Weekly Roundup: Taylor Swift Plays Fool's Ball + Trucker Convoy and Satanists in Idaho
Brad and Dan begin by discussing the right-wing meltdown about Taylor Swift and the Super Bowl. They point out the misogyny at the heart of the discourse, as well as the Christian nationalist and patriarchal dimensions.
In the second segment, Brad analyzes the trucker convoy headed the Border - centering on how its participants are using J6 as its inspiration to be warriors for God.
In the final segment Dan takes us through how satanists are warding of Christian nationalism in Idaho by using their proposals for government funded private schools against them.
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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, if I can get that out, at Landmark College.
It's been one of those days, doing some fun tech stuff, and I've got a kid home with COVID.
It's mild, but it's, you know, it's a thing.
So, glad to, I don't know, this is as normal as my week gets, I think, is just doing this.
Yeah, I'm not going to go into it, but it's been a week over here too.
I do have a bone to pick though, Dan, before we get going.
So, got a couple of new reviews of the show this week, and one of them is from a user whose name is listed as 80221, who says, good show, but too much Brad, who kept saying he would cut to Dan, but just kept on talking.
So, I'm just going to say, in my life, it's rare that anybody says, Dan, talk too little.
That's a rare thing.
Well, I just want to know which one of your brothers is user 802221.
Is it Tom?
Tom, is this you?
Is this Mrs. Miller?
Tom or Seth, I don't know.
Maybe it's Allison, my daughter, who is now acquainted with us.
Because that's what every teenage girl wants, to hear more of her dad lecturing.
Yeah.
In this detective novel, I'm going to say it's not Allison.
But anyway, all kidding aside, yes.
I actually, I think I did talk a lot last week.
So I take that criticism with all equanimity and we'll do better here today.
Was this just a setup for you to say equanimity?
I'm just asking.
The whole conversation was building to that.
Excellent, correct use of an underused word.
Do you know what a renaissance man I am?
It's hard to explain.
I'm a man who uses the word equanimity in sentences.
For dinner last night, I had my daughter's half-eaten chicken nuggets while I stood over the sink washing dishes.
I mean, I'm a very refined human being, Dan.
Okay.
Today we're going to talk about Taylor Swift and conservatives, especially conservative men, melting down because she's going to the Super Bowl in her first year of playing football.
We're also going to talk about the trucker convoy that is headed toward the border, or kind of the border, and what that's looking like.
They're calling themselves God's Army.
There's a lot of biblical references.
Militias were not invited before.
Now they're kind of invited.
So we need to talk about the trucker convoy in the context of the standoff between the Biden administration and Governor Abbott and the Texas National Guard and so on.
We'll finish up by talking about Idaho, and Idaho was all set to give vouchers to religious schools, and then a pesky satanic school popped up, and everybody rethought whether or not they wanted to give vouchers to these schools.
So I love stories like this.
That one's going to be super fun.
We just don't get to talk enough about the Idaho satanists, so they're due.
You know what I love about this week too, Dan, is none of these stories are Trump or DeSantis stories.
We don't, I mean, they will be hanging around, Trump at least will be hanging around, but these are all stories that I think are really important, but we don't have to kind of go and dig into like the Trump campaign or DeSantis or anything like that.
So I think that's a nice treat too.
Let's talk about Taylor Swift.
I'm going to play a montage from Fox News Cuts from Fox News that just show how much Fox News lost it this week, like lost their mind, lost their mind.
All right.
Here it is.
We have had enough of Taylor Swift for now.
She shouldn't be liberal.
She should be a total conservative, given what, given everything.
The Pentagon PSYOP unit pitched NATO on turning Taylor Swift into an asset.
Yesterday, she flew private from New York City to Baltimore, yet she constantly talks about climate change.
So just please don't believe everything Taylor Swift says.
We're all begging you.
I think she should just stick to her singing and let her love life be what it is.
The New York Times just speculated she's a lesbian.
A new poll shows 18% of voters are likely to vote for whichever candidate Taylor Swift endorses.
Uh-oh.
Biden effectively has Taylor Swift as his VP.
A single post of hers led to 35,000 new registrants.
That's arguably more power than the president.
Don't get involved.
Don't get involved in politics.
We don't want to see you there.
Okay, Dan, you are a football fan.
I don't think that'll be...
Don't get involved.
Don't get involved in politics.
We don't want to see you there.
Okay, Dan, you are a football fan.
You watch more football than me.
I sometimes know what's happening, but not really with the football.
Taylor Swift, I think just started playing football is a tight end.
She's going to the Super Bowl in her first year.
I don't know why people are so mad.
That's, that's really amazing to be in your first year of playing football and be going to the Super Bowl.
So that's a, you know, hats off to Taylor.
What's going on?
Why are people so upset about Taylor Swift and the football?
Yeah, so as pieces of the montage, we'll have sort of alerted folks.
There is this, right now, this fever dream, or if you could link a bunch of minds together and have a bunch of concurrent fever dreams, that's what we've got, about conspiracies about Taylor Swift, the Kansas City Chiefs, the Super Bowl, Joe Biden, the fixes in.
Somehow the NFL is conspiring to, like, make Joe Biden president because, you know, the National Football League is known for its liberal policies and its progressive positions, and so on and so forth.
So, like, for anybody who doesn't know, Taylor Swift is dating a guy named Travis Kelsey, and Travis Kelsey is the tight end, starting tight end.
For the Kansas City Chiefs.
And what's funny about this is you would have thought that this would have made all, like, the cisheterobro fanboys, like, you would think they'd be drooling over this, right?
It's Taylor Swift.
She's obviously not the pop icon.
She's maybe, like, the pop icon.
She's, and I'm going to sound really awful and kind of misogynistic and stereotyped here, but this is how I would have thought it would play out.
She's this tall, blonde pop star dating this man's man, tight end, who's not just a tight end, he's the best tight end in the NFL.
If Travis Kelce retired today, he would go into the Hall of Fame.
It's just, it's like straight out of central casting of like the head cheerleader dating the, you know, the football quarterback or whatever.
