Weekly Roundup: The Secretive Christian Nationalist Fraternal Order Planning American Domination
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Brad and Dan break down the revelations surrounding the Society for American Renewal, which according to the Guardian is "an exclusive, men-only fraternal order which aims to replace the US government with an authoritarian “aligned regime”, and which experts say is rooted in extreme Christian nationalism and religious autocracy. It includes Harvard grads, millionaire industrialists, the president of the Claremont Institute, financiers, and other upper-crust right-wing men (and they are all men).
In the second segment, they turn to more toxic masculine Christianity in the form of a call for violence and spiritual warfare from Oklahoma State Senator Dusty Deevers - an abortion abolitionist who is trying to outlaw pornography.
To finish the episode, the hosts discuss the tragic news about Nex Benedict's death - the non-binary teenager who died by suicide after bullying at school.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty, University of San Francisco, joined today by my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Always nice to see you, Brad, rocking the hat and everything.
You look very like California to me today, like winter-ish, early spring California.
So, you know, points for you.
I knew I was going to get the comment, and I want to tell you that I have a...
Young child, which means Dan, I do not most days have time to shower, uh, much less go get a haircut.
So I've not got a haircut in quite a while.
So there's, my choices are hat or, uh, complete disaster.
As you know, on our, you know, the, the bonus episode, people were asking about the respective aesthetic choices of, you know, of Dan and Brad.
So yeah, I guess that's, that's part of it.
I wear the hat because I don't have any hair, and you can wear the hat because you have too much.
It's fine.
It's fine.
I'm not bitter about it at all.
Well, yeah.
You have other attributes, Dan, that ... I stopped growing in sixth grade.
I've been 5'7 since I was 12, so I think we could just start there.
All right, everyone is bored.
Thank you for staying with us through our midlife crisis.
Okay.
So, Dan, in the history of this show, I do not think I have gotten more emails about one article than I did this week, and that was an article at Talking Points Memo by Josh Kovinsky about the Society for American Civic Renewal, and it's essentially a right-wing secret society of upper-crust men who want to Create a post-constitutional America after the national divorce they think is going to take place.
So we're going to talk a lot about that today.
So many of you emailed me, so we are going to go right there.
Don't worry.
I'm even going to talk more about it on Monday.
So if you don't get enough today, you're going to get more Monday.
We're then going to talk a little bit more about Katie Britt and just Some fallout from that whole story.
And then spend, hopefully, a good chunk of time at the end today talking about Nex Benedict in Oklahoma and the news that Nex's death was a death by suicide.
So we want to kind of just break down what that means.
Some of the, Biden mentioned it, Ryan Walters, the superintendent of schools in Oklahoma, fired back at Biden in a way that I thought was ridiculous and so on and so forth.
So we'll get to all of those things as well.
Okay Dan, here it is.
The Secret Society Christian White Men.
It's like- Wealthy, wealthy Christian white.
You gotta throw the wealth in there as a piece of this, yeah.
So it's like we've done a show for five years about Christian nationalism and talked about all this stuff and they just made a secret club in a treehouse one day and it embodied everything we've talked about for 600 episodes.
Or one of those things where like you know somebody accuses you of like a caricature and then like it walks in the room you're like that right there that's what I was talking about so this is like the all the people like everything you say it's too extreme it's not true You know, all the stuff you say about what they think real Americans are.
It's not really that bad.
And you're like, no, here's a club and you can't be part of it because you're not cool enough.
Like that's even a whole piece of it is that you have to be invited to be a part of it.
The amount of times people have commented on like reels or, you know, YouTube stuff we've done or anything that are like, you guys are ridiculous.
No one actually wants this.
I just want to like go to church and live in a Christian country, dude.
What's your problem?
Well, I have a lot of problems with a lot of stuff, but this is one of them.
So I'm going to start reading, and we're going to break it down.
In some ways, this piece makes it very easy to do our job this week, because sometimes, Dan, we're trying to draw together six, seven, eight stories and really make sure the threads are all weaving and overlapping.
This is just, let's read a paragraph, and you and I, trained to read, trained to analyze, we'll do our best.
Here we go.
Josh Kavinsky writes this at Talking Points Memo.
It sounds like the stuff of fantasy, but it's real.
The group is called the Society for American Civic Renewal.
The acronym is pronounced SACR by its members.
Now, Dan, I'm a grown-up.
I'm 43 years old, but if I were Kurt Vonnegut writing a new novel... A couple weeks ago, I told you all to go read Yvonne Klima.
I'm going to tell you right now to go read Kurt Vonnegut.
The secret society of white Christian men who want to take over the world.
Having the acronym SACCR would be a fitting, I think, piece of my Kurt Vonnegut 2024 novel.
All right, here we go.
It is open to new recruits, provided you meet a few criteria.
You are male, a Trinitarian Christian, Heterosexual, an unhyphenated American, and can answer questions about Trump, the Republican Party, and Christian nationalism in the right way.
One chapter leader wrote to a prospective member that the group aimed to secure a future for Christian families.
So I'm going to give you one breakdown, Dan, one decoding piece here, and then I'll let you do a couple of others.
The reason for the Trinitarian, in my view, and I think it's pretty clear if we read the piece, is Kavinsky mentions this.
They don't want Jehovah's Witnesses.
They don't want Christian scientists.
They don't want the Christians that they don't think are Christians.
They don't want the people that you and I, when we were evangelicals, were told are not real Christians.
So if you're wondering why Trinitarian's in there, Kavinsky decodes it in the piece, but I just want to make sure we set it to here.
That's why that's in there.
The other thing that catches my eye here is unhyphenated American.
Like, they are trying to tell you what we're the real Americans and there's no add-on to our American identity.
We're the ones.
Who don't need any other descriptor.
And my argument has been for years that we're all hyphenated Americans because this country is built on indigenous land.
It's a country that is supposed to be one of immigrants.
