Weekly Roundup: Examining the Fallout: Trump's Verdict, SCOTUS Revelations, and Texas Curriculum
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Brad and Dan discuss the harsh rhetoric from the American right in response to Trump's recent conviction on 34 felonies, including calls for retribution against Democrats. They explore the significant ethical issues surrounding Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. The episode also covers Texas' proposed public school curriculum changes that push a Christian-centric education, and reactions from a Mexican American family's departure from Idaho due to feeling unwelcome. The hosts emphasize the dangers of the current conservative landscape and its implications for American politics and education.
00:00 Introduction: Should Democrats Be in Jail?
00:26 Reactions to Trump's Conviction
01:04 Exploring the Supreme Court Fallout
02:09 Texas School Curriculum Controversy
02:33 Weekly Roundup and Personal Updates
04:04 Discussion on Trump's Verdict and Political Reactions
18:30 Clarence Thomas and Supreme Court Ethics
29:26 Frustration with Institutional Norms
30:08 Texas School Curriculum Controversy
31:54 Religious Influence in Education
38:46 Parental Concerns and Ignorance
46:01 Texas GOP Convention Highlights
53:25 Mexican American Family's Idaho Experience
59:46 Concluding Thoughts and Reasons for Hope
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When Donald Trump gets elected, should he start locking them up?
No question.
Should there be lists of Democrats that need to go to jail?
100%.
The reason for that is they've committed crimes.
And the reason why we put them on trial is that we can show the whole world, we will uncover what you've done, we will make sure everyone knows, and you will be held accountable for it.
Not just jail, they should get the death penalty.
It's been one week since Donald Trump was convicted on 34 felonies.
The reactions from the American right have been alarming.
You just heard Tim Pool say that Democrats should be put in jail and that political vengeance should be at the top of the list for the next Trump administration.
At the end, Laura Loomer jumps in to say, not just jail, but the death penalty.
Today we'll explore the ways that the American right has responded to Trump's conviction.
Not only pundits and podcasters such as Poole, but also sitting officials.
We'll look at the dangerous rhetoric and what it means for the summer ahead.
We also dive into fallout at the Supreme Court.
Ways that the National Review and other right-wing institutions are capitalizing on Justice Alito's use of the Appeal to Heaven flag at his summer residence.
New revelations about Clarence Thomas and the gifts he has received over the years from large donors.
Here's Chris Hayes talking about it last night.
New data out today from FixTheCourt takes a look at the value of gifts to justices over the past 20 years, both disclosed and then undisclosed gifts that were subsequently reported out.
To take you through just a handful, that'll give you a sense.
Justice Elena Kagan's calculated to have received gifts valued at just under $1,200.
That's over 20 years.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, over $59,000.
Again, over 20 years, $3,000 a year.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, over $59,000.
Again, over 20 years, $3,000 a year.
Now, Justice Samuel Alito taking quite a bit more, $170,000 over 20 years.
But none of that is in the zip code of the ballpark of Justice Clarence Thomas, whose gifts totaled over $4 million.
$1,000.
Finally, we'll head to Texas, where new school curriculum proposals would inject Christian doctrine, Christian teachings, and Christian scriptures into Texas public schools.
We'll talk about that, as well as a story out of Idaho of a Mexican family who moved there to be around more conservative political communities, and yet are now leaving because they feel unwanted.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is the Straight White American Jesus Weekly Roundup.
Good to see you, Dan.
It's been a while.
You've been away and dealing with important stuff, but it's great to have you back.
Thanks.
Yeah, my mom is not well.
Had to go deal with some things with that.
And thanks for picking up the slack and folks dealing with that and pre-recorded segments and all the stuff we get to do.
But yeah, glad to be back.
Not glad to be back in the humidity.
I've been out west where there's no humidity.
It's where I grew up.
Like, the first thing I noticed when I get off the plane the other night is how hot it still is when it's dark.
So, anyway.
Yep.
Yep.
I'm not going to do it.
I want to talk about humidity.
I'm not going to do it, Dan.
I'm going to resist my days in D.C.
and the East Coast because it's boring.
But it also is so miserable, the humidity.
All right.
Friends, if you're wondering, we're gonna get to our special episode, our bonus episode, as soon as we can.
Dan's obviously been away, so we haven't been able to do that, but we will get there as soon as we can, and we'll get back to normal here.
So if you're wondering about the bonus episode, it is coming.
Today we're going to talk about- It'll be like a double bonus.
It'll be two bonus episodes in a kind of short period of time this month, I guess, to make it up.
I'm not talking- You're not promising that?
I'm not talking for four hours on the microphone.
That's a lot.
That's a lot.
Anyway.
So, we're going to talk about the fallout from the Trump verdict.
Not going to spend all day on it, but there is some alarming stuff and some things to talk about.
We're going to roll into that, Alito and Thomas, because there's just always Alito and Thomas news, and it gets worse.
From there, we're going to go to something that is going under the radar a little bit, partially because of the Trump verdict, and that is news out of Texas about school curriculum.
Robert Downen and others have really just done a fantastic job on this.
And we'll end up today in Idaho with a Mexican family, Mexican-American family that moved there from California and is moving home now to California because they found a climate in Idaho that didn't work and just kind of want to take a moment to reflect on that as well.
So that's what we're up to.
Let's talk about these reactions to Trump's verdict, Dan.
So first of all, let's just talk about Trump.
Trump has said a couple things that are worth mentioning.
Not going to go into great detail, not going to play the clips, not going to do the whole thing, but I do think we should just get him out there.
He said that he may need to jail political opponents.
He talked about it may need to happen to them.
So that's been one of Trump's reactions.
Another one has been To say that there's a line that, you know, there's only so much the American people can take.
And if he goes to jail, that may cross the line and who knows what will happen.
I mean, that was the kind of implication and very Trumpian cadence kind of response to questions from from an interviewer.
So Trump himself has done nothing to help this.
And that's all we expected.
But, you know, we need to comment on that just because we expected it doesn't mean it's not a big deal.
The man is A former president, he may be president again, and here he is stoking violence and saying he will jail political opponents, something we've known for a long time.
Alright, that's out there.
Mike Johnson is somebody who's had his own reaction, and I do want to play you a clip from Mike Johnson because what he said is alarming, so let me play that clip for you now, Dan.
Well, look, I do believe that the court needs to address that clearly.
We have to set a standard here.
There's a really important principle of immunity for a commander-in-chief.
I mean, that's always been part of our legal tradition, and it makes good sense.
