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Brad and Dan open with a discussion of the J6 cases at SCOTUS - and the fact that Clarence Thomas has not recused himself, despite his wife being involved in J6.
The hosts then move to the details of the Stormy Daniels Hush Money case - going through the actual crimes being charged and explaining why they are indeed related to the election.
In the final segment Dan analyzes an article in the Atlantic on what Americans lost when they stopped participating in organized religion. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/04/america-religion-decline-non-affiliated/677951/
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
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My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Joined today by my co-host.
I want to say, friends, I am having some audio difficulties today.
So if you hear a change in my mic or something like that, I'm doing my best to fix it.
So anyway, just bear with me.
Other than that, I'll say here today with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
It's really early for you, I know, and I feel like sometimes for mine, I'll have to get up and I'll have to record, it's in the code, early in the morning, and I feel like I'm screaming.
I'm trying to sound energetic, but not too loud.
My kids are asleep and I don't want to get yelled at by my wife and if the dog downstairs who's like not out for the day yet hears that there are people awake she'll start barking so it's like it's like this hushed excitement uh so I don't know if you feel that with you know little ones in the house and such but I'm sorry you have to get up so early to do this today.
There used to be a time Dan when like getting up before am would have wrecked me you know like my whole work week I tell my colleagues, like, oh, I had to get up at 3.30 because the dog woke me up or there was a thing outside.
And now it's like, I have tiny babies in the house.
Like, I have no idea what time it is.
I have no idea how many hours I slept last night.
It doesn't matter at this point.
Maybe I stayed up till 2 a.m.
Maybe I got up at 2 a.m.
No one knows.
It doesn't matter.
So there's that.
Okay, real quick, because people are going to email me and they're going to be like, guys, stop with the chatter, stop with the stuff.
But I just, I need to know after last week, how many shirts do you have?
Because like last week you told us you got the shirt from the Eclipse, but, uh, Like, this is one moment where I think we're very different.
I never buy the shirt.
When I see people in LA who have a shirt that says, like, Portland, or if I'm in Dallas and there's somebody that has a sweatshirt that says Los Angeles, California, I'm like, what?
You went to LA and now you're wearing a shirt that's like, I went to LA.
I don't know.
How many shirts do you have?
Is it 10?
Is it 100?
Do you get them everywhere you go?
Do you have a Lowell, Massachusetts shirt?
Do you have a Holyoke, Massachusetts shirt?
What's going on over there?
Yeah, so I actually have.
It's funny, I've never laid it out, but I have this weird calculus of when it's permitted to buy a shirt and when it's not.
I'll never wear a band shirt of a band that I don't listen to or didn't go to a show or something like that.
Because of that, if somebody's like, you ever actually been there?
I'd be like, yep, yep, I have.
I used to have an Oxford hat and people would be like, have you ever actually been to Oxford?
I'm like, yeah, actually I studied there.
And they'd be like, oh, all right.
There's that.
I don't do local stuff.
I'm not going to wear a shirt that's like, Hadley Mass.
If people know where Hadley Mass is, there's not a lot in Hadley Mass.
There's like a Lowe's and a Home Depot and stuff, but you can buy a Hadley Mass t-shirt.
I don't have those.
So sometimes if it is like a big event or memorable or something, that kind of thing, I get them.
I think what you've made me see is even the darkest hearts have a sweet spot, and maybe I should, Dan.
Consider buying these things.
Go to places, get the shirt, have a good memory.
What's wrong with that?
I'm also just going to have to reiterate.
I say this, and I think people think it's a joke, but you know me.
You know it's not, that I'm just not cool.
There's nothing cool about me.
And I buy t-shirts or hats.
It's usually one or the other.
So, yeah, I just have to I have to lean into my not coolness and just acknowledge it.
And, you know, all right.
It is what it is.
All right.
It's the season, friends.
Spring has sprung.
Easter has passed.
And it is the season where we talk about Trump, unfortunately.
We're going to talk today about three things.
One is the Supreme Court and a J6 case that's in front of the Supreme Court, as well as the Trump case.
And some of the things we've learned this week about the justices and the questions they're asking regarding prosecuting anyone who participated in J6, including Donald Trump.
I'm going to mention Clarence and Ginny Thomas there because we just have to.
You'll see why in a second.
We'll also spend some time talking about the hush money case in New York and just going through the mechanics of that.
I think a lot of you out there probably know that Trump's on trial.
He paid Stormy Daniels, blah, blah, blah.
There's going to be Uncle Rons out there that are like, it's not a crime, just it's a witch hunt, let it go.
And I think we want to kind of take you through that and hopefully clarify some things so you just at least have a novice understanding of what's going on there mechanically in terms of the law.
In the last segment, we're going to attend to an article that was in The Atlantic this week by Derek Thompson, and it's about what Americans lost when they stopped going to church, and more broadly, stopped participating in organized religion.
And so I think we both have thoughts about that.
That's something that we feel strongly about.
We've experienced ourselves.
We have a lot of people that we know who've been in that.
So, Dan, I'll throw it to you.
Talk to us about the Supreme Court, about obstruction of justice, about J6, and all the rest.
As people probably know, the case that is before SCOTUS that this is relevant to is Fisher versus the United States, and they had opening arguments earlier this week.
And basically, there's a law about obstruction that a lot of J6 defendants have been charged under, and this is now before the Supreme Court.
And this is what the text of the statute says.
I'm not going to dive way into this, but I think it's important that, you know, when we do these things, people actually look at, like, what is the actual law that is being broken?
And it says that whoever corruptly, and it gives a number of different things, talks about altering, destroying, mutilating, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, etc., etc., etc., or Otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding or attempts to do so shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years or both.
So it has a maximum penalty of 20 years imprisonment.
One thing I read is that the massive amount of people who've been charged under this related to J6 are getting sentences like in the one to two year range.
It has not been 20.
I think that can be a bit misleading when people hear that and that comes up in some of the reasoning.
But the stats I've seen of over 1,200, almost 1,300 people who've been charged in connection with J6, about 330 of them have been charged under this statute, or at least in part under this statute.
So it's like a quarter of them.
And one of them is Trump.
This is relevant to Trump, not obviously in the same case, but in other cases.