It is a place where people from all different cultures, ethnicities, backgrounds, religions are supposed to have freedom and equality.
So, we are all potentially hyphenated Americans.
Now, if you're not a hyphenated American, it's because you're privileged to the place where white is a category that you fit into, and socially a hyphen is not demanded of you, as it is of an Asian American, or a Black American, and we can get more specific, of a Hindu American, or a Japanese American, or a Thai American, or Mexican American, or whatever.
So, alright Dan, from that first paragraph, anything you want to jump in on?
I misread it.
I thought they were saying only Native Americans could be a part of it because they're the only ones who are not hyphens.
So thanks for clearing that up.
No, clearly that's not what I meant or thought.
I want to pick up on that unhyphenated thing, too, because the way that that works is, right, if you look back at American history, and you know this, you talk about this, we've talked about this, once upon a time, if you were from, say, the British Isles, that was okay, but if you were maybe German, not so much, or Italian, or Scandinavian, like, and the point being that there was no white identity, there were a bunch of different identities, and it's not until you're confronted with a Native American population and you start bringing people of African descent into the country
That you get the concept of whiteness as we understand, which really it's a sort of pan-European identity.
So the whole point is that when it says unhyphenated, in case anybody's wondering if that's code for white, it is.
For the reasons that you're highlighting for privilege, for historical reasons of constituting this new identity, and long term.
And this brings us together with other discourses that we see right now.
The people who call themselves like, they won't say they're white supremacists, they'll say they're like cultural chauvinists or something like that, or they'll be like, What?
I'm just trying to say that, like, Northern and Western Europeans did everything good in the world.
That's not racist.
It's that.
It's the way of trying to bring that in.
And the last piece of this, of course, is a lot of these are internal documents that were leaked here.
So this is not This is not something that you're sort of reading into.
This is stuff that, this is the stuff they're circulating.
This is the stuff they're saying to prospective members.
I think the last piece I want to, on this, this notion of being hyphenated, hyphenated Americans, and we've talked about this before too, that white supremacists, whether sort of, let's say hard white supremacists who are like out there and call themselves that, or soft white supremacy that tries to play that game of saying that they're just, you know, I don't know, they just want to appreciate white culture or something.
We've talked about this before, that they'll say, we're not opposed to immigrants, we're not opposed to people of color, it's just that everybody needs to assimilate.
They need to become real Americans, they need to fully assimilate to the way of American life.
The trick is, though, that then you create groups that are defined as not able to assimilate, as unassimilable, and that's what that hyphenated identity does.
You call somebody African American, you call somebody Asian American, whatever, you call them that, you identify them, you mark them as not white.
With a linguistic marker that needs to be stated.
And then you do something like this and say, well, yeah, but I mean, see, you're a hyphenated American.
So, you know, it'd be cool if we could let you in, but we can't.
So all the dynamics there are protecting white identity.
And, you know, we mentioned non-Trinitarian Christians or those like Mormons or Jehovah's Witness Christian scientists, but this also means that Jews, Muslims, Hindus, other non-Christian religious folks are not welcome.
Okay, now, this is a secret society of people who want civic renewal, as we just talked about.
What is somewhat unique about it is that the members of this are not street brawlers.
So let me read Kavinsky's writing and then I'll tell you what I mean.
The members identified by Talking Point's memo don't necessarily fit the profile of the disaffected, disgruntled loner or the amped-up, testosterone-fueled militia types often found on the paranoid right-wing fringe.
TPM's reporting has identified the Society for American Civic Renewal members, the president of the influential Trump-aligned Claremont Institute, Harvard Law grads, and leading businessmen in communities scattered across America.
The one who incorporated the group is a man named Charles Haywood.
He's a very, very, very wealthy man.
I mean, we're talking tens of millions of dollars kinds of wealthy, maybe more.
And there are others in here that I could mention.
So, what's the point?
The point is, Dan, I think some of you to this point in the show might have been imagining Stuart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers, the guy with the eyepatch and a vest and he's out there with the bullhorn getting his troops in line or the Proud Boys, the street brawlers who are out in the streets of Portland or Seattle or at J6 acting as foot soldiers.
These are not those guys.
Some of them are affiliated with the Claremont Institute, and if you don't know what that is, John Eastman, the man who was one of the architects of the attempt to overthrow the election, who was Trump's lawyer, is from the Claremont Institute.
Michael Anton, the guy who wrote the Flight 93 election, who basically is calling for a kind of post-constitutional America, is Claremont Institute.
So, these folks, in some sense, These are not your quote-unquote everyman.
These are upper crust people, people who've gone to Ivory League schools, people who are financiers, people who are in finance, people who have way more money than you do.
And so I think that's something that stands out about all this.
I'll read one more little bit here, Dan, and then I'll get some more thoughts from you.
Group members hold the distinct vision of America as a latter-day ancient Rome, a crumbling decadent empire that could soon be replaced by a Christian theocracy.
To join, the group demands faithfulness, virtue, and alignment, which it describes as deference to and acceptance of the wisdom of our American and European Christian forebears in the political realm, a traditional understanding of patriarchal leadership in the household, and acceptance of traditional natural law and ethics more broadly.
Dan, I feel like we talked about All those things in the last, like, two or three weeks on this show.
You and I did a whole half an hour on natural theology and how it hurts people.
Well, here it is!
And surprise, surprise, patriarchy goes hand in hand with natural law ethics and this emphasis on European Christian forbearers.
It's like, again, we've been talking about it for 600 episodes and they just made a secret society and embodied the whole thing.
Thoughts on this aspect of the article?
Yeah, just again, there's real intellectual traditions behind natural law and a long history of Christian patriarchy.
But for me, I see these, and again, if you just want the current code, like what does this mean in contemporary society?
Natural law in this is basically a shorthand or a code for anti-abortion.
Anti-birth control.
