is weird.
It's weird to think about how they're doing this, right?
When you watch basketball now, Dan, in 2023, everybody is playing like the Warriors did in 2016, right?
Okay.
What does that have to do with any of this?
What's the point of J6?
There's a lot.
There's a lot of people that were at J6 thinking the point is to stop the election.
I think Donald Trump was like, I should be president.
That's the point.
But there's a larger point to these anti-democratic strategies, and one of them is Teach people what to do next.
So do you think anyone in those counties in Georgia, Dan, before J6 was like, you know what we're going to do to get our way?
We're not going to certify the results.
It's just copycat stuff.
You use the metaphor of the boomerang.
It's exactly right.
You learn and you go, Oh, okay.
I'll go do that where I live.
Right?
And then you do it.
You, you, you do it in a slightly different manifestation of someone else.
Then they copy you.
And in a world where we have memes and we have social media, it's really hard to know who was first ever.
Well, this is a great example.
J6.
One of the reasons for J6 is the long-term play of teaching people forces that will undermine democracy legally and extra-legally.
And I think this is the perfect example of that.
So, final thoughts before we go to Reasons for Hope.
Just to stick with that metaphor, it's funny that they'd say exactly the same thing in the NFL, right?
It's a copycat league.
But what you'll often get Is in the NFL, it's always about loosening up rules for offenses because high scoring games make more revenue and things like that.
And you'll also have this thing where people are like, oh, they're unstoppable now.
But eventually defenses figure out how to catch up, but there's a lag, right?
There's always that season or two To catch up, it's the same thing with this on the flip side, right?
Are there responses to this?
Yes.
Will there be court rulings about things like this?
Yes.
Will there be clarity about what's allowed and what isn't when it comes to certification, etc., etc., etc.?
Yes.
But there's a lag.
We've seen it.
We saw it with J6.
We're seeing it still with the stuff that happened in Georgia in 2020, right?
So, I think that's the other piece of this that is part of the lesson itself is we can do stuff now and even if it doesn't work in the long term, by the time anybody makes that decision, It'll be in a rear-view mirror.
It becomes one of those things where we can say, well, you know, maybe we shouldn't have, but, you know, it doesn't do any good to look backward all the time, Brad.
You should focus on the future, right?
I think that's the other piece of this, is that there will be ways to counter this, but they're always reactive, there's always that lag, and I think that's the other real threat about something like 2024.
All right.
My reason for hope comes from last night's debate between Ron DeSantis and Gavin Newsom.
They debated.
Sean Hannity was the moderator.
Newsom walked into a booby-trapped haunted house that was a sort of Fox News setup.
And it just felt like you destroyed him.
I have very tempered and realistic and jaded views of Gavin Newsom.
I am not a Gavin Newsom true believer.
I do not think he's a real progressive.
If there's ever a chance to talk about it, Dan, with people over coffee or something, I'm happy.
And if the chance arises on this podcast in the future because he's running for president or something, I'll share that at length.
However, Ron DeSantis is a bully.
And there's another famous instance in basketball where Zach Randolph was bullying Boogie Cousins.
Some of you are like, what is he talking about?
And the ref was like, yo, Zach Randolph, cut it out.
And Zach Randolph looked at the ref and he says, where I come from, bullies get bullied, right?
And Boogie Cousins in the league was known as a bully.
So Zach Randolph was like, I'm going to bully him.
I'm going to bully the bully, right?
Newsome bullied DeSantis.
I mean, he made him look silly.
I mean, he said things, you know, like, you know, here's, y'all should go look up the clips, but he said things like, one thing's for certain, you know, he said, Ron and I differ on so many things, blah, blah, blah, here's how, but we're the same in one way for sure, and that's neither of us is going to be our party's nominee in 2024.
You know, he looked him in the face and he was like, I don't know why you just don't drop out, man, at least give Nikki Haley a chance to take down Trump.
And I mean, and the facial expressions on DeSantis were just excruciating.
And it was one of those moments where you take a politician like DeSantis out of a prefabbed political environment, out of the softball, out of the line of fire, and he looks so awkward and weak.
And don't get me wrong, this is not me being like, Gavin Newsom's the answer.
It's not.
But that was at least a moment of like, you can show this guy DeSantis for the very limited politician that he is if you get him out in open water.
And I think that's what happened.
So we focus a lot on, you know, obviously negative things on this podcast.
And so my reason for Hope, it's close to home for me, but I don't think it's unique, is that we talk about the Dobbs ruling and the impacts on women's health and abortion access all the time.
But I was reminded this week in Massachusetts, Massachusetts where I live, right, was one of the states that Reacted the opposite way of like the Mississippi's and the Texas's and the Florida's of the world in the wake of Dobbs and passed a raft of legislation to make sure that there was protected access to abortion care.
But one of the things that I hadn't realized or just thought about is that that included requiring all public universities to create abortion readiness plans for students.
And that was that was brought to my attention this week because this is the week they had to submit those plans to the state.
A lot of private universities have also sort of, a lot of universities were already doing this, but a lot of private universities also sort of participating in this because then the state helps them implement these or like think through like if they're in a more rural place and there's not ready access what kinds of resources can they provide for students.
I found that really hopeful in a time when we spend so much time talking about threats to health care.
Threats to access.
And I also think that for lots of college women or people who can carry children who are not in their home states, right, that oftentimes those universities or those other places where they spend nine months of their life every year can be a really hopeful place for them as well.
So I took a lot of hope in that story this week.
Well, it's kind of a selling point for those states, dude.
For, hey, come and go to college here.
I mean, Newsom said that to DeSantis last night.
He was like, I don't know what kind of presidential campaign strategy you're running by telling everyone California is a hellhole.
One out of 10 Americans lives in California.
It seems like you might want some of those votes, buddy.
Anyway, same goes for college, right?
It's easier to... Anyway, it doesn't matter.
We'll talk about it.
Yeah.
All right, friends, as always, so thankful for your support, for our patrons, for all of you who left reviews for us.
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