Instead, you have like this meltdown on the right.
And why?
So one is the people on the right, they hate Taylor Swift.
Okay, why?
The first one is she's a powerful, successful woman.
She's a billionaire, right?
She's worth over a billion now because of what she does.
She is a woman and it's just straight up, you know, the standard misogyny.
It's the same reason people get upset every time there's a woman cast as a Jedi in a Star Wars movie or like whatever else.
All of that sort of stuff.
She also is not sexualized and hasn't marketed herself in the same way that some other pop stars have, and there's been a fair amount written about this this week.
I think that's really important to note.
She also has been increasingly politically vocal.
For a long time in her career, She, I think by design and to have this kind of neutral pop star appeal, like, was not vocal about politics.
But somewhere around 2018 into 2020 started talking more about politics, came out in favor of some LGBTQ issues, had a song, right, that featured that.
In 2020, she endorsed Joe Biden for president.
And so, she also has this huge following of fans that just, I think part of it, she just takes the spotlight away from a lot of powerful men.
And it's, she's like, coming at what, 17 to 20 years or something, like, as like this pop figure.
So, she has a multi-generational fan base that covers a lot of things.
I'm not a pop Music person, but she's a phenomenon.
And I think she, the more I've sort of followed Swift or learned about Swift, I think she's really an impressive person.
And so they hate her.
They also don't like Kelsey, the tight end of the Kansas City Chiefs.
Why?
Partly because he did commercials promoting COVID vaccines for Pfizer.
None other than Aaron Rodgers, another NFL figure who's completely irrelevant, blew his knee out like literally four plays into his season, still managed to keep the limelight on himself by saying crazy stuff on the Pat McAfee Show.
He mocked him, others have mocked him, and so forth.
So, as their relationship has become more public, and it started out, you know, people spotted her in The family suite at a Chiefs game and they were like, whoa, what's going on?
Is she like, you know, together with Travis Kelsey and over they've sort of opened up and whatever.
These things have all sort of come together and it has turned into this like hate fest for her and Travis Kelsey.
So that's some of the background of this.
Okay.
Here was a tweet or an X or a post or whatever we call them now from Vivek Ramaswamy this week that sort of Or not, I mean, that's a week, a couple weeks ago, whatever it was, that sort of sort of mashes all this together.
And he said this, and this is like just typical and leads right into the sort of montage that you highlighted.
He said, I wonder who's going to win the Super Bowl next month.
And I wonder if there's a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially, culturally propped up couple this fall.
Just some wild speculations over here.
Let's see how it goes over the next eight months.
What's weird about that is he positions this like it's a conspiracy.
So, I hate the Kansas City Chiefs.
I have to, as a matter of football faith, dislike the Kansas City Chiefs because I'm a Denver Broncos fan and they're in the same division.
I think the Chiefs are going to win the Super Bowl.
They're there for like the third time in five years.
It's not any kind of like bold statement to say that the Chiefs might win the Super Bowl.
Travis Kelce just broke Jerry Rice's record for receptions in the playoffs.
On and on and on and on.
And again, she endorsed Biden in 2020.
So somebody's like, oh, watch out, I bet she's gonna endor—yeah, fine.
But then it led to all the kind of crazy stuff that you're talking about.
So none of what he said made that big a deal, but then there were the spinoffs.
This is gonna sound, you know, just like the stuff that Fox says.
Heather Schwedel at Slate had a nice sort of summary of a number of these things, and you can find these all over.
This is how she summed up the sort of stuff that came up after that tweet.
What followed was like an Intramaga round of Exquisite Corpse, the game where you write a story by passing a piece of paper around the room and having each person add a line.
With each plot development, the story grew increasingly unhinged.
One-time presidential candidate Jack Lombardi II wrote that Kansas City's whole football season and path to the Super Bowl must have been scripted.
Podcaster Mike Crispy predicted an official endorsement of Biden during halftime at the big game.
Far-right activist Laura Loomer added that the Super Bowl and surrounding events were a psy-op and the Democrats were going to use Taylor Swift as the poster child for their pro-abortion GoTV campaign.
Consumer influencer Rogan O'Hanley chimed in to say that if the Chiefs won, it would inevitably result in World War III and millions of deaths.
End quote.
So this is what we're talking about here.
So that's the phenomenon.
What the hell does it mean, the takeaways?
The first is, I think, again, we talk about this a lot, the need to maintain rage, to maintain outrage, to have targets for outrage.
And this is the thing, when you have a political movement built on outrage, on disgust, on all of these kinds of emotions, you have to constantly create objects of outrage and disgust and so forth.
And this just shows how unhinged it is.
Most conspiracists, at least, you know, they'll pretend to, like, have reasons or they'll give you rationale or something.
These are just these bizarro sorts of claims.
I think it shows the deep-seated misogyny on the right.
I think it's almost impossible to understate the misogyny of these, not just as directed to Taylor Swift, but I see it with Kelsey as well.
When he came out and did these kind of almost public service-y kinds of things, it was for Pfizer, but it was about the COVID vaccine and so forth, where lots of people were like, I always thought that Travis Kelsey was a man's man.
And I just, I didn't expect this from an NFL player.
I didn't.
His masculinity was called into question because he's pro-vaccine.
Hey, would it be good?
I mean, maybe to sometime talk about man camps and the men are not all right on this show or, Oh, I think, you know what?
I think last week we, yeah.
Anyway.
Okay.
We never mind.
I think we did do about 48 minutes last week.
And I'm willing to say to all the people who want to mock Travis Kelsey's masculinity because he has the COVID, I would stack him up probably against most people in the man camps.
If that's the game somebody wanted to play, I think we could.
Well, I'm not going to say that that's what it means to be a man.
I do know that if we are going to go to a camp and the games we're going to play are going to be ones in which you have to push heavy things or run far or lift heavy things, then yes, I think Travis Kelsey is probably in the top And I would be probably, my back would be hurting and I would probably be reading poetry under a tree somewhere.
But so yes, under that rubric, he's in.
Yeah.
