On the eve of the Iowa caucuses, Brad and Dan first take stock of two wild but related claims by Trump: He is immune from the law and chosen by God to enact it. Sounds more like a medieval monarch than a democratically elected president . . .
In the second segment, the two hosts analyze how Iowa, the center of American politics this weekend, became deeply red while its neighbors - Illinois and Minnesota and Michigan, and to some extent Wisconsin - have trended blue and progressive. It's a matter of an urban/rural divide with a racial element and a heavy dose of generational difference.
Finally, Dan digs back into issue surrounding trans care in Ohio and outlines the disgusting playbook anti-trans legislators are using there - it's a warning for the rest of the country.
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My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, joined today by my esteemed co-host, I'm esteemed.
I am the esteemed Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Always nice to see you, Brad.
You too.
I was going to make a joke about rice and cauliflower because I'm really angry about that still, and steamed rice is what we eat.
I don't know.
There was a lot of, you're esteemed and I'm steamed.
I don't know.
Maybe that's a thing we could do in the future.
A shirt.
Dan is esteemed and I'm just steamed.
You know that I do.
I do trauma coaching stuff, right?
So if we need to set something up in a more formal basis, just let me know.
Well, I don't really trust your expertise in rice or cauliflower, so I don't think I'm going to be signing up with you.
All right.
Friends, we have a big announcement today.
We've been kind of teasing this.
If you're a patron, you might've, you might've heard already.
So we're going to play for you a little announcement that we have about our show and just something that we're excited about and really hopeful about going into the rest of 2024.
It's 2024, an election year, a year that will no doubt change our lives forever.
We at Straight White American Jesus and Access Moonday Media are more committed than ever to doing pro-democracy work that educates in order to activate.
We exist in order to help safeguard democracy from religious nationalisms, extremisms, and rising authoritarianism.
But now we need your help.
We are launching a Straight White American Jesus and Access Moonday Media subscriber program.
Our goal is to raise enough support so that we can do more in 2024.
We have plans to do a weekly show on the ways that Pentecostal and charismatic Christianities are part of the Trump campaign and the American right writ large.
We want to make long-form narrative series about militant masculinity.
We want to cover progressive communities of faith in conservative spaces in order to show how the places we consider red states are more complex than the media will usually tell you.
If you subscribe, you'll get ad-free listening.
You'll get access to the 500-episode archive of Straight White American Jesus.
You'll get an extra episode every month, two hours, where Dan and I answer questions What you probably don't know is that behind the scenes, Dan and I have numerous jobs.
We do this podcast usually when it's dark, whether in the morning or at night.
The subscriber program is going to help us devote more of our attention and perhaps even all of our attention to this podcast.
We already published Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and we're committed to doing that, but we want to do as much as we can in 2024 to help preserve our democracy as fledgling and as fragile as it might be.
You can go to axismoondy.supercast.com in order to become a subscriber and help us fulfill our mission.
The link is in the show notes.
We appreciate y'all and we can't wait to take this journey with you and fight the powers that threaten this republic.
All right, Dan, there it is.
We have a new subscriber program.
It's connected to Access Moondi and to all the things we're doing.
I don't know about you.
My hope for 2024 is that we can do as much as we can in an election year that certainly will just change everything.
And I guess, you know, just wanting to focus as much as I can on this and on this podcast and all the things that we do here.
I think you and I are really bad at Selling things and getting, we're just not good at the whole like traditional social media.
Hey, follow, subscribe.
Hey, blah, blah, blah.
So we, we gave folks our pitch.
What else do you want to say real quick about our, our new program here and what we're up to?
And then we'll get into today's, today's weekly roundup.
I think just to echo that point of wanting to do things, and you know, for folks who don't know how much you do, I tell people all the time, you're the producer of Straight White American Jesus, right?
Like you're a content producer or whatever, but you do everything else and things that will help, just help us to have more focus on the podcast, be able to expand what we do.
Also kind of, I guess, feels like we're growing up a little, so that's kind of exciting.
I'm in my mid-40s now, and I'm finally beginning to approach some form of adulthood, so that's exciting too.
But no, we're really excited about it.
And, you know, if people have questions or thoughts or whatever, obviously welcome hearing that, but really looking forward to it.
If you're a patron, we sent you a message on Patreon, so please check that out.
We want to make sure that you're able to switch over.
It's super easy.
And if you've been thinking about supporting us, now's the perfect time.
It takes like two clicks, I promise.
All right, we're going to leave it there.
And like Dan said, if you have questions, reach out.
And I will, I'll say one last thing, Dan, is that we're going to be doing a premium episode now.
A two hour episode.
We're going to record our first one here in like a week.
And I'm like excited because I, A, I really only get to see you on Weekly Roundup.
You know, people think we hang out all the time.
That's not true.
And, you know, second, like we're going to hang out for two hours.
Yes, we're going to talk about important things.
We're going to talk about something that we need to get to.
But I think there's going to be more time to like Hang out.
There'll probably be a few more dad jokes.
You'll probably learn more about my fixations on rice and cauliflower.
I'll update you on the minivan a little bit.
And here's one of the best parts is like the AMA, like people are going to send in questions and we're going to answer those on air.
We're going to get shout out people's names.
And so I'll just say.
Send us your questions.
Start now.
Straight White American Jesus at gmail.com.
If you're a subscriber or you're a patron, send it in and we're going to answer those on that premium episode every month.
So I think that's exciting, Dan.
I don't know.
You may not be as excited to hang out with me as I am with you, but I am.
I was going to say, it's sort of a way to let our hair down, metaphorically speaking, since I have none.
I was going to say.
Yeah.
Metaphorically, if I had hair, that's where we would let it down.
We'll have intelligent conversations like this a little bit more often.
All right.
I'm glad you said it, because I was going to say it.
I think we're good enough friends that I was going to say it, and I'm glad you just said it.
Well, let's talk about today.
Dan, today is January 12th.
