Weekly Roundup: Toxic Masculinity Outside a Courtroom and at a Commencement Speech
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Brad and Dan take on a series of stories related to hypermasculinity, politics, and religion. They begin with the commencement speech by Harrison Butker, the NFL player who sparked controversy with his rad-trad commencement speech. From there the hosts move to the Trump sycophants visiting his trial each week - breaking down why they are all dressing like Trump and what this says about the toxic masculinity operative on the American Right. They finish with a brief discussion of Texas Governor Greg Abbot's pardon of a man who ran over protesters and shot a person at point blank range.
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- Axis Mundy. - Just days after Trump was inaugurated, the right-wing site Infowars asked, "Will men start acting like men again once Trump is in the White House?"
Almost eight years later, it's not clear whether Trump has inspired men to act like men in the minds of Infowars or the American right more generally.
What is clear is that men are starting to act more like Donald Trump.
Never before have we had a speaker of the U.S.
House of Representatives Travel to a criminal trial in order to vouch for, in this case, an adjudicated rapist, someone who has been civilly convicted of fraud in hundreds of millions of dollars against one of our sovereign states, the state of New York.
And he goes To that trial to speak for the criminal defendant who's defending himself against charges of having cooked the books in order to cover up hush money payments to a porn star.
And that's just unbelievable for any speaker to do, much less a speaker who says that the Bible is the law of the land.
That's Representative Jamie Raskin talking about Mike Johnson's visit to the Trump hush money trial this week.
Not to mention the parade of other men, many of whom are vice presidential hopefuls, who also made their way to New York and dressed in the uniform of Donald Trump.
Dark suit, white shirt, red tie.
Whether it was Matt Gaetz, Doug Burgum, Byron Donalds, or others, The message was clear.
Acting like men means acting like Donald Trump.
And then there's the case of Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker, who gave the commencement speech at Benedictine College in Kansas.
In the speech, he encouraged men to be men and women to be women.
As men, we set the tone of the culture.
And when that is absent, disorder, dysfunction, and chaos set in.
Be unapologetic in your masculinity.
Fighting against the cultural emasculation of men.
Do hard things.
Never settle for what is easy.
Butger is a traditional Catholic who attends the Latin Mass.
He went on to tell the women in the audience that their greatest joys will come from being at home, from being mothers, not from job success or career achievement.
And finally we come to the case of Daniel Perry, who was just pardoned by Texas Governor Greg Abbott.
Perry drove his car into a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters before shooting and killing one point-blank.
Today we analyze these cases of American masculinity and violence and ask what they mean for the contemporary moment and the future ahead.
I'm Brad Onishi and this is the Straight White American Jesus Weekly Roundup.
Hello, Dan.
How are you?
I'm good, Brad.
I'm Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Always nice to be with you at the end of the academic year.
I had to fight my way through traffic in my little tiny town because UMass and Smith colleges are both graduating, but I made it so everybody can rest easy.
There's a lot of colleges where you live.
The Happy Valley, they call it, and it's... Yeah, so the five colleges is, yep, so... It is a cool part of the country for sure.
All right.
We got to talk about the Trump trial, and the... It's raining men, Dan, at the Trump trial.
Just raining men, and they're all dressed like Donald Trump.
So we got to talk about that, and... Men and Lauren Boebert.
Like, we'll get to that.
Yeah.
Lauren Boebert and a couple of other women, but mainly Lauren Boebert.
Kristi Noem, some others.
And then there is Harrison Butker, who's the kicker for the Chiefs, who gave the commencement speech at Benedictine College and upset pretty much everybody.
I think there are some folks, actually, who were a fan of this.
I'll talk about at least one person who was very happy with this.
He works at the Daily Wire.
So, basically, as we enter summer, Dan, the men are not okay.
I'm not sure if the men are ever okay, but they're certainly not this week.
We also had Governor Abbott pardon somebody who ran over a Black Lives Matter, excuse me, Black Lives Matter protester and protester, as I should say, and shot one person in point blank.
We'll get there.
There's a theme, though.
The men are not okay.
Let's start with the kicker for the Chiefs.
I have some, you know, thoughts, Dan, about a man who, you know, dresses in tight pants in front of a lot of people every week.
A lot of his teammates wear midriffs.
They show their stomachs and arms when they play.
It's a very revealing outfit he wears every week.
It's tight.
It's form-fitting.
And he has one skill.
He kicks a ball.
I mean, he uses his body to get paid.
You know, I won't compare him to sex workers because that wouldn't be fair to sex workers.
They have more than one skill, usually, than just doing one thing, which is he just kicks one ball In one place.
Every week.
Using his body for money.
And, uh, you know, in a tight uniform.
So anyway, Dan, with all that context, I'm just wondering, what did Harrison Boote Kerr say this week, and what do we need to know?
Yeah, so as it happens, I was also, and I promise I'm going to land this plane, I was re-watching season one of The Handmaid's Tale, the Hulu series, based on the longtime Margaret Atwood book.
My kid, like most of us in high school or middle school, has just recently read The Handmaid's Tale, so we were watching it.
But people may remember back when the first trailers for the series came out and there were a bunch of Trump followers who were all over Twitter, all about how this is aimed at Trump and this is ideological and everything else.
And everybody from Margaret Atwood, the author on down, was like, this is based on the book from the 80s, has nothing to do with Donald Trump.
We talked about it here and I remember saying, if you see yourself, Trump fans in the theocratic society in The Handmaid's Tale, that should tell you something about where you're hitching your wagon.
The reason I say that is we're still there.
I was watching this last night, and there's this line, there's this kind of flashback to when they're creating this theocratic government, and these two men are talking, and they're talking about women, and they're talking about the role of women in this new society, and of course in this new society women aren't allowed to read, they have no bodily autonomy, and so forth.
But this is what one of the characters said.
He said, this is our fault.
We gave them more than they could handle.
