We Are Living in the Klan's America Part II + Bonus Content: Abolish the National Prayer Breakfast
In a new Atlantic article, Ronald Brownstein reports on Trump's plans for a second term - using National Guard troops in American cities to round up migrants; massive camps for undocumented persons; the deportation of ten million people - in short, an operation to reshape American society by putting anyone suspected of not being a real American behind barbed wire or on a plane to another country. This is the Klan's America. Brad talks about it with Dr. Kelly J. Baker, author of the Gospel According to the Klan.
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My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Today, I have part two of the interview with Kelly Baker on the Klan's America.
Last week, I began the episode by pointing us to Charlie Kirk and TPUSA and Nick Fuentes.
And today I want to contextualize this part of the interview by talking about what Donald Trump is foreshadowing as his plan for immigration if he is back in the White House.
This week.
We also have a few minutes of bonus content coming your way for subscribers.
Going to be talking about two things that happened in Congress over the last two weeks.
One is the moving of the National Prayer Breakfast, or at least a prayer breakfast adjacent event, to the Capitol.
And good piece by our friends, Jared Huffman, Representative Jared Huffman in Congress, And Andrew Seidel at Americans United who outlined why it's so problematic.
So I'll talk about that.
Also going to talk about the fact that Jack Hibbs, a vehemently anti-LGBTQ pastor who believes in conversion therapy, gave the opening prayer as the guest chaplain in Congress about 10 days ago.
So that's coming for you subscribers.
If you've not subscribed yet, obviously go ahead and do that now so you don't miss any of the bonus content.
But let's get into Kelly Baker and a piece this week that came out that I think should be a warning to us all.
A few days ago, there was a piece that came out by Ronald Brownstein at the Atlantic, a piece called Trump's Knock at the Door, and I had tons of folks sending it to me.
I had a flag to myself, and it was a very, I think, frightening look into what the Trump campaign is portending for immigration if he wins the White House again.
Here's how Brownstein opens the fourth paragraph of the piece.
Trump has repeatedly promised that if re-elected he will pursue the largest domestic deportation operation in history.
As he put it last month on social media, inherently such an effort would be politically explosive.
That's because any mass deportation program would naturally focus on the largely minority areas of big democratic-leaning cities, where many undocumented immigrants have settled, such as LA, Houston, Chicago, New York, and Phoenix.
What this means is that the communities that are heavily Hispanic or Black, those marginalized communities, are going to be living in absolute fear of a knock on the door.
Whether or not they are themselves undocumented.
That was David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
Brownstein goes on to note that Stephen Miller, yes, that's Stephen Miller, has outlined how this deportation program would take place.
Miller talks about a private red state army under the president's command.
He says that Trump would requisition National Guard troops from sympathetic Republican-controlled states and then deploy them into Democratic-run states whose governors refuse to cooperate with their deportation drive.
Let me just stop for a minute and break that down.
You're going to have a private army under the president Requisitioned from National Guard troops from, say, South Dakota or Texas.
And you might send some of those National Guard troops into places like Chicago or L.A.
The article then outlines some of the mechanics of the deportation process.
So not only do you have National Guard troops who are knocking on doors, terrifying communities of color, terrifying marginalized groups.
But you have Miller who is talking about the ways that they would construct camps that would house a massive amount of people in those camps.
They would be working to deport folks every day on a kind of set schedule.
I mean, Miller goes in detail in this piece about how Monday and Friday there's flights back to different African countries and Thursday and Sunday there's flights back to different Asian countries.
He talks about, in order to do this, getting red state governors to deputize National Guard as immigration officers.
He talks about how the Alabama National Guard is going to arrest illegal aliens, quote unquote, in Alabama and the Virginia National Guard in Virginia.
And if Maryland won't cooperate, then they'll just send in the troops from Virginia to go to their neighbor and do the arrests there.
Miller talks about targeting 10 million people in this whole program.
And there's voices in the article that say this would be nearly impossible and it would require so many new immigration officers and personnel and so on and so forth.
But the thing that is, I think, chilling about Miller's comments is that he talks about how, over the course of the first Trump presidency, they learned.
They learned how to govern.
They learned how to be efficient.
They learned how to get people out of the way that didn't agree with them, and so on.
And that if and when they get back in the White House, they'll be ready to do this.
And now, I don't know if they'll be ready.
Trump is full of errors.
There was infrastructure week his entire term.
But I bring this up today.
Because once again, I want to argue that we are living in the Klan's America, just as Kelly Baker talks about in the interview and you'll hear about in this segment.