We are entering what is essentially the GOP primary.
The Iowa caucuses are supposed to happen here pretty soon.
There's a blizzard in the Midwest.
We hope all of you are safe there.
that may prevent that and may make it difficult for people to get to caucuses.
And so I think we want to talk a lot about Iowa today.
And I think Iowa we're going to talk about as a test case for a kind of polarization of the country.
We want to compare Iowa to some of its neighbors, Minnesota and Illinois, and kind of show what's happened in those states and how they look drastically different.
And the lived experiences of people in those states is very different at this moment.
So we're going to get there.
Donald Trump is leading in that Iowa GOP primary polls like by 50 points.
And so before we get to Iowa, Dan, Let's get to Donald Trump.
And a lot of stuff happened this week.
You may be tired of Donald Trump.
You may have a hard time catching up or keeping up with everything that's going on with Donald Trump.
But friends, we are in an election year.
That election literally starts now.
He's winning by 50 points in the Republican primary polls.
And this is what happened this week with this man who, by all accounts, if things were to happen right now, would be the GOP nominee for president.
Dan?
Yeah, I just want to also start by emphasizing, I think, I know we all have like Trump fatigue, but I think that's part of what benefits Trump.
And we've seen this since he first burst onto the scene of just saying the same things over and over and over and outrageous things and so forth.
And it normalizes it to such an extent that I think we have a tendency to withdraw and to stop listening or taking seriously how serious what he says is.
To your point that he's leading by 50 points, whatever it is, this week in my neck of the woods, Governor Sununu in New Hampshire, in an interview, affirmed that, yeah, he would absolutely vote for Trump if he was the nominee, even if he was a convicted felon.
And, you know, sort of articulated this rhetorical position that, like, why would that surprise anybody?
He's the GOP candidate.
Of course we would.
Which just shows that it's partisanship for the sake of partisanship.
So I think it's important to keep that in front of us.
So Trump had a busy week.
If we needed a sign that some of these legal troubles are really occupying his attention, and I think a real cause of concern, For him and his campaign.
It's the fact that he left the campaign field to attend court dates.
Apparently he's going to do that in some of his upcoming cases as well.
I think that that's really telling.
As you say, he's like 50 points ahead, so it's not imperative that he be out on the trail right now.
But I think that's telling.
So this weekend is fraud trial, right?
Let's start with that one.
The trial has essentially wrapped up.
The judge's decision on damages for the Trump organization is, most people think it'll happen by the end of the month.
Just as a reminder, and I feel like this is important because Trump keeps not acknowledging this either, Trump has already been found guilty of fraud.
He's already been determined to be guilty.
He, of course, will appeal that.
That's his right.
But he's been found guilty.
This is the sort of damages phase to figure out what what he owes for this.
And so the big thing this week that created fireworks, one of them is that Team Trump wanted him to offer closing statements.
This is not common in cases, especially if somebody has an attorney.
The judge agreed in principle, but He said there have to be some stipulations that Trump would meet.
He said Trump would not be allowed to essentially defame he or court staff.
We know that that's something that Trump has been doing.
Sort of said this is not an extension of the campaign trail.
We don't want to hear you complaining about the fact that you've already been found guilty of fraud.
That's not what this trial is.
You'll settle that in appeals.
Basically said you have to stick to the facts of the case and summarize that.
Trump refused to do it.
And so he was barred from speaking.
But after delivering their closing arguments, his attorneys still let him speak anyway.
The judge let this go on for about five minutes.
And Trump hit all of his greatest hits.
I think you'll walk us through some of those in a minute.
But he said that the trial itself was fraudulent.
He called it a witch hunt.
He played the victim.
He said that he should be paid for what he's suffering.
uh said kind of typical things like that the numbers were perfect uh and so forth so that was the first thing um led to reports of a bomb threat on the judge's house uh as a result that was deemed to not be a credible threat to have been an issue of swatting but this was trump with the fraud trial and the kinds of things he said i think you've got a sense of some of the specifics of that and The courtroom, of course, doesn't have cameras, but he repeated these same things afterward.
We know as well from court reporters what he said.
So you get the joyful task of walking us through Some of the things that he said.
I want to start with this witch hunt idea, because we're going to hear witch hunt a lot in these cases over the next couple of months.
I don't know if anyone is watching Fargo season five, but that's the one TV show I'm watching at the moment, just when I'm holding a sleeping baby or something.
I have about 20 minutes every three days to watch television, and so I watch an episode of Fargo every week.
I won't do any spoilers, but it's a great season, and I've actually considered doing the whole thing on Fargo Season 5 as a Christian nationalist kind of piece of storytelling.
It's really good.
There's a moment here where a Trumpian character in Fargo Season 5 says that he's the victim of a witch hunt, and he's a powerful
Man with an elected office who has a history of abusing women and a woman says in return to him, you know a witch hunt if we look at what that is is not when powerful men are persecuted for wrongdoing, but it's when men try to kill women for basically doing nothing and I just want to remind everyone of that as like pictures of Donald Trump from Epstein archives come out
And Donald Trump repeats the witch hunt mantra like every two minutes?
A witch hunt historically, if you've all been to Salem and you've read your history, is about hunting women who were deemed suspect or outside legal or cultural or religious bounds for various reasons.
Not elected men who held a lot of power and status.
So I'll just put that there first.
One of the arguments that, Dan, we have to zoom in on from one of the other cases this week that I think is really, really important.
So you talked about the fraud case and you talked about the ways that Trump used his moment to kind of whine and complain.
It's amazing to me when Steve Bannon and others talk about how tough Trump is, because all the man does is whine and complain.
I mean, I know this is basic stuff, But he just complains and whines all the time.
I've never met somebody who's actually tough, resistant, resilient, who actually just spends their days whining about other people.
But anyway, I'll leave that there.
In another case where he's arguing that he has immunity from what happened on January 6th.
His lawyer's pursuit of line of argumentation that went like this.
