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This week was the end of the first act. The point in the story when all the players, themes, issues, histories, and institutions that will determine the rest of the season come into focus. It's not the end. It's not even close. But it's the time when we see who and what will guide the journey.
Brad and Dan begin by discussing the weight of the Trump hush money trial on Trump's ability to campaign - and project an image of bravado and control. They then go into the abortion case at SCOTUS, focusing on the grotesque nature of the discussion on women's health and bodies, and how this will weigh on voters in November. Brad hones in on the Ukraine/Israel/Taiwan aid package, commenting on how Biden touted it as a bipartisan win, but observing that the student uprisings at Columbia, Yale, USC, and all over the country portend a hard road ahead for Democrats with Gen Z. He finished by analyzing what the TikTok ban means and why it might be a Trojan Horse in the aid package.
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Axis Mundi By now a lot of you have heard me talk about becoming a Swag Premium member.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, joined today by my co-host.
Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
What I told Dan Miller before recording is I think this is the week that 2024 started to look like 1968.
1968 was a year when there were massive protests against the Vietnam War and things that happened early on in 1968, like January 68 really started off with a bang with the Vietnam War and its protests.
We're going to talk about protests today.
You had sanitation strikes in Memphis, and that's what led Martin Luther King Jr.
to Memphis, and that's where he was assassinated.
You had Lyndon Johnson, a president who decided not to run again, and chaos at the Democratic Convention, and a lot of the chaos was surrounding war and anti-war sentiment, and who was the anti-war candidate.
One of those anti-war candidates, or at least one who was foreshadowing that, was Robert Kennedy, who was assassinated also in 1968.
There was more that happened that year, but 1968 is often seen, Dan, as a watershed year in the United States and beyond, shaped the political landscape for a long time.
So I think this week between the Trump hush money trial, the Trump immunity case at SCOTUS, the abortion case at SCOTUS as it pertains to Idaho, abortion in Arizona,
The aid package to Ukraine and Israel and Taiwan and so on, the college campus protests and police crackdowns and arrests, and I'm not gonna lie, the TikTok ban, I think all of that
Is what I would characterize, Dan, as the components and the characters that are going to be the main players in this three-part act, which is 2024.
I think this week is when we got to the end of act one.
If I were watching a Netflix series, eight episodes, I would characterize this as the end of episode three.
Where we know the characters, we know what's at stake, and we know the issues that are going to put them all together.
We're going to get more Black Swan events this summer.
Crazy stuff will happen this summer.
I don't know what it was going to be.
I don't know if it's going to be surrounding the conventions.
Trump's trials, Joe Biden, student protests, Gaza, I don't know.
And then we're going to get to November and we'll have the final act.
But to me, Dan, this is the setup and the end of act one, because everything we're going to talk about today is linked.
You know, some days, Dan, we do this show and it's like segment one is about Trump and segment two is about a really local story out of Chattanooga.
This week, it is a national focus with integrated parts that are all part of a network that I think will totally determine how the rest of the year goes.
Now, I pitched this to you as we were talking earlier, and you looked at me the same way my partner often looks at me, like, Brad, You're very excited.
We might need to calm down and just take a minute and see if we feel this way after you have a drink of Kool-Aid and a snack, which is a fair response.
But before we jump into the issues, measure me out here.
How do you see it, or have I convinced you in my nice opening soliloquy?
I don't know that you've convinced me.
I'm scattered for the reasons why.
Number one, I feel like we could say January 6th was the opening act of the 2024 election.
There's a certain sense in which- That was the prequel.
That was the prequel.
That was the prequel?
Yeah.
But the prequel that was actually a prequel and not written afterward?
So I think there's that.
I mean, I agree that all these things, I think, make an important nexus.
I think they're all going to be important.
But we've been, for example, with the abortion stuff, we've been talking about abortions since Roe v. Wade has overturned.
And I think part of the reason it feels so important is we, and like lots and lots of other people, not just us, have said, abortion's not going anywhere.
This is going to be back before the Supreme Court.
They said they wanted states' rights, and now it's going to be back.
And here we are talking about Idaho, and I think by default, places like Texas and other places.
There's also the fact that I think you and I pay a lot of attention to this stuff.
I think our listeners pay a lot of attention to this stuff.
Lots of social scientists will say average American voters don't.
They have a short memory and the irony, we talk about this all the time in a 24-hour news media landscape, is that because information is coming at us all the time, Things fade.
And so I really think, you know, you hit through the summer and you come back from Labor Day and people are back from vacations and kids are back in school.
There are a lot of voters who don't really tune in much to November until then.
And I just, I have no idea what's going to happen.
So I don't disagree that all of these things are a nexus.
I think they're all there.
I think they're important.
But I'm not sure exactly what that'll look like or how it works with the kind of American psyche, if that makes sense.
Yeah, I'm not saying that this week is going to determine who people will vote for.
Right, take the poll today and we know who's going to win the election, right?
What I'm saying is like, if you watch the detective procedural that's an eight episode series, by the end of episode three, you don't know who did it.
You don't know the end.
You shouldn't, at least.
And you don't even know how you're going to get there, but you know who's involved, you know the conflict, and you know what they're going to fight over in order to take you on the journey.
And that's what I'm getting at with this week, is that I think, and let me lay out the case and then jump right into Trump and the hush money case in New York.
I think we have two major characters.
Donald Trump, who in my mind, and there are many people who agree with this, is trying to assault democracy through a second run for the presidency.
On the other side is Joe Biden, and by no means am I going to champion Joe Biden as a hero or a unscathed figure of good in any case.
But Joe Biden seems to represent this Status quo, keep the system alive, even if the system is deeply flawed kind of force.