So again, I think the misogyny, you get this, I know you get this question, I get this question, folks we talk to get this question of why do you always talk about race or why do you always talk about gender equality?
You should be talking about religious beliefs or, you know, and we try to say all the time that these other aspects of identity are core to Christian nationalism and the identity of the right.
And I think this shows this.
I think it also shows how misogyny works against lots of people, right?
Not just female identified people.
Not just queer folk, but against somebody who, in most misogynistic accounts, we would think would be the quote-unquote the man's man.
And yet, because he was pro-vaccine, he's targeted.
I think it also demonstrates, and people have pointed this out, the really counterproductive nature of the right-wing culture wars.
A lot of people have been like, wait, hold on, GOP.
You've got this issue with suburban women and the gaps opening up.
You've seen what has happened on the issue of reproductive rights and women's health since Roe v. Wade was overturned.
And you're targeting Taylor Swift, right, who is this pop icon to millions of, in particular, millennial women.
Has articulated positions about women's health and access and so forth.
Has many, many, many, many, many followers that lots in the GOP are worried that if she were to really come out and endorse somebody hard and be like, you know, if you're a real Swifty, this is who you'll vote for, I don't think she's going to do that.
But there are people that are worried if she did, she would suddenly flip the switch For a whole bunch of people, or if she were to, I don't know, mobilize her army to go out and, you know, get out the vote or whatever, that this is a potent potential political force.
And so, lots of people just point out this is really counterproductive, and this is how the culture wars work.
And we've seen this.
We're starting to see it with other people, that it drives the base.
But it doesn't play with undecided voters or moderates or women and so forth.
So those are some takeaways.
Other thoughts that you might have on whatever we want to call this, this mania.
Well, I wasn't sure if you were done, and I was just going to jump in on that last point quickly, which was to say, so this week, the American right did lose their mind this week on this.
Jack Postabeach came out and was like, you know, we don't have Taylor Swift on our side, but you know who we do have?
Ted Nugent.
Scott Baio.
You have a teenage daughter who you just mentioned.
I am right at the cusp between oldest millennial ever or Gen X. My wife is a couple years younger than me and she's definitely millennial.
I think we could ask any millennial Gen Z alpha person, and the gen alphas might be like, who's Taylor Swift?
Too old.
I don't know.
But, hey, who has a, I don't know, cultural presence in your life?
Taylor Swift or Ted Nugent?
Or, I mean, the other big gun they came out with this week was Kid Rock, okay?
And so, Kid Rock and Ted Nugent versus Taylor Swift.
Yeah, good luck with that one.
Good luck seeing who has the persuasive power there.
I feel like ticket sales are just about equal between The Heiress Tour and Ted Nugent.
I just went down to the theater and watched the Ted Nugent concert that they had in theater.
Oh wait, wait, no that wasn't.
Ted Nugent doesn't get to do any of that because he doesn't have those numbers.
Yeah, so that's one.
Okay, I want to just get a couple things in before I go into my big points about Taylor Swift on this.
One is, four years ago today, Donald Trump I tweeted this out.
Congratulations to the Kansas City Chiefs on a great game and a fantastic comeback under immense pressure.
You represented the great state of Kansas and in fact the entire USA so very well.
Our country is proud of you.
So, I don't think the Kansas City Chiefs play in Kansas.
I think they play in another Kansas City in the state of Missouri.
But anyway, am I right about that?
You're the football guy.
Yes, yes.
So that's fun.
That's just a little historical trivia for four years ago today, if you want to remember what those years were like.
Number two, Brett Walmsley, I believe, is the one who pointed me out to this.
So, Brent, thank you.
This is going around, though.
But in 2009, Taylor Swift was accosted on stage by Kanye West, who said, hey, I'm going to let you finish, but you should not have won best video of the year.
Fifteen years or so later, one of them is a white supremacist, a Nazi-supporting anti-Semitic person who is really a big symbol of the American far right.
The other is Taylor Swift, a white woman who is doing things like you're talking about with reproductive rights and thinking hard about things like climate change and other stuff.
I should also just real quick throw in that.
I should have mentioned this.
The other thing that she's done that I think ties in with everything you're highlighting and this was the sexual harassment case that she took to court.
For people who don't know or don't remember, her testimony was amazing.
It was like a takedown of the manager who touched her inappropriately.
It was a takedown of the whole system.
And she did it for like a dollar, right?
Those were the damages.
That she was claiming because she was just making a statement about women and women's bodies and the fact that just because she's a pop star, she's nobody's property.
I think that's another piece that ties in with all of this.
And the Kanye West piece is just like slots right into all of those kinds of issues.
Well, and she remastered her entire library as a result of all of that and now owns, you know, her, all of her own masters, Taylor's version.
So that's, that's all part of this too.
So I think that leads to a point you alluded to, but I just want to make sure to touch on, which is that Taylor Swift is, is a woman in her mid thirties.
Well, she's not married.
She has no children.
She's a billionaire.
This is everything that Fox News and many in the American right and many Christian nationalists do not want young women to think they can be.
So you're telling me that she's happy and she's 34, no kids, she's a billionaire.
She might be when her tour shows up in your city, including where I live, the Bay Area, which is, you know, there's an incredible
Uh centrality of wealth in this part of the country even here when she shows up it changes the GDP of the but changes the economy wherever she goes she is that big of a deal that if she chooses to come to your city it will change the ways that the hotels and the restaurants and everything happens for that that uh financial year because the heiress tour came to you so she's an independent woman that that Fox News does not want anyone to think is actually happy.
I was talking with Eleanor Janega, who is a scholar, a medieval scholar, and has written a great book, and I'm going to interview her soon, about medieval women and the ways that misogyny in the medieval ages still operates today.
And one of the things she said in that talk was that, Whenever the Vikings showed up in medieval Europe, everyone was like, hey, they're not part of Christendom.
They're like pagan.
They don't have a Christian God.
And yet they're like super powerful and amazing.
And they're kind of making me rethink everything I've heard about like, I better be in The church and I better be in this certain way of life.
