Brad and Dan begin by discussing what happened to Ron DeSantis. Taking stock of pundits who blame his failure on policy or lack of people skills, Brad argues that DeSantis lacks the aesthetic and eroticism to be a fascist leader. He was never Trump+. Just Diet Trump. The MAGA movement wants a strongman autocrat - and so he didn't have it.
In the second segment, Dan reports on "man camps" around the country where guys are going to "get hard." It's a wild ride.
In the final segment, the hosts discuss a profile of a man who openly says he wants Trump again order to blow up the system and take revenge.
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A year that will no doubt change our lives forever.
We at Straight White American Jesus and Axis Mundi 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.
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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.
Just started my semester, so I kind of roughly know who I am at this point and what day it is, but it's nice to be with you, Brad.
Students' names, trying to, you know, get everything prepped, and I think the thing that surprised me as a teacher when I started teaching full-time 10-12 years ago was like, how tired you are that for after those first couple sessions you're just like, oh, I just talked for three hours and I'm gonna go put a wet cloth on my head because I am exhausted.
For me, it's the data entry.
If people haven't taken classes in, I don't know, 10 or 12 years, and now there's all of this online stuff, you get it all set up, and it's like every assignment for the semester has to have the due date and the time and all of that.
And I have those students, the one student that will be like, This date over here, this assignment says it's due like April 23rd.
Is that supposed to be April 23rd or is it supposed to be April 22nd?
And you're like, I don't, I don't know.
But yeah.
So anyway, that's, that's my week.
It's like when the dentist is like, Hey, when do you, what are you doing six months from now on November 14th at 8am?
And you look at them like, You know Janice?
Nothing.
So let's book it.
I guess I'm at the dentist.
That's what I'm doing.
Before we get going, a couple things.
If you want more of this really entertaining banter, and there is a lot more of it, believe me.
We're going to be putting out our first bonus episode next week, and that'll be Dan and I for two hours talking about a lot of things related to Mike Johnson, God's Will, answering all your questions, all the AMAs that came in, talking strangely about how Oxford and our experiences there helps us understand Christian Nationalists, a lot of good stuff.
So sign up to be a premium subscriber and you can get that episode.
I'm going to be releasing some bonus content as well on Monday.
And plan to do that most Mondays.
So if you haven't subscribed yet, do that.
I want to just a couple shoutouts, Dan.
I went to Minneapolis this weekend, spoke with the Humanist group there, which was awesome.
I want to thank Suzanne and her team.
It was a great event.
But there were so many Swag people there, Dan.
So many.
So I want to just shout those people out.
Scott.
Fantastic.
Darcy was there.
Darcy had been to like a couple of different events.
We hugged.
It was awesome.
Adam brought his partner on a date night, Dan.
Partner on a date night to come listen to me talk about Christian nationalism.
So that's either a really good partner.
I don't know.
I don't even know what to say about that except for I feel sorry for that partner.
Julie, Diane, Abriel, there was so many of you.
Came from Iowa.
Abril came from Iowa.
So anyway, it was really great.
I just want to say we have the coolest community here and I'm really excited.
And if, you know, just thank you to everybody who came out.
So anyway, it was really neat and it was, it was minus six degrees and I made it, Dan.
So I feel, I feel pretty good about that.
All right, let's do it.
Today we're going to talk about Ron DeSantis, aborting his campaign.
Going to talk about how the men are not all right, and the man camps across the country that are training men to be violent, patriot warrior Christian dudes.
We're going to then talk about the blow it up guy, as Dan and I have been discussing him.
And that's from a Politico profile about a guy who says that we just need to blow the system up.
And Dan and I kind of think there's a lot of good insight there about our current political moment.
So, a lot of men this week, Dan.
A lot of toxic, strange, blow it up little men.
Okay.
Here we go.
Ron DeSantis is out.
It's over.
I was going to say, speaking of like blow it up little men, we'll start with Ron DeSantis.
Uncle Ron is out.
Now, I want to just go through a couple of like, as I want to do, I want to go through a little bit of like historical reminiscence here.
I, along with many others, about 17 months ago, was kind of not sure.
I kind of thought, all right, DeSantis is Trump.
In terms of policy, you noted many times on this show, DeSantis is to the right of Trump when it comes to a lot of things.
DeSantis is... Trying to out-Trump Trump, I think I said.
I don't know how many times I said that.
People, if they're into the drinking, swadge, bingo game, you can go back and listen and see how many times I talked about DeSantis trying to out-Trump Trump.
Exactly.
We also talked about how Florida was a laboratory for right-wing policies.
He ran on extreme cruelty to trans people.
He ran on extreme cruelty to migrants.
He ran on book banning.
He ran on... He totally dismantled New College, a liberal arts college in Florida that is renowned.
He took on Disney in a culture war.
And I think, I'll just be very honest, if you would have asked me 15 months ago, I would have thought, and I said it on the show, DeSantis might have a shot here.
He might have a shot to beat Trump, but better at governing.
And he clearly is not.
He clearly has no shot.
He clearly is not somebody who's going to be part of this presidential race.
And I want to talk about why, not only because it might shed light into what happened with him and why he was a failure, but why Trump continues to surge and what's at play in our current political moment.
So Rick Wilson, At The Guardian, Rick Wilson's a longtime Republican voice, somebody who's pretty famous on social media these days as the leader or one of the leaders of the Lincoln Project, says this about Ron DeSantis and The Guardian.
This guy was politically overpriced stock from the very beginning.
He represented Diet Trump, but no Trump voter wants the low sugar, low fat, no caffeine version of Trump.
They want the real thing.
I want to hold on to that.
I thought, I'm not always a big, you know, total fan of Rick Wilson's work, but Diet Trump.
Okay, why did Diet Trump not work?
So let's, let's put that in our brain.
Let's go to the New York Times, Nate Cohn.
At the end of 2022, Mr. DeSantis briefly held the promise of uniting the moderate and conservative opposition to Trump around a new set of issues, the coronavirus response and the woke left.