Now, we're going to get to Joe Biden and why that whole part of his campaign and persona is thoroughly under threat and vulnerable at the moment by way of Gaza, by way of Palestine, by way of Israel, by way of what's happening on college campuses all over the country.
And we'll talk about that at the end today.
So, if you just think about these two major forces, On one side, we have Donald Trump.
He's in New York on trial right now.
We're going to get to abortion in a minute.
And so Donald Trump and the attack on democracy and the attack on reproductive rights is all very clear to everybody.
And we're going to talk about those in depth.
Then on the other side, you have Joe Biden.
And yet Joe Biden, in ways that happened to the Democratic Party in 1968, is under deep threat from a progressive sentiment driven by young voters.
That he is taking part in a genocide and is willing to partner with folks who are doing really, really horrible things.
And we can talk about the details of that in a second.
So let me just start here.
On the one hand, if we just take the two sides of our grand conflict, Donald Trump is having a bad week, Dan, if you ask me, in ways that I think remind me of the January 6th Select Committee's hearings.
It's become clear to me that seeing Donald Trump in court every day and having more and more testimony from the likes of David Pecker, this former head of the AMI group and the guy that was catching and killing stories for him, with a name that, you know, author, whoever wrote this play we're living, thanks for that name, just right on the, like if, once again, if I submitted that to the editor, they'd be like, you named him Pecker, huh?
I don't think so.
Please change it.
So, here's every day Donald Trump in court.
He has to walk into court.
He has to sit there and listen to people say things about him.
People call him a liar.
People call him sleazy.
Everybody's reminded of the case with Karen McDougal.
Speaking of that average voter, Dan, how many people had Karen McDougal lodged in their brain in terms of Trump?
That's all back.
E. Jean Carroll is mentioned.
E. Jean Carroll comes up, okay?
People talk about his perverse relationships, his paying porn stars, his celebratory dinners for David Pecker, for doing a good job catching and killing stories about Trump sleeping with women other than his wife.
Trump's demeanor, Dan, looks like a man who is beholden to the legal system.
He walks into court every day, he sits in what he calls a freezing room, he falls asleep sometimes, and he's at the behest, he's at the mercy of the court.
He can't leave, he can't go out and do whatever he wants, he can't hold a rally, and he looks downtrodden.
The New Yorker, Eric Locke, wrote in the New Yorker this week about the ritual humiliation of Donald Trump.
And there's a big difference here than Joe Biden.
Joe Biden announced this week that aid for Ukraine, aid for Israel, aid for Taiwan is happening.
The bill was passed.
It was a big bipartisan moment.
They got Mike Johnson to stand up and do it.
Now, don't get me wrong.
There's a whole backside to that that I think Joe Biden needs to be wary of.
Nonetheless, Joe Biden's out here campaigning, talking about his wins, talking about working across the aisle.
He's actively being a politician and a leader.
And Donald Trump has to sit for eight hours a day in a courtroom getting humiliated.
And I think that matters in some sense, Dan.
And I think this case is turning out to be pretty clear.
Will he get convicted?
I don't know.
But I would not be surprised if he did, which is not something I think I would have said six months ago.
This is one of those things, just to throw out, like just a standard statistic that I've heard from CoreWatch is that if trials, if prosecutions go to trial, the conviction rate is something like 80%.
Like now that's not taking account of somebody like Trump, that's not taking account of how politicized, it's not, you know, it's just a general statistic.
But if you actually go to trial, like that's, the cards are stacked, I don't mean that it's fraudulent when I say the cards are stacked against you, I just mean it's hard to get to that point, that's why people try so hard not to.
So it's already bad news for Trump, but all the observers I've seen, the transcripts I've read, whatever, they're not sounding good.
All the prosecutors, witnesses are saying exactly what everybody thought they would say, and so yeah, it's a bad look, and I think it also, As you say, Trump does not thrive in this kind of context, and it's beating him down.
And I mean, long time until the election, but Biden's closing the poll gap.
Tied in with that, that I think is also bad news for Trump in this, is you've got polling data showing that Kennedy's run, this kind of third party run, is having more of a negative impact on Trump than it does on Biden.
And I saw a poll today that said something like, If they forced voters who want to vote for Kennedy and said, if he doesn't, you had to vote for one of the other two, would it be, it's like 47% Trump, 29% Biden.
I feel like, so there's a compounding effect of some of these things.
So I agree.
I think he's having a bad week on that side of things.
And I think it's really significant and the optics and all those things matter.
The optics are exactly what we're not used to with Donald Trump.
We're used to the rallies, the bluster, we're used to the machismo, and instead we have a man who just walks into court every day looking dour and having to sit there while people debate his future and talk about things that are really unseemly.
I want to make one more point about Trump's hush money case, Dan, and then we can go to the abortion cases at SCOTUS and what happened in Arizona this week, which are also just major components, not only of this week, but I think what will unfold again until the election.
I really think we're starting to see the components that will determine how people end up voting and what ends up happening in this country here in November.
What's become clear through the hush money case Is that Donald Trump was paying someone and allegedly, it's not decided, but this is just from the testimony and this is what's been alleged.
He's paying someone to tilt the scales of the media.
Hey, pay somebody $150,000.
And give them some things that supposedly are being paid for, a couple of magazine articles and a cover.
Dan, I've written for magazines, a bunch.
I know you've done some of that.
Yeah.
Did you cash those $150,000 checks you got?
No.
I ordered a children's meal at Burger King.
No, it's not like that.
But pay somebody $150,000.
So that this story only runs here or it never runs at all.
Just buy the rights to it and then bury it or just stick it in a drawer, put it in your trash file, whatever.
And if anyone else runs it, they get sued.
Okay.
Yep.