Otherwise, everything will be terrible.
So there was this like wide scale concern that if anyone actually like was exposed to the Vikings somehow a you know, the Vikings might overrun them but be the Vikings what might show them that you can be a lot of things flourishing without the Christian God.
I think Taylor Swift is a little bit like that.
I think Taylor Swift is like if you see a woman who is like never been married does not have children is an overwhelming Megastar success.
Does things like testify in court?
Does things like remaster her own library?
Does things like essentially change a generation musically?
Whether you're a fan of hers or not, I think anyone can recognize that.
Fox News is like, what?
And, right, she kind of starts out as a country-ish.
Pop star, country light, country something.
She's white.
I mean, Laura Ingraham said this this week, like she should be conservative, like you could see it on her face, like she should be conservative.
I don't get it.
I don't know what went wrong.
And what's funny is also it's not as if Taylor Swift is like super liberal.
She's not.
Or maybe she is.
Maybe her personal views are there, but she has not articulated that in any sane world, she's Pretty mainstream and moderate in at least the political views that she has articulated.
But yeah, you're right, she said the quiet part out loud.
She should be conservative.
She looks like our vision of what a conservative woman would be.
Well, and I think that last part you just said is one that we should hover on.
Let's not overlook, okay, that, yeah, Taylor Swift is not a kind of overwhelming progressive, okay?
So Swifties, please, I'm not, this is not criticism, please don't come for me, I'm not being mean to Taylor, okay?
I'm in all seriousness here.
But in political terms, this is not somebody who is like campaigning for a Green New Deal with AOC or is talking about reparations, things that you might think of as squarely on the left in the United States.
She's also dating a football player and the Kelsey brothers.
Again, this is no criticism.
Everyone hang with me.
Do not say that Brad hates Taylor's boyfriend.
I don't.
OK, please just hang out for a sec.
But like, the Kelsey brothers are like beer drinking bros.
I mean, you can correct me, Dan, here, if I don't know some stuff, but like- If people didn't see the playoff game with Travis Kelsey's brother, who stole the show, like yelling shirtless and like running around in the crowd and stuff, that's like, yep, that's them.
It was awesome.
But that's what.
So this is not like that football.
Like there's like those football players that you're like, yeah, he played three years in the NFL and then he went to be on a neurosurgeon or like he played four years in the NFL and now he is professor of politics at the University of Toronto.
These are just beer drinking dudes who like if you read the stories about them in college, they like legendary how much beer they could drink and how many video games they could play.
And none of that's criticism.
I whatever.
Here's my point.
She's not dating the guy who's like, yeah, once I'm done with the NFL, I'll probably move to Paris and pursue my passion.
In French literature, this is just beer drinking American white boys and they're still losing their mind.
They're still like, I can't believe this is happening.
They're still like, I can't, I don't understand why this.
And so one of the things I did see, you mentioned, you mentioned Travis Kelsey's masculinity.
I saw a post from a conservative that was like, I don't get it.
Why would he want to date a 34 year old woman?
It's hard to have kids with women.
I mean, this is what The Post said.
This is not me.
It's like, it's hard to have kids with women in their 30s.
And, you know, why would he want to do this?
And like, she has her own career.
And it's also because, and this is the ties in all, he's punching up to get to Taylor.
Like in this couple, it's a power couple.
She is the power player.
It's like, wow, Taylor Swift's dating a football player.
You know what I'm saying?
There's that piece of it, because what that's one step from is, he's Travis Kelce.
He could date any 20-year-old he wants.
That's where it's going.
Layers of this.
So layers of this.
It's I mean, he's punching way up.
I mean, there's no this is not like this is not when Jay Z and Beyonce got together and everyone's like, well, yeah, you know, I mean, a lot's happened since then.
But like, you know, there's a whole thing of him like having to try to get his number to her.
Like it's, it's just, it's really funny.
Like he had to like, he had to work to try to get her to like notice him.
Not many people in the world you got to do that with if you're Travis Kelce.
This is not Brangelina.
This is not, I'm like, I'm like definitely dating myself now.
Um, whatever.
Well, I'm going to make one more point and then I'll throw it back to you and then we can wrap this up.
I'm not sure if we get this reaction if we don't have two things present.
One I already talked about, which is Taylor Swift being a kind of country-ish person.
Like she's a Nashville, like she was for a long time a Nashville person.
So she was supposed to be, and Nashville to me is sort of the, it's not only the country music capital of the world, but it's sort of the white entertainment capital of the world, right?
It's the place where if you're a white country artist, That's kind of your Los Angeles.
That's kind of your New York.
I have joked in the past that if we made a Stuff White People Like for 2023, 2024, Nashville's in the top five.
The amount of white people I went to high school with who now live in Nashville, some of you are listening, I know that, is in the double digits, maybe the triple.
I think, Dan, if you and I went right now to Nashville, I might be able to find 100 people that I know, even though I haven't been to Nashville in years, okay?
So the fact that Taylor's not a rap artist, is not a jazz artist, I think is totally part of the Fox News meltdown.
I also think football is.
Because football is supposed to be like a representation of American might and nationalism more than any other sport.
You see the firefighter jets fly over the game, the American flags, the service men and women.
It is a It is a game of war meant to represent America's wartime and war power capabilities.
And the fact, we're not talking about baseball, right?
She's not dating a left fielder.
She's not dating a point guard.
She's not dating whatever may be an MLS soccer player.
This is the best tight end on the best team in the National Football League.
And it's like, They have gone to the conservative house, they've flown from Nashville into the football stadium, and they're just melting conservative minds all over America, and they don't know what to do, and this is where we are.
So, all right, final thoughts on this before we move on.
Just to tie in again, I know I just keep coming back to the misogyny of it, but the thing I almost said earlier is that SWIFT is not Taylor Swift is not the conservative Barbie doll image.
Oh, but wait, guess who else wasn't the Barbie doll image that created all the outrage on the right?
It was Barbie.
It's the same.
Like, like we've we've seen this before, right?
We see it all the time when there are powerful, successful women, white women telling stories, living stories that don't fit a certain conservative narrative.