We're living in an era where the man who is crushing his opponents in the GOP primary is saying that illegals, quote unquote, immigrants, poisoning the blood of the nation, which is a paraphrase of Mein Kampf.
We're living in an era where Stephen Miller, Is talking about sending away 10 million people.
An era where if you are brown, black, Asian, you're going to have to worry about a knock on the door.
Or if you wear a headscarf, you might need to worry about violence.
We're living in an era where if you are different, if you're not a white Christian, then you'll probably need to live in fear.
You can say, well, even if you are a Christian, but you're not white.
Trump's knock at the door is exactly what the Klan wanted.
A president who would round up anyone who doesn't look like what they think of as a real American, put them in a camp, and then send them away.
To deputize the National Guard.
To be used internally as a President's Army.
Doesn't that sound like a mob?
Doesn't that sound like, I don't know, what the Klan might have done in a sundown town in the Midwest or the South?
It may be jarring to think of living in the Klan's America, but I don't really know how else to put it when I read Brownstein's article about the knock on the door and what Stephen Miller wants to do.
Stephen Miller says that this will be a joyful occasion.
And it just strikes me of how sick that is, to think that rounding up folks, terrorizing them in the night, taking children with their families and putting them in a camp is somehow joyous, somehow wondrous.
It's scary to think of a human being reveling in that.
But once again, I'll just put it out there.
As Kelly Baker says, we're living in the clans America.
Today, there's bonus content coming at you if you're a subscriber, so stay put.
Going to be talking about the National Prayer Breakfast and kind of change in venue and change in scope and it somehow gets even worse.
So, National Prayer Breakfast, our friend Jared Huffman was there to protest.
It's a whole thing to kind of hear about, even if you think you know about the National Prayer Breakfast.
And so if you're a subscriber, hang out after the interview with Kelly Baker.
If you're not a subscriber, today is the day to do that.
Every Monday we have, or at least most Mondays, not every Monday, but most Mondays, we have bonus content.
And once a month we have a premium episode.
You have access to the 500-episode archive and ad-free listening.
So, sign up today and get access to all those things.
Otherwise, thanks for being here, friends.
Here is my interview, the second part, with Kelly Baker.
Hi, my name is Peter, and I'm a prophet.
In the new novel, American Prophet.
I was the one who dreamed about the natural disaster just before it happened.
Oh, and the pandemic.
And that crazy election.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not bragging.
It's not like I asked for the job.
Actually, no one would ask for this job.
At least half the people will hate whatever I say, and almost everyone thinks I'm a little crazy.
Getting a date is next to impossible.
I've got a radio host who is making up conspiracies about me, a dude actually shooting at me, and an unhinged president threatening me.
But the job isn't all that bad.
I've gotten to see the country, and meet some really interesting people, and hopefully do some good along the way.
You can find my story on Amazon, Audible, or iTunes.
Just look for American Prophet by Jeff Fulmer.
That's American Prophet by Jeff Fulmer.
I'm so glad you mentioned preachers and churches.
Here's a scene that I always imagine happening after reading your book, is that you go to church in the morning in Indiana or in Georgia, could be New York State, could be Oregon, wherever, and that Sunday is sponsored.
By this group of patriotic boys who love America, and they got American flags everywhere, they love Jesus, maybe they have a choir, and they actually paid for a big potluck after church for everyone to come to, and they just happen to be called the Ku Klux Klan.
Their pitch is, hey, if you're a man and you love this country and you want it to stay God's country, then get up here and join us, because that's what we're doing.
I mean, is that a fair kind of recreation of their pitch on a Sunday morning to the everyday white man?
No, it's not far off.
They're like, they're like, men, come join us.
We're a fraternal order.
We love America.
We love Jesus.
We want you to continue to go to church.
We support the white race, which would be the other piece of this.
Like, we're going to support people that look like us and look like you.
And we want you to be a part of that as well.
So that it's not far from this.
We're going to have picnics.
We're going to have parades.
We even have this auxiliary where women can join and support us too, you know, that we have stuff for the kids even.
I mean, it didn't last long because it was not very well organized or put together or fun.
But, you know, like they attempted to do that to you in some kind of way.
So, yeah, I mean, it's close to what they had and part of their Attempt, right?
To sort of mobilize and organize and recruit.
And so yeah, just your friendly neighborhood Klansman saying things that people would find innocuous and not really surprising.
So I think people imagine that their pitch was something like wild, right?