So we have testimony this week of like Stormy Daniels being on the television and Trump telling people while she's on the television, she owes me a million dollars every time she says something because of the supposed NDAs and other stuff.
Other people, like, you know, all of the We're not lawyers, and I don't want to pretend that we're going to be a podcast that's going to go through the granular aspects of the legality here, okay?
Lawfare, Amicus, those guys do such an amazing job, right?
Boom Lawyered.
There's great podcasts out there that do that.
Here's the point I want to make, and then we can go to abortion.
Dan, what was one of the foundational components of Trump 2016?
The mainstream media.
How many times did he stand at a rally and point to the camera people and the reporters from MSNBC and CNN and Reuters and everyone else and say, look at them.
Vile scum, liars.
The enemy of the people.
The enemy of the people, he called.
We have an American president who called the press enemy of the people, a place that, Dan, if we're not known for anything in the United States, for all of the marks on this country worldwide and all of the bruises, the freedom of the press is supposed to be one that people look up to globally.
And yet, who was the one paying the press?
Who was the one tilting the scales of the media?
Who was the one using privilege and power and money to make sure the media was not unbiased?
To make sure the media swayed an election?
David Pecker said this week, why did we do this?
What was the why?
The why was to sway the election.
Last week we talked about it when we went through the mechanics of the hush money case.
Why did you do these things?
David Pecker answered the question that I talked about last week, to sway the election.
That is something that should never be forgotten as we move forward in this election season and the run up to November.
All of the cries of the biased media and you were the one buying the stories and killing them.
You were the one standing on the scales of the press and making sure you got what you wanted out of it.
The dystopia that Donald Trump told people we were living in as a result of the media was one created by Donald Trump and the likes of him by buying and killing stories such as this and not letting our public square being a place that is one of the free flow of ideas and information.
And I just want people to remember that as we move forward.
Any thoughts on this?
And then we'll take a break and go to abortion.
Just again, I think we talk about the damaging testimony.
That was the really clear one where, you know, it was like, so why did you do this?
And it's like, we did it because he didn't want it to weigh against him in the election.
That's what, again, people can go back and listen to what we said last week, listen to some of these other podcasts, but that's the point of why this crosses into illegality and not just sleaziness or, you know, just kind of slimy behavior was because of the intent To shape the election and to mask that that's what was going on.
That's the reason that he's on trial.
Let's take a break.
We'll come back and we'll link all of this to abortion and what happened at SCOTUS this week as well as in Arizona.
Be right back.
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Getting a date is next to impossible.
I've got a radio host who is making up conspiracies about me, a dude actually shooting at me, and an unhinged president threatening me.
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You can find my story on Amazon, Audible, or iTunes.
Just look for American Profit by Jeff Fulmer.
That's American Profit by Jeff Fulmer.
All right, Dan.
So we've got a situation in this country where the president who we just talked about, the former president, is the one who appointed the judges that led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
It's a former president who is already a convicted sexual assaulter in the E. Jean Carroll case, somebody who has been accused of sexual assault and or rape by numerous women, who is Had testimony against him that he was paying for his affairs to be covered up.
And yet he's the president who says, I love women the most.
This leads us to harrowing testimony and discussion in Supreme Court this week in a case out of Idaho about the abortion ban there.
And one of the things that became very clear in this testimony, and this testimony is the wrong word, in the debate and the discussion between the lawyers and the justices was There's like graphic discussion of women in dire distress, perhaps losing their lives, and justices like Samuel Alito being like, well, when do we step in?
When she's almost dead?
When these organs fail?
And it all became incredibly grotesque in my mind, Dan, I'll be honest.
And I think there were others who shared that sentiment across the country.
Take us through the details and what happened at SCOTUS and then in Arizona as well.
Yeah, so the issue is in Idaho, as people know, Idaho has one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the country.
And there is a federal law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, EMTALA, is what you might see it as in news sources.
It's a federal law requiring hospitals to offer treatment, including abortion, when called for.
That is required to stabilize patients in an emergency.
And basically the Biden administration is arguing that this law applies and supersedes state laws about abortion bans and so forth.
And so if medical stabilization would require abortion care, that it doesn't matter what the state law is, this federal law has priority and this has made it to the Supreme Court.
Okay?
That's the nuts and bolts of it.
Idaho says no.
The federal government says yes.
So here are some sort of takeaways.
You indicated, one, we have, we, the big we, people, for months, years now, have talked about these hypothetical cases of what will happen if you have this ban and you have these vague issues of life-saving, only when the life of the mother is threatened, and so on and so forth.
And what was on graphic And I think it was, as you described it, harrowing testimony.
I think it struck a lot of observers and I think it struck some of the justices, right?
real cases of this happening.
And I think it was, as you described it, harrowing testimony.
I think it struck a lot of observers, and I think it struck some of the justices, right?
You had, as you say, Alito, who is the classic, you know, the conservative, tone-deaf-when-he-needs-to-be kind of person, who's using the fact that it's a hard question to somehow turn it into a question they shouldn't get into.
He's sort of like, well, who decides?
And we've talked about this in Texas.
It's the same strategy of the legal system being like, well, you know, we're not doctors.
We're not the ones to decide.
But then the doctors are like, well, hey, you know, we need a legal rule on this or we're not going to act.
So it goes in circles.
But on the flip side, you had somebody like Justice Barrett, who seemed to be kind of moved by these things.
A lot of observers said, wow, like here's one of the super conservatives, ultra Catholic, as you've talked about so much, staunchly anti-abortion person, who really seemed to be, seemed almost personally upset with the people representing the state of Idaho, and basically was like, You've said that these kinds of exceptions would be covered and so forth, and it doesn't sound like they are.