You can't have somebody sitting in the Oval Office worried about some rogue prosecutor somewhere, some Soros funded DA or some lawyer that's going to come after them for their decisions.
And so that principle needs to be made concrete and needs to be expanded.
I think this court will do the right thing because they see the abuse of the system right now.
And that's the greatest peril here of all at the end of the day.
This transcends even Donald Trump.
It's about whether or not the people believe in our institutions, our system of justice.
There's nothing larger than that in our system.
I mean, he's so casual here.
He thinks that the Supreme Court justices will get this worked out and that he knows them.
He talks to them and no big deal.
Like, he saw Sam while he was, you know, out there getting a latte this morning and he saw Clarence.
At the tennis club and him and Brett maybe drink beers together?
I don't know.
We know Brett Kavanaugh loves beer.
So who knows?
Beer pong?
Maybe at Mike's house?
I don't know what they're up to.
But apparently Mike Johnson's just Speaker of the House.
Talks to the Supreme Court Justices.
No problem.
And they'll get it worked out.
It's like a little issue.
It's like Junior got in trouble at Georgetown.
You know, he was cheating and he just talked to the Dean.
We'll get it worked out.
No big deal.
Just a bunch of rich, elite, privileged people talking to each other.
Now he's since rolled that back a little bit because it didn't sound great.
But Mike, you were pretty casual here, man.
And I think we got the feeling of how you feel about the Supreme Court.
There's others.
There are others out here.
So I think one of the things I want to take notice of, Dan, is a kind of temper tantrum by Mike Lee and a bunch of Senate Republicans.
Mike Lee is somebody who in 2016 did not want Donald Trump to be president.
If you go back and look at Mike Lee from 2016, he's telling him to not to not run.
And now he's saying that Democrats have made a mockery of the rule of law.
It's un-American.
They've turned our judicial system into a political cudgel.
And they must be held accountable.
He's also said that there will be no more cooperation.
There will be no more working with Democrats.
They're essentially not going to govern.
He says we will not allow any increase to non-security related funding for this administration.
Two, we will not vote to confirm this administration's political and judicial appointees.
Three, we will not allow expedited consideration and passage of Democrat legislation or authorities.
This is signed by Mike Lee, J.D.
Vance, Eric Schmidt, Rick Scott, Marsha Blackburn, Roger Marshall, Senator Marco Rubio, and Tubby with love from Russia Toberville.
He's been spouting Russian propaganda all week.
Sorry, I had to get that in there.
So, Dan, there's this sense from the Senate Republicans here that the Democrats just orchestrated the trial in the state of New York to convict Donald Trump.
So once again, we've talked about this.
I don't want to just go over the same old stuff all the time.
I just do want to point out that there is this widespread reaction to the Trump verdicts that does not include, as you said last week in your tape segment, Hey, maybe he was guilty.
It was a jury of his peers.
Or I don't think he did, but the jury has spoken.
The people have spoken.
That's how this works.
And yeah, you've got the right to appeal, but until they do, this is the decision that's been made and blah, blah, blah.
None of that.
So, none of that's happening.
And the question is, do the American people care?
And if you listen to Mike Johnson, Mike Johnson's gonna tell you that, yeah, there's something happening out there.
Like, Mike Johnson's a man of the people.
He's out there, like, really, he's really feeling it, you know what I mean?
Now I'm, like, imagining Mike Johnson dancing, and that's the worst image I've ever had.
But, like, You know, like whenever Mike Johnson's like, I've been out here and talking to the people, I'm like, bro, what people have you been talking?
Like, what did you?
How many sprites did you have at that, like, cafe in Iowa?
Come on, man.
You haven't been out there.
Anyway, it doesn't matter.
Maybe somebody's been giving him Zima.
Remember Zima?
The stuff that just tasted like Sprite?
Maybe he doesn't know.
He's a little looser than he thinks he is.
Grandiose visions of mixing it with the people.
Out there wearing a bandana and a vest with no shirt.
Just out there getting it going.
Alright.
So here's some polling from the Data for Progress.
New Data for Progress polling feel that after the guilty verdict was announced finds that a majority of voters, 56%, including, and Dan, here's where I think it's important, 60% of swing voters approved the jury finding Trump guilty.
Now, I could go on and on about this data.
There's strong data that a lot of independents approve of this and they see it as important.
Now, I will also say, Dan, after doing this show for almost six years now and us living through the Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump election and everything in between that and today, polls are things that are really hard to trust at this point.
I'm sorry.
So am I going to sit here for the next 40 minutes and pontificate about what it means that 60% of independents find this good or approve of it?
No, I'm not.
I will say that If you go back about two months, I said that I thought the story from now till election time had been set up.
We had our characters.
We had our events.
We had our arcs.
Those included Gaza, Palestine, and young voters, the Democrats.
Those also included Donald Trump and his cases.
Three of those four are not going to trial before the election.
What's happening in Georgia?
Nope.
Jack Smith?
Nope.
Florida?
Nope.
None of it.
It's not happening.
This is the only one.
So I will say, it does seem to me that the general take of the country outside of MAGA land, which is a minority, is that yeah, this is important and it does bear on things.
What does that mean in terms of polls and numbers?
No idea.
And I'm not going to sit here and pretend to know.
But I will say I do think the Americans, the American public as a whole, does not see it the way Mike Johnson says, who claims he's been everywhere all at once and that people are revolting because they are in support of Donald Trump.
So tell me about what you think about these reactions to the Trump verdict, if anything.
And then we'll get into the Alito Thomas stuff and leave this stuff behind for today and move ourselves to Texas.
I have no thoughts of that.
Good to have you back.
Good to have you back, Dan.
No, so again, all the responses are pretty predictable, and I don't want to repeat everything I said last week either.
I think one thing that stands out, and I think people recognize this, but it bears repeating, and it goes straight to your point about taking polls with a shaker full of salt at this point.
This is irrelevant for people who are never going to vote for Trump.
There are not, I think, any, say, Biden voters or Clinton voters who are like, well, you know, I was really on the fence this time, but this really settled it for me.
There are no MAGA people who are not going to vote for Trump because of this now.
So it's going to come down to this thin little sliver of true independents.
By true independents, I mean, we mentioned this before, political scientists, social scientists will show that most people who are labeled as independent vote reliably with one party or another, right?
So there's a much smaller number that are actually One might think of swing voters, truly undecided voters.
It's a super small, in my opinion, pretty small percentage of the American population, but our elections are decided by really, really small percentages of the American population.
