Weekly Roundup: "MLK Was a Bad Guy" + Fallout from Iowa
Brad and Dan begin by discussing the ways White evangelicals pushed Trump to victory and Iowa - and then dispel a bunch of myths about why White Christians keep voting for him. They also dig into reactions to a mainstream media source calling out Christian nationalism (hint: White Christian nationalists weren't happy).
In the second segment the hosts examine Charlie Kirk's characterization of MLK as "a bad guy" and his claims that the Civil Rights Act was a mistake because it signified a "refounding" of America.
The episode ends with analysis of the Texas National Guard's conflict with Border Patrol - and the Americans who cheered on migrants dying in a river.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, here today with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Good to see you, Brad.
You too.
You are back at school.
I'm looking at you in your school office, not your home office, about ready to start teaching.
I am.
And for once, I'm cold because I have these single-pane windows right to my left.
And people can see the nice hole in the ceiling that I keep forgetting to tell facilities about.
So yeah, nothing but the best for all of us and everything that we do here.
So we're recording a day early and I appreciate your flexibility.
We're doing that because I'm heading to the Twin Cities tomorrow to talk to the Humanist Society there, which I'm excited about.
But I want to tell you, Dan, last time I went to give a talk was, I went to Dallas in August and it was 106 degrees.
I'm guessing that the Twin Cities are not probably going to be in triple digits tomorrow.
It's going to be high of six degrees.
Dan, it's a hundred degree difference between, like I only speak if it is, Extreme heat or extreme cold.
If you are lukewarm, the Lord will spit you out of your mouth.
Book of Revelation?
Do not invite me if it's going to be 67 and I just need a sweater and a scarf.
And I'm the weird one that I'll take the 6 degree day over the 100 degree day every day of the week.
That's me.
All right.
So here's what we're gonna talk about today.
I want to talk about the fallout from Iowa and just what happened there with the resounding Trump victory.
There's a lot, I think, to dig into.
I mean, it's one thing that Trump won by 50 points.
I think we saw that coming.
I wasn't surprised.
There were people on Twitter that were.
I was not.
I kind of just thought this is what's gonna happen.
But we'll dig into some of those numbers.
Well then, talk about something that happened on television, which was a mainstream major news outlet person calling out white Christian nationalism, and guess what, folks?
They have received immense backlash saying that they hate Christians and should be cancelled and put in jail, and they're the worst.
We'll then go to Charlie Kirk's thoughts on Martin Luther King, which are disturbing to say the least.
I'll just tease it there.
And then we will get to some things happening on the border with the National Guard and the Border Patrol and just...
Issues we need to talk about.
So before that, Dan, I'm just going to say real quick, friends, we have launched our subscription program.
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We've gotten a couple already, but you can send those to straightwhiteamericanjesus at gmail.com.
Ask us anything.
Ask us about Mike Johnson.
Ask us about Christian nationalism, Lance Wallnau.
Ask us about Dan growing up in Colorado and how many times he was arrested or, you know, things like that.
I mean, those are the things people want to know.
How many ska bands I was in in high school.
I don't know.
We can see where all that goes.
All right, Dan, tell us about Iowa and the fallout from the caucuses there.
Yeah, so I'm going to go to Robert Jones and PRRI, friend of the show.
People hear us talk about Robert's work all the time, PRRI.
If you've never followed it, never checked it out, please do.
It's just, in my view, one of the best resources that we have for lots of things relating to religion and politics and American society and so forth.
But he put something out recently, and he kind of updated it right after the caucuses, talking about what he sort of described as the sort of a zombie theory about evangelical support for Trump.
And it was a great phrase, and we'll get into why he held that.
But what he was looking at was white evangelical support for Trump in Iowa this week, right?
And this was in the lead up to the caucuses.
As I say, he updated some of this with polling data, you know, entrance and exit polls and so forth.
And some things, as you say, some people will seem surprised still that so many white evangelicals support Trump.
I don't know how that's surprising at this point for anybody, but for some people it is.
But some data that he had, I want to dive into that just briefly.
I'm not going to throw all the numbers that everybody invites you to just, you know, take a look at this if you wanted to look at all the numbers and so forth.
But a few things that he pointed out that were interesting, it turns out that a majority of Iowa caucus goers were white evangelical Christians.
That's the first thing to note, that's a really high number, it's 55%.
They supported Trump at slightly higher numbers than other GOP voters, so a lot of consistency in the GOP generally.
Significant point is that those white evangelicals were slightly more supportive of Trump than non-evangelicals.
And more of those evangelical voters, those white evangelical voters, supported Trump than the other three candidates combined, right?
So you add up numbers for DeSantis and Haley and Ramaswamy and Trump, I think got 53 percent, was still ahead of them combined.
For reference, in 2016, in the Iowa caucuses, only 21% of evangelical white voters were at that time supporting Trump.
We know that number skyrockets into the 80s by the time of the election, but that gives us some perspective, okay?
So within that framework, right, no surprise, lots and lots of evangelicals within the GOP, a disproportionate number compared to the U.S.
population, and those white evangelicals overwhelmingly supported Trump.
Again, nothing that should be surprising there.
But Jones noted what he calls The resurrection of this zombie theory about Trump support.
And what he means by that is, this is what I love about it, it's this thing that won't die.
It's like a theory that you just keep taking shots at it and it won't die.
I am currently playing a zombie horror video game, and you lop off limbs and you take the shots and you dismember the zombies and they just keep coming.
That's how this theory is.
And the theory is the idea that Trump's evangelical support can be explained by evangelicals who seldom go to church, right?
Robert calls these white evangelicals a name only, or whinos, I guess that would be.
For me, we've talked about this.
It's part of what I call the, they're not really Christians argument.
It's the, all you people, you and Brad and straight white American Jesus and the liberal elite and whatever, you criticize white evangelicals all the time, and it's really, it's bad evangelicals, or it's people who aren't really evangelical.