And they're like, no, no, no, they are.
And she really pushed back.
So it wasn't just the liberals who seemed to be sort of moved by this testimony.
And a lot of people said that it appeared that some of the conservative justices were really disturbed by some of these stories and this kind of argument.
On the flip side, you had the kind of conservative, Alito in particular, Who kind of seemed annoyed at just having to talk about abortion again.
They kind of had this attitude, it felt like, of, we already talked about this.
Like, why are you bringing this up?
They, you know, kept sort of interrupting the liberals.
They kept getting upset.
So I think there was a lot of emotion in this.
And I think that that was another thing to note, even among justices and the way they responded to each other.
You, of course, had both sides, both the people representing Idaho, the people representing the federal government, Using the kind of classic slippery slope arguments, right?
The federal government is saying, you know, if this doesn't apply here, then what's to stop states from just willy-nilly deciding to violate federal law?
And on the Republican side, the side of the Republican administration in Idaho saying, this is just classic government overreach.
They want to regulate everything.
Soon they'll be making all of your decisions and states will have no rights and so forth.
So it was a mess.
But I think it's really interesting because I'll just say it's not clear to me where it goes.
And I think that that has to be counted as a win for pro people who favor abortion access.
If you've got a six to three conservative majority that overturn Roe v. Wade and it's not immediately clear that they're going to side with Idaho, I think that that's worth noting.
Curious to see where this goes.
And I'm curious to see longer term, both on the court and beyond, what real life stories getting this kind of visibility will have or can have in the broader abortion debate and sort of keeping this issue alive.
So the shift gears and go to Arizona, right?
Where abortion... Yeah, go ahead.
Well, I'll just say on the Idaho case, I think this is one of those moments where there's going to be a lot of fodder for anyone who wants to protect reproductive rights.
Because, as you say, Coney Barrett seemed to be very interested in this.
Side note, I think Coney Barrett's been very interested in the immunity case, and we'll get to that here in a second, too, and talk about when we're going to cover that.
But I think what became grotesque, Dan, for me, was having the likes of Alito ask about, like, well, when do you step in?
The caricature I took away from it was, Like, debating when a woman who is perhaps dying, who is perhaps an organ failure, who is perhaps going septic, and saying, well, I'm a doctor.
I'm not allowed legally.
I'm not allowed legally.
Oh, you know what?
Almost flatlining.
Okay, guys, jump in.
Let's try to save her life.
Even in cases when the pregnancy is not viable.
I mean, I listened to transcripts from From the debate, right?
I listened to folks discussing this with Alito in the chamber, lawyers from the prosecution, and it's just really unsettling, I think, to have a Supreme Court justice Trying to figure out exactly how dying a woman needs to be before, like, you're allowed to step in as a doctor.
And I just think that message is bursting through.
People are always like, well, the details, the wonks, the policies, the weeds, it never gets through to the average Joe.
But I think enough of this bleeds into people, no pun intended.
I think people get wind of it.
I think people start to realize they're debating how dying I need to be before they're allowed to step in.
And I just think that's not going to stop going forward.
I don't think that debate in November is going to have ceased.
I don't think we're going to be on to the next new news cycle.
I think people are going to be thinking, I live in Idaho, Texas, Florida.
If I'm a woman who gets pregnant, The state is saying, I have to be almost dead, and then they might try to save me, but they might not.
They might not.
They might need to airlift me, you know, out of the state to save my life at the very last moment.
That's the kind of place I live.
I just think people are going to get that.
Sorry, go ahead.
Which is, no, this is another thing.
That's what's been going on in Idaho, is that they have been airlifting people to other states.
And again, if you don't understand, for me, The sign of how backwards your state laws are when you're like, oh, we can't do this.
We know this person needs to be safe, so we're going to send them to another state where they can do what we won't.
I think it just highlights how ludicrous this is.
I think you're right.
I think this is all stuff that keeps this alive to the electorate.
And so the first thing I'll go into in Arizona, right, because abortion continues to be a winning issue.
I've said before I was wrong about this back when Roe v. Wade was overturned.
I did not think it would have this kind of force.
I'm delighted that it has.
I'm glad that people are fighting for it and that it has mattered and it continues to work for Democrats.
So in Arizona, I feel like this week we see all the tensions that the GOP has and they just have no—because there is no way for the GOP to win on abortion.
If they moderate their views, they lose their staunch right wing.
If they don't moderate their views, they continue the problems with suburban women.
They continue the issues with ballot initiatives.
They get more Democrats coming to the polls.
Just all the things that we've seen.
And I feel like we see all of that in Arizona this week.
So, on the one hand, as you say, was it just yesterday or the day before, the Arizona House voted to repeal this Civil War era law with the strict abortion ban.
And that has to be seen as a win.
For Democrats.
This is what they wanted.
This is what they said.
They can now say, look, the GOP did what we said they should have done all along.
Anti-abortion activists are upset about this.
And nobody shows this to me more clearly than Carrie Lake, our friend Carrie Lake, who, as you know, as they know, she was running, is running rather, for a Senate seat.
She's a GOP candidate.
Strong anti-abortion activists had for, you know, for a long time advocating on this law and so forth and then the court rules in Arizona that the law can be enforced and she backtracks on that because she realizes that the public sentiment is really bad and she talks about it not being enforced and so forth and then earlier this week she backtracked on that
Because she got a bunch of bad press and bad messages from anti-abortion activists and bemoaned the fact that the Democrats in Arizona were not going to enforce the law.
And this is what she said.
She said, the Arizona Supreme Court said this is the law of Arizona.
But unfortunately, the people running our state have said we're not going to enforce it.
So it's really political theater.
We don't have that law as much as many of us wish that we did.
