Weekly Roundup: Opportunistic Judeo-Christianism + Samson, Delilah, and Hush Money
NAR WATCH: a monthly episode on the New Apostolic Reformation with Dr. Matthew Taylor debuts on the SWAJ feed next week. Become a premium member to get full access! https://axismundi.supercast.com/
Brad and Dan begin by discussing the fact that the trial surrounding Trump's payment to Stormy Daniels has buoyed his support among religious conservatives. They break down this confusing phenomenon through the story of Samson and Delilah, and great scholarship on the connections among hyper-masculinism, nationalism, and sex. Drawing on work by Sara Moslener and Leslie Dorrough Smith, the hosts point out how straight White men often receive approval for aggressive sexual behavior because it proves they are up for the job of protecting the nation from outside invaders and internal threats.
In the second segment the hosts turn to what Brad calls opportunistic fights against anti-Semitism on the part of the American Right. While acknowledging repeatedly that anti-Semitism is an ascendant and insidious force in the USA, he argues that the right-wing politicians suddenly interested in defending American Jews are doing so not because of genuine interest in their safety or flourishing, but in order to mobilize against enemies and others they feel will win them political favor.
In the final segment, the hosts discuss Trump's appeals to billionaires - and whether it's healthy for the presidency to be sold to the highest bidder.
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Axis Mundi Axis Mundi The New Apostolic Reformation is the molten core of Christian Trumpism.
As Matthew Taylor puts it, it was the tip of the spear in getting Christians to turn out to try to overturn the 2020 election.
We've covered the NAR extensively here at Straight White American Jesus.
I also produced Charismatic Revival Fury, created by Dr. Matthew Taylor, an award-winning 8-hour docuseries on the history and present of the New Apostolic Reformation.
Well, today I'm excited to announce something new.
A monthly episode on updates and news surrounding the New Apostolic Reformation as we approach the November 2024 elections.
I'll be sitting down with Matthew Taylor, the leading scholar on the New Apostolic Reformation, once a month, in order to get updates on the NAR and the way its leaders are organizing with Donald Trump's potential administration, the ways they're creating threats and vulnerabilities to our democracy through local rallies, And how they're promoting spiritual warfare language and spreading the Seven Mountains Mandate everywhere possible in American Christian spaces.
Segments of these episodes will be posted on our Straight White American Jesus feed, but in order to get full access, you'll need to become a Straight White American Jesus Premium subscriber.
The link is in the show notes, and make sure to do it soon, because the first episode of Narwatch is posting this week.
Stormy Daniels is at the heart of Alvin Bragg's falsified business records case against Donald Trump, and today she described in great detail the alleged sexual encounter in 2006 that the former president denies ever took place.
Her account was so tawdry that Trump's lawyers called for a mistrial, arguing it was designed to inflame the jury and embarrass the former president.
But the judge slapped down the motion.
In the late 1990s, when Bill Clinton was mired in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, evangelical leaders decried the downfall of our nation and its morality, said that the country would never be the same again.
So you think that just about a generation later, in the week that Stormy Daniels testified about her alleged sexual encounter with Donald Trump, those same leaders or leaders of their ilk would have the same complaint, the same worries, the same anxieties.
But what if I told you that this sexual scandal is not hurting Trump with his most conservative religious voters, but instead helping to increase his already divine image among them?
Mr. Banks, does Israel have the right to exist as a Jewish state?
Is the phrase, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, is that anti-Semitic?
Why are so many conservatives now so concerned with anti-Semitism?
What's behind all of the testimonies, the congressional hearings, the declarations about protecting Jewish people?
Is it a real concern?
Or is it a moment of conservative opportunism?
And finally today we'll talk about the billionaires considering throwing their support behind Donald Trump.
Is it possible to sell a presidency?
What are the dangers of having a president be holden to the 1%?
I'm Bradley Onishi, and this is the Straight White American Jesus Weekly Roundup.
The Great American Jesus Weekly Roundup Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad Onishi, joined today by my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Nice to see you, Brad, as always.
You too, Dan.
I know you're in the very last—it's like trying to drag yourself away from the school year, grading and meetings and the most fun things one could ever think of.
So I hope you're making it.
Lots of fun.
Yeah.
Rereading world shattering books and papers that students have written.
They've just written whole novels for me.
It's, it's amazing.
No, uh, it's, it's not what always is, right?
You got some students who are, you know, they work really hard all semester and it pays off.
And you got the ones who somewhere kind of after spring break are like, Oh, like I should be doing stuff.
And so let's try to pull them across the line.
But, uh, I think most of them are making it.
So yeah.
Yeah.
Well, we need to talk about the Stormy Daniels trial, we need to talk about what I would call the opportunistic anti-Semitism of many on the American right, and then for a couple minutes at least we'll talk about Whether or not Trump is trying to sell the presidency and what that might mean going forward.
So, let's start with Stormy Daniels and the testimony we heard this week.
One of the things that emerged is that this trial is not necessarily hurting Donald Trump with some of his most ardent supporters.
We have seen folks Talk about the ways that this shows his masculinity, shows his aggressiveness, which are good things.
And so the salacious details of this encounter are not turning people away, at least some people, and at least some of his most ardent supporters.
They're in fact re-entrenching them in the kind of Trump myth.
So take us through that and let's see what we get.
So everybody following Trump's hush money trial was treated to some pretty salacious details of his sexual relationship with Stephanie Clifford, stage name or performer name, Stormy Daniels, this week.
And some background, the trial is not about him having a sexual relationship with Stormy Daniels.
It's about allegedly violating campaign finance law with the way that he made hush money payments relevant to that sexual relationship.
But, because lots of people have asked, been like, why are we having this testimony?
Why are we going into this?
And we'll get more into that.
But here's the reason why.
He is repeatedly denied that the encounter ever took place.
He's consistently always said that this was all made up and it never happened.
And more importantly, his attorneys in their opening statements in the trial also said that this was made up and that it didn't happen.
The reason that that matters is it paved the way for prosecutors to put Stormy Daniels on the stand to corroborate her claims.
And this is what the judge ruled, basically, that they can do this and it's not simply prejudicial to do so because his own attorneys kind of introduced this.
If they had just come out at the beginning and said, this happened, he had an extramarital affair, that's not what this is about, we probably never would have heard anything from Stormy Daniels except maybe about receiving the money or something like that.
In addition, her testimony did stray into lots of salacious details, pretty cringey if you go and read any of the transcripts.