They don't go to church They don't believe their Bible, they're not good Christians, what have you, right?
And he cites a January 8th New York Times article as one of the newest sort of iterations of this.
And I think, as I say, it reflects this concern to show that real Christians are not the ones, or real evangelicals are not the ones who are supporting Trump.
Jones also, at the end of the material, he shares a view that I agree with.
I think you agree with it.
I think we've said a version of this lots and lots of times.
And it's the question of—because what he's going to argue, and we'll go through this in a minute, he's just going to say the data doesn't support this.
The theory just doesn't hold.
So why does it hold on?
Why do people keep bringing it out?
His suggestion is, he says, that it, quote, protects a deeply held American assumption about the positive value of church.
I think he's right.
I've called this a cultural deference to a certain kind of white religion.
You call it Christian privilege.
I think we're all talking about the same kind of thing.
I think he's right.
I think that that's the issue.
So what is this?
I want to talk just a little bit more about this zombie theory that won't die and the fact that, as I say, it's not backed up by the data.
And Jones offers a great takedown on this.
And you're going to talk a little bit more.
He wrote this up.
That's what I was looking at.
Then, as you say, does an interview and we get the backlash and so forth.
But he's done really multiple takedowns of this.
But what he does is he breaks the myth of the why-no-Trump support that is white evangelicals and name only.
He breaks it down into two parts, sort of two claims that underlie it.
The first is that the overall drop in U.S.
church attendance has produced large numbers of people who identify as evangelical but don't go to church.
And the other one is that Trump support is strongest among that group, right?
So card-carrying, committed evangelicals, the ones who go to church and listen to sermons and read their Bible and make sure their kids go to youth group and all that kind of stuff, they're not the Trump supporters.
That's the thesis.
The first thing that he notes is that church attendance among white evangelicals, it's much higher than the general population.
So there has been, long term, a drop in the number of Americans who go to church.
Since COVID, there has been a drop in the number of Americans who go to church.
A lot of Americans left the church, literally, they couldn't go there many times, and they didn't return for lots of reasons that did not impact evangelicals as much as it did other religious groups, other Americans.
There has been a number who attend less frequently, but he points out that over half of evangelicals are still what he calls super attenders.
That is, they go to church more than once a week.
These are the people who go once a week on Sunday.
They probably go midweek again.
They take their kids and so forth.
And the attendance is 30 points above the general U.S.
population.
So basically, he says this notion that there's this massive kind of hidden number of white evangelicals who don't go to church, it just doesn't hold up.
The second part of that thesis, that it's these unchurched evangelicals, that they're the ones supporting Trump, what he shows is that it's actually the opposite.
Not just is this wrong, or the data is ambiguous, or it doesn't back it up.
It's the opposite.
The data shows—and we've talked about this, I know we write about it, we talk about it, Robert Jones is not the only person to note this, and people can find this data—the more frequently that white evangelicals attend church, and that's one of the metrics that people use to measure religiosity, is how often somebody attends religious services,
In other words, the more times an evangelical person tends to go to church in a week, if we consider that a form of commitment, the more likely they are to support Trump.
So, I mean, let me just say that again.
The more religiously active they are, the more likely they are to support Trump.
So, his point is, A pretty quick look at the data will dispel this thesis that the real issue is lots of white evangelicals don't go to church and these wayward evangelicals who don't listen to their pastor and don't read their Bible and they're not real evangelicals, they're not good Christians, whatever.
They're the ones supporting Trump.
He shows that this just doesn't work.
It's not compelling.
It doesn't hold on.
Why does it keep coming out?
Why is it a zombie theory that won't die?
Again, I think it's this cultural deference to religion.
It's this notion—we hear it from folks, certainly from evangelicals who don't support Trump, who want to tell us—I've been having this conversation for like eight years now—from the people who are evangelicals, theologically conservative, they don't support Trump, who want to insist that it's not their church.
It's not people attending their church.
It's not people in evangelicalism.
It's these kind of outside evangelicals.
There's that.
I think there's also within the broader media this emphasis on wanting to somehow explain away religious support for Donald Trump, that it's really about something else.
I think it shows that MAGA influence is not external to white American evangelicalism.
It is very internal to it.
It is very much a part of that movement.
I'll go further and just say, and this is maybe provocative to some people, this is why I'm so critical of white American evangelicalism, because I believe it's systemic.
I think it's a thing that harbors inside of it.
I say all the time that bad theology hurts people, and I think that mainstream white evangelical theology is bad theology.
And to the pastors and others out there who say, that's not what I preach.
I'll be like, that's cool.
It's what a lot of your parishioners think, right?
If we're going to talk about evangelical life, if we're going to think we're having theological conversations, we should get into the lived theology.
So that's all of that.
As I say, though, Robert Jones, you know, shares this information in lots of formats.
The case point of the cultural deference to religion, I think, is exactly what you're about to walk us into, which is the response that people have had to this line of reasoning from Jones.
So, I just want to make one comment before I get to that, which is, alright, 2016, Trump is on the scene, and it's starting to look like he's going to be a major player in this race.
If people remember, it wasn't like we thought Trump was going to win, even at the Iowa caucus.
As you mentioned just now, Dan, eight years ago, he gets 20% of the evangelical vote.
Ted Cruz did really well.
There's no contest now.
And I think there's just two things worth noting, and I'll be very quick.
One is support has increased.
You know, all the other candidates, DeSantis, Haley, Ramaswamy, they don't get combined, the votes that Trump gets.
Two, they know who they're voting for.
Kirsten Kobe Dume said this, others said this.
This guy has 91 indicted counts.
He is a convicted sexual abuser.
E. Jean Carroll trial concluded that.
He has been convicted of fraud.
I mean, we could go down the line.