We put so much focus on academic pursuits and professional ambition, we let them forget their real purpose.
We won't let that happen again.
And this week, Butker comes along and decides that, you know what, he's going to channel his inner Handmaid's Tale and basically say all of that at a commencement address.
So, he is the Kansas City Chiefs kicker, for those who don't know.
So first of all, as a Denver Broncos fan, I The Chiefs are arch rivals, and they are way better than Denver, and have been forever, and they've won three of the last Super Bowls, and they're a phenomenal team.
So as far as NFL kickers go, kickers are not very high in the NFL pecking order, but Booker is higher than most.
And he was the commencement speaker, as you say, at Benedictine College, a small, private, Catholic, liberal arts college.
And in his, I think it was a 23-minute speech, he basically gave a clinic on conservative Christian right-wing talking points.
It was like, literally, if you were playing Christian nationalist right-wing bingo, your entire card would be full.
Nobody would win because everybody would just have a full card.
And so let's start with his Handmaid's Tale moment.
There are other moments, but this is the one that I think got most of the attention.
This is what he said.
He said, I want to speak directly to you briefly.
He's talking to the women.
He says, I want to speak to you briefly because I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you.
How many of you are sitting here now about to cross this stage and are thinking about all the promotions and titles you're going to get in your career?
Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into the world.
He then continued on to say that his wife, Isabel, quote, would be the first to say her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and a mother.
He added that he was beyond blessed in his marriage because his wife was able to be a homemaker.
And he went on to say, "It cannot be overstated that all my success is made possible because a girl I met in band class back in middle school would convert to the faith, become my wife, and embrace one of the most important titles of all: homemaker." So that's him channeling his Handmaid's Tale moment.
It sounds like a script straight out of Handmaid's Tale.
The NFL pretty quickly distanced themselves from what he said.
Just to throw it out there, the NFL statement was Harrison Booker gave a speech in his personal capacity.
His views are not those of the NFL as an organization.
The NFL is steadfast in our commitment to inclusion, which only makes our league stronger.
So you had that sort of thing.
Critics have come at this from all different directions.
There's the obvious double standards.
Melissa Jacobs of The Guardian, for example, highlighted all the women working for the Kansas City Chiefs organization that helped him win three Super Bowls.
She said, quote, she said, there's Kirsten Krug, the Kansas City Chiefs executive vice president of administration.
She oversees player services and during the height of COVID ensured the Chiefs were healthy and safe while serving double duty as one of the club's infectious control officers.
There's Tiffany Morton, an assistant athletic trainer who keeps the players stretched, iced, and taped up so they can maximize on-field performance.
There's also Rosetta Chennault, a security officer who helps keep the peace so the players can do their jobs without incident.
These three employees of the Chiefs are just a handful of the many women who keep the organization thriving.
They are pieces of the framework that has helped the Chiefs win three Super Bowls in five seasons and allow Harrison Butker to do what he does best, kick a football.
Unfortunately, he sometimes also opens his mouth.
That's a quote from her.
Other people have noted that he referenced Taylor Swift, who is famously dating Travis Kelsey, another Kansas City chief.
Timi Butker, who is herself an unmarried, childless, career woman.
And we've talked about that and the double standards here.
I also wanted to highlight, as we're sitting on this, the class dimensions to this that I think sort of scream out to this, right?
Let's just assume we're thinking about women who would want to be stay-at-home moms, right?
And I am in no way suggesting that that's something women have to want or that anybody has to want to be a stay-at-home parent, but let's say that somebody did.
That's what they wish they could do.
Even as an NFL kicker, Some of the lowest-paid starters in the league.
He makes about $4 million a year.
I looked it up.
He's like in the top third of kickers.
He'll probably get bumped up next contract because of all these Super Bowls.
Of course, his wife can stay at home and be a stay-at-home mom if she wants if your partner's making $4 million.
Not everybody has that luxury, and it's not even an irony.
The piece of this that really sort of lingers for me is, as you know, Brad, and we've talked about this before too, the same Christians
On the religious right, who started, you know, making their moves back in the late 70s, the 80s, the story you've told so well, stories we tell all the time, it coincides exactly with the rise of so-called Reaganomics, neoliberal economic policies, which made it impossible for most middle class families to stay middle class on a single earner income, let alone poorer families.
So the reason why, one reason why, you have fewer and fewer and fewer single income families is not just because radical feminists have emasculated men and put women in the workplace, it's because lots of families couldn't afford to have a single income earner if they wanted to.
I'm also reminded, and I think this will resonate with you, when I would go to church on Sundays, when I was in that evangelical world, and we would have this whole thing about how, you know, Sunday should be the day when nobody works, we should honor the Sabbath even though it's not the Sabbath, and then we'd all go out to lunch.
We'd all go to, like, the pizza buffet down the street.
Yeah.
We'd all go to the restaurant.
What about the server at Chili's, Reverend Johnson?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, that's exactly it.
Yeah.
And it's the servers, right?
For me, that is such—there's just so much of a class and economic dimension here that that whole—everybody should be off on Sunday, not if you're serving somebody else's food, right?
Not if you're especially a person of color in the back working in the kitchen.
Sunday's just another day.
There was all of that, and lots and lots of people jumped on that as they should.
He also hit all the other right-wing playlist themes, right?
He had Biden as a bad Catholic.
He blamed absentee fathers and men who are, quote, emasculated by society as the causes of American violence.
He played out a classical Christian anti-Semitic trope, referring to the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act working its way through Congress.
He said, this is the sentence, quote, Congress just passed a bill where stating something as basic as the biblical teaching of who killed Jesus could land you in jail, end quote.
So first of all, it's not a bill or it's not a law.
It hasn't been passed.
Uh, but number two, that's just a, it's a classic Christian code for, you know, Jewish people as the quote-unquote Jesus killers and so forth.
Uh, he let his queerphobic flag, uh, fly high.