But the defense didn't object at the time that it was going on, so they were allowed to happen.
I say that because the defense filed for a mistrial and said that these statements shouldn't have been made, and the judge said, like, you could have objected at any point during her testimony.
You could have said that she was straying into territory that she shouldn't have been straying into, and we could have handled that.
So here's where we are, right?
Just as a reminder.
We have a former president on trial who has been found liable for committing sexual assault.
That's already happened.
That's a real thing.
He has boasted about committing sexual assault.
We all remember the tapes in the run-up to the 2016 election.
And the world has now had to endure lurid testimony about his sexual affair with Stormy Daniels.
And, as we all know, and this was to your point that you sort of opened up with, Brad, he remains still, for millions of conservative American Christians, a divinely sent deliverer of a Christian nation.
And so we've talked about this issue a lot.
Lots of other people have talked about this issue.
We spent years looking at this, about why it is That white conservative Christians continue to support somebody who is, in their own terms, we would say sexually immoral, right?
And sort of unapologetically so.
So this week, Dylan Jones with Politico interviewed Sam Perry, somebody who we talk about a lot, loves Sam's work, he's been on the show.
Specifically highlighting one of the biblical tropes that he thinks illustrates this.
It was really sort of worth talking about.
It fits in with a lot of things we've talked about.
It fits in with discussions you've had in some of your interviews with folks, and we're going to revisit some of those.
But here's the key idea.
Okay.
And again, thanks to Sam for pointing this out.
We've pointed this out.
Sarah Moslin or Kristen Dumais, like so many people, right?
This is such a theme and yet there is still this sort of shock of like, why do they continue to support Trump?
And here's the key point.
He reminds us that they don't support Trump despite his sexual moral failings.
They support him because of his sexual moral failings, right?
And in the interview, he offers, Perry does, a great illustration of why this is.
And he notes that, you know, if you're looking for like biblical models, there are lots of them.
There are lots of models, especially in the Hebrew Bible, lots of stories of men who are divinely appointed figures who are pretty horrific when it comes to their sexual misconduct, right?
But he offers up the story of Samson as the most apt metaphor, and I thought that that was really interesting.
So, Brad, if it's been a while, you know, since you curled up and set down your French novels and decided, I need to read the book of Judges and remind myself of, like, the story of Samson, I have not.
Well, I'm not going to say the last time I read Judges.
I used to read Judges all the time.
Anyway, we'll save that for later.
It's one of the action movie portions of the Hebrew Bible.
When you're a teenager and you commit to reading through the Bible in one year, Like, when you get done with Deuteronomy- You need a reward after Deuteronomy.
You get to Joshua and Judges, you're like, let's do this.
This is like, as you said, there's some action, there's some events, there's some, this is pretty cool, let's go.
You know what I'm saying?
There's like, sex in there, and it's like, okay to read, because it's the Bible.
Yeah, I know.
I mean, anyway.
All right, go ahead.
Part of the stuff that would get the Bible on the banned books list, if people were serious about it, is Joshua and Judges, right?
Not just Joshua and Judges, but they're there.
So, For those who are like, what in the world are you talking about?
Judges is the name of a book in the Hebrew Bible, okay?
So it's a story, and so who's Samson?
Samson is this Israelite warrior known as a judge, and judge in this context kind of means sort of a kind of divinely appointed leader.
And the narrative is of a time in Israelite history when the Israelites are trying to fully take control of the territory of Canaan and they are opposed by a group of people called the Philistines.
So it's like lots of stories of basically their conflicts with the Philistines.
And this guy Samson emerges in this context as a mighty warrior who delivers God's promises He delivers God's promised land to his people.
And people might know from Samson, he was big and he was strong and all of this sort of stuff.
And if there are obvious parallels that you already hear of a guy named Donald Trump delivering America to its rightful Christian people.
I mean, that's why this, as Sam is suggesting, that's why this is a parallel that fits.
So, Samson, the first piece of this, he's a man's man, as conservative Protestants would view it.
And Perry describes him as the John Wick of killing Philistines.
And it's a good description.
Perry says this, he says, Samson is thought of as this uber-masculine hero.
He's big, and he's strong, and the representations of Samson are of this hyper-masculine guy.
And it's exactly correct.
Jason Momoa as Samson.
I think we're there.
Jason can give us a call.
We can, you know, for just a small part of his representation fee, we're happy to pass that idea on.
Yeah.
Yeah, so he's just, he's a real badass.
Jason Momoa, I'm thinking of Jason Momoa right now.
That could, that'd be awesome.
Jason Momoa as Samson.
I think we're there.
Jason can give us a call.
We can, you know, for just a small part of his representation fee, we're happy to pass that idea on.
Yeah, with all of our connections we have in Hollywood.
Yeah, so he's this man's man, but he also has a man's weaknesses.
Turns out Samson in the story is also pretty into prostitutes.
Like, that's kind of his thing.
And so here's the trick.
To the uninitiated, if you are not in that conservative Protestant world where, you know, with its views of masculinity and so forth, this would seem to pose a problem for Samson, right?
It would make him a pretty flawed figure.
But what Sam reminds us of, and again, other folks that we've talked to, and I know listeners will know this, he perfectly hits on why this isn't the case.
And so he says this.
He says, this is from the article, it says, Trump's sexual misdeeds may break religious doctrine, but they also affirm his masculinity, at least in the evangelical view.
They demonstrate that Trump is a virile, red-blooded man, afflicted by God, like all real men, with lust.
Obviously like, cis, hetero, white guy lust, right?
That's the model here.
Not just lust for sex, Perry says, but for power.
And much like biblical warriors who themselves struggle with sexual temptation, Trump can wield power and lead the faithful to glory.
He also goes on to say, Perry does, he says, part of Samson's masculinity is his huge and enormous sexual appetite.
The guy was the embodiment of physical superiority and that includes his sexual superiority as well.
And finally, Sam is a sociologist and he talks to people and finds out what they think and how they perceive things and he says this, he says, in my research...
I found that evangelicals tend to see sexual temptation as just a normal part of being a Christian man.
That God gave men tremendous sexual appetites because he wanted them to be leaders, and initiators, and people who take charge.
And this isn't just about sexuality, this is about every area of life.
So this is what it turns out to be, and Samson's sexual appetites bring about his ultimate fall, right?
The story of Samson.