So I think that's going to be significant moving forward to see what happens.
I think the sentencing is going to be significant and for a number of reasons.
I mean, number one, what is the sentence going to be?
Is it going to come off to those who oppose Trump as some sort of slap on the wrist?
If it's, I don't know, some sort of like house arrest or something like that.
If he does actually get jail time, which is possible, is, you know, that's just going to feed the narrative that they were after Trump and that this was all a conspiracy and so forth.
I think.
It's like a fractal point where things can go different directions, right?
If the sentencing isn't significant, does that tell some people that say that it's significant that he was convicted?
Well, maybe it wasn't such a big deal.
He got house arrest for a little while.
He got an in-house suspension in school once, and that wasn't so bad.
It wasn't such a big deal.
How's that going to play out?
I think it also keeps it in the news.
On the other hand, the Republicans can't just put it in rearview mirror and let it go.
So I think a lot of variables moving forward.
But I think what we really have to watch and what pollsters and others will be watching is battleground states, the effect there, undecided voters, those kinds of things.
So I think those are the biggest issues.
I think one is that, as I say, keeping it in front of people will be important.
And the Democrats are not clear yet on how to do that.
You watch their responses have been actually really muted.
They don't want to be seen, I think, as feeding into the narrative that this was all a political targeting and so we're going to maximize it.
But I think they need to keep it in front of the public that Hey, the GOP nominee is a convicted felon.
That's not a hypothetical anymore.
He is, in fact, a felon.
So keeping that in front of people.
So I think just a lot of moving parts and variables as we go through the summer into the fall when we really kick into the high gear of the election cycle.
So what we do know is that the, so I want to say two things.
One, I said last week, and I stand by this, I think this does matter emotionally.
I think if he does get a sentencing that is more than community service or probation, that will matter to people.
Because I think emotionally, people are going to be like, finally, finally, justice.
Finally, somebody punishing someone who has been You know, flouting the law and flouting American norms and processes who, inside a direction, finally something happened to him.
So I think it's important.
I think it's important for enthusiasm and for who's going to vote.
We talk a lot about independent voters.
I want to know who's actually going to vote because, you know, some people are going to stay home.
Some people are not going to care because they're going to find this boring.
Like right now, Dan, the NBA finals are on and, you know, my team is not in the NBA finals.
The Boston Celtics are in the finals.
As a Laker fan, I hate the Celtics with everything I have.
The team, not the players.
My wife and daughters could play for the Celtics.
I would still root against them.
That's how I feel about them.
But they're playing against the Mavericks, and for whatever reason, I just hope they lose, but I'm not compelled to watch.
I don't know why.
I don't know what it is.
I'm not... I didn't watch last night's game.
Here's my point, is like, I'm just not voting in the NBA Finals.
Like, I know who I want to lose, but I'm not, like, carving out my schedule to make sure I watch.
I'm worried in this election who's going to make time to go vote, right?
Those college kids.
Are they going to stand in a three-hour line?
Are people who have two jobs and three kids and it's hard for them to vote because we don't have a national holiday?
Are they going to vote?
So that's what I'm thinking of.
Let me say one more thing.
We know how MAGA World feels.
Tim Pool says put him in jail.
Laura Loomer says they deserve the death penalty.
And the Proud Boys on their Telegram channel.
Trump is, of course, getting railroaded, but we will not be walking into any honey pots over this thing.
We're not going to get in trouble.
Nonetheless, other Proud Boys, like from the Ohio Proud Boys chapter, are saying it's time for war.
Fighting solves everything.
Now, more than ever, we are recruiting.
Come join us.
The Proud Boys, as Reuters reports this week, are back.
They're building, they're recruiting, and they're trying to recover from all the sentencing.
So, we know how MAGA World feels.
They want Dems and everyone else in jail or put to death.
That's a really good reminder of, like, possibilities of if Trump is elected once again.
All right.
Let's go to two other men leaders who are behaving badly, and that's Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas.
So, Dan, I'm going to just throw this to you.
You take Thomas.
You always take Thomas.
I'll take Alito.
We now know that Clarence Thomas has received something like $4 million in bonuses, perks, from like billionaire donors.
That's a big deal.
In comparison, Elena Kagan has taken like $1,200 in 20 years.
Sam Alito has taken like $180,000.
years.
Sam Alito has taken like $180,000.
Clarence Thomas, $4 million.
Does it seem to you like it's hard to get a fair shake if you can be a billionaire who gives a justice like $100,000 vacation or something else and you can kind of see how he's starting to feel about certain things with What do you take from the Clarence Thomas revelations?
Yeah, so first you finally disclose these things retroactively, like some of these things are from like 2019 and so this all goes to the dust up that first started all this for the ProPublica report uncovering this.
Yeah, it sort of boggles the mind.
And to me, it boggles credibility, this notion that you're going to receive $4 million worth of largesse from powerful interests who, directly or indirectly, are going to have issues before the court.
That's how this works, right?
I know that Crowe's name is not listed as a defendant, or he's not on one side of the so-and-so versus so-and-so in the Supreme Court.
But as I think we all know, the sort of American oligarchs, they have their fingers and their tendrils in everything, right?
They are powerful interests, and as powerful interests, they are impacted by the court all the time.
It just defies any kind of expectation that it's not going to have an effect.
We talked before about, again, for all those Christians supporting people like Alito and Thomas, avoiding all appearance of evil.
It appears corrupt.
And just to put it in perspective, I'm a professor at a college that most people have never heard of.
It's not a big thing.
I can't take, like, vacations from, I don't know, parents of students who might do it.
Well, he didn't take your class this year.
If he happens to be your class in the future, I'm sure you'll be fair, Professor Miller.
I'm sure it won't matter that we flew you down to the Bahamas to have a good time and, you know, whatever.
Of course we know it's not a pay-to-play system, right?
I can't do that.
I'm pretty sure I'm not allowed to do that, but I haven't received gifts, so I don't actually know I wouldn't, because it's weird.
So yeah, it's just, it's ridiculous.
The whole notion of it is ridiculous.
There are people who do biographies of Clarence Thomas and have done deep dives into his history who said that he has long been bothered that Supreme Court justices don't make more, that they don't They can't cash in the way that some other people can.
Nope.
This is his way of doing it.
Nope.
You know why, Clarence Thomas?
Because, look, you're really smart.
You're really, really capable.
You are really, really well connected.
Leonard Leo's like one of your best friends.
If you wanted to make money, you could have gone and made money on K Street and anywhere else.
You could go now.
