Weekly Roundup + Festivus (Brad's Version): Slavery, Stolen Elections, Civil War, In n Out, and Cauliflower "Rice"
Brad begins by discussing the news that Trump is off the ballot in Maine and what that means in the wake of the Colorado decisions. He breaks down why the complexity and tumult of these decisions does not warrant objection to them and why they are necessary in order to safeguard democracy.
In the second segment he decodes Nikki Haley's weak answer on the causes of the Civil War (and her follow up remarks), showing how she winked at Neo-Confederates and others in her answer. He references a fight over a Confederate monument in Arglington Cemetery as proof that these debates rage on in 2023.
He finally addresses an incident in Massachussets where a police office visited a classroom searching for a book that a parent complained about.
In the final moments, he airs his grievances from 2023: Mike Johnson, In n Out, Cauliflower "rice."
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My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Today here on a kind of hybrid episode, going to do some weekly roundup and also going to do my version of Swedge Festivus.
Not going to lie, folks, it's a kind of a hard week on my end.
I had a death in the family on December 22nd.
A very close uncle who just grew up with and whose house we had Christmas Eve every year, kind of a central time for my family to celebrate and gather.
So for him to not be there this year was very different.
And anyway, it also meant that my family and I traveled from the Bay Area down to Los Angeles unexpectedly.
And if you've ever traveled with a two-month-old and a two-year-old and driven 400 miles, you know that that It is a thing, and it certainly requires organization and patience and all that stuff.
But we are home and we are safe, so can't complain.
And anyway, so going to give some thoughts today here about Trump and the ballot in Maine and Colorado and other places.
I want to talk about Nikki Haley's comments about slavery and then want to talk about some things that happened in Massachusetts with a policeman going into a classroom.
We'll then switch over and do a couple of Best of Us items, just like Dan did last week.
So let me jump in and talk about Trump and the ballot.
Admittedly, friends, my thoughts today are a little bit more A little bit more expedited than normal because again, just have had a lot going on personally and travel and all that.
So let me talk about Trump.
Today is December 29 and we learned last night on December 28 that Trump has been ruled off the ballot in Maine.
We also learned that the Secretary of State, Jenna Griswold of Colorado, Is leaving it up in essence to the Supreme Court to decide whether or not Trump will be left off the ballot in Colorado.
She's essentially sort of saying, this is how the Supreme Court ruled in my state, but we're going to see what the Supreme Court of the United States says about this.
We've also got word that California will have Trump on the ballot.
So what are some thoughts and takeaways about this?
It's all very confusing.
And I think there's some, some things that are worth talking about.
One of the things that you're going to hear over and over again during the coming weeks is that this is just a big mess.
And when Maine decides to leave Trump off the ballot, they're creating headaches.
They're creating trouble.
They're creating tumult and rift in what is going to be an election year.
And I think that you're going to hear arguments from Uncle Ron and from other people on television and anywhere else that say, this is just creating more division, okay?
I mean, is this what we need right now?
Isn't this just hurting the country?
And my response is, don't fall for that.
Don't fall for that.
Trump, in the last weeks, has been saying That he thinks that immigrants are poisoning the soil or the blood of our country.
He has talked about being a dictator.
And just this week, we got recordings of Trump and RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel pressuring canvassing board members in Michigan to not certify the election.
I mean, they're on tape, friends.
They're on tape.
So anytime anyone's like, you know, this is a lot.
Maine is leaving him off the ballot and Colorado.
And I don't know.
Our country needs healing.
Remind them of who we're talking about.
Remind them of the person that not only incited their insurrection, but who talks about being a dictator, who was caught on tape saying, don't certify an election.
I'm the president.
I'll get you a lawyer.
Who says that immigrants are poisoning the blood of the nation in ways that echo, if not like mimic, if not recite Hitler's Mein Kampf.
Okay.
I think that it's, it's, it's hard.
And I want you to think about it this way.
And I know for some of you, this will be personal and it will be difficult.
So I don't, I don't want to trigger anything.
I'm going to talk about family dynamics here and toxic people and, and, and relationships, but.
I want you to imagine a scenario where you have a family, you have a relationship, where somebody is overwhelmingly toxic.