Twice impeached, started an insurrection.
I don't know.
That's probably good to remember.
They know who he is and they're voting for him because that's what they want.
So I want to say not only do I not believe the zombie theory, I don't believe the transactional theory.
I don't believe the like, well, he'll give us the judges we want.
So will DeSantis.
So will DeSantis.
This is about we like the bloodlust.
Matthew Taylor noted this, and I want to give him credit, but there was a Trump supporter who said that Trump is both our David and our Goliath.
And that's an amazing quote, Dan, because David is the king.
David is the pre-Messiah sort of figurine.
He's the guy that prefigures Jesus, according to a lot of Christians.
He's the leader of Israel.
And yet, who is Goliath?
He's a bully.
He's a big, bad bully.
And once upon a time, he was the bad guy.
Like, he wasn't the person to be emulated.
He was the bad guy, not the good guy.
Have you ever gone to Sunday school, Dan, and heard the teacher be like, here's, I want to talk today about how we should be more like Goliath.
Like, that just shows you how American evangelicalism has changed.
So, I think that's that.
The only point I'll throw in there, I mentioned the not all real Christians thesis.
The one you're highlighting that it also undermines is they did it holding their noses thesis.
Yeah.
The theory that Christians all, you know, they didn't like Trump.
They don't respect him.
They realize he's a bad guy, but they held their nose because he was going to give them judges or whatever.
I'm with you.
I think that that theory is also just completely bogus.
After the results came in, or actually as the results were coming in for the Iowa caucuses, Joy Reid was on, and she frequently has Robbie Jones on to talk, and he talked about everything you just mentioned, Dan, okay?
And then Joy Reid, as she was sort of sending it to Chris Hayes, and they were about to call the Iowa caucus for Trump, went on about a minute long kind of rant about how Iowa is a disproportionately white state.
We talked about that last week.
Iowa is a disproportionately white evangelical state.
And therefore, you have a lot of people voting for Trump who are Christian nationalists.
So I'm going to play that clip for you right now.
But, you know, I feel like the important sort of data point—and, you know, Steve talks about it a lot, he's going to probably talk about it a little more tonight—is that these are white Christians.
That this is a state that is overrepresented—we're overrepresented by white Christians that are going to participate in these caucuses, especially tonight.
I today, earlier today, reached out to Robert Jones, Robbie Jones, from the Public Religion Research Institute, knowing that we were going to talk about Iowa.
And this is a hyper-evangelical white state.
And he said the following to me, Iowa is about 61% white Christian.
The country as a whole is approximately 41% white Christian.
And in Iowa, we're talking about evangelical white Christians.
And he said the following.
Because I asked him, what do they get out of supporting Donald Trump?
Because he keeps losing, he keeps delivering losses and losses and losses.
And he said the following, they see themselves as the rightful inheritors of this country and Trump has promised to give it back to them.
All the things that we think about, about electability, about, you know, what are people gaming out, none of that matters.
When you believe that God has given you this country, that it is yours, and that everyone who is not a white conservative Christian is a fraudulent American, is a less real American, then you don't care about electability.
You care about what God has given.
So Joy Reid, I agree with what she said, Dan.
I think she didn't have time, I'll just say, I'll give her credit, she didn't have time, or give her the benefit of the doubt, to go through all of the steps of the long division.
So here's how I would go through the steps of the long division in very quick form.
Iowa is like 87% white, I have to look that up, but it's something like that.
As you noted earlier, there is a large number of white evangelicals in Iowa.
There's a large number of white evangelicals who voted in these caucuses.
I think you just quoted us, over 50% of the people who voted were white evangelicals.
The numbers I saw was 55%, I think.
Okay, 55%.
So that is not true across the nation.
You're not going to get 55% white evangelicals voting in Georgia, or even in Texas, because there's so many people of color there, much less in California, Oregon, or somewhere else.
Now what else do we know?
Because we do this, and we study this, and we write, we research, we have read the books by Robbie Jones, we know all the PRRI numbers.
Something like 80 to 85% of white evangelicals score as Christian nationalists.
So if you have 55% of evangelicals who voted in the Iowa caucuses, and 80 or 85 of them would score as a Christian nationalist on various metrics, then it's safe to say that something like 46, 48% of the people who voted in the Iowa caucuses are white Christian nationalists.
So when Joy Reid says what she says, I agree with her.
And here are the responses, Dan, and this highlights so many things we've talked about on this show for so long.
So Benny Johnson is a kind of right-wing talking head, but he has two million followers on Twitter or on X. He says this, MSNBC's Joy Reid has on-air meltdown about Iowa having too many Trump voting, quote, white Christians seconds before having mic cut to announce Trump landslide victory.
All right, so there's that.
Western Lensman, who has 47,000 followers on TwitterX, by now most everyone has seen Joy Reid's anti-white Christian rant from MSNBC last night.
So just everyone hold on to that, that what Joy Reid said was an anti-white Christian rant.
And Western Lensman then goes on to post a video of Robbie Jones discussing these things, basically saying, hey, Joy Reid deserves our ire, and so does Robbie Jones.
Let me get to one more here.
And this, this is, well, I'll get two more actually, because there's, there's, there's just really good stuff.
By good stuff, I mean the worst stuff.
Joel Berry.
Joel Berry is the managing editor of the Babylon Bee, if you are familiar with the Babylon Bee.
Leave it to Joy Reid to paint middle-class evangelicals, the most decent, hard-working, law-abiding group of people in this country, as a terrifying boogeyman.
If she wants to know why people vote for Trump, she should look in the mirror.
Dan, this is like, we've talked about it for five years and he just tweeted it out?
Okay, so let's just go to Joel Berry and dig in for a minute.
Let's do a close read, a slow read here.
I'm going to stop.
I'm going to read it, and I'm going to let you just spit words, Dan.