You could leave.
Like, that's the thing, right?
No.
So, yes, as a Supreme Court Justice, no, you don't make as much money as you would if you were some attorney in private practice or if you were a lobbyist or whatever, but you could turn around tomorrow and do that.
To me, the parallel to this, for me, is like when super, super rich and famous people Complain about having like no privacy.
And don't get me wrong, I don't think paparazzi should be like people's backyards or like peering in their windows and stuff.
But when you're like, I can't go out to a restaurant without having to do autographs.
Cool, just stop doing what you're doing.
Cash in, go buy a house like the one that I live in that's like a regular person house and a regular person neighborhood.
Announce on Instagram that you're sort of leaving public life and then like delete your account and you could have all the anonymity you want.
So yeah, it's completely just bogus nonsense.
But Clarence Thomas wants, in my opinion, he wants everything.
He wants to be Clarence Thomas.
He wants the prestige of being a Supreme Court justice.
But he wants to cash in on it.
And I think he sold his ideological soul a long time ago to be able to do that.
And I think that this is the evidence we see We can compound it with Justice Roberts refusing to talk to Congress about it, the refusal to put in like a real code of ethics.
The Supreme Court has long played by a different set of rules from other courts.
The fact that, you know, protesters aren't allowed at the Supreme Court the way that they are other places has always sort of driven me nuts, this bastion of free speech and so forth and sort of On and on and on.
But I think he is absolutely as corrupt as anybody ever thought that he was.
The fact that he just gets to quietly report these now, I think just brings it into starker relief.
And I just invite people to just think about, in your own life, what would happen if, I don't know, your clients gave you that kind of If you're a teacher and the student's parents are giving you vacations, if you're a doctor and your patients are buying you stuff, just on and on and on.
There are all kinds of fields where we recognize how corrupt this is.
And it's just free reign if you're in the GOP, which I think Thomas is, in the Supreme Court.
Yeah, there's so much.
I'm not going to do it.
I'm so angry about this, the fact that he wants to cash in.
I'm not going to, I'm going to resist my tangent.
I want to talk about Alito because we're going to run out of time as usual.
So let me just, let me just tee up Alito.
Annika Brockschmidt sent me this this morning and I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was.
The National Review, Dan, is now selling Alito flags.
So it's an Appeal to Law flag with Alito's face on it and a pine tree.
A clear, like, allusion to the Appeal to Heaven flag.
You can buy the Appeal to... You can also buy another flag with the American flag, essentially, with an altered number of stars on it.
The flag's cost, the Alito-Bennington battle flag, costs $197.
$197.
So, no.
And look, I don't know.
This is a new story.
I don't know what Alito, if anything, will say.
But Dan, it is so troubling to have Clarence Thomas take $4 million over X number of years in terms of gifts or whatever else.
It is also so troubling we now have a justice who has acted in a way That an outfit like the National Review can take his likeness, put it on a flag, completely politicize it, completely use it for a certain political end, and sell it to folks who are now going to fly that on their house.
And he could come out and say, don't do this.
It's wrong, right?
He could have come out a long time ago and given some explanation.
He could have just never flown the flags.
But to me, the theme of this whole first segment today is fallout.
Trump gets convicted.
Do you take responsibility, GOP?
Do you say we have to trust our process?
Jury.
Normal Americans doing their—nope, none of that.
Mike Johnson, Mike Lee, everybody—J.D.
Vance, they're all writing letters and getting on TV saying it's a travesty.
Clarence Thomas.
We've known for a long time.
He's been hanging out with billionaires.
Is there any... What's the fallout?
He doesn't take responsibility.
You said it, Dan.
He wants it all.
He wants to be nasty rich.
He wants to have the most prestigious law occupation in the country, Supreme Court justice.
And he wants to have a wife who is out there, like, you know, doing incredible, extreme activist work for MAGA World and claimed that none of it affects none of it.
The four million doesn't affect anything.
Ginny Thomas and everything she's up to, that doesn't affect me either.
Okay.
You just, you get it all and none of it seems to touch each other.
Is that right Clarence Thomas?
None of it infringes, none of it's entangled.
Sorry if I don't believe you.
And then there's Alito.
Two flags, fallout.
What's the fallout?
A whole segment of America has now politicized your face.
And it just weakens the court's credibility because you're just this guy who's on a flag now.
You're like Trump.
You're like anyone else who they're flying on a flag.
Ashley Babbitt and everyone else that they've got on flags at these rallies and in these spaces.
And it's just you want to talk about why people don't trust our institutions.
It's because we keep having leaders who don't value our institutions.
Donald Trump doesn't care about American institutions.
He cares about Donald Trump.
The Supreme Court justices seemingly don't care about what they've done to the court.
And this is where we are.
If Alito wanted to distance himself, it's not hard to do.
You just issue the statement saying that Like, you think of bands that do this all the time, right?
Like, they have their music when some candidate walks up onto the stage and the artist says, sorry, I really don't want you playing my music.
Like, I don't support you.
What do they do?
They stop playing the music.
Even for show.
Alito won't do it.
And I'm sure that the argument would be, hey, I've got nothing to do with it.
Is there free speech?
I'm a big fan of free speech.
As long as, you know, you're a conservative Christian.
I'm Justice Alito.
All about free speech.
God, how could I tell these people to take my face off a flag?
It'd be an infringement on their free speech.
Yeah, it wouldn't.
He could.
He hasn't.
I think, again, if Thomas revels in, I think, the wealth and the prestige, I think Alito revels in the attention.
I think he basks in The persona that he now has and rightfully earned of being the GOP supporter on the Supreme Court.
The contrarian.
The contrarian.
Yeah.
And lots of things published looking at the case law and how often, which is all the time, he sides with conservative positions on the court.
I think he now is just leaning into that and sort of basking in the glow of that.
And I think that that for him is his badge of honor that he's happy to carry around.
But we can have rules, and we do need a revamped code of ethics for the Supreme Court.
I wholeheartedly agree.
You know what?
I think we need new ethics for SCOTUS, and we need to expand the court.
I'm totally in favor.
If you want to ask me about it, that's what I think.
You know what we also need?
Here's what we also need.
We need leaders who don't want to cash in, who don't want to cause firestorms, and who take the duty, the sacrality, The dignity of their office?
Seriously.
That's what I want.
Rules would be great.
Ethics codes?
Wonderful.
Expand the court?
Sounds good.
You know what I also want?
I want to get out of this stupid age where everybody is just testing the institution as far as they can go and saying, well, that's a norm, not a rule, so come get me.