So, one of the ideas for DeSantis going back to like the beginning of 2023 or the last parts of 2022 was like, look, if I run on extreme coronavirus policies, talk about the vaccine in a certain way, lockdowns, and I just demonize the woke left.
And that includes the book bans, the Moms for Liberty.
That's enough.
That's enough.
That's what I'm going to run on.
Get rid of DEI.
Fight the culture war at every turn.
Cruelty to trans people in any way I can.
Racism doesn't exist.
Get rid of the Black Studies curriculum, the Black Studies AP curriculum in Florida.
All of those things.
And if you go back to that time, he was ahead of Trump.
We talked about it on the show, Dan.
We talked about the ways that DeSantis seemed to be surging.
Trump was in legal trouble.
DeSantis was raising way more money than anyone else.
There was a lot of billionaires who were happy that it would be DeSantis and not the loudmouth Trump who was always off message and so on and so forth.
And what they wanted, and this is now coming from Politico, is Trump Plus.
Like, we can get Trump in terms of policy, but we can get a guy who's, like, really good at governing.
We can get a guy who doesn't veer off message.
We can get a guy where there's no Stormy Daniels, where there's no embarrassing things.
He doesn't tweet Kavithi and then claim that he meant to.
He doesn't think we can buy Greenland.
He doesn't...
You know, go on TV and say, should we like shine light inside people's bodies and maybe that'll cure coronavirus?
Like that would be Trump plus.
You would get more.
But instead, as Rick Wilson said, you got diet Trump.
Now, there's a bunch of there's a bunch of takes on why DeSantis didn't work.
One of them is simply people did not want the country to become Florida.
DeSantis was like, hey, let's make America Florida.
And to some extent, I buy that.
To a very limited extent.
He, I think, overshot the culture wars.
I think we're getting to a place where Moms4Liberty is running into major bumps in the road.
We're getting to a place where people are voting to protect reproductive rights.
So a six-week abortion ban is just not something that is all of that popular all over the country.
We can talk about the ways that DeSantis' attempt to make Florida his reason for failure.
There's probably a little bit in there.
But come on, we're talking about Iowa.
We're talking about New Hampshire.
We're not talking about Oregon.
We're not talking about, you know, California, New York, Michigan.
We're talking about Iowa and we're talking... And we're talking... Sorry, we're talking about GOP primaries.
We're talking about primaries with those voters.
We're not talking about general voters yet.
We're not, for the most part, talking about independents.
We're typically talking about dyed-in-the-wool Republican voters, you know, who love the so-called free state of Florida.
So the second reason you might give would be, well, he's so awkward.
Like, you can't have Trump Plus when on the campaign trail in real life, this guy feels like he's just not cut out to be shaking hands in an Iowa diner.
He's not cut out to go to the ice cream shop or the, you know, the bar in New Hampshire and just win over the crowd.
And we could point to people, and I think a good example might be actually Jeb Bush.
Jeb Bush was supposed to be the guy eight years ago.
And everyone was like, well, he's got the pedigree.
He's a Bush.
Governor of Florida.
He's got the experience.
He's smart.
Blah, blah, blah.
He's smarter than his brother.
Look out.
There's a smarter version.
Like, it's George W. Bush Plus.
He like, no Bushisms.
No.
No truthiness, no none of that.
I mean, going back to the Jon Stewart Daily Show days, Dan, the good old days of that show.
And what happened to Jeb Bush is he just looked awkward on the campaign trail, and he just got humiliated on the debate stage by Donald Trump.
You remember those debates where Jeb Bush just looked like a guy in glasses?
I say that as a guy who wears glasses.
A guy in glasses who had just never met a bully, who just didn't know what to say to somebody being mean to him, and he was just sort of, like, stuck, like, I don't know how to respond at all to this mean bully on the stage.
Well, Ron DeSantis gets out on the campaign trail and the amount of memes and videos and clips and Twitter shares of Ron DeSantis just not knowing how to interact with humans, it's immense.
So, all right.
I mean, I'm happy, Dan, if you get your thoughts, but I think that's a little bit of it.
You got to connect.
But I think reducing it just to Social awkwardness is a little bit to miss the bigger picture and here's where I'm going to throw you my idea and then I'll turn it over.
Jeff Charlotte talks about in the undertow in his recent book and he talked about when I interviewed him on this show that fascism is about a certain aesthetic and a certain eroticism.
That fascism and strongman leaders and autocrats and I know that we need to pull those all apart but just hang with me.
That when you want to be the guy who is the one strongman leader, or if you want to be a fascist strongman, there's an aesthetic that goes with it.
And that aesthetic, we can all conjure.
We can think of Mussolini.
We can think of Bolsonaro.
We can think of Putin.
We can think of Trump.
But they all are able to make it all, whether on TV, on a debate stage, whether in a press briefing, to make it look a certain way, to carry off a certain demeanor.
And DeSantis, the longer it went, it was like he can't do it.
If you watch that debate with him and Newsom, Like, I know if Trump was there he would not have given coherent answers, but he would have done a lot more like yelling and pounding and all kinds of tantrums to not look weak the way that DeSantis did.
Now don't get me wrong, tantrums and yelling are weak, are signs of weakness, but to many they wouldn't have been.
I'll throw another in there and then I'll give up the mic.
And just forgive these words.
Some of you are going to hear these words and never forgive me, including Dan Miller.
Just, just, I'm sorry I have to say them.
Please don't aggregate them and like put them on a loop on the internet somewhere or something.
I'm just warning everyone right now.
Okay.
But I'm going to say some words that I will regret immediately saying, and then we will discuss.
There is no eroticism to Ron DeSantis.
And here's what I mean, and I am trying to be sort of analytically serious here.
I just want the t-shirt.
Yeah.
That's all I'm saying.
Brad Onishi's face and like- A quote bubble?
Yep.
What Jeff Charlotte, I think, does really well in the undertow when he's painting the pictures of the Trump rallies or the biker gangs or whatever is there is a way that that movement, that MAGA movement, that going to a Trump rally It instills a sense of desire, a sense of lust.
Like your blood is pumping, your heart is moving, you feel warm, you feel energized.
In religious studies we would call this collective effervescence, a la Emile Durkheim.