It is shorthand for anti-LGBTQ population.
Like, that's what it is.
So, again, this is their way of, even within their own internal stuff, trying to say, you know, hey, we're not saying we're, we got any problem with people of color.
We're just saying you have to be white.
We're not saying that you can't be queer.
You know, that violates natural law, so of course that's not going to work.
Patriarchy, which then is built into the natural law theory as well.
So again, it's one of these sort of ways of trying to, I think, in my view, put like an intellectual patina on some of this and make it seem like this is really intellectual.
This is, you know, even the appeals to Rome, this kind of tired, I think it's an account that basically people who like Rome have had since the Western Roman Empire collapsed about how it was because it was decadent and this and that.
The fall of Rome has been used as an alibi for people to try to Push their own visions of society like literally since the Roman Empire fell.
So just kind of tired tropes and like standard moves that sound to me like they're trying to be more sophisticated because we're going to talk about natural law.
We're going to talk about being Trinitarian.
We're going to use these kind of words.
It's just code for what we talk about all the time and what we see all the time on the show.
Okay, so I want to read a little bit from the mission statement of the group.
So this is not Josh Kovensky's reporting.
This is the actual mission statement of the Society for American Civic Renewal.
We acknowledge our intellectual, political, and social inheritance of both America's founding and of Christendom.
Okay.
Everybody in class, circle Christendom.
We're going to come back to it.
We are unhyphenated Americans and we believe in a particular Christianity that is not blurred by modernist philosophies.
Okay, Dan Miller, circle modernist philosophies and write down Schleiermacher.
We're going to come back to that, too.
I know.
We get to talk about Friedrich Schleiermacher today.
It's amazing Friday.
I'm going to get boba later.
Who knows what's going to happen today?
This Friday's wide open.
We ambitiously point to an ideal based on that dual inheritance.
We are willing to act decisively to secure permanently, as much as anything is permanent, the political and social dominance.
Of that ideal.
Okay, Dan, I'm going to do Christendom.
You do modernist philosophies.
These guys are not saying that we are inheriting the American Revolution and founding and the Christian ideas that we believe are founded therein.
They're using the word Christendom.
Christendom is a word that hearkens to empires that were, in essence, Christian empire.
You could talk about the Holy Roman Empire, you could talk about medieval Europe, in the sense where medieval Europe was made up of various kingdoms and states, but the Pope was really the unifying kind of political force.
Christendom is not, hey, we have Christian ideas.
Thomas Jefferson was actually an evangelical.
Christendom is, we want a society where Christian people and Christian laws are imposed on you.
And if you don't submit to them and conform to them, We will punish you for that.
We will put you in jail for blasphemy.
We'll put you in jail for not going to church on Sunday.
We'll put you in jail for flying the wrong flag outside.
Christendom is not we want a Christian society where everybody loves each other and follows Jesus.
Christendom is we're going to have a Christian kingdom, a Christian empire, a Christian society.
Okay, so when they say Christendom, that is not, in my view, any kind of accident.
Again, we get the unhyphenated Americans, and then we say, a particular Christianity, not blurred by modernist philosophies.
All right, Dan Miller, 12 years of grad school, you've been living, you trained for this moment.
This is the chance.
Tee it up.
Why are modern philosophies opposed to their kind of Christianity?
Yeah, so when they use the term modern, and modernism means lots of different things, but what they're really talking about is basically like everything from after the medieval period.
This is like literally a model of going back to a medieval model, a Western European model of medieval society.
Where the entire society is the body of Christ.
If people are familiar with that metaphor from the Bible, the church is the body of Christ.
It was this vision that all of society is the body of Christ and subject to divine authority, which means subject to people who exercise divine authority and so forth.
Where does that break down?
It breaks down as you get movements like humanism and people start studying ancient languages.
They start opening themselves to ideas.
You get like More interaction with the Islamic world, and so rediscovery of Greek philosophy, and Europeans start learning Greek and Hebrew and classical languages again, and begin to sort of pose new kinds of questions.
You get theologies!
Christians who begin to rethink the nature of Christianity.
You mentioned Schleiermacher.
He's obviously like a distinctly, you know, a little bit later figure.
But Christians, people who profess Christianity, but who also radically reconceived what that meant.
The kind of theological radicals that have existed in sort of different times and different places.
You had the Protestant Reformation, which also coincides with the rise of the modern nation-state.
And what does that do?
It fractures medieval Christendom.
You don't have a vision of a single sort of cultural unit in all of Western Europe that is united as the church.
You now have individual states that do what?
They challenge church authority.
You get the European Enlightenment.
People are familiar with that.
The philosophies that come out of that.
Technologies that come out of that.
The scientific revolution.
We're off and running now, and now we're into the really bad stuff like Darwin.
Or modern atheists or all of those kinds of things.
It's a kind of slippery slope argument of this pure ideal Christianity in the medieval period.
It sounds like that's their thing.
You could always pose the question like why that Christianity when it had changed from earlier Christianity and there never was one Christianity all that stuff.
But it's there's a purported we talk about purity a lot on this.
It's a pure society.
It's religiously pure.
It is, as they're envisioning it, ethnically pure.
It is pure in terms of its structure.
It's structured as it should be.
It's patriarchal.
People who don't have a place there aren't going to play a role in this.
And it's ideologically pure.
We're going to stick with natural law.
We're going to stick with the medieval period.
All that stuff that came later that challenges natural law, all that stuff that challenges Christian authority, ideas like modern democracy, modern republicanism, feminism, any of those, all of those are going to be lumped under this term of modernist philosophies.
That really, if you sort of trace the sort of evolution of these things, it starts in that late medieval period, moving forward, and so on.
So this is a very nostalgic vision.
Like all nostalgic visions, it creates and hearkens back to something that never actually existed in the way that they envision it and imagine it.
But that's what it is.