He said, this is another quote from his speech, I'm certain the reporters at the AP could not have imagined that their attempts to rebuke and embarrass places and people like here a Benedictine wouldn't be met with anger.
But would instead be met with excitement and pride.
Not the deadly sin sort of pride that has an entire month dedicated to it, but the true God-centered pride.
So there's his shot at that, in case anybody needed to worry about it.
And of course he criticized quote-unquote gender ideology and the evils of that.
Those are the things he said.
The fallout, as I say, lots of criticism in the NFL.
The Los Angeles Chargers, who are also division rivals of the Chiefs, tweeted out an image of Butker in the kitchen taking something out of the oven, just kind of poking fun at him.
The Benedictine Sisters of Mount St.
Scholastica—again, it's a Benedictine college—they distanced themselves, said his speech, quote, fostered division.
There were former students who were critical of this and so forth.
But, as you're going to get into here in a minute, I think, there were also those on the right who cast him as brave and speaking up for, you know, sort of beleaguered men who are victimized in society.
I just read, right before we came on, I didn't have time to write it into my notes, that the heir of the Hunt family, the Hunts are the ones that own the Kansas City Chiefs, came out with this statement about how privileged she was to grow up and have her mom be able to be a stay-at-home mom and so forth.
And again, if you're a billionaire, yeah, you can have a stay-at-home parent.
No problem with that.
This is also coming from somebody who will, like, just be a billionaire because she was born.
Like, she didn't have to do anything for that.
I think the most telling point is that his jersey is one of the top sellers at the NFL right now.
It is now outselling Patrick Mahomes and other star players.
He's a kicker.
Why?
Because this resonates with millions and millions and millions of people in a way that other things don't.
So, that's Harrison Butker.
In a nutshell, not much of a nutshell, and yeah.
I got so much to say here.
Give me what you got.
No, I'm in one of those moods where... Well, you couldn't make it up, right?
Again, this is just one of those things, like if you were like, we're going to write a screenplay about, I don't know, a bigoted player in the NFL, and he's going to give this speech, and if you put all of this into it, Somebody would be like, man, this is a really ham-fisted literary device.
Like, you need, like, a bunch of characters doing these things.
No one person in 23 minutes could possibly, like, do all of this, and the caricature walks into the room once again.
I feel like we see this just weekly at this point.
Yeah, there's so much here.
Once again, I want to come back.
There's a lot here.
So let's just start with Harrison Boodker.
A lot of people, including yourself, Dan, like watching football.
It gives people pleasure.
It gives people a form of entertainment.
Okay.
We can talk about all the problems with every form of entertainment ever made.
We could talk about them with the NFL.
And you are very aware of those.
We could talk about it with the film industry, whatever.
Okay, great.
So, he has a job.
Good for him.
I'm not gonna sit here and whatever.
It's amazing that, as I indicated at the beginning, American football is a very strange sport because it's so specialized.
Like, if you ever watch American football, Dan, like we used to in the UK with, like, English people, they really are befuddled.
Like, they're like, I don't understand at all what's happening.
The action seems to last like five seconds and then it stops.
And this is very difficult to like watch because it just stops and starts every three seconds.
And then you really get to the absurdity of American football with the kicker.
Because like when the kicker comes on, your friend from the UK is like, so what's that guy doing?
You're like, well, he kicks it through the gate there.
That's like his whole job.
He just has to kick that ball through that gate while another man holds it.
And they're like, okay, okay, but he doesn't have to run or jump or anything.
Does he tackle people?
No.
Does he throw things?
No.
No, no, no.
He doesn't do that.
Okay.
He just kicks it through there.
Yes.
Okay.
Cool.
So I'm not, look, I'm not mad.
Harrison Booker has a job.
He makes $4 million a year.
Uh, but he does so using his body with a very specialized narrow skill that is like one skill.
He kicks a ball one direction.
He wears tight pants doing it.
Like I said, he and a lot of his other teammates have their stomachs and their arms and some of their legs exposed.
I'm just thinking of what Harrison Boutka would say to other people who use their bodies for jobs in order to give other people entertainment or pleasure.
And do so in a way that, you know, basically is using their embodiment as their means of labor.
I'm just so I'm going to start with that.
I'm then going to go to the fact that he gives us this super anti-Semitic sentiment about Jesus and, you know, the age old trope of the Jews killed Jesus.
And I want to use this to say that Harrison Butker is a trad Catholic.
He is a Catholic who attends the Latin Mass.
If you didn't know that, if you listen to this speech, you're like, yep, we talk about decoding stuff and it's in the code.
If you say things like this, you identify as Catholic, that's where you are on the Catholic spectrum.
I feel like if people have listened to all 99 episodes, congratulations by the way, you're about to do your 100th episode if it's in the code.
I didn't even know that.
If people have listened, I feel like that could have been a test.
Like, hey, listen to the speech and just tell me what you think he is.
Decode it.
This would be a really good test.
But here's the thing.
If you were doing it to students, that's what you would do, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So let me play you a clip of him talking about the Latin Mass.
I can speak to my own experience, but for most people I have come across within these communities, this simply is not true.
I do not attend the TLM because I think I am better than others, or for the smells and bells, or even for the love of Latin.
I attend the TLM because I believe, just as the God of the Old Testament was pretty particular in how he wanted to be worshipped, the same holds true for us today.
It is through the TLM that I encountered order and began to pursue it in my own life.
And then I want to talk about what it means to me.
So here's him talking about the Latin Mass.
Okay.
In that clip, Dan, he says something that is so telling to me.
He says, "When I discovered the Latin mass, it's not just because I like Latin.
It's not just because I like old stuff.
And he even says, it's not like because I just like smells and bells.
It's because what?
Just as the God of the Old Testament was pretty particular in how he wanted to be worshipped, the same holds for us today.
Okay, so what does the Latin Mass have to do with that?
It is through the Latin Mass that I encountered order and began to pursue it in my own life.