Whatever's in your brain, just spit them out.
You ready?
Middle-class evangelicals, the most decent, hard-working, law-abiding group of people in this country, as a terrifying bogeyman.
If she wants to know why people vote for Trump, she should look in the mirror.
All right, Dan.
Just give us the reflex response.
So the first thing is, it's just math.
We're just counting numbers of people and doing basic math.
Like you literally called it division, right?
It is.
It's like, oh, if X number of people fit this category and you have this total number, like it is.
If X number of the population is this and you have this many people here, how many people here?
It's like a sixth grade word problem, right?
That's what they're upset about.
It's descriptive.
They weren't on there talking about awful threats to America and they're terrible.
And it's awful that lots of white Christians live in Iowa or whatever.
It was just descriptive.
And I think that that says an awful lot.
There's the kind of classic, you know, you protest a little bit too much here, right?
Like the reaction tells you that they know that there's something to this.
The other, you said, just spit out words.
I got more words.
Here's more.
The most decent, hardworking, law-abiding people.
We just talked about the support for the guy with 91 indictments.
Governor Sununu of New Hampshire, right?
Literally, like, where I am right now, New Hampshire is like two miles away.
It's right across the river.
Says, yeah, even if he's a convicted felon, of course we're voting for him.
You should know that.
We're Republicans.
He is a convicted sexual abuser.
Yes, yes.
Period.
Yeah.
And not even like, yes, he's convicted.
He's also on tape bragging about sexual assault, in case we forget that.
Like, just sort of on and on and on and on and on.
He's already been found guilty of fraud.
I mean, just sort of, so like, yeah, don't give me the whole, like, law abiding, whatever sort of thing.
Another piece of this, and this is a little more abstract, is one of the lines that you'll get.
Is somebody will say, well, these people don't identify as Christian nationalists, so it's not right to call them that.
You're calling them something that they don't call themselves, and so this is the real issue, and whatever, okay?
This is an issue that actually goes into academia and stuff, and you have complex discussions in the social sciences and things like that about defining other people.
Here's the thing, right?
Somebody's a racist, they're a racist.
Nobody walks around being like, hey, I'm a racist.
No, it's a pejorative term.
Nobody wants to be called a racist.
Nobody wants to be called a misogynist.
Most of us don't want to just be called a-holes, right?
Like, we don't walk around saying that.
It doesn't mean you're not one.
We all know somebody in our life who, like, is an a-hole.
They don't wear a badge that says it.
They don't self-identify as an a-hole.
But you're like, yeah, by any objective measure, that's what you are, right?
That's part of this, too.
If you believe certain things and do certain things, like, I don't know, say, for example, that supporting a presidential candidate who tried to stay in office by usurping power and preventing the peaceful transfer of power, Because you think that that's the Christian thing to do?
Yeah, you're a Christian nationalist, right?
There's something Jeff Foxworthy-ish here that you might be a Christian nationalist.
So there's that piece of it too, and everybody's upset about that term sometimes.
And you're right.
We just said that a bunch of these people are Christian nationalists.
Cool.
Show me that you don't believe all these things, and I'll stop calling you a Christian nationalist.
Show me that you're going to stop going for the convicted sex abuser, the person who's already committed fraud and been found guilty of that, on and on.
Well, and the guy who says that immigrants are poisoning the blood of the country.
Yeah, the guy who's like channeling Mein Kampf at this point.
I mean, and I say that people should know this, right?
Not just to be, you know, incendiary or something.
People have looked and been like, this is like Hitler language.
Trump even said when Hitler said it, it was bad.
Like that was basically his sort of thing is that, you know, he said he was, he says he never read Mein Kampf.
He's like, but when Hitler said it, it was bad.
The implication being that when he says it, it's not, right?
On and on and on and on and on.
And what is the takeaway for the people who hear this?
Oh, this is anti-Christian, this is terrible, this is—when none of that was even part of the discussion, right?
It was just description, it's just math, it's just basic percentage.
If we know that X number of white evangelicals are this political persuasion, then it stands to reason that in a state with 55% of caucus goers being this kind of Christian, we can calculate with a reasonable certainty what percentage of those are Christian nationalists.
So if people get really angry about just the math, it's because they know all this other stuff.
They know it They want to justify it.
The only other point that I'm going to make is you also hear that anti-white Christian rant.
You also get this, how come you keep calling us white Christians?
I get this all the time.
Like, I love everything you and Brad do, but how come you always say white evangelicals?
Why do you make everything about race?
Guess what, folks?
It's about race.
That's why.
There's no hiding it.
There's no masking it.
People will try to be like lots of African American Christians believe the same thing as white.
You're right.
Indoctrinally, they do.
But you look at their social policies and how they vote and how they think about police or how they think about Social safety nets or how they think about the family or any number of things, it doesn't line up.
Whiteness is a huge part of this.
Naming it?
It might surprise you, Brad.
I read as white.
I think most people looking at me are going to be like, yeah, that guy's white.
It's like super white in lots of ways.
Yeah, yeah.
And I'll say it's about whiteness.
The support for Trump is massively about this.
So, the level of animosity, I think, should alert us to the fact that this is about more than, I didn't like that they threw out these numbers.
This is because they know full well what the numbers mean, and it's a reaction against that.
It's a reaction to want to preserve that cultural deference, a certain cultural blindness to what this very, very mainstream American religion has become.
So I just want to comment on one part of this and then we'll take a break.
Joel Berry, the most decent, hardworking, law-abiding group of people in this country.
This is part of the game.
Part of the game is the mainstream media cannot say anything about the conservative white Christian in this country because the image, the Imagined character is Ned Flanders.
It is the hard-working, law-abiding group of people.
They live in small-town Iowa.
They live in small-town Nebraska.
The heartland.