You feel it.
Like it is coursing through you.
And Trump makes people want to do all kinds of things.
He makes them want to cheer, and yell, and grunt.
He also makes them want to hurt, and hit, and destroy.
But he makes you feel it.
And that's part of that strong manesthetic, is you have to go into that rally of 30,000 people in Iowa, or in Georgia, or in Nebraska, and you gotta make them all feel it, like a good preacher would.
Right?
Like a good showman would.
And that's what Trump's always been able to do.
It's not that he's smarter than DeSantis.
It's not that his policies are all that different than DeSantis.
It's just that, and we're going to get to this at the end of the show today, but if you're a Trump supporter, you feel like he makes you full of a kind of erotic sense of desire for this gross vision of the country that he gives you.
And one of the things he does is he promises to hurt the people you want to hurt, and you kind of believe that he's going to do it.
I just think by the end, when DeSantis got anywhere, nobody felt anything.
And that was a big problem.
So, what do you think?
I think that analysis is right.
And I think if we circle back around and tie it up with some of these other things, because I said forever he was out-Trumping Trump.
The weird part is, and this was what crippled everybody in the GOP field, is that nobody wanted to critique Trump.
Nobody wanted to attack Trump.
You had that weird thing where they're like trying to run against him for the GOP nomination, but nobody will criticize him.
One of the things DeSantis needed to do if he was going to be Trump Plus is he needed to say, I'm going to do better than Trump.
Trump was too afraid to punish trans people.
Trump was too afraid to actually do this.
Trump was so caught up in hush money scandals that he was afraid.
He needed to do that.
That's what he needed to do because it would have done everything it is that you're describing.
Another way to describe this.
I don't know where I heard this, but I think it's a kind of concept of almost like dark charisma.
Like a really negative charisma that just draws people in, but in that kind of violent, angry sort of way.
It doesn't inspire you to greatness.
It doesn't inspire you to go out and do good.
It inspires you to break windows, or to yell at your neighbor that you've always wanted to, or to say the quiet parts out loud, or like whatever.
And it's like, so he had the policy pieces to do that, and everything you said for weeks and months was right, that like, if he could get the nomination, you've got this kind of supercharged MAGA figure who could actually govern and do politics in a way that Trump never could.
Um, but he wouldn't ever come out and attack Trump.
He wouldn't ever come out.
And that, to me, that's what ties a lot of this stuff together, though.
The lack of stage presence, for lack of a better term, the awkwardness, the lack of dark charisma, the lack of eroticism, all of that.
If he had really come out and said, I am more than Trump, Trump is a big deal, but look what I'm doing.
And like, you know, if he had done that, I think I think things could have been different.
I mean, that's what he had to do to fully out Trump.
Trump quietly doing it in policy and bragging about Florida wasn't enough.
He had to take on Trump and he had to be nasty because that's what Trump does.
And he didn't do that.
And a lot of people don't and can't.
I don't pretend to understand exactly what it is in the world that makes it so that some people Have charisma or dark charisma.
People that study that, it's kind of a mystery to me.
But I think, I think that's what ties a lot of this together is rewind all the way back if he had just decided to swing for the fences and instead of thinking, I don't know, I'm going to stand on a debate stage and try to convince people that they should vote for me instead of Trump, but I'm not going to criticize Trump.
I think that's what, that's what did him in.
I think it's for all of these, all these reasons we're talking about, I think all come together there.
Yeah, just one more comment on this, and I think I agree with what you say there, and I think it's one of those things, too, where if you think about the style of leadership, and I don't think this is a good thing, I think this is a terrible thing, but I think back to Barack Obama, okay?
And let's just do a weird thing today.
I've already said there's no eroticism in Ron DeSantis, so we might as well just get weird.
I don't know.
Let's compare Bill Clinton to Barack Obama.
If you put those two guys on the campaign trail, take Barack Obama and drop him in Iowa trying to get elected, and then take Bill Clinton.
I think Bill Clinton has a thousand times more energy to go out there and shake hands, kiss babies.
I think it makes Bill Clinton feel good.
I think Bill Clinton...
He loves it when there are cameras and people watching Bill Clinton.
I think he loves that.
And I think that was part of Bill Clinton's charm.
So how does Barack Obama become president twice?
I don't think he's actually that like interested in that kind of just nonstop attention on him.
But I think he was really good at it in terms of just being kind to people and making them feel like he cared about them.
And then when he got up and spoke to you on stage, you felt it.
So Barack Obama, I don't think wants people staring at him at the Iowa Diner, but I do think when Barack Obama gets on the stage, he does want you, like, he's that professor who believes he really has something to say, and he's good at it.
Here's my point.
You can get elected as Barack Obama with a Democratic coalition who doesn't want an autocratic strongman, with that kind of charisma.
But if you want the MAGA vote, if you want the, like, you want to be Trump Plus, not Diet Trump?
Your style can't be anything like Barack Obama or minus Barack Obama in terms of that kind of... It's got to be that huckster, non-stop, self-promoting, bloodlust, make-you-wanna-hurt-people, get-in-here-and-just, you know, darken-your-desires guy in ways that Trump couldn't be.
I mean, and you said it.
He was never willing to out-Trump Trump.
I almost wonder if, like, you merged the absolute Disgusting self-promotion or Vivek Ramaswamy with the whatever Ron DeSantis is, you might get somebody who could have ever challenged Trump on Trump's terms, but nonetheless, it really doesn't matter.
So, all right.
Anything else before we jump and we go to some other fascinating stories about men training camps, which is going to...
There's no eroticism in Ronda Santas and we're going to men's training camps.
Today is just not... It's a whole thing, Dan.
It's February.
We're getting to February.
This is what happens in February.
On that note, all I was going to say is, you know, looking back on it, it is, I don't know, ironic that, of course, I think they, just strategically speaking, the DeSantis campaign had it exactly backwards, right?
This notion that they could sneak into the primaries and somehow beat Trump by not attacking Trump, and I think that that was what undermined him.
I continue to think it's, I don't know, strange that people somehow, even other GOP people, think that they're going to get Trump on policy or principle or something.