Think about what this dude just said, Dan.
I go to the Latin Mass, the Mass that Pope Francis says not to use, the one that was supposed to not be employed after Vatican II, the one that, if you've listened to this show or so many other shows that have investigated trad Catholic environments, I am not going to make a blanket statement about, they're all filled with these people.
Nope.
But what the reporters I've interviewed, what the scholars I've read say is that trad Catholic communities where they do the Latin Mass, are infiltrated and infested with a large number of ethno-nationalists, a large number of people who are very into hyper-masculinity, a large people who have very, very stringent ideas about patriarchy, about gender, about race, about immigration.
And so when you go to a trad-cath community, I would say if someone said, well, what should I expect?
I would say you should expect some incredibly conservative people that have retrograde ideas about all those things.
Now, does that mean everybody?
No.
Are there people in the world who love old things and Latin?
Yes.
Is the Latin mass beautiful?
It is.
Dan, you and I, how many years of our lives, Dan, have you and I spent in old libraries?
I love walking on cobblestone streets and going to an old library.
Like, that's a great day for me.
Get a coffee, walk it on the way to the library, on those cobblestone streets, get in there, some dusty books.
That's awesome.
I love it.
But this dude says he loves it because it gave him order.
And then he's telling us about how society should be ordered.
This is one of those moments where Christian nationalism and religion are often a way to give legitimacy to women stay in the house, women you're a mom, women you're a wife, men.
Be masculine.
Do hard things.
Don't let them tell you that that's not you.
And if everybody did that, we'd have a good nation.
Fatherless homes?
We'd fix the country.
If everybody did that, we'd have a good society.
If everybody did that, they'd be happier.
Go ask my wife.
On our four million dollar mansion we got down here down the road.
See if she's happy.
She says yes.
Does she want a career?
Heck no.
Order is what it's about.
We've said this on the show so many times.
Christian nationalism.
Perry and Gorski are good on this.
It's an ideology of order.
If you order society the right way, you'll be free.
And I'm going to claim that the order comes from God, whether that is through natural theology, whether through that's a An understanding of Adam and Eve as the model for all gender and sexuality and so on and so forth.
Let me give you one more thing and then I'll throw it back to you.
This guy Michael Knowles, he works for the Daily Wire.
He's about the same age as Harrison Bootker.
Bootker's like 28.
Knowles is like in his early 30s.
He's also a traditional Catholic.
And he did a whole Instagram clip.
He's very proud of Butker.
He thinks it was great.
He can't believe that people would be upset.
This man's literally almost crying, talking about how thankful he is for his wife, because she recognizes her role as a woman, that she's supposed to stay home, not have a career, raise the children, and that's who she is and all she is.
I'm crying.
It's so great.
She's wonderful.
Thank you for filling that role and making me so happy.
Why would you criticize a man for that?
Well, Knowles has a clip from a recent piece he did at the Daily Wire, and I want to play that for you now.
Here it is.
It's not possible.
I know we live in modern life where we're told that, you know, if a man doesn't wash exactly 50% of the dishes, he's a misogynist or something.
But that's totally nonsense.
Men and women are different.
We're drawn to different things.
And you, one hopes, tame your wife or at least provide some leadership to your wife.
It's not just a one-way street.
Liberals hate humans because, I'm just going to speak very bluntly here, because the liberals are largely enthralled to demons who hate humans and want to destroy us.
That's kind of it.
So he says men and women are different and he talks about taming your wife.
You have to tame her.
You gotta tame her and provide leadership.
And then he says liberals hate humans because they're largely enthralled to demons who hate humans and want to destroy us.
Like, Dan, this is not a good place to be when you think That unless you understand a marriage relationship, gender, sexuality, a partnership, relationships, romantic relationships, erotic relationships, sexual relationships, in a certain way, Then you're a demon and you hate humans and you hate everybody you want to destroy them.
Like everything we talked about with Metaxas and Voight the last two weeks about Gaza and about, right, the anti-Semitism as an opportunistic opportunity, chance, I should say.
Same thing here.
Unless you see men and women and their roles in life The way I do, you're a liberal who is enthralled to demons.
This is not a good place to be in terms of having a public square.
So, back to you, because the caffeine's going to kick in, Dan.
It's going to get even more excitable here if you don't take the wheel.
I didn't realize that somebody could see so clearly to me that my problem is that I just hate humans.
So, yeah.
I'm glad they called me out for that.
Yeah, I mean, everything that you say, right?
We talk about this notion of, you know, a properly ordered society.
You know, I wrote a book about this.
Like, we talk about this all the time.
It's the veneer of antiquity and authority that attaches to it.
And this is one of the ironies.
I always feel like I have to bring this up.
Maybe it's because I was a biblical studies person.
I don't know.
But when you hear somebody say, well, you know, because what he's kind of saying in that clip about the Latin mass, which you sort of hear there, is this sense of worship needs to be the way that God set it up, right?
Like, this is how God ordained worship to be.
And you're kind of like, uh, sorry, let me, Harrison, I've just got a thing.
First Church didn't worship in Latin.
Like, that wasn't a thing.
The Bible's not written in Latin.
There were Christians all over the place in the globe that didn't know Latin.
There's no evidence that Jesus of Nazareth could speak Latin.
Aramaic?
Is that in there?
Yeah.
You know, but that just sort of flies right over, because no matter what people do when they claim the antiquity and the authority or whatever, they are always claiming some human mediator as the actual authority, right?
The person they're going to actually point to is, maybe it's a conservative pope from some period of time.
Maybe it's their church pastor.
Maybe it's their dad.
It's typically going to be somebody who's male, right?
But the point is, they will tell you that it's God telling them this, They're never just going to God.
There's always some concrete, flesh and blood, almost always male human, who is the one claiming the right to speak that way.
And I feel like that's the part that just gives the game away for me, is no matter what, if you say to them, cool, show me the God part, like point me to God, the closest they'll ever get, maybe point to a Bible verse, you're like, okay, cool.
