Weekly Roundup: More Supreme Court Controversies, SBC Condemns IVF, and Georgia's as a Lab for Stealing 2024
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Brad Onishi and Dan Miller examine the shocking comments by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito caught on tape and contrast them with Chief Justice John Roberts' more measured approach. The hosts also delve into the Southern Baptist Convention's recent resolution condemning in vitro fertilization (IVF) and its implications for reproductive rights and the 2024 elections. Lastly, they discuss Georgia as a testing ground for voter suppression tactics designed to benefit Trump and the GOP in upcoming elections.
00:00 Introduction: The Challenge of Polarization
01:19 Supreme Court Controversies: Alito's Shocking Comments
01:55 Analyzing Alito and Roberts: Trust in the Supreme Court
02:04 Southern Baptist Convention and Reproductive Rights
02:22 Georgia's Voter Suppression Tactics
02:55 Meet the Hosts: Brad and Dan
04:43 Supreme Court Justices Undercover: Alito and Roberts
30:48 Reflecting on Political Discourse and Integrity
31:11 Supreme Court Controversies: Then and Now
34:34 Southern Baptist Convention's Stance on IVF
38:24 Political Implications of the SBC's IVF Resolution
50:00 Georgia: The MAGA Movement's Testing Ground
51:06 Election Integrity and Voter Suppression Tactics
59:32 Hope Amidst Political Turmoil
01:01:01 Upcoming Events and Final Thoughts
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And considering everything that's been going on in the past year, you know, as a Catholic and as someone who, like, really cherishes my faith, I just don't, I don't know that we can negotiate with the left in the way that, like, needs to happen for the polarization to end.
I think that it's a matter of, like, winning.
I think you're probably right.
I think one side or the other, one side or the other is going to win.
I don't know.
I mean, there can be a way of working, a way of living together peacefully, but It's difficult, you know, because there are differences on fundamental things that really can't be compromised.
It's not like you're going to split the difference.
And that's what I'm saying.
I just... I think that the solution really is, like, winning the moral argument.
Like, people in this country who believe in God have got to keep fighting for that to return our country to a place of godliness.
Oh, I agree with you.
That was Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito talking to the filmmaker Lorne Windsor on June 3rd of this year.
His comments are nothing less than shocking.
They reflect a binary understanding of the world and of the country, one in which one side must win and the other side must lose.
The comments come in the wake of the controversy surrounding Alito's flying the Appeal to Heaven flag over his summer residence and the flying of the Upside Down American flag over his primary residence.
Lauren Windsor also spoke to Chief Justice John Roberts, who gave a much different response to her comments about the state of the country.
Today we'll break down what both of them said, analyze what it means, and analyze the ways Americans are losing trust in the Supreme Court as an institution.
We then turn our attention to the Southern Baptist Convention.
The SBC is the largest Protestant denomination in the country, and it just voted to condemn in vitro fertilization treatments.
What does that mean for the future of reproductive rights and religion in the United States?
And how will it affect the 2024 elections?
And finally, we turn to Georgia, which has become a laboratory for voter suppression, for taking resources away from election officials and election programs, a place where new laws are making it harder to stay in voter rolls, and where voters who are registered are being purged for no reason.
And laying the groundwork not to certify the 2024 election if Donald Trump loses.
It's a constitutional crisis four years in the making and one built on the resentment and grievance of Trump's loss in Georgia and the Democratic victories in the Senate.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is the Straight White American Jesus Weekly Roundup.
Hello, Dan.
Good to see you.
Brad, how are you?
Are you, um, you know, it's summertime.
Are you still employed?
How's your, what's your title these days?
Well, I am still employed.
What really matters... Are you still a professor at Landmark College?
I am still a professor at Landmark College.
That's how out of it I am.
What I really wanted to start with, though, like really, is something you can't do anything about and people won't know, but I am currently wearing a shirt about a place I have been and a hat about a band that I'm into.
Well, there it is.
Yes, I am professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
I have been up to my eyeballs in, like, complicated reading the last two days, so my brain is sort of mush at this point, so we'll see how it goes.
For those in the know, I've been reading, you'll appreciate this, Brad, Analytic Philosophy of Mind.
Oh my.
Which is about as far from my wheelhouse as you're likely to get.
So for people who are like, what is that?
Why would you want to do it?
The answer is I wouldn't.
So yeah.
So I'm out of it.
For those of you who are not regular listeners or you're new or something, Dan has a proclivity for wearing shirts from places he's visited like Bangor, Maine or Long Beach, California.
He also wears band hats and I detest both of those things.
So that's a long running What Brad's trying to say is he's an elitist and thinks he's above such things.
If this podcast ever ends, it'll be because we have just not been able to negotiate on these things.
Speaking of which, Dan, that's a nice segue.
Let's start with the Supreme Court Justice.
Dan, give us the rundown.
I'm sure most people have heard some of the clips, maybe have seen a headline or two, but what did Sam Alito say?
What did Justice Roberts say?
I have a clip for us so we can listen to Justice Roberts.
And what's the news here?
And then we'll break it down.
Yeah, so the first gist of this setup is, as you say, that a progressive filmmaker, Loren Windsor, basically posed as a conservative and secretly recorded Justice Alito, Marianne Alito, his partner, and John Roberts, and kind of got them to say things that they would not have said if she had said, I'm Loren Windsor, you know, progressive filmmaker.
As you say, it was at the Supreme Court Historical Society's annual dinner, and the recordings revealed a number of points.
I think none are probably super surprising.
I find the things Robert said really interesting, and in my view, I think, at best, super naive, but we'll get to that.
But we'll start with Alito, right, whom we've talked about.
And again, some of this is not news.
It's not surprising, the stuff Alito says.
I don't think anybody who follows Alito is like, wow, what a shock to hear him say that.
But what's telling, I think, for all of us is this was like, they thought, a safe space, right?
This is a space full of conservatives or just talking to another conservative over dinner, they thought.
And so I think we're getting a kind of unvarnished insight.
So Windsor told Alito that she this was sort of the setup.
She said that she could not see herself again.
She's posing as a conservative, right?
She couldn't see herself getting along with liberals, quote, in the way that needs to happen for polarization to end.
And the reason she said she couldn't do that is that the court should be about winning.
I just want to highlight the trumpiness of that, right?
That the court's about winning.
It's not about justice.
It's not about equal rights.
It's not about constitutionality.
It's about winning.