It blows my mind that people are still misreading him in that way.
Well, and it's like you and I, we know church, like what churches draw people.
Does, does having the best theologian bring like thousands to your church or does having the preacher who's really good at what?
Being a showman, making you feel it, the whole thing, the whole aesthetic, the whole look, the cool kid church, the whatever church.
All right, let's take a break.
Come back and talk about man camp.
Oh man.
Talk about a segue there, Dan.
People are dying.
They're like, get this commercial over.
I cannot wait for that.
Woo.
Be right back.
Dan, do you remember the movies with Billy Crystal and Jack Parlance?
What's that guy's name?
City Slickers, where, like, you know, three middle-aged men went to the Old West, apparently, and, you know, reconnected with their manhood?
I feel like that's what we're going to talk about now, but in the most worst-ever toxic masculine terms.
So, take it away.
Yeah, so, we've talked about these kind of things before, and we've talked about them specifically in church context.
These kind of church Team building, masculine identity things, or you know the the church retreat and where it turns out you're like repelling off of stuff and like shooting guns and crawling under concertina wire and like you know whatever you're kind of preparing for like the invasion or something like that.
There's an article that got us thinking about this this week out of USA Today about men paying big money to go to what it described as sort of brutal boot camps.
But what struck me, and I'm going to circle back around to this, is that this was in a non-religious context.
This was more of like just guys.
Just guys, not necessarily Christian.
I am sure if, you know, our friend Robert Jones or others went and poked around there, there's a lot of Christian identity among these men.
But these are not like church groups.
These are not church organizations and all that sort of stuff.
And the context here was, I think, it gave evidence of this kind of increasing cultural awareness.
It's bleeding its way into more mainstream awareness, pop culture, into a mainstream media outlet like USA Today or something like that.
About the awareness of and the presence of what it described as all-male experiences for men's self-improvement, right?
As this sense of setting this up as a kind of almost therapeutic model of helping men to be men, of a kind of male self-improvement.
And it noted that there are a lot of ways that this happens.
It said some of these kinds of man camps are essentially like, you know, sort of therapy groups, and it's guys kind of sitting around talking about how they feel and things like that.
But the focus it had are on the ones that follow the boot camp model, and it's got this kind of illustration of this, and it features one of these in its article.
And so this was their description, okay, from the article.
The name of the organization is the Modern Day Knight Project, K-N-I-G-H-T, of course, like Medieval Warriors Knights, or just The Project, of course, you know, we shortened that down.
And it said it was billed online as a 75-hour crucible and experience involving grueling physical challenges under the instruction of military veterans.
Those who make it through also get access to a year-long coaching and mentorship program called the Modern Day Knight Mastermind Program.
And it costs $18,000 to attempt.
So guys are signing on the dotted line, paying $18,000 to go through this, like, 75-hour boot camp and, like, crawl up muddy hills and have people pull them back down and yell at them and spray them with fire hoses and all this other kind of stuff.
And if somebody's listening, it's like, what is the context of this?
I think it also fits in this broader cultural narrative.
And this is a real thing.
Like, lots of people have noted this.
This kind of phenomenon of male loneliness or isolation.
There have been lots of articles and studies about how a lot of male-identified people, they don't have a lot of friends, they feel isolated, they feel lonely, and so forth.
And there is this kind of sense of people reaching out for something here.
And Eric Anderson, who's a marriage and family therapist featured in the article, he said this, and I think that this is true.
He said, men are seeking out difficult experiences.
They're seeking out groups.
They're seeking out tribes.
They're seeking out some sort of social bonding and sense of social capital.
I think all of that's true.
I think all of that's a real thing.
Lots of social scientists, lots of, you know, people who work in the mental health fields, in the physical health fields have noted this, okay?
That's a real issue.
The trick is, I think, and this is what stands out, why is this the way that men are reaching to fill that or to fix that?
They're not like, I don't know, they're not starting friend groups, they're not going out and doing these other things.
Why are they willing to spend $18,000 to have somebody yell at them and berate them and to undergo these physical processes and so forth?
And this is what they're being sold.
If you participate in this, this is what's going to fix this.
This is what's going to help you find your tribe.
You're going to recover your masculinity, whatever.
And the way that it describes The goal, the organization, it states that its own goals on the website as being to help men to shatter their self-doubt, to see their purpose clearly, to heal their trauma, and uncover what's holding them back, right?
Now again, those are all laudable goals.
I'm all for people, you know, trying to shatter self-doubt and Figure out what matters to them, what their purpose is.
I am a trauma resolution practitioner with the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery.
I'm big into people trying to process their trauma, figuring out what's holding them back.
But this is the issue for me, and I think it is for you, in coming back around to this, is like, what does it tell us that this is how that's supposed to happen?
That this is what that quote-unquote masculinity is supposed to look like?
Why is that the quote-unquote masculine way to address these issues?
Does it actually address those real needs?
The marriage and family therapist says, you're getting sold a false bill of goods.
It's not clear that this is going to do it.
And what does it say about the views of masculinity that we sort of even think that it does, that it's going to do that?
Another person noted that the camps promise men that if they adhere to what he calls hardened masculinity, their lives will improve.
And it talks about efforts at becoming better men, and it interviews men.
Interview one guy who like, you know, cheated on his partner, and so he's like, I'm here because I want to be a better man, you know, whatever.
So here are the issues.
Let me tie all this together and be like, here are the issues I see.
Here are the things that immediately just jumped to mind.
I want to throw it to you after that, hear your thoughts on this.
But it is not at all clear to me that this is the way you could meet those goals.
Like, so, okay, yeah, I'm a guy and I commit an act of infidelity against my partner.
I feel terrible about that.
I feel bad.
I feel like I'm not the good partner I should be.
So, So what, I'm going to learn to figure out, maybe I don't know what emotional needs I have that aren't being met, or why I did that, or how to communicate.
No, I'm going to go climb up a muddy hill and have other guys yell at me.
How's that going to help?
Or how is doing this kind of thing going to help somebody when their kid comes out as queer?
Is this really what's going to make us into, quote unquote, better men?