And so for me, that's what stands out is that purity language, this Christianity uncorrupted by modernist philosophies.
So, for me, the reason I said Schleiermacher is, when I was in an evangelical, Schleiermacher was always used as this caricature, because Schleiermacher is a modern theologian, but Schleiermacher wanted to correlate modern culture and Christianity.
He was one of those Christians who would say, look, there's changes happening in scientific revolution, there's changes happening to how we understand the Bible.
We as Christians are going to have to update our understanding of our faith so that we can correlate modern culture and Christianity.
These guys are saying we reject modernist philosophies such as that, and that includes everything that since then, Dan, since the 19th century till now, feminism, gender theory, so on and so forth.
We reject all that.
And we are a particular kind of Christian, okay, who says instead of correlating culture and Christianity, Christianity is going to conquer culture.
Instead of being the kinds of Christians that correlate our Christianity to our society, we're going to conquer our society.
That's what I take them to be saying.
Now this continues when we go back to the piece Ryan Williams, who is the president of the Claremont Institute, the place where John Eastman came from and so on, said this when he talked to the folks at Talking Points Memo.
He denied that the group was, quote, some cabal with the aim of taking over the federal establishment and said that it only sought to create, quote, a common citizenship of, you're going to love this part, Dan, the Americanized and assimilated as the best recipe for a large, multiracial, multi-ethnic republic.
You were going to say something, I think, when I was on Schleiermacher, I cut you off.
So you go ahead and then tell me what you think of that statement.
All I was going to add is that on this notion of modernism, it's also key to recognize the sort of ideological role that it's always selective.
Have a hunch these people are not going to do away with modern capitalism.
They're going to be all about unregulated free market economies.
Guess what?
That's a distinctly modern sort of revolution.
I don't think they're going to start, like, riding in, you know, wagons and taking horses everywhere and do away with airplanes and, you know, cancer treatments and things like that, all of which come out of those same modernist philosophies and currents that they're decrying.
So, again, as I say, it's an imaginary sort of Nostalgic vision of an idealized society that's not even going to do what it says.
But yeah, all that notion about being Americanized and assimilated, when in my work on the, you know, the national social body, what do we say?
That everything, it's a social body that has the right shape, it has the right members, and everything is in its place.
And so you can say, we're talking about this for a multicultural society, what do you, You lefties and people that live in California saying that this is, you know, about racism or it's about, you know, having a mono-ethnic society.
Of course it's not.
Of course we should have those So it just needs to be ordered right.
We'll just make sure that none of those people with this, whatever this special citizenship status is supposed to look like, if we're saying something, they don't get to have that, of course.
They don't get to have the same rights as the kind of full Americans, but we'll just have different tiers of citizenship.
We'll have different tiers of social belonging.
So of course we're going to be A multiracial, multiethnic society.
So, just as long as everybody remembers their place.
As long as all those people of color and queer folk and whatever, if we got to acknowledge that they exist at all, if they just remember their place and be subordinate to the white Christian men, everything's fine.
And that's the shoulder shrug.
If that sounds a lot like Discourses Americans should be too familiar with about uppity people of color or, you know, people getting out of line.
It's because it's the same logic.
But that's how it works, is they'll say, of course, everybody has a place.
It's just not an equal place.
It's not a place of equal rights.
It's a way of subservience and marginalization.
And as long as everybody's okay with that, Then yeah we'll live in this happy society and by the way we'll appeal to natural law and say that's how God wants it to be by nature and so forth.
Just quickly I'll just say those of Asian descent in this country are very used to people saying you should just assimilate but then in the same breath saying that Asian people are unassimilable, that you are the perpetual foreigner, that you will never be truly American.
I mean the amount of times Asian people have been told that in this country In addition to many other racial minorities.
It could be Latinx folks.
There's a unique history, a uniquely tragic history of black enslavement in this country.
And so the ways that black Americans have been told that, you know, they're not really American.
Anyway, the whole point is when you say Americanized, it's like any person of color, any black person, any indigenous person who hears those words, it's just going to, their body's going to start to like You know, they're going to start to clench because they know what's coming.
They know the fear and the danger that is ahead when someone talks like that.
Okay, a couple more minutes here.
This is Ryan Williams speaking again, the president of the Claremont Institute, who is a member of this society.
This shouldn't be regarded as anything radical or new.
It's in a long line of tradition of American civic organizations of like-minded men worried about the direction of their country.
Okay, so Dan, he says it's not radical or new.
So this is an appeal to history that is supposed to take the burden off of him and his society.
The appeal to history is one that says, well, we're not the first ones to do this.
People have done this before us, so clearly we're not wrong.
That's the rhetorical function here of that statement.
If it's been done before, then clearly we are not wrong.
That's what he's arguing.
A long line of American civic organizations, like-minded men.
You're not wrong, Ryan Williams.
You're not.
We agree.
This is not new.
It may not even be radical for the United States.
The Ku Klux Klan?
Long line of tradition.
Like-minded men worried about the direction of their country.
That was the Ku Klux Klan.
The Christian Front.
Like, Catholics in the 30s who listened to Father Coughlin and were pretty much I'm totally on board with like fascism, like-minded men worried about the direction of their country.
I could go on and on about the Citizens League or the ways that in the past, and please don't email me, but in the past, the American Legion has acted in a way that has been completely exclusionary.
I mean, I can go deep cuts on this if you want.
But there are places in Oregon where after World War II, they wrote the names of every boy and man who served in World War II on the town sign on the way into town, except for the Japanese-Americans who served.
And that was largely because of the American Legion.
So here's the point, Ryan Williams.
Just because it's been done in American history doesn't mean it's good or safe or democratic or beneficial.
It is not new.
And unfortunately, it's not radical for this country.
Doesn't mean it's not dangerous.
Doesn't mean it's not terrible.
So you don't win the argument based on history.
I'm sorry.
All right.
I'll give you one more, Dan, and then we'll wrap it up.
