Weekly Roundup: Project 2025, NatCon, and the Call for a Christian Nation
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Brad and Dan dive deep into the controversial Project 2025, which involves figures like Donald Trump distancing himself from its details despite many from his camp being involved in its formation. The conversation moves to the recent National Conservatism conference (NatCon), addressing key speeches by Al Mohler and Senator Josh Hawley, both promoting Christian nationalism. They critique the theological and historical inaccuracies in Hawley's references to St. Augustine and the Puritans. The episode rounds out with a detailed analysis of a stunning political result in France, where the left-wing coalition successfully opposed the far-right, offering a hopeful parallel for similar movements in the U.S. going forward.
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This week, Donald Trump tried to distance himself from Project 2025.
It seems that too many Americans have been learning about the details of the Heritage Foundation's plans for a second Trump presidency.
It's also the week that many conservatives, aligned with Trump, appeared at NatCon, a major conference for the American right.
Here's Al Mohler, leader of the Southern Baptist Seminary, talking about how all people in the United States need to acknowledge the Christian structure of civilization, regardless of whether or not they are practicing Christians.
I want to maximize the Christian commitments of the state, of the civilization.
And I would call that acknowledgement.
In other words, I'm not claiming that everyone in the state, every citizen, is going to be a confessing Christian.
I'm going to say that does not mean they're not obligated to the acknowledgement of the Christian structure of this civilization and its commitments.
And here's none other than Senator Josh Hawley talking about how he understands Christian nationalism in the United States.
Some will say now that I am calling America a Christian nation.
And so I am.
And some will say that I am advocating Christian nationalism.
And so I do.
Thank you.
Today we break down what happened at NatCon, how it aligns with Trump and Project 2025, and the ways that the stunning victory of the French left might help provide an example for the United States moving forward.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is the Straight White American Jesus Weekly Roundup.
Welcome, Dan.
Good to see you.
Tell us who you are, tell us where you work, and tell us about the newest shirt in your collection.
So my name is Dan Miller.
I work at Landmark College where I'm professor of religion and social thought.
And I went to Boston the other day.
And yes, I bought a shirt, Brad.
It doesn't just say Boston.
It's like a historical one.
It's the, you know, it's the snake cut up in pieces trying to get people to join in the revolution.
But I did buy a shirt.
I thought about texting you and just sort of daring you to mock me, but then I thought that your rapier wit would do too much to me.
So if you're a new listener to this show or not a longtime listener, there's a long running gag that Dan and I are referencing about him buying shirts when he goes places.
Feel free.
And hats.
I'm wearing a hat.
I'm wearing the metal band Lacuna Coil.
This is the hat right here.
Okay, Lacuna Coil.
No idea who you are, but that's a sponsorship.
Please, we'd like some merch and some tickets to your next concert.
So, yeah.
Fast forward 30 seconds if you are not a regular listener and or don't want to hear this.
I promise you, we'll be over in this 30 seconds.
I want to tell you that it has been egregiously hot where I live here in California.
And just over the hill from where I live is a beach town where the weather's always like 25 degrees cooler.
So we took our whole family on the weekend.
And of course, me being a dad, I'm like, we need to leave early and beat the traffic.
So we get to the beach at like 930, and I'm feeling great.
We got a great parking spot.
We did not hit any traffic.
I'm feeling good right now.
Dad, it's like the parent checklist, right?
No traffic, good parking.
And of course, it was like slated to be 102 degrees where we live.
And it was slated to be 74 where we went.
So by 930 in the morning, it's like 66 degrees.
And my kids are freezing.
My partner's freezing.
So we have to go buy sweatshirts of the place where we are that say, you know, the city and the town.
And now we have these sweatshirts.
And I want you to know they all bought one.
We got one for our kids and for my wife and guests who said, I'd rather freeze than buy a shirt from this place.
Me.
So there it is.
I feel like there's some when hell freezes over like line waiting to come along here.
Yeah.
In what dire literal survival circumstance would it have to be for Brad Onishi to put on a shirt with the name of a town or something?
We're like a plane that crashes in the mountains.
It's like a blizzard and Brad freezes to death.
I just don't get it.
I see someone walking and they have a shirt that says New York City and I'm like, oh, that guy went to New York City.
That's cool for him.
I'm glad.
I don't know.
I just don't get it.
Anyway, we need to stop.
All right, Dan.
We're going to talk about Project 2025 and Trump.
We're talking about Haydn-Biden.
And we're going to talk about NatCon and just a whole mess there, especially a speech by Josh Hawley and his highfalutin Augustinian theology that I know you're just very mad about.
Take us through Project 2025 and the fact that so many people now know about it.
Trump all of a sudden doesn't know about it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And we'll keep this quick.
We've talked about Project 2025.
And I think a lot of credit goes to you.
You're the one that I think you're one of the first people I heard who was like, oh, my gosh, have you looked at this thing on Project 2025?
And We've been talking about it for a long time and sounding sort of sounding the alarm on it.
But if people have paid attention in like popular media and I think sort of mainstream news media, you started hearing about it.
And I think the big thing is just the other night, Taraji Henson at the BET Awards, like sort of called out alarm about it a number of times.
Democrats have started hitting it hard.
They say that this was always their strategy.
It has nothing to do with Biden's, you know, bad debate performance.
That's probably true, because I don't know why you wouldn't hammer away on Project 2025 and the threat that it poses, but they're starting to talk about it.
I came across an article today looking at Google Analytics, at how the number of people searching it and looking it up has just spiked.
It was at 13 or something, and it's in the 90s.
Whatever the units of measure are, it's gone up exponentially.
So here's the thing.
As you say, this thing we've been talking about, some other people have been talking about, we're starting to hear about it in news media and stuff.
And all of a sudden, Donald Trump's like, I don't know what that is.
I got no idea what that is.
He said on social media posts that he has, quote, no idea who's behind it.
Project 2025.
By the way, this is another one of those things where Trump does that thing where he's like, I don't know anything about whatever.