They live in a place that still has a main street where you look people in the eye and you pay the neighbor kid to mow the lawn and you get home from work and dinner's on the table and you eat as a family and pray before you do that because we got to get the Bible study Wednesday night.
Whatever.
You don't get to be that.
Part of the whole work of this show is to say you don't get to be the people who try to elect a convicted sexual abuser who mimics Mein Kampf, started insurrection, tried to kill the, you know, is arguing that he has immunity from killing anybody.
And then tell me that you're the most decent, hard-working, law-abiding group of people in the country.
That is the Christian privilege.
And if anyone on the mainstream media, if some of you ask me, why don't we hear this on MSNBC?
It's because when someone like Joy Reid says this...
The amount of phone calls and pressure that they get from sponsors, from others, it's immense.
I'm going to read one more, and I'm not going to read one of the words in this tweet, because I don't think that as a man, this is a word I should be saying.
This is Joey Manorino.
Joey has 459,000 followers on X, is a social media strategist, somebody who works on doing things on the American right.
Joy Reid is an anti-white, anti-Christian, B-I-T-C-H, who should not be allowed on television ever again.
That's the reaction you get when you criticize this group of people.
Why?
Because of exactly what Joy Reid said.
They think they're the rifle heirs to the country.
They think it's theirs.
So if you criticize... They had no problem when Lindsey Graham said, make Iran a parking lot.
No problem.
But when this happens, it is just all outrage.
Let's take a break.
Be right back.
All right, Dan.
So this all happens on the week that we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.
And there's a federal holiday.
And we've talked about various things on Martin Luther King Jr.
Day over the years.
But this year, there's something particularly Just it links up with everything we just talked about.
So we just talked about conservative white Christians and Christian nationalists who believe the country is theirs.
We talked about the attacks on Joy Reid, who is a black woman, by the way, and the way that everything went down in Iowa for Trump.
You just talked about whiteness, the whole thing.
So let's check in on the American right.
Let's check in on the American right and Martin Luther King Jr.
Because for years now, and Dan, I'm happy for you to tell me if you think this is wrong, okay?
For years now, if you said characterize what the American right does on Martin Luther King Jr.
Day, I would say that they find a quote That will serve the colorblind approach to race and race relations in the country.
Use that quote for their advantage and twist it around so that they say, Martin Luther King Jr.
said this and that's why you should vote for Donald Trump or that is why gay marriage is wrong or abortion should be banned or whatever.
They're going to try to find a quote that's like, A, I'm colorblind.
I don't see race because racism isn't real and we shouldn't even talk about it.
And B, I'm going to use it to my advantage in something.
That's been the go-to, I think.
And I'm happy if you think I'm wrong there, but okay.
I think you're right.
It has also been used to then contrast King with anything contemporary.
So, for example, Black Lives Matter, a typical right-wing line is, you know, Martin Luther King Jr.
would never support a Black Lives Matter because they're so radical, you know, whatever.
It's a way of saying, essentially, we listened to King and we fixed racism and it's gone now and now you agitators, you're the ones who are turning on King's legacy and so forth.
It's that kind of logic.
And we've talked about that.
We've talked about the ways that people have used King to basically whitewash his legacy and his radicalism, his activism, and so on.
This is a sign of the times.
If you all want to know how the United States has changed, I don't think that that approach to Martin Luther King Jr.
and his legacy and his work is helpful.
Everything we just talked about with colorblindness and the whitewashing and using him to negate the work of the Movement for Black Lives or anything else, I think that's not good.
Okay?
But somehow it gets worse, Dan.
Charlie Kirk, America's Christian nationalist youth pastor, who is one of the most influential people in the country when it comes to conservative politics, period, is now on a kick where he is not saying Martin Luther King Jr., civil rights icon, he's saying Martin Luther King Jr., I quote, was a bad guy.
A bad guy.
He says that he was wrong to call MLK a hero and a civil rights icon in the past.
He goes so far to say that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was a mistake because the Civil Rights Act, quote, was a refounding of the United States.
Okay?
Kirk also talks about how he thinks that King, and this is decades old propaganda stuff with no real evidence, that King was guilty of sex crimes and he witnessed sexual abuse, did nothing about it, so on and so forth.
Matthew Bode, who is my go-to source for Charlie Kirk, who follows Charlie Kirk on a daily basis to alert us to all these things, has noticed a lot of these on Twitter.
So Matthew Bode, B-O-E-D-Y, if you'd like to follow him.
Charlie Kirk, the deification of MLK and his proto-DEI ideology marks the exact moment that the progress of black America goes sideways.
Their cities disintegrate.
Their families collapse.
Educational progress stagnates.
They become enormously dependent on government support.
Crime explodes and 25% of black men are incarcerated by age 25.
You will know the tree by its fruit.
So... It's just... I just laugh out of exasperation.
I mean, first of all, there's...
Charlie, there's correlation and there's causation, and we can talk about all that.
Second of all, the things you're naming are hyperbole and caricatures.
Their cities disintegrate.
Well, which ones are their cities?
I mean, is there a your cities and their cities?
I mean, there's all that.
There's so much to talk about here in terms of the carceral state.
So supporting MLK and his fight for civil rights is what led to the carceral state and mass incarceration.
That's not how I interpret that, but we can talk about that in a second.
So I just, we're going to run out of time today.
And so, Dan, I want to just, I will stop.
If you want more about Charlie Kirk and this, you can follow Matthew Bode.
You can look at an article at Wired that discusses this.
Here's the point I want to make.
On the week of Martin Luther King Jr.
holiday, we have reached a point where not somebody on the fringe, not somebody who's kind of trying to make a name for themselves.
Charlie Kirk, one of the top 10 most influential people in the American right today, if you ask me.
He's been dubbed the new Rush Limbaugh.
He has been sort of getting very cozy with Christian Nationalists.
He just announced that he's going to be doing a set of rallies and a tour with Lance Wallnau.