The SACR website speaks to the deeply held grievance and sense of a lack of masculine purpose, which animates the group.
So masculine purpose is going to come up later in the show.
Sacker exists, the website says, because a man is no longer encouraged to fly to the stars.
Because those who rule today spit on such ambitions.
They corrupt the sinews of America.
They've alienated men from family, community, and God.
We counter and conquer this poison.
Rebuilding a society.
We're a man.
I feel like I have to talk like I'm in a Coors commercial right now.
Got boots on, got a cowboy hat.
I'm like standing on some rocks looking into the distance.
You know, there's some cows going by where a man can find genuine fulfillment.
What the f- Genuine fulfillment.
Oh my God.
Come to Sacker, find genuine fulfillment.
True to his nature and calling, rejoicing in virtue and vitality.
All right, Dan.
Sorry, I got to stop because I don't, I'm going to say things that should not be said on the podcast.
So you take this away, please.
Go ahead.
Just, just a couple of things.
First on that, I just, I can't even anymore with the whole like lack of masculine purpose.
Like I just, All the insecure men just I don't know go just stay in the woods doing your thing and just leave the rest of us alone like if you're that insecure and worried about like I don't know that you can't be man I just I don't I don't I don't get it um by which I mean like I understand it intellectually but you're just like come on uh it's the other piece of the presenting these things always as if they are some sort of assertion of
Like authority and dominance when they just scream insecurity.
It's pathetic.
It's really pathetic, yeah.
The last point I'm going to make though about this is quoting from the article again.
He's got a great line here and this is a theme that's going to come back for me a little bit later as well.
He writes, it's an uncanny mimicry of the clandestine engine that, in the right wing's furthest imaginings, has driven recent social changes and left them feeling isolated and under siege.
I talk about this theme of fantasy a lot and I've said other times that oftentimes when you look at the far right or you look at, you know, contemporary Republicans talking about critical race theory or whatever, what you actually get is like a view of their sort of fever dream vision of what society is, of their understanding of like how others are perceiving them and how they're under threat and so forth.
And this is one of these, because how do they view society?
They view society as run by, like, all the conspiracy theories, the anti-Semitism that, you know, queer folk are trying to take over America and push on an agenda, and Christianity is under radical assault, and, you know, Jewish financiers control everything and are pulling the levers and so forth.
And for them, they believe that there is like this secret cabal of people working to overthrow America and topple it like they did the ancient Roman Empire and so forth.
Of course, that's all nonsense.
But if somebody asks me, well, how do you know they actually sort of think that?
I'm like, because look what they're doing.
They are trying to mirror that.
They are trying to counter that.
How?
By creating this sort of secret movement to work behind the scenes and pull the levers and operate what we might call soft power as well as hard power within American society and steer it in the right direction.
So, this whole thing, I think, speaks to this kind of fantastical vision that Wright has About what America is and what's wrong with it and what all of us who are part of the secret cabal to like, you know, take it over and make it fall, what it is that we're involved with.
And that just really stands out to me in so many things on the right, how there are those fantasy visions that they see of what's going on for those who aren't them.
Now you might be wondering, where does this vision come from?
And one of the places in this case it comes from is from the founder of this society, Charles Haywood, who has likened himself to a warlord and calls himself the Maximum Leader.
And that may... Dan's laughing.
Dan, I gotta keep it together.
So just cut it out.
He calls himself the man.
Even the names.
Even the names.
It's like, gee, are you confident in your masculinity?
Clearly not by the names that you're choosing.
That's all I'm saying.
It's so insecure.
I asked Dan to call me Dr. Professor Onishi on the show.
He never does.
I don't know what his deal is, but I asked him to call me Dr. Professor Magnum Onishi.
Won't do that.
I would like to be called Reverend Dr. Professor Magnum Onishi, but he won't even get on board, so I don't know why I'm even here anymore with this guy, but I digress.
So, I am going to do on Monday a long and deep dive on Charles Haywood, and so I'm sure at some point Behind the Bastards will do a version that's how they do it and they're amazing at that kind of deal, but I'm going to jump into Charles Haywood on Monday.
So if you're, if you're like, why?
Well, guys, keep going.
Why don't you talk about him now?
I'm going to give you a whole deep dive on, on in like two days.
So just hang tight with that.
We need to take a break.
We're going to come back.
We're going to talk about one more unfortunate instance of this kind of toxic masculine Christian nationalism among elites in this country.
That'll lead into some talk about Britt, Katie Britt, and then we'll go to next Benedict after that.
Be right back.
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Okay, Dan, this was not the only, unfortunately, instance of toxic Christian man-ness we got this week.
Dusty Devers from Oklahoma, a state senator, was making the rounds on Twitter.
Because he gave a speech at an event held by Response Ministries, okay?
So we're going to go ahead and just play you the clip, and then we'll respond to it, and I'm going to tell you a little bit more about Dusty Devers and the people he hangs out with, because it's worse even than you might expect.
So here's the clip, and then we'll talk about it.
Jesus, your warrior king, has summoned you!
He has commanded your formation for battle!
Line up, men!
Your charge is to fight the king's battle with the king's weapons, to fight on his battlefront, to make offensive war on the gates of hell, and to prevail, to push the lines ever forward, to extend the dynasty and the dominion of our king who rules from on high, and every enemy will bow!
He will footstool every enemy, and this world will be dominionized, and it will glory reflect like the waters cover the sea.
The world will be conquered, and the conquerors will sit with King Jesus on His throne.
Amen!
Men, it is now time for shrinking back.
Know this.
You will suffer.
You will be called to share in the sufferings of our King, but they cannot be compared to the eternal weight of glory that is to be revealed to you.
In your groaning, you will grow.
In your mourning, you will hope.
In your struggle, you will triumph.
So keep your eyes on our loving, crucified, but resurrected warrior king, Jesus.