But, like, why are you posting about it?
If you don't know anything about it, like, things I literally don't know about, guess what?
I don't tell people I don't know about them because I don't know about them, but anyway, you're laughing about something.
Why does it also always sound like a Scooby-Doo movie?
Like, it's like, I have no idea where this came from, you know?
If it wasn't for you kids, you know?
Meddling kids.
Yeah, like, it always sounds like some unaware, like, villain who almost got away with it.
Anyway, whatever, go ahead.
Yeah, yeah.
So you say he has no idea who's behind it, and of course that's nonsense.
And this week, CNN, other people have looked into this, but CNN had a really good article where they were just basically like, okay, Trump, you say you don't know who's behind it, so here's who's behind it.
People can Google that.
I just wanted to throw out some numbers here because they are really, really striking.
You've drawn a lot of these points out, other people have, but I don't think any of us have the resources or the time to delve into it the way they did.
They put a great piece together and here's what they found, right?
Six former cabinet secretaries from the Trump administration collaborated on Project 2025 and its vision for America and all of that.
Four people he nominated as ambassadors.
are involved in it.
Enforcers of his immigration crackdown are involved in it.
20 pages, and I think you've talked about this, 20 pages of it are credited directly to his first deputy chief of staff.
So not a super peripheral person, not that first assistant to the second assistant to the deputy whatever, no, deputy chief of staff.
The same CNN investigation found at least 140 Trump administration people involved in this.
That included more than half of the people listed as authors, editors, or contributors.
There are additional former Trump staffers who currently work with conservative groups who are advising the project, names like Mark Meadows and Stephen Miller, two of our favorites from Trump administration 1.0.
And they found that overall, nearly 240 people have ties to both Trump and Project 2025.
So I want that number to sink in, right?
240 people.
Why do we bring all that up?
Because it's no surprise that Trump is trying to distance himself from this, right?
A lot of it is straight from his playbook.
Other people point out there are things in there that he has said he's not into or that he says he doesn't endorse.
In my view, again, they're just logical outflows of everything that Trump says.
I think that there's nothing in Project 2025 That Trump would not try to put in place, if he had the advisers telling him to do, and if it was red meat to the MAGA crowd, he's going to do it.
It doesn't matter what it is.
He also posted the quote, he knew nothing about the project.
Kevin Roberts, who is the Heritage Foundation head, said that the U.S.
is, quote, in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be, end quote.
That was that was recent, obvious inflammatory.
He's tried to walk that back.
And now the Trump administration is trying to take a distance from this, say it has nothing to do with them.
The Project 2025 put out a statement that says it does not speak for any president or campaign.
So a lot of angst on the right trying to, in my view, put the genie back in the bottle.
They've spent all this time working on this, circulating it, communicating it, making sure people know what they're saying.
And now that people are starting to realize what they're saying and that it's terrifying, they're suddenly trying to walk it back, especially Trump.
But I think it's worth paying attention to.
I think it is and should be a winning strategy for people opposing Trump to like Make as much noise about Project 2025 as possible.
And I think people should know.
I think most people do know that it's nonsense when Trump says he has no idea what it is or who's behind it.
It's like he forgot who Mark Meadows was or he doesn't know all these other staffers and things like that.
So that was the news this week about Project 2025.
Just back in the news and Trump trying to create distance from it.
I do think it would be getting more traction if we didn't have the whole Biden sideshow thing going on.
So just to reiterate, and I think this is just a moment where if you're listening and you want to find a way to talk to somebody who is a persuadable person, and I know that that's somewhat of a mythical voter right now, but let's just say you do have people in your life that are like, hey, Biden looks like they're not into politics and they jump in.
And see a clip of Biden, they're like, oh, he looks super old and it's not going great.
And Trump.
And, you know, they're not sure.
Well, like this is one of those moments where my argument would be.
We can talk about Biden or Harris, and we're going to get there today for a minute at least.
If I'm talking to that cousin or friend or colleague who might be on the fence, I'm going to say, look, Project 2025 is, as Dan just said, created by 240 people related to Trump, including top advisors like Mark Meadows and Stephen Miller.
OK, here's what it will do.
Eliminate the Department of Education.
Your taxes will go to pay for private religious schools.
There'll be an attempt to infuse public schools with Christian teachings and what some might call indoctrination.
Gonna get rid of like a lot of civil rights and DEI protections.
Maybe, maybe, maybe eliminate no-fault divorce will definitely move us toward a ban on all abortions.
More tax cuts, meaning more debt and less for you, somebody who's probably not part of the 1%.
Totally weakening unions.
Are you a union person?
Are you an electrician?
Are you somebody who is part of a labor union in some way or a teacher's union?
Okay.
Eliminating climate protections.
Are you that person who's 25, 28, 31, and climate is a big issue for you?
I think these are ways that you can say, instead of talking about Biden and Trump, Say this is what Trump said he wants to do.
I'm not I'm not going to sit here and tell you that either of these any of these Democratic candidates or Joe Biden or whoever are going to be world savers.
I'm here to say there is a world destroyer on the other side and that's not something you should vote for.
So I think this is actually very handy and there's a shortcut to get to what matters here with people that might be doing the whole well, what's Biden done and he's old and It's all broken.
All politicians are the same.
They all suck.
Get your card out and just tell them what Project 2025 will do.
So we're going to get more into this, Dan, but if you have more on this or you want to take us into some thoughts about Biden and some of the latest on the status of the effort to push him out or some of the things people are talking about.
Yeah, we'll jump into Biden.
Like when you said hiding Biden, that was pretty good.
I had like, you know, hiding Biden in plain sight.
No, no, no.
I got it from you.
Full disclosure, that was yours.
That's Dan Miller's trademark.
So ironically, what I think is funny is that I think you have a penchant for awesome t-shirts despite your heavy anti-t-shirt bias.
No, I like t-shirts.
I don't like t-shirts from places.