Um, all kinds of visions of the, you know, problems of this vision of hypermasculinity.
It's so heteronormative.
It's not even like, you know, it's built into this.
How affirming are these people going to be of queer folk?
How affirming are they going to be of people who are not, like, I don't know, physically strong?
It's ableist.
Are you a real man if you can't climb?
If you're, uh, if you're in a wheelchair, if you have asthma or whatever, just all of this stuff is baked in.
And this is why you called it toxic masculinity.
I will call it toxic masculinity.
It's so one-dimensional, and I think it also can't address and actually, I think, reinforces all those links between a certain kind of masculinity and violence, a certain kind of masculinity and militancy, all the things that we just talked about a few minutes ago with this kind of notion of dark charisma, that that's what that feeds on.
And I think the other thing that hovers over all of this is, what are the connections between religious culture and secular culture here?
Because on one hand, like I said, we've talked about this in the Christian context, and I don't have the full answer here, but I'm curious sometimes.
I'm like, so I've shared—I've been reading Kristen Dumais' Jesus and John Wayne book again.
I'm teaching it this semester, so it's given me a chance to go back and sort of reread it and just Continue to be impressed with how much she drives home this point that for decades, conservative white Christianity has built this conception of masculinity as violent, as powerful, as militant.
It's tied in with support for literal militarism and so forth.
That is part of mainstream culture now.
That theological vision is out there in the world where people will spend lots and lots of money because that essentialist notion of what it is to be a man is there, but that broader cultural mainstreaming is what also keeps it alive within that religious subculture.
And I think this is the really interesting thing for me, is how much these two cultures merge, and it really becomes a kind of undecidable question of which one comes first, which is the chicken and the egg, and it's largely an irrelevant question.
Last point I'll make is when people sometimes ask me, you know, we talk about Christian nationalism, what makes Christian nationalism Christian if people aren't talking about going to church or things like that or, you know, whatever?
One of the things is, I think, the shared conception of masculinity, of what it is to be particularly a white, masculine, real man in America.
The same answer happens inside and outside the church, and I think that that's part of a common sort of cultural conception of a kind of Christian hyper-masculinity.
So, lots of other thoughts about that, but I'll throw it over to you for sort of your thoughts or impressions or reflections or disagreements or anything else on anything I just said.
I have a bunch of thoughts, as you might imagine.
So, one of them is I want to do something you didn't do, and I want to talk about your work.
So it's been a while since we've talked about your book, Queer Democracy, but you have this really wonderful metaphor that I have talked about on this show a million times.
I've talked about it in other places where I give lectures and stuff.
You have the idea that every society has a vision of its body, so that there is a body politic.
There's a way that people imagine the American body.
So they imagine American body.
And what we've said on this show so many times, and you obviously wrote this in your book, is that when so many cis men, when so many straight men, but also so many white Christians, including white Christian men, imagine the American body, they imagine the guy at that boot camp.
They imagine the guy who's got You know, he's climbing through the mud, he's wearing athletic shorts, and he has some, you know, some big arms and biceps, and he talks loud, he grunts, he takes what he wants, he's straight, he's white, he's cisgender, and he's an authoritarian dad who doesn't let his kids boss him around or He's the man in charge at home and that kind of stuff.
And that's the guy.
That's the American body.
And that's the ideal.
That if you want to be a real American, be that guy.
And what we've talked about all the time in this show is that what that does for the Christian Nationalists is a number of things, but one of the things that it does is that it really creates, for me, a sense of a drive for purity.
And what I mean by that is a drive to make the American body free from things that would not be part of that vision.
That that vision does not include that that guy is this big, strong dude with big biceps and athletic shorts and a pickup truck, but he's gay.
Or he immigrated from another place and even though he appears white and passes for white, his family history goes back to Venezuela, just in his lifetime.
Or that he's not white, that he's brown and wears a turban.
One of the things that happens is that they want to harden The body so that the fluidity, the mixing, the mosaic is not there.
Why do I bring that up?
I bring that up because I think what that does is it corresponds to the way that men in this country, whether Christian or not, often turn to a model that says, if I harden myself, And if men were just willing to be men and be the kinds of men that are tough and rough, that grunt, that don't take no for an answer, that do instead of ask.
Then the country would be great again because the body of the country would be strong and pure and it would be without any fluidity or slippage.
There wouldn't be any leaking or ambiguity as to what that body was and its identity.
So when I hear about these man camps, that's what I hear.
There's a book that I've read before and I really learned a lot from.
A lot of people have read it.
It's called Manhood in America, Cultural History.
And in that book, Michael Kimmel, who's written a lot about this, talks about how American men try to gain control over their masculinity by doing a number of things, but one of them is to escape.
And he traces this history where like if you go back to Teddy Roosevelt, if you go back to the end of the 19th century, the beginning of the 20th century, many American men entered into like very similar programs.
And like I have pulled up right now a PDF.
About medieval knighthood camps for teenage boys in the 1910s.
Because in the 1910s, there was feeling that too many boys were not doing boy stuff.
They were going to school and learning math and learning how to read literature.
And they lived in cities, not on farms.
They weren't feeding animals or cleaning up slop.
They were soft.
So how do we do that?
Well, we send our boys, who might be upper middle class, to a camp that is for, like, becoming a medieval knight in a Christian way.
None of this is new.
Like, Teddy Roosevelt, Dan, was not born Mr. Frontier Adventurer.
He was a rich kid from a rich family.
And he sort of invented this image of the guy that goes off into the wilderness and, you know, manhandles bears and rides a horse everywhere and doesn't sleep for 36 hours because he's so tough and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So I think American men have this very particular form of masculinity, but it does hinge on this sense of wanting to gain control or regain control by becoming hard and getting rid of Any fluidity, any ambiguity, any slippage.
And I'll just say one more thing and then I'll throw it back to you, which is one of the insights that Kimmel points to in Manhood in America is the idea that masculinity, and especially in America, is about performing an identity so that you are not considered weak or effeminate by other men.
That most men are worried About not being manly enough for other men, not for women.