I'm Clarence- You want character.
You want character, not rules, not just parameters, but people who act because they are actually people of character.
And this is what I talked about last week with Hank Willenbrink is Trump infects your politics.
He shows you how Possibilities can be achieved by way of no character.
And then everybody copies him.
And the Supreme Court just doesn't lean into it too.
And I'm tired of it.
Let's take a break.
Come back and talk about Texas.
Okay, Dan.
This is a big story.
It was largely overlooked because of the Trump verdict last week.
This story is about a week old.
But we need to talk about it.
What's happening in Texas?
Yeah, so I've leaned pretty heavily in the Texas Tribune, which looked at this a lot, so hats off to them.
So a couple things out of Texas.
The first we're going to talk about is school curriculum, right?
Yay, that sounds like super exciting, but we all know that the school curriculum has been, I should say specifically public school curriculum, has been its own battleground issue, culture war issue for some time now.
And sort of backdrop to this, as of 2019, so right immediately before the pandemic, half of Texas students, or less than half of Texas students met grade level standards for reading on standardized tests, and that number has declined even further since the pandemic.
So, the Texas Education Agency, the TEA, has released new proposed curriculum this week All right.
So far, no story.
Nothing big.
Kids are not doing as well in school as the standardized tests people think that they should be doing.
And so they're going to revise the curriculum and put it out and try to help kids.
Cool.
Great.
The TEA says that these materials are based on cognitive science to improve scores.
So they're rigorous, Brad.
They're scientific.
They're designed to help the students.
It's promoted as a shift from a skills-based curriculum to a more broad-based liberal arts curriculum.
Now, I'm a liberal arts professor.
That warms my heart.
If we want to talk, I could talk for hours about the value of the liberal arts education and what's lost with skills-based focused and so on.
Sounds great.
So what's the problem, right?
Liberal arts here is a code for Christian.
That's what they mean.
A liberal arts education, what they're doing is bringing Christian teaching into the public school curriculum in Texas.
And this is why it has created an uproar.
I think the rationales that are given and the way that this is framed is part of why it's flown under the radar, right?
We have legitimate issues with grade-level performance.
We need to rethink how we're going about teaching kids, etc., etc., etc.
All valid education goals and so forth, but it's code for Christian, right?
Why do we say that?
Because the materials for reading and language arts, in particular, those subject areas, are infused with materials on the Bible and Christian teaching that just sort of runs throughout the curriculum.
Now, if somebody says, well, it's a public school.
You can't do religious instruction.
Well, here's the issue, right?
Texas will say and is saying, hey, schools don't have to adopt this.
It's completely voluntary, Brad.
They're not forced to.
They'll get better funding if they do.
We'll pay, I think it's an extra $60 per student in funding if they adopt the new curriculum.
But hey, you know, we're not making anybody do this.
If they don't like it, they don't have to.
TEA Commissioner Mike Morath said that the religious materials are, quote, small pieces of the content pie, end quote.
It's probably true.
I'm sure the math and science sections probably have less about Christianity.
Maybe not.
Maybe there's stuff about evolution and geology.
I don't know.
And this is what he says as well.
I'm going to come back to this phrase.
He says, quote, it's just where it makes sense to do that.
And he also says materials from other traditions are included, right?
An initial review, though, shows that religious references are widespread in the materials and that the Bible references are the most prominent.
They by far outweigh any other kind of religious expressions.
Mark Chancey, religious studies professor at Southern Methodist, is quoted a number of times by the Texas Tribune.
He says, and I agree with this, he says there's nothing inherently inappropriate with teaching about the Bible or other religious texts as long as it's done neutrally.
In other words, Brad, you and I are religious studies professors.
We know how to do this.
We do this on a regular basis.
You can teach about religion Without endorsing religion or a religious view, this is not what's going on in these Texas materials.
Lots of people have noted that stories in the Bible are presented just sort of side by side with historical events, taking for granted that they're historical fact, and so forth.
And as he points out, that is, Professor Chancey, he says, teaching about religion is different from giving religious instruction.
And this is what he's trying to do.
And I think we see this, if we come back to that phrase, we're just putting this in where it makes sense to do that.
All right, let's look at where it makes sense for them.
So, some examples.
The Proposed State textbook has excerpts of Martin Luther King Jr.' 's Letter from a Birmingham Jail.
Great.
Standard.
Produced in a lot of places.
It's paired, Brad, with the biblical story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.
If people remember the story of Daniel in the Lion's Den and things like that, that's the context.
Their defiance of the Babylonian leader was given as an example of civic disobedience by King, and so that's the purported rationale.
But the curriculum omits all the material about the intended audience of King's letter, right?
And people will remember we've talked about this on the podcast before.
King's letter was aimed at white moderates and clergy who he chastised for critiquing civil disobedience.
So there's no context of King's Letter, and you have this story from the biblical book of Daniel that's sort of presented alongside MLK materials.
The curriculum promotes lessons on Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper.
Great, cool, an important artistic piece.
It has a biblical reference to it, fine, we understand, but it's alongside the Gospel of Matthew?
Which of course focuses on Jesus' crucifixion and his atonement for human sin.
What that illustrates, just those examples, is that the framing and the content are the real key with this.
Last point I'll make and then I'll throw it over to you before we sort of move beyond this into other stuff going on in Texas.
Chansey also points this out, the Southern Methodist University professor, He says that the proposed instructions on religious liberty in the original colonies, he calls it a, quote, tremendous oversimplification.
How so?
He says it doesn't discuss the persecution of dissenting religious groups like Quakers or Baptists, or we could add Catholics, or we could add Jewish people, right?
And he suggests that it masks the real lesson from the period, which is, in his words, quote, the dangers of religious favoritism.
Why do I bring that up?
I bring that up because the framing matters, right?
It's the framing of the myth of a kind of American founding that everybody who came to America came for Christian, you know, and religious freedom and founded this Christian nation and we're a beacon on a hill and everything we've done is good and so forth.
This is religious instruction.
This is religious indoctrination.
This is theological teaching.
This is not We're teaching people to read critically, and one of the things that we'll use is, you know, a text from the world's largest religion, right?
That's a very different framing of this.
The last piece, and we're going to go into this and more the other piece that should make people suspicious, is the week before these materials were proposed and released for consideration, the Texas GOP had their annual meeting and called for what?
Requiring Christian instruction in public schools took a hardline MAGA stance.