It turns out he had taken what's called a Nazarite vow, this kind of vow to do things like he wouldn't touch dead bodies.
I don't know how you kill all these Philistines and not handle dead bodies, but he didn't.
And not have strong drink, and importantly not cut his hair.
And it's because he had vowed himself to the service of God that he's given these almost like Comic book superhero kinds of powers and abilities.
So the Philistines know that he's got this weakness for women.
They employ the services of a woman named Delilah to seduce Samson and to find out what his weakness might be.
And Samson confides in her that his long hair is like kind of the Fabio, I guess, Momoa superhero mix here.
You know, you think these things and then you say them, and you're like, that's something that shouldn't exist.
But anyone under- Yeah, who's Fabio?
36 is like Fabio?
Anyway, go ahead.
Sorry.
I'll take 36.
Yeah.
Yeah, so Delilah coaxes this information out of him.
He tells her that if his hair is cut, he loses his power, and so she goes to the Philistines.
Well, she cuts his hair, hands him over to the Philistines, and the long and short of it is Samson dies.
He goes out and ablades the Blades of Glory, takes a bunch of Philistines with him, and so forth.
So, what's the moral of the story, right?
If you're a conservative evangelical Protestant Trump supporter, what's the moral of this story?
It is not That there's something wrong with Samson.
It is not that unbridled masculine sexual aggression is somehow bad or a problem.
It is that women are traps that can ensnare godly men.
And that's why Delilah becomes one of many Hebrew Bible women, women in the Hebrew Bible, who become this kind of Western image of the dangerous woman, the seductress who will lead otherwise godly men astray.
Let's bring all this back to Trump's trial.
This is exactly why the evangelicals continue to, not just continue to support him, but you say Brad is driving up his popularity and his support among evangelicals, right?
His sexual misconduct isn't seen as a weakness or a failing on his part.
He's just a red-blooded man's man, of course.
He's attracted not just to women, but to a porn star and all the ugliness of the way that that plays out.
It's seen as a confirmation of his masculinity, right?
And those who accuse him, they're not victims, they're seductresses leading him astray, standing in the way of what God has called him to do.
And I'll wind up with sort of a last quote from Perry in the article.
Because he really hits on this.
He's asked how evangelical leaders and institutions treat women who are cast in the Delilah role.
In other words, how does this figure of Delilah continue to inform what we're seeing in court with Stormy Daniels at present, what we have seen with the Access Hollywood tapes, what we have seen with his other sexual misconduct trial, and so forth.
And what Perry does, he highlights that, but I think he also highlights how this is about more than just Sex is about more than just sexuality.
This notion of masculinity bleeds into a full vision of leadership and control and power and God's design for men and so forth.
So this is what Perry says.
He says, if you follow the narratives with, say, the Southern Baptist sex scandals that have come out within the last few years, we've talked about those, often the counter-narrative that I see, at least on social media and among some Christian right journalists, is to ask, well, what was the woman's role in this?
The Christian right is now so partisan that any of the darlings of the left, like minorities who are harmed in situations of police brutality, or women who are the victims of sexual assault, the first impulse on the Christian right is to say, well, what did they do?
Did they have it coming?
Did they ask for it?
Were they initiating this in some way?
Are they lying just to get some godly person in trouble?
Are they lying to get the cops in trouble or to get a pastor in trouble?
There's an evangelical suspicion, or a Christian right suspicion, of women involved in these kinds of sexual affairs.
That they are probably asking for it, probably tempting, probably not helping the situation, and certainly not the victims.
That's what he has to say.
The last point I'll make about this is that that bleeds into governance and ruling and different things like this, right?
Men are to be aggressive and they're to take control.
It also explains, I think, the double standards and blind spots we've seen with this testimony.
Not at all surprising if you're familiar with these kinds of things.
None of it is surprising, but it's still very troubling.
There is, on the one hand, the moral approbation of, oh, she's a porn star.
Just the hand-wringing and the pearl-clutching about this evil sadar.
She's not just a woman.
She's not just somebody who slept with a married man.
She's a porn star.
She is discredited as inherently immoral, as maybe a step up from the prostitutes that Samson would visit, but maybe not.
But notice that there's no concern about the guy fetishizing her for this reason.
The fact that Trump wanted to sleep with Stormy Daniels because she's an adult film star.
That's the reason.
It's not about Stormy Daniels, it's about this persona on screen.
And there was also this, I found really troubling, line where she talks about sort of that she didn't anticipate having sex with Trump.
She did not say that she was coerced or anything like that.
But she talks about sort of coming out of the bathroom and Trump's basically stripped down, kind of waiting in bed, and she wasn't expecting that.
And Trump's attorney had this line where she sort of said, well, you're used to being around naked people and seeing that.
Like, why would that surprise you?
And again, no recognition that this is what she does as a profession.
It's on a movie set.
It's highly artificial.
It is set up.
It is regulated.
There are lots of safeguards in place.
There are people there making sure that things are managed in a particular way.
There's a level of safety that is not present in a one-on-one encounter like this.
Again, castigating her in the role of this Delilah figure, seeking to drag Trump down, destroy the nation, and so on.
Things that we've talked about.
I've been talking for a while now, and I know you've got some some good insights on this as well.
But I thought it was really a really, as he says, a really apt analogy to think about Samson and Delilah as this this image of why it is that the evangelicals support Trump through this.
So Stormy Daniels said in response to that line from Trump's lawyer that, yeah, when you're expecting it, And so, again, what it hints at is that if you're a woman, and here's the line, it's a line that's been played out since time immemorial of, well, if you're the kind of woman who is sexually promiscuous, then any sexual encounter is welcome and you wouldn't be caught off guard.
It goes all the way back to Me Too and all of the discussions from 2017 and so on and so forth.
I think anyone listening who has experienced evangelical purity culture or complementarian marriage frameworks is already understanding what's going on here.
That women by nature are seen as evil.
They're seen as in the Eve complex.
They're seen in the Delilah complex.
They're seen in the Jezebel model.
They're seen as those who are supposed to keep the world chaste and in line sexually.
And when they don't, They're seen, and Sam Perry has another great line, he says, they're seen as traitors to their sex.
If a woman is actually sexually interested or a sexual being, she's not just doing something wrong, she's betraying her nature.
So I think everyone listening who's experienced any of that or is familiar with that, whether in evangelical spaces or just in American culture at large, there's so many echoes and bells ringing and so on.
