Weekly Roundup: Walk by Faith, Not by Impeachment Votes (or Immunity Claims)
Brad and Dan take a winding tour through a bundle of issues: the GOP's failed impeachment vote; the lampooning of their own bill in the Senate; Red Shirts beating a Latino man live on Fox News; Elise Stefanik saying she wouldn't have certified the election if she was VP; book burning political candidates; a woman who has faith that God has chosen Trump for the presidency.
The common thread: Democracy requires faith; authoritarianism only requires fear and anger.
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My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, here today with my, I think, kind of tired co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
I am kind of tired, but I'm here and of course this will energize me because I get to be with the brilliant Bradley Onishi.
I'm not going to do it now, but I think on our next bonus episode where we have room to roam, I'm going to give everybody my take on...
The calendar, and that's going to include why February is the hardest month.
I think February is the hardest month, and I think I have a good case for that.
Some people don't agree, but I will make that case on our next bonus episode.
I've heard that more people eat rice to cauliflower in February.
All right.
Okay.
All right, Dan.
I think we can bring everything together.
That's what we need.
Man, you know, that's low.
That's low.
It's very, it's just like a, you didn't even, yeah, it's like scorched earth.
All right.
Some of you don't listen to the show every week and you're like, what are they talking about?
Don't worry about it.
It's all good.
Okay.
Today, on a serious note, we're going to talk about the GOP not wanting to govern, and that will include commentary on the border deal, on the failed impeachment attempt.
We will sort of touch on what happened with Trump and the hearing yesterday about whether or not Colorado or other states can leave him off the ballot.
There's some indications, too, about the immunity case.
So we'll talk a little bit about that, but we're not going to spend the entire day on it because there's just more to happen there.
And we're going to let that play out a little bit.
In our second segment, we'll talk about democracy versus authoritarianism in a number of examples from the week.
Red shirts beating up somebody on live air on the Hannity Show, Elise Stefanik, saying if she was vice president, she would not have certified the election, and an instance of book burning that I'll talk about.
And then we'll go to South Carolina.
In a notable case of a woman who thinks that Trump was sent by God and what that means.
It's not the first case, but there are things to say about it.
So, Dan, let me throw it to you.
There's just a kind of bundle of issues this week that reflect on how crisis and fear-mongering are really the agenda of the GOP rather than providing any kind of flourishing vision for human beings in this country.
What happened?
Yeah, so the GOP this week decided to give us all a clown show and show us what they're capable of slash not capable of.
And most people probably have some sense of what this is.
Just to run through it, and I think it shows us a lot of things.
The first one, Tuesday night, the House voted to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas.
I always have a really hard time saying that full title.
And this has been in the works for a long time.
And we know that especially ever since Trump was impeached twice, the GOP has been on this impeachment bandwagon.
We're going to impeach other people.
We know that this is all a run up to impeaching Biden in retribution for Trump.
I mean, this has been sort of telegraphed and like laid out there for a long time.
So they finally have it.
They're ready.
They televise it.
It's on TV.
We're going to have this big spectacle of the GOP saying, ha ha ha, Democrats, we can do this too.
Terrible border policies.
We're going to impeach you and so forth.
And then they weren't able to do it.
They lost kind of their own vote.
They didn't have the ability to impeach him.
Turned into this, you know, real debacle publicly held and everything else.
And then just a little bit later, there was also a standalone bill that would have included, among other things, billions of dollars in aid for Israel.
For Israel, this is the like the most GOP of GOP things, and they couldn't pass it.
What does that show us?
So for a number of things, people have talked about this.
We know this, the GOP dysfunction.
They can't govern.
People can remember back when Trump was elected and the GOP had majorities in both houses.
I thought that Obamacare was going to be gone like five minutes after Trump was inaugurated.
And we all saw it.
It turned out that they can't govern.
They can't do anything.
And that was with majorities everywhere.
This is on display there.
So there's that piece.
I want to just kind of hold that.
But then, just to make the clown show more entertaining, over in the Senate, you have this bipartisan border deal.
Democrats didn't like it.
Lots of progressive Democrats didn't like it.
Of course, the most right-wing Republicans don't like it.
That's what happened to, you know, sort of the mark of the compromise bill, right?
Lots of people don't like it, but the GOP helps negotiate this, sends somebody in to do it, and so forth.
But then they blocked their own bipartisan deal.
They tanked it, pretty much, is what happened.
Why?
They said that it wouldn't do enough to crack down on border issues.
That was their stated reason.
But we all know, and again, it's all public because everything's on X and so forth.
Trump basically told them to.
Trump said to tank it, said it doesn't do enough.
Basically, he's like, we want Democrats to own the problems at the border.
We don't want to saddle ourselves with those and so forth.
We all know Trump wants a crisis at the border.
That's what he's after.
He's campaigning on that.
The last thing that Trump wants to do is to have anything that could fix issues at the border.
And I'm not even getting into the whole, like, does it fix the issues?
What about Biden supporting it?
All of that stuff, okay?
We know that that's what Trump wants, so that's what he does.
So what do we get from the GOP, right?
We have a party that, when it wants to govern, can't.
And people are now concerned about things like, you know, another spending bill and things like this.
What's going to happen when, like, there's something they really need to pass and they just can't?
And when they have the opportunity to govern, they choose not to.
So what are my takeaways?
My takeaway is, and I'll throw it over to you for your thoughts on this and my take on it, The GOP, we've said this for a long time, all the way back to the Obama years, when they talked about them being the party of no, right?
When it was just very explicit, we're going to oppose Obama, sort of period.
when Mitch McConnell said that their highest priority was to make Obama one-term president, you're like, there goes any notion of governance.
We are just an opposition party.
But I feel like the GOP, this has become their destiny.