Or it was something like, Outside of what you would imagine would be normal in some kind of way.
And it wasn't really, right?
It was something that would be sort of appealing.
And I think that that's part of what I tried to show with the book is that most of the stuff is really like mundane and everyday.
And really people found themselves in this Before they would kind of realize it in some instances.
Not to give them a pass at all is what I'm, I'm not trying to say that, but they were like, yeah, I do love America and Jesus.
Sure.
You know?
Like the pitch wasn't, hey, did you wake up today and want to kill 10 Catholics?
Because I bet you did.
Right.
That was not the pitch.
Yeah.
The pitch was, and I guess this is where I want to go next, is like, I think people always ask me, what's Christian about Christian nationalism?
And I think if we go to the Klan, I think people just think that the driving force, the out-and-out leading the cart was racism.
And don't get me wrong, this is not me saying it wasn't.
This is not me exonerating the Klan.
I'm not trying to reduce or minimize any of the white supremacy, any of the anti-Semitism, any of the anti-Catholicism.
But what I am trying to say is that according to you and your work, the pitch is not, hey, did you wake up today and just want to be like malevolently violent against black folks, Jews, and Catholics?
Then come join us.
The pitch was, do you love God and America?
Come on down.
Right.
And I think that a lot of their symbols and their garb and their myths and rituals were infused and centered around Christianity.
Right.
I mean, is that true?
Yeah, it is.
It is.
I mean, and so so much of it is.
was patriotism and religion baked into the symbols and the garb.
So, and then the white supremacy piece is also a part of it, right?
So, one of the things that I did in the book is I was really looking at it from the Klan's perspective.
And which is a choice.
And so I will say that that's a choice.
And people have come at me for that choice.
And that's like legitimate.
That's fair.
I take that criticism.
But one of the things that they did is they spent a lot of time thinking about the robe as like a theological object.
Right.
And as a patriotic object.
So that they're like, when we put on the robes, what we're doing is we're putting on the example of Jesus, because we're becoming Members of a body of Christ who are no longer individuals.
We're subsuming ourselves.
We are no longer being seen as individuals because we're putting this mask on, right?
And they spent a lot of time and effort on this to think about the theology behind this.
On the flip side of this, this is clearly an object of terror.
Like, they're walking around terrorizing people in these robes, and it gives them cover, it hides their identities, these other sorts of things.
So they function in both ways.
They don't function just in one way, right?
White supremacist object, also theological object.
They can be both.
When we're talking about the fiery cross, they're doing the same thing.
They're like, this shows us the light of Jesus.
When we set it on fire, that's what we're seeing, right?
We're bringing Jesus's example to the world.
When they set it on fire in someone's yard, This is not showing someone the light of Jesus.
This is clearly to terrorize them and to show them that the Klan was there, that they're being threatened.
So again, it's like terrorist, white supremacist object, theological object at the same time.
And so I had to think a lot about that, right?
Like they're saying one thing and they're doing another with it at the same time because they're so-called enemies, right?
They're not bringing Jesus's love to them.
With the robe or the cross like that's not what's happening here at all.
But but you're probably blowing some people's minds right now because I think because because the Klan is such an agent of terror.
Right.
And symbolizes terror in this country especially for for black people and for for others that they targeted.
The idea that putting on that robe would be a theological or religious act of saying, hey, I'm no longer an individual.
I'm part of the body of Christ and I'm not Jerry.
I'm your neighborhood dentist with his own little family.
I am this anonymized part of a bigger body, a mystical body of Jesus.
People are like, are you serious?
No, you put on that mask so no one knew who you were so you could go out and terrorize people.
That's what you were doing.
And I guess what I just can't hold off any longer, like in terms of the present day, the question that people ask me all the time is like, how can you be a Christian and think that your actions when it comes to like talking about migrants dying in a river at the border are the love of Christ?
That's inhumane.
That's terrorizing.
But the mindset is exactly what you're describing of, oh no, this is me bringing the love of God to my country by shutting down its border and having people die in a river.
Just as the Klan imagined, we're bringing Christ to the world by putting on these robes and lighting these crosses in people's lawns and scaring them into submission and doing what they're supposed to in terms of our social order.
It seems to me to be the same thing, I guess.
Yeah, and one of the things I always emphasize to people, because I always get asked this question too, where they're like, Jesus is about love.
Like, how can you talk about the Klan?
I always have, and it's always like this really sweet little old lady that asked me this question.
Like, it never fails.