They have created hurt and division and pain by acting selfishly, narcissistically, by not recognizing the humanity or the feelings of other people.
I want you to imagine the situation, whether it's a family dynamic, whether it's two people who are married or partners or whatever, And there's always this sense where somebody wants there to be reconciliation.
And I'm going to talk more about reconciliation when I get to Nikki Haley.
But there's always a sense where somebody wants reconciliation.
And that makes sense.
You know what, y'all?
It makes sense.
We all have these things in our lives, things that are difficult.
I certainly have endured these.
In my family and in various ways, you don't want there to be division or a rift.
You don't want there to be a family situation where people are at odds.
You don't want that.
It hurts.
It's not easy, especially around the holidays.
And it's just not fun.
And there is an impulse to say, we just want peace.
We want to enjoy things like a family would.
We want to enjoy things in ways that reflect that we love each other, that we're related to each other, whatever.
In those situations, it's easy to overlook the fact that there's somebody who is toxic, somebody who might be abusive, who has created that rift.
Now, don't get me wrong, things go both ways.
And when we talk about families and partnerships, it's different than talking about political people and all that stuff.
But the resonances are there, right?
Trump talks about immigrants like they're not human.
He thinks he wants to be a dictator, but he's kind of joking, but he's kind of not.
He's on tape pressuring people not to certify an election.
He incited an insurrection.
I don't care if it's difficult to wade through that Maine is leaving him off the ballot and Colorado is but they're kind of waiting on the Supreme Court and California and everything.
It is difficult.
You know why?
This is really difficult to have a democracy.
It's really difficult to have a democracy when it's challenged by a figure like Trump and a movement like Trumpism buttressed by white Christian nationalism.
It's a test to see will it hold.
Will it endure?
It's not easy.
And guess what?
Maine leaving him off the ballot is part of it.
So is he off the ballot in Maine and not other places?
Is he going to be left off the ballot somewhere else and here and there?
Yes.
We're going to have to wade through it.
And it's all part of the experience of having this Challenge by a wannabe autocrat buttressed by a ethno-nationalist movement like White Christian Nationalism and MAGA Nation to a democracy that is supposed to be multiracial, pluralist, and open to all.
So it's hard.
The year ahead is hard.
And part of the difficulty is going to be the ballot and the legal battles and all of that.
Now, other people are going to say, well, you're just trying to steal the election.
And Dan and I have talked about this, but I just want to mention it again.
You're just trying to steal the election.
You can't win.
So you're trying to steal the election.
So here's what I say to that.
You ready?
In 2016, Trump lost the popular vote by millions and he won the electoral college by tens of thousands.
Did he win?
Sure.
Yep.
But it was a slim majority and he lost the popular vote by 3 million people.
In 2020, he lost the popular vote by millions and millions and millions.
He has not won the popular vote ever.
He lost to Joe Biden in 2020.
So then let's talk about stealing an election.
I just want to remind everybody, if you get posed with that idea and you're sort of tempted to think, yeah, it's just kind of not fair to leave him off the ballot.
We can't steal the election.
It's, it's gotta be, you know, who the people vote for.
Isn't that what we should get?
3 million people more voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Many more than that voted for Joe Biden in 2020 than Donald Trump.
And guess what?
He already tried to steal the election.
He tried to overturn your vote.
The people who voted against him in places like Wisconsin, Arizona, Pennsylvania.
He tried to steal your vote already.
He's already told you, I don't care if I lose, I will take the election.
It is my election.
It is my country.
It's my presidency.
I will do what I want and I will be in power.
That's the least democratic thing you can say.
It kind of goes without saying it, but I'll just say it.
If somebody shows up to a democracy and says, I will be in power no matter if you vote for me or not, that's literally the antithesis of democracy, and he already tried it.
He already tried to steal your election.
We know this.
You know why?
Because last week, we caught him on tape telling people in Michigan, don't certify the votes.
Before that, I don't know, you all heard the recording?
Hey, I just need 11,000 votes.
Mr. Raffensperger in Georgia, can you find me those?
We're going to go down to the Capitol and we're going to talk to those Congress people, some of whom we may not like.
That's what he said at the Ellipse on January 6th.