I like t-shirts.
My family's from Hawaii.
I come from California.
I don't, you know, t-shirts are like our uniform.
You come to a funeral in my family, you're going to see more t-shirts than you will, you know, black ties.
So, yes.
I'm not anti-t-shirt.
That's the t-shirt I'm going to make today.
I'm not anti-t-shirt.
Brad is on the defense.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
So, so, Haydn-Biden, right?
It's like, let's create our own, like, political headlines about, like, you know, nobody's focusing on the issues.
We're too locked in on t-shirts.
No.
So, obviously, the fallout from, you know, the last two weeks about the debate and everything with Biden and so forth, there's been a lot of soul-searching among Democrats and others and As we talk, there's speculation about whether he will or won't step aside, and how many House Democrats have said what, and what leaders think, and so forth.
But one of the things that's been going on is, I think this is true of you, I think it's true of me, there were concerns about Biden, have been the whole time.
I think nearly all, let's call them honest observers, I think everybody who, you know, acting in good faith, watching that debate, were caught off guard with just how shaky Biden was all around.
And one of the things that has struck me this week is on the one side, you have Democrats and Democratic leaders who are outraged, especially Biden's advisors, because they feel that they hid this, that they buffered him from this, that they basically were gatekeepers and kept not just the public, but people in Democratic circles and donors and so forth from seeing some real issues.
On the other hand, on the right, you have those who are saying that the media conspired.
There's a media conspiracy to hide what was going on with Biden.
That Hayden Biden was a conspiracy and it's all the mainstream media in collusion with the Democrats and so forth.
And I think this is interesting because I think it's hard to say where the reality is with all of that.
Let me be clear.
I don't think that the media and the Democrats were sitting around drinking martinis or doing whatever other, you know, America-hating elitists are supposed to do in trying to hide what was going on with Biden.
But it really made me think, because this is one of those issues that has created a lot of Anger, frustration on all sides.
And I've had a couple of people have reached out to me about that as sort of like, you know, do you think the media did conspire to do this and so forth?
So here are some of my thoughts.
And I'm interested in your thoughts on this, too.
I think there's no doubt That Biden's handlers have worked to mask real issues.
And everything we've read have said that, you know, like most presidents, I think, like Trump and anybody else, there are advisors and then there's like the core inner circle, some of whom are advisors, some of whom are family members.
And by all accounts I have read, there is real concern that that core inner group has not only sort of shielded others from seeing what's going on with Biden, but have probably shielded Biden from hearing what others have been saying.
And the concerns that they've been raising.
I think that there's, I think there's no doubt that that's a reality and there's a lot of discussion about that now and that breaking down.
I think the media absolutely dropped the ball.
Absolutely.
I do think that, you know, we've had stories since this happened of problematic interview prep of like, Places getting lists of questions that they can ask.
And I know that's not unique to this.
I've interviewed a couple people in my life where they were like, you need to give us a heads up ahead of time of kind of what you're going to be asking about.
I do that with people sometimes just so I can, you know, have some things prepped to think about.
So I've got something intelligent to say.
But this seems that it went beyond that.
There have been a couple of cases of news sources admitting that they edited interviews at the request of the campaign.
And things like that.
So that's an issue.
I think there's no doubt that the media didn't press and probe to find out if there were more significant issues.
And we've seen the media do this.
We go back a few election cycles.
We've seen this with polling.
We have seen this with some stuff with COVID and governmental responses to COVID and things like that.
We have seen cases where the media didn't press as hard as it should.
And I think that that's a thing.
I think on the flip side, the media for a long time, we've talked about this for years, fed the Trump machine by just sort of covering Trump all the time, talking about Trump, repeating things he said, not knowing how to respond to falsehoods, things like that.
I think that's a real thing.
But I don't think there was a conspiracy.
I don't think the journalists were sitting around saying, we need to make sure that Biden's in the White House or we need to work with Democrats or something like this.
This is where I think it really comes down.
The GOP is, you know, when they're upset that nobody listened when they said the things about Biden, this is one of the things.
When you say there are conspiracies everywhere, you are the proverbial boy that cried wolf, right?
The GOP finds conspiracies everywhere, all the time, every issue.
What have they done for years?
They have decried anything coming out of the mainstream media as quote-unquote fake news.
So yeah, they said that Biden, that his age was an issue, that there was mental decline and so forth.
And it appears to many that that might've been accurate.
Did they actually think that?
Or is it just like, if you list enough conspiratorial things long enough, you'll hit on something that's actually true?
I don't know.
But I think the GOP, this is one of those cases where they have undermined themselves by calling everything a conspiracy, by trying to discredit everything that the media says all the time.
They've lost any legitimacy for then criticizing the media when they got something wrong.
But it has been a really interesting story, I think, if we step back from the emotions of the whole thing to look and say, how did we get here?
How did we miss this?
How did people who were well-meaning, people who had concerns about Biden last election, people who weren't crazy about nominating Biden this time, and yet none of us saw the true scope of this?
And I think there's a complex mix here of politics, Of media, of wishful thinking, a number of things going on that have helped you to hide Biden and where he was.
Interested in your thoughts on any of that?
Well, I think there's a couple of things this week.
There's a mock poll of Harris versus Trump, and Harris looked good.
There's a lot of uphill challenges with a Kamala Harris presidency in terms of name recognition, in terms of mobilizing a base.
She's a completely different candidate and a completely different politician than Joe Biden, has a completely different profile.
So that would be a challenge.
I think it will be Kamala Harris if it is not Joe Biden.
I will say, Dan, I don't want to spend all day on this because I think my stance is this.
If and when he steps aside, he will have stepped aside and we will have someone else who's standing in the way of fascism in the United States.
And my stance, and I think you feel this way too, is we should work to not allow those who want Project 2025 to be a reality to not have power.
That is my goal right now.
And so if that's Kamala Harris, if it's Joe Biden, if it's someone else, that is where I'm at.