And this is what Alito said.
And I'll just quote this.
Folks are going to hear it.
Some will already have heard it.
You can jump in here in a second.
He said, I think you're probably right.
On one side or the other, one side or the other is going to win.
I don't know.
I mean, there can be a way of working, a way of living together peacefully, but it's difficult, you know, because there are things and fundamental things that really can't be compromised.
That's the point that you were referencing earlier.
They really can't be compromised, so it's not like you're going to split the difference.
He goes on then to agree with her assertion.
She makes an assertion.
He agrees with her assertion that we should fight to, quote, return our country to a place of godliness.
So that was the Alito statement.
And we can maybe pause with that for a minute.
And I'd love to hear your reflections.
One of the things about Alito is if anybody pays attention to his public speeches, right?
I feel like he's like at Notre Dame all the time giving speeches and things like this.
He says this.
He cries about how, you know, Christian freedom of speech is limited and, you know, America's not being a good Christian country and all that sort of stuff.
So I don't think it's surprising.
But what I think what shows is Alito views himself as a partisan of Christian America.
This is the accusation that's made against him.
This is the thing that he tries to play down in public.
But here it's very clear that, as you noted and as he says here, You know, there are fundamental things that can't be compromised, and we need to return the country to a place of godliness, and so he seems to kind of embrace his role with that.
And again, I think it just kind of brings into the open what everybody already knew.
He also talked some things about, you know, the leaks in the Supreme Court and things like that, but I think that these are the statements that are really of relevance and interest to other folks.
So, we can jump to what his wife had to say, we can look at Roberts, or you can jump in on a leader here.
Let's talk about Alito.
So Alito, as you say, I think this is unvarnished.
And so I want to say two things about Alito quickly before we go to the other recordings.
One is, This is the same thing I said about the flag, but I'll say it about a historical society dinner.
Lauren Windsor explained to CNN and every other outlet out there this week that all you have to do is pay $650 to be a member and then pay for the dinner and you can go.
So she did that.
And no, she did not walk up and say, hi, I'm progressive Lauren Windsor.
Nope, didn't do that.
But you know what, Dan?
Here's the thing.
You're a Supreme Court Justice.
You're in public.
Everything you say, people will hold on to.
You're not running for office.
You're not trying to get election support.
You're not trying to get donations.
You are a part of a nine-person body, which, as I've said over and over the last couple of months, is not elected, is a lifetime appointment, so you have the highest duty to be responsible to your role.
You will not be held accountable by voters in four years, or two years, or six years.
So when you go out in public, guess what I think?
This is just me.
I don't care if you think you're talking to Lauren Windsor or Ginny Thomas, Sam Alito.
Don't talk like this.
Don't talk like this at dinners.
Don't do it.
Everyone is entitled to their personal opinion, but as one of the nine justices on this Supreme Court, there's no way that you should talk like this to a stranger.
It's just... And you can say, well, he thought he was with other conservatives.
Don't care.
If I'm a Supreme Court Justice, Dan, someday, I mean, I don't know, maybe I go back to law school and it just, yeah, really happens for me.
Sometimes Dan laughs with me, sometimes it's at me.
I can tell you that I'm sure I'll have two or three friends who when we sit at night in one of their homes or my home and share, you know, have a bottle of whiskey and once in a while I'll tell them things like on my mind, like in the innermost workings of my soul.
I'm not going to do that at a dinner out in public where I might be recorded and all this other stuff.
That's number one.
Now to the content of what he said.
Dan, we deride, we criticize people on this show almost every week who reduce the world to a binary.
You and I had that experience as evangelicals.
It's much of the reason we left that worldview.
We don't like it when it's done by pastors.
We don't like it when it's done by conservative think tank types or professors.
I criticize that intellectual apparatus and a worldview all the time.
And yet he does it again.
It's the left and the right.
We can't compromise.
There's no way to negotiate.
There's just some things that you come down and you say, one of us has to win.
And I just want to stay on the winning part.
Like, I know that the winning part's a little bit mumbled in the recording.
Are they talking about the court?
Are they talking about the culture wars?
Whatever.
But think about everything we've talked about with Trump over the years.
It's just about winning.
Political nihilism.
The goal is power.
The goal is victory.
The goal is not justice.
The goal is, right?
And I know Sam Alito would, if he were interviewing him right now, he'd be like, of course the goal is victory and justice the way that God wants it.
And I'd say, great.
But to frame this as just winning, not negotiating a public square where all Americans flourish, not negotiating a public square where all of the people who represent this republic in all of its diversity, religious and racial and ethnic and gender and sexual, can find a place to live and thrive.
Nope.
It's about winning against the left.
Like everything, Dan, we think we might hear from Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, Alex Jones on a good day.
We hear from a Supreme Court Justice.
And so when he flew the Appeal to Heaven flag last week, I was just talking to Matt Taylor for an episode of Narwatch this morning, and it's like, you know, Alito's response is like, Mrs. Alito flew the upside down flag and the Appeal to Heaven, we just, American founding.
And like Leonard Leo, when he was asked about the Appeal to Heaven, it was like, I'm just really into maritime history.
And now it's like, what you just said about winning and not negotiating is everything the Appeal to Heaven flag stands for.
That's exactly why people use that symbol.
They don't want to negotiate.
They want to win.
They want victory.
They don't want dialogue.
They don't want debate.
They don't want a public square based on democratic living together.
And that's what's so upsetting about these comments.
So I just I just look this up because this is something that's striking, because everything you're saying about it being public is right.
You pay to attend, but it's not a lot.
There's not you don't have to punch a card somewhere saying that you're a conservative.
It's anybody can go to this or any ideologically speaking, anybody can go to this.
He clearly didn't know Lauren Windsor.
Like they're clearly not life.
You know, been friends for 10 years.
He doesn't know her.
When all the things with the flags came out and Alito was, you know, he wrote a letter to Congress saying why he would not recuse himself from J6 things.
And this is part of what he said.
He wrote in that, right?
He said, and I'm quoting from, I think I'm on NBC News here.
Alito said in his letter that in both instances, quote, a reasonable person who is not motivated by political or ideological considerations or a desire to affect the outcome of Supreme Court cases would conclude that no recusal was required.
So that's what he said.
What he's saying there is a reasonable person I would never conclude that flying the flags and whatever indicates that I'm a partisan person who is going to rule in a particular way, that I feel like I as a Supreme Court justice have an ideological stake in the decisions that I'm making.