The president can only be held accountable by way of impeachment.
So the judge asks in response whether a president would be immune for having taken a bribe or for ordering SEAL Team 6 to murder a political rival.
Since those are criminal acts.
Trump lawyer Dean Sauer says in response, he would need to be impeached and convicted first.
The argument for Trump and January 6 has come down to the president is immune unless he's impeached and convicted by the legislative branch.
Donald Trump, during the 2020 election, could have told SEAL Team 6 to murder Joe Biden and he would not have been able to be arrested.
There would have had to have been an impeachment and a conviction.
That's the argument.
Okay?
Now, the reasoning here is that, and this is his lawyer, to authorize the prosecution of a president for his official acts would open up Pandora's box from which this nation may never recover.
If the judges rule against absolute presidential immunity, it would authorize, for example, the indictment of President Biden in the Western District of Texas after he leaves office for mismanaging the border allegedly.
They also talked about Obama and drone strikes and George W. Bush and Iraq and other things.
So I want to connect two things.
One is an argument that if you are president, you are immune until you're impeached.
And we all know the very high threshold of impeachment, what it takes in the Senate to impeach you and essentially convict you.
But two, let's run through the scenario, Dan.
You ready?
Let's run through the scenario.
Donald Trump, in 2020, in the run-up to the election, has sealed Team Six, murdered Joe Biden.
And everyone knows it.
He says it.
He talks about it.
Joe Biden was a threat to the country.
I had to do it.
Joe Biden did this, so we had to move quickly.
So now you're in this moment where like a political opponent has been murdered.
Do you know the kind of instability, the kind of unrest you would have in the country?
Do you know the kinds of like things that would be happening in our streets?
There would be protests, there would be rally, there would be uprising, there would be people who would walk off their jobs and refuse to serve that president.
There would be military commanders who were questioning whether or not they should be in blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
And you're telling me that in that scenario, a man who might be facing an uprising, who might be facing a revolution in the streets, can only be punished if by way of impeachment, which takes a long time, has a huge threshold, and is really meant for certain high crimes, misdemeanors, etc.
Now, I want to just connect this to one more thing, then I'll throw it to you and I'll shut up.
The same week this dude releases a commercial in Iowa where it's 2 minutes and 40 seconds of a narrator saying, Trump was chosen by God and Trump was created by God for a special purpose.
That God created Trump because he needed a warrior.
God created Trump because he needed a man brave enough to walk into North Korea.
Remember when that happened?
God needed Trump or created Trump because he needed a man who would be willing to go to lunch with him.
It's a strange ad.
Go to lunch with his wife and then work all night in the Oval Office.
To meet with heads of state.
Which is like so weird.
It's like it's midnight and he hits a button and he's talking to like Putin and you know, Angela Merkel or something.
Anyway.
Why am I connecting that?
Damn, this guy is saying I was chosen by God and I'm immune.
Do you know what it looks like if this guy's president?
I'm president, you can't do anything to me, even if I have somebody kill Barack Obama with SEAL Team 6, and God created me because I'm a warrior and I'm specially anointed.
We've heard that talk for years, from evangelicals, from Pentecostals, whatever.
But think about those two going together.
Dan, all of your training in political theory, about Carl Schmitt, about secularization theory, about the idea of the monarch as king, about the idea of the one leader as a divine leader, about the fascist leader taking off, taking a transcendent aura.
I mean, that has to hit you as somebody who spent years reading in these kinds of discourses.
So I'll throw it to you there.
He also called J6 rioters hostages.
Uh, he said openly he hopes the economy crashes because that would help him get elected.
There's a lot to talk about from this week in Trump.
I'll throw it to you.
Yeah.
So, I mean, we'll start with that, that logic of sort of undivided authority.
I say, I say on, so, so two lines of thought here.
One, I say on, it's in the code all the time, the bad theology hurts people.
The notion of imagining ultimate authority, ultimate reality, God, whatever name you want to give it, as Undivided, sort of indivisible power.
It's a bad theology.
It's been a bad theology since people first started thinking about it.
It didn't originate with Christianity, but it's been a central strand of Christianity for a long time.
Tied in with those who have argued for a long time that there are theological origins to the way that lots of people in the West have envisioned political authority.
And this goes for other cultures too, the notion that religious conceptions or ideas impact the way that people imagine human rulers.
The point is, what we see here is the notion of the president, and specifically Trump, Trump as president, as undivided authority, indivisible sole authority.
And you bring in the populism stuff, as Trump is the embodiment of the people, as you indicated, echoes a medieval political theory that said that the king had two bodies, the king had his physical body, but also that was the sort of embodiment of the state.
That's incarnational theology, right?
That's taking the language that God became human and transmuting it to a political leader.
There's even Reformed theologies that would argue that the Christian prince is God on Earth.
I mean, if you read Stephen Wolf's book, The Case for Christian Nationalism, he has this line of argumentation that's like, the Christian prince is God to the people on Earth.
And so, for me, when I see Trump being like, I'm chosen by God in this weird ad, and I'm immune from any persecution, I'm like, he's a Christian prince who is God on Earth, and we can do nothing to him as long as he has power.
That is the idea we're getting.
Yeah, it is.
It's just a transposition of a concept of divine sovereignty as absolute power and authority into a human political figure.
So I think it's bad theology.
It's always been bad theology.
It's certainly a bad political theology, and it's a terrible political theory, and we're seeing it unfold in front of us.
The good news is that as Trump was, not Trump, his attorneys were saying these things and it was, it really was, I just want to put out there like one of those things we could say is like sort of shocking but not surprising to like actually hear his attorneys because that's what lawyers always do.
You hear this all the time in Supreme Court arguments where the justices pose these kind of probing questions and they're hard questions and usually they've got some for each side or whatever Sometimes you can really tell that they're skeptical of one or the other position, but they pose these hard test cases, and the task of the attorney, usually, is to show that they can meet the standard of those test cases, or those test cases wouldn't apply, or that they're non-sequiturs, or, you know, whatever it is.