What I want to do in just a few minutes is connect this to the nation, because you hinted at this with Samson, but it comes home because what is happening with Donald Trump as a former president and as a presidential candidate is he's meant to be a representative of the nation for people who support him.
And a couple years ago, I interviewed my colleague Leslie Dorough-Smith from Avila University.
And Leslie wrote a whole book on sex scandals in American history and their religious underpinnings.
The book is called Compromising Positions.
And what she does is she connects sex scandals and the ways that white heterosexual men are often forgiven For their sexual infidelities or failings, and even given a kind of reputation boost, she connects it to nation building.
So here's a clip from that interview with Leslie.
So the ideas that we have here that really inform a lot of American patriotism are very much manifestations of American exceptionalism.
We are a strong nation, we are the best nation, but we are also the righteous nation.
And so one of the things that I think it's important to remember is that when people vicariously associate in patriotic ways with their country, then they they want to think about the politicians who represent them as something like a microcosm of the country.
So if a politician comes across as masculine, hyper-aggressive, and if he promises to protect the public, to protect the citizenry from whatever bad guy is out there, and that could be the terrorist or the undocumented immigrant or whoever it is, Then what I found in my research is that the American public is more likely than not willing to forgive that particular politician for whatever sexual indiscretions he's committed, and that's because he's got something to give them in exchange.
So here's the idea.
America is a strong nation.
America is a nation that needs protection against certain enemies or others.
We need a masculine, hyper-aggressive father figure, leader, Whoever at the front.
Well, that's how some Americans think, okay?
So, if you need that kind of leader to protect you from bad guys, someone like Trump's attractive.
Yeah, just one quick thing.
I know people might ask sometimes, we talk about hyper-masculine.
I've had people ask me, so you think there's something wrong with masculinity?
No.
There's no problem with masculinity.
It's the equation that masculinity is aggression.
Aggression and violence are what masculinity means.
That's what it essentially is.
So somebody is not violent, if they're not aggressive, they are somehow not masculine.
That's the image, right?
The reduction of masculinity to aggression, to violence, to possession, to control.
Yeah, I think that's so well said.
And so what Leslie finds in looking at all these sex scandals from American history and political history is that The American public will forgive you if you're the hyper aggressive masculine protector, man.
Well, when you go and have sex and initiate a sexual encounter like Donald Trump did in this way that cut Stormy Daniels completely off guard and she wasn't necessarily thinking was going to take place.
Right.
If you take the initiative, if you if you act, if you are the aggressor, if you're not a reactor, but the the the one who takes charge, well, then you're seen as a good leader.
This might actually convince people.
And this is the thrust of Leslie's book.
This might actually convince people you're the guy for the job and that you're going to be for our nation what we need to protect us from all the people who are threatening it.
Okay?
Now, she then connects it to data she has about men and everything you just said, Dan, about evangelicals and many other conservative Christians think about gender and sex.
And she relates all this to masculinity and to the family.
So let's listen to one more clip from her.
And the reason why I connect evangelicalism to this, and to be very clear, you know, if you ask evangelicals, you know, as, as a kind of a block, if they approve of political sex scandals, nobody says yes.
Okay.
Nobody says yes.
Oh, was that many of the sex and gender norms that have been generated within evangelical groups and that we find tangibly in places like evangelical sex and gender marriage advice literature, for instance.
If you look at those treasure troves of data, what you often find is that there is this sense that God made men sexual because their sexuality, their libidos are actually the power that drives society.
And so the family is the basic core building block of society, many conservatives will argue, because it is the place where male energies are harnessed through female morality and the female nurturing, you know, propensities.
And this is how the family comes together to sort of represent these opposing forces that ultimately generate a productive society.
So what that means then is that when we have a politician who is engaging in some sort of illicit sex, if we can understand him as a person who's going to be kind of like a fatherly figure who protects us, then there is now an outlet through which to excuse those behaviors because suddenly you can say that he is a person who will protect us.
This is just how he is.
This behavior is sort of natural.
So basically the idea is, and Sarah Malzin are so good on this too, Virgin Nation is the book, Pure White is the podcast.
Sarah Mosiner, Leslie Dorough Smith are basically going to outline for you the idea in these theological frameworks that men are by nature hyper-aggressive, hyper-sexual beings.
That's how they were made.
So if you try to stop them from that, or if you try to tell them not to be that, you're trying to tell them what God made them to be.
The only chance we have is for them to direct that in the right way in a marriage relationship.
Okay?
It's not about It's not about changing that behavior.
It's not about not equating masculinity with hyper-aggressiveness and hyper-sexual activity and hyper-sexual take-what-I-want.
It's just a matter of, well, hopefully they'll just keep that within the marital frame.
But if they don't and they want to be the leader of your nation, what you can take away from that is, well, they're the guy for the job because they're not going to let al-Qaeda, they're not going to let Whoever, in the MAGA world's eyes, they're not going to let undocumented immigrants, they're not going to let people from Palestine come and get us, they're not going to let the boogeyman.
No, he'll step in.
He takes what he wants.
He's the guy.
So this is the explanation as to why this helps a Trump rather than hurts him.
It's also the explanation, and I've talked about this endlessly on this show, I talk about it in my book, as to why like Obama got made fun of for wearing mom jeans or dad jeans and the tan suit and Obama doesn't like ride around on a horse with no shirt like Putin.
What they were trying to do is tell you he's not man enough for the job, right?
That was always the goal with the Obama-Putin kind of comparisons.
Yeah.
And we see that now with Trump and the Stormy Daniels trial.
It's all coming back to roost.
Final thoughts on this, Dan, before we move on.
I think you're right, again, as the other friends of the show are, that the family is one of the key focus of this.
Another one, and Kristin Dumas is the one who kind of reminded me of this, I just taught her book this semester, so it's fresh in my mind, is that the military is the other one.
If there are like sort of two pillars Where that hyper masculinity is supposed to be sort of properly directed.
It's in the family, and it's in the military and I would argue now that the border language is all part of that as well.
And and so that's why you also have like not figurative militarism.
But literal militarism as well, is because these are the legitimate sort of God-ordained channels for this hyper-masculinity, just as Samson exercises his masculinity, not just with prostitutes, but by slaughtering Philistines, who are the kind of military opponents of Israel.
So much to say about this.
If you're interested in this, you can listen to a bunch of things.
You can listen to Pure White by Sarah Mosner.
You can listen to my interviews with Sarah Mosner, with Leslie Dorough Smith.