And that's the issue.
I've used the illustration before.
You know, I'm a big Denver Broncos fan.
I'm never going to be an official in the NFL.
But if I am and I'm ever going to like, you know, have to officiate a Broncos game, I'm going to have to show that I can not be like a Broncos fan for three hours and like officiate the game neutrally.
That's part of what being a Supreme Court justice is.
So he says that.
I mean, what was that last week or the week?
It was probably the week before, maybe three weeks ago.
My timeline's muddled, but it was recent that he wrote this letter because the flags came out.
Two weeks ago.
Two weeks ago.
Thank you.
People in Congress are trying to get him to recuse himself, and he writes this letter.
And then here he is, as you say, with somebody he knows is not a trusted confidant.
You know, they're not, as you say, they're not sitting in the basement watching Netflix, you know, having a couple beers and talking about stuff between friends.
There's no non-disclosure agreement signed.
I don't know, any of that kind of stuff.
And he says something that directly flies in the face.
Of what he said to Congress.
If I'm Congress, I'm looking at this and saying, hold on, here's another public, like a statement you said in a publicly open venue that seems to fly right in the face of what it was that you told us about where you are.
So I think it, again, brings right out in the open what's there.
And this kind of open secret that's not even a secret about some of the justices in the Supreme Court at this point, who are clearly not Aiming to find justice.
The fact that he accepts this logic of winning, that it's about winning, not adjudicating.
Those are two different things.
Not judging something or rendering a judgment, but about winning and losing, I think says, I think it says everything.
And I think it tells us exactly who Alito is and that he is who we have thought he is.
A lot of folks have been pointing to this this week, but I'll do it now.
I think it's worth it.
In 2022, right after writing the opinion on Roe and the overturning of—I'm sorry, the opinion on Dobbs and the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Alito gave a speech in Rome.
And a couple of things happen in this speech that I think are really telling about who Alito is.
One, he says in the speech with like super sarcasm and snarkiness that he was like really hurt that Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, spoke to the United Nations and was upset with the ruling and didn't like what had happened in our Supreme Court.
Once again, Sam Alito, you're a Supreme Court Justice.
Stop.
Why do you need to be, like, getting in online debates and fights with, you know, Prince Harry or anyone else?
Who cares?
Like, why do you need to respond to them?
But the second thing is what he said.
He said, religious liberty is under attack in many places because it is dangerous to those who want to hold complete power.
OK, so religious liberty is dangerous.
So this is like an allusion to some sort of Marxist, Soviet-style, complete-powered government.
It also probably grows out of something dark and deep in the human DNA.
A tendency to distrust and dislike people who are not like ourselves.
Sam Alito, I hate to say it, A, I don't agree with your understanding of religious liberty, but B, when you talk about winning and not negotiating and the left and wh- You sound like somebody- Who has a tendency to distrust and dislike people who are not like you, which you claim is something dark and deep in the human DNA.
It sounds like religious liberty is a cudgel here, a weapon, and everything everyone else who doesn't agree is under suspicion, and you've divided the world into us and them.
How can you call balls and strikes on the Supreme Court If that is the presupposition you're bringing into every case.
I want to jump to Martha Annelito for just a second.
Then if we're going to talk about that, you know, hate and whatever.
So she.
I didn't know anything about Martha Anelito really before this.
She does not come off looking like a really, I don't know, just person that most people want to sit down and probably have a cup of tea with after this.
She brings up, that is, Lauren Windsor brings up the issue of the flags and the we've talked about that everybody's talked about.
First, there's obviously no sort of repentance, no remorse there, no, gee, I'm sorry that, you know, it was taken that way, or, oh, I never meant to give the impression that Sam here would ever be a neutral arbiter of the law or whatever.
She just talks about vengeance?
She says there will be a way, that is to sort of get even, to get back at people for this.
It doesn't have to be now, but there will be a way.
She also takes a real shot at pride in the LGBTQ community.
So she says, she's talking about the Sacred Heart of Jesus flag this time.
She says, I want a Sacred Heart of Jesus flag because I have to look across the lagoon at the pride flag for the next month.
But when you're free of this nonsense, and I think she means the quote-unquote nonsense about the outrage of the flags and so forth, I'm putting it up and I'm going to send them a message every day, right?
So, yeah, we want to talk about, again, any reasonable person would never—no reasonable person would ever suggest that Samuel Alito could be swayed in some way.
This is the person that he lived with.
This is the person that he is partnered with, making explicitly anti-LGBTQ statements.
And he doesn't, as far as we know, interject and be like, oh, no, no, no, we can't talk that way, we can't think that, right?
Again, he embodies exactly what it is that in the speech you're highlighting in Rome, exactly what he decries in others.
And we've seen this before.
This is standard fare on the right.
I feel like this is like Trumpism 101, to just take whatever it is that you think or feel or whatever bigotry you have and assign it to your opponents as a way of legitimizing what you were doing in the first place.
So, yeah, her statements were, I think, noteworthy and really, again, just reinforced the context of the flag controversy in the first place.
Why does it always have to be about revenge with these people?
Like, why?
Why is it always about, like, getting back at others?
Like, when I read James Baldwin, when you read the black radical tradition, when you read folks who are fighting for representation and rights in this country, when you read classic literature, queer literature from the 20th century, Like, so seldom is the spirit about vengeance and return of pain, and it's really just, I want liberation and freedom.
Just let me do what I'm going to do.
Like, it's not going to hurt anybody, so let me be me.
Like, that's what it is.
And anyway, Martha Ann just seems to have this worldview of resentment.
I mean, she talks in the recordings about she wants to put up a Sacred Heart flag, and she wants to put up all these other flags, and Once again, I'll just say, like...
I think Justice Samuel Alito way out of line here, talking like the way he did on the recordings.
I also think that if you have a spouse, like Dan, I don't know about you, I from time to time have to go to like events for my spouse's, like my partner's job and work.
And you know what my mantra is?
Like when I go to those things, especially if they're like formal or her boss is going to be there or it's just hang out.
Don't do anything dumb, man.
Don't do anything stupid.
This is not your industry.
This is not your ball field.
You're here to support your spouse.
Just hang out.
Be a good support.
Be a good like citizen of the event and make her look good and then go home.
That's the that's the goal.
And I think Martha Anelito here is just like, hey.
Who wants to talk?