Dan, we're going to run out of time today.
I just want to be quick on this, but When I listen to that man, I could spend three hours talking about this, and I may talk about it a little bit more on Monday, as I talk about Charles Haywood.
It feels like he wants violence so bad, he wants to dominate people so bad, and this is one of those moments where Christianity feels like a really great framework to stuff The impulse and desire for dominance and violence and pain into.
Like, he's talking about Jesus as the king.
He's talking about going into battle with the king's weapons.
He's talking about the battlefront.
The enemy will bow, the footstool.
Jesus will footstool every enemy.
The world will be conquered.
You'll be, you know, you're called to come into that war.
This is just like, you talked about fantasy?
God, talk about fantasy.
Like the desire to be part of battle and to hurt and dominate and inflict and kill.
It's like he's not even containing it as he says these words.
And so I got more to say on Dusty Deaver's book.
You know, when you listen to that, what do you think?
We've talked about this before, but it's there.
The irony—it's more than irony to me—of proclamations of an all-powerful God, an omnipotent God, and God's all-powerful.
But their God sucks at being all-powerful.
He needs them.
You need Dusty Devers to, like, help expand your kingdom.
Like, your all-powerful God is, like, you know, Jesus died, what, you know, a couple thousand years ago.
And we're still, still waiting, still waiting for the all-powerful kingdom to come.
The point is that, again, this is, all this does is project the same insecure masculinity That you find in the One Movement, into the sky and name it God.
So now God is the ultimate insecure male who has to exercise dominion and authority, clearly can't, so he needs a bunch of humans to do it.
And if anybody needed like more evidence of the kinds of things that I talk about in my series about how people claim divine authority, But you never get to the divine.
You just get them.
You just get the Dusty Devers of the world preaching their sermon and telling you what God wants.
This is why.
All it does, it's like this big reflective exercise.
You take your insecure masculinity, your vision of wanting to dominate and control and exercise power that you haven't been able to exercise the way that you want.
You project it into the sky and you blow it up real big so that it's God now who's telling you to do that.
And then you claim that authority that you just like made up to legitimize everything that it is that you want to do in the down and dirty earthly realm to legitimize your own authority.
Just call it authoritarianism.
Just call it fascism.
That's what it is.
It's just, for me, it's so much of that toxic, insecure masculinity stuff, but like just blown up bigger and scarier and more threatening to try to get people behind it.
And, of course, if people hear that clip, you can hear the energy.
You can hear the anger.
You can hear the resentment.
You can hear everything behind that.
Okay, so Dusty Devers is becoming a name that people are starting to become aware of outside of Oklahoma.
Let me just give you a little bit of background on Dusty Devers.
So he's an abortion abolitionist.
He wants abortion outlawed completely.
He has put forth the idea that pornography should be banned.
So anything involving sexual acts, nudity, partial nudity, outlawed.
Okay?
He is also against no-fault divorce.
So that's that's Dusty Deaver.
So these are kind of things you might expect.
Now he was giving this talk or sermon or whatever we want to call it at an event with Right Response Ministries, which is run by Joel Webbin.
Joel Webbin is somebody who hangs out a lot with Doug Wilson, so Dusty Devers is connected to Joel Webbin, is somebody who hangs out a lot with Doug Wilson.
And I can tell you that, I can tell you, I know that because it's on his website, where he justifies his belief in biblical patriarchy, quote unquote, by way of a discussion with Doug Wilson.
You can find Doug Wilson and Joel Webbin together quite a lot on the internet.
He thinks that women, men should have the authority over what their wives read, even though he says he's only told his wife once what she could not read, that she wanted to read.
And he, and I'll stop here because we're going to run out of time, he is an open Christian nationalist.
Do you know how I know that, Dan?
Because there is a statement on Christian nationalism and the gospel.
Guess who it was written by?
Dusty Devers.
Guess who was a contributing editor?
Joel Webben.
So they are openly saying, we're Christian nationalists, we should have a Christian nation run by Christians where we impose Christian quote-unquote law on everyone else.
One of the other contributing editors is William Wolfe.
William Wolfe was a member of the Trump administration, but William Wolfe is one of the most insidious and toxic Christian nationalists on Twitter.
I mean, the things that he posts there About the ways that men should have control over women, the ways that this country should be made into a Christian theocracy.
It is startling even for me who studies these things.
What's the point?
Dusty Devers is an elite.
He is a state representative, he has a microphone, he has a platform, and he's connected to To people like, on one side, Doug Wilson in Moscow, Idaho, a notorious Christian nationalist who at one point said slavery was a good thing, who now makes some of the most outlandish statements you can find.
If you're not familiar with Doug Wilson, you should be.
And on the other side, he's with William Wolfe.
William Wolfe was part of the Trump administration.
He's also close to Russ Vought, William Wolfe, who is the one spearheading and advising Project 2025.
So you can write off Dusty Devers as a sort of obscure Oklahoma State Senator, but he's somebody who's voicing things that we've already seen, whether it's the Society of American Civic Renewal, whether it's Joel Webbin, the pastor, whether it's William Wolfe, whether it's Doug Wilson, whether it's Project 2025.
Guess what, friends?
This might be, as Ryan Williams said, radical.
But it's not new, and it's certainly not fringe.
This is what's coming in a Trump 2.0 presidency, and it is the mindset of many on the American right as we make our way through 2024.
Any thoughts on this, Dan?
And then if you can, tie this together with what we talked about last week with Katie Britt's response to the State of the Union and the themes of white womanhood and femininity and innocence.
Yeah, so I think just about these first two pieces, it's almost the see-it's-real day of like, you know, straight white American Jesus.
Like, see, this stuff is there.
It's not hidden.
We're not just making it up.
We're not digging deep for hidden codes.
It's right there.
And as you say, we talked about last week, you know, Katie Britt and her response to the State of the Union address and all the themes of, as you say, white female innocence and a certain Weird sense of like carefully cultivated victimhood.