So there was Paul who wrote that, but like, Like, how do I get past Paul to God?
No, no, no, God's there, I promise.
How do I get past the Pope to God?
No, no, no, no, no, God, like, he knew what God was saying, right?
Or Joseph Smith, or like, name the religious figure that we want, right?
So I think that that's the other piece of this, that to me it's just such a, it's such a naked grab for power that is right on the surface, but it's so common, and I think people who believe it really, really believe it and just simply look past that.
We should have a shirt that says Yahweh speaks Latin.
Don't you think?
Yahweh speaks Latin.
I don't know.
Anyway, I don't know who would buy that.
One more comment on Butker and then we'll go.
You know, Butker's 28.
Butker is somebody who is clearly trying to find a way to articulate a worldview where there is a sense of order, as we've talked about, of beauty, of Sensibility.
And I want to say I understand all of those impulses.
I want that too.
But the problem we have in our public square right now is that too many men find any sense of themselves and any sense of meaning and order in the world by way of ideologies that say men need to be hard and women need to be in the home.
And it Unless you abide by this binary, you're a demon.
Like, you know, we've really reached this point.
And it could be Harrison Butker.
It could be Andrew Tate that we're talking about.
And it could be the man we're going to talk about next, Donald Trump and his his acolytes and cronies this week.
But that's the unfortunate part.
And I'll just say I'm sorry on the part of all cis hetero men to any woman, anyone who's Not a cisheteroman sitting in that audience having to listen to this guy say that, you know, you just did a nursing degree.
You just did a philosophy degree.
You spent four years earning a degree for what?
Like, to not, yeah, to not use it in any way.
Yeah.
For me to come here and tell you that your true calling and the only way you'll be happy and please God and yourself and your husband is by way of you staying home and having children.
Now, let's just say one thing that I think you've implied, but I'll just say it clearly and explicitly is, if you feel like that's what you want to do with your life, man, woman, person who is non-binary, person who is trans, whatever your gender, sexual identity, you are in a relationship with one or more people and you say, I would like to stay home and that will be my role in this relationship in order to whatever may be.
We can fill in the blank with all kinds of things that happen at home.
Awesome.
This is not us saying... I mean, this is us saying the problem is when you assign women as, in their essence, homemakers and mothers and nothing more, and you tell them not to look forward to their accomplishments, or that if they don't fulfill those roles or have those roles as mother and homemaker, then they will never be what they're supposed to be by what they were designed to be by their creator.
It's a diabolical lie.
Right.
If they're pursuing anything with their education, career, and I think all of us recognize this point.
These do not have to be all either or zero-sum choices.
But if you're pursuing that, you have fallen prey to, as he says, diabolical lies.
And once again, like, man, all right, I'm not going to let it go.
I'm not going to let it go.
And then we'll go to break, but I'm not letting it go.
Like, he has a job.
A lot of people, if you're in Kansas City, you won three Super Bowls, you're super, you're hell happy about it.
Good for you.
Mahomes, the whole good.
Have a great time.
Y'all get, get out there and party, Kansas City.
Okay.
But the headline could just be, Man Who Kicks Ball For Living And Has No Other Job Criticizes Women Who Want To Be Nurses, Surgeons, And UN Secretary General.
Like, he literally gets up in the morning, and his employment is to kick one ball in one direction, And he's telling everyone else what the essence of their vocation should be.
It's absurd.
That's an absurd thing.
It's an absurd proposition, Dan.
He makes four million dollars a year kicking a ball held by another man through a gate.
And he's out here for 20 minutes saying, like, you all should look forward to being mothers.
Like, My guy.
My guy.
Are you serious?
The only thing Harrison Butker's going to have in comment?
No, I'm not going to do it.
Nope, I'm done.
It's over.
Dan, take it away.
Dan?
The only other thing I'm going to say, as a fan of American football, is...
I don't know how anybody doesn't see the homoeroticism of a sport where there's lots of homophobia.
I mean, it's right up there with the Top Gun volleyball scene.
The butt slapping, the quarterback's hand placement when he takes a snap.
You name it.
I will also just point out that in the pecking order on teams in, you know, football at any level, the kicker is, like, half a step up from, like, the second string quarterback, typically.
Like, they win lots of games and they're important and whatever, but...
There's a reason they're always drafted in the seventh round, like they're the last people drafted.
Yeah, he's not a premier sort of figure as well.
As you say, literally preaching to everybody else about what their God-given task and role has to be.
He has a job.
I'm not going to make fun of that job, because we all want jobs, so that's good.
I'm just going to start calling him Prophet Harrison, because he's the one that can prophesy to all of us what our divinely appointed role is.
Yeah.
Well, now I'm thinking about Val Kilmer playing volleyball, and I kind of want to just get a beer and go watch Top Gun, but whatever.
Let's take a break.
Be right back.
All right, Dan, the men are not all right.
I think we've established that and we're going to talk about it even more, unfortunately.
So this week at the Trump hush money trial, the parade of men continued.
It was reigning men, as I said earlier, and a lot of VP hopefuls showed up.
We had everybody from Rick Scott to Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson.
All the way to Byron Donalds, Matt Gaetz, Doug Burgum, and they were all dressed like Trump.
We'll get to that in a minute.
Here's Trump talking about how great it was outside of the courtroom.
And Vivek is here right now, so he can speak for himself.
He said this is a sham trial.
It's politically motivated.
It's an assault on the leading candidate for U.S.
President.
I would expect he would say something good, actually, so I won't go through the rest, but he's here.
He's going to talk to you.
The Speaker of the House is here.
We have a lot of great people here to talk to you and they won't let them speak here.
I guess they want to make it difficult for them to speak.
So for some reason I can speak here, but I'm the only one that's allowed.
So, Dan, I.
Vivek Ramaswamy was there.