And so whatever it is that the justices decide, it's going to be relevant.
That's what sort of heightens this.
It's not just the J6 activists, it's Trump as well.
A federal appeals court argued, most people say very, very clearly, that the law applies to the effort to obstruct congressional proceedings to certify the election, that it applies to that.
And obviously, typically, things don't make it to the Supreme Court unless they've gone up through the appeals courts and so forth.
In this case, the appeals court said that this statute does apply.
Pretty much everybody who looked at and listened to the opening arguments observes that a majority of the justices appear ready to basically give the accused insurrectionists a win here.
They note that when they were first questioning defense, like they were pretty harsh with them too.
And people were like, oh, we'll see.
But then the prosecutors stand up for their turn and really got sort of hammered.
That would undermine all these prosecutions.
It would undermine, arguably, the prosecution of Trump.
That's the sort of big storm cloud lingering in this.
That's no surprise, right?
It is no surprise that a Supreme Court with a majority of conservative justices are leaning that way.
I came across a link that showed how often Alito, in particular, it's like he's never met a Republican cause in the Supreme Court that he doesn't like.
It's very highly predictive of of how he'll rule.
That's not a surprise, but what I want to focus on, and it'll maybe drive people nuts because I focus on this a lot with the Supreme Court, is the rationale that's given.
Because what a lot of observers say, and there was a really good article in particular that talked about this, that said, you know, it's interesting.
It's clear they don't like it.
They don't want it to apply to them.
But it's actually not clear what rationale they'll find or use for not applying it to the J6 insurrectionists, that they're basically looking for a rationale.
And I'm getting that from Ian Millhiser of Vox made that point.
I want to throw that out and make sure to acknowledge that.
Here's what stands out to me, though.
This is Milhiser.
He sums it up this way.
He says, many of the justices expressed concerns that the law sweeps too broadly and that it must be narrowed to prevent people who engage in relatively benign activity from being prosecuted.
Justice Samuel Alito, for example, expressed uncharacteristic sympathy for hecklers who interrupt a Supreme Court hearing, suggesting that prosecuting them under a statute that can carry a 20-year sentence goes too far.
Justice Neil Gorsuch expressed similar concerns about prosecuting someone who peacefully conducts a sit-in to delay a court hearing or someone who pulls a fire alarm to disrupt an official proceeding.
That's clearly a shot at Democrats who pulled a fire alarm in Congress and so forth.
Here's why that matters to me.
Remember, everybody?
These are supposed to be the textualists.
These are supposed to be the originalists.
These are the ones who argue and say, you should not decide Supreme Court decisions based on what the effect of the law will be.
Clarence Thomas, who we'll hear more about Thomas bowing out of this, or just kind of not showing up for work that day later.
Clarence Thomas, if people remember the case about race-based admissions, Really tore into his fellow justice for aiming to create a college community that reflects the social community and this is social engineering and this is bad and this is a social aim that courts have no business trying to do and you know so on.
That's been the conservative argument and here the argument from From Alito, of all people, is that the law is too broad.
Suddenly Alito is all about people exercising their civil liberties to disrupt the Supreme Court hearings and things like that.
That's a cause Alito has never been into.
So, what I think we see, once again, is that For the Uncle Rons of the world who've picked up on the language of originalism, or maybe they like to cite Scalia and say they believe in a dead constitution, or whatever other language there is, what we see is what I think a lot of people have recognized for a long time, that justices, and this is not just on the right, Justices often, they know how they want to rule on something and they'll find a rationale to rule on it.
They have lots of clerks and interns and mountains of things to go through to try to create these rationales.
The problem for conservative justices is they say that they have a coherent interpretive strategy.
They say that it's philosophically robust.
They say that they are just, quote unquote, applying the law, that they're not paying attention to social issues, that they are somehow uninfluenced by this.
And they're just not.
So that's part of what stood out to me.
So you've got the stakes of this.
What does it mean if not just these 330 or so people, if this charge goes away, you have what does this mean for Trump?
And then you've got the kind of level above that about the rationale that is used.
The last piece I'll just throw out is it's worth noting when they say that prosecuting them under statute in care of 20 year sentence goes too far.
I agree.
There are things that people could be prosecuted for if they don't deserve 20 years in prison.
They don't have to be sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Most J6 people haven't.
It says a fine or imprisonment of not more than 20 years.
Like most laws, there's a lot of movement for judges in sentencing cases to be able to, you know, use a wide range of latitude here.
So I feel like that's a little bit of a, I guess I shouldn't say bogeyman, bogey person, bogey human.
It's a bit of a false argument that's coming forward, a false narrative, as if people's hands are tied and, you know, somebody's going to pull a fire alarm in a courthouse and be in prison for 20 years.
It's just not the case.
So, a lot of spurious reasoning.
I think clearly, most observers say, aimed at making it so that the J6 folks have an easier time in the prosecution.
Okay, a couple things here for me.
So if I'm not mistaken, Dan, this statute or law is about 20 years old and it's rarely if ever used.
And so it's not something you're going to see show up in courtrooms every day.
I think that's part of what the Supreme Court justices are drawing on is like, oh, how come you're using it now?
And that plays into this reasoning that you're talking about, right?
Like, how come you're not using it when somebody shouts something and disrupts the Supreme Court?
I'm Samuel Alito.
I was offended.
I'm clutching pearls right now.
Should that person be in jail for 20 years?
And I agree with your thoughts here.
There's a sense of like, oh, you've never used a statute.
Why now?
And it's like, I don't know, guys.
Have you heard of an insurrection?
Did you see what happened on January 6, 2021?
Did we, I don't know, is there a time in the history where we've had people doing bowel movements in the Capitol?
Putting their feet on the Speaker of the House's desk?
Ripping up documents?
People dressed up like shamans?
QAnon shamans?
In the Senate chamber saying prayers?
Police officers being beaten to get into a place where the entire Congress is trying to certify an election?
I don't know.
I don't know.
It's weak.
Like, it's weak to think that this is the kind of reasoning you're giving.
That the incredibly grave thing that the entire world watched, that threatened our democracy, and you want to compare this to other things.
As you just said, Dan, it doesn't have to be 20 years.