There just is not any way for conservatives in America to sort of countenance that because it threatens everything that they say that you have to be and have to do to have a real and authentic and true America.
Well, Charlie Kirk says all the time to young women, get married, have as many kids as possible.
Don't move to a city.
That's how you be happy.
And then Taylor Swift shows up and it's like, well, there went that fantasy or myth.
All right, let's take a break.
Come back and talk about the trucker convoy.
Be right back.
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All right, here we go.
There is a trucker convoy, Dan, heading to the border this week, or the non-border, we'll talk about what I mean there.
This started a couple of weeks ago, and it actually started before the Biden-Abbott standoff.
There was a group of people who were talking about leading a border convoy to protect the border and retake the border and so on.
Very early on, And I want to highlight this for a number of reasons.
One is I think that The Christian nationalism is just right there at the heart of all this.
There's a J6 element that I think is really important for us to notice, and then there's a militia element too.
So let me go through some of this.
Shout out to Tess Owen, who has just been covering this so amazingly at VICE, and I believe is still on the beat, like, hanging out at the convoy, which is, I'm sure, a whole experience.
On 1-26, Tess Owen published a piece at VICE and had a couple of quotes from people who were involved with the convoy.
This is a biblical, monumental moment that's been put together by God, one convoy organizer said on a recent planning call.
We are besieged on all sides by dark forces of evil, said another.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God.
It is time for the remnant to rise.
The remnant from the book of Revelation are the ones who remain faithful to Jesus in times of crisis.
So right away, Dan, this is everything that I'm always talking about with Christian nationalism.
We have a geopolitical issue here.
We have an issue of two nations separated by a border.
We have an internal political dynamic between the Biden administration and Border Patrol and Governor Abbott and the Texas National Guard.
But that is not how this is framed.
Did you hear the words I just said?
This is a biblical, monumental thing.
This is us being besieged on all sides by what?
By A president who doesn't agree with our immigration policy?
Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no.
That would be too calm.
By dark forces of evil.
Do you all see the difference?
When you frame politics not as, hey, Dan is the president and I disagree with him.
We really need to rally our side to show that there's more of us than him.
It would be really smart for him to reconsider.
We need to sort of show that If you don't do this, there's going to be issues here and people won't vote for you and you're going to create other political problems over there.
Nope.
It's just dark forces of evil and a biblical monumental enterprise.
We are the remnant.
We are somehow the peacemakers who by going to the border with militias, as we'll see in a minute, are going to somehow make peace.
Good.
All right.
These latest developments, Tess Owen writes, have aroused Civil War fantasies on fringe forums, as well as on the social media accounts of GOP lawmakers.
We have Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt and Newsmax host Carl Rigby musing about the possibility of a force-on-force conflict.
We've had other governors promise to send troops.
Kristi Noem and others have said, we will send people there.
Pete Chambers, a former military commander who says he was a Green Beret, was quoted as saying, There's a war literally happening now for America.
We are at 1774 right now.
He later drew a comparison with the biblical story of Gideon's army in the Book of Judges, the army's faith in God allowed them to prevail over their enemy.
All right, so not only is this all framed in cosmic terms, but they're toggling back and forth between the American Revolution and biblical references.
If you all want to know how Christian nationalism works, that's it.
You superimpose a biblical narrative onto an American political issue and you compare it to the American Revolution.
So we, this is such an amazing sort of references.
We're at 1774 right now, meaning we're right before the American Revolution.
Cool.
So who are we?
Well, we're Gideon's army.
Bible reference.
Like, there's no like, we're at 1774 right now, George Washington, right?
It's like, American Revolution?
How do we know we'll win?
Bible.
God's on our side.
They're called the God's Army.
So I just want to point that out, that there's, this is all framed in these terms.
What I've argued for a long time, Dan, is that this is how J6 was framed.
This is how people justified being at J6.
You talk about it as, we're at this inflection point as a country.
1776 moment.
God put us here for a reason.
Jericho March.
Trust him.
And here we go.
So, I know that some of you listening are like, hey, the convoy's not as big as they say.
It may just, like by next Friday when you guys do this show, the convoy may have just petered out into a big nothing.
And you might be right.
The reason I'm bringing this up is because not only do we continue to have Governor Abbott stoking the flames, like Texas is now flying the Gonzalez come and take it flag just to like instigate this conflict.
More and more conservative politicians are chiming in saying we will send troops.
I think there's some troops on the way.
I don't have that in front of me from other states.
National Guardsmen is what I should say.
But this superimposing of biblical themes onto revolutionary war ideals in the midst of a potentially violent conflict, that was J6.
J6 didn't peter out.
J6 is not something we should laugh at.
And so even if the trucker convoy does, there's going to be another one.
There's going to be more of this.
It's not like this is just like, oh, it will go away.
I got a couple more things here I want to say, but jump in.
What do you got so far?
Well, just some of the same things that you sort of tied in the first when you talked about peacemakers.
It's always interesting to ask or analyze when somebody says that or, you know...
What constitutes peace?
And we've talked about this before, right?
This notion of what some theologians call like the myth of sort of righteous violence and so forth, right?
This notion that violence brings peace and the conflating of those things.
So it's just always worth noting when people use these words like peace, like, how are they using them?
What do they mean?
Who's peace?
Who gets to win?
Who doesn't?
And how is that brought about?
I think it's also interesting, people listening, it's in the code, I've been doing this, this kind of thing on the Bible, right, and how the Bible works in this, and you're highlighting this perfectly, that one of the ways that a certain kind of Christianity that will claim to be quote-unquote biblical, to use the Bible, to believe the Bible, right, whatever, this is one of the ways that it works is because the Bible has no context.
It has no history.
It is just this divine text that exists and can be sort of applied timelessly.
And so you can conflate passages in the Bible, for example, images of Jesus in the Gospels as this peacemaker, and images from like the Book of Revelation where he comes in power and violence and so forth, or passages from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, whatever.
But you can also Yeah, according to them.
As the Bible operates for them.
It is a book with no context, right?