With that said, I do think, this might sound strange, I do think the George Clooney editorial was a weird sign for me that there probably is a growing chance that Biden will be pushed out.
That, I think, was a smokescreen of an Obama, kind of like, you know, Politico and others reported that Obama and Clooney had been in touch.
Clooney had been campaigning for Biden, in essence, and then he turned on him, like, hard.
So you might be like, who cares about Clooney?
Tell me about the House Dems or like, you know, some random senator.
And I think Clooney was a sign to me that major donors, major celebrities and perhaps Barack Obama are trying to usher Biden out.
Biden and Obama have a strained relationship for a number of reasons, but one of them is when Obama was done being president, he backed Hillary Clinton.
He did not back his then vice president to take his place.
I think that's still a thing there.
So all that to say, I think that's probably enough on Biden today.
If you want my prediction, I will give you my prediction.
And I don't know if this will hold.
We'll see next week.
I think Biden may be out by this time next week.
That's what I think.
I could be wrong.
But I do think the headwinds, with Nancy Pelosi kind of being ambiguous... We're not talking... Pelosi's response, it was one of those things that if people don't know how to read political code, it sounded fine, right?
It was something like, I think that Biden should decide what he wants to do kind of thing.
Except it implied that there was a decision to be made, that he was not just the de facto nominee.
She didn't just come out and say, I'm with Biden.
So I think that was the other one.
I think that and Clooney were, as you say, two of the really big sort of signals this week of how deep this is.
I mean, Pelosi is not a backbench second term congressman from somewhere.
Pelosi is a household name, former Speaker of the House and so on and so forth.
Last thing I'll say, and this goes to the same point of Project 2025, Dan, is they did too good of a job with Project 2025 to the point that too many people found out about it.
John Oliver did a big segment on it.
And now they're like, you know, more is not always better.
Too many people understand our like draconian, disgusting, terrible fascist plan to take over the executive branch.
The same is true with Biden.
They sold Biden to everybody even before the debate as too old and out of it to be president.
If that if we end up with no Biden, and this is coming straight from a bombshell story by Tim Alberta at The Atlantic and his reporting on two top Trump advisers, Wiles and La Civita.
If they do get a different candidate.
The Trump campaign will then have to shift its sort of messaging and it will abandon years and years of planning to make Biden out to be too old.
You know, they're going to have to shift to Kamala Harris is radical and woke and she's a Marxist.
Right.
They're going to have to go to that.
But they're no longer going to have the like too old to compete.
Like she is going to be a much different face and voice.
In public than Biden would be.
So it's kind of the same problem.
Project 2025 and Biden are kind of the same problem for the Trump campaign.
I think there's real concern in the GOP right now that Biden will step aside.
Because I think that they're, you know, here's Brian, I don't know what to predict.
I've gone back and forth on this on whether some moments I'm with you and I'm like, I think maybe this time next.
Other times I'm like, maybe just running out the clock.
They get too close to the nominating convention and, you know, we're just stuck.
But I do think this, if somebody says, well, does another Democrat have a guarantee to beat Trump?
Nope.
Does anybody necessarily?
No.
I don't know that anybody, I just am not confident that Biden can beat Trump.
So at this point, why stay with that?
I think that anything is a better option at this point.
The thing that no one's talking about either, though, is something, so again, I'm going to go back to my little Landmark, in my own head, landmark idea from like three months ago, which was that the main players in this story are Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
The main issues are reproductive rights and abortion and Gaza and Israel.
The people who are in question here, there's a bunch of them, but one of them is Gen Z. A question I have, I don't know the answer and I'm not going to claim to have any evidence or data to prognosticate on this is,
If it is Kamala Harris or another Democrat, does that free the consciences of some of those Gen Z voters, some of those voters who are Muslim, some of those voters who are overwhelmingly angry and have drawn a line to say, I just won't vote.
I'm not going to vote for Biden because of Gaza.
He has done too much.
Like, I don't know the answer.
I don't know if there is some of those votes that like release back into the pool.
There might be.
Again, it's a thought.
We'll dig into more of it later.
Let's take a break.
We'll come back and talk about some other things.
Hi, my name is Peter and I'm a prophet in the new novel, American Prophet.
I was the one who dreamed about the natural disaster just before it happened.
Oh, and the pandemic and that crazy election.
And don't get me wrong.
I'm not bragging.
It's not like I asked for the job.
Actually, no one would ask for this job.
At least half the people will hate whatever I say, and almost everyone thinks I'm a little crazy.
Getting a date is next to impossible.
I've got a radio host who is making up conspiracies about me, a dude actually shooting at me, and an unhinged president threatening me.
But the job isn't all that bad.
I've gotten to see the country and meet some really interesting people and hopefully do some good along the way.
You can find my story on Amazon, Audible or iTunes.
Just look for American Profit by Jeff Fulmer.
That's American Profit by Jeff Fulmer.
All right, Dan, this week was NatCon 2024.
I played a couple of clips.
We had a couple of clips at the top of the show from Al Mohler, from Josh Hawley.
I think that Josh Hawley is going to hear from you in a minute, Dan.
So I'm going to just set that up for us and tell us about NatCon.
NatCon has kind of become one of the landmark right wing conferences for American conservatism.
It's probably not as important as CPAC.
But it is a group of conservatives who really see themselves as not only willing to identify as the kind of true conservatives in the country, but to criticize the Republican Party heavily.
They're totally willing to be to the right of the Republican Party.
But it doesn't prevent really important and really influential conservatives from being there.
In fact, many of them see it as a showcase for proving they're bona fides.
So this year, we had a whole bunch of folks, and I just want to highlight some of those things and go from there.
So we first had, as I played for everybody at the top, Al Mohler.
And he says, the language that we are endowed with by our Creator, with unalienable rights, is not just decorative.
Behind that is the affirmation of a natural law.
It is an order.
Behind that order is the God of Genesis.
Dan, Al Mohler's doing ontology here.