Lance Wallnau, the new Apostolic Reformation figure, and they're going to work together to get Trump re-elected and all this stuff.
Charlie Kirk openly saying Martin Luther King Jr.
a bad guy.
That is where we are in the United States, Dan, today.
We're not at a place where it's some soft-peddled, colorblind, you know, BS about racism.
We're not at a place where you're even going to quote MLK and say, oh yeah, that's why MLK was actually for the thing I'm for as a white.
American conservative in the United States.
We're at a place where he says he was a bad guy and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a mistake.
Do you know how many times I talk about this in my book?
Do you know how many times I talk about in my book the ways that white Christians like Charlie Kirk, who are Christian nationalists, think that the 1960s, and particularly the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and immigration reform, refounded the country in a way that took it from them?
We've been studying this for years.
He just said it out loud.
It's like the second time it's happened today.
All right.
Off to you for a couple of thoughts on this.
So a couple.
One is that the, you know, we've talked about this too, that the dog whistles, the coded language that would be used, we're just past that to just saying the quiet parts out loud, right?
It's not even like hidden.
It's not subtext.
It's not any of that.
A couple things.
I want to point out the logicists, right?
Because earlier this week, Nikki Haley said that America's never been a racist country, right?
But now the 1964 Civil Rights Act, aiming to do what?
To combat racism, was a re-founding of the United States.
So which is it?
Is it that it's never been a racist country or that a huge mistake when we tried to combat racism and it amounted to re-founding the United States?
I want people to sit with that and to think about the logic of everything you just said, of calling that a re-founding.
The other piece is the claim to a moral high ground here, right?
MLK was a bad guy.
What are the examples that he gives?
Primarily sex crimes.
I'm putting that in quotes, air quotes, for anybody who can't see it or isn't seeing it.
As you say, a lot of innuendo and debunked things and so forth.
Do you get to claim the moral high ground when, as we just discussed, the person you're elevating is a bad guy?
When Donald Trump is the alternative or the sort of the counterpoint to this, and somebody could say, well, Dan, that's whataboutism, that's whatabout supporting Trump.
It's not if you're claiming the moral high ground.
If you are saying, I'm not the kind of person who would support a bad guy.
And if you support MLK, you're supporting a bad guy.
That's the logic?
You're doomed.
Convicted.
Incredibly accused of lots of other stuff, fraud, 91 indictments, just on and on and on and on.
Don't come at me with like, this guy was a bad guy, or not a good person personally, and so forth, and then turn around and support Donald Trump.
You don't get to play that game.
Again, if somebody says, why do you make it about whiteness all the time?
Here's a double standard, right?
MLK is a black man.
He's not a good guy if these things were true and so forth, but our convicted sex offender, we'll call him a good guy.
We'll call him the anointed.
He's our David and our Goliath.
He's all of those things.
On and on and on, as you say, it's stuff that I feel like for years, not just us, but people like us have been saying these things, and we're told that it's hyperbole, we're told that we're overstating it, we're told that we read too much into just, you know, honestly held opinions, that this isn't what people mean, this isn't coded language for anything.
Here it is, out in the open.
Part of the reason he's So you talked about the good guy aspect.
So part of the reason he's against MLK is DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion.
And it goes back to him.
That's why he's a bad guy.
And then it goes back to the Civil Rights Act.
Like, Dan, I feel like we might need to do like a five hour episode that just goes through what the Civil Rights Act was and what it was meant to do and why we had it.
Why did we need a Civil Rights Act?
Do people remember Birmingham?
Do people remember fire hoses?
Do people remember poll taxes and tests to see if people could vote and whether or not they had the right, even though it is your right to vote no matter who you are in the United States?
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
When you say, I'll just be brief, when you say that you think the Voting Rights Act was a mistake, I know exactly who you are.
You don't have to call yourself a racist, you don't have to call yourself a Christian nationalist, just like you said earlier.
When you say the Civil Rights Act is what ruined America, it refounded America.
I don't think it refounded America, but I do think it reoriented and changed America.
And if you think it changed it for the worst, then I know where we are.
I know exactly who I'm talking to.
I don't need you to tell me you're a racist or a Christian nationalist.
That's fine.
Okay?
A former ambassador in the TPUSA, Charlie Kirk Organization, Sharice Lane, tweeted this the other day.
I want to follow up this by saying that this is why I left the organization.
I used to be an ambassador because I really thought Charlie Kirk cared about the black community and opening our eyes to conservatism.
In 2020, I quickly realized that was far from the truth.
He and several of his counterparts hate anything having to do with celebrating black culture, I am so tempted to talk about Nikki Haley, Dan, because she got up there and said, we have never been a racist country.
I'm going to just give you one minute on Nikki Haley.
and 2020.
So that was Sharice Lane.
I am so tempted to talk about Nikki Haley, Dan, because she got up there and said, we have never been a racist country.
I'm going to just give you one minute on Nikki Haley.
You ready?
There was a great article by Politico a little while back, like about a year ago about Nikki Haley.
Here's some fun facts about Nikki Haley.
You ready?
Only the second Indian American governor ever.
Okay.
After Bobby Jindal.
Okay.
What's Nikki Haley's first name?
Nimrata.
No.
Everybody goes by whatever name they want.
Guess what?
I'm the kind of person, Dan, who thinks whatever name you want me to call you, whatever pronouns you want me to use with you, sounds good.
Your choice.
What do I care?
You want me to call you Nicky?
What's up, Nicky?
How you doing?
But I kind of think you don't go by Nimrata when you run for office.
I don't know, because maybe... I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
And maybe because people won't vote for Nimrata.
Maybe because people like Trump will now start using her first name the same way that they did Barack Hussein Obama, which might indicate racism.
Just saying.
Just throw that out there.