And when they feel as if they've lost control in their life, they don't have enough money, they don't have enough power, they don't have enough identity, they don't know who they are anymore, they've lost purpose, they resort to, well, if I just get tougher and bigger and harder, If I go out to the wilderness for 18 grand and relearn how to be a real man, if I walk on all fours and practice the jungle walk and I go through war games...
Then I'll feel better about myself because there's no way when I walk out into the world anyone will ever doubt my manliness, my manhood.
I will perform a role that no one will ever think is just me pretending or can claim is not good enough.
And I think that's a huge part of American masculinity.
I remember so clearly, Dan, sitting with a French friend when I lived in France.
And I don't know why.
I think a friend showed him on social media like someone they wanted to date.
And it was like this American dude with really big muscles and he went to the gym all the time.
And my French friend just laughed.
And he just was like, Americans are so silly.
And my friend, who was a woman, was like, you don't want to look like that?
He was like, no, why would I want to look like that?
I have no interest in that.
I don't want to go to the gym three hours a day so that I can perform some sense of body image for other men because I don't care about that.
That's ridiculous.
We can debate and everyone can call in and tell me why going to the gym is good and bad and whatever.
You and I can discuss that.
My point though is it's a performance.
And if you feel threatened, sometimes you're like, I'm just going to double down on the performance of being tough, hard, and big, and that'll make me feel like I'm a real person.
And I think what you and I have talked about in this show forever is that'll make me feel like a real American.
And those two all go together.
And then you add the Christian element and you're really doing it.
Now I'm dad, Christian, husband, tattoo on my right bicep with a chain, a big truck outside, I yell at my wife at Target, I tell my kids what to do without listening, I go to the gym in the morning and lift big weights, I drink the creatine shake in the afternoon, and Now I'm a real American, I'm a real godly man, and I'm a real dude, and I feel really good.
All right, that was a lot.
I apologize.
Back to you.
I just want to pick up, you know, you mentioned this theme that's developed about the role of presence and absence there, the sense of retreating to become the real man.
I think that that's also a telling point, too.
I mean, let's imagine, like, the fantasy America, that the Make America Great Again category.
I was like, man, what is it?
The dad's out of the house, he works all day, mom's at home, and what's the kind of stereotype?
The guy comes home, his wife hands him a cocktail, he heads to the study and like, you know, he reads his paper, he has his alone time, you know, whatever.
Or the most mythic, I feel like the most American kind of Mythic image ever, you know, the kind of old west cowboy hero.
What does he always do?
He always like rides off at the end, the woman's crying, the people that he helped.
He can't be civilized to be the real man that he is.
He has to be the loner and the wanderer and whatever.
And I think that there's this weird I say weird notion because it's this notion that to be the real man, you also have to maintain this distance.
And I think you're right.
It's hardening boundaries.
It's hardening borders.
It's all of that.
When what's really interesting to me is the examples I did hunch that, I don't know, if your marriage is falling apart because of infidelity, we probably need some presence.
We probably need some listening.
We probably need to be in the same space.
I don't know how many queer kids or queer folk I have heard who have talked about coming out to their parents and what happened.
The parent gets up and walks out of the room because it's just too much for them.
And like what the kid wants and needs is somebody to sit and hear them and just listen.
Just be willing to hear that.
So I think that that's another piece of this.
That to go back to what are probably really well-meaning men who really they are experiencing all those real things we talked about.
They want to find ways to be better husbands or fathers or whatever.
And so what do they do?
They like run off and focus on all this stuff that the people in their lives that probably would like them to be better fathers and better partners and whatever don't need.
I think To your image about the guys in gyms, like, another sort of running joke around lots and lots and lots of women that I've ever talked to, like, with dating apps and stuff, are, yeah, the big gym photos and, like, fish.
It's always the fishing, the big fish, and it's these guys who post all of these pics about, you know, working out and whatever.
And the whole notion about performing a certain kind of masculinity for other men, I think, is right on the surface because there's all this data that shows there are huge numbers of American women Who are like, yep, need not apply.
Now, obviously, there are people who are attracted to that.
Obviously, there are lots of men who try to be better husbands and fathers by being present and by cutting back on work hours and by listening to their kids.
All of that's real too.
But there is this massive discourse that, as you say, is not new.
And I keep highlighting Kristen's work, but that's one thing she does so effectively is to show again that this is not new, that it's this kind of repetitive cycle.
I think a lot of us think that we've simply moved past this kind of mythic 1950s model of domestic masculinity.
That is still the ideal that's put forward in so many ways.
Just one or two more thoughts, because I think you and I, this is something we care a lot about, and I know some people listening are like, hey, you guys aren't like talking about elections or churches right now.
You're talking about, you know, manhood, and that's kind of different.
But, you know, I think you and I think a lot about this.
We both went through purity culture.
None of this is saying going to the gym is a bad thing.
Go to the gym, people.
Be healthy.
Work out.
You know, feel good about yourself.
That's not what we're saying.
You talked about absence and presence.
I think what this model of manhood does is teaches men that the only emotion that they should show is anger.
So, if you're angry, that's the kind of emotion you can show.
Donald Trump shows that all the time.
And going back to the eroticism, the bloodlust, he makes you feel as a man the emotion that you're allowed to be in public.
You're not allowed to be introspective, vulnerable.
You're not allowed to be empathetic.
We see all of these Christian leaders and theologians coming out these days saying empathy is a sin, empathy is a temptation.
So, I think what it teaches you to do is to be present through anger and absent emotionally every way else.
Like, empathy, you talked about listening, you talked about vulnerability, those are not things that you should be present for.
And in that way, it's a cop-out.
It's like, yeah, I'm going to be on the horizon as the cowboy.
I'll come in and be violent when I need to put everything in order.
And then I'm going to leave and I'm not going to be the one who like helps you when you skinned your knee or talks through your, you're going through puberty and you have a lot of like stuff happening and you're coming out to your parents as queer as you're coming out as bi, you're coming out in some way.
Uh, that's nah, too much.
That's too much for me.
I'll, I'm going to get up and leave the room.
I'm not doing that.
Right.
That's, that's not something I can handle.