So it doesn't matter when it was written, or how it was written, or that it was written a really long time ago.
And so you can just map it right on to the American Revolution.
Like, it just lays right on top.
Or as you highlight all the time, that the sort of mythic element of things like the American Revolution within the minds of lots of Americans, myths become timeless.
So here in this event, That is obviously not on the scale of a literal civil war going on in Texas.
You can layer on the myth of the American Revolution as the right has it.
You can layer on to that this kind of biblical mythology as they have it.
And you can sort of create this really potent sense of mythologizing the present.
And this is a dynamic you talk about a lot.
Another point I just want to point out, and I know this is maybe the biggest thing, but one of the things that really bothers me with all of this, we are literally at war stuff, is I'm like, people on the right don't like to talk about privilege and stuff, but I'm like, we got places like Ukraine in the world.
We've got people in the world suffering in war.
We see what those cities look like.
Don't give me this stuff that like, as a white person in Texas somewhere or whatever, that that's your experience.
Like, there's just that piece of it as well that I find really just sort of, not sort of, I find it really offensive, sort of layered onto this.
So yeah, just lots of stuff.
I think that mythic element is one of the things that really stands out.
And I think partly because it's something that you're highlighting all the time.
So let's talk about J6.
Kate Brickley, I'm not sure how Kate pronounces Kate's last name, but writes in the Daily Beast.
Three years ago, Joshua Macias was facing prison time in Pennsylvania for bringing an AR-15 and a samurai sword to a Philadelphia vote counting site in an attempt to disrupt the 2020 election.
This week, he was whipping up the crowd of a MAGA convoy that's heading to the US-Mexico border for a peaceful protest against the influx of migrants.
Standing in the bed of a pickup truck emblazoned with We The People on Tuesday, Macias told the group, My name is Joshua and I am one of the J6ers.
I was thrown in the Philly Gulag for 21 days for asking if every vote was being counted.
That was just a simple question.
For context, while I had an AR-15 and a samurai sword, but I'm just asking a question.
He then focused on more than 70 military vets charged with storming the U.S.
Capitol, calling them, wait for it Dan, hostages.
Since the convoy took off Monday, participants have focused as much on January 6th as they have on the border crisis.
Let me say that again.
They have focused as much on January 6th as they have on the border crisis.
They've talked about Roseanne Boyland, who was trampled by a mob during the insurrection, and after Macias led a prayer, a woman joined him on the truck.
This gentleman is a J6er.
He is a hero.
But I'm here to tell you, there are over 1,200 patriots locked up.
Then the crowd started chanting, Ashley Babbitt, Ashley Babbitt, Ashley Babbitt.
Never forget her name, a woman shouted.
Say her name.
Murdered by the D.C.
Metro Police, Ashley Babbitt.
Never forget her.
Rest in peace.
I've been saying since the insurrection that this riot was an Alamo moment that would be the beginning and not the end.
It would be a thing that people would memorialize and use to recall and inspire further violence and further events.
Unfortunately, that is what is happening right here.
These guys who are in this convoy, and again, this could be a major story by next Friday.
It could peter out.
I don't know.
Regardless, they're doing what a lot of people do in this country, which is using the J6ers as what?
What are the words that I've been recounting here?
As heroes?
As hostages?
The guy that was locked up for 21 days said it was a gulag?
And then they're talking about Ashley Babbitt not as someone who was attacking a federal building, disobeying police orders, but as a martyr, as a hero, as somebody that they will remember forever as who spilled her blood for their cause.
This militia is, I'm sorry, this convoy is exactly the kind of thing that I thought would happen if we did not condemn J6 unilaterally in our society and excise it and evaporate it from our midst.
This is what you get.
You get myths.
You get myth-making in real time.
You turn prisoners into hostages.
You turn people who died storming the Capitol to stop an election from being certified into martyrs.
That's how it works.
And that's what we're seeing here.
Let me make one more point, Dan, I'll throw it to you.
Initially, this group said, no militias.
This is going to be peaceful.
Tess Owen has reported this week that they've since relented, that there's a group from Nebraska, a militia from Nebraska that will be coming down, and it looks like maybe some others.
However, the organizers of the convoy have said, please don't bring long guns or big guns, just sidearms.
Cause we want this to be peaceful.
Y'all ever heard of like, like an 18 and over club that serves alcohol, but you have to have like a wristband.
That says you're 21 to go order a drink.
Dan, you and I are old, so this is not the kind of thing you and I think about very often.
But in my 20s, every once in a while, you'd go out, and there'd be a place that was 18 and over, and you're like, oh, that's kind of weird.
But like, oh, don't worry.
You have to show your ID, and if you're over 21, we'll give you a wristband, and you're thinking, okay, cool.
So the 21 year old's going to go order like 12 shots of Jaeger and hand those off to how many 18 or 19 year olds that are here, right?
When you just tell militias, Hey guys, come on down.
Let's just leave the big guns at home.
Go ahead and bring the sidearms and the pistols.
You got one in your boot.
No problem.
Got one in the purse there, the cross body bag.
No, no biggie, but you know, the shotgun, I don't leave it.
Danny, leave it in the truck.
I just, that's, that would be my encouragement for today.
It's.
Is that really how this works?
Is that really like what, what we're after?
I don't know.
I just, when I read that, I wanted to bring that up because one more time, the American right is like, yeah, we're just going to court the militias.
We're going to buddy up to them, but they're not going to be violent or overstep boundaries.
We just want them on our side.
Okay.
And finally, the politicians here have done nothing to defuse this.
That by raising the come and take it flag in Texas, by getting on Fox News and getting clicks, various governors have only legitimated this entire convoy and their whole cosmic divine mission to be the peacemakers who show up with the militias and somehow affect peace.
They say they may not actually go to the border.
Because they don't want to instigate.
They may gather somewhere that is in a different location.
That remains to be seen.
We'll know more next week.
But Dan, final thoughts on the convoy before we head off to Idaho to talk about the Satanists.
Just a couple.
Like, what a surprise, right?