Her dad, when they came from India, he went to Canada to get a PhD, and then he started teaching at an HBCU in South Carolina.
That's how they got to South Carolina.
I've seen people say this, and I have not verified it, but a lot of folks are like, you know, he taught at an HBCU, because really hard to get a job as a professor, as faculty, when you are of South Asian descent in the 1960s.
It's really not easy.
I just interviewed someone whose father Taught in Indiana.
She is of South Asian descent, and she told me that when the father took the job, a South Asian man, he was told he could never get tenure because he's not American.
In kindergarten, she was given the role of Pocahontas.
In the Thanksgiving skit, the boys danced around her doing the American Indian hand-to-mouth call.
Did they realize I wasn't that kind of Indian, she wondered.
Why can't I be a pilgrim, she thought to herself.
Interesting.
She and her sister were contestants in the Little Miss Bamberg pageant.
She sang, This Land is Your Land.
Now, in that pageant, the judges usually picked one white winner and one black winner because it was a very segregated place in South Carolina where she lived.
They pulled her parents to the back and said, if we put them in one category, then one group will be mad.
And if we put them in the other category, the other group will be mad.
So she got a beach ball as a token of apology for her disqualification.
One more, Dan.
It's just too good, Nikki Haley.
It's too good.
She wanted to play kickball with her classmates.
You can play with us, but you have to pick a side.
Are you white or are you black?
I'm neither, she said.
I'm brown.
We can go on and on and on.
It's just amazing that a woman whose given name is Nimrata, whose parents immigrated from India, whose dad taught at an HBCU, is now on the TV saying, we've never been a racist nation.
It just, everything we talked about in segment one comes flying to the fore in segment two with Charlie Kirk and MLK.
And yeah, there's more to say, but we should stop.
Any like brief final thought on this before we take a break?
Emphasis on brief.
The response that she'll have and that she's had is, well, of course I experienced racism, but that's individuals.
It's personal.
How pervasive does it have to be before you're like, yeah, there's a racism problem and always has been in this country.
The country founded on slavery and all that other stuff.
How many Nikki Haley experiences have there been in this country?
Millions?
How pervasive does it have to be before you say it's not just about individuals or isolated incidents or whatever?
The logic baffles me.
The name thing hits home for me because so many of my family members go by names that are, because they were given those names by, like my grandmother would have been 104 this year.
She was given the name Betty in kindergarten because her teacher told her that she could not pronounce Toshiko, that that was too hard.
So she was Betty for 93 years of her life, like after she lived to like 98.
Anyway, all right, let's take a break.
We'll be right back.
All right, Dan, let's talk for a few minutes here about what happened in Texas this week.
Some of you might have seen headlines that the Texas National Guard was preventing the National Border Patrol agents from accessing certain areas along the border, various reports about migrants dying and not being allowed to be saved, etc.
So, take us through what happened and what's going on.
Yeah.
So, as you say, there had been this could be a pretty wonky and, you know, sort of, You know, the proverbial pissing contest between the federal agencies, specifically Border Patrol and Texas.
And, you know, everybody says Biden's not doing enough at the border and anti-federal this and that.
And so the Texas National Guard had been preventing the Border Patrol from accessing certain parts of the U.S.
border in Texas.
And why does it matter?
It matters this week because, among other things, you know, a tragedy occurs and it just sort of thrusts all of this into the limelight.
So, last week, a woman and two children drowned trying to cross the Rio Grande River at a section of the southern border where Texas was not allowing federal agencies access.
National Guard soldiers, they seized control of...it was a public park, a place called Eagle Pass.
The Border Patrol had been using the area to process migrants and they barred access and so forth.
And the border control, federal officials, Democratic Texas congressperson, all accused Texas National Guard and Governor Greg Abbott for preventing those agents from rescuing the migrants in question.
The story has evolved some.
It now appears that the migrants had already drowned, unfortunately.
There were other migrants in distress and so forth and conflicting accounts from the Texas National Guard about saying that they weren't preventing them from rescuing them and so on.
But what isn't in dispute is that the Texas National Guard would not allow access to the border there.
And so now there are accusations that there were other migrants in distress who were not treated appropriately, that the National Guard didn't do everything that they should have done.
I'm sure other discussions about training and different things like, right, the National Guard is not trained for border protection or helping people who are in distress and so forth.
It's back in the news.
The Biden administration is now before SCOTUS arguing that the Supreme Court should direct Texas, that they have to allow federal agencies to have access to the border.
Texas continues to prevent this, and that's never been denied.
They've never denied that they denied access to the border.
All in the name of better border protection and so forth, it appears that this week, Texas officials have started arresting migrants entering at that spot and charging them with criminal trespassing.
You get a lot of complexities of like federal law versus state law versus whatever.
Really, really messy situation.
Highlights, I think, a lot about The arguments of the border, again, I can't get past the symbolism of yet other people of color in the same week as MLK Day and all of these other things.
And a certain what feels like a disregard for brown bodies and brown lives.
Were they entering the country legally?
Yep.
Do we think current immigration laws are right or wrong?
Lots of people are divided on that.
Did they deserve to die?
No, it didn't.
It's not anything that they deserve the disregard that comes to that.
So, lots of layers to this, lots of thoughts on this.
Throw it your way for just your reflections or quick hit thoughts as this continues to unfold, this issue.
All right, Dan.
I'm going somewhere you're never going to expect, and you're going to enjoy it.
So, there's an idea in the writing of the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, who Dan knows a lot about.
Dan was once upon a time... I mean, maybe he still is.
I don't know.
Sorry, Dan.
I don't want to disparage you.
But Dan is a really specialist, expert reader of Jacques Derrida, and you should send in an AMA about that if you want to know more.
It's gripping.
Just ask me my relationship between deconstruction and phenomenology.
I'm sure we'll fill up hours of discussion of that.