They can only govern or sort of govern from the sidelines.
They're that person that can only yell from the sidelines and scream at the refs and the players, but can't play the game themselves.
So when they have power, they can't use it.
And they have to have adversity.
They have to have something to be opposed to.
So like the borders, they can't actually fix things because they have no concrete policies.
And they certainly have no concern for most Americans.
They have to have anger.
They have to have blame.
They have to have resentment.
And so when it comes to the possibility of passing legislation that could fix things, well, they can't do that.
And we've already seen it.
Running on the economy and rising inflation and so forth.
There are lots of articles that are like, yeah, it looks like we missed a recession.
So that's a problem for Trump because he's been predicting that that would happen.
Inflation sucks and food's really expensive and things like that, but it's slowing down.
It's come down some.
Oh, that's bad news for Trump.
Why?
Because all he can have is negative things.
And so the GOP keeps those going.
So I think it fits a pattern of, again, not being able to govern when they need to, when they want to, because they don't know how to do anything positive.
All they know how to do is yell from the sidelines and scream.
And they're so geared now to creating crises, creating fear, feeding off resentment, that they have to perpetuate it.
And they tank their own legislation to make sure that that happened this week.
Yeah, just a couple of comments on the details and then a big takeaway that I think I'm going to talk a lot about today.
So with the impeachment vote, there was this Al Green, who's a congressman, congressperson from Houston, is sick, hasn't been in the hospital, but made it out of the hospital to vote.
And apparently Speaker Jeffries and others were able to keep that from the Republicans.
Nobody told.
And so they were completely caught off guard.
Marjorie Taylor Greene had a laughable press conference where she was whining about how, yeah, I mean, she literally said these words like, Yeah, there's a strategy here where you try to get the most votes and we could say that they were playing a strategy.
And it's like, what am I watching right now?
So, I know I use sports metaphors, but it's like when you talk to the coach and they're like, you know, what you got to do is you just got to get more points, more points on the board than the other team.
And you're like, awesome.
Like, cool, I could be an NFL coach then.
Like, they've got a strategy of getting more votes.
Like, there it is.
And you're like, if that's your bar on governance, maybe that's part of your issue.
And so that happened, and if you watch the clip when Speaker Johnson has to actually get up there and announce that it failed, it's a pretty amazing clip because his face is not a happy one.
So one thing is, let's impeach Mayorkas.
That fails.
It turns into another sort of just grand failure.
And it's all tied into the border.
So you mentioned what happened in the Senate.
And I think the larger sort of political on the ground policy issue here is like, They tanked their own legislation because the guy who's trying to be the leader of their party basically said, don't do this.
I need this to run on.
Okay.
If you fix what is happening at the border, if there are news headlines that come out and say, you know, conservatives are able to bend the Democrats will and push through measures that are going to help the border crisis.
And Fox News is interviewing Steve Scalise or someone else.
And those guys are touting a line that's like we've taken real steps to address the border crisis.
Trump's looking around like, what?
I mean, there's so much to say here about the way they frame the whole the whole border issue as a crisis to start with.
But even in terms of their intention, it's not to fix something that they claim is the problem that they claim it is.
It is simply to instill, and this is what I want to, in sort of conceptual terms today, I want to focus on.
It's to instill, cultivate, and just spread two things in anyone who will listen.
Fear and anger.
And I'm going to come back to that.
It may sound very simple.
You're like, Oh, well, you're a genius.
But I want to come back to why fear and anger actually are such important things at this moment in our politics.
So anyway, those are some brief takeaways.
I'll throw it back to you.
And then I will transition into sort of, I think some like more political theory slash democratic reflection type stuff.
Yeah, it's an older movie and not one that maybe everybody knows, but the film years ago, Wag the Dog, where it was this kind of parody in a way of things that real politicians do of creating a crisis to then, in that case, it was to have a reason for doing it.
This is the GOP.
They're the party of crisis.
And they have to keep on going.
I think, as you're saying, anger and fear are real motivators.
I think it also shows how much the GOP party line is built on racism and xenophobia, right?
This is tied in with Trump not just saying that the border's out of control, but saying that they're poisoning the blood of our nation and that kind of language.
I think that's all part of this and wrapped up with this as well.
So, I want to just get it on the record because I haven't done it and I think it's worth it before we kind of go to a little bit more conceptual discussion.
Just count me as somebody who's not happy with the way the Biden administration handled this.
I mean, he said, I'll shut the border down.
He basically went so far to the right and framed this issue in such a way That I mean, he was very center left is maybe generous.
So I'll just say that that was, to me, a thing to notice when it came to Biden and his stance on this.
And so, yeah, I think what it shows is that when you have one party that has moved so far right on this issue, And you get a president like Biden, who's built his career on being a moderate and, and working across the aisle and being somebody who's, is not, you know, far to the left, he's gonna like play ball and say, okay, your way over there.
I'll come over there too.
Let's, let's get a deal.
And you get to a point where there's a Democratic president saying, I'll shut down the border.
And to your point, right, that you made earlier, imagine the talking point that would have been for the GOP if they're like, hey, we got Biden to say this.
We got Biden to do this.
See, we're the ones with the real answers.
The Democratic president can't.
And instead, Trump kind of throws in this giant lifeline because he can't have the GOP get a political win on this because it's not a win for him personally.
So exactly to the point that you were making earlier.
All right, so let's go from the clown show of the impeachment attempt, the Marjorie Taylor Greene press conference, the tanking your own bill in Congress.
I mean, this is all laughable.
So if we zoom out and we say, what's at play here?
We have something that we've said on the show before, which is the goal does not seem to be to help people.
Right?
The goal seems for the GOP to be retaining power in any way possible.