I mean, and there's this picture, Dan, from whatever it was, Tuesday or Wednesday, where it's like, it's Ramaswamy and Burgum and Donalds and one more person, I can't remember right now, and they're all standing, and they look like an a cappella group.
Seth Meyers called them the Four Treasons.
And this really set off something that I know some of you out there are sick of the Trump hush money trial.
But I think there's a larger issue at play here with what happened this week.
So who are the people that went?
They're all of these men.
OK.
And they didn't go just to the trial.
There's a huge sort of theatrics to it.
They're all standing in these pictures.
They're all kind of the president's men.
They look like lieutenants of a mob boss showing loyalty.
And then they're all dressed like him.
They're literally wearing a Trump uniform.
In that picture I'm talking about, it looks like an acapella group because they all have the same tie, the same shirt, and the same suit.
And it looks like it was from the Trump uniform company.
So the question I had all week was like, why?
And I already knew the answer, but I wanted to dig in deeper.
Why?
And Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who's always just an incredible source on these things, talks about how there's this imitation factor that fascism is a hyper-masculine movement where there is a strongman leader.
And that strongman leader does a couple of things.
He is misogynistic.
He treats women as if they are disposable, as if they are things.
There is a kind of underside or underbelly of the boot crop understanding of women here, where it's not just that they're stay-at-home mothers, it's that women are, right, disposable or they are sex objects and so on.
And we've already seen that with Donald Trump.
It's indisputable.
He has been Convicted of sexual assault, E. Jean Carroll.
He's been accused of sexual impropriety by dozens and dozens and dozens of women.
Their role is to serve and submit to men.
And that submission takes lots and lots of different forms.
I think it's written into the concept.
You have.
Yeah, it's wonderfully said.
So one part of the fascist masculine model is women submit and serve.
The other is all other men need to do two things when it comes to the fascist leader.
They need to submit to that leader.
But they also need to imitate and extend that leader in the world.
They need to be mini versions of that leader and extend his aura and his power and his virility out into the world.
Okay?
And so that's what, to me, is happening when I see these men all dressed in a Trump uniform.
Like, Dan, can you imagine having A job interview, and your friend's like, hey, what was your job interview?
You're like, well, my potential boss has been accused of, like, this weird hush money scandal payment thing, and I just went by the trial to kind of get a feel for his leadership.
He really is asking all candidates for the job to come and sit at the trial and show their support.
Yeah, his leadership style is basically he assaults women, and then he asks all other men to be an extension of his virile, hypermasculine presence.
Sounds like a good place to work.
Now there's even further extensions of this because let's think about the men in the American right who have either challenged Trump.
Okay.
Or, or not.
So who are the, I'm going to give you two examples of people who have challenged Trump in different ways.
One is Ron DeSantis.
Now Ron DeSantis challenged Trump by trying to be Trump.
He didn't offer a different version of masculinity.
He didn't offer a different version of being a man.
He just tried to be Trump in ways that were out-Trumping Trump.
We talked about it for hours and hours on this show, through policies in Florida, through all kinds of rhetoric.
He tried to out-Trump Trump and it failed miserably.
He did not have the virility and the potency and the whatever he needed.
He just wasn't the guy.
So he couldn't be Trump.
The other is Mike Pence.
Now, Mike Pence never tried to be Trump.
He has never... Mike Pence is just not that macho, machismo person.
It just doesn't seem to be who he is.
And to his, like, one cent of credit, it doesn't seem like he's ever tried to be that.
Now, that doesn't mean he's not overwhelmingly misogynist and homophobic and everything else.
He is.
But he has never put forth the aura.
Whenever he was vice president, he seemed to be Robin.
He seemed to be the submissive second fiddle.
Until he wouldn't do what they wanted him to do on January 6th.
And guess what happened to Mike Trump?
They set up gallows!
They were gonna hang him, and Trump was like, maybe that's okay.
So you either try to beat Trump and fail, and DeSantis is now off into Republican hinterland.
He's a no-one.
Or you challenge him and you become Mike Pence and they're willing to hang you.
That's how fascist masculinity works.
So when I see these men dressed like him, everyone's like, why would you do that?
And it's because the choice they have for success in this twisted, toxic world of masculinity and power is to be an imitation and a submissive extension of the divine masculine who is the strongman leader.
I got more to say on this.
I want to talk about a book I've talked about before called God's Phallus, which none of you expected I was going to say.
And you're all wondering, like, oh, my God, could today get even worse with the men?
But going to talk about God's Phallus in a second, Dan.
But give me some thoughts on the four treasons and the men all dressed in Trump uniforms.
I want to talk about, too, about the women that were there.
So I will say Kristi Noem is there, Lauren Boebert, some others.
But we can get there, too.
Go ahead.
Yeah, I think the two words that struck me for this are like, you know, apart from all this, but feed into what you're saying, are fealty and loyalty.
They are there to show fealty, to do homage to Trump.
And they are there to like, not saying you're loyal to Trump, saying the right things is not to be visibly present.
As this loyal follower of Trump, to be visibly present imitating Trump, you had Gates and Boebert sitting in the row behind Trump while he's on the stand.
Literal proximity to him is a sign of loyalty, a sign of submission, a sign of emulation, a sign of all of that.
And I think what you're highlighting is it's not just about Trump's ego.
It's all part of Trump's ego.
Right.
Like, I think we can never I don't know if it's possible to overstate the role of ego in motivating Trump.
But it is a fascistic ego.
Right.
I mean, it's it's that's that's what sort of like fascism and authoritarianism.
That's how they work.
I think also in really concrete terms, this notion of imitation was key this week, because what also happened is, as you say, it was very theatrical, it was very present, you have the images, but they also talk to reporters, and they are not limited by gag orders, right?
And so they get to literally be the mouth of Donald Trump, who can't say all the stuff he wants to say about the judge, and the witnesses, and Cohen, and Daniels, or whomever else, And so they come out and they work as his mouthpiece to say all the things that he right now can't for legal reasons.