I mean, he's taking the Declaration of Independence and saying, we are endowed with inalienable rights by our Creator.
As a result of that, There is a natural order backed by our Constitution that points to the God who designed all those things.
So I just want to put that in your ear, Dan Miller.
He's using the Constitution to do natural theology, natural law, and Christian ontology.
As a result, he comes to this conclusion.
You must acknowledge that the Christian structure of civilization, even if you aren't a Christian, this is what it means to be American.
I want to maximize the Christian commitments of the state.
I call that acknowledgement.
I'm not claiming that every citizen will be a confessing Christian, but that does not mean they are not obligated to the acknowledgement of the Christian structure of this civilization.
So he's basically saying if the Constitution says we have inalienable rights from our Creator, the structure of the country is Christian, and you have to acknowledge that if you want to be a citizen here.
In my mind, this is the end of religious freedom because you are imposing on all people a sense of what is real and what is actual as Christian.
So even if you're Hindu or Muslim or agnostic or atheist, you have to acknowledge the Christian order is the real order and it's the one that governs the United States and the creator who gave you those rights is the creator who gave you America and on down the line, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
All right?
So that's there.
That's Nat Khan.
Who is he on stage with, Dan?
Al Mohler, leader of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, was on stage with none other than Doug Wilson, the absolute provocative and bigoted and extremist pastor, theologian, and leader from Moscow, Idaho.
Ben Lorber and Annika Brockschmidt wrote about Wilson this way, Wilson, a deeply problematic figure, Explained at DatCon that supporters of the old conservative consensus of fusionism, the marriage of the religious and libertarian strains of conservatism, always believed in the pursuit of virtue, must only be individual.
And that the state should only protect liberty in the public square.
According to him, this is insufficient, as moral agency declares states should protect moral virtue.
Now, what does that mean?
Well, it's more it's more along the lines of what Mueller argued.
He's basically saying.
That we we've had a conservatism that combines religious identity.
Think of like, you know, Jerry Falwell.
Think of Billy Graham.
Think of Pat Robertson.
Think of George Bush.
Think of, you know, whoever you want to think of as like conservative Christian politicians of the last 50, 60 years and also leaders and and and pastors and so on.
He's basically saying, look, what they sold you was.
Religious identity and economic and governmental libertarianism.
Small government.
Keep the government out of it.
That's what we want.
Small government, big God.
The less state, more family.
It's not about the communal or the collective.
It's about the individual.
That's been that libertarian strain of American conservatism, right?
We can trace it to Goldwater.
We can talk about Reagan.
We can talk about, you know, whoever you want going back to the kind of post-Cold War 20th century.
That has been called fusionism in the past, religious identity and libertarianism.
What Wilson is saying is something you have argued for a long time, Dan, and not argued for, but you've identified that that is happening.
And that is this.
We don't want libertarianism because libertarianism means the government stays out of it.
You know what we want?
We want the government in it.
We want the government to legislate morality.
We want the government to impose ethics.
We want the government to impose structures of family and sex and gender.
We want a big government.
That's what Wilson's saying.
No more libertarianism.
No more laissez-faire.
No more hands off.
I want a big government infused with my version of Christianity.
That's what he's saying.
Okay?
Now, these two men were asked, will there be room for Jews, Hindus, or other religious minorities in the Christian state that they imagine?
And Wilson says, Jews in this ideal republic would be more welcome than they currently are here, right?
Okay.
Dan's laughing.
Moeller, my tribe, theologically, it would be an absolute divine responsibility to be fully respectful of Jews, fully integrated into the entire project.
However, when it came to the Hindus and Muslims in that question, Moeller, and this is according to Brockschmidt and Lorber once again, Moeller stresses that the Christian state would be grounded in theology that others would have to respect.
Would have to respect.
What they are saying is, we want a situation.
Where the government legislates Christian morality on everybody, every person here has to acknowledge the Christian structure of all of reality, including the political order of the United States.
If you are not somebody who is Christian or Jewish, well, you can be here.
But it's going to be kind of tough for you if you're not willing to at least acknowledge And give veneration to the Christian order.
Dan, this reminds me so much of what we used to hear about the New Testament when we took our seminary classes that, you know, that throughout the Roman Empire, there were these local deities, there was the emperor, and Paul is always going throughout the Roman Empire talking about these local deities in these various cities and regions.
And he's always saying to folks, you know, don't, we worship one God and that's Jesus Christ.
There's one Savior, there's one gospel, the book of Galatians chapter one.
And here we have almost the reverse.
It's like, it's a Christian empire.
Everybody has to acknowledge the Christian God, even if they want to go into their house and privately venerate their gods or whatever they do, right?
That's kind of what I hear.
All right, give me one more, one or two more here, and then we'll get to Josh Hawley, I promise.
During the same week that this happened, Joel Webben, who's a leader and a pastor and a pundit in the Doug Wilson orbit, was on another panel.
So this is not at NatCon, but I want to play this clip for you because it's him talking about how we need a Christian state, a la Wilson and Moeller, because when he took his daughter to the playground, there was a woman in Hindu garb, and he had to explain to his daughter what that was.
Here's the clip. - Like, I walk around my neighborhood, and it's not that there are different shades of, you know, white and brown.
Who cares?
Um, no, it's, I mean, like, full, straight-up Hindu garb at the, our neighborhood swimming pool that my daughter is asking, I'm trying to explain.
She's like, you know, what, like, and I don't even know what country I'm in, in my own neighborhood.
I just, I don't, I don't know where I am.
It's, you know, I mean, the, the number of, when we go on a family walk, The number of Pakistani, Hindu, all these different, not just ethnicities, but religions with visible religious outfits on.
And, you know, the same thing like when we go to Costco.
I'm like, where, where am I?
You know, and so like every, I mean, it's rare.
Like we'll go on a family walk and every now and then we'll pass by, you know, a white, a white family that's a man and a woman and has more than one kid.
And and every time I see it, I'm like, I don't want to be this way, but I feel like this like small sense of relief.