I'll tell you about all the vengeance and resentment I have in my heart that is coded in religious language.
That's Trumpism.
That's Christian nationalism of the last decade in its essence.
Same kind of thing.
I feel like when they go to that, it's like, if you saw the movie, right?
It's like where you would have like reminders written on your wrist, like under your cuff.
And it's like, kids, yes.
Weather, yes.
Sports, maybe.
And like, that's it.
That's what you're talking about.
Like, I quit drinking during the pandemic, so I don't even drink anymore.
But you know, it's like you go and you're like, all right, you get one gin and tonic.
Because we get to gin and tonic two and a half, guess what?
Nope.
We're not being a good citizen of the event anymore.
And we could potentially do harm here.
So we're not doing that.
Yeah.
All right, let's go to Roberts.
What did Roberts... Actually, let me... Yeah, go ahead.
Let me play the clip.
Let's play the clip and then we'll talk about Roberts.
So here's Roberts responding to Lauren Windsor and what she had to say.
The first thing I think is to tell me when the non-tumultuous time has been here.
I mean, you look at the court, what the court was doing in the 60s, what the court was doing during the New Deal, what the court was doing, you know, after Dred Scott and all this.
It's kind of a regular thing.
People think it's so different and special.
It's been pretty tumultuous for a long time.
Do you think this is a normal period?
You know, I don't know if it's normal.
I mean, since I've been here 20 years, there have been quieter times.
But the idea that the court is in the middle of a lot of tumultuous stuff going on, that's nothing new.
I guess, I wouldn't say that it's not, it's not like it's an innovative thing.
It's not new.
I guess I just, I really feel like we're at a point in our country where the polarization is so extreme that it might be irreparable.
Oh, I don't think that.
Polarization is extreme.
It's like the Civil War.
We did that.
During Vietnam, people were getting killed.
I was there in Vietnam.
This is all right.
I mean, it's not all right, but it's not like it's as dramatically different people.
That's a common thing.
People with their own perspectives think this is so extraordinary.
I don't know.
But you don't think there's like a role for the court in like guiding us toward a more moral path?
No, I think the role for the court is deciding the cases.
If I start, would you want me to be in charge of guiding us toward a more moral path?
That's for the people we elect.
That's not for lawyers.
Well, I guess I just, I believe that the founders who are godly, like, were Christians, and I think that we live in a Christian nation, and that our Supreme Court should be guiding us in that path.
Yeah, I don't know that we live in a Christian nation.
I know a lot of Jewish and Muslim friends who would say, maybe not, and it's not our job to do that.
It's our job to decide the cases as best we can.
Alright Dan, a little bit different than the Alitos.
Yeah, so on one hand, right, and I...
I can be a Roberts critic.
I am a Roberts critic.
I don't think there are many things John Roberts and I would agree on.
But OK, I will acknowledge that he does not just bite down on the whole, we're a Christian nation.
Our job is to make it make it a godly nation, that piece.
And so good.
And I'm glad and I think probably pleasantly surprised to hear the chief justice of the Supreme Court say that.
Right.
Talking about, you know, the perspective of his Jewish and Muslim friends and how, you know, the role is not to make it godly and so forth.
Here's the other thing, though.
I'm assuming that, and maybe, maybe Roberts is more aware than Samuel Alito is, than Martha Ann Alito is, that this is a public event, that I don't really know who this person is, and I don't mean that I think they're betraying me somehow, I just, I don't know this person.
Maybe it's a politic statement.
Maybe he believes it.
I tend to think that maybe he does.
But when he makes that statement about the court, you know, that it's not especially politicized, that he does that.
If he really means that, first of all, let's say this, if he's being politic about it, if that is his political statement, is to say, we're not politicized.
And we've heard other justices say the same thing across the ideological spectrum, right?
It's just nonsense.
And I think every court observer of every ideological position knows that it's nonsense.
But there's a part of me that's kind of worried that he might actually believe that.
And like you mentioned that, talking about the Alitos, that this is Christian nationalism 101.
And I wonder about that too, if it's isn't, you know, if you are, like you shade toward Christian nationalism, if you are Maybe a well-meaning Christian nationalist.
That is, you're the person who really believes America was founded as a Christian nation and that there's some kind of Christian privilege or that it's some divinely appointed nation for truth or justice or whatever it is, right?
Then I think that you could be a John Roberts and actually think that you're being a lot more neutral than you are.
You could think that what a lot of non-Christians or non-partisan Christians would say is favoring Christianity, favoring Christian nationalism, pushing us down that path, there's a possibility that what you feel is pretty neutral and even-handed.
Everybody else is like, are you kidding me?
So I don't know.
And I'll be interested in your reflection.
I don't know exactly where John Roberts is here.
If he means it, it's at best really, really naive.
It could indicate somebody who does identify with a certain kind of conception of America such that what he takes to be a kind of neutral or nonpartisan approach is something that everybody who isn't in his particular ideological camp would be like, are you kidding me?
Or it could just be a really politic answer.
I think John Roberts knows he has to know.
He knows, everybody says he knows very much what the public opinion about the court is.
He has to know the damage that it does.
He knows that it's not a trusted institution.
I think he does have a mission every time he opens his mouth to try to shore up its credentials.
But I don't know, I was sort of intrigued by this response.
On the surface, I guess it's good, but I think, I don't know, there's a lot of stuff there that really makes me wonder where Roberts is at and what he's really thinking about.
So I'm going to do something I rarely do, which is give someone the benefit of the doubt.
And I have a brother who's two and a half years younger than me.
We're a lot alike.
And when we talk, I feel like we agree, but I always come down way harder on people.
And he's always like, hey, what if we look at it this way and give them a chance?
So I'm going to try to do that right now.
And say, what if, what if two things, Roberts knows he's in public and he's trying to make statements that are an institutionalist statement.
Yeah.
Right.
This is what we should do.
This is who we should be.
Well, don't you think the court's super polarized?
Here's, I don't know you, Lauren Windsor.
Here's what we should call balls and strikes.
Do you want me being the moral judge?
No.
I should just help figure out the case in front of me.
That's for the elected officials.
The standard elected officials versus legislating from the bench line that he trots out.
I wish Alito would have said that.
I don't know what Clarence Thomas would have said if asked this question, but I think he would have landed way more on the Alito side than the Roberts side.
Is this naive?
Sure.
Is Roberts a frustrating figure?
Yep.