Uh, so I, I want to make one more point and, and I know we're running out of time today.
Historians of sexuality, I think, make this point over and over, which is white men in America have performed this kind of weird paradox when it comes to the sense of masculinity.
Because there's this sense among white men in the 20th century that they had grown soft because they were working in offices, they were working in town, they were not, a lot of them, just by the numbers, were not working in jobs that made them feel physical.
So the response, like I think some of the men in the USA Today article, if you have 18 grand to spend, you're probably a day trader or an executive or something.
You're not out there, you know, doing physical labor to make your money.
They think that to be a man, you have to return to the primitive state.
Like the answer for them is like, go back to being a real man by going back to being what men were when we lived in caves.
The reason that's a paradox is because when you hear those same men talk about why people of color, black people, indigenous people are not real human and not real American, it's because they're primitive.
It's this weird thing where they're like, well, they have never evolved past, as racist, you know, we will say they've never evolved past their primitiveness, their savagery.
And so that is why we are better than them.
Me, yes, I am going to go back and be primitive and savage, but it's because I evolved in the first place and now I need to get back to it.
And you see what I'm, there's a lot of big lines here, but you can also see in here like white vulnerability and fear about the physical Prowess and the physical presence of black bodies, or of black men, or of people of color.
Being able to overpower them, or being stronger than them.
We could talk for the next 28 hours about this, but I just wanted to get that in there today before we wrap up this part.
Just one thought to tie into that.
It's also the same thing where the white racist discourse about black families for generations has been what?
The absence of black men.
It's because black men aren't present and so forth, but Within this white masculinist notion, what we need is less presence.
We need to withdraw.
We need to put distance between the family.
So again, it's that same kind of double standard that, as you're highlighting, just highlights how much this is really an issue of white masculinity in particular.
All right.
I feel like, Dan, we could really truly talk about this for hours.
We're going to stop.
Let's take a break.
We'll come back and talk about another man who wants to break things.
Surprise, surprise.
What a theme we have today.
Be right back.
All right, Politico, a really, really interesting article by Michael Kruse.
And it profiles a man named Ted Johnson in New Hampshire who is a Trump voter.
And I know some of you are like, Brad, we don't need more white men.
Trump voter profiles, we have enough.
This really stood out to me because of what it shows about the psyche of this particular Trump voter.
And I think, Dan, why He, DeSantis had no chance being Diet Trump, why Haley is not going to come close to challenging Trump, why Trump dominated white evangelical votes in Iowa, and so on and so on.
This guy Ted Johnson's really interesting.
So he is in New Hampshire.
He's a retired military veteran, served over 20 years in the military.
That was his career.
He was not in for one tour or five years.
He was in there for a full 20.
And he says that he wants Donald Trump to be president.
Quote, he breaks the system.
He exposes the deep state and it's going to be miserable four years for everybody.
For everybody, I said, and that's Michael Cruz, the reporter.
Everybody.
For you?
I think his policies are going to be good, but it's going to be hard to watch this happen to our country.
He's going to pull it apart.
That's how the article begins.
So Ted Johnson is basically outlining a vision where he's like, you know, I'm going to vote for Trump because he's going to tear apart the country and it's going to hurt for everybody.
And you're like, OK, what?
Why?
Why is this what you want?
And the article goes on to, and I'll summarize because we're going to run out of time.
The article goes on to basically show the progression of Johnson's thinking.
He at one point is like for some of these very fringe candidates in the Republican primary debate.
You know, remember when there was like 78 people in the primary stage debating?
And then he's for Haley.
Okay.
And he's like, you know what?
I'm going to be, I'm going with Haley.
Okay.
Because he thought Haley could pull us all back together.
And at some point, however, He gets to this place where he's like, you know, I can't vote for Haley because she doesn't seem interested in punishing everyone, holding everybody accountable.
That could be Hunter Biden.
That could be Joe Biden.
That could be anyone else who's committed crimes.
He says, I'm a military guy.
It's black and white for me.
If you do wrong, you do wrong.
And so I got to go with Trump.
And if you read the article, then you know what he's saying?
Yeah, Haley's got some good ideas, but Trump's the only one who I think's going to hurt people.
I think he's the only one that's actually going to punish people.
Hunter Biden, sure, that's an easy one.
But all the others that have like ruined the country, he's going to punish them.
He's going to hurt them.
And that's why I'm going to go with him.
Yeah, it's going to be bad.
He's going to tear the place apart.
And a lot of people are going to probably suffer.
But that's, I think, I think, I think.
The people who I want to suffer suffering is more important than the country prospering or us being united.
And I'll just mention one more part of this and I'll throw it to you because we are going to run out of time.
And that is, by the end of it, the reporter, Michael Kruse, has really cornered Ted Johnson.
And he's like, you realize that Trump is being indicted for 91 counts.
And Kruse goes through all the court cases, like the fraud case.
Oh, well, they just, that was, they, they gin that up.
That wasn't real.
E. Jean Carroll, okay, whatever.
And then we get to the stolen classified documents case.
And Michael Cruz is like, you're a military guy.
Doesn't that bother you?
And Johnson's answer is basically, yeah, whoever told him that was a case shouldn't have.
And he totally takes the accountability and responsibility off of Donald Trump, the commander in chief, the ex-president.
And he's like, yeah, somebody gave him bad advice.
He should not have had those classified documents in his bathroom or whatever.
By the end of it, Dan, you get this profile of a man that's like, I'm going to vote for the dude that will hurt people.
I want him to hold everyone accountable, except for himself, and he's exempt.
And I'm okay with that.
And I think it is everything packed into what we talk about in this show.
If people want to know about white evangelicals, if they want to know why not DeSantis, why not Ted Cruz back in the day, why not Mike Huckabee back in the day, why does Donald Trump continue to—it's this.
When you go to the rally, he makes you feel like his interest is to hurt those you think need to be hurt.
And you know what?
And this guy says it out loud, and I'm so grateful he did, even if it tears the country up, even if it just makes everybody here suffer, I would rather see those people brutalized than have a country that's on its way to healing.
On its way to a new form of flourishing.