Friends, he already tried to steal the election.
So when your uncle, or the person at your kid's soccer game, or whoever's on your Facebook wall is like, you guys can't win, so you just won't let him on the ballot.
That's what this is.
Remind them, he's never won a popular vote.
He lost in 2020.
And when he lost, he tried to steal the election.
He's never accepted that the election is one that he lost.
Period.
So I talked with Andrew Seidel about this.
And if you haven't listened to that episode, go back and listen to it.
I did that last week, last Wednesday.
He explained why he as a constitutional lawyer thinks this is the right decision to leave him off the ballot.
He talked about it.
He explained it.
So if you're not convinced, listen to that episode.
I'm going to leave this here for now.
All right.
Let's talk about Nikki Haley.
Nikki Haley was asked about the civil war and what that was about.
And, uh, she was asked if, if the civil war was about slavery.
Okay.
Um, what caused the civil war?
Nikki Haley, you're the person who's running for president.
You are second in the polls and the GOP primary to Donald Trump.
And you're the former governor of South Carolina.
She said that the causes of the Civil War, well, that's a difficult question.
And then she answered, that's basically about, this is her answer, what caused the Civil War?
Basically, it was about how government was going to run, the freedoms and what people could and couldn't do.
Okay.
Now, let's be fair.
Haley has qualified the comment now.
She went on the radio in New Hampshire, and she said this.
Of course the Civil War was about slavery.
We know that.
That's unquestioned.
Always the case.
We know the Civil War is about slavery, but it was also more than that.
It was about the freedoms of every individual.
It was about the role of government.
Okay.
So you're like, Brad, leave her alone.
She apologized.
It's good.
She recognized she was wrong.
You need to realize that sometimes people apologize.
They know that they messed up and they say sorry.
Here's why, if I read between the lines, to me this is an answer that is coded in a way that leaves the door open for people who want to believe in the lost cause and the Confederacy's legitimacy and superiority are going to really love this answer.
We know the Civil War was about slavery, but it was also more than that.
It was about the freedoms of every individual.
It was about the role of government.
This is code, y'all.
I know Dan is the it's-in-the-code man, but I'm gonna do that right now.
So it was about slavery.
So she's basically saying, hey, national press, hey, CBS, hey, Slate and New York Times, you gotta get off my back.
You gotta publish a headline that says, Nikki Haley addresses criticism about Civil War remarks.
And go ahead and Google it right now.
You're going to see 88 articles.
And basically, if you only read the headline, you're like, all right, yeah, she, she addressed it.
She probably knew she was wrong.
I'm going to go like, look at something else now.
Scroll Instagram.
What's over here?
Who's doing a dance on TikTok?
Great.
Good.
But it was also more than that.
It was about the freedoms of every individual.
It was about the role of government.
If you are a pro-Confederacy, lost cause person, you're like, OK, all right, Nikki Haley, we see you.
Because you're saying that the Civil War was about the freedoms of every individual.
It was about the role of government.
If you followed my work, you know that I have been somebody who's compared the lost cause from the South to Maga Nation.
And I wrote about it in the New York Times two weeks after the insurrection.
And the Lost Cause mythology of the South goes like this.
The Civil War was an invasion by Yankee vandals.
That's a phrase from Caroline Janney, a historian at the University of Virginia.
And so the South, the Confederacy, occupied the moral high ground in the conflict.
It was a class of honorable and loyal families who defended their soil and way of life in the face of undue northern aggression.
Was slavery part of the war?
Sure.
But that was a pretext for political and economic power grab.
And this is it right here.
Slavery was part of it, but that was a pretext.
So when Haley says it was about the freedoms of every individual, it was about the role of government, they're like, yeah, slavery, sure, but the real issue was about states' rights, local control, getting the federal government, the union, the northerners out of our lives, okay?
And it was, it was enacted through rituals, right?
This myth of the Confederacy as a superior society, this myth of the Confederacy as attacked by a North that wanted its land and its resources and to tell it what to do and to change its way of life.
There were rituals, right?
They had funerals of Confederate soldiers.
They celebrated Confederate Memorial Day.
Long after the Civil War had ended.