Like I see.
I'm glad I'm glad you're one of my neighbors, because at the end of the day, again, it's not about whiteness, but at the end of the day, if things get rough, I don't know if my Hindu neighbor is going to fight to save the lives of my children.
All right, Dan.
So if you listen to the clip, Webin says two things.
A.
When I am walking and I see a white family with my kids, I look at them and I'm like, yeah, I'm glad you're here because I feel outnumbered and I'm not sure and I feel threatened.
He talks about how he doesn't want to explain to his kids that there are Pakistani people or people of other ethnicities or other religions around him.
He keeps saying this phrase, what country am I in?
Right?
Like, he's so offended.
He's so offended that everyone around him is not white.
He's so threatened.
And he keeps conflating Christianity and whiteness, even though he says he's not.
And then his last line is, yeah, when it all goes down, I'm not sure a Hindu person's gonna, like, protect my kids.
So that's why I want a Christian state.
OK, it's it goes everything along with what Mueller and Wilson are saying here.
There are a couple of others.
So there's a guy named Brad Littlejohn, and he talks about how Republicans should oppose the the idea of church and state for a number of reasons.
OK, he gives three, Dan, and I'm going to see what you think of these reasons.
The founders did not envision a wall of separation.
So I don't know, Dan.
We could talk to Thomas Jefferson.
We can go see what that says.
We could go read Andrew Seidel's The Founding Myth.
Number one is just sort of boilerplate BS Christian nationalist history.
Number two, separation of church and state is at odds with reality as one religion or another will always dominate society.
Ha ha!
There it is.
There it is.
Number three, religion has been reduced to nothing more than sincerely held personal beliefs.
So this is all at NatCon, where Mueller and Wilson spoke.
I want to start with number three.
He's basically echoing Doug Wilson here by saying, we cannot reduce religion to a libertarian, laissez-faire personal thing.
It's got to be imposed.
And then it goes along with what he said in point number two, which is, one religion will dominate, might as well be us.
Like.
What?
I'll just.
You know what?
Here, I'm going to read you a tweet from Scott Coley, who I recently interviewed on the show, and I think he had a great tweet about this.
He says, It doesn't even occur to them that there might be a neighborhood where no one dominates anyone.
Domination is an immutable, omnipresent reality, and it's the only thing they pursue with unwavering conviction.
Power is their god.
And I just think Scott really summed it up really well there.
All right.
I want to get to Josh Hawley.
I just gave you a lot of stuff, though.
Do you want to respond to that before we go to Josh Hawley?
I do.
Al Mohler, you know I'm going to talk about Al Mohler, right?
So he has bothered me.
Al Mohler famously attacked this show in 2020, so everybody just go look it up.
He has bothered me since I was an undergrad, right?
I was a Southern Baptist.
He has been the president of, the title is the Southern Baptist Seminary, right?
It's the flagship Southern Baptist Seminary.
What stood out to me about this NatCon thing was the pseudo-intellectualism of it.
If somebody was like, what were the differences between this and CPAC?
This was, I feel like, framed in many ways as, no, we're the intellectuals.
We're the thinkers.
There's some depth here.
And there is no bigger pseudo-intellectual in the evangelical world than Al Mohler.
He's one of these guys who, you go read about him, he's the self-professed, world-renowned, he's not a world-renowned theologian.
Nobody outside of evangelicalism listens to him.
But within that world, he has created this kind of little empire.
Southern seminary has been shaped by him for years.
And yet, he does terrible theology.
What he's doing in this, I just did an episode on bad theology, right?
A couple episodes ago on The New Code.
This is, on his own terms, terrible theology.
So let's just talk about a couple reasons why.
Number one, and this is just bad civics too, We have the Declaration of Independence.
I was in Boston for the 4th, and they do this thing at the State House where they read the Declaration every 4th of July.
It was the first time I saw that.
Really cool, really moving.
Guess what, Brad?
The Declaration of Independence is not the founding document of our current system of government.
The U.S.
Constitution is.
And guess what doesn't talk about a creator and all that other stuff?
It's not there.
Two, some history.
Why do they say Creator and not God?
Why do they say Creator and not, like, Lord Jesus Christ or something like that?
Because they're all deists.
There were Orthodox Christians among what we call the American Founders, but many of them weren't.
They had this very Enlightenment-inflected view called deism that somebody like Al Mohler does not support, does not hold to, and he knows that damn well, but he's just gonna, like, mask that part.
That's just general history stuff.
Here's some bad theology.
Just because they said it doesn't make the metaphysics true.
We hold these truths to be self-evident.
Wow, cool, so there's a creator that created everybody this way?
How's that for a philosophical or theological fallacy?
I guess Santa's real?
I could take that as self-evident.
But like once again, they're doing the thing that you as a tried and true Baptist hate, which is putting the definitions and the curation of religion in the hands of the government.
You're basically saying, if you're Al Mohler, you're basically saying to the writers of the Declaration of Independence, you're the theological authority and we'll follow from you.
Which is basically the handing over of theological authority to those founders.
And you as a Baptist have said on this, I mean, you're not a Baptist anymore, I don't know if you are or not, but you've said on the show many times, that's why Baptists were so fiercely against the infusion of religion and government, because you hand over theological religious authority to non-religious leaders.
Yeah, you cannot have a less historically Baptist position than that that's being advocated by the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary at present.
All of that.
Another one, and I'm not going to go too far in the weeds in this, Moeller is famously a Reformed theologian.
Guess what Reformed theologians don't like?
Traditionally, the Calvinists, natural theology, natural law theology, they were so opposed And inerrantists and biblicists like Moeller have for years, for decades, told us that only liberal Christians and Catholics and others believe that there's this natural law that we can discern without the aid of special revelation and so forth.
And now he's on his own terms.
It's not a theology that makes any sense.
It's It's problematic for all the reasons you highlight.
It's historically problematic.
It's bad theology.