There seems to be a sense in which they recognize we don't have the majority of the country, and we're not even sure that we can persuade the majority of the country to come to our side, and we're not even sure we're interested in that persuasion.
So what we're going to do is we're going to basically use the two passions of fear and anger as our political drivers.
Not hope.
Not optimism, not anticipation, not togetherness or negotiation or what feels good.
You ever been in conflict with somebody and you resolve it and it feels good?
You're like, oh man, I feel better.
I feel better that we've come to an understanding, we've both apologized, we've hugged, we've whatever.
The sense of catharsis, none of that.
It's just anger and fear.
Now here's my thesis, Dan, is that if you can get enough anger and fear in the bodies, in the blood vessels of the people that will listen to you, You will get them to lose trust that there can be anything like principles or ideals that govern your public square in your life.
And it will simply be, I'm so angry and I'm so afraid that we have to win at all costs.
Because if we don't, I'm so afraid that catastrophe will strike and I'm so angry at the other people they don't even deserve, right, understanding or empathy.
So we need To just win.
You know what that's called?
It's not called democracy.
It's called priming a population for authoritarianism.
Authoritarianism is not based on trust or faith in ideas.
Authoritarianism is based on this notion.
I have the power, therefore I am right.
And I promise that what I'm doing is best for you, even if it doesn't seem like it, even if it doesn't appear that way.
I'm always acting in the best kind of interest of our group, even though it feels like I'm persecuting you or invading your privacy or limiting your freedom, a la any number of autocratic regimes in history.
The difference I'm trying to draw down is a democracy demands trust and faith and belief.
If you're going to have a democracy, if you're going to have a public square where we share power, you have to think that there are ideals and concepts that will outlive and outbid anybody's desire to win, anyone's desire to be in power.
And if you can just diminish that trust to almost zero in the people that will listen to you, as the GOP or anyone else, then you can get to a place where authoritarianism starts to seem like a more optimal pathway, where instead of ideas, instead of concepts, instead of an experiment based on liberty or equality, it's just, unless we win, they will come eat us.
And when we win, we will go eat them.
That's the calculus.
So I have like a bunch of examples here, but I'm just real quick, before we go to break, wondering, you're probably much more red and adept at political theory than me.
What strikes your kind of, you know, training there as I talk that way?
So one of the things that I think of is that you use notions like faith and trust.
Trust requires risk, right?
I feel like trust is something different from assurance, right?
By definition, if you're trusting somebody, it means that they could fail you.
They could betray you.
Something could not work out.
And so I think Putting oneself at risk is required for trust.
I think it's built in.
I think we can make the same argument about faith, right?
And that if we wanted to go into philosophy of religion, this is just a difference between faith and knowledge and why this kind of fundamentalist faith actually isn't very faithful and so forth, right?
So, what does that mean?
I guess what it means for me is that I think it's the difference between living in fantasy and reality.
Because the reality is, in social life, we are at risk.
We are at risk that institutions will fail or that bad ideas will prevail or that we, all of us, might make decisions that willingly or unwittingly hurt others or marginalize others or there aren't enough resources to go around and maybe we'll make bad decisions about how those are allocated and just on and on and on.
I think authoritarianism is the fantasy of thinking that you can escape that risk, that you can live without risk and that there is no threat.
So, the ironies here are that you have to create this sense of threat.
You have to deny its reality by saying, if you invest power in me, there's no more risk.
There's no more threat.
Now, we know that that's false.
We know that it's there, but it can feel a lot better to live in a fantasy world than to have to peel that away and say risk is part of life.
And so you've got one political model that acknowledges that, that's built on that, that sort of has that out in the open.
And you have another that tries to hide that and mask that and sort of repress it.
And I think that that's one of those pieces that's there.
And so I think you talk about anger and fear.
They're also emotional.
We all know this.
Everybody's been really angry or really afraid and the neurobiological people will talk about how it shuts down parts of the brain and you can't deliberate and things like that.
Or another thing that I sort of think of, we use the metaphor of, you know, burning it all down.
I think it's actually a good metaphor because fear and anger, they're like, I've been using my fireplace lately.
It's like when you don't want the big roaring fire, you just dump a bunch of wood on there and it roars up and it's cool but it's super hot and it burns down super fast and what do you need?
Constantly you need more fuel.
You can't, it's not sustainable.
So you feed that and feed that and feed that and you feed it with a fantasy that we can set aside any risk, any vulnerability, we don't need to trust.
And the irony of course is that you place your absolute trust in a political leader and you live in that fantasy world.
See, that last part is, before we go to break, is what I really want to touch on because I think we talk a lot about what an authoritarian leader wants.
Oh, authoritarian leaders want absolute power.
They want to, you know, and we rarely talk about why folks are willing to hand over power, hand over authority to authoritarians.
And that's what happens, right?
Democracies break down when, over time, you hand over authority and trust to people who are telling you I'm going to overstep democratic processes and norms and bounds in order to do what I want.
And you saying, yes, please do that.
Yes, we support you.
Yes, we want that.
Why?
It's exactly what you said, Dan.
It's I'm going to just put my trust in an absolute leader.
Under the fantasy that that will solve me.
That I won't be scared anymore.
I won't be vulnerable anymore.
That my life will be fixed.
And they promised to get the bogeymen who are making my life terrible.
Those immigrants.
Those queer people.
If I put my full trust in that guy and he gets rid of the bogeymen, then I will be okay.
That's the fantasy.
And in real life, as you say, we're always, as humans, we're always vulnerable.
It's always a work in progress.
There's always just working, working, working.
You know, you fix one thing as an adult, there's another thing happens.
You got to figure it out.