So it's both symbolic, I think, like sort of enacting this kind of symbolic and psychological association.
It's politically calculative.
Yeah, somebody wants to be the Veep, right?
Somebody wants to be the candidate for this.
They all want to curry Trump's favor.
But I think the benefits for Trump are also really on display of, you know, the political support.
You've got the Speaker of the House.
The Speaker of the House showing up to his trial to show solidarity and support, it's even more telling than having him travel down to Mar-a-Lago, in my view.
But then to have them coming out before the cameras to say the things that Trump can't, it just sort of feeds further into that.
It helps him to do what he can't do otherwise.
I think that was a really key component as well, is that there are these elements that you're highlighting, all the kind of The visual and I think symbolic pieces of this really, really, really concretely important roles that these folks are playing as they say the things that Trump can't say due to things he can't do.
Fascism is an aesthetic, right?
You know, Ruth Ben-Ghiat talks about it.
Jeff Charlotte talks about it.
It's an aesthetic.
And we saw that this week, I mean, with these guys.
It's comical, man.
It is comical.
Can you imagine getting up in the morning and dressing like Donald Trump to try to impress him?
To be his VP.
Now, I'm just imagining Brad and Ishii trying to dress like me to impress me.
So, like, I'm viewing you right now in, like, flannel shirts and, like, cargo shorts and, uh, I don't know.
Cargo shorts are back.
They're in.
You are unintentionally cool.
I'm so out of date that I'm cool again.
Yeah.
So, all you need is the flannel shirt and maybe a band shirt or a shirt from a place you've been underneath it and you're all set.
Okay.
I'm going to think about it.
All right.
Here's a book that I read in grad school.
I've written about this book.
I've talked about it here.
I'm going to talk about it again.
So a man named Howard Eilberg Schwartz wrote a book called God's Fallas.
And in that book, he puts forth a provocative thesis.
I understand that all biblical studies scholars may not agree with it, but it's certainly, I think, worth mentioning in this case.
He talks about the prohibition in Israel, ancient Israel, on Uh, envisioning or, or drawing or sculpting Yahweh.
So the Israelites and the Jewish folks in general do not make icons, sculptures, idols of their God.
Right.
And this is, you know, in the 10 commandments, you're not going to make idols, the golden calf incident.
Many of you are like, I'm jogging your memory.
Great.
Auerberg-Schwarz though says, look, it's very interesting because despite not creating these physical images of Yahweh, God, there's a lot of descriptions of Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible and especially in places like Exodus, right?
Of God's mouth, God's hands, God's voice, okay?
We also have these descriptions in the books of Hosea and Ezekiel of God as a sexual agent who's very Jealous of Israel because supposedly Israel has cheated on him with other gods?
Okay.
And what Albert Schwartz says is that ancient Israelite masculinity was always unstable because Israel was in a monogamous relationship with Yahweh.
That there was this sense that if you look at the context of the ancient world, the ancient Near East, if you look at the way that Israelite religion was set up in relationship to other traditions and peoples of the time, so on and so forth,
And you look at the books of, and we could go down the line, Ezekiel, Hosea, Isaiah, there's a lot of reason to imagine the relationship between Israel and Yahweh as a monotheistic and monogamous relationship between Yahweh the male and masculine figure and Israel as the feminine female figure, okay?
What that means, if you're an Israelite man, is that you are supposed to be, in the world, an extension of Yahweh.
You're supposed to be this masculine image of the God who created all things, like Yahweh, the Yahweh of Ezekiel, the Yahweh of Hosea.
You're supposed to be angry, jealous, controlling, dominant.
But when it comes to you and Yahweh, just you and Yahweh together, Moses up on the mountain, You're not masculine.
You're feminine.
You're supposed to submit.
If that's what feminine in this case means, and I'm not saying that that is what feminine means, but if that's some sort of image of a feminine role, then you are supposed to be the one who submits to the authority and power and dominance of Yahweh.
So as an ancient Israelite man, Albert Schwartz argues, You're always acting in this unstable role as, on earth, I control things.
I'm dominant.
I'm in charge.
But when I approach God, my spiritual husband, I'm submissive.
I am passive.
I am whatever.
And we get these arcane, traditional, retrograde gender roles all baked into that whole equation.
Dan, when Donald Trump is the fascist wannabe leader of the American right, when he talks about himself as being created by God to do special things, when so many American Christians envision him as anointed by God to lead the nation and say he's the one that can save us, I see a similar thing at play.
That if you are going to be in Trump's orbit as Doug Burgum or Vivek Ramaswamy or J.D.
Vance or Senator Rick Scott or whoever, You have to do two things.
You got to go in the world and and emit that hyper masculine, misogynistic aura that Trump is wanting to spread everywhere he can.
But when you approach Trump, You are submissive.
You are deferent.
You dress like him because you don't have an identity.
Your identity is just an extension of him, and when you're with him, you submit to the direct power and aura of the one who's been chosen, who is the image of God on earth.
That's what I see at play when I see these guys dressed like Trump looking like sycophants just in the most degraded, humiliating fashion on television this week.
Does that make any sense?
Am I way off?
Is everyone like, wow, Onishi just gave us 10 minutes on ancient Israel and gender I didn't want?
What do you think?
No, I think it's right.
The dynamic you get at is this strange dynamic of exercising authority understood as a form of hyper-masculinity, as violent masculinity.
That's what authority is.
Right up until the point when Yeah, you have to literally sort of bow and scrape and obsequiously sort of kowtow to the other person who you have to submit to that person's greater masculinity.
I think, yeah, there's all kinds of contradictions there that we could bring in.
I guess we could make, you know, if we really wanted, we could...
Bring that back into the NFL and like, you know, all of these, I guess I just am always, always, always struck by the deep insecurities and contradictions of that vision of masculinity.
Whether it's the deep insecurity and having to proclaim your power and authority all the time.