Is there a deep legacy for Roberts to reckon with someday regarding voting rights and all kinds of other things and voting protections and big money in our politics and everything else?
Yep, there sure is.
But you know what?
I'm going to say here that You hear folks say from time to time, oh, I wish we had the Republican Party of Reagan or George H.W.
Bush or something like that.
And I'm never one to do that because I know what Reagan really was.
I feel like Reagan was not some, you know, principled conservative that I'm just going to give the benefit of the doubt to.
What I think people are saying when they say that, and I'm not, I can't speak for everybody, is If you have conservatives in the country and they're in a place of leadership, I wish they would look at their role like Roberts does here.
I have an institution.
I'm supposed to function in that institution in a way that makes democracy happen and possible.
That means Judging cases, not being the moral order.
That means not having a mission to return the country to godliness, but just, you know, doing everything I can to be fair when a case comes in front of me.
Is this a Christian nation?
I don't think so.
A lot of Muslim and Jewish friends, not to mention John Roberts, you know, and I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, right?
But atheists, agnostic, Hindu, Buddhist, it doesn't matter who you are.
It's a nation of democracy.
I wish they would talk like this again, at least.
Does this mean I long for George H.W.
Bush?
Oh, the good old days.
Do I long for 1986 and Reagan's America?
Nope, I don't.
But at least there, and this is the difference, right?
And this is not a longing for any of those people.
This is not an homage to any of them.
What you got from those people when they talked about the presidency or the court or the Congress was it would be devastating to American democracy or the republic if the institution and the people at the head of it appeared like this or that.
We talked about a month ago, Dan, about Abe Fortas, the Supreme Court justice, who resigned after he took payments that seemed completely out of whack.
He just resigned because he was like, we can't do this.
He didn't have to resign.
It was not like anybody had formally started an impeachment process, etc.
He resigned.
Clarence Thomas, we learned last night, took more trips with Harlan Crowe than we knew about.
The billionaire.
He just seems always to be on a billionaire's jet, Dan.
And he won't resign.
So when I say that like Roberts here, I'm gonna give him the benefit of the doubt, is it feels like a throwback to a time before MAGA when, don't get me wrong, I think conservatives in the country did things that were inhumane, things I don't agree with, a way of governance that is not my own, blah, blah, blah.
But at least they spoke like this and not like Alito.
At least you expected them to talk like Roberts.
Now I expect them to talk like Alito.
And that's the difference from 20 years ago to today.
Just the last point is I'll say I'm not an expert of the Supreme Court, but every expert I've ever read or every, you know, biographical thing I've ever heard about Roberts is that he is that, right?
To your point about giving him the benefit of the doubt, he is an institutionalist and views the court very much that way.
So I think, you know, I just think this is probably such an idealized vision for him of what he wants the court to be or what he wants to think that it is.
And I think, understanding even the impulse behind it, there's a sense in which It's not going to become reality because it's something that he aspires for the court to be, if that makes sense, right?
Because as you say, you've got Alito at the same time making this statement with just ongoing, it feels like constant revelations about Clarence Thomas at this point.
And Alito and Thomas are both basically just like a big middle finger up in the air to everybody who wants to suggest that there's any whiff of impropriety about anything that they do or say.
When I get on XNOW Twitter, I just expect there to be news that Martha Ann Alito has raised the flag, just of the middle finger.
Like, I just want someone to send me a picture that's like, I saw Martha Ann Alito at Target.
She was driving a car that had a massive decal on it that just was...
Raising the middle finger.
I would not be surprised right now if I went on, I signed in my email and the New York Times is like, breaking news, Martha Annelito photographed wearing middle finger shirt at a conservative rally.
She's at Staples photocopying her hand and screen printing it onto a shirt.
She can do it herself.
Just making copies.
Somehow Martha Annelito just says, 100,000 copies of her giving the finger and she's handing them out to anyone who will take them in her town, to her neighbors.
She can sell them on Etsy.
Yeah.
I think as long as we get our cut and when she takes our idea, I guess it's all right.
That's what the founders would have wanted, Dan.
That's originalism.
That's James Madison.
That is Thomas Jefferson.
That is, you know, come on.
All right, let's take a break, come back and talk about the SBC.
Be right back.
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All right, Dan.
So, about two months ago, actually more than that now, yeah, about two months ago, I wrote a piece for Politico outlining how the idea that life begins at conception is not a unanimous opinion in Christian history, whether past or present.
And that the idea that a clump of cells is the same as a fully developed person is not something that people in the Christian tradition, going back anywhere from Augustine to Aquinas to the Irish, you know, clergy and nuns of the 18th century to any number of examples, they would have not believed that.
What I wrote at the end of that piece was that the alliance, the reproductive alliance between Protestants and Catholics, may be under threat because of what's happening in Alabama and the IVF ruling that we talked about and many, many people talked about for a couple of weeks.
We now have a new chapter in that story, and that chapter revolves around the Southern Baptist Convention, which just had its major annual meeting, a meeting that has become something of a hot press item over the last couple of years because of the abuse, allegations, and other happenings within that convention.
If you don't mind, tell us a little bit about what happened here with the SBC and their condemnation of IVF, and then we'll get to the fallout.
Yeah, so again, just for folks who aren't familiar, Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S.
It has actually been losing membership for about the past decade, but it still represents something like 13 million members in 45,000 churches.
You count all those frozen embryos?
That's like, how many more members?
Lost your chance, SBC.
I'm playing chess.
It's the new chapter in what's called the Quiverful Movement, right?
We'll just inflate the numbers by counting the unborn as Southern Baptists.
The frozen.
Anyway, it's okay.
It doesn't matter.
I'm done.
I'm not going to interrupt you anymore.
Go ahead.
And some background for this as well, to teach some of the history you're talking about.
For a long time, and this is the part of the abortion history people often don't know, right?
You had organizations like the Catholic Church that was always opposed to abortion, always opposed to IVF.
Protestants often were not, and sometimes it was because they were opposed to Catholics.
And so, for a long time, a lot of U.S.
history, Protestant denominations did not oppose abortion because it was a Catholic position.
That has changed.
Everybody knows this.
Well, what happened this week at their annual convention meeting is the SPC passed a resolution basically against in vitro fertilization.
The resolution holds that IVF, quote, most often participates in the destruction of embryonic human life.
So there you have that link, right, that this is a full human life, an embryo is.
And so Southern Baptists should only affirm the use of reproductive technologies that quote, affirm the unconditional value and right to life of every human being.