If you're a subscriber, premium subscriber, you have access to the full gamut of our archive to listen to those.
You can listen to my talks with Audrey Claire Farley.
You can listen to my series Mild at Heart, which is on the Access Moondi platform.
So we've just discussed this at length and could talk about this for hours.
I'll also say you should read Dan Miller's book, Queer Democracy, because he talks all about Uh, the ways that you imagine a political body in the image of a physical body.
And so, if you want to protect the body's borders, if you want to make sure no foreign agents penetrate the body, uh, you need the big, bad, aggressive, uh, daddy figure to, uh, to do that who will wield the military and all the weapons he has to make sure that the invaders don't get in.
Well, that's all at play here.
Let's take a break.
We'll come back and talk about opportunistic anti-Semitism on the American right.
All right, Dan.
I want to play you a clip from a congressional hearing this week with chancellors and leaders from some of the nation's largest school districts.
This is Florida Representative Aaron Bean talking to these leaders.
Mr. Banks, does Israel have the right to exist as a Jewish state?
Absolutely.
Ms.
Silvestri?
Yes.
Ms.
Ford-Marthel?
Yes.
Is the phrase, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, is that anti-Semitic?
I think most Jewish people experience that as anti-Semitic, and as such, it is not allowed in our schools.
You would say it is?
I would say it's anti-Semitic.
Ms.
Silvestri?
It is if the intent is the destruction of the Jewish people, yes.
And it is?
And it is.
And so I would say I'd put you down as a yes.
You're okay with that?
A yes?
Yes.
Ms.
Ford-Murthell?
It's a yes or—you can just go yes or no.
It is if it is calling for the elimination of the Jewish people in Israel.
And I will also say that I recognize that it does have different meaning to different members of our community.
I'm going to go yes.
I'll put you down as yes.
I got to book it because five minutes goes by so fast.
All right, I'm going to come back to that clip, but I want to talk about anti-Semitism as opportunism.
And I want to go back to something I've been talking about for the last month, and that is a strategy on the American right that was largely pioneered in the last half century by Arthur Finkelstein, who helped Reagan, who helped Nixon, who helped so many senators, Orrin Hatch and others get elected, who helped Orban, who helped Netanyahu, who trained up Manafort, who was super close with Roger Stone.
And that's this.
Identify the other who will win you the most support and mobilize against them.
So identify the person you think the public, not the person but the group, you think the public is scared of most.
Who is the group that the public is scared of most?
And take the side against them.
Okay?
I hope everybody understands that strategy.
Who do they fear the most?
In some cases we've seen over the last half decade it's been trans people.
People are afraid.
They're uncomfortable.
They don't know many trans people.
They're not sure what that means.
So hey, take the side against them.
Mobilize.
And you can probably get more folks to jump in with you than on the other side.
Pretty, pretty clear strategy.
In this case, it's choosing the side of Jews against Palestinians.
Now, I want to be very clear.
Anti-Semitism, as we've said on this show all the time, every chance we get, is real.
It is present.
We have seen an ascent of anti-Semitism in the country over the last decade, particularly since Donald Trump became president.
We could talk about the Tree of Life synagogue shooting.
We could talk about the anti-Semitic aspects of so many manifestos of those who've committed mass atrocities in the country.
We could talk about the ways That anti-Semitism has grown on the far right and was present at Charlottesville.
I mean, anti-Semitism is real.
It is ascendant.
It is present.
Nothing I am saying right now is to say, nope, no anti-Semitism.
What I'm trying to say is, I think there are people using The ascendance of anti-Semitism to join forces with a group they think will help them win support against another group, and that is Palestinians.
And in this case, Palestinians represent what, Dan?
They represent Islam.
They represent, as we saw last week with Sean Foyt and Metaxas, Jihad, Iran, even demons.
Simply put, if you're with The Palestinians, the American right is going to tell you, you're with the enemies of the USA.
The Palestinians are bad religion.
Islam is bad religion.
That is how it is coded by the American right.
And in this case, what we have is opportunistic Judeo-Christianism.
This is the moment where the Christians are like, Oh yeah, the Jews are with us.
Yeah.
We're Judeo Christian.
Yep.
Yes.
We need to protect, we need to protect them.
The very, the very selective Judeo that gets added into like all of these, these, these conservative white Christians are not preaching on a typical Sunday about Judeo Christian stuff.
They're preaching about Christian stuff and they will laugh at you or mock you or swear at you, except they'll, they'll use, I guess, Jesus friendly swearing.
If you were to suggest that there are connections between Judaism and Christianity and so forth.
Christianity has surpassed Judaism and is past it.
If somebody on the left starts talking about a Judeo-Christian ethic, they'll say that they're afraid to just declare the Christian origins of the country or that they're denying it.
But here, all of a sudden the Judeo is super useful and it's back in vogue on the right.
I think that's exactly right.
So, what happens here is, here's the equation.
Palestinians equal Islam, Jihad, Iran, demons.
Enemies of the USA.
Jews equal USA.
So, I cannot tell you how many times I've seen on Twitter and other places this week, Dan, people calling folks.
On college campuses, and largely these are like, I'm sorry to characterize, but they're largely what appear to be like WASP-y frat boys, okay?
And these are folks who by all appearances are Rooting against the Palestinian protest encampments.
Okay.
The most famous one that a lot of you might have seen is from Ole Miss.
There is a group of guys, mainly men, there are some women, who appear to be almost all white.
Now, we can go through the video, we could see how they identify.
I don't know the racial makeup of all those people.
But I've been on a lot of Southern campuses, Dan.
I taught in the South for years.
They are dressed like the frat boys on a Southern campus.
Dockers, USA shorts, polo shirts, and one of them is dressed in a USA set of overalls with no shirt, okay?
And they are facing down one black woman.
And I think she's black.
And if I'm wrong about that, I apologize if she identifies in a different way or they identify in a different way.
I don't know.
But I've watched the video many, many times.
She appears to be a black woman.
Dan, it's straight out of the 1960s.
It looks like a mob storming somebody during the integration of schools or during sit-ins.
One of those moments.
But here, the dividing line is Israel-America versus Palestine-Americans who hate America.
Right?
It's our side.
Israel is America versus Palestine and Americans who hate America.
And in the video, one of these young men makes a monkey noise and gesture.
So he's making one of the oldest anti-Black racist gestures one can think of.