The Civil War ends in 1865, but they made pilgrimages to the Confederate monuments that were erected at the dawn of World War I. And this gave younger generations, generations that did not live through the Civil War, a story to live out.
One that still is with us today.
People still believing this idea of the myth of the South as the lost cause of a great society.
Of an agrarian culture.
Of a superior way of life.
This was of course combined with Christian myth.
They saw the South as crucified yet unrisen like Christ.
Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were the saints.
And as Paul Harvey says, key to this mythology was the exalting of Southern war heroes as Christian evangelical gentlemen.
Evangelists of the New South era immortalized the Christian heroism of the Confederate leaders and soldiers and dovetailed them into revivals of the era.
It's worth pointing out that this, uh, continues today.
It's not over.
What Nikki Haley did in her, uh, in her little answer and her addressing of the remarks and all those things is simply, uh, give voice to something that is still alive and well today.
Just in the past few weeks, there has been a debate over A monument at Arlington National Cemetery.
A debate about taking down a Confederate monument at Arlington, the place that is of course revered for its being a burial ground for military veterans and heroes of the United States, not of the Confederacy.
Clint Smith wrote about this for the Atlantic, and he talked about how the monument was coming down amidst this debate and this argument.
Now, if you're on X, also known as Twitter, you might have seen some of the debate.
You might have seen people saying that when you tear down the Confederate monument, you tear down a symbol of reconciliation, that this is a travesty, that you desecrate the lives of those who lost their lives for the Confederacy.
In the Civil War.
And you see folks lamenting it, saying that this is a great threat to people who revere those men who died in the Civil War.
Here's a little bit of background about that monument.
The statue was paid for and erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a group of southern white women who were the wives, widows, and descendants of Confederate soldiers, writes Clint Smith in The Atlantic.
The organization was responsible for erecting hundreds of Confederate monuments across the country in the late 19th and 20th centuries.
This monument was built by Moses Jacob Ezekiel, a former soldier in the Confederate Army, and unveiled by President Woodrow Wilson on June 4, 1914.
Friends, that's a full 49 years after the Civil War ended.
This was not 1866, 1870, 1875.
This was people 50 years later trying to do something in the present to give a certain vision of the country.
Woodrow Wilson, not to go on a tangent, but just to say Woodrow Wilson was, of course, the president who screened the film Birth of a Nation in the White House.
Birth of a Nation was the film that depicted the kind of myth of the KKK as the great Christian organization that would protect the South and the United States from freed black people.
It was really, in many ways, the piece of art that gave life to the rise of the KKK in 1915 and then the 1920s.
So, Woodrow Wilson is a notorious figure in these histories, and he's the one who unveiled the statue.
Uh, now there's a whole bunch of things about the statue that are just really worth noticing.
One is that there are portrayals of African-American soldiers or African-Americans following their, uh, the people who claim to own them, uh, into battle.
Now, this is a part of Lost Cause mythology, that black people, that enslaved people fought for the South.
If you read the article by Clint Smith, if you listen to historians, there are so many resources that will tell you.
That that was not true.
That the search for the Confederate black soldier is one that yields no results.
Second, there's an inscription on the monument.
And Ty Seigel, who wrote about Robert E. Lee, noted in his book that the inscription was quite something.
So here's what he says in Robert E. Lee and Me.
So the inscription is in Latin, but in English, here's how it reads.
The victorious cause pleased the gods, but the conquered cause pleased Cato.
So, if you're not fully fluent in Roman history, and I am not, then you may not get the reference, but, as Sajo writes in the book, the historian Jamie Malinowski broke down the meaning for him.
You have to know your Latin history to know that they're talking about the Roman Civil War, that the dictator Julius Caesar won, and that Cato was pleased with the Republican sacrifice.
With that background in mind, the inscription is a fuck you to the union.
It's that sneaky little Latin phrase essentially saying, we were right, and you were wrong, and we'll always be right, and you'll always be wrong.
Anytime somebody says that taking down this monument is an affront to the efforts at reconciliation, there you go.
That's literally the inscription on the monument.
The larger point though is this.
We're still talking about Confederate monuments.
We're still talking about the causes of the Civil War.
We're still talking about the people that we should celebrate as a nation when it comes to that war.