So she's flip-flopping back and forth all over the place.
And then in the meantime, The GOP has now worked to repeal this law.
It just highlights what a mess it is, how much of a problem it is for the GOP.
And I think that this plays out for SCOTUS, no matter what they do, if we're looking at the politics of it, right?
Not the rightness of it, the wrongness of it, not the politics of SCOTUS.
If SCOTUS comes out and says the Idaho ban gets to stand, Republicans continue to be positioned, I think correctly, as the party that just really does not care about the living, does not care about people who can have babies, does not care about that health.
And if SCOTUS comes out and says the federal law wins, it's still a win for Democrats.
And they say, see, we told you.
We told you that this was important.
Really not a complicated issue, per se.
It's easy to understand the lines.
But really, really messy, really significant both in terms of women's health care, And the outcomes we want from that, but I think the politics of it this week as well, and it's the issue that's just not going away.
So let's zoom out.
Let's look at what I said at the beginning.
What I said is I think that the characters and the issues that are going to shape November have now come into clear view.
I don't think the election's decided.
I don't think we know who is going to be standing at the finale.
I don't think I know how the story ends.
But I do feel like I'm at the end of episode three of my eight episode series where I know the players and the issues and what is very clear to me, Dan, through everything you just said and things we've been saying for months and everyone else has is that reproductive rights, reproductive health care, abortion are going to carry us, not carry us, they're going to carry through November as a hot button kitchen table, everyday American, 25 year old, 35 year old, 45 year old issue.
They are a young person's issue.
I will never forget the example of college students lined up for hours at University of Wisconsin campuses across the state to vote in an off-season Supreme Court election for the Supreme Court of Wisconsin because if Janet, if the person known as colloquially in Wisconsin is Judge Janet, One, then reproductive rights would most likely prevail in the state.
And so young people lined up for hours.
This is an issue that is burst beyond the Washington Beltway, the politics junkie who listens to this show and 28 others.
This is an everyday issue, period.
And what you're seeing is something that I've been talking about and you have too.
I wrote a whole thing in Politico that got me like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pieces of hate mail, which was this.
Well, there's a lot to it, but one of the messages was this.
When you start saying in Alabama that IVF Embryos are persons.
You're going to see cracks in the Repro Alliance because not enough Americans are with that to get you elected.
Carrie Lake, not enough Arizonans are with that to get you elected.
And what's Carrie Lake doing?
Flip flop, flip flop, can't figure it out.
Flip flop, flip flop.
Am I going to stand with the abortion abolitionists?
The conservative Catholics, the very conservative evangelicals and Protestants who want to ban abortion in every case because they're true believers that this is murder?
Or do I want to stand with that kind of people that are with me on most right-wing politics, but they, you know, this is going a little too far.
Women are dying on tables.
I had an ectopic pregnancy.
I'm not sure this is good.
And you're seeing it out.
Donald Trump has flopped.
Carrie Lake has flopped.
They don't have an answer.
If you said, hey, I'm trying to figure out my detective drama, what's going to happen in November, you'd be thinking, hey, I think that might be something that really helps the likes of Joe Biden and everyone who is not on the side of MAGA, of Abortion, abolition of a federal ban of treating women's health care, as you say, and basically choosing the quote-unquote unborn over the living.
I mean, you just put it.
This is not a party that cares about the living.
That's devastating.
And I think it's clear that that's true.
And so these cases to me have great import and are a big, big deal.
They're hurtful to women's health and they cause millions of women and people who can get pregnant to live in fear.
They're also just showing that The Republican Party is not a party that cares about the living.
And so, in some sense, that is the silver lining, if there is any.
Any final thoughts on this before we tie it all back to some other massive things happening this week?
Just quickly, the impossibility of putting this away before the election, because just to remind people, this is a ballot initiative that is alive and well in a number of places, again, which is going to keep it in front.
No, like, had opening arguments this week, and that'll fade, but then in June, the Supreme Court's going to make their decision.
They're going to make their ruling.
So just, you have these built-in benchmarks, and because it's a ballot initiative, it's on the ballot in various places for November, so it's not going anywhere between now and Election Day.
Earlier, I was trying to remember the name of the person.
It was Elizabeth Prelogar, the Solicitor General of the DOJ.
So, I was stumbling on my words.
I mean, I heard people talking to Alito, just like an idiot.
All right.
So, sorry about that, y'all.
We'll be right back.
Okay, Dan, so I'm going to keep on my detective drama metaphor for today.
I think if you were just taking the first half an hour of what we talked about, you'd be like, well, this does not look good for the character Trump and everything he stands for.
The assault on democracy, the assault on the good faith of American politics, the reproductive health of millions of women and impregnable people, and simply those who are living, the actual living in the United States.
However, Some big stuff happened this week that I think is really, really important.
And I know we say that every week, but I just, I don't know, Dan, you keep looking at me like I'm, I've had way too much coffee today.
I did drink like two bobas in one day the other day, cause I was just, I couldn't get a handle on my feelings.
And I drank one boba and then I ordered another and I drank that.
So, uh, I will admit it's been one of those weeks.
Let's start with the Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, Indo-Pacific package.
So if we want to keep on what is supposed to be good news for Joe Biden and this whole side of non-fascist, non-assault on democracy characters in our detective drama, this seems like a win.
And if you watched a lot of cable news this week, I watched a bit, they were playing it as a win and I understand why.
So hear me out.
This week, Mike Johnson put things to a vote.
They were passed.
He finally got on board with support for Ukraine.
A lot of people saying good for Mike Johnson.
I'm not going to say that because enough people have said it, but what I'm going to say is I do think it's a good thing that the United States is supporting Ukraine against the invasion posed by Russia and Vladimir Putin.