That militancy and the language of militancy and the images of militancy draws militants.
Sorry, it's like, hey, we talked about, you know, being an army of God.
I can't believe all these militias keep calling.
We talked about civil war.
We said we're at war.
We're an army of God.
It's a righteous army.
It's like the American Revolution, but I don't know why all the dudes with guns showed up.
Like, that's weird.
Janice, why are we getting so many emails from militias?
Ah, weird.
Anyway.
Yeah.
And then I think that last point that you make about courting these, we've seen the GOP, the GOP has unraveled for A couple decades at this point.
Longer, right?
They've been courting radicals for longer.
But again, I always go back to the Sarah Palin moment when it was like this unveiling of American Christian nationalist populism and mainstreaming it into the American political bloodstream.
And we've seen what happens, and over and over and over there's this notion of like, we need these people, we need to court these, but we'll keep the lid on it.
And it doesn't happen.
We've seen that.
And then I think the final thing is just this notion of the enabling of this, the Glad you brought up Sarah Palin.
encouraging by not discouraging at best, and then sometimes encouraging by political leaders.
It's a repetition of January 6th.
It's a repetition of calling into question the legitimacy of the election.
This is like standard Republican politics at this point.
Glad you brought up Sarah Palin.
Guess who spoke at one of the events this week?
I think, and I would have to look this up- Make Sarah relevant again.
Like that's her move.
If I remember Tess Owens reporting in Twitter feed and other people's feeds this week, I'm pretty sure Sarah Palin introduced Ted Nugent.
So yeah.
So that's one of those.
Anyway, we're going to run out of time.
Let's take a break and come back and we'll talk about Idaho.
All right, Dan, before the break, just want to say we are going to be releasing this weekend our bonus episode.
So if you're a subscriber, be ready for episode one of Hanging Out with Dan and Brad.
If you're not a subscriber, you can subscribe now to make sure to grab that and the bonus content that is appearing on Mondays and everything else.
So just wanted to get that in there.
All right, Dan.
Idaho, Satanists, schools.
How is this good news?
I just want to say that a list, Idaho Satanist Schools, I don't know if anybody in English has ever uttered quite that list before, so this is pretty fun.
I did that with equanimity.
I did that list.
Good.
Good.
Just keep using it.
What nobody can see is that off screen I've got my equanimity bingo card out, and I'm almost there.
I'm almost where I need to be.
So, all right.
In January, in Idaho, lawmakers filed a resolution, right?
It's a GOP-controlled state, right?
So, GOP lawmakers filed a resolution to allow taxpayer money to go to churches, faith-based ministries, church schools, that kind of thing, right?
If somebody says, ah, wait a minute, that sounds hinky.
I don't think you can do that.
It turns out in Idaho you can't.
It is explicitly prohibited by the Idaho Constitution.
Due to what is known as a Blaine Amendment, that gets its name.
I did not know this until, you know, I did some digging around in the wake of this story.
There was a proposed U.S.
constitutional amendment back in 1897 that would have banned federal money from going to religious schools.
It would have been known as the Blaine Amendment.
It didn't pass, but 37 states have basically a version of this in their constitution or law somewhere.
And so they're typically known as Blaine Amendments.
And so Idaho is one of these states.
No problem, says the Idaho GOP, because they will repeal the Blaine Amendment.
That's what they're going to do.
But that was placed on hold, and here's part of the reason.
And I love this.
This is the kind of thing that we've seen people do with book bans and stuff like that.
It's the kind of thing I had said people should do with book bans and things like this.
They had public hearings about this, and lots of people spoke against repealing the Blaine Amendment or this limitation on money for religious things and so forth.
Lots of people spoke in favor of repealing it.
And one of the groups that spoke in favor, or one of the individuals, was Rowan Astra, representing an organization called Satanic Idaho.
And Rowan Astra, representing Satanic Idaho, argued in favor of repeal.
In other words, of allowing tax money to go to religious institutions.
And this is what they said.
This is a quote, I represent Satanic Idaho.
I'm here to support this.
Personally, I'm excited about the ability to truly represent religious plurality, which is a value that's upheld in Idaho and the United States of America.
So I look forward to the opportunity to be able to start a satanic K-12 performing arts school and being able to have access to the same funds that any other religious school would have." Mike dropped, you know, leave, whatever.
So all of this happens, and what it did is it brought the real aims into view.
We talk about this all the time.
When people on the right talk about religious freedom, they're not really talking about religious freedom.
They're talking about Christian privilege and Christian hegemony, right?
And in case somebody says to me, well, how do you know that, Dan?
They didn't say that.
Nobody said that.
They did.
So this is what happens a little bit later on, is a lawyer named Catherine Hartley.
She's a lawyer with the Pacific Justice Institute, which is a right-wing organization in favor of repealing this.
So another right-wing person in favor of repealing this thing.
She was posed a question, right, in this hearing.
GOP representative Vito Barbieri asked this question.
He said, Catherine, I'm curious what your legal perspective would be that if this provision was passed by the electorate, would that result in equal distribution of public funds to Satanists and other what we might call fringe religious beliefs or organizations?
So Satanic Idaho gets up, says, yeah, let's do it.
We're going to start a Satan school.
Then he's like, oh, yeah, Catherine, right-wing lawyer with this.
Is that going to happen?
Is that like a thing that's going to happen?
And her response was, Chairman and Representative Barbieri, it would.
It would allow any religious group to utilize any benefit that's offered by the state.
And obviously today we are not specifically talking about any specific benefit or bill or potential bill, but generally speaking, yes, it would be open to all faiths.
And she says, obviously, with the, I would say, safeguards that are within the law, meaning a person has a right to the free exercise of religion, and the government can only step in if it has a compelling interest that's narrowly tailored, that's called strict scrutiny.
So if someone's free exercise of religion is something so concerning that the state has a compelling interest in prohibiting, the state has the ability to do that.
She tries to throw a little bit of a lifeline, like, if it's really crazy, we might be able to do something.
Yeah, it says free exercise of religion, and if it's a religion that wants free exercise, they would do that.