We everybody else said it would be the Saturday Night Live cold open and it was and if folks haven't seen that it's worth a look because they actually really pick up on that the theatrical sort of performative nature of this and the performative fear and so forth.
So I want to pick up on that.
If there's one thing about all of this for me It's the sense of pervasive threat.
Having to maintain a sense of threat.
So if it's the civic movement, it's a sense of threat.
It's such a dangerous threat, Brad.
It's the same thing that brought down the Roman Empire.
That's how bad it is.
Or if it's these other kinds of movements, it's just this perpetual pervasive threat.
We saw that in the State of the Union response last week.
And I want to say more about that this week, because one of the things that everybody noted was the strong focus on immigration, immigration as threat, precisely the kind of people who are unassimilable, who won't be the real kind of white Americans, European Americans, and so forth, that are going to come in and be a part of this.
That was the threat.
And so there was more about that this week because this came into specific question.
So as people noted, Katie Britt was about to like make up a name that didn't exist and suddenly drew a blank.
She talked about, she told this story, very moving, intense story about sex trafficking last week, and what she said was this.
She said, quote, again, hold this idea of threat, hold this idea of danger, and hold this idea of white women under threat, white women in danger, as this kind of motivating force on the right.
She said, when I first took office, I did something different.
I traveled to the Del Rio sector of Texas, where I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me.
She had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at age 12.
President Biden, and she goes on to say, President Biden's border crisis is a disgrace.
It's despicable.
And it's almost entirely preventable.
Now, anybody linking that together is like, wow.
Biden, you know, she says at the beginning that within minutes of taking office, he basically opens the border and lets the threat in and then tells this story.
Well, of course, what has happened since then is we now know that this was a story about a woman named Carla Jacinto.
And it did happen, but it happened in Mexico, not the United States.
It happened and it happened during the George W. Bush presidency.
Nothing to do with Biden.
Here's the interesting thing about this.
So then this came out.
So first of all, people know who Jacinto is and they reached out to her and she said this.
She said, I hardly ever cooperate with politicians because it seems to me that they only want an image.
They only want a photo.
And that to me is not fair.
So she called out Brit and this response for using her story basically to drum up this sense of fear and to mislead.
But here's the other interesting thing about this.
This week, excuse me, They asked Katie Britt's communications director, you know, about this misleading language.
They acknowledged that the story was about Carly Acinto, but they said the language was not misleading.
And that she did not intend to give the impression that it happened during Biden's term.
And this is one of those things where people like to do that.
Like, technically, she just said two sentences side by side.
She didn't say, and this happened during Biden's term.
She just, you know, leaves it to any normal interpreter of the English language to interpret it that way.
Why do I bring all that up?
She lied.
She made it up.
All of that.
Fine.
But here's the part for me that ties it together with a lot of this stuff.
You get the theme of threat.
But you also, again, have this ongoing sense of political fantasy, a threat that is fantasized.
Here's what I think.
I think, on the right, this is the pervasive threat of the non-whites, of the rapacious men coming after white women, on and on and on and on.
This is the threat, and that threat is so real that we're not going to let facts get in the way.
This story, it has to be true.
It has to be true from somewhere, because this is what the Democrats are about.
They're going to tear down the wall.
They're going to open the border.
They're going to threaten America's Christian heritage.
They're going to let rapacious, darker-skinned people come in and attack white women cowering in their kitchens, all of the performativity of this.
This is what we see.
And so, in a certain sense, I think for them, it's like plug and play.
We've got this great story, this great anecdote, and it kind of doesn't matter That it happened like three presidents ago under a Republican administration in a different damn country.
None of that matters because it's so good it's got to be true.
It feeds our fantasy so much.
It has to be true.
It has to be real.
And it feeds that fear.
That fear becomes so pervasive that it creates the reality that supposedly drives it.
And you get this kind of feedback loop that goes in and this is what All of these other folks that we're talking about, this is what they feed on.
This is what they thrive on.
It's what spawns them, but it's what they perpetuate, this feedback loop of fear that legitimates taking power at all costs.
Like Ryan Williams said, it's not radical or new.
And we talked about it last week, the myth of white womanhood and its innocence goes back to the 19th century, as Sarah Mosner's work points out.
It goes back to the birth of a nation and the reasons the KKK existed in the 1915s, 1920s.
It goes back to Emmett Till.
It goes back to Jim Crow.
I mean, it goes back to all those things.
But neither are the fraternal men's organizations that are supposedly here to renew the nation by protecting everybody.
And we talked about that today.
So the two go together.
In this case, the myth of white woman innocence and the myth of white American Christian male renewal are two sides of the same coin.
They always have been in this country, and they still are today.
Let's take a break and come back and talk about what we learned in Oklahoma about Next Benedict.
Be right back.
All right, Dan, what did we learn this week? .
Yeah, so, I know we don't have a lot of time, and we'll keep this brief, but it's worth talking about.
So, it was tragic news.
The story last week about a transgender student in Oklahoma named X Benedict, who was bullied, had a history of being bullied, was beaten in a school bathroom, and then died the next day.
We now know that the death was ruled a suicide by the medical examiner.
The next died by suicide.
It was a drug overdose.
And that's tragic for lots of reasons, but it has continued to raise the outcry about this, and I just want to say something about that for a minute.
We talked a little bit about the state superintendent, Ryan Walters, and policies that he advocated and passed and forced on Oklahoma schools that targeted LGBTQ people.
We also know that trans and gender non-conforming people in particular, LGBTQ youth in general, but trans and non-binary people in particular, guess what folks?
They are at increased suicide risk.
They are four times as likely to attempt suicide than their peers.
The Trevor Project did a survey that found that 41% of queer youth contemplated suicide in the last year, and that number's higher for trans and non-binary youth.
It's roughly 50%.