A few weeks ago, I interviewed Ghislaine Schmidt, who is a professor at the University of Virginia, who was one of the people who spearheaded the effort To remove the statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville in the wake of what happened in Charlottesville at the Unite the Right rally in 2017 and everything that followed that.
Jelaine Schmidt chronicles in our interview what it took to take that down, why they melted the statue instead of giving it to another place.
What she noted there is that the only people that really wanted the Robert E. Lee statue were people who were pro-Confederates, neo-Confederates in 2023, who wanted to put the statue on a battlefield where they could simulate battles and basically venerate and revere Robert E. Lee as a great American Christian saint.
You wonder why we call this podcast Straight White American Jesus.
Well, this is Straight White Confederate Saint Robert E. Lee.
So Nikki Haley, if I go back to my original point, says the Civil War, sure, about slavery, yeah.
But it was really about the freedoms of every individual.
It was about the role of government.
And there it is.
If you're a pro-Confederate, if you're somebody who is bemoaning taking down this statue in Arlington National Cemetery, if you are somebody who believes in the lost cause, the South will rise again.
If you think That those who died for the Confederacy should have a public monument, that they should be revered by the United States, then you see a lot of room in Haley's statement about all of this not just being about slavery.
You certainly don't see a condemnation of the Confederacy, do you?
You don't see a, well, it was about one group who wanted to enslave others, and it was about another group that didn't.
You don't see that.
Let me just finish this point by quoting Alexander Stevens, the Vice President of the Confederacy, in his cornerstone speech, March 21, 1861, Savannah, Georgia, a speech that many of you may know already.
But here is one of the last parts.
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea.
Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.
This, our new government, is the first in the history of the world based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.
So anytime you want to discuss this with a friend, with an Uncle Ron, with a person on your Facebook wall, just go to the cornerstone speech by Alexander Stevens, Vice President of the Confederacy, March 21, 1861.
March 21, 1861.
All right, we'll be right back.
All right, y'all, just want to talk about something that happened in Massachusetts over This is from December 20, but I haven't talked about it yet, and I think it's worth mentioning.
So the American Civil Liberties Union, according to an article, The Daily Beast says it has deep concerns after a police officer in plainclothes entered a classroom, turned on his body camera and searched for a book someone reported was sexually explicit.
This is in Great Barrington, Mass.
And the officer was escorted by the school's principal and searching an 8th grade English classroom for the book Gender Queer, a Memoir by Maya Kobabe.
The officer didn't find the book, but police insisted they were obligated to investigate as a complaint came straight to them.
The school district apologized, everyone apologized, the ACLU got involved, etc.
etc.
All right, friends.
So let's just think about this real quick.
And I just want to touch on it.
Not going to spend all day on it, but it's worth thinking about.
We have a classroom in Great Barrington, Mass.
This is not the Deep South.
This is not an overwhelmingly conservative place.
Massachusetts is complex politically, for sure.
But when we think about a small state like Massachusetts, when I think about family members there, when I think about that state, I do not think of one of the states that is at the forefront of this kind of movement, this book banning, this school curricula takeover, PTA, Moms for Liberty.
I'm not thinking of Arizona.
I'm not thinking of Florida.
I'm thinking this is Massachusetts, okay?
So in Massachusetts, somebody calls the police.
So the police are like, well, the complaint came straight to me.
So here are the police getting a complaint.
Hey, I think there's a book in a classroom that's sexually explicit.
What's one response they could give?
I mean, I'm sure all of you listening can think of many responses they could give.
I'll just give one.
I'm sorry, person on the other line, but that's not our job.
This is really a matter of the school department, the school district, the principal, the teachers union.
The PTA.
There's a lot of people involved that are really invested in education, really invested in what's happening in those classrooms.
So we're going to leave it to them.
And if something that seems to be our concern comes across our desk, we'll certainly be there to respond.
That could have been the response.
That could have been the answer.
Instead, in today's climate, a police officer goes into a classroom looking for a book.
So the ACLU had this comment from Ruth Borkwin.
Police going into schools and searching for books is the sort of thing you hear about in communist China and Russia.
What are we doing?
I can't say it any better than that.