And so what happened?
The repeal vote is basically tabled.
They more or less are like, oh, we've got to let these people play.
If we're going to do this, we're going to withdraw this.
Again, the big takeaway, the obvious takeaway, is the let's bring what's hidden into view that this is about Christian privilege, this is about Christian identity, this is about Christian Americans, this isn't really about religious freedom, this is about protecting and reinstating white Christian privilege.
And I have no idea if Satanic Idaho is just doing this to do this, if they actually want to start a K-12 school, no idea.
But what this highlights is exactly what we talk about all the time.
The last point I'll make here, we talk a lot about how a lot of these issues, they're about identity.
They're about emotion.
They're about value.
They're about sort of creedal beliefs that are not really open to changing.
And people ask all the time, well, so like, why engage?
Or why argue?
Or why highlight these things?
This is one of those things where I think there's value in that, because what it does is it brings into view what's really, really going on.
Even for people who probably watching this hearing, they maybe never even thought about it before because they just take for granted that we know what religion is.
It's the church down the street.
When they start thinking about what that's going to mean, it opens up other things.
And of course, we're not just talking about Satanists.
We're talking about Jewish people.
We're talking about Muslims.
We're talking about Sikhs or Hindus or whomever else.
That's what we're talking about, who simply don't fit into a white Christian America from within the perspective of the people who want to repeal this.
As you were talking, I got a report in my earpiece here that Taylor Swift, according to Fox News, has reportedly donated $50 million to the Satanic School in Idaho, so that's another reason not to like her, no.
Travis Kelce is giving vaccine shots, I think, at the clinic as well.
Yeah, he's actually coaching the football team there, which is what I've just seen on Fox News.
I mean, I look forward to the, like, Flying Spaghetti Monster school for kids who can't read good in Boise.
I mean, that's the kind of thing that was coming next.
So, I don't know if there's too much more to say here except for it's a really good play, and this is by no means us judging the Satanist groups.
We talked about the Satanic Temple, the Satanic Temple does amazing things in terms of personal liberties and religious liberty in this country.
So please don't take any of this as us saying anything negative about the Satanic Temple or any of those groups.
It's not.
It's a really clever way to point out the hypocrisy in Christians' privilege that is at play in these legislative proposals.
And so I think that's our point.
So it's, it is interesting.
And it's not, it's not often you get to see an about face so clearly once people realize what they've done.
But this was a really poignant one.
And I'm really glad we had a chance to at least highlight it here at the end of the show.
All right, let's go to Reasons for Hope.
Dan, what do you got?
So I had mixed emotions about this.
But if I try to set those aside, there's a story this week, excuse me, about Republican leadership in three GOP controlled states, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and maybe others, Working to expand health care.
And if they do this, it would expand health care to numbers I've seen around almost half a million people who are currently uninsured or underinsured.
The reason I mix, obviously this just smacks of the hypocrisy of the right.
This is, you know, after a decade plus of opposing Obamacare and so forth and denying the realities of this.
I think there are racial components here as you have more quote-unquote working class Americans, which means typically white Americans, aligning with the GOP.
Suddenly now in the GOP we're concerned about health care, but Half a million people getting health care that they wouldn't have had.
I see that as a sign for hope.
Something that brings this issue into the mainstream of America, where it has been living for a long time for a lot of people, but not in some of these states.
So it's a really interesting story.
Something that is hopeful, even if, as I say, I've got a lot of other things I could say about it.
Well, I'm going to just piggyback on yours and say, we're at a place now that in this country where on Obamacare or the ACA, under the ACA, you have something like 21 million people who are covered.
And the Biden administration has really, you know, I'm not...
I really wish we had another hour.
Is this about the mixed feelings thing?
Well, I'm pretty frustrated with Joe Biden and he's willing to say things like, I'll shut down the border if Congress will pass the Ukraine deal.
There's a lot to say about the Biden administration and how it's handled everything in Gaza and at the border.
The subsidies that the Biden administration is now making available mean that a lot more people are on the ACA and at prices they can afford.
So what's happened is something you have said for a long time, Dan, which is if you've got 20 million Americans who are covered, Are you really going to get up there as the GOP and be like, yeah, we're going to get rid of Obamacare day one.
There's a lot of people in conservative states that are like, wait, I'm on Obamacare and I need that.
If you're going to get rid of that, I'm just not going to vote for you.
That doesn't make any sense to me.
Nonetheless, Trump is saying he's going to replace it like he did when he started this.
And then they tried to replace it.
And then we talked about on the show, they had no idea what they were doing and actually had no plan.
Which is also their plan for the border.
I'll just, sorry, there's some things we didn't get to say today, but it's like, Trump is telling, you know, Mike Johnson and others, don't pass a border deal because I need the border crisis in order to get elected.
Like, it's not about fixing, it's just about problems and fear mongering.
So, anyway, we'll leave it there.
So, I think healthcare, I think the ACA, I think the amount of Americans who are covered and the ways it's now part of the American landscape and is starting to be an unmovable part or a move at your own risk part.
Is good news, and so I'll leave it there.
All right friends, thanks for listening.
Monday we'll have a great interview with Kelly Baker on the Gospel of the Klan.
We're going to be having some bonus content as well on Monday.
The bonus episode is coming out this weekend if you're a subscriber.
If you're not, subscribe now on Supercast.
It's in the code and the weekly roundup will be back, but for now we'll say thanks for listening.
This is not the Superbowl this weekend, right Dan?
Not this weekend, next weekend.
Okay, so we're going to release the bonus episode this Sunday.
Yeah.
So we're not competing with the Super Bowl, all right?
We wouldn't want to draw people away from the Super Bowl and drive down their ratings, right?
Yeah, I would feel bad if the NFL lost money.
NFL, we're going to release it this week, okay?
You're welcome, Roger Goodell.
As we agreed.
You emailed me, you wanted to know, and I said, we'll do it this week, so don't worry, all right?
We're not going to compete, okay?
All right, y'all.
Have a good one.
Catch you next time.
Thanks for listening today, y'all.
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