There are people, and I've read a few of these cases, that were in the Capitol for a few minutes.
They were part of the mob, but they were part of the mob in a way that led to police officers being overrun.
They entered the Capitol, then they left.
Do they deserve 20 years?
I don't know.
You have to dig into the case.
You've got to see.
Is it 18 months?
Is it 24 months?
That's all there.
But as you've said, most of these folks are not even attempted to be sentenced for that long.
The Supreme Court, to me though, at least Alito and Thomas and Gorsuch, this block, is signaling something that's the exact opposite of what we need right now.
The weakness on J6 and basically them echoing what you would hear on Fox News or from some very conservative member of the House who's like, it was a normal tourist visit.
Like, they're giving Dan, they're comparing this to sit-ins and people pulling fire alarms, okay?
Like, Dan, if you and I went and played horse right now, like shooting baskets, and I made like 10 shots in a row and compared that to Steph Curry, That would be a problem, because you'd be like, well, first of all, you're 43 years old.
Even when you were 23 years old, there's no comparing you to Steph Curry.
And what you just did there might have been a thing, but it was not what Steph Curry does.
Like, the comparison is so problematic.
And yet it feels to me like that's what's happening here.
And they're doing so in a way that is exactly what we don't need.
And it's showing us something that I think many Americans are coming to realize, but it's coming at the worst possible time.
The judicial branch is made up of humans who are susceptible to species arguments, and they're giving credence and legitimacy to something that is akin to J6, at least not denial, but at least questioning.
And it's a problem.
Anyway, I want to get to Clarence Thomas, but let me throw it to you.
Give us some more thoughts on this before we go into Ginny and Clarence Thomas.
The only point to reaffirm what you say is, yeah, that question of, well, why not?
Because other times you're like, yeah, it doesn't rise to needing this kind of penalty, right?
Like, yeah.
And I know this sometimes makes people uncomfortable because it can be abused, but there is inevitably discretion in how laws are applied, and I think that there should be.
And maybe this is on my mind because we're coming into grading season in higher ed, but I think of plagiarism or academic integrity with students.
That's a super squishy area and a lot of, you know, if you're a professor and somebody turns in a paper and something's not cited right, you've got to decide, like, was this intentional?
Was it not?
Is it a freshman who doesn't know how to write yet and, like, they got it off the internet and so they think that it's public and that means that they don't need to cite it or whatever, or maybe they put quotes around it but didn't tell where it came from, all the way up to people who, like, You know, steal footnotes from journal articles and, like, put them in their papers and stuff like that.
I've got a handbook that says, here's the rules about, you know, academic integrity, but I have to have the flexibility of knowing when to level those and how much and how significantly and so forth.
That's all this is.
And I think everybody in lots of walks of life recognizes that.
We recognize that with our kids, right?
You got rules in your house and consequences that come, but you also got to pay attention to, like, What's the kid doing?
And why were they doing it?
And was it intentional?
And all of that.
It's not hard to understand.
So I think it's a really false kind of construction, as you say, this notion that they put forward that, you know, everybody who pulls a fire alarm is going to be in prison for 20 years.
It's just it's a completely spurious reasoning.
And so with that, I'm happy.
Happy is not the right word.
You can you can bring us into a discussion of our favorite Supreme Court justice, all things related to Clarence Thomas.
One thing not to forget here is that the week all this happens, we get these signals from the ultra-conservative bloc of the Supreme Court.
They look at J6 in the same breath as the sit-ins and the other forms of protest.
This is the same week that the Supreme Court basically said, we're not going to hear the case McKesson versus Doe.
This comes out of Louisiana.
It involves Black Lives Matter activist DeRay McKesson, who back in 2016-2017 years was enormously, enormously popular on Twitter and social media.
DeRay was like ubiquitous in every facet of the Black Lives Matter movement.
He ran for mayor of Baltimore.
I actually met DeRay McKesson in the airport one time when I was walking through the Baltimore airport.
We had a short conversation.
And DeRay McKesson organized a protest in Louisiana after the murder of Alton Sterling, Dan.
And the protest took place near a police station, a police headquarters.
And eventually the protest became unruly.
There was a police officer who was injured, hit by a rock that was thrown, and have not found that person who threw the rock.
But they want to hold DeRay McKesson accountable for that.
Now, he did not throw the rock.
He did not tell people to throw rocks.
He did not encourage people to bring rocks.
He did not say, please come to the police headquarters and let's, you know, be violent.
None of that.
Nonetheless, he's being prosecuted for that crime because they say he's responsible for organizing the protest.
Now this is, Dan, this all requires nuance and complexity.
Because there's a difference in organizing a protest in my mind.
And one that's like, hey, let's organize a protest so we can go down to the Capitol and, uh, stand up to the powers that be and overturn our election.
And you'll never keep your country unless you fight and you have to fight like hell.
Anyone remember those words from January 6th?
We can't be weak.
There was months and months of rhetoric using warfare language and violent language, and then violence actually erupts.
I think another piece of this is just to think about, like, imagine that these things had been carried to complete, like, what is the outcome, right?
You have the overturning of a democratic election is the outcome of one.
Somebody yells at the Supreme Court, they're escorted out, it's a minor delay.
Somebody pulls a fire alarm, everybody has to go out to the parking lot and sit around for a while, while they determine that, you know, there's not really a fire or something like that.
That has to be a piece of this as well, in all of these cases, of like, what were the consequences, potential and real, of the activity that was going on?
And to your point, there's just a qualitative difference between J6 and almost any other, possibly every other example that I can think of.
But like if we go back to the McKesson case, Dan, like the thrust of that case is like you're not allowed to organize a protest.
And this is where, Dan, like democracy is hard, right?
Having the right to protest is part of American democracy.
Having the right to protest for right?
That's what Martin Luther King Jr.
said in the mountaintop speech in Memphis.
Protesting is a right.
It's a part of the American founding.
It's part of the American ethos.
But you're basically saying if you organize a protest, you're responsible for everything that happens in that protest, even if you're not encouraging people in any way to be violent or unruly or to destroy things.
Dan, there's like a weird echo here with the IVF decision in Alabama, because if I open an IVF clinic in Alabama and something happens, I'm now a murderer.