What are we doing?
You know, it's that time of the year when we reflect on things, right?
You know, life hopefully for some of you slowed down over the holidays.
I certainly had these moments because I had, as I mentioned, a death in the family and have had some time with family members and to myself to reflect on the life of my uncle and my family and what that all meant.
But it also brought up memories of my grandmother.
My grandmother on my dad's side died about six years ago and I remember having conversations with people when she died because she was born in 1920.
So she was born At a time of, right when women gained the right to vote.
She then was a young person when the Great Depression happened.
She was a young adult when World War II happened.
And as a Japanese American who had spent some of her life in Japan, you can imagine how complicated all of that was.
Well, when she died, I remember telling some folks, you know, that generation, Of folks who lived through World War II and the aftermath, who lived through the Cold War and Soviet Russia, who lived through the battles for control of places like what was known as Czechoslovakia and other Soviet outposts in Central and Eastern Europe.
They remembered authoritarianism in their bones.
They remembered fascism as a lived experience, and they didn't want it.
Now, that's not all of them, but here's my point.
If you lived that, you knew from lived experience it was in your body.
That having police search for books in classrooms is not a way you want to go as a society.
Because it creates fear.
It creates paranoia.
It restricts the ability to think.
To explore.
But it also makes people afraid of just having an imagination.
Having thoughts.
Of being who they might be, which might be genderqueer.
It's a really sinister way to conduct a human way of living together.
You can learn that from Soviet Russia.
You can learn that from Nazi Germany.
You can learn that from so many other examples from the 20th century.
And here we are a quarter of the way into the 21st century.
And my grandmother's generation is for the most part gone.
And the people who might have reminded us of the dangers of this way of living are no longer here.
We can read their accounts and their wisdom in books, sure.
But there's a new generation of people that think that I'm scared, I'm uncertain, I'm worried.
The best approach to making a better life is for us to restrict.
Is for us to send police to a classroom searching for a book.
It's overwhelmingly disturbing and I'll just say I spent the first part of today talking about Nikki Haley unwilling to talk about the Civil War.
In any honest way.
And Donald Trump, who tried to steal an election, who is caught on tape trying to steal an election, who incited a riot in order to steal an election.
And a man who's joked about being a dictator, joked about opening camps, said that he plans to expand the presidency, so on and so on and so on and so on.
Police going into classrooms?
Is the future if Donald Trump gets a second term?
I'll tell you that right now.
Okay.
Let's take a break.
We're going to come back.
I'm going to give you some Festivus items that are serious and a couple that are not serious because we need a nice pick-me-up.
So here we go.
Back in a second for Swatch Festivus, Brad's version.
All right, y'all.
So, um, I want to do Festivus, which is famously the airing of grievances, uh, from Seinfeld.
And I want to do a couple of, uh, kind of semi-serious ones, and I'm going to give you two unserious ones, and then we'll go.
Okay?
So one serious one that I have is with Mike Johnson.
So some of you may know that about a month and a half ago I wrote an article with Matthew Taylor about how Mike Johnson has the Appeal to Heaven flag hanging outside of his office.
I wrote this with Matt in Rolling Stone.
Matt is maybe the world's leading expert on the New Apostolic Reformation and he's really somebody who I just think is the scholar that I always look to when I need to know more about that movement.
And so Matt really provided his expertise on this article, and I want to give full props and recognition to Matt for all of his work and his brilliance.
And he outlined in the article that the Appeal to Evan flag is something that really grew to prominence in 2013.
A New Apostolic Reformation prophet, or excuse me, apostle named Dutch Sheets really took the flag as a sign from heaven.
That means that we don't look to humans or human authorities for our rights, but we look to heaven, right?
And so it really has become, if you read our article, it really has become a kind of symbol of Christian Trumpism, but also those who would say that the United States answers to God, not to human beings.
And it's a really scary kind of symbol because it's really a symbol of revolution.
It's a symbol of overturning what I would call America's constitutional government.
It's something that is frightening for those reasons.
And if you look at the footage from January 6th, you'll see many, many, many, many, many appeal to heaven flags.
People who were mobilized by Dutch Sheets and his cohorts to go to the Capitol on that day and to riot.