And so all of that to say, as we're going to go into in the next segment,
I think we have a situation where when I look at the details of the impeachment debacle and the uh tanking your own bill it's easy to laugh and just say you guys can't figure it out and I think some of that's true when you have Marjorie Taylor Greene as somebody who's like at the front we just have to think you're not sending your best people okay but number two what I see is this is the outcome of not wanting to help people but wanting to make people afraid and to make people angry
And when it comes down to actually governing, there's no solutions, as we've talked about on this show many times.
So there's another set of takeaways, I think, to all this, and I want to give some examples in the next segment.
So let's take a break, and we'll come right back.
All right, Dan, I should have said this at the top, but last week I mentioned a review that said Good Show Too Much Brad.
And I wondered if one of your brothers or mom put that up.
This week, someone left a review that said Good Show Not Enough Brad.
And I just want to say, coincidentally, this was the week I did teach my mom how to leave reviews on Apple Podcasts.
So I don't know if that's causation or correlation, and we'll never know, Dan, but that did happen.
All right.
So we're talking about democracy and authoritarianism.
We're talking about faith or not.
So here's a continuation of my thesis for today.
When your trust, when your faith breaks down, when you no longer believe that ideals can govern action, then you have nothing but physical conflict.
You have war.
You have a will to power.
So one of the ideas that I think we learn early on, at least I did, Dan, as Americans, is that we believe in certain values, certain ideals, and they govern us.
Liberty, equality, freedom.
Now, have we ever lived up to that?
Not even close.
Okay?
And as soon as you learn about those, you learn about all the ways we've failed.
Okay.
But there's the idea that we don't live under authority of somebody who is in charge because their family is royalty and they just get to be in charge.
That's not how we do it.
We don't live in a reality where that guy controls the military, so he just gets to be in charge because he took control of the military and they have all the guns and the tanks.
We have ideals, we have values, and they're supposed to sort of organize, right, how we live in this country.
But if that breaks down, here's the thesis.
You're just left with physical conflict, war, will to power.
So here's some examples to me this week, apart from the impeachment, apart from the tanking their own bill in the Senate, of how the American right is going toward that whole side of the spectrum, that authoritarian side of the spectrum.
Number one, Sean Hannity is live on TV the other night, and he's interviewing the head of the Guardian Angels, which is this sort of They're an extra-police, para-police group that started in New York but now has chapters all over the world.
They wear red jackets, and they're an interesting organization to say the least.
But in essence, they tout themselves as folks who sort of patrol their neighborhoods.
And they are not a white-only group, so I think we need to say that.
They're actually a minority-majority group.
They have outfits in major American cities.
There's some in Brazil, other places.
That's great.
Okay, whatever.
But what happens the other night is Hannity is interviewing the founder of the Guardian Angels.
And as they're talking, he's like, hey, look behind me.
Some of my guys have taken down one of these migrants who's been dropped in New York City because they're just taking over.
They're a menace.
So the camera like turns around and there's like three or four people in these guardian angel red jackets beating up somebody who is ostensibly brown and speaks Spanish or is speaking Spanish.
Well, come to realize later, Dan, not a migrant at all.
American citizen walking down the street speaking Spanish.
And here he is not only getting attacked, But Sean Hannity's like, yeah, let's air that on TV.
That's a that's great.
This is a great example of what we want in this country, right?
Later on, we learn all these details.
Hannity gives a half apology, a semi apology, whatever.
Not really.
What's the point?
On a show that's like the second rated cable news show every night in this country, the host is like, let's show people who are not police, not military, not deputized, beating up other people on the street because they're brown and they're speaking Spanish.
That is faith breaking down.
That is ideals breaking down.
That is the kind of very little fire on the corner of a New York street on a Wednesday night.
And if we think that this There's so many historical precedents to this, whether it's the brown shirts in Germany, whether it's all of the American Nazis of the 30s and 40s, whether it's the Ku Klux Klan.
You dress up, you show up in public, you intimidate, you claim you have the authority to do things, and now you're physically attacking people and physically menacing people, okay?
All right, so that's one.
Any quick thoughts on this or you want me to keep going?
Just keep going.
You're on a roll.
All right.
Stay on it.
All right.
So on the very other end of the spectrum is Elise Stefanik.
Elise Stefanik used to be my congressperson when I lived in New York and is very much trying out to be the VP candidate for Trump.
And she gets on there with Caitlin Collins on CNN and says this week, if I were Mike Pence, I would not have certified the election.
So she's saying, I would not have certified an election that was free and fair, that no court, no judge, no one in the country have found any issue with at all.
An election where by all accounts, things went as they were supposed to, even though people claimed falsely as the judges and the courts ruled dozens of times.
Nothing was amiss, regardless of what conspiracies are out there.
She says, if I'm vice president, I will not certify.
She's basically saying, Trump, if you pick me, I won't fail you like Mike Pence did.
What is she saying?
She's saying this, even though no judge, no court, no appeal, no one, after dozens and dozens and dozens of attempts in Arizona and Pennsylvania and everywhere, Georgia, I don't trust it.
I'm not going to follow the democratic process.
I'm just going to say, I have the power not to certify, so I'm not going to do it.
That's a breakdown in belief.
It's a breakdown in the trust of the system.
It's a breakdown in the idea that anything can go how it's supposed to.
Okay.
That's, that's number two.
Elise Stefanik basically saying, sign me up, Trump, and I won't fail you next time they try to get you out of office.
Okay.
Number three.
Marjorie Taylor Greene and other representatives came out, and Marjorie Taylor Greene had one of the most incoherent rants I've heard in a long time, but said, when folks came to the Capitol on January 6th, you called that an insurrection.
But when Biden was inaugurated and there were National Guard folks protecting him, you called that an inauguration.
I don't get it.
Okay, that just sounds like Karen in the comments.
Like, Karen, no one knows what you're saying and you just seem like you're just saying things in the comments now.