We're going to dive into that more, but if somebody says to me, you know, they're just talking about, you know, liberal arts stuff and you're a religious studies professor, you should know the value of knowing about religions.
You can't understand world events.
Without knowing about religions, lots of people have talked about how teaching English literature is hard now because most Americans are pretty religiously illiterate, and you have all these texts with references to biblical and church history, and people don't know what it means.
How can you be opposed to this?
Because it's religious instruction.
It's religious indoctrination.
This is what it is, and the framing of it for me sets it up.
Got more to say about the GOP annual meeting, but first your thoughts on the education side of this and this move.
Sorry, one last point that I should make.
Another reason this concerns people is Texas is a really big state, and oftentimes textbooks that are produced for Texas get adopted by lots of other places.
This is another dimension to this, right?
This is not just about Texas.
I'll take a breath, dive in.
What were your thoughts?
I'm sure you fully endorsed this as a religious studies professor.
Yeah.
So, this has real-world consequences.
So, I want to just link two things.
I published an interview on Monday with Mike Hicksonbaugh.
That interview is all about his new book.
They came for the schools.
It's in Texas.
And it starts with a couple of students from South Lake, Texas, who are white, and they post to social media a video of themselves in which they say the N-word.
There's a firestorm in the community, and then another video appears, and the community's like, what are we going to do about this?
Now, the story ends with not a racial reckoning or changes to the curriculum.
It ends with a Christian nationalist takeover of the school district, a hard right MAGA movement within the town.
And over and over again, Dan, and this is something I asked Mike about on Monday, Parents coming forth and telling the school district, I don't want you teaching my kid stuff that I don't want to talk to them about.
So here's how the logic goes in the book.
And I'm not making this up.
If y'all go read Mike's book.
Yeah, I know.
Yeah.
And Mike, you know, I asked Mike about it Monday.
And in the book, though, there are so many people who come forward and say things like this.
Hey, You guys are teaching my kid about minorities.
My kid doesn't even know what a minority is.
He's 10 years old.
And guess what?
I don't want to tell him.
I don't want to talk about that.
So you shouldn't be talking about it.
There's other people that are like, my kid doesn't know what the n-word is.
I don't really want to talk to him about it.
Why should you?
And it happens over and over.
So here's my point.
When it's things that don't fit the worldview, that don't fit the social structure, that don't fit the societal order that the white person wants, the white Christian nationalist wants, the conservative person wants, you know what the drive is for?
Ignorance.
Do not expose my children to that.
Don't do it.
I can't believe you would teach a child what a racial minority is.
I can't believe it.
I don't want to talk about that.
I don't want to do it.
Next thing you're going to be saying is season the food.
You want me to put seasoning on the food?
Are you serious?
I don't want to tell my kids what paprika is.
Or cumin.
Turmeric?
That's perverted.
No way.
We're not doing... Right?
And yet... Sorry, Dan.
Aren't you glad you came back?
And yet, when it comes to teaching the Bible, when it comes to teaching the Book of Daniel, or Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, or whatever else, it's like, no, this is just, we're just teaching children great moral lessons from one of the classic texts of Western civilization.
We just want a broad and expansive and informed curriculum.
Now it's just all about exposure.
What?
Dan!
Certainly you, a man with a PhD, a learned scholar of Oxford, can see the value in teaching our children these biblical texts so they might understand Shakespeare someday.
How will they ever read the poetry of Yeats without knowing the New Testament, Daniel?
Please, Dr. Miller, certainly you can see how this should go.
When it does not fit, it's ignorance.
When it does fit, it's just impose on you what they want.
And that's how it works.
Yeah, so, first, you've got young children.
And you know what, Dan?
My child is 18 months old and if you tell her what a minority is, you're never coming to my house again.
Go ahead.
I've got kids that are a little bit older, but the reason I bring this up, kids come home from preschool and they open their mouth and stuff comes out and you're like, oh geez, where was that?
Where did they hear that?
Or they come home from what I discovered when my daughter started middle school.
Is that older middle schoolers like to swear a lot.
They think swearing is awesome and they do it all the time.
And she comes home and opens her mouth and words fall out.
I'm like, great, cool.
Like, how do we, I don't know the best way to respond to this.
Like, whatever.
I wish life worked that way.
Parents need to grow up to be like, could you just, I'd like my kids not to have questions about things.
I'd like my kids not to maybe have opinions that are different than mine.
I would like my kids to only like things I like.
Whatever.
So to all of that whiny parent thing, I'm like, just stop.
I think the weaponizing of ignorance, and lots of people have written about this, and lots of great African-American theorists have talked about this for years, the sort of cultivating ignorance about race.
As then sort of an alibi for your actions, a kind of willful, a willful unknowing of certain things, and that's what this is all about.
Other pieces of this, like we talk about this, and I know this is a bit of a tangent, I could go off on it further than I will, but the whole appeal to Western civilization thing, right?
We've talked about this, the selectivity of including Judaism in like quote-unquote the Western canon, that whole story.
Daniel in the lion's den, Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, happens where?
It happens in like Iran and Iraq.
That's where it happens.
But now, selectively, those are not places that are far off and oppose the West.
No, that's part of Western civilization, right?
That's where the story, like, it's just, it's all such a construct and it drives me crazy when these people who have, as you say, they've cultivated this ignorance, they have opposed It is.
The liberal arts and critical thinking for decades, that has been their mission, now suddenly want to pretend that they're appealing to these things to justify religious instruction in public schools.
It is.
Let's talk about the GOP meeting, but here's my 30 seconds of opining on parenting.
I know.
You're gonna hear it.
I just look at it, man, like you brought these kids into a thresher of a world.
A just, rushing, Difficult condition of being human.
And like, if you want to be a parent, you got to own up, man, that you brought these folks into something they didn't choose and is excruciating.
Being human is so hard.
And so if you just want to give them the joy of Disneyland and birthdays, but you don't want to be a parent when it's time to talk about the overwhelming vulnerability and tragedy of being human.
Then don't talk to me about being a parent.
Don't talk to me about it.
Talk to me about something else.
You want to talk about birthday candles?
Good for you, Jeannie.
You want to talk about taking them to Epcot Center?
I'm glad to hear it there, Jeff.
But like, when you can't handle that you brought them into a world that is full of unavoidable, unavoidable pain.
And mortality.
Then don't talk to me about being a parent.
I'm good.
I stopped listening a long time ago.
I started thinking about, you know, that French detective novel I'm going to read tonight when you got on that kick, because my ability to listen to you about parenting just went out the window.
All right, Dan, what happened at the GOP Texas meeting?