And then I feel really terrible that I have to, like, answer this question and, like, respond, where I feel like I'm the awful person that has to then be like, well...
And so I always emphasize that Christian love can be exclusionary, that it doesn't have to be, like, universal.
It doesn't have to be like we imagine it to be or we hope it would be, which is to be, they would be all-encompassing and it would cover everyone.
That for these groups, that it's always very exclusionary in who it covers, that it can be very selective.
And that it can be used super selectively so that, yeah, it cannot include immigrants at the border.
Yes, it cannot include Catholics, right?
Or African-Americans.
It cannot include Jewish people.
It can just very much have borders set up and say, no, what we're talking about is certain people in our country who matter.
And other people who don't.
And Christian love is very much mobilized for the Klan in a defense of a certain type of nation.
And for them, it's a white Protestant nation only.
And if that means that other people get left behind, right, or hurt, then they're okay with that.
And it doesn't, and it's not logically inconsistent for them.
And I think that's hard for folks to wrap their heads around sometimes.
That it can be both and that they don't have a problem with it.
Like, it doesn't register that this could be problematic or that this could not be Christian love somehow.
But yeah, it's a tough one, I think, for folks to, like, really, like, come to grips with.
But I have this happen a lot with my work, too, where people are like, how dare you?
And I'm like, I know, but I dare.
Sorry, you know?
Well, and I think the temptation is to say, well, they obviously weren't real Christians.
And I think, you know, as scholars of religion, it's always like, well, they called themselves Christians.
They did this in the name of, in Christ.
And so whether or not I think they are, I don't know what you want me to say, good Christians or something, I don't know.
I'm not going to, I don't know.
I'm not going to make that judgment, but I will say they seem pretty Christian to me.
And so we have to take them seriously with that.
So, here are the things that I hope folks are taking away, that this was a mainstream organization reacting to fears of replacement by new immigrants and new demographics.
They were Christian through and through.
Christian was not an add-on, Christian was not a veneer, Christian was not a surface-level thing that they kind of gave lip service to.
Being Christian and having a Christian nation was at the heart of the mission.
And the resonances with our public square today are just resounding.
I want to ask a question I have not asked you on previous times you've been here or just in our individual conversations, and that is, the Klan's demise is sort of around the Great Depression, at least this Klan.
Is there anything we can learn from their demise about how we might fight white supremacy and white supremacist organizations in our current moment?
Or was it just they shot themselves in the foot?
Financial scandals, lying, sex scandal from the leader.
So they went away.
I mean, is there anything we can learn or is it like, actually, no, they just sort of imploded.
Well, you know, it's hard because they had particular scandals that kind of did them in that went against their principles.
So, like you said, there was a big sex scandal that involved one of their leaders that went against their principle of virtuous white womanhood.
It looked like they were hypocritical.
That got a lot of attention.
Unfortunately, under our current situation, that seems to not be a thing.
That matters.
So I don't think that one will work for us, you know?
Yeah, strike on that one.
There was an attempt to go after them on, like, taxes that also worked.
I don't know if that's, I mean, gonna work for us in this situation.
It could.
It could, maybe, you know?
We'll see.
So I think they just kind of imploded.
What concerns me about their demise Uh, it makes me nervous is that their ideas lived on even though they didn't.
And I think that's the piece that sometimes people don't get with the Klan is they're like, oh, they ended.
It's a miracle.
Like, they were done.
Like, they ended in the 20s and, like, we moved on as a culture.
I don't know how many books I read that did this.
They're, like, triumphant.
They're like, they ended.
We succeeded as a culture.
We got better.
And I hate to be this person, but I'm like, did we?
Did we get better?
Or did we not need them anymore because their ideas became entrenched?
And showed up in different places.
Like, did they actually win because we didn't need them anymore?
And the ideas that they had about, like, white supremacy and Christian nationalism just got embedded in other different movements and carried on in more subtle ways that are harder to fight.
I don't know.
I made this comment, like, a few years ago at a panel where I was like, I think we're living in the Klan's America.
I think they kind of won.
And the audience sort of revolted at me.
This was before the Trump years, which is, I think, why they revolted.
I think people would less revolt now if I said this.
Well, maybe not.
I don't know.
I mean, we literally are in a place where the leader of TPUSA, Charlie Kirk, said on Martin Luther King Jr.
Day or in that week that Martin Luther King Jr.
was a bad guy, and he hurt black Americans by all of his work, and he really set our country backwards for several decades.