What the McKesson case says in Louisiana is if I organize a protest and somebody ends up throwing a rock or something, I didn't encourage them to do it.
I don't want people to hurt anyone, but they do it nonetheless.
Now I'm responsible.
And you can see Uncle Ron being like, well, what's the difference between McKesson and Trump?
And there are differences, but we have to attend to the nuances and the complexity.
We have to attend to the fact that one person is organizing a protest, the other one is organizing a protest in order for people to do something that is illegal.
Encouraging them to walk to the Capitol, encouraging them with warfare language and violence language.
I mean, we just have to attend to that.
And I know it's not easy to do that in a sound clip.
In a world where IG Reels and all that is what we follow and what fits in a TikTok is what matters.
It's hard to do that, but it matters.
It matters a lot.
So, let me just mention the Thomases before we move on, Dan.
We've reached a place where Clarence Thomas is now presiding over J6 cases.
He's presiding over the Fisher case that you talked about, and he's of course in on the Jack Smith case with Trump.
Clarence Thomas is one of the most conservative justices on the bench.
Him and Alito are usually in a race for this.
And he's married to Ginny Thomas, Virginia Thomas, who many people have noted was directly involved in January 6th.
And I just want to remind you how.
Okay, how was she involved?
Well, there's people who say she helped organize things and etc.
There's not hard evidence for Ginny Thomas Paying for buses and etc.
At least not that I know of.
You can send me that if you have it.
But what we do know is Ginny Thomas was texting and emailing with people who were directly involved in January 6.
She was texting with Mark Meadows often in the run-up to J6.
She texted him, Help this great president stand firm, Mark.
You are the leader.
You're standing for America's constitutional government and governance at the precipice.
The majority knows Biden and the left is attempting the greatest heist of our history.
And Mark Meadows wrote things back like, this is good versus evil.
I mean, it was a cosmic war.
Okay.
She talked about Sidney Powell, the lawyer, and she says, it seems like Sidney and her team are being inundated with evidence of fraud.
Make a plan, release the Kraken, save us from the left taking America down.
So this is the wife of Clarence Thomas.
She also emailed with John Eastman, the architect of the attempt to overthrow the election, the fake electors, the Green Bay sweep that Bannon talked about on and on and on and on.
So she's encouraging this.
There are people who would say that she helped to pay for buses and things like that.
Now, again, that, that seems to be speculation at this point and so on.
But she's married to a Supreme Court justice who's now listening to January 6th cases, including the ones that we talked about today.
He seems to be suspicious of prosecuting people for J6.
And here we have these text messages.
Whatever we think, Dan, there's marriages out there where, you know, they seem to have a certain dynamic, like Melania and Trump.
That marriage seems to have a certain dynamic.
And I don't want to be a Hollywood gossip show, but I think we can all agree that that marriage has certain contours to it that go back to the beginning of the marriage and the reasons for the marriage and all that.
Ginny Thomas and Clarence Thomas have been two peas in a pod fighting the good fight in their minds for decades, three and four decades now.
So I just, we're going to run out of time.
I just want to quote a Washington Post article from 1991, and then I'm going to move on.
The one person Clarence Thomas really listens to is Virginia, said longtime friend Evan Kemp, chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
He depends on her for advice.
So, you know, maybe things have changed, Dan, in the 30-something years since that happened.
But all the appearances are that Ginny and Clarence Thomas are very close.
They believe in the same things.
She converted to Catholicism.
They have the same church.
They have a very similar understanding of how their church and their faith should look in terms of policy and laws and so on.
This is not one of those moments of like Kellyanne Conway and George Conway being on opposite sides.
Every day they're on the camera and they're on different sides of the coin and yet somehow they're on like TV or they go home and they read before bed and they leave it to Beaver and all that.
This is not it, okay?
This is two folks who have been working together for like 40 years doing the same stuff.
So what do you think of this?
Just the last comment is there's a really simple solution.
It's called recusal.
You just say, yeah, people could really wonder about this, so I'll step aside, which of course brings us back to the whole lack of an ethics code.
There's no formal mechanism for this.
There's no need to recuse and so forth.
This is not about them being conservative.
Oh, they're both conservative, so he can't rule on anything she might have an opinion on.
It's not about even having... It's about this specific event, right?
So nobody is saying like, oh, Clarence Thomas has a conservative activist prominent partner, so he shouldn't be able to rule on anything the conservatives care... Like, I've heard that caricature of criticisms of Thomas.
No, it's this event.
Like, where she clearly had an interest and was trying to sway power brokers to act in particular ways related to J6, the solution would be simple.
The fact that Thomas won't consider or simply step back, to me, tells us everything we need to know about who and what Clarence Thomas is as a person, as an ethical actor, and everything related to that.
And he didn't show up to work last week, one day, and it And it wasn't a recusal, Dan.
There was no explanation given, right?
Just no explanation at all.
It's just not there.
Which, last point for today, we've been talking about the Supreme Court for half an hour, is just, we are out of place, friends.
Do not imagine the Supreme Court justices as not human.
They are human beings.
And as we're seeing, there is a threat that our Supreme Court can be used as a political weapon in ways that we're just, we're taught it's not supposed to be.
And I, you know, I will say right now, there are 13 circuits.
We should have 13 justices.
The court has been expanded in the past, expanded again.
We're also just at a point where it should be clear, this is how democracy eats itself.
If you can get a judiciary, That we'll look at things like J6 in the same vein as a peaceful protest, and including looking at J6, the person who inside of it, as potentially not on the same level as a peaceful protester, somebody who pulls a fire alarm, you can see how democracy eats itself.
So we'll leave it there for now.
Let's take a break, come back and talk about New York.
All right, Dan, give me 10 minutes here.
I'm not going to do a bunch, but just give me 10 minutes.
I want to do something that I think It's important for me because I feel like this was a good exercise for me.
So, the case that has basically started, the jury has been sat and apparently we're going to get opening arguments Monday, Dan.
So, we're talking like two days from now, this trial will start and Trump has been in court all week for the jury selection and the opening proceedings of this trial in New York about the Hush Money case with Stormy Daniels.
Couple things to note.
It is interesting to see Trump in a place, in court, where he has no control.