It's faux intellectualism at the highest level, and that's what stood out to me the best, whether we're talking about Mueller or we'll come into Hawley in a minute.
You sound sophisticated.
You talk about natural law.
You talk about all these kinds of things.
It's a bunch of nonsense, and they know it's a bunch of nonsense.
But I think the average person, of course, doesn't.
And so when you start sounding sophisticated and talking about natural law, or St.
Augustine, which we'll get into in a minute with Holly, or these other things.
It lends an air of intellectualism that is really lacking to the whole discussion.
It's ideology with a thin religious vernier painted over it.
All right, let's take a break.
We'll come back and jump into Hawley and some other aspects of this.
Be right back.
All right, we're of course talking about Josh Hawley, senator from Missouri.
Josh Hawley, I played the clip at the top there where he says, some will say I am arguing this is a Christian nation.
I am.
Josh Hawley always like, sorry, I have to say this, he always says something like that and then he looks up at the crowd like, please recognize how... Clever that was.
Yeah.
How edgy that was.
Yeah, he's always looking for that edgy recognition from the crowd and he's like, and some people will say that I'm arguing for Christian nationalism.
And I am.
And he looks up like, huh?
Yeah.
Pretty crazy.
Or even, but that in life, like, indeed I am.
Indeed I am.
Something like that.
Like there'll be some word.
Yeah.
Thou shalt.
He starts talking like, okay, you're not Shakespeare.
Now, if you listen to the entire, you know, 28-minute speech he gave, he bases this idea of American society as based in Christian nationalism.
I mean, he says throughout the speech that Christian nationalism is our American founding.
I mean, that's an almost direct quote.
He does all of that through this weird reading of St.
Augustine.
He starts the speech with some jokes, and then he goes into this whole thing about how the Roman Empire was crumbling, but over there in North Africa was St.
Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, and he was arguing this, this, and this.
So Dan, I already know how angry you are about this.
So just for most people listening who are not reading Augustine every day, or they read Augustine before, they haven't in a long time, whatever.
What is Holly doing and why is it so misguided?
Yes, misguided.
So number one, what I think he is doing is he is tying in to a stream of discourse that is always there on the right.
And we hear this all the time, especially around family issues, anti-LGBTQ issues and so forth.
There is this line that says, The Roman Empire, the greatest empire in Western history, collapsed because of moral decay.
And you will find people who have this weird notion that, like, I don't know, they abandoned the 1950s American-style nuclear family and that's what led to the Roman collapse, or...
They gave into homoerotic impulses, and you hear that a little bit in him.
He talks about the moral decay, and he contrasts the late sort of decayed Roman Empire with the earlier Roman Republic, and that's a standard piece of affair that comes through in these kinds of things.
And what he does there, then, is he wants to do this thing where he says, what St.
Augustine is doing is trying to argue that A good Christian nation, a good Christian polity can survive and so forth.
And he's right.
One of the reasons why Augustine produced The City of God was to argue that Christians were not responsible for the collapse of the Roman Empire, because he and a lot of other people were really afraid of what would happen if everybody turned on Christianity.
Fine.
True.
Good.
Whatever.
Okay?
From there, everything Holly does is, again, a bunch of nonsense.
He's a good speaker though, and he can sell it.
We used to have a saying in evangelicalism, I don't know if you've heard this, but where somebody would do something and you'd be like, man, that'll preach.
Right?
That'll preach.
It sounds good, it sounds compelling.
He's citing Augustine, he's citing the founders and the pilgrims and the Puritans.
He's wearing a skinny tie.
It's a bunch of nonsense.
So what are some things that he does here?
Number one, fine, Augustan city of God, if you want that to be your civil model.
You cannot draw a straight line from Augustan city of God to like the Puritans in Massachusetts.
When he says that 20,000 Augustinians came and settled, it's just nonsense.
It's not there.
All the visions that he has, you know, we are a nation forged in Augustine's vision, calling America to be a Christian nation.
Augustine's Christian nationalism has been the boast of the West, and he talks about peace and weird things like love of wife and children, love of labor, neighbor, and home, that this is the vision.
You can read The City of God, I guess you can try to find that stuff.
But he skips like all of European history between Augustine writing and like, you know, what the fifth year, he's talking about the fall of Rome in the fifth century.
All the way up to the present as if, I don't know, medieval Christendom wasn't built on warfare.
It wasn't built on conflict.
It was this great, beautiful place.
Yeah.
Well, what about the wars of religion after the Protestant Reformation?
I mean, what about the utter brutality of the Protestants versus the Catholics all throughout Europe in ways that every time I teach that to my students, they look at me like, this can't be real, right?
Like this is way too disgusting and gruesome to be like an actual thing.
Like you're telling me these people killed each other?
You want to talk about, you know, something like the Spanish Inquisition and say that this is our model of this inclusive society that welcomes what?
Jewish people?
religion.
And I'm like, yep, that's exactly what I'm saying.
Utter devastation.
You want to talk about, you know, something like the Spanish Inquisition and say that this is our model of this inclusive society that welcomes what?
Jewish people?
Are you kidding me?
So just, and this is another piece of the ahistoricism of this kind of mythos that people weave, is to create this sort of sense of timeless truth so we don't have to look at the problematic almost two millennia that separate us from somebody like Augustine and just pretend that none of that stuff happened.
But let's fast forward.
Let's pretend that the Puritans are all good Augustinians coming to America.
He says that the Puritans gave us limited government.
There's some element to that.
I live in New England, right?
And there are still what they'll call the sort of village meeting, and they'll still have the time when the whole town comes together and you've got these direct democratic meeting house kind of things.
It's like, OK, yeah, some of that does go back to the Puritans.
Purity of conscience.
Freedom of conscience.
Purity of conscience.
No.
The Puritans did not come to North America to allow religious freedom.
They came to exercise their religion as they saw fit and happily persecuted anybody who disagreed with them.
How did we get Rhode Island?