In Congress, Aaron Bean, as I mentioned, was grilling the heads of the nation's largest school districts this week.
And we played that clip and we talked about it.
And I'm going to play some more of that in a minute.
Aaron Bean is the one, if you listen to the entire testimony, who's just like, he's outraged.
He cannot believe anti-Semitism is present in our schools.
Aaron Bean is a representative of Florida, Dan.
He's from Naples, Florida.
Naples is about an hour and a half drive from Mar-a-Lago.
So, if you and I were in Naples, over there in Aaron Bean's district, and we said, let's go to Mar-a-Lago, see what that place is like.
Takes about an hour and a half.
Aaron Bean is, you guessed it, endorsing Donald Trump for president.
Aaron Bean didn't, I didn't find anything.
If y'all want to send me something, I could be wrong, but when Donald Trump had dinner with Nick Fuentes, a Nazi, somebody who says he's pro Hitler, didn't see anything from Aaron Bean.
Didn't see any outrage, didn't see any posts.
He just didn't seem like a big deal.
But now, now let's get these, these school heads in.
Let's get these, these chancellors in front of the mic.
Okay.
I want to talk about, I'll throw it to you here in a second.
Let me make one point and then I'm going to throw it to you.
There's a book by K. Helen Gaston called Imagining Judeo-Christian America.
And in that book, Gaston argues that the idea of a Judeo-Christian America, it pretends to be inclusive while working to be exclusive.
That every time white Christians in the country have turned to the inclusion of Jews as near them, as extending the walls of the city on a hill to include the Jewish people in America, it's been to exclude the secularists.
It's been to exclude the Muslims.
It's a way to say, oh, you're with us so that we can be against them.
It happened in the Cold War.
It happened in the interwar years in the 1930s.
It happened during the Vietnam War.
Okay?
And America's identity, Gaston argues, is envisioned here as America and Christian.
And Opportunistically, the Jewish part is brought in.
That is what I see when I see Mike Johnson go to Columbia.
That is what I see when I see Aaron Bean and other congressional Republicans up there just red-faced about anti-Semitism.
I want to be very clear.
Anti-Semitism is real.
It is ascendant.
It is so dangerous and problematic and hurtful and scary.
But I think that these are false friends.
I think that these are people who are working for more destructive purposes and not in fact, right, to invest in the Jewish people for the long haul, to invest in Jewish communities and their safety perpetually, and to build something like peace and understanding by way of education among various ethnic and religious groups.
To me, this is simply, we can bill ourselves as the Americans and you as those who are with America's enemies.
You pick a side, America, and we'll meet you at the polls.
This is sort of implicit in everything you're saying.
It's impossible to, I think, also overstate the whiteness dimension in this.
As you talk about this, this tried and true strategy, this political strategy of identifying the other who will win you the most support, The period when this emerged, you mentioned Nixon, you mentioned Reagan, right?
That was the war on crime language.
And what was that code for?
It was code for black people.
And we know this, the strategists who were behind that have said, we knew that you couldn't just be anti-black anymore, so we had to have this way of saying this.
That's what it was.
As you say, and I absolutely want to affirm as well, anti-Semitism in America is real.
So is Islamophobia.
And Islamophobia also has this racially coded dimension, right?
There's a lot of great scholarship about... I read a book recently called The Racial Muslim, and there's one by a guy named Eric Love on Islamophobia and racism in America, and there's this kind of creation of this kind of vague category of the quote-unquote Middle Easterner who is brown, who is visibly marked in some way as not white,
And just to put some spin on this or some perspective for me, years ago in my religion and pop culture class, I started a section on American Islamophobia, and it's a piece that's there.
And this was back in the early aughts.
And I remember not that long after 9-11, I was like, that's religion and pop culture.
I don't know if this is always going to be a thing that's going to stay.
We're in 2024, I'm teaching that class again in the fall, and guess what section I still have in the class, because it is more pertinent now than it was post 9-11, is American Islamophobia.
So Islamophobia works.
It works politically, it works socially, it is an enemy that has been constituted in a way that lots of angry or scared or white Americans, or white Americans who were just looking for something to latch on to, right?
A way to name If you have a fear or an anxiety that doesn't have an object, you give it that object and it works, and that's why they're doing that.
I think the last point, you mentioned that, you know, this is straight out of the 1960s and, you know, it's interesting to talk about the Congressional Republicans because McConnell, Mitch McConnell this week, when Biden did say that they were going to not, they were going to hold up weapons shipments to Israel if they invade Rafah and so forth, do whole shows on that, he said, Oh, Biden, he's taken the wrong lessons from 1968.
And what were the lessons from McConnell?
That you can't embolden the critics of America.
And so it just tied together, it's like he said it out loud, all the pieces that you're tying together, the direct line to the 60s, the identifying, you know, naming some group of Americans as the enemies of America, Changing notions of whiteness, the history of antisemitism and Jewish people being figured as somehow not white in the KKK histories that you've told us about so many times on this show.
But here, conveniently, they're wrapped into that white Christian identity.
We'll slap the Judeo on there so that the Islamophobia can do the work that those on the right needed to do.
Let's talk about refugees.
Famously, during World War II, the U.S.
was not a place that was going to take in many Jewish people.
There is a shameful, shameful history there.
Well, now, there are loud calls from the American right to refuse any consideration of bringing Palestinians into the U.S.
as refugees.
Some folks, as Media Matt reports, have been trying to permanently relocate due to ongoing warfare and dire humanitarian concerns.
And some of them have been doing this for a long time.
Nonetheless, Ben Shapiro says Palestinians would be a destabilizing force.
Charlie Kirk says this would endanger the Jewish people.
Newsmax Rob Schmidt says that Palestinians are indoctrinated to hate the Jews, to hate the West, to hate the whites, to hate Americans.
I could go on.
Sean Hannity.
Todd Bensman, Jesse Waters, Washington Examiner.
Any idea of bringing in those suffering in Gaza is seen as bringing in anti-American forces.
Once again, it is the entire Palestinian people who are seen as something.
It is an essentializing move that says, if you are part of that group, you have this characteristic.
And not just the Palestinian people, but what you're also highlighting is that that itself becomes this cipher for all Muslims, the entire Muslim world.
What's the first thing Trump, like literally the first thing Trump did when he becomes president?
The so-called Muslim ban.
So again, when they say Palestinian, they don't just mean the Palestinians, they mean all Arabs, they mean Muslims.