So, like, when you say we're living in the Klan's America, you know, when I think about, you know, what's happening in Florida and Oh, yeah.
You know, the Black Studies AP or Black History AP class or everything with the efforts to get rid of DEI.
I mean, we can talk for the next three hours about the ways that that's all present.
But for me, when you say we're living in Klan's America, my reaction is never like, oh, I'll have to think about that.
I'm going to get a latte and think about that.
My reaction is just like, vigorous head nod.
Like, yep.
Dr. Kelly Baker, right again.
Because that's so...
But I don't want to be right.
Like, I mean, this is one of those instances where, with the damn book, can I say damn?
But like, you know, with the damn book, I'm like, I don't want it to be relevant.
Like, there's a part of me that has this moment where I want the book to not be relevant.
Like, I have this, like, thing where People will text me and they're like so I suggested your book to someone again because things happened and I feel like they should read it and I'm like that's not a win like I feel like if the book is doing good Something has gone wrong in our culture again.
Like, it's that weird thing where the relevancy of that book and talking about, like, the 1920s Klan and that sort of thing, for our current moment, always signals that something has gone terribly wrong.
So I don't like being right about this kind of stuff.
It never makes me feel good.
Well, it's the same thing with this show.
Someday I'll go fulfill my dreams of, I don't know, being a horticulturist or something.
But for now, here we are.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, my joke my partner makes is he's like, one day maybe you'll work on something that's like puppies and rainbows.
You know, like maybe someday that would happen.
Well, we can dream, but yeah.
All right.
Well, I have kept you long enough.
Just very grateful to have you come back a third time and discuss things you have discussed many times.
We had you on way back at the very beginning of this show.
We had you on right after, I believe, the insurrection.
Yes.
Where we talked about all of these issues in light of that event, and here we are talking about them again.
You are always writing.
You seemingly always have a new book coming and a new project.
So can you tell folks where they can find you and keep up with all of your amazing things?
Sure, I am still on, I really don't want to call it x, but I guess I will, at kelly underscore j underscore baker, though I'm on there less.
I'm also on bluestock and I think there it's just at kelly j baker because they didn't let me keep my underscores, which is really sad.
I also have a website which is just my name where you can find what I'm doing.
Thanks for listening to my interview with Dr. Kelly Baker, y'all.
It is eye-opening, as always, with conversations with her, and I just appreciate her work so much.
I'm going to transition now into some thoughts on some recent events over in our nation's capital and talk about the National Prayer Breakfast and some other things.
Jared Huffman and Andrew Seidel this week, or excuse me, last week, wrote about how the National Prayer Breakfast has changed in the last couple of years.
Now, if you're not familiar, I think most of you are, but the National Prayer Breakfast started in the 1950s.
It was really in the heyday of the kind of Eisenhower God and Country era of the nation.
This is post-World War II.
This is when we got In God we trust on the money and under God in the Pledge of Allegiance.
And this is the era of fighting communists and the Cold War and Jesus and America go together against the godlessness and the communism of the Soviet Union and so on and so forth.
Now, what's happened in the last couple of years is that we now have not one, but two National Prayer Breakfasts or events or whatever you want to call them.
So let me talk about what has become the alternative to the National Prayer Breakfast.
This is the group that thinks that the National Prayer Breakfast is too compromising or too moderate.
So here's Matthew Taylor, my colleague, writing at the Bulwark last week.
And he says this, this event has been billed as a more radical alternative to the newly bipartisan and toned-down National Prayer Breakfast.
It was designed for Republican politicians, including Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, to meet and pray with right-wing, charismatic, Pentecostal, and evangelical Christian leaders.
Where did they meet, you ask?
They met at the Museum of the Bible, which, if you know anything about that, is a Christian nationalist outpost and largely a work of propaganda.
So that's one.
And this is a really scary kind of event.
And if you want more details on this and you want to understand why it represents a kind of radicalization of things, see Matt's work at The Bulwark because he wrote about it last week and he talks about it in just such incredible terms.
But I want to talk about the actual Prayer Breakfast too, what these folks would consider to be too mainstream and too compromising.
The National Prayer Breakfast now has been kind of taken over by Congress.
What Andrew Seidel and Representative Jared Huffman write at the Daily Beast is this, in a misguided damage control effort, Congress partially took over the event in 2023 and 2024.
But they've created a host of new problems by holding an exclusionary Christian ceremony in the Capitol.
So, what's happened is the National Prayer Breakfast, the one that's been happening since 1953, is now taking place in the Capitol Building.
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