What we showed in the article is Mike Johnson has deep ties to Dutch Sheets and other New Apostolic Reformation prophets and apostles.
He is part of that movement in some sense.
And he has the flag outside his office.
Now, when we publish that article, Friends, I do this show, been doing this show five years.
I'm used to getting hate mail, but I got more hate mail from that article than I ever have in my entire career.
I got almost daily just many messages saying that my family and I should die a slow death and that I might be the stupidest person they've ever met and blah, blah, blah.
Somebody from Newsmax tagged it on X Twitter and it went viral and they just said, how can these guys, me and Matt, be this stupid?
So here's my grievance.
The argument that they made, that people who contacted me made, that the Newsmax people made, was this.
It's a flag from history.
It was developed by George Washington.
It was inspired by John Locke, and we say that all in the article.
And it's still used in some places in the United States, Massachusetts being one of them, as an insignia.
Great.
So how could it be a symbol of insurrection?
How could it be a symbol of Christian revolution?
It's not possible because it's from history.
So I just want to point out, because I'm not going to respond to those people on X and I'm not going to respond to the hate mail and I'm not going to do that.
So I'm just going to tell everyone here, one of my grievances is the stupidity of that argument.
Because symbols have a life of their own.
Symbols can become To represent things that they did not originally represent.
So the Appeal to Heaven flag might have come into life in the Revolutionary War.
It might be traced to John Locke and George Washington.
Wonderful.
It does not mean that what it symbolizes today is not Christian revolution, Christian autocracy, Christian Trumpism, white Christian nationalism, and so on and so forth.
The swastika is a symbol that has ancient roots going back to the Indian subcontinent and so on.
But guess what?
Nobody flies the swastika today and when asked about it says, well, why are you so upset?
This is an ancient symbol.
This goes back a long time.
This could never be the symbol of Nazism.
No.
Genocide?
Of course not.
No.
Fascism?
How dare you?
Of course, if somebody flies a swastika today, particularly in the United States or Western Europe, we take it to be a sign of Nazism.
So the Appeal to Heaven flag might have origins going back to the 1700s.
It does not mean that today, for the people who wave it, that it's not a symbol of something much more sinister, something much more menacing, something anti-democratic.
So that is my grievance number one.
Alright, grievance number two.
Semi-serious, semi-not-serious.
Is with In-N-Out Burger.
Alright, I'm from California.
If you listen to this show regularly, you know I love In-N-Out Burger.
I am...
Particular to it, I have started many arguments with my students saying that In-N-Out is better than Shake Shack, it's better than Five Guys, it's better than Whataburger, whatever you want to do.
And right now some of you are angry, some of you almost drove off the road, some of you broke the dish that you're washing, you're like gonna crack it on the counter and call me right now.
Alright, that's fine.
I grew up with In-N-Out, I'm just, it tastes better to me than those other places.
Whatever, great, okay.
But if you look at In-N-Out, and some of you might've seen this headline, they just expanded to Idaho.
People waited eight hours to get In-N-Out.
That's pretty extreme.
I'm not sure I would have waited eight hours to get In-N-Out, I'll be honest with you.
But you know, it shows that people love In-N-Out and they wanted to get it.
Now, if you look at where In-N-Out has expanded to over the last couple of years, it's a really interesting map because they have opened where?
They've opened in Texas.
They've opened in Colorado.
They've opened now in Idaho.
They plan, they say, to open in New Mexico, but they have not yet done that.
And there are some in Arizona.
So we have Arizona, Idaho, Texas.
Now, if you've read my book, if you've listened to this show, you know that I'm somebody who has tried to track for people the migration of white Christians from California to Idaho and Texas.
I am not lying when I tell you that I could go to Idaho right now and find a hundred people.
I'm serious.
One hundred people that I used to know from church or school when I was growing up.
So when I see that they opened in Idaho, my brain starts to think, all right, what's going on there?
And one of the things that's happening with In-N-Out and some of this is that In-N-Out is a Christian company.
It's an evangelical company.
And it's a company that, uh, was started by a family that had, there's a whole history here and I, I'm not going to go in all today, but it remains a company that prints Bible verses on it's like, uh, soft drink cups and other parts of it's, it's, uh, disposable containers that it gives when it, when it's serving food, so on and so forth.