But another representative gets up and says, what happened on January 6th was just like any day in the Missouri State Capitol.
Go to Jefferson City, just like any old day there.
What is he saying?
He's saying, we had people physically, violently attack the Capitol.
And it is not something that you should take notice of.
And, right, according to Marjorie Taylor Greene, there was something just as bad two, three weeks later when the National Guard was there with with Biden, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Give you one more.
J.D.
Vance tells George Stephanopoulos this week that he thinks that the president, according to the Constitution, has the authority not to listen to the Supreme Court.
If the Supreme Court puts down something that the president deems unconstitutional, the president can just say, no, not listening to that.
And if you watch the clip, Stephanopoulos basically cut the interview right at that moment and was like, okay, thanks for letting us know you think that that's okay.
And Vance was left there like, no, no, no, George, while that went to commercial.
It was kind of embarrassing.
What's he saying?
He's saying, hey, if you're president, You get a ruling from the Supreme Court about things like, I don't know, immunity or anything else, and you don't like it, you don't have to listen.
That doesn't bode well for a context in which we have a presidential candidate who's foreshadowing Project 2025, expanding the executive branch.
He said dozens of times, I want to run for four more years and four more after that.
Does not bode well in a context where he's openly saying, I'm going to stay as long as I want, basically.
And I'm going to expand the executive branch to the point that it is a pretty autonomous machine and can't hardly be checked by the other branches of government.
Yeah, Supreme Court says something I don't like.
That's what J.D.
Vance says.
So, I know some of you are listening like, Brad, you're all over the place.
You got Red Shirts, you got J.D.
Vance, you got Elise Stefanik, you got the insurrection.
What's the takeaway?
The takeaway is this, create fear and anger.
Make it so people just put their trust in you and hand over authority to you.
And then signal that when you can't get your way, when you can't do it how you want to do it, you will resort to either physical acts of violence or extra-legal approaches to governing.
Democracy demands faith in all of us to share power and a process.
These are all very small But what amount to an entire political party in this country saying, we don't believe in that anymore.
We will turn to violence.
We will turn to extra legal ways of governing.
And if we have to do it, that's how we'll do it.
And people will let us do it.
Why?
Because we've made them so afraid and so angry that they are going to hand us the keys to the kingdom, whether you like it or not, Democrats, progressives, or anyone else who's not on our side.
I got one more big example that I want to talk about, but I'll throw it to you.
I just want to pick up on this theme of faith, right?
This notion of faith and trust.
And if we really wanted to geek out and go into like the etymology of the word faith, it's built on the concept of trust and like a fiduciary institution, etc, etc.
Here's the thing that strikes me is that the same people, and I like this analysis you have, the breakdown of faith in or trust in these concepts, these institutions, these procedures, just other Americans.
The same people that are embodying that lack of faith are the ones who will proclaim their faith the loudest, right?
It's the ones who, we're the real Christians.
We're the real people of faith.
And their Christianity is built on what?
An authoritarian God.
But I mean, that's their claim to faith.
Or they're the ones who will say, we're the ones who have, why are we doing this?
Because we have faith in America, right?
And of course, you're suggesting it's exactly the opposite.
And I think that that's another piece of this.
And I guess that's what I'm trying to get at when I say that I think that faith and a kind of radical assurance, they don't go together, right?
Faith is an act of trust.
And this is why When I talk, it's in the code and things like that, I say all the time that bad theology hurts people.
This is why.
I think the notion that when this gets defined as faith, when we sort of mask a lack of faith by sort of calling it faith, calling it a superlative faith, when we ground it in a vision of an absolute God or an absolute state or an absolute ruler, right?
It's absolutism.
That's what I find so tricky and ironic about this.
And I talk to people, people say, are you an anti-faith?
Are you opposed to people of faith?
I'm like, I'm not.
But I think that most of those Christian nationalists who are the loudest about their faith are the ones with an utter lack of faith.
And I think that's true of a lot of those kinds of things and those connections between religion and politics.
So I think what you're highlighting is a real thing.
And I would just sort of challenge people that when people who claim to be quote-unquote people of faith or to be the ones with real faith and so forth are the ones who lash out in these kind of infantile ways.
That's what these are.
I'm really scared and angry so I'm just going to run around and hit people or blow things up or yell at people or whatever.
My kids do that.
I'm like, this is ridiculous.
Except that you're like 10, or you've got a toddler in the house, or a preschooler.
It's like, okay, I guess that's developmentally appropriate, but we're going to have to learn how to not do that.
When you have grown-ups doing it and proclaiming faith, for me, that's when we're not talking about faith, we're talking about something else.
So I like that you're sort of making this connection with these developments.
So I think we'll get to this later today, and I think we've talked about it at length on the show, but I just, I agree wholeheartedly with you that, and I think you and I have talked about this in our various faith kind of deconstruction journeys, is you learn very quickly that the people who are the most ardent fundamentalists and extremists are the ones who are scared to have faith.
Because as you said earlier today, faith requires trust.
And faith is an admission of vulnerability.
I don't know exactly what's going to happen.
Trust.
Hey, I think you can do it, Dan.
Obviously, I don't know for sure, but I think you can do it.
So I trust you.
Go for it.
When I trust someone, that's what I'm saying.
I mean, think about how we act with our family members, Dan.
I think about this a lot.
Think about with your partner.
Right?
If you have a partnership that's somehow based on trust and faith, you're saying, hey, you and I have talked about the parameters and values of our relationship, and I trust you to live those out.
I think that you're going to uphold the ways that we've negotiated that we're going to be in a relationship.
The same goes with my kids.
You just talked about kids.
I can be the type of dad who just yells at them and when they're like, why?
And it's like, because I said so.
That's one parenting style.