Here, they were just like, yep, yep, that's what it means.
The good news is that I think the court The court wasn't buying it, which was good.
They were very, very skeptical of these arguments.
One of the judges said, and I think this is excellent, said it is paradoxical to say that his constitutional duty to take care that the laws are to be faithfully executed, that's the oath that you take to make sure the laws are faithfully executed, that that oath allows him to violate criminal law to do that.
Basically said that that's contradictory, suggesting obviously that he's bound by law.
This notion, we know this, but it's worth remembering that all of this notion about the office of the president, his official duties, that's the real key here.
Prior courts have already found, and this is why it's at the appeals court, that he was running for president.
He was acting as a candidate.
And so he was not acting in his official duties.
He was trying to get himself to be president.
That's why Trump in the last couple weeks has trotted out a new line and said the election was long over when this happened.
By which he's trying to say the election was done, I was just trying to be a good president and enforce the laws.
And then you have the issue that he wouldn't be in court in the first place, there wasn't a question of violating the law.
There's nothing in the Constitution that suggests that you should be able to violate the law to be president and uphold it as it says.
It's also worth noting, I think, the Pandora's box thing of you would go after every former president.
Again, it comes down to that issue of official duties.
Everybody disagrees with presidential policies and things that they do and so forth, but they fit very squarely within the authority of what the president is required to do.
Last point to make about this, to this argument that he would need to have been impeached and convicted, you know, for it to even be possible to consider whether or not he might not be immune or something like that, I just want to point out the GOP and people like Mitch McConnell explicitly argued the opposite.
To not impeach Donald Trump when he was, excuse me, to not convict Donald Trump the second time he was impeached.
They said, this is a question for, you know, the Justice Department.
This is a question for the legal system.
This is not a question for us as politicians to settle and so forth.
So we get the standard circularity that we find on the right, where Justices will say, ah, that's a judicial or a legislative thing.
They got to go fix it.
And the legislature will say, nah, we don't really know.
We should let the justice system sort it out to leave it unsettled.
So a lot going on there.
I was obviously heartened to see that the court, all three of the judges on the panel hearing this, Seemed very clearly not to be buying the argument.
We all know that it's destined for the Supreme Court, where Trump basically thinks his justices are bought and paid for.
We'll see how that goes.
But it was a really sort of breathtaking piece of theater this week for all the reasons that you're highlighting, whether we're looking at it legally, whether you're looking at it constitutionally, in terms of political theory, political theology, a lot of different aspects to it.
So I just I just want to I want to make one more point about this, because I just want to hammer home that because something sounds absurd does not mean that it is not possible.
I want to get over the idea that, oh, that is an absurd argument.
Therefore, it would never happen.
Did you think.
That we'd ever have a president, Dan, who'd get up on TV during a pandemic and be like, hey, doctors, have we tried bleaching inside the body?
He did that.
Like, that happened.
I'm old enough to remember it.
Did you ever think we'd have a president who would encourage people to take Hydro... Hydro... Chlor... I practiced this.
Here it is, Dan.
Hydrochloroquine.
I think I got it.
17,000 people estimated to have died as a result of ingesting that as an antidote to COVID or a help to COVID.
Okay.
Did we ever think we'd have that president who thought maybe we should buy Greenland?
Here's my point.
Second term, Trump.
Something happens.
George Floyd is a good example of something that happens and it takes over the nation in ways we didn't expect or we didn't foresee or no one could have known.
Donald Trump sends in troops to California, to the heart of Los Angeles.
Donald Trump decides to do something drastic with the military.
Kills a bunch of American citizens.
The country is at war with itself.
You're telling me there's no way we can prosecute that man?
Friends, I'll just be really honest.
Do you want to live in a country?
Where the leader is supposed to enact the laws and hold you accountable to the laws, but cannot be held accountable to those laws himself, herself, they self?
I don't.
But that's what he's proposing, Dan.
That's what he's proposing.
That's what's at stake here as people go to vote in Iowa.
So, once again, he threatened violence.
He said if people don't vote for him, there'll probably be bedlam.
Uh, as I mentioned, he says that he hopes the economy crashes.
Uh, he called the J6 riders hostages, and Elise Stefanik did this too.
Just point out that when you say hostages, you're crafting a myth.
They are hostages from what?
An unjust government?
From a deep state that is holding them there against their will, even though they've done nothing wrong, right?
One word, hostage, gives you an entire narrative about January 6th and what happened three years later.
So anyway, there's so much more to say.
I want to get to Iowa, so let's take a break.
We'll come back and jump in and talk about the Midwest.
We'll be right back.
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All right, y'all.
So let's talk about Iowa, Dan.
The Republican primary heads to Iowa.
As some of you know, Iowa famously has a caucus system, which is very complicated.
I am not an Iowan.
I'm also not an expert in the caucus system.
I know the outlines, but I know that if I try to explain it, I'm going to get emails from Iowa and being like, well, you got that point wrong.
It's a little bit like the triangle offense that the Lakers ran.
Under Phil Jackson and the Bulls.
People think they know what it is, they really don't.
And they think they are experts and they really don't have much clue.
The reason I want to talk about Iowa, Dan, is there's pieces out in WAPO, New York Times, a bunch of places this week pointing out that Iowa has landed in a very different political place than some of its neighbors.
So if we just take the Midwest and you take the states of Minnesota and Michigan and throw in Illinois for good measure.
Now, Illinois is a little different.
Illinois houses Chicago, the third largest city in the country.
But if you take Minnesota, Michigan, Illinois, Very quietly, at least nationwide, in ways that might be under the radar, those places have enacted fairly progressive policies over the last, let's call it a decade.
Michigan is a place where Gretchen Whitmer and the state legislature are now one of the most, like, Democrat-controlled in the middle of the country, and are really pursuing things that appear, at least for this country, to be progressive.