Now, are all Arabs Palestinians?
Are all Palestinians Muslims?
Nope.
None of that, but the rhetoric is how that works, so that you're talking about huge swaths of the world all encoded in this call to keep Palestinians out.
And just to make the final point that this is opportunistic, in other moments in recent years, the American right has done what?
Well, they've used the George Soros conspiracy to drum up and to popularize age-old tropes about Jewish people.
So there's this whole idea, and this has been going on a long time, about the Illuminati and the Rothschilds and the cabal of Jewish bankers who control everything.
Billy Graham and Richard Nixon were caught on tape talking about how the Jews control everything.
We got to do something about it.
The George Soros conspiracy was conjured by Arthur Finkelstein, the man I've been talking about here for a couple of weeks.
But that conspiracy is one that has been revived when, Dan?
Am I talking about 2016?
14?
Nope.
How about...
Last couple weeks.
Obviously, I think Soros is part of this, said Representative Ronny Jackson on Fox Business.
The FBI should be investigating that, too.
So, here's George Soros, the Hungarian Jew, who is clearly orchestrating the entire campus protest movement in the United States.
The target of extreme anti-Semitism is, in fact, the mastermind of this kind of global anti-Semitic conspiracy.
I think a lot of it's being funded by outside forces, including George Soros.
Those who are determined to disrupt and bring chaos in our country.
Representative Mark Alford of Missouri.
I could go on with these.
Mike Johnson himself had one of these.
And as you say, so here is a Hungarian Jew.
Who is the target of the antisemitism, but he's fueling the... And you start to realize they're going to use anything they can to make you afraid.
Whoever and whatever they need to play the bogeyman, they will.
And therefore, what I'm arguing today is not to ignore antisemitism.
It is not to say antisemitism isn't real.
What I'm arguing today is to say that when these people that I'm talking about today are supposedly standing up against it, I see them doing so in order to destroy and divide our public square, not to invest in Jewish people, Jewish communities, or American peace and safety.
In order to say it better than I can, I'm going to turn to the Chancellor of the New York City Schools and his remarks to committee this week.
We really care about solving for anti-Semitism, and I believe this deeply.
It's not about having gotcha moments.
It's about teaching.
You have to raise the consciousness.
Of young people.
And the challenge we have as a system is that we do have some adults who bring their own bias into the classroom.
And we've got to figure out how do we impact all of it at the same time.
But the ultimate answer for anti-Semitism is to teach.
To expose young people to the Jewish community so that they understand our common humanity.
And I would certainly ask that my colleagues from across the nation and I would call on Congress Quite frankly.
To put the call out to action.
To bring us together.
To talk about how we solve for this.
This convening for too many people across America in education feels like the ultimate gotcha moment.
I appreciate the way he said that.
The gotcha moment is what I think they're after.
And I'll give you one more quote, Dan, and then we can take a break.
Jerry Nadler, who is a New York congressperson, has represented New York City, part of New York City, and of course, the largest Jewish population in the country for a long time and is himself Jewish, said this in response to the proposed Anti-Semitism Awareness Act from last week.
I will take lectures from no one about the need for vigorous efforts to fight anti-Semitism on campus or anywhere else.
I am also a deeply committed Zionist.
But while this definition and its examples may have useful applications in certain contexts, by effectively codifying them into Title VI, this bill threatens to chill constitutionally protected speech.
Speech that is critical of Israel alone does not constitute unlawful discrimination.
So, there's a little bit of further discussion there in terms of the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act and a whole other set of issues, but the larger point for me is here's Jerry Nadler saying, we're not going to have a situation where I want a law that says you can't criticize Israel.
I bring that up because I think that's where we're going.
The American right's like, well, if you even criticize Israel, you're anti-Israel, you're anti-Semitic, and you're anti-American.
Pick a side.
Gotcha.
One or the other.
You with us, you're against us.
That's always the goal.
Binary.
Either or.
Us or them.
America or the world.
You choose.
And that's what I see at play in all of this.
Let's take a break.
We'll come back and talk about the billionaires Trump is trying to get to fund his campaign and perhaps to sell the presidency to.
All right, Dan, two reports this week I just wanted to touch on briefly.
Don't have a ton of time here, but I thought it was worth a mention.
Trump had a fundraiser with a bunch of oil execs, and this is from the Washington Post, Josh Dossey and Maxine Joslow.
And he's sitting there with all these top exoil executives at Mar-a-Lago, same place where he had dinner with Ye and Nick Fuentes, so that's cool.
And he told them something that, according to the reporters, stunned the entire room.
Let me quote it.
You are all wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House.
At the dinner, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden's environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted, according to people with knowledge of the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.
Giving $1 billion would be a deal, Trump said, because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him.
Trump's remarkably blunt and transactional pitch reveals how the former president is targeting the oil industry to finance his re-election bid.
He goes on.
He's going to roll back clean energy and electric vehicle standards and achievements of the Biden administration.
He's going to take back environmental regulations that have passed.
He's going to do a lot to make things different in the country as it comes to oil and gas, even though It's not like Biden is Mr. Anti-Oil.
We're producing more oil than anyone in the world, so there's that.
There's another report out there, Dan, about Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and a bunch of other billionaires having an anti-Biden dinner.
Going back about a month ago, there was a proposed, or at least a reported dinner between Elon Musk and Donald Trump, even though Musk has not come out in favor of Trump.
We only have a few minutes.
Here's the point I want to make about this, and I'll throw it to you.
We have a president who's doing two things, or there's two factors I guess I should say at play.
One is he's not even doing the elegant Lobbying dance?
Cockatoo?
Peacock?
Attract your mate?
Soiree?
I don't know what I'm even saying anymore.
I'm sorry.
Dan's laughing.
All right.
He's just coming out and saying it.
You give me a billion and I'll do this for you.
It's completely open.
He's not hiding it.
It's not in secret.
He's not sending a proxy.
It's just open.
I'll do this.
You do that.
Second, We haven't really been talking a lot about the $175 million bond and whether or not Trump had the cash and where it came from.
But there is, under the surface of the Trump campaign and Trump's life, a kind of need for cash liquidity, whether that's for legal bills, whether that's whatever.
I've talked about it before.
When Jimmy Carter got into the White House, he put the peanut farm in a trust.
When he got out of the White House, he was in debt because he didn't touch it and he didn't know what was happening and the people who were managing it didn't do him that well.