Okay.
Included in a whole sort of package of various bills.
Was support for Israel.
So another 17 billion dollars of aid for Israel.
This is as Dan, the United States calls for Ceasefire in some sense, but also calls on Israel to stop doing all kinds of things that are seemingly crimes against humanity.
So it seems like on one side of its mouth, the Biden government is like, here's 17 billion.
Keep doing what you're doing.
On the other hand, please stop what you're doing because it's really inhumane.
Okay.
So, on one hand, this was celebrated as Joe Biden at his best, the dealmaker, not the flashy guy in front of the camera, the guy who's been behind the scenes in Washington for 40 years, shaking hands, giving the Joe Biden smile.
Punching you on the arm.
Hey, let's get ice cream partner and talk it out kind of thing.
He and Mike Johnson figured out a way forward.
It's bipartisan.
There's a whole wing of the Republican Party.
That's MAGA.
Well, there's the rest of America and we stand for them.
That's Joe Biden this week.
Okay.
Got it.
On one hand, Dan, I am not saying this is unilateral bad news, but I want to point out something that I think really alarms me and, and, and I'll try to make sense here.
Okay.
The $17 billion for Israel comes in conjunction with student protests all over the country.
Columbia, and there's a great piece out today talking about how Columbia really became the epicenter of this and how Columbia students really organized what became a national uprising.
There are protests all over the country.
The University of Southern California, USC, if anybody knows about USC out there, Dan, it's not known as a politically progressive campus.
USC is a place where there's a lot of conservatives.
There's a lot of middle-of-the-road people.
That is not historically UC Berkeley, okay?
That is not UC Santa Cruz, just as a Californian I can tell you.
And that's a place where they have canceled commencement.
Where there are protests, where there are many things happening.
The head of the philosophy department at Emory University was arrested yesterday, Dan, at a protest on campus.
And, perhaps most notably, at UT Austin, there was a massive presence of police force.
I want to read a little bit from Don Moynihan and his substack from the other day.
A group of students assembled on the University of Texas at Austin campus to call for an end to the war in Gaza.
They did not engage in violence.
They did not disrupt classes or occupy administrative buildings.
Now, some of those things have happened.
There have been buildings that have been occupied.
At Cal Poly Humboldt, north of me, students did occupy buildings and they did so in a way that was so successful, the police just left.
And I saw several TikToks that were like, you tried to get into a school building where Gen Z was?
You've trained us for years in active shooter drills to keep people out of school classrooms.
Did you think you were going to get in?
We're pros.
You trained us as the US government trained us and now we're turning our training against you.
Take that.
That's not what happened at UT Austin.
Dan, we could go in on Abbott, and I have a lot of thoughts about Greg Abbott and what happened at UT Austin.
university administrators.
Students and journalists were arrested.
Greg Abbott is one of the many on the right that has bemoaned the death of free speech on campus.
He signed a law in 2019, and yet he called for peaceful protesters to be arrested.
Dan, we could go in on Abbott, and I have a lot of thoughts about Greg Abbott and what happened at UT Austin.
I want to make a point, though, about Joe Biden, and I want to make a point about this week.
I think that this win, this bipartisan win that millennials and Gen X and boomers are so focused on, on MSNBC and CNN, might be overlooking something that's really important. .
And that's that the Democrats are, I think, have pretty much lost Gen Z. I might be overstating it.
You might be saying, too much boba, too much coffee.
Calm down, bud.
But I think there's a chance that the Democrats have lost Gen Z in a way that will be really, really, really, really problematic come in November.
Okay?
Let me give you some statistics about 2020 and 2022.
Okay?
This is coming from Tufts University.
We estimate that 50% of young people ages 18 to 29 voted in 2020.
That's an 11 point increase from 2016.
in 2020.
That's an 11-point increase from 2016.
Okay?
What about 2022 midterms? - Midterms say Gen Z's voter turnout in 2022 was higher than that of Gen Xers and Millennials when they were that age.
Now you know who had the biggest increase in voter turnout among Gen Z?
College students and college educated people.
I was at Utah Valley University a week and a half ago and I spoke at length with two students.
We had like lunch and I was sitting and I talked to two different students for like half an hour to an hour each over coffee, over lunch, whatever.
You know the first thing that both of them asked me, Dan, in Utah, which is not known as like a progressive hotbed of the United States, they said, I'm not sure I can vote for Joe Biden because of Gaza.
Should I vote for Cornel West?
That's what they asked me.
I think, Dan, that we're at a place where what happened this week with these uprisings, we could talk about the mechanics of all of them, about police cracking down and going into Columbia, the New York Police Department, about what happened in Texas, what's happening at Emory, what's happening in USC, whatever.
I think that this is the week that Democrats and Joe Biden and anyone who does not want Donald Trump to be president should be really worried.
I don't think that the kids who are seeing this on their campuses are going to be the ones that are like, you know, despite all this, Let's do it, Joe Biden.
Round two, you know?
I think they'll stay home.
If they don't stay home, they'll vote for Cornel West, they'll vote for someone else.
And there's just going to be a lot of people who say, who voted in 2020 for Joe Biden, this is my prediction, that are like, nah, I'm good.
I'm not doing it.
Because in their minds, he is supporting genocide.
He is sending billions of dollars to a war that is depriving people of basic human necessities.
And so on and so forth.
I have one more thing to say about this, just in terms of anti-Semitism, in terms of, you know, Palestinian liberation and what's happening in Gaza, but I've been talking a long time.
Give me some thoughts.
Calm me down if you'd like.
Walk me down off my boba high, whatever you want to do.
I think everything you say makes sense and is right, and I think it's like lots of yellow flashing warning lights, as they say.