I'll get to Minnesota and Illinois in a minute, but those places too.
But Iowa, as the New York Times says in a piece by Jonathan Wiseman this week, no state in the nation swung as heavily Republican between 2012 and 2020 as Iowa.
Dan, I'm not going to put you on the spot, but in 2012, And I'll let people take a minute.
Who won the state of Iowa in 2012, Mitt Romney versus Barack Obama?
And how much did they win by?
So everybody listening, take a minute.
Who do you think won?
It was Barack Obama.
Okay.
By six points, Dan.
2012, six point win for Obama in Iowa.
Now Trump won Iowa in 2020 by eight points.
Okay.
So what happened in Iowa?
As people head to the polls there, that's the question that some journalists and others were asking this week.
Well, there's a couple of answers, and I'm going to sort of throw out some factors, Dan, and I'll get your reactions to them as we go.
Here's the piece from the New York Times, and it turns to a political scientist named Susan Lane from Iowa State.
She recounted how an issue that once would have been handled through discussions at church or the Rotary Club instead became infected with national politics, with her husband, the Libertarian Greene County Attorney, stuck in the middle.
New multicolored lighting installed last summer to illuminate the town's Korean bell tower prompted an angry debate over LGBTQ rights, leaving much of the town soured on identity politics they largely blamed on the national left.
So Dan, I think if we want to ask what happened to Iowa to make it such a solidly Trumpian red state, one of the answers is cell phones.
In 2012, some of you are old like me and Dan, not everybody had a smartphone.
You remember the iPhone, Dan?
It came out in like 2008, 2009.
I don't think I had a smartphone until 2000.
I'm going to say, I'm going to call it 2012 or 13.
Dan is smiling because I think Dan had a flip phone up until like two months ago.
Am I right about that, Dan?
They fit in cargo shorts better, smaller phones.
No, I was also a late adopter on the smartphone, yes.
All right.
I won't ask you when you got your first smartphone, but my guess is it was deep into the Obama years.
So, here's my point.
I think you have a situation now where so much of politics is controlled by smartphones that we are shaped, whether it's at a PTA meeting in Orange County, California, whether it is a city gathering, a debate in a small town in Greene County, Iowa, about the rainbow lighting on a bell tower,
When you walk into those meetings, so much of the information people have is coming from them scrolling through a phone.
Right?
It's coming from the memes.
It's coming from the TikTokers.
It's coming from their Instagram Reels.
It's coming from the podcasts and the YouTube channels they subscribe to.
And so I think between 2012 and 2020, one thing I will throw out here when it comes to this issue about national politics and the local is that The national is now the local.
You can be in a tiny town in Iowa, and the things people are going to say in those meetings are not things they heard at the grocery store.
They're going to be things they heard Charlie Kirk say, and Alex Jones say, and someone from Monster Liberty say, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So, to me, that's one.
And I'm happy for your thoughts on that.
How does that hit you?
I think all of that's true.
I think all of it just fits under the category, too, of the echo chamber.
I mean, that's what happens with The instant access to all of this is it's all people, you know, getting things from people that they're following, from news sources that they're already looking at, from people on X or Twitter or whatever we want to call it, who are like posting things and like just Cyclically reinforcing everything.
I sound old, but the reduced attention spans and the not being able to handle or even acknowledge complexity of issues, all that kind of stuff.
You take all of that and yeah, you put it in your pocket and everybody has access to it all the time.
And I think you're right.
Right.
I think that the way that we access information, what passes for information, the media that purveys information, I think all of that has changed radically since 2012 and is significant in this regard.
All right.
So, some of you are listening, and you're like, well, that's true for everywhere, guys.
Come on.
That can't be the only factor.
And it's not.
And I actually don't think it's the biggest factor, but I did want to mention it.
Now, another factor is this.
An analysis in 2022 by economists at the University of North Carolina The University of Michigan, University of Chicago, other places showed how states with dynamic, excuse me, dynamic economic centers are luring college graduates from more rural states.
So let's compare Iowa to some places.
Iowa loses 34% of its college grads to other states.
That makes it 40th in the nation.
By contrast, Illinois gains 20% more college grads than it produces.
And Minnesota, you might be thinking, well, Illinois has Chicago, but Minnesota has about 8% more than it produces.
So Minnesota is different than Iowa in this case.
Now there's another thing here.
If more than half a state's vote comes from dominant metropolitan areas, as in the case in Illinois and Minnesota, states tend to be democratic.
If smaller rural counties dominate, states tend to move to the right.
We now arrive, Dan, at I think what's probably a much bigger factor in the shift of Iowa to the right than the cell phone thing.
And that is the fact that Iowa is one of the most rural states in the nation.
Okay?
So if we look at the statistics, and I did this this morning, and just because I am Brad and a weird little dude, I did this this morning and I looked it up.
And Iowa is right there in terms of being one of the most rural states in the country.
You have places in the Northeast, right?
Like New Hampshire and Vermont, which are quite rural.
You have other places that you might think of, the Dakotas, et cetera.
But when it comes to rankings, Iowa is really high up there when it comes to having a rural electorate.
What I would point out is that it does not have what you might call a really big dynamic target of a city that draws people in.
So I looked up some other numbers.
So Des Moines and its suburbs are increasingly democratic.
If you live in Des Moines, Iowa and the suburbs surrounding Des Moines, Iowa, there's a good chance that you might be College-educated, you might be somewhat affluent or upper-middle class, and you might be voting Democrat.
There's some really good statistics that point that.
But if you're in another county in Iowa, and many of those are rural or considered rural, not urban or suburban, the statistics tell you that you're going to vote conservative slash Republican.
Now, Des Moines is thus the kind of center, right, in Iowa.
But Dan, how many people are in Des Moines?
Something like 212, 220,000 people.
Okay.
And if you go to Des Moines, you're looking at some racial statistics that tell us that you have in Des Moines something like 70% of people who are white.