So all the philosophical nuances are there.
That the fertilized egg is a full human being.
It has all the same rights, privileges, moral status, etc.
that anything else does.
Why does this matter?
On the one hand, it's a non-binding resolution.
People often don't understand this about the Southern Baptist Convention.
It's not structured like the Catholic Church.
It has no formal authority over individual churches.
They can't force individual churches to hold certain positions and so forth, but they can kick them out of fellowship and The Southern Baptist Convention that passed this resolution, it's like 11,000 basically delegates from Southern Baptist churches who go there as representatives of their churches to make these resolutions.
So this reflects the position of the majority of those delegates.
And so it's significant.
Despite its loss in size in recent years, the Southern Baptist Convention still holds tremendous political sway.
It is also a bellwether for broader American evangelicalism.
It both reflects what's going on among white American evangelicals in many ways, and it influences what will happen with white American evangelicals.
And lots of analysts say it's significant that they came out and did this, and now let's watch other smaller denominations, smaller evangelical groups, to see what they do.
And the logic of the move, I'm going to emphasize this again, I know we've talked about this, but here's the thing, right?
If you are looking at the philosophical issue, if you believe, sincerely believe, that as soon as an egg is fertilized by a sperm, that you have a full human life, Morally speaking, you should oppose IVF, and so they know this.
The trick is, and we recognize this, that this is not how most evangelicals have been.
Something like, the numbers I saw, 83% of evangelicals support IVF.
73% of evangelicals support IVF.
Something like 78% of pro-life advocates support IVF.
And so we've had this, and this is why this is so significant, you have this potential cleavage within what has been a really unified block of Republicans, anti-abortion activists, white evangelicals, and so forth.
And so now you have this move where you have this religious group, significant religious group, a religious group that is, as I say, very emblematic of white evangelicalism, Putting pressure on the GOP, perhaps putting pressure on some of those church-going, pew-sitting white evangelicals who support IVF.
And you have a GOP that's stuck with the fact that their positions on abortion are incredibly unpopular.
Their positions on IVF now, if they go with these conservatives, they're going to alienate other people.
If they try to draw a line and not alienate other people, they run the risk of alienating this religious group of white evangelicals that they can't alienate.
It just highlights and continues to exacerbate the difficulties faced by the GOP.
One last thing I want to just throw out here, a couple of things.
You had in Congress, the GOP put forward legislation to do what?
To protect IVF.
Guess who opposed that?
The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention came out and opposed that.
Al Mohler, who is a well-known Southern Baptist, he's the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, kind of viewed as, you know, the biggest intellect within the SBC and so forth.
This is what he said in the context of this.
He said, quote, after the Dobbs decision, for which President Trump deserves massive credit for the three Supreme Court appointments, he certainly needs to reassure pro-life Americans, pro-life voters, that he's going to act consistently in the future as he has in the past.
That was a shot across the bow of Donald Trump, that you need to be staunchly anti-abortion and that this is going to carry through into opposing IVFs.
So, a lot of significance to this.
Not surprising in the sense that, again, I was a Southern Baptist.
I came out of this.
I remember in, you know, ethics courses when we would talk about abortion and I would be like, if we think this about life, you have to be opposed to IVF.
If you find yourself not being opposed to IVF, if you have some intuition that that doesn't make sense, guess what?
There's more to life than just a fertilized egg.
That's what it means.
You need to rethink that part of the equation.
It continues to keep this alive.
I think it means that, again, it keeps it in the news.
It keeps it in front of the GOP, the GOP having to figure out how to try to respond to this.
And I think it gives more fodder to Democrats who have been trying to really press the levers On the IVF issue in Alabama and other places as well.
So that was sort of the uptake of what happened.
Your thoughts as you looked at the SBC with great interest this week, because I know looking at the SBC is what you really like to do.
Well, about seven weeks ago, I laid out a framework that not everyone agreed with.
Some people did, some people didn't like it.
But I said, look, I don't know who's going to win the election.
I don't know what's going to happen in between now and then.
But I think that we have a situation where the characters and the story arcs are in place.
Now, how they all play out and where they end up in the grand finale in the last episode of our eight-episode series here, I don't know yet.
One of them, I thought, was Gaza, Palestine, young voters, Muslim voters, and other voters disillusioned with Biden.
And I think that remains in play.
I think you also have Trump and his trials.
The other one is abortion and reproductive rights more generally.
And I said, this is a major issue.
It's one the Republicans have lost on consistently for two years now, ever since Alito, you know, wrote his opinion and then went to Rome and was spouting off against Prince Harry.
It's one that has found support all over the country from Arizona to Kansas and the East Coast and so on.
So reproductive rights is not a winning issue for the Republicans right now.
They lose when you put this on the ballot.
The IVF situation with the SBC does not help that.
If we just think about electoral politics, this is not going to be a winning thing for them.
If a national abortion ban plus an opposition to IVF is going to just feel like to so many of those Supposed, moderate, suburban, whoever's like, this is crazy.
I don't want to vote for this anymore.
I'm done.
I don't want to play.
You guys are just getting too weird now.
It's not a thing I want to do.
So I think that's there.
I just want to spend one minute on why.
Why is the SBC doing this now?
And I think there's a couple of answers.
One is, after Roe, Dan, we asked, what will happen?
What will they chase now?
Because overturning Roe was this quixotic quest to find restorative justice, happiness, covenant with God that they always had in their mind.
You and I lived it.
You and I were part of it.
Then it happened and the dog caught its tail.
What do you do now?
Well, you need another goal.
You need another thing to accomplish, even if it doesn't help the party you've embedded yourself with or the party you've adopted, the Republican Party.
And the question would then be why?
And I think we can talk about how there's these beliefs about the beginning of life, a conception and personhood, all that.
That's fine.
I'm going to throw one out that I think should not be overlooked and that is the constant need for a moral high ground to prove that you're the real and right human in every conversation and that the people who oppose you are not.
Roe gets overturned.
Now what do we do?
It's not just enough to oppose abortion.
You know what we need to do?
We need to oppose IVF.
We need to join in with our Catholic brothers and sisters because they've had it right all along.
They knew all along that this was murder.
This was the murder of, you know, so many frozen children, frozen unborns.
So don't overlook the desire to be morally superior from the outset of any argument.
And I've written about this, Dan.
I think you know what I'm talking about.