We know from the Stormy Daniels trial, Trump was intimately involved with his company while president.
And here's a guy that is open to selloffs who might need money.
Do you know what it looks like if someone like Musk or one of these other lobby groups like the oil execs or others can basically like pay to play?
They can like buy out a president.
I mean, I've seen this mentioned briefly among the mainstream media.
Chris Hayes and others have talked about it at times, but this is a big deal.
Someone like Elon Musk, the contracts he has with the like military and the, the, the satellites and the, I mean, all the others, like the fact that Tesla is part of the, the, the car industry.
I mean, there's so much at play here to do in five minutes.
I just wanted to mention this cause I don't see it coming up.
So off to you.
So just real quick, a theme that we've talked about before as well is the way that, you know, the neo-fascists will look at everybody as neo-fascist, right?
Like people projecting what they would do if they were in power.
On to those who are in power and sort of attributing them motives that they might not have.
The reason I bring that up, and I don't feel like I just stated that very well, is you've also had Trump accusing Biden of what?
Of trying to buy votes, how?
Through student debt relief.
So you've had the same discourse coming up and saying, well, you know, essentially, well, yeah, sure.
I mean, everybody's trying to buy votes, right?
Everybody acts transactionally like this.
There's nothing wrong with Trump.
Telling oil billionaires that they ought to just give him money because they'll get a rollback.
Because, hey, look, he's trying to forgive student debt relief.
What do you think he's doing?
He's buying votes from all those kids who have student debt.
This notion that everything is always transactional and that becomes the license for doing what they're doing, despite the fact that, again, I'm not here to defend lots of things about Biden, but I've never heard Biden say, I think all those people are going to vote for me now because I tried to get rid of their student debt.
I don't think I've ever heard him bringing a bunch of, I don't know, Gen Z and millennial folks into a room and saying, hey, you know what?
You really should vote for me because I'm going to save you thousands of dollars by getting rid of student debt.
But you've seen the same logic, that same reversal of trying to argue that the other side is doing the same thing.
It's just a pattern that we see all the time where people on the right use like sort of project their own motives onto everybody on the left and then use that projection, which is already a kind of fantasy, to then license whatever it is that they're doing.
And we see the same thing here with Trump in this.
That's what you hear about people coming from by way of the southern border.
Oh, those are democratic voters.
Palestinian refugees.
Well, it's just democratic voters.
And I mean, it's the same thing.
It's amazing.
That kind of projection.
I have to mention this.
I'm sorry, we have to mention it.
So Biden stops the bombs to Rafa.
And, you know, it's about time, in my opinion.
And there are people, there's an impeachment bid now, because they're saying this is a quid pro quo.
And Dan, it's like, I can't believe how stupid a timeline we live in.
If you go on Twitter, there are Republican representatives who've copied and pasted a tweet from Biden a while ago about how Trump entered into a quid pro quo with Ukraine.
So what did Trump say to Ukraine when they wanted military aid?
He said, go find me dirt on Biden.
What did Biden say to Netanyahu and the Israeli government?
Stop doing a geopolitical act of trying to bomb and attack a place where there are thousands and tens of thousands of civilians.
What?
Dan, do we?
Can we not see the difference?
Like what?
There's a personal quid pro quo.
There's a personal I will do this for you if you do a thing for me personally to hurt my political opponent.
Then there is Well, whatever you want to call it, like geopolitical maneuvering, statecraft, diplomacy, negotiation across international lines, I don't know, that says, hey, my government's not going to keep supporting what you're doing in an attempted invasion or attempted, what might become or is an attempted genocide in Rafa and Gaza as a whole, because we don't think that's a good idea.
Can we live in a stupider time and yet that's the goal?
Anyway, I'm sorry.
Am I crazy?
Did I read it wrong?
Did I read it wrong?
Nope.
It's exactly that same logic of trying to make it the same.
What Biden did to the leader of Israel is say, I am not going to give you something that you really, really want.
There was no promise.
Yeah, it's completely different.
But not because you wouldn't attack Eric Trump.
Right.
It's a big, powerful state trying to direct and influence the domestic policy of another state.
And it is.
By definition, statecraft is what geopolitical entities have been doing as long as there have been geopolitical entities.
And it is not personal and transactional in the way that everything with Trump winds up being.
I just, I can't believe, anyway.
I read it and I thought, it's one of those moments you're like, I feel stupid because this can't be what I think it, they can't be saying what I think they're saying.
They can't be equating Trump telling Zelensky, get Hunter Biden dirt with, hey, don't, don't go to Rafa and do what's going to end the lives of tens of thousands of, anyway, whatever.
What's your reason for hope?
Because I got to stop because I'm going to lose it.
So there's an article, excuse me, in Politico by Joanna Weiss, and this is back to the Stormy Daniels case, but she made a really good point that I thought was great and it sort of struck me that you've had, we just talked about some of these tropes that are launched at Stormy Daniels, but one of the points that she makes is if you compare this with, say, the Clinton Lewinsky scandal, they're not sticking.
And what she just sort of highlighted is We do not live in an equitable society.
We do not live in a society where female-identified people are treated the same as male-identified people by any means.
But she did highlight that you have this woman who is pushing back.
She is sex positive.
She is very open about what she does and who she is.
And the sexist attacks on her outside of that kind of Trump world, they just aren't sticking and landing the way that they did back in the 90s.
And I found that to be really hopeful and a really useful sort of piece of cultural comparison for those of us who are old enough to remember just the character assassination of people like Monica Lewinsky.
So I thought that was a really insightful piece.
Mine is personal.
May 24th we are releasing a podcast series called Misinformation by Susanna Crockford.
Susanna's been on the show a number of times.
And Misinformation is all about how misinformation and conspiracy theories penetrate religious spaces, wellness communities, other places that humans gather.
There's great episodes on biohacking, the Great Replacement Theory, the Great Reset, You get wellness culture on yoga, you get to everything from the Tech Bro trying to live forever to Naomi Wolf to 15 Minute Cities to, you know, yogis who are going to tell you they'll cure every ailment you have.
It's really good, and I can't wait for it to come out.
So to me, that's going to be a great educational resource for anyone who's interested in that.
It's great stuff to put on a syllabus, and it's just fun when something you've worked on with a scholar like Susannah finally gets to be out in public and be available to everybody.
So I'm looking forward to that.
All right, y'all.
Thanks for being here.
Thanks for listening.
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Want to just say we couldn't do this without you.
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