You have 12% who are black and not quite 7% which are Asian.
So 70% of the people in Des Moines are white, much less the rural counties surrounding Iowa, which are whiter, much whiter.
So Iowa has Des Moines.
Des Moines is only about 212,000 people and it's still 70% white.
Let's look at Dubuque.
Dubuque is 88% white.
So another, you know, larger city in Iowa, overwhelmingly white.
So let's look at the Twin Cities, okay?
If we look at the Twin Cities and the statistics about Minnesota, we have 700,000 people between St.
Paul and Minneapolis.
Minneapolis is only 60% white.
Now that's still a white majority, but Dan, when you walk in Minneapolis, 4 out of 10 people Are not white.
That's a sizable minority.
I mean, that's enough that when you walk around and you walk into a shop, you're not sure the person is going to be white, black, Asian, etc.
Okay?
If you go to St.
Paul, St.
Paul, Dan, is only 50% white.
Barely a white majority.
So it's half white and then half a lot of black folks.
There's a lot of Asian folks.
I know some of you don't expect that out there.
There's Latino folks, etc.
Let me give you a couple more.
Some of you just hang with me.
This is the moment in class where I'm like, I'm giving you some numbers, but I'm going to make a point.
So hang out.
Don't look at your phone.
You ready?
Illinois has Chicago.
Chicago's got 2.6 million people.
It's a completely different animal than Des Moines or even the Twin Cities.
42% white in Chicago, 28% black, 7% Asian, so on.
Let me give you one though that's a little bit more comparable to Des Moines and to the Twin Cities, and that's Milwaukee.
Milwaukee's got 569,000 people, so it's about twice as big as Des Moines, and 38.8% of the people are white, and about the same number are black.
What's the point I'm making, Dan, is if you want to think about the polarization of the Midwest and the kind of self-sorting that's happening, what you have is places like Minnesota and Illinois and even Wisconsin.
And I'm going to get to Wisconsin.
They have a dynamic urban city that is luring educated people, people with college degrees, people that want to make money and be young professionals.
And there are longstanding communities of color in those places.
So if you live there, you're going to be in contact with people who are different than you.
You're going to see politics different than them.
Does that mean everyone there is quote unquote progressive?
Not at all.
But Iowa is a place that is losing young people, college grads, is losing folks to these places and places you might not expect.
Sure, Chicago, but Minnesota.
Milwaukee.
Those are places that you're like, yeah, you know, that's not New York City.
But there's jobs there for me if I'm 25 years old.
What if I'm in an interracial marriage and one of us is from New York City and one of us is from rural Iowa?
Maybe Minneapolis.
Is like a good, you know, place for us to go because we're close enough to family in Iowa, but we can still be in an urban place where there's some racial diversity.
What if I'm an immigrant?
What if I have a family that's mixed in some way?
Here's my point.
I think you're really good at pointing us to the ways that the urban-rural divide Has always been laced with a racial element throughout American history.
I've been talking a long time.
What do you think about these statistics, the ways that these urban centers play into politics and the kind of what I would call self-sorting that is happening in the Midwest that are making Iowa and some states look much different than places like Illinois, Minnesota, Michigan?
I think I think it's a really fascinating analysis that they're doing.
And so I think so.
Obviously, there are parts of the country where there are lots of of urban or excuse me, rural people of color, like not everybody who lives in the country is white.
But there are also lots of parts of the country where most people who don't live in an urban area or suburban area, let's say a third of a million or larger, right, are white.
And I think that's what's playing out.
I think the two pieces that align here are rural versus urban and people of color versus people who are white.
And there often is that correlation, right?
I think every city in the country, if you were to, I don't know, maybe you can do this if you want to really geek out on numbers, make out some list of like, I don't know, the 150 largest cities in America and the demographics and so forth.
What do you find?
You find the future, right?
By which I mean, demographically, you find usually something close to whites being a minority.
The largest single group, perhaps, But not a majority of the population, maybe a plurality of the population.
That's what we know demographically is happening in the U.S.
We know that that's what lots and lots and lots of white people in America don't like, and it's what they fear.
Lots of data that that's what Christian nationalists really don't like and really fear.
But I think that it maps onto that urban-rural thing.
And I tell people all the time, we talk about it all the time, I still think Social scientists know this.
Political scientists know this.
Lots of people, if you live in rural areas, you know this, but I think a lot of Americans who live in urban or suburban areas really don't, even in so-called blue states, how conservative rural areas are.
You're in California, which has lots of rural areas, and lots of them are conservative.
I used to live in upstate New York, however, Dan, in a very small town and in a place that was three hours from Boston, three hours from New York City, three hours from Montreal, an hour or less from Albany.
That three hours could be 12.
Like, that's what it feels like.
Do you know how many Confederate flags I saw if I drove 10 minutes?
Yeah.
In New York, in the state of New York.
I did my grad work at Syracuse, a small city in All of New York is called upstate except for New York City.
It's a different part of upstate, but same thing, 20 minutes out.
I live in Massachusetts now, one of the bluest states in the country.
I live in Amherst, which is one of the bluest areas in one of the bluest states and so forth.
I drive by a straight ally flag flying out on somebody's porch on a daily basis.
I drive by pro-Trump protesters standing on street corners.
And if you go into what we call the hill towns, the area of the Berkshires, things like that, it's the same.
And this is largely, in my experience, and I've lived in lots of different parts of the country, This is one of what feels like one of the most universal things that there is, is that that feel of being in the country and the politics of it and the attitudes of it versus being in especially a major urban center.
And I think that we lose sight of that when we look at these big national maps and we look at things like, you know, red states and blue states and electoral college math.
It hides all of that.
It hides the fact, just to use another state close to my heart, Colorado, with, you know, very progressive politics now, the Eastern Slope and Denver and Boulder and those areas, and the governor gives a sense of being very, very blue.