When you believe that life begins at conception and that any abortion is murder, and now you include IVF.
And you approach somebody who doesn't fall in line with you, you are in that conversation with a trump card that says, I am clearly the real moral person, the real Christian, the real child of God.
And if you oppose me, you're a murderer.
How can I listen to anything you say on immigration, on the Bible, on any other issue of importance?
So I don't want to overlook that psychological need for the higher ground that is always, always at play when we have discussions like we do with Southern Evangelicals and the SBC or any other conservative Christian around the United States.
So just to pick up on that, because I think you're exactly right.
And I think these things are like flip sides of the same coin.
The other thing that you have to have is an ongoing sense of crisis.
You have the Supreme Court now.
You have a Christian nationalist frontrunner, GOP, You have a GOP that has been made in your image.
But one of the things you have to have, if you're going to have, you know, all the spiritual warfare language, everything else we've talked about, right?
It's also part and parcel of just populism and nationalism when they're not even religiously inflected.
You have to create a continual sense of threat and crisis, because that is what powers your movement, is anger, is fear, is the sense that you're being attacked.
And so I think that those two things are there.
So if you can create that sense of crisis while occupying the moral high ground to do it, so the people that are threatening you, it's not just they threaten us, it's that they're immoral, it's that they are godless, it's that they're whatever, all the more.
And I hear both of these in this statement.
So this is the statement by Brent Leatherwood, who is the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.
So that is the wing of the SBC that's kind of their Think tanky, public policy sort of wing.
So it's part of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Here's what he had to say about this.
He said, it's going to be a long process.
It took us 50 years to take down Roe.
It may take a similarly long time frame to get people to a place where they're thinking more deeply about something like this.
He's talking about IVF.
It's okay.
It takes time.
We have to be patient.
I feel like he is signaling all of that there.
The fight's not over.
There's more moral high ground to be taken.
It took us 50 years.
We fought against a secular, godless country for 50 years, and we won.
And so we'll do it for another 50 years.
I think it captures all those dynamics.
I think it is also a signal to GOP candidates, if you're hoping that this goes away, That for the true believers, it's not going to.
This is an issue that is going to stay.
They're going to keep making these demands, and I think it'll be interesting to see how this plays out in so many ways, including—and here's the last point I'll make, and this is sort of speculative, but I think I've got good reasons for speculating this way—the generational components to this.
I don't know the demographic makeup of all the SPC messengers, that's what they're called, these representatives who go to the SPC.
They are not usually 20-something-year-olds.
They are not people who are trying to start families.
They are not people who are of childbearing age.
They are not people who are confronting infertility.
They are people who, if they have families, they're mostly grown.
The people tend to be older.
And so I think that that's a piece of this as well.
It's one thing for somebody in their 50s or 60s or 70s to come out pontificating about the evils of IVF.
It's something very different for people trying to start a family in their 20s for whom this is a real thing.
Or for somebody who's sitting across the table looking at their child who was conceived through IVF Who's now going to be hearing from their church that that child was somehow conceived in sins I think there are a lot of really interesting directions of this as well Let's take a break.
We'll come back talk about Georgia for a few minutes be right back All right, Dan, I want to talk about Georgia today because I think Georgia's, well, I know Georgia is part of a larger movement throughout the country on the part of the MAGA movement, the MAGA world, Trump's orbit, to set up a situation where they can not only win the election, but win the election one way or another.
And what I mean by that is Georgia is a place where Republican operatives are saying things like this, and this is from Rolling Stone, Adam Rossley, and Azawan Subesang.
And so, they talk about Georgia, and in the piece, there's this quote, and I think it's really indicative.
Georgia's become our laboratory.
If we can do it in Georgia, we can do it throughout the country.
Okay?
And what is it that they're doing?
And it's a long piece, and we don't have time today for everything, but I want to break this down to them trying things that involve four groups.
Voters, election workers, donations to the voting system and the voting system itself, and then denying elections.
The goal here is to make it impossible for Trump to lose, one way or another.
So, after Trump lost Georgia in 2020, SB 202, the Election Integrity Act, passed in 2021.
Now, that was the famous law that makes it illegal to bring somebody water if they're waiting in line to vote.
It restricts early voting and it limits mail-in ballots.
It massively expanded the number of challenges that activists can file contesting the validity of voter registrations in their county.
So there's an example in the piece of somebody who lives on a street and the street like had a name change for some reason.
I guess development or like it was, it was just like build more houses.
This happened.
The street I live on, I guess the name's a little different now.
I don't, I live on the corner, whatever.
And they underwent a challenge to their like voter registration because it didn't add up.
And then, what do they have to do?
Well, they have to then go to, like, get all that worked out.
They have to go to a hearing.
And the person in question says this in the piece, I just feel like this is a waste of my time and also my kids' time.
I'm here when I have other things to do.
I have a job.
Again, I have two young children.
If you told me you have to spend, like, nights and afternoons at a hearing so that you can vote again because your street name changed and some citizen out there complained about you on a voter roll, I would think, what am I living in?
What kind of country is this?
Well, that's Georgia.
It's a laboratory.
It's not just, like, a card, right?
You fill out, like, an address update card or something like that.
Like, you go to the post office, maybe, and you're like, I need the card to do this, or you do it online, and that's it.
It's an intentionally labor-intensive process.
The other group that I'll mention are election workers.
Now, election workers for a long time have known that they are in a climate of contestation and in some cases danger.
But there is just a real sense of that in Georgia these days.
There's the cases of Trump and Trump supporters basically menacing election workers and that became national news.
But there's a real sense that if you're on election boards, if you are somebody who is part of the election system, you might be doxed.
You might have emails in your inbox that say, you better watch your back.
You might get sent suspicious packages in the mail.
Okay.
It's really hard to have a democracy when the people who are just trying to run the voting system feel like they're in danger all the time.
Let me talk about the voting system itself.
Now, we don't have a national holiday and we don't have an infrastructure that Simply put, is sufficient when it comes to our voting and election systems.
Up until recently, you could donate money to them, Dan.
So like somebody like Mark Zuckerberg could say, I'm going to give $2 million for the election system, like meaning so that we have enough funds for election workers and election equipment and all the things necessary so that all these tens and hundreds of millions of theoretical Americans could go vote.
Georgia says we don't want that and there's one activist who says we don't want Zuckerbucks because those are the ones that funded election, you know, there's an election administration charities and they were bringing in big donations.