He doesn't get to talk.
He doesn't get to banter.
He doesn't get to yell.
He doesn't get to stand up.
He just sits and has to listen.
And it does not seem to suit him at all.
He actually fell asleep one day.
And I'm just going to throw this out there.
Had to listen to a lot of prospective jurors say really negative things about Trump.
Clearly drove him crazy.
Memes being shown in court and he fell asleep one day, Dan.
He calls Joe Biden sleepy Joe and the guy literally fell asleep in court.
We have this case right now because two of the three other cases have been basically delayed by judges who have been shown to be favorable by Trump.
One is the Supreme Court who decided to hear the the Jack Smith case or aspects of it related to immunity.
And then the other is the one down in Florida and the documents case where Eileen Cannon has done everything she can to make sure that case doesn't happen until 2030, if ever.
The other one is Atlanta where Fonny Willis, uh, that's all been held up because of the relationship with the prosecutor and that whole business.
Okay.
So of the four, we now have the one that people thought of as kind of the most specious.
So I just want to go through it for a minute because I'm not sure everyone out there understands the mechanics.
I think everyone out there is like, okay, so Donald Trump paid.
Stormy Daniels, $130,000.
Uh, so she would not say anything about them having a sexual encounter going back decades.
That's the, that's the basic outline.
So here's what you're going to hear from Uncle Ron.
That's not a crime.
Yeah.
I mean, sure.
He did have sex with somebody, you know, weeks after his wife gave birth and that's not blah, blah, blah, but this is a witch hunt.
Okay.
That's what you're going to hear at the barbecue.
So Michael, Excuse me.
Mark Joseph Stern at Slate this week says, I was a skeptic of the Stormy Daniels prosecution.
I was wrong.
For the record, Dan, I was a skeptic of this too.
You go back and listen, we were skeptical.
We were not sure that this was a good idea.
We were not sure why Alvin Bragg totally went away from everything Cy Vance was doing before him in this, in this prosecutor role and so on.
What are the mechanics of the case?
Here's the mechanics of the case.
Okay.
Going back to 2015, Michael Cohen, you all know who Michael Cohen is, created a shell company.
And Michael Cohen had money, he paid Stormy Daniels, and eventually Trump funneled $420,000 to Cohen in installments.
And it was labeled for a retainer, legal services rendered.
So every month, Dan, let's just stop for a minute.
Michael Cohen gives Stormy Daniels $130,000.
And then every month thereafter, Michael Cohen receives payments from Trump that say retainer.
So let's say he received $15,000 a month, okay?
That $15,000 was ostensibly for Michael Cohen doing legal work for Trump in say, December 2016, December or February 2016, whatever month you want to say.
So Dan, it's like you had a business and I sent you an invoice and I was like, $10,000 please.
And I sent you one every month.
And I was like, please give me $10,000 for the work I did for you.
And on that invoice, it was like, what work did you do?
And it was, this was a retainer for the legal services I do for you.
When in fact, The only reason you were paying me is because I had given money as an intermediary to someone else to keep quiet about a thing.
I was not doing ongoing work.
I was not doing work in the month I billed you for.
I was not doing work for, when I said I was doing work for, a retainer.
Giving money to a, as a third party, giving money from one person to another is not a retainer work.
So that's a misdemeanor.
So does everybody understand that?
This is the point where I stop in class.
I'm like, if I falsify why we're giving and receiving money as business entities, that's not okay.
Now, we're still in the arena of Uncle Ron saying that's a witch hunt.
Like, are you really gonna pursue this man and bring up all of these felony charges because he's, you know, doing this?
Isn't that something small?
And the answer might be, it's not small.
I think, Dan, if you and I did this?
We'd be looking at years in prison.
I mean, that's not small.
That's like a real thing.
But is that when it comes to the presidency, when it comes to 2024, when it comes to 80 million Americans voting for him, is it really something you should be doing?
Now here's where Alvin Bragg is trying to make his case.
Okay.
Here's Mark Joseph Stern at Slate.
In his indictment, Brad claims that Trump lied about the payments with the intent to violate election law.
Which is what elevates the crime to a felony.
So the question is, why did he lie about the payments?
Why did he say that Michael Cohen was on board for a retainer rather than saying Michael Cohen acted as an intermediary to pay someone else?
Like, why did they try to use a paper trail to conceal why the $130,000 was given to Stormy Daniels?
They did so because Trump was running for president.
And they did not want it to come out that he had had sex with a porn star weeks after his wife had given birth.
So Bragg has argued convincingly that the former president intended to violate at least two election laws, one state, one federal.
Bragg asserted that Trump and Cohen ran afoul of the Federal Election Campaign Act by making unlawful campaign contributions at the direction of a candidate.
Cohen already pleaded guilty for this very act in federal court.
And Dan, I actually spent the morning or the last evening reading the documents from this plea.
And it's all there.
I mean, I already knew this.
I read these way back when, when all this happened.
But as you do, you get up at 3am and you just start reading things like this because you want to refresh your memory.
And it's all there.
Like it's all there in terms of like Cohen didn't really have an official capacity in the campaign.
He had an email address with the campaign.
He opened up all these shell companies and bank accounts within a day.
Within a day, money was put in those bank accounts.
That money then went to Storvy Daniels.
And then over the course of the months, he gets that money back plus more.
Rudy Giuliani even is on record talking about how Trump gave him what he had paid out plus more in order to cover Michael's expenses and his taxes and everything else.
So it's all there.
It's all on the record.
And we knew that I knew that years ago, you all do that years ago, but things happen and you got, you got to refresh your memory.
Back to sleep.
Bragg argued that Trump ran afoul of a New York election law that forbids any conspiracy to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means.
And this is where I'll just stop.
And I'll say, I think, I think Mark Joseph Stern's making a really good point in this article and I'll throw it to you.
This case is about the election.
We can see how the J6 case is about the election.
We can see how the Atlanta case is about the election.
Trump called Georgia and Raffensperger and was like, find me 12,000 votes, please.
That's about the election.
What is Trump paying a porn star have anything to do with the election?
He is doing something illegal.
Putting money through shell companies by way of Michael Cohen and then lying about it.