Well, you know, some people do want to know the relationship between deconstruction in the Derridian sense and evangelical deconstruction.
So anyway, people, send in an AMA.
Ask about it.
We're happy to talk about it.
But Derrida has this idea, Dan, of originary violence.
And what he means by that is when you create, and I'm happy for you to tell me that I got this completely wrong in Derrida.
But what I take him to mean by that is when you create a society, when you create a human community...
You have to make these original or originary decisions about your values.
You have to choose what you value.
And there's not necessarily a rational basis to that choosing.
And that sounds really weird.
And there's a lot of like philosophical Pandora boxes lying about with all of this.
But the idea for me has always stuck that it says like, hey, if I've got 10 people or 100 people, we need to get together and say, what do we think is important as a group?
And that's the originary, and violence sounds like a weird thing there.
I always think about it as cutting a garden in the jungle.
You got a hundred people, you're dropped into a jungle, you've got to find a way to organize the space, the time, the geography, the resources.
And you're going to have to make decisions.
What crops do we grow?
How many people do we put into farming?
How many people go into security?
How many people go into strategy and decision making?
Do we fish?
I don't know.
The point I want to make is this.
There comes a point where you just have to say as a nation, a state, a community, a church, a people, we value this.
That's who we are.
And I'm going to say on this podcast right now, I am of the belief that our value should be this.
There's a lot of difficult things when it comes to immigration and everything that's happening in the border.
But I am not somebody who thinks that any person is illegal.
I don't care who you are, you're not illegal.
I don't care what country you are foot in right now, you're not illegal.
You may not have documents to be there and that it may be an unjust situation as to why you don't have documents or why you're there and not somewhere else.
But I'm just going to close today on this and then we'll go to reasons for hope.
I am of the belief that no human should die trying to cross a river.
I don't care if they're coming to this country or any country with no documents.
I don't care.
Call me a humanist, call me a liberal, call me whatever you want.
I'm never going to think that it's okay for someone to drown in a river.
I don't care who it is.
It does not have to be women and children.
I don't care who it is.
To drown in a river trying to get from one side to the other, ostensibly to have a better life.
I don't care if that person has a criminal record.
I don't care if that person... You can give me all the things.
Guess what?
I still don't think they should die in the river.
And when we get to a place as a country, and I saw it on Twitter, there were so many people cheering on Texas for starting a new civil war.
I mean, people were like, Texas is succeeding.
This is the first battle.
The Alamo rises again.
I was sick because I was thinking you are cheering on people drowning in a river because you think that somehow is what the value of your society rests on.
And that's disgusting.
And I will never back down from that.
And so that's what I took away from this story was we've reached a place going all the way back to segment one from today about just the ultimate Trump worship that we've seen for eight years now.
This is what it turns our country into.
MLK was a bad guy and we're going to cheer people dying in a river.
Fuck that.
That's all I have to say.
All right, Dan.
I got to go take a walk, because otherwise we're going to have to click like 17 explicit boxes on this episode, because I'm going to use words you've never heard on this show, and I'm going to teach you like eight new cuss words.
So, take it away.
What's your reason for hope?
My reason for hope is...
It was, I think, stuck with me this week because of all the MLK stuff we're talking about.
But people know I'm a football fan.
I like saying I'm a football fan, not an NFL fan.
I like the sport.
I don't necessarily like the league.
Lots of things not to like about the NFL.
And one of the issues for a long time has been that in a league that's something like 80-some-odd percent of the players are black, very few black quarterbacks, very few black head coaches.
But the playoffs started this week.
And a record number of coaches of color and quarterbacks of color, and that was really noteworthy to me this week.
You had, of 14 teams that are in, you had three with black coaches, one with a coach who identifies as biracial.
Six of the quarterbacks were black, and it's the playoffs, so there's the best quarterbacks in the league.
I found that hopeful as I was hearing the Charlie Kirks of the world and talking about how bad civil rights legislation was and what a bad guy MLK was and Nikki Haley saying we've never had a racist country and whatever.
It's not where it needs to be.
It's not probably national news to most people, but I took it as something hopeful and a sign of progress in a week when I think I needed one.
I really have an interesting reason for hope.
So, this week, Pablo Manriquez, who's a New Republic contributor and somebody who reports on Capitol Hill, asked Speaker Mike Johnson, do you believe that Joe Biden's presidency is God's will?
And this is such a good question, and we need more of this from the press corps.
I have a story about this, by the way.
Someday, maybe in one of those supplemental episodes, remind me.
Like, yeah.
AMA people, AMA.
Send them in.
Ask Dan all about God's will and this question.
So, Johnson responds, Oh, I know where you're going with this.
The Bible says that God is the one that raises up people in authority.
I believe that God is sovereign.
By the way, so did the founders.
I quoted the Declaration, blah, blah, blah.
He goes into all this really bad history about everything.
Andrew Seidel rolling over right now, just like Andrew Seidel just got a headache.
Okay.
So if you believe all those things, then you believe that God is the one that allows people to be raised in authority.
It must have been God's will then, Johnson noted.
Interesting.
I mean, so right.
Okay.
But, but right.
Here's where he adds, but he thinks collectively in 2024, the nation will make a much better choice.
And that the pre the next presidential election will be a regime change.
Okay.
So, he also says, and he also says that the people chose Joe Biden.
This is such a great question.
We could do a whole hour on this, Dan, this whole God's will.
I mean, maybe we should in our supplemental episode, but he really put... So, Johnson had to choose between it was not God's will or It was God's will that Joe Biden... His choices were, it was God's will that Joe Biden is president, or it was not God's will that Joe Biden was president, and the second would imply that God is not sovereign, God is not... I mean, it's an amazing question, and I just want to say hats off to Pablo Monriquez.
Well done.
All right, friends, as always, find us at Straight White JC, find us at Bradley Onishi on social media.
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