Whether it is the exercising of authority only on the understanding that you submit properly when the real authority comes in, the sort of trying to, I don't know, repress all of these things about what it is to be a human being until you're in certain conditions, on and on.
I think it's one of the most contradictory positions to hold, and I think we see it all the time in things like this.
If you just sort of pull on those threads a little bit, I think those things really come into view.
But Michael Kimmel writes in his book, Manhood in America, he talks about how if you envision masculinity as dominance, right?
If masculinity comes down to dominance, whether over women or other men, then when men are worried about their masculinity, and if they're masculine enough, what they're really saying is, I'm worried other men will dominate me.
And then what happens in the Trump orbit is Doug Burgum or Vivek Ramaswamy or J.D.
Vance is like, well, I'm going to go dominate other people.
Right, J.D.
Vance is such a tough dude.
You see him on CNN, he's Mr. Tough Guy.
He's Mr., you know, he's very combative.
But then when he gets into the Donald Trump orbit, he knows the choices.
I have to just recognize I'm not the one who's going to dominate here.
Ron DeSantis tried it.
Went really bad.
Mike Pence didn't go along, almost got hung.
So, if dominance and masculinity are synonyms, then you're always going to be, oh, so insecure as a man, because your whole identity as a person in the world is, who can I dominate and am I going to get dominated?
Because to lose in any way is to have your masculinity denied.
You create a zero-sum game.
Because that's how everything is.
It's all a competition.
It's all a dominance game.
It's all who can dominate whom.
Anytime you don't, it threatens, like, your core identity of who you are.
There is no sort of middle ground, and it is.
It absolutely breeds a kind of tenuous and insecure existence.
And so I guess this is, I mean, there's a whole conversation here about like other forms of masculinity.
They might say, hey, instead of like thinking about ourselves as dominators, why don't we think ourselves as like other stuff?
People who are in the world with other meanings.
But when it comes to a fascist wannabe leader like Trump, it means that masculinity is about, I'm the dominator.
I'm I am the strong man.
You're not going to be stronger than me.
So if you want to be in my orbit, you better extend my strength.
And then when you talk to me, you look down and you don't you don't think that you and I are the same.
You submit or you get out.
Like you can see this in the Michael Cohen testimony and how Michael Cohen used to talk to Donald Trump.
He was scared.
He was nervous.
He was anxious.
It was not a relationship of mutual respect to be employee and employer.
All right.
Let's take a break.
We'll come back and wrap up with with Perry and Abbott and some other stuff.
I just have to throw this in, Dan, for today, and I'll throw it to you.
I'll just mention it.
Greg Abbott, he pardons Perry, who told somebody, he texted a friend, I'm going to drive into this stream of protesters.
And if they get in front of my car, I'm going to run them over.
He talked about black people and Muslim people.
And then when somebody he thought was polling on him, et cetera, he shot him plain blank.
This is the type of man.
This is the type of man that apparently, whether it's Trump or Abbott or anyone else in the country, wants to hold up as the kind of person we should pardon.
And I'm sure he'll be making the rounds with Kyle Rittenhouse and everyone else as a right-wing hero here pretty soon.
Any just off-the-cuff thoughts about this before we wrap up today?
The first is just don't come at me with the, oh, but all lives matter line, right?
Like people get upset about, why do they call it black lives matter?
All lives matter.
Call black lives matter because as Abbott made clear, the black lives did not matter as much as a white life in prison, right?
Like, period.
And the second is?
He was a real man.
He dominated.
He exercised that masculinity and he's now been rewarded for it.
So, for those who say like, you know, accuses either making everything about race all the time or making about masculinity all the time.
I get people who tell me that.
It's there.
It's right there on the surface and it fits perfectly with what we've been talking about for the last 15 minutes.
Abbott's another one who in the Trump years has, you know, in the time Trump's been around, has just doubled, doubled, tripled, quadrupled down on these kinds of policies and these kinds of things.
And you see the way Abbott and Dan Patrick and others in Texas talk.
It's like, can we be the toughest of the toughest men?
I mean, it's always this contest.
Right?
Of who can dominate, who can be harder, who can be... And as you say, Perry, oh, he showed.
This is a virtue.
Driving through protesters and killing someone is a virtue here.
That's so scary.
All right, Dan.
Give us a reason for hope.
And you better not talk about the Kansas City Chiefs.
Do not do it.
I'm not.
The presidents of Barnard College and Columbia both had votes of no confidence against them this week, at the same time that police departments involved in there have had to, as a result of reporting and accounts of people who were giving medical aid at the time, have contradicted police reports that there were no serious injuries and so forth.
It was something like two thirds of the faculty at Columbia voted no confidence in their president.
Those are our votes that don't sort of have teeth.
They can't remove the president or something.
But I took hope in that that, you know, after this kind of onslaught of police violence against protesters and so forth, we're beginning to see the sort of a rebound in that.
And so that that came out this week.
And for me, the two are linked, the vote of no confidence, because it was about the way that the police were used, the way that they were called in, the notion that this was done without consultation with other members of the university and so forth.
So I took hope in that.
I took hope from Representatives Crockett and Ocasio-Cortez, who did not allow Marjorie Taylor Greene to just get away with some of the lowest of the low rhetoric in a committee yesterday.
If you watch the clip, it's really just... But Ocasio-Cortez in particular, right away, jumped in and said, no, you cannot insult the looks of another member of the Congress.
But, you know, I know many of you see Taylor Greene on memes and wherever else, but if you watch her in action, it's even worse by a hundredfold.
And Ocasio-Cortez, Representative Crockett, they both didn't stand for it.
And I appreciate that fact.
And Jamie Raskin's also in that committee and had some good comments.
So anyway.
All right.
Appreciate you all.
Just cannot say enough how much we are so thankful for you being here, being part of our community, being part of this show.
Send in your questions, straightwhiteamericanjesus at gmail.com.
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