On its way to a new chapter of American peace and Pax Americana.
It's fascinating and so, so terrifying.
What do you think of this article?
All the same things you did.
A couple things here.
Number one, it's about the right people suffering, the people who deserve to suffer.
This is the purity of the American body.
This is punishing or effectively expelling those impure parts, holding them to task.
This is populism and nationalism.
It's not about everybody.
Being held accountable.
And the contortions this guy goes through to, like, exempt Trump, it's everything that goes on in the GOP right now, the so-called party of law and order, unless you're a J6 person, unless you are Trump, unless you're anything else, and then that's not accountability.
There's a lot of crying from Ted Johnson here for, you know, the poor, ultra-rich white guy who, you know, is being persecuted.
I think the other thing about this is that this is not about—it just highlights how much these discussions—I talk about this on It's In The Code in a number of ways all the time.
You get in these discussions with people in your life and it just goes in a circle.
This article moves in a big, giant circle.
It's not about reason.
And I can't delve into it.
I know we're out of time, but an idea I've been playing with based on some stuff I'm reading, and I think folks are going to hear about it in some other contexts coming up, is sort of the difference between what I would call sort of factual belief, believing in something as a fact, which means that you're also open to counter evidence, things like that, versus believing something creedally, as a creed, as an act of faith.
It is an act of faith that Trump will do this.
And so there is no counter evidence That can be given against this and it's the same thing if we're talking about conceptions of masculinity or whatever else and so for this dude He's gonna walk down the path to kind of just just a white male nihilistic vision of America that you know what if If I can't be sure that we're gonna have the right kind of social body We're gonna we're gonna blow the whole thing up.
We're gonna blow it up and we'll build it again We'll make it look the way that we want it to look But so, OK, think about what he says about Haley, the woman in this this whole discussion.
She's going to unite us too much.
I don't think she wants to punish.
I mean, he in the article, he's like, I don't think she wants to actually, you know, hold those people accountable and hurt them.
So I can't vote for her.
I mean, he's basically saying like and everything we talked about last segment about.
Men thinking that to be a man, you're the kind of guy that does what?
You get tough, you get hard, and you're ready to hurt people when it's time.
That's a man.
So this guy's like, I'm going to vote for the man that will do that, not the woman who promises to unite us.
The last part of the article, Dan, I think is so to a T, everything you just said.
And I just want to read it, and then we can move on.
So this guy, Ted Johnson, talks about accountability.
And holding people accountable for what they've done wrong.
So here's the reporter, Michael Cruz.
Accountability is accountability!
I said.
Accountability is accountability, Ted Johnson said.
Whether it's Hunter Biden or Donald Trump, Michael Kruse responds.
But do I trust the system?
I don't.
That's Ted Johnson.
You're a veteran.
You're somebody who doesn't trust the system that in the broadest sense you served, says Michael Kruse, the reporter.
I have no trust, says Ted Johnson.
The system you served?
That's right.
I swore an oath.
I believed in that oath, says Ted Johnson.
When did you stop believing about when Trump became president?
There's a dude who serves 20 something years in our military for a system.
2016, what happens?
Trump comes on the stage and convinces him that the system is broken.
And now when somebody tries to tell him anything about the system, he starts with, well, the system is broken.
And then he goes through all these iterations of like, should I vote for Haley?
Should I vote for whoever?
And he's like, you know, my first idea, my first premise is that the system is broken.
So whoever will continue to break the system, Is the one I'm going to vote for because that's what we need to do.
Oh, it's Trump.
Then you're like, wait a minute.
So how did you come to the realization of your first premise in this argument that the system is broken?
Oh, when Trump became president.
Like it's the exact circular reasoning you just said.
It's, it's mind boggling.
It's, there's nothing rational about it, but it, it is, it's all right there on the page.
And it's a really good example.
Michael Cruz, Politico, talking about it this week.
All right.
What's your reason for hope?
Debated on a few things.
I'm going to stick with a theme I had last week, talking about football and NFL, but something I found hopeful.
Another thing that goes on this time of year, you've got NFL playoffs.
You also have coaches getting fired everywhere.
And this year, this hiring cycle, the NFL just hired four minority head coaches.
That's the most that have ever been hired in a single cycle.
There are now nine minority head coaches in the NFL, which is more than there have ever been.
It's not good enough.
The NFL has lagged way behind lots of other sports, notably the NBA, in these kinds of issues.
But as somebody who just, I love this sport and I have so many issues with this league, it's, you know, we see all of these kinds of things in the news.
It was something that I found hopeful and a sign of what I think is positive sort of cultural change.
I hope someday you are hired by the NFL to be a A seminar leader about non-toxic masculinity.
That's what I would like to see in the future.
Yeah, that's on the horizon, and that's going to happen real soon, I'm sure.
I'm going to send some emails.
My reason for hope is The Humanists, Minnesota.
The gathering I got to attend was so cool.
Dan, there was like 150 people there.
And one of the things that I thought was really cool is that at the humanist gathering, which is a group of folks who are humanists, meaning they don't believe in God, they're not religious, they're secular people, there was somebody there from Christians Against Christian Nationalism.
There was a bunch of Christians there.
And what we talked about a lot over dinner and in the social hour and all this stuff was that people, we need to build coalitions, whether you are a Christian against Christian nationalist, whether you're a humanist, whether you're an atheist, whether you, whoever you are, whether you're part of a minoritized religious group in this country.
If we believe in democracy, if we believe in a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious democracy, then we should all join hands because that should be a goal, just because we differ on On religion or non-religion should not be preventative.
So that was so cool.
I came away from that gathering so inspired and that's my reason for hope.
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Next week, later in the week, I'm going to release our episode together, Dan and I, two hours of bonus content.
That's only coming to you if you're a subscriber, and it's coming via Supercast.
So if you're a patron, switch over now so you can catch all of that.
All right, y'all.
Thanks for being here.
Thanks for listening.
Be back next week with a great interview.
It's in the code.
For now, we'll say thanks.
Thanks for listening.
Have a good day.
Thanks, Brad.
Thanks for listening today, y'all.
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