That's, on its face, Dan, illegal.
If you and I did that in business, we would maybe end up in jail for two years.
That's illegal.
But why is he doing it?
Dan, if you and I were doing it, it would ostensibly be, who knows?
We don't want to pay as much taxes.
We have some reason.
We don't want to have people find out that, you know, we bought a hundred to a thousand shirts from various tourist sites around the country, right?
Maybe you don't want that getting out.
Maybe you don't want people knowing you bought shirts from the Grand Canyon.
And four corners and Acadia National Park.
I can see that.
I can see not wanting that to become public.
So that's why we might do it.
Okay.
Why is he doing it?
He's doing it to get elected.
He's doing it because he knows that if this comes out, there's a very good chance I won't be elected.
So I'm going to do something illegal.
So that I can be the President of the United States.
That raises the stakes of the game.
Sometimes in law, the why matters, right?
The how is important.
The what is important, but the why, why am I doing it matters.
This comes up in murder all the time.
Is it first degree murder?
Second degree murder?
Is it manslaughter?
Did you premeditate it?
Was it an act of passion?
Was it unintentional?
So you can see how that's coming to play in the Alvin Bragg case up in New York.
The intent Behind concealing the payments was, I don't want another Access Hollywood tape situation.
The Access Hollywood tape is when it came out and he's on the record saying, grab them by the, the, you know what?
I don't want that to happen again.
So I'm going to do something illegal to make sure it doesn't.
That's the case.
All right.
Off to you.
Thoughts.
And then we can, we can wrap this.
I just wanted to give people a little like map so they understood it in their own mind and then could also talk to Uncle Ron when they, they meet him at the barbecue this weekend.
So just to reiterate a couple of points you make.
The first is that it is.
It's about election law.
It's not about the morality of Stormy Daniels.
It's not about the morality of Donald Trump having an affair with Stormy Daniels.
It's not even about paying Stormy Daniels not to tell people.
That stuff's sleazy, call it immoral, whatever, but that's not what it's about and that's not what Trump is being prosecuted for.
So I think that's one of the points that you're making that I think is really important.
Another one is, like, we all know, I think everybody knows, people make plea deals and they plead to charges, you know, so that maybe the penalty's not as bad or they're not sure they're going to win in court or it's really expensive or whatever.
And I think those of us who are not lawyers, just regular people, understand that people can have lots of calculations that go into that decision, okay?
But here's the trick.
Once somebody pleads guilty, it means legally it happened.
It has been demonstrated to have happened.
So yeah, we can as regular human people be like, if I was in Cohen's position, I might, you know, plead guilty too, if it meant this and this and this and saves this much money and keeps these other things from potentially happening.
We've all seen crime dramas on TV where people are confronted with, you know, you plead guilty to manslaughter, you're like 18 months.
And if you don't, you could spend life in prison.
It's going to be But legally it means it happened so the argument that there's no evidence of this that you can't prove it in court No, it's been proven in court that somebody who is essentially a co-conspirator in this Did this and I think that that's a hugely important piece to understand When we're talking to the Uncle Rons of the world, there's evidence of somebody who was actually convicted for this, who's like the partner literally in crime in this case.
The other one that I hear from just regular people, or I hear it from students, a popular way of thinking is, this is about intent.
You just never really know what's going on in somebody's mind.
Can't know what they were thinking.
No, it turns out that legally there are parameters where, yes, you can draw conclusions about what people were thinking.
You do it the same way we do it all the time.
You do it by looking at their actions.
You do it by looking at things that they said.
And that's where you get into the clunky legal language that's often like, a reasonable person would have understood these actions to indicate whatever.
That's just another one that I think you can hear coming from the Uncle Ronald, it's impossible to know what he thought.
No, it's not.
Not if you've got other witnesses who are party to conversations.
Not if you've got, if you can convince a jury of people that, you know what, if I was in that situation and somebody did that, yep, that's the conclusion I'm drawing, that they did this.
Beyond a reasonable doubt.
Nothing else really kind of makes good sense and I'm going to move forward with this.
So I think it's important, as redundant as this may sound, to recognize that these are legal questions, not ethical questions, not just moral questions, not squishy things about what kind of person would do this to their partner and whatever.
And once they're framed in that way, I agree.
I think it's a much more solid case than it used to be.
I've had more time to try to better understand exactly what the accusations are, but yeah.
And I think it's notable that jury selection went pretty fast and worked.
There was a lot of talk about, will it be possible to see the jury?
This is not going to be possible.
And they've done it.
And I think all of that bodes well for this moving forward as just a regular trial, a regular trial of somebody Who's accused of breaking laws and we're going to go to court and see if a jury agrees with that.
And we've already had Jesse Watters on Fox trying to out one of the jury members and a couple of jury members said that potential jury members said, I don't want to do this because I'm afraid.
And again, I mean, Ruth Ben-Giad on Twitter said it and others have said it.
This is what happens in authoritarian regimes.
People are afraid to participate in the process because the process is tainted by intimidation.
It tainted by a media scape that will allow for that intimidation and cultivate it and so on.
So there's a lot going on here.
Let's take a break, come back and talk about this article, The Atlantic, about what Americans lost when they left church.
Be right back.
Okay, Dan, I think this is something that goes to the heart of both of our experiences as human beings, people who have participated in religion very devotedly, people who had big changes in our participation in those communities.
We've been in contact with so many folks about these issues.
So, new article out at The Atlantic by Derek Thompson about what Americans lost when they stopped going to church.
Now, I just want to say, That's the title of his article.
I want to recognize that many Americans out there don't go to church and they never have because they're Jewish or they're Buddhist or they're Hindu or they've been raised non-religious.
And so I'm not going to be one of these folks who just thinks that all Americans used to go to church and now they don't.
Nonetheless, I think the point that I will take is that there are a record number of non-religious people in the country.
We do have widespread demographic change when it comes to religious participation, and that does mean a dramatic decrease in the amount of Americans who do go to Christian churches, as compared to previous eras, when you had participation levels well over 50%, sometimes in the 70th, and I believe 80th percentiles of people identifying as Christian, and another chunk of those actually going to church.
I have a cousin named Kevin Thompson.