It's not mine.
The other way is to express, you know, why we do things, explain that, ask them to sort of think about what is best for everyone involved, you know, go through why it's better to do it this way than that, ask them to trust me, ask them to see it my way, ask them to have patience, kindness, whatever, all the preschool values, etc.
But that's what we do in our families, right?
At least in mine.
That's how we operate, whether it's with our partner, whether it's our kids.
That is how you would think we'd want to carry out a democratic public square.
Now, let me give you one more example before we cut this and go to another break.
There is a candidate running for Mississippi Secretary of State.
Her name is Valentina Gomez.
And Valentina Gomez just aired a commercial, an ad for her campaign, where she is burning books.
Literally, like, with a flamethrower.
Valentina Gomez, if you want to look it up.
And she has a flamethrower and she is burning a couple of books.
One is queer.
The Ultimate LGBT Guide for Teens and a couple more.
She says in the ad that this is what she'll do to grooming quote-unquote books when she is Secretary of State and there's like a sign by the book she's burning that are called like liberal tears or it says liberal tears I guess so I guess liberal tears are being cried as she burns these books.
All right.
One of the other books is Naked, Not Your Average Sex Encyclopedia.
Okay, so she's burning these books.
Not the only Republican into burning books.
About two months ago, Sarah Huckabee Sanders appointed a former state senator, Jason Raybert, to the board.
Sorry, I'm reading something here.
And Raper previously said that he thought Jesus would advocate for burning books.
So that's, uh, we're going to have to amend the name of our podcast, Dan, from Straight White American Jesus to Straight White American Jesus the Book Burner or something like that.
Book burning to me, like if you're running on book burning, you can say, hey, Brad, you know, wasn't really into your examples today.
Like the red shirts, Elise Stefanik, uh, I don't know, JD Vance.
Come on, man.
This is not a, not a big news week, huh, pal?
My thesis, though, about a breakdown in trust, when you are burning books, you're doing exactly what I feel like we're talking about today, Dan.
You're basically saying that I'm not going to contend with the ideas, I'm not going to contend with the worldview, I'm not going to contend with the argument presented in these books.
I'm going to burn them.
And if you want to approach me with the ideas, with the worldview, In these books, then you might be worth imprisoning, putting in a camp, or burning yourself.
It's a book by Rebecca Knuth, who wrote two books on the history of book burning.
And I want to quote Rebecca Knuth right now.
To extremists, books are Trojan horses concealing political and religious heresies that have the potential to undermine ideology and weaken authority.
To me, that's the whole game.
Books can undermine ideology and weaken authority.
You might put your faith in ideas and concepts and values rather than the supreme leader, rather than the absolute autocrat.
Localized cultural violence engineered by extremist groups is often staged as a righteous protest to affirm group allegiance.
When an extremist group gains absolute power, destruction of culture escalates rapidly and rights of renunciation and affirmation spin out of control.
She goes on to say that one of the common denominators in book burning in the history of the world, not just the 20th century, is that the groups doing the book burning will tell you they are the victims.
We're burning these books because we're scared.
We have been the victims of a something, a culture war, of woke globalists, and so we need to burn these books.
We need you to know that these are not okay.
To me, Dan, if you're going to have a party that is openly letting folks running for big offices, Secretary of State, burn books, you're giving up on democracy.
You're saying, I don't want to confront ideas in the public square.
I don't want to try to persuade you.
I want you to know that if these ideas are your ideas, Then you might be next.
There's the over-quoted but very famous line from Heinrich Hein who said, right, if people are, where you burn books, people will be next.
And unfortunately, that is what history tells us.
If we look at the 20th century, right, if we look at places like Nazi Germany, okay, and we see book burning, you see what comes next.
And I'll just, I'll leave it here because I'm talking a lot and I'll stop.
We're going to get more reviews.
Too much Brad, I apologize.
I know that appeals to history aren't always convincing.
And I'm always the one who's like, history's nuanced.
Is this a Christian nation?
No.
Were there a lot of Christians who helped build this nation?
Of course.
There's a lot of nuance in our history.
I would put it out there and I'm happy for someone to email me.
I can't think of a situation where burning books took place in anything but.
The precursor to an authoritarian society or the midst of an authoritarian regime.
Send me the example where book burning was like, yeah, you know, they had a pretty good democracy going, sharing power.
Uh, but yeah, they burned some books.
Just send, send me.
If you're burning books, you have no historical precedent to draw on that says, oh yeah, our predecessors burned books and they were right.
The only people who can point to are Nazis.
And authoritarians and autocrats.
So burning books is the epitome of the breakdown of trust I've been trying to talk about all day.
All right.
Off to you.
Sorry.
So just some thoughts on that is that, you know, you talk about like what is one of the responses of fear, right?
Or anxiety.
It's denial.
It's avoidance.
It's just the person who won't acknowledge the, you know, the diagnosis they got from the doctor or who won't go in for that test because they're afraid of what they're going to, you know, they're afraid of what they're going to see.
That's what, like, book burning is sort of the enactment of that, right?
Like, we can't just not engage these ideas.
We are going to, like, literally obliterate them and just pretend that they don't even exist.
Burn this hard copy of it as if that will, like, sort of do away with the idea.
And to your point, and people can say that we're going to burn people next, that's extreme rhetoric.
Okay, but how about erasing people of color, right?
We're doing that.
Let's get quote unquote critical race theory out of schools.
Let's stop talking about slavery and so forth.
DEI.
Yeah, DEI.
Let's erase queer folk.
Let's make sure that there really is no such thing as a minor who needs to transition.
We're just going to legislate that away.
That's what these things are.
And I think the last piece about this, I think, you know, it brought up this notion of fantasy, this fantasy of what's real and what isn't.