But if you go out to the part of the state I grew up in, That is still, won't be for long, but it is still Lauren Boebert's congressional district.
Now she's carpetbagging to somewhere else now, but it just highlights that.
I feel like this just reinforces all of that.
I think it's a really great analysis of how some of those rural states are becoming more rural, which means what?
They're becoming more conservative.
And states that draw people to larger urban centers typically, it's not destiny, but typically tend to become more liberal or progressive.
There's a almost a centripetal politics versus centrifugal politics dynamic there.
Whether populations become more dispersed or more concentrated says a lot about their politics.
I just want to come back to Wisconsin before we move on.
Wisconsin, you might be thinking, is not, it's not a super Democrat, Democratic place.
It's a very purple place though.
I mean, if you look at, and it's been gerrymandered.
And so, again, I'll just point out Wisconsin is a really interesting example.
There's a lot of rural counties in Wisconsin, but you do have places like Milwaukee, Madison to some extent.
And Milwaukee's big enough with 569,000 people and it is diverse enough that it really does change the state's makeup when it comes to state-level politics, whereas Iowa does not have that.
And the second thing I want to say is none of this is meant to erase Those of you out there who are living in rural parts of the country, who are people of color, who are queer, who are not Christian, and to say, we see you, we know you're fighting the good fight, we know you're trying to find community and solidarity and to push back, and we want to highlight that on the show.
It's one of the projects we have on our docket.
If we can gain enough support is a show that really highlights the progressive communities in those places that are doing their best to resist and to organize.
So, none of this is to erase y'all.
Let me just say one more thing and we'll go to break.
So, Iowa, Dan, had a congressional delegation split between two House Republicans, two House Democrats, and two Republican senators in 2020.
So, Iowa gets four House of Representatives and two Senators.
In 2020, you had two House Democrats along with two Republicans in the House and two Republican Senators.
Now the government is almost wholly under Republican control.
And what does that mean?
Well, Iowa has some of the most conservative policies on abortion and transition care for minors.
It publicly funded vouchers for private schools.
And it pulls books describing sexual acts from school libraries.
That is some of the lived experience if you live in Iowa.
Very hard to get an abortion.
Hard to find care for trans youth.
Publicly funded vouchers, private schools.
We talked about what happened in the Iowa capital right there in the holiday season.
Let's go to Illinois next door on the east bank of the Mississippi.
High-capacity semi-automatic rifles are banned, the right to abortion has been enshrined in law, and recreational marijuana is legal.
If we go to Minnesota, pot is legal, unauthorized immigrants are getting driver's licenses, and voting access for felons and teens is expanding, and none of that is to mention Michigan, none of that is to mention Wisconsin, which just had some movement on reproductive rights and protecting it, and so on and so on and so on.
All right, let's take a break.
We'll come back and talk briefly about one more Midwestern city and kind of tie it to what was supposed to be good news last weekend has turned out to be mixed news at best.
We'll be right back.
All right, Dan, last week you brought us to Ohio and talked about Governor Mike DeWine's surprising moves on trans care for youth, or I'm sorry, care for trans youth.
And some things happened this week that mean it may not be as good as we thought.
Definitely got some emails this week that were like, hey!
Just when you think it's good news, it's not.
It was the classic thing where like, you know, we prep this and you put together all your notes and whatever, then like during that time something happens.
And yeah, so I shared last week Mike DeWine vetoing House Bill 68, which would have banned gender affirming care for minors and prevented trans women from participating in women's sports.
Praised him for listening to the evidence and so forth said at the time that I was not like, you know, a DeWine fan, but that I affirm that I now withdraw that statement based on what happened.
First of all, it becomes moot because the veto was overridden anyway.
But I think later on, like the same day, he actually went on to issue an executive order or a series of executive orders that severely restricted access to gender affirming care, not just for minors, but for all trans people.
So basically, and he even said, I think in his press conference, that it went further than HB 68.
So he vetoes this bill and then passes these kinds of things.
And what they would do, I'll go through what some of these restrictions are here, but two things.
Number one, they're going to effectively prohibit most trans people from accessing care in the state of Ohio.
They're still in like the comment period and all of that stuff.
Encourage anybody and everybody listening, you know, if you're in Ohio or know people who are, to be involved in that process.
But they haven't gone into effect yet, but when they will, they will effectively bar people from the care that they need.
In the other point that I'm not the only one to make this, other journalists and activists have noted this.
They took a page from the playbook of the anti-abortion activists, right?
Before SCOTUS overturned Roe v. Wade, when you had efforts to limit abortion by putting extreme requirements on clinics and so forth, this is what they've done.
So what it now looks like is that care for trans individuals, anybody, any age, would have to be signed off, not just by their doctor, right?
Not by their care provider.
It would have to be signed off by a psychiatrist, by an endocrinologist, and a bioethicist.
All three of those people would have to sign off on this.
Clinics providing care have to employ or have a contractual relationship with an endocrinologist and a psychiatrist, and then the endocrinologist and the psychiatrist have to put together a care plan, and the care plan would have to be reviewed and approved by a bioethicist.
I don't know how many bioethicists, like card carrying, you know, hey, what do you do for a living?
I'm a bioethicist.
People there are in Ohio, but I cannot imagine the workload that that would be, even if it were possible.
Why does it matter?
It matters because, as I say, it's going to ban care for most people.
It also, as I say, takes this playbook from the anti-abortion activists.
So here's how it happens.
We've talked about this before.
We've talked about this.
I've talked about this on It's in the Code.
This notion of what I call Christian health and safety, right, that Christians will target people And then they will appeal to their health to do so.
That's what they're doing.
They're saying, well, you know, gosh, I mean, if you need this care and hormones are weird and difficult, and these are obviously gender confirmation surgery is a super invasive surgery and so forth, you should just really have the best care you can get.
We're just looking out for the benefit of these folks.
But people have called out the lie on this.
Journalist Evan Urquhart gave this illustration, and this is what Evan wrote.