But I look at this and I wonder, and it's a question, it's not a, I think you're wrong, it's not a prediction, it's a, I think there are some other cards to come out here between now and November.
And some of this might sound weird and you might think it's overstated, others might, but I don't know.
After a long time in higher ed, one of the weird things about this that I actually think can be a dynamic in the lasting impact of these uprisings is the time of the academic year when they're happening.
Because academia is this weird place where you come back to campus in September and it feels different.
It always feels like there's some sort of reset.
If this was going on in like February, you had an entire semester in front of you of this, I think it blunts the impact of some of these things that are happening at the end of the semester.
They're happening when people are on just a practical level.
They're having to think about finals.
They're having to think about their summer jobs and summer internships, you know, and things like that.
I don't know what that does if, and this is the other card, what happens with Israel-Gaza this summer.
You've had even Democratic leaders calling for a change in leadership.
You have Netanyahu facing a lot of political opposition in Israel.
If politics in Israel change and it affects Gaza in a way that people like you and me and Gen Z and others want to see happen, because you know, we're talking four months from now, and then you come back to campus in the fall and all of that just feels cooler.
It's cooled off.
You can even, if you are some of those activists, claim some victory there.
We made a lot of noise.
We let the American administration know what we think about this, and things changed.
Then I think things look really different.
Do I know any of those things are going to happen?
Nope.
Don't know.
Don't know that those things are going to happen.
But I think there is some uncertainty.
So that's the only thing that makes it sort of yellow flashing lights on the dash for me and not red yet is that we're talking about a third of a year where I think a lot of things can happen when these students who are there on campus now are reconvening and they're really thinking about the election again.
And you got all those voter registration tables on campus and you've got all those kind of things that are there all the time in an election cycle.
So I think there are some wild cards to come out, but I agree with you.
I think that right now this is really bad for Democrats, for Biden, for political progressives who hope to win office.
And they're going to have to change course.
They're going to have to do some things to make some of those cards break their way.
I know some of you out there are thinking, well, college kids, they protest, they get upset, and then they lose interest.
Right.
For perspective, this is the largest college movement in terms of protests and uprising since the 60s.
It really is.
This is happening at hundreds of campuses.
You may be aware of Columbia or Yale.
This is happening all over the country.
So I think that's one.
I think, two, a lot of us are old enough to at least know about Kent State, 1970, and what happened.
Talking about 1968, right?
Kent State was only about a year and a half later.
Kevin Kruse puts this out the other day.
The day after Kent State shootings in 1970, a Gallup poll showed that 58% of respondents placed blame for the students' deaths on the protesters, while just 11% blamed the National Guardsmen who shot them.
So at the moment, most of the country was feeling pretty negative about college protesters.
Now, Kent State is seen almost unilaterally, with a few notable exceptions, as a time when police brutality and overstepping of law enforcement was very clear.
So I would just, if you're in your 30s or 40s or 50s, I would just caution you to think of what's happening on these campuses as no big deal or it will blow over once they, you know, have something else to think about.
That's what I would put out there for now.
I'm going to say one more thing that I think is bad news, and some of you are going to laugh when I say it, but I'm not going to lie.
When I saw it, Dan, I thought, there's something bad here.
And that is TikTok.
So part of what Biden signed was in the bill that TikTok has to change owners in the next nine to 12 months.
Otherwise, it will be banned in the United States.
Now, I'm not sure, and many people are not sure, and there's lawsuits coming, that this is allowed under freedom of speech and all kinds of stuff, the First Amendment.
Here's the bigger point, once again, for me, is Gen Z are kids, Dan, who grow up Like they were born like around the time of the financial crisis.
They were kids who went to school doing active shooter drills.
They lived through the Trump presidency and then they got to school or high school at least during the pandemic.
They have lived through countless mass shootings.
So when you say to them, The social media platform that we prefer, that is overwhelmingly popular among people our age, is now banned.
But you have not banned guns, you have not banned automatic weapons, you have not made it safe for us to go to school, you have not done anything about police brutality, right?
You have not done anything about the things we care so much about, and yet you were able very quickly Through a lobby from Meta perhaps, through the special interests of so-and-so, through people that would like to demonize China and so on.
You have made this illegal very quickly.
I am totally here for the four hour discussion about TikTok.
Maybe there are things I don't know about TikTok that Joe Biden and people who know things behind the scenes and classified docs know.
I don't know.
But this seems small, and some of you are like, kids, huh?
But check yourself, you're in your 30s or 40s, and if you think kids, ugh, TikTok, check yourself.
Because you're probably the same person who's like, we need the young people to vote.
The young people will save us.
The young people are coming to turn the country away from MAGA.
The college campus uprisings plus this ban on TikTok, Dan?
The ban on TikTok and our little detective novel for today, Detective Drama?
It may be the little detail you don't even notice in episode 3, that like in episode 9, you end up talking about.
Because I can tell you right now, there's a lot of kids, 18, 20, 24 years old, that are like, you're telling me no more TikTok?
I don't, why?
Like you guys care this much about this thing, and you care nothing about anything else that's actually killing us?
The actual living here?
I'm out.
Gaza, TikTok, I'm out because I'm 23 and I'm out.
I don't know, Dan.
Talk me down.
I've asked you to talk me down about 20 times today.
I'm just saying, man, I don't know if there was discussions in the Biden campaign or not.
The Biden administration is what I should say.
I don't know if they even thought about whether they should sign the TikTok ban.
I don't know if they realized it was like a Trojan horse that got it got slipped in.
I've not seen the 5,000 word essay about this.
I've not seen the MSNBC people talking about it.
I just, as soon as I saw it, I thought, bad news.
That is bad news.