And I'll just say this, we all know people's fantasies tell you a lot about them.
Right?
And so if their fantasy is, when I see things or people or populations I don't like, I will just literally erase them.
I think that tells us more than enough about the kind of person that we're dealing with.
And I think we need to take that seriously and not dismiss it because this is an American candidate doing this sort of publicity thing and whatever.
I think we need to not trivialize that.
Yeah.
All right.
I can feel a whole nother, it's all, there's just a whole nother, there's 28 more minutes here for me to say, and I'm not, I'm not going to do it.
I'm just, Dan, you've talked on It's in the Code about Wayne Grudem a lot.
When you see like Wayne Grubner's book in a library or if you walked into your house and that was on your, would you ever think, you know what I'm going to do?
Like if you walked in and your kid was reading Wayne Grubner, this is weird.
This is getting weird.
Would you just snatch it out of their hands, march them to the backyard, put some gasoline on it and put it on fire and be like, we don't read that here.
Here's what I'm saying.
I have never ever considered.
That burning a book would be the way to actually help the world.
I don't think I've ever entertained that thought.
I'm sitting here and I'm thinking, have I ever?
And you're right, it's a telling point.
I don't think there's any time when I'm like, this idea is terrible, we need to get the blowtorches.
That's clearly the reaction we need.
Yeah, anyway, all right.
It shows a lot.
All right, let's take a break.
We'll come back, and we're going to talk about what you and I think is probably the antithesis of faith, which is somebody who's screaming about faith the loudest.
Be right back.
All right, Dan, take us to South Carolina.
What's happening there?
We've been talking about this theme and we've talked about notions of God's will.
Our extra episode for folks that got to hear that, that figured prominently, but we talked about it before when the Speaker of the House was asked in an interview about God's will and what happens when it doesn't go the way you want and so forth.
There was a really telling, I think, telling and illustrative CNN interview this week with a South Carolina woman who I think represents that and the logic of this and what we might call the Donald Trump no matter what camp, right?
If you've got the never Trumpers, and there are lots of people in American politics for whom it's no mystery how they're going to vote in an election.
Probably nobody would be surprised if I said that I'm not really deliberating whether or not I'm going to vote for Trump.
We know that those people exist, but we also know the way that that can just become this.
It's a point of faith, right?
A whole different kind of faith or faith in the negative, not in the sense of trust, but in the sense of like an ultimate denial.
And so they interviewed this woman and it was really interesting.
Her name is Joy.
I think it's Rendulic.
I'm not positive how to pronounce her last name, but she has this story.
She moved to South Carolina from Pennsylvania, cashed in her 401k, bought an ice cream shop, and this is what she decides to do.
And she phrased it this way.
She said, God brought me here.
That is to South Carolina.
I thought I was doing what I was supposed to be doing for my life, and he had a different plan.
We think we are in control, but we're not.
So, she makes this big life move, moves to South Carolina, buys an ice cream shop, and, you know, attributes this to God, this is, you know, this sort of act of faith, and so forth.
And why do I bring that up?
I don't care about the woman, like, moving and buying the ice cream shop, if that's her dream or whatever, great, cool.
Instead, it ties in with politics, right, in this interview, and for her, because she starts talking about Living in South Carolina.
And she says that, talking about Haley, Nikki Haley, when she was governor of South Carolina, said she was a very good governor, right?
And they get into this.
And then in 2016, 2020, she votes for Trump.
And like, why do we bring all this up?
This is what made the news.
This is what made the headline.
She said that, quote, I totally believe God has assigned him to this position.
So everything we're talking about, elections, all of that, you know, we don't need it.
God has assigned this to this position, which means it was God's will and so forth.
And so in the interview, she is asked, OK, so like what happened in 2020?
Right?
Christian who says that this was God's will.
And I'm going to read from the interview because this is how she responds.
And we've seen people tie themselves in these knots before.
That was a mess, Rindjulik said.
That was so illegal.
Some improper cheating happened to the voting procedure.
Interviewer says, or the article says, we mentioned all the recounts and court cases Trump lost.
You just talked about that, including cases decided by judges Trump appointed that upheld now President Joe Biden's victory.
She goes on to say, I think so many people hate Trump.
I just know there was a whole lot of cheating, right?
So there's the assertion.
I just, it doesn't matter what evidence there is.
Doesn't matter that they were Trump appointed judges.
Doesn't matter that it was like they didn't win any cases about this.
I know that there was cheating.
The article goes on and says, there's no evidence of that, but she was adamant.
So we ask, if it was God's plan for Trump to be president, why would God let that happen?
And this is the obvious point anytime people talk about divine will and so forth.
And what she said was, what happened is what happened.
And I believe Trump is coming again, right?
Like sort of no answer, no response there.
So where am I headed with this?
We've had this theme of faith, right?
And here is this other point of faith.
And it's where, again, people sometimes are like, I'm not anti-faith.
I'm not opposed to people of faith.
I have really interesting, I think, or complex thoughts about faith.
But when faith is just denial, When faith is just a license for supporting exactly the kind of authoritarian practices you're talking about, that brings us full circle into what we're looking at.
Because what is the logic of her position?
God, how does she say it?
God assigned him, that's the word, not appointed.
I keep thinking appointed.
God assigned him to this position.
So Biden, you defied God's will.
Democratic voters, you defied God's will.
Mike Pence certifying the election, you defied God's will.
All of you other people defied God's will.
So what could possibly be out of bounds if that's the way politics works?
And again, to your point, here it's articulated as an act of faith, right?
I believe that God assigned him to that position and so forth.
I believe that all that evidence is false, everything.
I have an absolute faith in this.
It's an absolute lack of faith in all the things that make democracy work.
I put it out there, it's a lack of faith in God.