And I found another article, a journal article, from the Journal of Interpersonal Violence looking at this.
And it identified, you know, a couple factors that contribute to this.
And one of them is interpersonal microaggressions, so threats from others.
And another one was school belonging, that if trans and queer students don't feel that they belong, that they're safe in schools, they are more prone to suicidality.
They're more prone to attempt this.
And this is what happened.
And there was a walkout and students have said, you know, that it doesn't matter to them if it was death by suicide because they find these policies responsible.
The Department of Education has already opened an investigation into whether Nexus School failed to address sex-based harassment.
And as you noted, Joe Biden talked about this.
Everybody talked about this.
Biden said that it was heartbreaking.
But Ryan Walters remained defiant in the face of this.
He said his statement in response to this was, the loss of our student in Owasso is tragic for the family, the community, and our state.
The LGBTQ groups pushing a false narrative are one of the biggest threats to our democracy, and I remain, more than ever, committed to never backing down from a woke mob.
Where am I going with this?
For me, the big thing is that these policies, they instigate animosity toward queer folk, they greenlight violence against LGBTQ people, and this is what Nex experienced.
We've said on here that these spates of policies against queer folk and LGBTQ folk were going to lead to these kinds of events, and they have, and it says everything to me that Walters remains defiant and identifies the problem here as the quote-unquote woke mob and LGBTQ groups pushing the false narrative and so forth.
Tragic story, unfortunately not surprising, and I think it shows the true colors of the people who, for me, contributed to this by creating this context where this becomes an almost inevitable outcome.
One of the things that Walter said in response to Joe Biden was that he despicably politicized a child's death.
Yeah, exactly.
And I think what that brought up for me, Dan, is that here we have Ryan Walter as a Republican who is part of a party that has done everything it can to make access to reproductive Health care, including abortion, non-existent, and especially in places like Oklahoma, Texas, across the South and in the Midwest.
So here's somebody who's part of a party whose unifying goal, above probably all other policy goals, is like restricting abortion.
I mean, we talked about the IVF ruling.
Three weeks ago, we talked about how in Alabama, a frozen embryo is considered a person.
So the entire party is based on the politicization of what they call unborn quote unquote children.
And then as we've noted many, many times in this show, as soon as the child is born, the call for being pro-life seems to fade.
Like, you know, we need what?
Do we need programs for mothers to make sure that they have what they need to succeed?
Do we have programs to fund pre-K for everybody?
Do we have programs for schools to have lunches and breakfasts so every kid can succeed and be nourished?
Nope.
Access to healthcare.
Yep.
All of those things.
Access to healthcare.
So, to me...
I had a moment of blind rage of thinking Ryan Walters wants to talk about politicizing a child's death when that is the entirety of the GOP, not the entirety, but it's like the unifying force of the GOP platform for five decades.
And then callously claim that, you know, there's a false narrative about Nex's life and death in terms of a woke mob and blah blah blah.
It is enraging to say the least.
And this is one example of many across the country of queer kids feeling like they don't have a place in America.
And we'll just close on this today.
We talked a lot about unhyphenated Americans, the really Americanized Americans, Well, this is the flip side, is you make other people feel as if they have no place here, as if they can't exist here as themselves, as if they can't be safe, as if they're not welcome.
You make them feel as if, right, there is no future, and therefore, they end up with what they take to be very limited choices.
So, rest in peace, Next Benedict, and I'll just say shame on you, Ryan Walters, and I want to say more, but I won't.
All right, Dan, let's transition before we both lose it here a little bit in tears.
Reason for hope?
Do you have one?
I do, yeah.
So mine was Chuck Schumer this week gave a floor speech from the Senate calling for new elections in Israel and saying a number of other things, the most pointed statements Arguably by a high elected official in the U.S., somebody who's Jewish.
And that also follows, I think kind of related, I think it's related to this, follows U.S.
intelligence estimates that are saying that Benjamin Netanyahu will probably not remain in office long.
They think that there will be elections.
That's hopeful for me for lots of reasons.
The criticism of Israel, gaining political traction and so forth.
But I said some time ago, when all the things in Gaza were starting, that Netanyahu was in this position where he needed to keep the actions in Gaza going.
He needed to escalate it because he has to try to appease his right flank and he's gone very far to the right to do that.
He's facing his own legal problems and so forth.
All of this to say that for him, Gaza's really vital for staying in office, so he has huge incentives not to ever let this end.
And so I found all of this to be a sign of hope that I think that it creates pressure for elections, potentially for the removal of Netanyahu, which may be one of the only things that can bring about an end to what's going on in Gaza.
So I found that speech hopeful and sort of emblematic of some bigger things that are going on.
Yeah, we will look back on this and we will realize that, you know, we were the outliers in this country.
I know many of you listening already know this.
And the UN Security Council and UN votes, the G20 and so on, about calling for ceasefire.
We were the country that said not to do that.
So Chuck Schumer making that announcement is a change in the American political landscape for sure.
And I think that's big.
This morning we learned that Fonny Willis will stay on the Georgia case.
The prosecutor, I think that is good news, even if it's a distraction and it provides a kind of fuel for those who would take the case to be something, something, something, something, attack on Trump, blah, blah, blah.
Nonetheless, that will go forward, it also seems.
Yeah, anyway, I'll just stop there.
So I think that is good news.
I don't know what will happen there.
Some of those charges were thrown out, but they were just sort of cleaned up.
Most of them remain, and we will see what happens in Georgia.
There's been other delays in the New York case, and there's some other news that's somewhat discouraging, I'd say, but we'll just stay with that for now.
All right, friends.
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We'll be back next week with a Monday episode on Charles Haywood, leader of the Society for American Civic Renewal.
It's in the code on Wednesday and the weekly roundup.
For now, we'll say thanks for listening.
Have a good day.
Thanks, Brad.
Thanks for listening today, y'all.
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