Because those 23 year olds who told me they're voting for Cornel West, they're damn sure voting for Cornel West now.
And this is not going to help.
To use your mystery drama thing, it's like when there's pans around the room and there's like a closet open and then later you find out that like, I don't know, the bloody shirt or something is in the corner and it was in plain sight and yeah.
Like the Agatha Christie reveal where like, you know, you knew all along this little detail about the man in the red sweater.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I don't think anything you say is wrong.
I shouldn't make predictions, but what I wouldn't be surprised to see, how's that, instead of a prediction, is something that comes out that modulates this, that moderates the impact of this.
Some sort of settlement that's reached or some sort of a, oh hey, TikTok and the Department of Justice have agreed that, you know, they'll do this or that or whatever, to basically blunt the force of this and stop short of like a full, like, honest-to-goodness TikTok ban.
And the reason I think that is, this seems really ham-fisted, if not.
And so I think I agree with you.
I think I'm just, hopefully this seems like such a, yeah, such a weird basket to put all of your eggs in, so to speak, and to spend this capital that I think, I don't know, I wouldn't be surprised if we see some sort of Moderated form of this that makes it more mild or regulates some things or is an agreement or a memorandum of understanding about what TikTok will or won't do or something like that.
Which is to say I don't disagree but I just, this seems like such a, I don't know, such a weird and just sort of own goal kind of thing that I think I don't know.
Again, I guess I'm in the poker metaphors today.
I just keep waiting for other cards to come out and show us what's really going on.
Well, but you started the episode with a good point, which is most Americans don't pay attention until September.
Okay.
Yeah.
But let's think about the 21-year-old who kind of cares about politics, kind of doesn't.
Could kind of get activated into political interest.
Maybe, maybe not.
If all they know about Joe Biden is that he banned TikTok and he keeps sending money to Israel indiscriminately, that could be enough to just be like, I'm not voting for that guy.
So let me just give you one more stat and then we'll go to Reasons for Hope and we'll tell you about when we're going to talk about Trump and immunity because we're going to talk about it soon.
Don't worry.
This is Tom LoBianco who puts out a good newsletter who I've interviewed on this show and here's what he says.
New polling from the nonpartisan Pew Research Center shines a light on just how bad rematch fatigue has gotten.
Nearly half of respondents to a recent survey said they'd replace both candidates in the current presidential contest if they could.
With slightly more of that cohort in favor of keeping Trump and jettisoning Biden, it's basically tied.
It's like Biden 18%, Trump 16%.
Why do I bring in that statistic?
There's so many people so tired of Trump and Biden, Dan, that those young people who went out in force in 2020 now have a reason not to go out at all.
And they could vote for Cornel West, or some of them could just stay home.
And that is why What happened on college campuses this week and what happened with TikTok.
I could not sleep this week because I was thinking about those.
I mean, I was thinking about people involved in those protests.
I was thinking about all kinds of things.
Anyway, all right.
We are going to, today's Friday, we're going to be taping our special episode for this month on Monday.
And we're going to talk all about the Trump immunity case on that episode.
So if you're wondering, guys, how are you not talking about the Supreme Court and immunity and what's happening with Alito and what's happening with Kavanaugh and Gorsuch and it's a it is a mess.
It is a mess that I never thought we'd see.
Well, we're going to talk all about it on Monday.
That episode should be up early next week.
So if you're a subscriber, that's coming to your ear.
Your ears soon.
If you're not a subscriber, you should sign up now so you can get that.
We're going to be taping that episode with Leah Payne, who wrote a book on contemporary Christian music.
So what I'd love for you to do is send in AMAs to straightwhiteamericanjesus at gmail.com, to us, to Leah, about contemporary Christian music.
The book is called God Gave You Rock and Roll.
And you can also ask us about Trump immunity.
I want to talk more about antisemitism and how It's being used in the media to kind of drive these issues surrounding college campuses.
We'll get to that too.
All right, Dan.
Real quick, you got a reason for hope?
I do.
It was a bright one.
It's a little different, but it made me feel good this week.
The Department of Transportation instituted new policies for people flying on airlines this week.
And it's one of the most hated businesses or industries in the country.
Those of us who fly, I don't fly a lot, but I fly some.
You fly more than I do.
I know a lot of people fly more than both of us.
Talk about like an industry that just seems to not care about the people who buy their product.
And so there were new rules about refunds and delayed flights and things that I think sound like they could really take a bite or force this industry that also took, as we know, boatloads of money during the pandemic and then like fired people and had huge profits and everything else and seems to not care about the consumer.
That gave me hope this week.
I don't know if that's good hope or just to stick it to an industry I don't like hope, but it was hopeful to me.
We're going to talk about Sean Foyt on that episode, too.
Sorry, I just can't.
Sean Foyt organized a protest at Columbia yesterday, Dan.
So we've got to talk about that on our special episode, too.
So if you're wondering why we didn't get to Sean Foyt today, we're getting to Sean Foyt next week.
Don't worry.
My reason for hope is my friend, my colleague, Blake Chastain, who is the host of the Exvangelical Podcast, has a new book coming out called Exvangelical and Beyond.
The cover has been released and you can pre-order the book.
So I've got to read the book.
It's fantastic.
There's a lot of just amazing reflections in there about the last 10 years.
And it made me happy to see that book come into my feed and to be available to people.
So we'll be talking more about it soon.
All right, y'all.
Thanks for being here.
Thanks for listening.
If you haven't already, subscribe and get all our bonus content.
If you are a subscriber, appreciate you.
Send in your AMA so we can get to your questions next week.
Other than that, we'll be back next week with a great interview with our special episode with It's In The Code and the Weekly Roundup.
For now, we'll say thanks for being here.
Have a good day.
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