The author of this article is Derek Thompson.
from this article, what are some of the things that Thompson puts forth and what are some of the things you agree with or don't?
I have a cousin named Kevin Thompson.
The author of this article is Derek Thompson.
We know my penchant for saying the wrong name, so if I attribute this article to my cousin, I don't think he wrote it.
So just quickly, some facts, 'cause Thompson does do a good job of just giving some sort of facts, like data that sort of is with this.
Just again, we know this, historically high levels of non-religiosity in the U.S.
There are more people who don't identify with a religion now than we think has ever been the case in U.S.
history, at least since people have been tracking these things.
To one of your points, two-thirds of those religiously unaffiliated were brought up in at least nominally religious households, which means a lot of those people who don't identify as religious could have.
They were brought up in a context where that was sort of an option, or maybe that was a background, and so they've moved out of or away from that.
And I think that's a piece of this.
As you identify, it's a big drop.
In the 1980s, it was something, as you say, about 70% who said that they still belong to a church or a synagogue or some sort of faith community.
Relatively recently, in the last 25 years, as he points out, 40 million people, which is 1 in 8 Americans, stopped going to church.
And in 2021 was the first time that the membership in houses of worship fell below a majority for the first time on record, right?
So this is really big, important, significant demographic shifts.
Lots of reasons for this.
People aren't entirely sure what they are.
One is political, as conservative or traditional religious groups have become more and more aligned with conservative politics.
Younger people who are not conservative have disaffiliated from religion because they see and sort of feel the two to be connected.
So all of that sort of stuff's going on.
Why does it matter?
Because it also corresponds, this is the connection that Thompson is making with some other social shifts, which is that it's also talked about that in the United States, as he puts it, the U.S.
is in the midst of a historically unprecedented decline in face-to-face socializing.
That's not specifically about religion.
That's other social scientists and people who look at this, and all of us probably have a sense of this.
I think a lot of us have experienced this.
But that breakdown in lack of face-to-face socializing, being part of in-real-life community groups and so forth, is most pronounced among some of those groups that are in the sharpest religious decline.
So if you're a social science-y person, you're like, oh, that's really interesting that there are these parallels.
What does all that mean?
Just to sort of fast forward to that, one of the things that they highlight is that there just are not, for many people, very many communal shared spaces anymore.
I think all kinds of stuff lines up with this, right?
I think people being more mobile and separated from their families is part of this.
Everybody who's lived in a big city has probably had the experience of being surrounded by people all the time, but not kind of Knowing anybody, right?
These things aren't specifically religious.
But a couple points that I'll make.
One is, I think, and I'm interested to hear, I'd love to hear if people think I'm wrong about this, but I think that if you think outside of religious communities in the U.S., there are not that many contexts where people are around multi-generational communities that they're not related to.
My kids, the adults, they're all related to school or their parents have other friends with kids or whatever.
It tends to be very local, very sort of micrological.
Church communities and those, you would have a full, you know, ranges of generations, people of different backgrounds together.
And I think that it's true that in American society, that's not as common as it used to be.
There aren't as many social clubs.
There aren't as many sort of public spaces and things like that.
And one of the reasons this resonates with me is when I work with my clients, my clients at the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery, all of whom, maybe not all, most are out of religion, they have disaffiliated, they don't identify as religious, the ones who do have this very kind of awkward relationship, not sure what that means.
But almost universally, one of the struggles they all have is not being able to feel like they can recreate community.
They have not found something that can fill the gap that they had.
And there are social scientific studies as well of both white and black churches that I'm familiar with of people sort of remaining in those communities despite queer identity, despite other disagreements, because They don't feel like they have a community outside of that space.
That's not me apologizing for religion.
That's not me saying that people aren't religious.
They can't have community.
That's not me saying that this is a reason to be religious or to stay religious or any of that, right?
I don't think any of that's true.
But it really struck me because it's something that I've seen when people ask me about the coaching work that I do and, you know, commonalities and patterns.
That's one that I often say.
Everybody, almost to a person, says, I really struggle with the loss of shared traditions.
And communities beyond my immediate family or beyond the people I see maybe on Christmas or Thanksgiving or whatever.
So, that sort of resonated with me.
And also, if people follow broader cultural discussions about loneliness among white men and different kinds of things, these different aspects of social isolation, it was an interesting look.
And I think that there are some real connections to be drawn and questions to be explored further.
So many thoughts on this and so many, as you can imagine, Dan, I think you and I could probably talk about this for the next couple hours.
Maybe we'll get to it on our special episode next month or something, because there's just so much to say here.
One is I think that loss of community is very real.
I think I've seen that, I've experienced it, and it's really hard.
One thing I'll point out about American culture is that it's staunchly individualist and it's staunchly built on the idea that your community doesn't come from A social safety net that is somehow affiliated with the government.
And that may sound weird, like how would that even work?
But Dan, I think of other countries that are highly non-religious that I've spent time in.
And there were ways that people built community that were not religious.
So I'll think of like France, a lot of high number of like non-religious people there or people who might identify as religious, but have not been to church and like.
15 years, right?
So they may say, I'm Catholic.
And you're like, cool.
When's the last time you went to Mass?
And they're like, 1998.
You're like, wow, very good.
Okay.
A lot of people there form associations with political activism, with political communes, with groups.
I remember living in Paris and walking one night alone, being one of those people who lived in a big city, Paris, having very few friends, and on a Friday night walking by myself through the city, just sort of like, I'm in Paris, I'll just take a walk.
I don't know anyone and I don't have anything to do.
And coming across like little city meeting halls where people were having gatherings and they were like, it was like a local philosopher was reading and there was a debate.
And I was like, as an American, I was just like, what?
So you're telling me this little like community center in this part of Paris, it's like a sleepy little, like 20th arrondissement, like, you know, part of the city is having like a reading tonight from a philosopher and everyone's here just to debate and listen.
And then there's going to be some like violin music after that.
Okay.
That as an American, that's like the most foreign thing I could ever think of.
So I think that's one.
I think there's ways that people in non-religious societies often will form these kinds of things, but we traditionally don't have those in this country.
Now, we have had things that you mentioned that were fraternal orders or ethnic enclaves.