Now I want you to stop and think about that logic just real quick.
We're going to run out of time.
So you're telling me that the GOP wants big money in elections.
That they're all for the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act.
They want to treat corporations as people.
They want a world where you as a billionaire can give nearly unlimited money to any candidate you want.
You can be Tim Dunn in Texas and give in such a way that you have every Republican part of the state legislature under your thumb.
But you don't want a situation where you can give money so that people can run the voting system.
Is there another place where the GOP is like, nah, no private money, please?
We're not really into private money or private enterprise.
Only when it comes to election systems.
That's very strange, I think.
Last point on this article, and I think it's helpful, is they are setting up an election denial in Georgia right now.
They're even talking about not certifying the election if Trump wins just to make a point that there's supposed widespread fraud in democratic areas like Atlanta and all the places where we have a predominance of people of color, black people, and so on.
There's voter suppression efforts underway right now.
They're preparing for it today, okay?
And one of the things that they're hoping for is to have a situation where the Board of Elections have the authority to deny the certification of election results.
So now we have a board of elections, a board who's like, nah, we're not gonna certify the election.
What do you think that's, I don't know, Dan, does that ring any bells?
Does that ring like, I don't know.
I'll be very succinct, I'll throw it to you and we can wrap up.
I said when January 6th happened, if you don't evaporate this from the political aura, if you don't get insurrection out of the water, and if you don't get the source of insurrection out of our politics, It will infect the water further.
You're not going to have an ecosystem that's safe.
And guess what we have now?
In Georgia and other swing states, they're preparing.
They have been preparing to say, yeah, Biden won Georgia by 40,000 votes.
We're not certifying.
Deal with it.
Let's see what happens.
We have a constitutional crisis four years in the making, and it can all be traced to the fact that we let the poison in our drinking water remain there.
And now none of it is safe and we don't know what's going to happen.
Just a couple points.
One is, again, how out in the open this is, right, in the reporting, that this isn't, like, a secret that, you know, the... Like, calling Georgia the lab is not us.
Like, we didn't come up with that language.
It's the people doing it who are like, yeah, this is where we're doing it.
The other part, this is, like, just a general thing.
I get so tired of hearing the rhetoric, like, that we have to make Voting really, really difficult.
Again, empirically, no evidence of widespread voter fraud anywhere in the U.S.
in major elections.
Just doesn't happen.
But what I was just thinking about, I had to do my estimated taxes this quarter.
I hate doing estimated taxes.
When they want to take our money, Yeah, no problem.
You can pay your taxes online, right?
You can e-file.
There's no concern about, I don't know, somebody faking your... I mean, there's some concern and they have steps in there.
The point is, we live in a world where mail-in voting is not hard to line up, it is not hard to regulate.
Online voting would not be hard to regulate or hard to set up.
The infrastructure exists.
We do it with other things all the time.
We do e-signatures for big purchases.
We transfer money electronically.
We pay our taxes electronically.
So, the next time Uncle Ron or somebody comes along and says that, you know, the real reason we got to make this so hard is because of integrity, we do all kinds of things, left and center, Where we don't lose sleep over fraud or we have safeguards in place where I think fraud is much more common.
Credit card fraud is way more common than voter fraud.
Fraud against the IRS, you know, people pretending to be somebody else to get a refund, whatever, way more common.
How about getting guns?
Yeah, all of that.
All of that.
One more, you know, we talk about the voting is a fundamental right and we make it really, really hard, but gun ownership for the same people that want to make voting almost impossible for some folks is just slides right on by.
So, yeah, the whole thing is crazy.
Took me longer to vote today than it did to get a gun.
God bless America.
Like, think about a world where you wait in line for seven hours to vote.
And nobody can bring you water.
And in that period, your friend was like, hey, I'll be back.
When you're done, I'll come get you after you're done voting.
And they bought three guns at three different stores.
Yep.
Yep.
Like, what?
All right, Dan, give us a reason.
And then they showed up in the voting line because some state passed a thing where, like, you know, it's legal to intimidate voting workers and you can, like, carry an AR-15 and, you know, stand near them and everything else.
They were just protecting the elections, right?
That's it.
Yep.
Give us a reason for hope, Dan.
So a reason for all this is a weird one, but it's there.
Hunter Biden was convicted this week, and I really don't care about Hunter Biden like at all.
I don't have any deep stake.
But number one, I took over the fact that he was convicted and that President Joe Biden said that he would not pardon Hunter Biden.
Why?
One of the things that this did is it really defanged some of the rhetoric on the right about how stacked and corrupt the justice system was because all of a sudden, The son of the sitting president was, in fact, found guilty of crimes and the sitting president has said that he would not pardon him.
And it's been interesting to see how that has sort of tamed some of the rhetoric on the right that was so rampant after Trump's conviction.
So we'll see what happens.
We've got sentencing coming up.
And I think I saw that Hunter Biden's sentencing will probably happen in like October.
So right before the election.
So this isn't done.
But I thought the way the effect that that had on right wing rhetoric was really noteworthy.
And I think I think it was good timing, frankly, for Democrats.
Mine comes on the reproductive rights front.
The Supreme Court course about the abortion pill unanimous decision.
I don't think that fights over.
But for now, access to the to the abortion pills will will remain intact.
So it seems as if there will be access to that.
And it's not been decided in any way by the court in the contrary, so that seems like good news.
All right, y'all.
I wanted to say thanks to those of you who reached out.
I had a course planned and had a family situation that prevented me from doing it this week, and everyone's okay, but yeah, it's just one of those times where I had to put family first, and it's not easy to do that.
This next Tuesday, I'll be in San Francisco at an event with Sarah McCammon on June 18th at the Commonwealth Club.
So if you're around, you can attend, but if you can't attend, you can watch that online.
So check out the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, and it's 530 Pacific, 830 Eastern, and I'll be in conversation with Sarah about her book, The Exvangelicals.
Other than that, we'll be back next week with a couple of things.
A great episode on Monday, NARWATCH on Tuesday, Dan's It's In The Code on Wednesday, and then the Weekly Roundup.
And then the week after that, we are hoping we'll finally get our bonus episode in place to get to you all.
We are behind because, again, of family issues and Dan's absence there for a couple weeks.
Thanks for being here.
Thanks for your support.
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Happy Father's Day, Dan.
Catch you next week.
You too, Brad.
Thanks.
Thanks for listening today, y'all.
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