If you are a person who believes that everything that happens happens because it's part of God's purpose or God is doing it, But you want to explain away or resist the things you don't like about that?
You've got weak faith, right?
And I'm not endorsing that view of God.
I'm not endorsing that view of faith.
But I just keep coming back to that.
I think this is where it licenses that and shows it in a very kind of on-the-ground way that we've seen in the Speaker of the House.
We've seen it in national media.
We see it in the books that people write.
And you and I, Brad, I know, get the question all the time of, you know, well, how do you get from people going to church and having faith to something like J6?
to trying to overturn an election.
I think this is how, right?
We have no faith in anything except this authoritarian god who's all powerful but apparently not powerful enough because he needs us to go and overturn an election.
So I could keep ranting on but I'll throw it to you for some final thoughts on that.
So I can, I can see someone at home saying, Hey, we know these examples.
Come on, Trump.
People say this kind of stuff all the time.
Like this is what are you guys doing today?
And I guess for me, what you just said ties the whole thread that we've been, we've been drawing today together.
It really like, it really makes the ribbon because this woman is saying, I just know there was cheating and I just know absolutely that God has assigned him to this role.
So if you are afraid of enough, if you are angry enough, you will arrive at a place where you will say, I don't want to hear anything about courts, data, evidence.
I don't want to hear about studies.
I don't want to hear about polls.
I just know Trump has cheated and God wants him to be president.
If you can get people angry enough and fearful enough, they will get to where she is.
Okay.
So that's point number one.
Point number two then is what you just said.
So Trump is going to be president again.
I know that that's going to be true.
God wants that.
What's the next step?
What's the next step?
The next step is, if that means overstepping democratic bounds, if that means extra legal, extra judicial, violent, warlike actions to make sure that Trump is president, you can see someone like this woman, middle-aged to getting older kind of woman who owns an ice cream shop, of all things, basically outlining a worldview where for me, what I'm seeing
there is someone psychologically primed to say, if there's more violence, if there's another J6, if there is an Elise Stefanik not willing to certify an election, if there are Vance saying the president doesn't have to listen to when the Supreme Court checks his power.
She's like, yep.
That's what that's what I believe.
And that's what God wants, because I am so scared and I am so afraid that I have put my trust in this guy, Trump, that he will solve it.
He will fix it.
Do you see what I'm saying, y'all?
You go from being afraid and angry to absolute trust in an absolute ruler who's sent by the absolute creator of the universe.
The third part is the really key part for us on this show.
You're psychologically and emotionally primed.
To then go say, yeah, I know there was another J6.
I know there was violence.
I know people got hurt.
I know that those books got burned.
I know that those gay people got put in camps.
I know that those election officials got put in jail.
But we needed that for Trump to be president, and that's what God wants.
So it's all part of the plan, and I'm okay with it.
I'm good.
With sacrificing democracy as long as I get the guy in power that I want.
And to me, your illustration here at the end of the show ties everything we've been trying to do today all together.
All right.
Reasons for hope.
What do you got?
So we didn't spend much time on it, but I took hope in this week.
Trump was smacked down in a big way by the Federal Appeals Court.
It was the case about these claims to absolute immunity and so forth.
It was very, very clear.
It was sort of a scathing rebuke of like every point that was made.
It was unanimous among the panel.
They also gave a deadline of Monday of next week for Trump to appeal this to SCOTUS.
So like, Clearly trying to move this along and being like, my takeaway, I think a lot of analysts' takeaway was, there was no merit to this.
They found none.
They were very, very clear.
And they were like, you're doing this to waste our time and Americans' time and delay things and so forth.
And so we need to speed this along.
I think it was really powerful.
We'll see if Trump appeals it and so forth.
But I'm actually fairly optimistic about what the Supreme Court will do with this.
But I took a lot of hope from that.
People have been waiting and hearing, and it kind of took a while for the court to make their decision.
And I think that had some people worried, but I think they sent a very, very clear message that there was no ambiguity about this.
So I just think real quick, we have a one-two punch kind of situation this week.
I think what you're saying is right.
The appeals court ruling was a true rebuke of Trump.
A lot of analysts have said it's so well done that they can see the Supreme Court not taking the appeal and therefore the immunity claim would just It would go away, and then the trial with Judge Chutkan and Jack Smith would resume in the spring, and we would have it pretty quick.
So, that seems like what a lot of people are forecasting will happen.
The other part, however, is that it seems like, based on yesterday's hearing in the Supreme Court and the arguments made and the questions asked by justices, including the liberal justices... I was going to say, across the spectrum, are there sort of perspectives and opinions?
Brown, Jackson, Kagan, they all seem skeptical that Colorado can leave Trump off the ballot.
So, we haven't really done much today, but I think what we're going to get, and we'll obviously talk about it when it happens, is Trump on the ballot in Colorado and in Maine, Trump not granted the immunity argument that he's got, and we may not even have the Supreme Court take it up.
So, that's what seems like it's on the docket.
So, anyway, we'll keep an eye on it, of course, like all of you will.
My reason for hope, Aaron Reid, a great journalist, reported and had a great post about how the state legislature in Virginia defeated all of the anti-trans bills there.
They held the line and Virginia really did not allow for those bills to go forward, not one of them.
So that's pretty cool and I appreciate Aaron Reid's reporting on that and Aaron Reid's work on that beat.
All right.
As always, friends, join us on social media at Straight White JC.
If you have not subscribed yet, please do.
Bonus content on Mondays, a bonus episode every month with Dan and I chatting for two hours.
We'll probably have some special guests here in the future.
You can find all of that in the show notes.
Next week, we'll have my second part of my interview with Kelly Baker.
We'll have it's in the code and the weekly roundup, but for now, we'll just say thanks for listening.