So, the convention railed, among other things, right?
They had their annual meeting, and the first thing to say is, you read the excerpts of this, you see clips of it, and so forth.
It looked more like I don't know, the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention or something than it did a political meeting, a meeting of the political party.
So the Texas GOP had their annual convention.
They started by railing on supposed democratic indoctrination of students in schools.
That's part of the framing of this whole thing, right?
Schools were front and center.
Here's a statement from the State Board of Education chair in Texas, Aaron Kinsey.
Kinsey promised to advance Republican interests.
A promise to oppose critical race theory, diversity, equity, inclusion initiatives, or quote, whatever acronyms the left comes up with next.
So openly partisan, openly hostile to anybody who doesn't share their worldview in a public school system that's supposed to educate all students, right?
Regardless of creed, regardless of ethnicity, regardless of, say, religion.
Uh, and here's what Kinsey said.
You have a chairman who will fight for these three letter words.
G.O.D.
G.O.P.
and U.S.A.
That's... I know, right?
That's what they made up.
Wait, Dan, is U.S.A.
a word?
That's an acronym.
Am I wrong?
I don't think you're wrong.
I'm just saying that Aaron Kinsey... So, the chair of the... Wait a minute.
Are acronyms words?
I mean, I guess an acronym is a word, but anyway.
Dan, I'm just saying more liberal arts might help us here.
We have to say USA, because the head of the Department of Education doesn't know the difference between words and acronyms.
So, yes, that was the quote.
Delegates also urged the lawmakers and their Board of Education to do what?
To quote, require instruction on the Bible, servant leadership, and Christian self-governance.
So, the week before these curricula that had been promised are sort of advanced, and of course they didn't write the curriculum in a week, this was already in the works.
This is part of the framing.
This is part of what tells us what's really going on when I talk about this quote-unquote liberal arts sort of education here.
All of this is consistent with the overall themes of the convention.
It consistently situated American politics as spiritual warfare.
We talk about this all the time.
That language was front and center.
It pitted Christians against demonic Democrats and forces on the left.
Steve Hotz, who's a once-fringe, indicted election fraud conspiracy theorist who has become mainstream, had this to say, to give just one example.
He said he was pleased by the party's growing embrace of his calls for spiritual warfare, again with, quote, demonic, satanic forces on the left.
And here's what he had to say.
He said, quote, people that aren't in Christ have wicked, evil hearts.
We are in a battle and you have to take a side.
We've talked about this literally from some of the first episodes we ever did, right?
The painting of this in apocalyptic terms, in Manichaean terms, and so forth.
These were common themes.
Here's some other excerpts from this.
Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick of Texas said, quote, they want to take God out of the country and they want the government to be God.
Senator Angela Paxton of Texas said, a state senator, quote of the Bible, excuse me, getting all worked up, our battle is not against flesh and blood, it is against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.
None other than US Senator Ted Cruz.
Republican Senator from Texas said, look at what the Democrats have done.
If you were actively trying to destroy America, what would you do differently?
I, by the way, if I was trying to actively destroy America, there's lots of things I would do differently.
Ted Cruz.
The point is that the whole thing is situated, it's Christian nationalism, it's at the center of it, to tie it back to that previous segment.
Education is front and center.
A couple other things worth noting though, they also took aim at elections and basically party purity, making sure that the GOP remains the party of ideological purity.
They approved changes that would punish dissent on the part of anybody in the GOP.
So if you are in the GOP and you're, I don't know, a state senator, state representative, you're holding some office somewhere, if you are censured by the GOP in the state for holding some contrarian position, maybe you say something crazy like, I don't know, Donald Trump should abide by the finding of a jury that found him guilty.
If you are censured, you cannot appear on a ballot as a GOP representative for two years.
So to make sure that they have their own party purity, just on and on and on.
There were the calls that churches were afraid to engage because of anti-Christian government forces.
The usual things about the Marxist socialists on the left undermining Christianity.
On and on and on.
This is the context for this, and I think what the education piece shows us are, as you said, the real world consequences, the consequences on the ground, that this is not just rhetoric.
People will say the Texas GOP convention has long been a place for sort of the most ardent and kind of what, crazy GOP ideas are often embraced.
They're often not fully put into policy and so forth.
But this is all front and center.
It's there.
And as I say, it was a Christian nationalist rally where that was front and center and present.
Calls on the schools to help produce new Christian nationalists, on and on.
Your thoughts, Brad, on what we saw with the GOP convention in Texas.
Well, I'll be brief and we need to take a break.
So I'll just say that when you talk about, Dan, you and I have both taught the humanities for decades now.
I, I I've taught in programs that are supposed to be about teaching this mythical idea of Western civilization.
And the whole time I was in that program, I was with other faculty saying, this should include more Muslim texts.
This should include black authors.
And there's always that fight.
But here's the point.
When I think about the humanities and liberal arts, I think about dissent.
I think about, like, what is—we can go to what, the form?
You want to go to, like, Plato and Aristotle and all the debates of the philosophers in the public square?
Like, when I teach students the humanities, my goal is, let's be in a room together—10, 15 people.
Let's think about, read about something really, really important and difficult.
Let's articulate our ideas about it.
We're not going to agree.
Let's learn from each other and then let's go home and we're going to keep talking, keep dialoguing.
That's the exact opposite of everything you just described with what sounds like a conformist, authoritarian party, where if you even voice one article of dissent, you are not allowed to be on a ticket.
You know what that does not sound like to me?
Freedom.
At all.
Let's take a break.
Be right back.
OK.
Last thing for today, Dan, is a story out of Idaho.
So many people sent it to me.
I just I told you last night we got to talk about it.
So there's a there's a family on TikTok who made some some waves this this week.
They moved to Idaho three years ago.
And then they made a TikTok all about how they're leaving.
And they are a Mexican-American family.
The article actually is not that clear, at least from my reading of it, of if both the husband and wife in this family are Mexican-American or one of them.
Anyway, they have two children and they talked about their leaving Idaho for a number of reasons.
They moved there because they wanted to get away from California politics.
They are conservatives.
They don't want to be in Newsom's California and all the restrictions.
However, What they found in Idaho, they claimed, was a conservative state that was judgmental, where everybody gossiped about everyone else, where kids forget to say please and thank you, where they talk about the new people moving here for a better life as in the negative.
One of the statements is, we left California because of politics but forgot there are other kinds of politics to consider.
Now, It's a TikTok.
It's not an essay.
It's not a 40 minute video.