It says, imagine you have diabetes.
There are five top diabetes specialists in your state, but you, like most patients, get your care from your primary care physician.
The specialist provides better care, and their patients do better.
Now imagine the impact of a regulation requiring all patients in your state to get diabetes treatment from one of those five.
If you can't see one of them, your diabetes goes untreated.
If you're an ordinary patient, the most likely outcome is that you lose treatment for your diabetes entirely.
You don't get improved care.
There are still just five specialists, and they have nowhere near the capacity to see everyone with diabetes in the state.
It's a great illustration.
Perfectly highlights the point.
Two points that I'll make to add to that, though, is that, number one, this is the same GOP who's done everything they can to gut access to healthcare for everybody, right?
And number two, that this is the mechanism, this is intentional, to require greater care, but to make sure that people can't access that care.
I would not support these policies for any reason.
But if somebody was to say, we're going to pump, I don't know, 400, you know, Four billion dollars into developing our healthcare system and, I don't know, putting a bioethicist on every corner between now and whenever?
Maybe that would be something, but they're not.
So this is intentional.
Again, we've seen this.
It's the same thing they did to kind of eradicate abortion before the SCOTUS decision.
They're doing this now.
So I take back What little qualified support I had for DeWine's opinion last time.
Thank you, and thank you to the listeners who were on this before I think we were.
I had emails, like you say, as soon as the weekly roundup went out, I had emails from folks, and I want to thank them for this.
But yeah, just a really dark time.
Last point to note is this, this puts Ohio together with Florida as the only two states, like 22 states that have limited care for trans and gender non-conforming minors.
This puts Ohio as one of only two states to effectively regulate to the point of banning care for all trans and gender non-conforming people.
It was one of those times too when we recorded and then we recorded at one point and then we put it up like, I think I posted the episode like six hours later.
And by that time, it was like in that purgatory, DeWine had done some of the stuff and some things had happened.
There's been other movement on anti-trans bills in South Carolina this week, and again, we mentioned one in New Hampshire, so these things we will keep paying attention to, and we'll keep highlighting the work of those who do, and doing everything we can to make sure that folks know about them.
All right, Dan, let's debrief here and transition to Reasons for Hope.
Let me do that by asking you a question.
In all of my statistical mining this morning before dawn, I looked up the oldest states in the nation.
So, Iowa's up there.
Iowa's one of the oldest states in the nation, but it's not the oldest.
This is where I'm going to put you on the spot.
What is the oldest state in the nation?
This is embarrassing that I'm not actually sure.
I thought you were going to ask- No, it's not.
It's not.
I mean, why would you know this?
I mean, no.
I would guess ... It's not Massachusetts, is it?
What is it?
I would think it would be like one of the 13- Florida.
Is it really?
No, you would think ... Well, I thought Florida because so many folks moved their retirement, but Florida's way too big for that.
Oh, no, no.
I know what it's going to be.
I don't know what it is now.
Maine.
Maine.
It's going to, it's projected to be Vermont at some point.
Yep.
Vermont's like second or third right now.
So the average age in Maine is like 44 and New Hampshire and Vermont are right there behind it.
So yeah, not a place young people stick around.
And again, we could talk about this, but Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire don't really have any urban dynamic centers.
So if you're 24 or five years old and you want to get a business job or something like that, a lot of people move to Boston, they move to New York, they move I do a lot of things, Dan, at 5am.
I'm a renaissance man and this is one of them.
of the whitest states in the country and maine has had anyway i you know i do a lot of things dan at 5 a.m i'm a renaissance man and this is one of them all right what's your reason for hope mine is uh going sort of back to massachusetts Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, one of our federal senators, has proposed the Preventing Private Military Activity Act.
So there's now proposed federal legislation that would ban paramilitary activity, basically aimed at militias.
Why is it significant?
And I realize it's got long shots of actually making it through the House and so forth.
All 50 states technically have laws banning militias.
But we know that a lot of those are not enforced, that were taken seriously.
And so I find it hopeful that there could be federal legislation that would regulate that and that would ban things like Proud Boys and other groups that do patrolling and drilling exercises and so forth.
My reason for hope is this week there was a seminar slash teach-in slash hearing—hearing's the wrong word, but it was a panel I guess is the word I'm looking for—on Mike Johnson, Speaker Mike Johnson's ties to Christian nationalist movements and organizations.
It was hosted by the Free Thought Caucus, which is really a small caucus in the House of Representatives.
Uh, whose main players are Jared Huffman from California, who I've interviewed on this show, and Jamie Raskin, many of whom many of you will be familiar with.
They had Rachel Lazor from, uh, Rachel Lazor, I should say, from Americans United.
They had our friend Matthew Taylor.
And we, Dan, have the recording of that.
I think we're the only media outlet with the recording of that, and I'm going to be working to bring you some clips from that hearing and hear Representative Huffman and Matt and Rachel and others talk about Mike Johnson and why he is a very dangerous figure on Capitol Hill because of his ties to Christian nationalist movements and figures and institutions.
So that is coming soon.
All right, before we go, I just want to say thank you for your support.
We've always been a show that's kind of been two professors just wanting to help people understand things, and we're now at a place in 2024 where we feel like we have to do everything we can to educate in order to activate, connect the ivory tower and all the things we've learned and our friends and colleagues have learned with the grassroots, with the people who are organizing and doing their best to protect democracy.
When we ask for your support to become a subscriber, that's what we're asking for.
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Put in the subject line, AMA, and fire away.
You can ask us about everything from populism, to what brand of cargo shorts Dan likes, to what kind of mileage I'm getting on the minivan, to, you know, what we consider Derrida's greatest work.
Whatever you want to ask, go for it.
We'll do our best.
The answer and we're going to record that episode here in the next week.
Check out the show notes for everything.
Other than that, we'll say thanks for listening.
We'll be back next week with a great interview.
My second interview or part two of my interview with Tim Alberta.