So like, if you go back to the 20s or 30s or 40s or 50s, a time in America that was by no means idyllic and there were so many issues.
None the less, you might have had people participating in the Italian community center, right, in Pittsburgh, or the Polish community center in some part of Massachusetts.
I can say as a Japanese American, the times when my kids and myself are around Four and five different generations are when we are at often Japanese-American events, Japanese-American gatherings.
It could be things related to our heritage.
Could be like this, this tomorrow, there's Mieke Matsuri in my, uh, in my neighborhood.
And that means it's a celebration of Japanese-American, Japanese life.
And there will be food and games, but there will be 90 year olds, there will be 50 year olds, there will be 20 year olds, and there will be two year olds at that gathering.
And they will all be doing something.
Those resources are available to some, but for some people they were positive, for some people they're not.
So I think that's all on the table.
I want to make one more point.
And then, and then I can throw it back to you is, I think of another country where there is a, like, I think of like Scandinavia, I think of like Finland, Sweden, and Denmark, places in the very Northern parts of Europe.
And I think of like Denmark in particular, country of 5 million.
High non-religious population, but a deep sense of communal identity as a nation.
Like five million people who are really proud to be Danish and who feel like, not all, don't get me wrong, but many feel like they have a stake in Danish identity and Danish politics.
And I think one of the things that happens in the United States is it's such a huge country.
But not everybody feels as if they have a stake in their community and in where they live, whether that's the national federal government or whether that's just what's happening on the ground.
And traditionally in this country, churches have filled that in.
And we could talk about some of your, your mind's already turning.
You're like, this is why you erode the social safety net, because then everyone depends on the churches and the churches are also mechanically involved in the The churning of conservative politics and big business, and it all works together.
And I'm here for that.
We've covered that on this show, and there's something there.
Like, if you don't have a social safety net in rural America, the church is your best shot.
Not only at community, but it might be your best shot at like, hey, we don't have food tonight.
I need help.
I'm sick.
Who's going to come, like, give me a hand?
Who's going to watch my kids?
Like, I have a double shift.
What am I going to do?
The church might be your only option, right?
And there's a whole, like, set of histories there that make people dependent on that kind of community and so on.
So, long, long discussion, but I'll just say, you know, very interesting article.
There's one book recommendation I'll give and that's by Dr. Joseph Blankholm.
I've interviewed Joe on this show.
I've interviewed Joe about this book.
The book is called The Secular Paradox.
And he explores through interviews and in-depth looks at secular people, the attempts to create community in ways that mirror religion, but are not religious.
And the paradox of being secular is you're trying to recreate things from religion while not being religious.
And that's really hard.
So anyway, final thoughts for you on this, and then we'll do Readiness for Hope.
Just sort of an upbeat piece from that last point.
I work with clients on this, right, who are like, you know, tradition.
And one of the things I note is that there's nothing specifically religious about ritual or tradition, right?
They're not...
Religion never had a monopoly on that, and once we recognize that, what I tell people is I'm like, traditions all came from somewhere.
They started, and it's not inauthentic or fake or weird or shallow.
If you're like, you know what?
Here's our new family tradition.
We're going to do this thing, or we're going to do that thing, or we're going to get together with these three families down the street on holidays or on a beach holiday or whatever.
That's our new tradition.
Humans make meaning and it's not false or fake or something to make meaning in it.
It doesn't have to be grounded in some sort of metaphysics or transcendence or something.
And I say that because that's something that can really resonate with people when they recognize that like, oh, it's not an all or nothing thing.
We can create meaning.
We can find value.
We have our quote unquote found families, our communities, whatever.
All of that is real as well.
And just encouraging people to sort of look for that and lean into that.
With that said, Dan is already organizing trips for the next eclipse.
So if you would like to sign up for, is that 2079?
When is that?
It's like 20, I think 2044 in Montana.
Oh, 2044 in Montana.
Okay, good.
All right.
So we got the Airbnb reserved already.
We have room.
We have 58 bunk beds.
So if you'd like, we do not, do not email me with anything in the title.
That's like Montana eclipsing.
Cause I'm not going to respond.
Okay.
That's not, it's not real.
We're not doing it.
Okay.
Dan, what's your reason for hope?
My reason for hope this week was a little bit of Eating Crow by Ron DeSantis, who was forced in Florida to sign a bill limiting their book bans.
They've had so many people banning books that they finally had to put some rules in place.
I think it's if you don't have a student in the school district, you can only recommend a ban of one book a month.
It's like a book of the month club now.
It's just sort of funny.
He blamed it on liberal activists going after the Bible and stuff like that.
But I think what it also speaks to is that even the conservatives having to realize that, like, you can't put a cap on this and that there's no way to just limit the books you don't like without other people coming in or going crazy.
I don't know where that goes.
I don't think the book bans are a thing of the past.
I don't think it shows any real change of heart for DeSantis.
But I took it as a hopeful sign of, again, just bringing into view how damaging and ridiculous these bans have been.
Yeah, that's, uh, there's so much to say.
I'm sorry.
I got any time you bring up Ron.
I could go a lot longer on that as I always can with DeSantis.
Something we did not talk about today is...
Arizona than we could have.
And there is a huge fight in Arizona over abortion.
We mentioned it last week.
We will probably need to talk about it in the future.
But as we talked about, the hardline abortionists, abortion abolitionists, are not wanting to repeal the law that has made abortion all but prohibited in that state.
We're going to see what happens there.
I don't know if that's not a reason for hope, I guess, Dan, as I'm saying.
But what it is is a large, it's a, it's a window into a larger fracture that we're going to see over the next couple of months between people like Trump trying to get elected, knowing that abortion abolition is not a winning issue and abortion abolitionists being like, I actually believe this stuff.
I'm not doing this to get elected.
I actually think that any abortion is murder.
And so I'm not going to stand with it.
And it's, it's, it, it's fascinating politically and, and.
And historically, but it also has massive real world, overwhelming human consequences.
And it is just something we have to watch.
I don't know if it's a reason for hope as much as it's a reason for a potential tectonic shift, potential tectonic shift in the reproductive alliance that has been held together among Protestants, Catholics, Evangelicals, Pentecostals, and so on for decades now.
We'll see what happens there.
All right.
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