I don't know the whole story.
I don't know everything about this family.
They did a dance while they did it.
They did not do a kind of sit down like here's 25 minutes on our reflections.
It's not something that I can dissect in earnest.
What I will say though are the reactions to this are really telling.
So there have been a bunch of people online commenting on this that have said we've had the same experience.
I've actually talked to former members of my church who've had similar experiences.
And I'll just make two comments and I'll throw it to you and then we'll wrap up for today.
There's something we've said from the beginning of this show that I think is easy to overlook and that is that For a lot of white Christian nationalists in this country, not all, and the New Apostolic Reformation is a really good example of this, not all, but for many, whiteness is a driving part of their story about themselves and their country.
And the Christianity is a really helpful component for making that story coherent, making it transcendent.
And so what you hear from Idaho conservatives, because I've done this in my research, is that everyone's welcome here.
We just want to be like-minded people.
As long as you're like us, and you believe in no gun control, and you believe in libertarian values, and you believe the government should have no role in your life, and Jesus is Lord, and you're good.
Come on up.
You're good.
And then a Brown family moves there, and they end up leaving, and it's like, yeah, I guess we weren't good, because a lot of people didn't want us.
And, you know, there's folks that will report out on this, that there's swastikas on the Anne Frank monuments, that there are hate crimes against people of color.
Just to remind everybody, one of the reasons extreme and radical right-wingers and Christian nationalists have targeted Idaho and Montana as an ideal place to live is because those places are 93% white.
You know, we just talked about Texas, and I've said this a million times.
Texas has Austin and San Antonio and Houston.
So, so, so many Latino people.
So many black people.
So many Asian people in Houston.
You don't have that in Boise.
And so you can be a Brown family who has the same politics as the folks up there.
And guess what?
You still might get harassed.
You still may not feel welcome.
I just think that's something that needs to be pointed out.
Now, if you read the article, here's my second point.
A lot of the people are like, no, I moved here three years ago and I've had a great experience.
It's like going back in time.
I feel like I live in in Mayberry.
Everyone's so nice to me.
I can't believe it.
And there's no indication that those people are people of color, at least on my reading.
I can read it again.
And so the different experiences based on your identity, based on how you're socially read, is telling here and really important.
So, you know, I'll throw it to you for brief thoughts before we go to reasons for hope.
What do you think about this story?
Yeah, so I've also read similar sorts of stories about this.
And I read, I cannot right here on the spot, I can't think where I read it, but there was an account of people moving back out of Florida recently.
And what struck me about it was that the people in that story, I believe, were from Pennsylvania originally, or maybe they went from Florida to Pennsylvania.
I don't remember where they started.
The point is, what they had in common is they're all political conservatives.
And I think what it speaks to is that there is still, I don't know how, but there is still this realm of people who have conservative values who really, really don't get that this is what conservatism is now.
And the reason I bring that up is the case with Florida.
They said, man, it's politics all the time.
You have to be ideologically pure.
It's not enough to just be conservative or just vote Republican or go about your daily business and, you know, I don't know, have lower excise taxes on your car or not have a state income tax or whatever.
You have to be ideologically pure.
And we weren't and it was too much and we had to go, right?
People who are conservative, Finding that, oh, gee, yeah, this Christian nationalism stuff that everybody talks about, wow, that's real, and it really is that far to the right, that if you're not right enough or white enough, you don't fit in.
And I think this also illustrates a point that I make to my students all the time, that American religion, when we talk about religion in America, religion is essentially an ethnic category.
You can plot so much about identity in America If it's about religion, it almost always is about race or ethnicity as well.
And that is especially true geographically if you're looking at particular regions, and it's especially true if you're looking on the axis of white and African-American.
Sometimes there's more ambiguity with Asian-American context.
Sometimes there's more ambiguity, as you say, in states like California or Texas or Arizona or New Mexico with higher Latinx populations.
But I think it highlights all of that.
And that's what really stood out to me is the fact that these are political conservatives for whom It's a good point.
It's well said.
All right, Dan.
left, but they go somewhere else.
And it turns out they're not right enough.
They're not white enough.
Christian America is leaving them behind as well.
Yeah, that's a good point.
It's well said.
All right, Dan, what's your reason for hope today?
My reason for hope ties with something that we saw earlier, but there was a sort of do-over poll after Trump's conviction that There was a New York Times-Siena College poll, and they re-polled the same people that they had polled before after the Trump conviction, and Trump's lead fell from three points to one point.
Now, we talked about polls, we talked about all of that.
What it shows is that there is an effect, and there is an effect among some people who prior to the trial Had said they would vote for Trump now, and it's June, it's not November, right?
In June, say that they would rethink that.
And so I took hope from that, ties in what we talked about before.
Completely unrelated, I am also going to note that we are recording this on National Donut Day.
And so I feel like that's just, if not a reason for hope, certainly a reason just to, you know, to be a little happier in the midst of some bad news.
So my daughter, my older daughter, her favorite things in life are rice.
When I ever ask her what she wants for dinner, she says rice.
My 10-year-old still will eat rice as like a meal.
We are Asian-American.
She does eat it with her hashi, with her chopsticks.
Her second favorite thing is sushi, California roll.
Her third favorite thing are donuts.
So anyway, just want to throw that in there.
My reason for hope, I don't know if this is a reason for hope or not.
And bear with me, Dan.
I have talked to journalists over the last week from so many countries across the world.
France, Germany, Sweden.
I got somebody from Japan wanted to talk, the UK, other places.
In some sense, it's scary because they're bracing for a Trump presidency and they're trying to figure out what's going on.
In another sense, it's good because they're really taking Christian nationalism seriously and seeing it as something that is driving American culture.
And every time I've talked with these folks, they've been intensely interested and wanting to help people at home understand Why religious folks like Mike Johnson would stand outside the trial of a president who is on trial for paying a porn star money and doing so in God's name.
And it's hard to figure out if you're looking from afar, from across the world.
But it is good news to me that so many of them are trying to get this right.
And so we'll see what happens with that.
All right, y'all.
Good to have you back, Dan.
Thanks for all your insight today.
We'll be back next week with regular programming, including It's in the Code, and we'll get our bonus episode up as soon as we can, so look forward to that.
For now, we'll say thanks for listening.
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I'm doing some pop-up courses this summer, so if you'd like to come and hang out and learn about authoritarianism, Christian nationalism, and so on, check that out.
The first one's coming up June 13th.
We'll be back, as I said, next week, but for now we'll say thanks for being here.