There's been discussions of donations to the Trump campaign and Republican stuff, whatever.
But most notably, in California, In-N-Out was banning some of its employees at one point from using masks.
In-N-Out, in terms of its leadership, remains an evangelical company, a white evangelical company.
And In-N-Out has said they're not going to expand all 50 states.
They're not going to be anytime in Massachusetts or in New Hampshire or in Maryland.
But the next place they seem to be opening is Tennessee.
And guess what, friends?
Tennessee is a place that Californians, white Christian Californians, are moving.
If I went to Tennessee, if I went to Nashville right now, I bet you I'd find between 30 and 50 people I used to know from home.
And guess what?
In-N-Out is a classically California company.
So what's the grievance?
The grievance is they're following the white Christian migration.
Their goal is just simply to cater to all those white Christians who've left California and they know where they've gone.
They know that the white Christians have gone from California to Idaho to Tennessee to Texas.
So that's where they're opening stores.
Yeah, is that a grievance?
I don't know.
But it's something I think is interesting.
Some people don't care.
Some people are going to be like, this is not a big deal.
But I think it is fascinating.
And there are books out there written about this very topic.
And I may devote some attention to the kind of rise of the fast food industry and its ties to conservative Christianity in the new year.
We will see.
All right.
Here's my last grievance.
You ready?
This is the not serious one that I think is very serious, if you know me.
So you can just hold on.
If you want to turn the podcast off at this point, go ahead.
I have a problem with anybody who calls little bits of cauliflower, cauliflower rice.
It's not rice.
Okay.
Let's just stop with that.
It's not rice.
Don't call it rice.
Don't come to me and say, here's some cauliflower.
That's rice.
It's not.
Don't do that.
I'm an Asian American, Japanese American.
Rice, yeah, kind of a staple.
People from East Asia, from South Asia, from a lot of places have been eating rice, oh, I don't know, for thousands of years.
Rice is something that when I was growing up, my dad would sometimes, like, make spaghetti and meatballs, and guess what we would eat with it?
Rice.
Because we eat rice.
That's what we do, at least in my household.
And I know many other Japanese-American, Asian-American, Asian families, they do the same.
So when you show up to my house and you say, hey, I brought some cauliflower of rice.
It feels like you are trying to like incite me into something that is just not, you know, polite.
It's not rice.
Rice is something very important.
It's something very like, I, to give you an example, in my family, we only eat one brand of rice.
Like we, we have a brand.
And like during the pandemic, there was like group texts in the family about how we couldn't find it and we didn't know where to get it.
And it was a big deal because people were very panicked.
Cauliflower's not rice, okay?
So, do not call it that.
If you cut cauliflower into little bits, it's not rice.
You could say it might be rice, but even then, it's not.
It's just little bits of cauliflower.
Now, if that's your substitute because you don't want to eat carbs or something, great.
Good for you.
I'm very happy for you.
I'm going to go a step further and then I'll be quiet with my deeply unserious, festivist grievance for 2023.
Don't talk to me about how I should eat less rice because I should eat less carbs.
Like, my people have been eating rice for millennia.
Okay, Janice?
Alright?
I don't need you telling me that I eat too much rice or that we should really cut back.
I don't know.
It's a kind of time-tested part of the menu.
Alright?
So don't show up at the cauliflower and then give me some rice explaining about how I should eat less carbs.
Okay, we're good, we've done it.
We figured it out.
It's been happening for a long time.
A long, long time.
Okay?
I don't tell people to eat less potatoes.
I don't care what you eat, so don't tell me about that.
There it is.
There's my grievance.
Festivus 2023.
All right, y'all.
Thanks for listening today.
We've been hinting at this, but basically, um, we're going to have a big announcement soon about Swag and some things we're up to, and that'll probably come next week.
So we will do our best to make that happen for next week and things that we can share with you.
But for now, we'll just say, I hope you're enjoying the holidays.
I hope you're finding time to rest.
I hope you're finding time to spend with family, to slow down and to enjoy it.
We'll be back next week, but for now, we'll say thanks for being here.