Yeah, well, that's what I was going to say.
Like, so I'm in Massachusetts.
I've been to Plymouth.
You can go.
It's like, it's a really cool, like, they've got this outdoor, you know, sort of real-life museum and all this stuff.
Massachusetts, under the Puritans, was one of the most oppressive places in New England.
Like, Massachusetts had an established church until well into the 1800s.
We executed Quakers on Boston Common.
I mean, that was Massachusetts.
If you want the model, it was Rhode Island with a Baptist, sometimes Baptist, named Roger Williams.
That was a place that allowed freedom of religion and was roundly criticized by people like the Puritans.
Popular sovereignty, whatever.
But here's the other piece of conflation.
Do you remember, Brad?
I had to look it up to make sure I had the date right.
You happen to know, remember when Plymouth was founded?
Yeah, you're like, no.
Well, I was going to give...
Go ahead.
I'm going to be wrong.
Go ahead.
No, no, no.
Give me a guess.
No, no, no, no.
No, go ahead.
It's like 1660.
Or 16...
1620, rather.
1620.
I was in the 1620s.
I'm going to say my guess was in the 1620s.
All right.
When was that Declaration of Independence?
I think, what, 1776?
150 some odd years later.
This is the other thing that happens when people talk, not just these people, but people that talk about the American founding.
Pilgrims didn't found the U.S.
Massachusetts Bay Colony did not found the U.S.
The U.S.
was founded a century and a half later and was a very, very different place with very, very different political and religious views than the Pilgrims when they landed at Plymouth Rock and so forth.
At Plymouth, rather.
Completely different.
And this is something you mentioned, Andrew Seidel.
We cite him a lot, mention him.
Read The Founding Myth, and it's one of the things that he highlights.
People talk about this idealized vision of the Puritans.
They did not found the United States and Puritanism was not, by 1776, this dominant American political ideology.
This is why, if you look in the Constitution, you don't hear the kind of language that you would get there.
So there's a lot of historical conflation there.
There's a lot of, I think, idealization.
And then there's the more, you know, just cutting out the history.
Let's just pretend that nothing has happened from 1776 till now.
This vision of this peace-loving society, we'll forget that America was founded as a settler colonial state.
We'll forget our histories of colonialism.
We won't mention slavery.
We won't mention that women are not allowed to vote and so forth.
We won't mention that African Americans are not accorded as a full person.
We won't mention Native American genocides.
He has this notion that we would always welcome people of all ethnicities and backgrounds.
Not until the 1960s that you get the first immigration laws that don't put quotas Joe Webbin doesn't even want to go to the playground and see people who aren't white and Christian.
What are you talking about?
Yeah, so there's this vision, everything about it.
Again, it's bad.
It's bad history.
It's bad theology.
It's not a good reading of Augustine.
I also find it interesting that these people who want to always put forward their conservative Christian credentials are not citing the Bible and things like that.
I find that sort of interesting.
Yeah, obviously I'm sort of apoplectic and I could go on and on and on about Hawley and Al Mohler and people with this faux intellectualism.
It's a vision that, you know, the crowd loves it.
They're eating it up.
And I'm sure that Uncle Ron goes there and then goes back home and he feels like an intellectual now because he can say the word Augustine.
I don't know, you know, whether Josh Hawley's ever read The City of... I'm going to be honest.
I'm going to say this right now.
I have skipped parts of The City of God.
Ooh.
Yeah.
If anybody wants to go to like, you know, online or go to your library and pull out The City of God, you'll see why.
But yeah, it's faux intellectual nonsense to try to take a contemporary ideology and a contemporary revisionist history, to baptize it, to make it something that supposedly we with a good conscience can go with, and to try to convince ourselves it's going to be good for everybody.
All those non-Christians, all those people who don't share our views, and so forth.
So, thank you for debunking and, no, I mean, seriously, thank you for, I mean, because I don't think there's many people out there who can do the kind of Augustinian debunking of Holly and the, you know, the theological background of Al Mohler in those ways.
So, what I want to do to wrap this segment up is just say, friends, regardless of whether or not what they're doing is bad theology, incoherent, not historically accurate, The overall theme is what?
We want an America where we can impose Christianity on you.
That's what we want.
That's what Josh Hawley said.
This is a Christian nationalist nation.
That's what Al Mohler said.
Acknowledge Christian structures.
That's what Doug Wilson said.
No more libertarianism.
That's what we heard from bad little John.
And then there's no separation of church and state because one one religion is going to dominate the other.
They are preparing.
They're setting the stage for a brand name theology of Christian imposition.
It's already spread.
Don't get me wrong.
I'm not naive.
It's already all over the country.
But what they're trying to do is say, isn't this just natural?
If I'm a Christian, wouldn't I just want my religion to dominate?
And make that sort of like it's common sense, like it's irrefutable.
It's a basic premise that cannot be argued with.
And it very much can be argued with.
It very much can be argued with by saying, I don't want a society based on domination, whether by religion or any other means.
I want a society where People are allowed to practice their religious faith or not, or no faith at all, or they're able to have their own beliefs in ways that are harmonious with other people of other ethnicities, other religious backgrounds, other races, other immigration stories, and so on and so on and so on.
So just notice the themes as full of holes and incoherent as the theology and political philosophy is.
All right, Dan, let's go to reasons for hope.
And I have an extended reason for hope.
I want to thank Dr. Tiffany Wicks for help in kind of putting all this together this week.
But there was kind of a stunning result in France.
I was preparing, Dan, to kind of do about half an hour this week about how the far right has taken over France.
And it's just I mean, I was just one more reason to be like distraught about global politics.
And the French left really pulls out something that is pretty stunning.
The Socialist Party, the Green Party, the France Unvode Party, LFI, they built a coalition and they did this in the face of what were like first round wins and domination, in essence, by the far right and Marine Le Pen and her party in France.
Now, they formed what they've called a new popular front.
And the original popular front, if people are kind of aware of their French history, goes back to World War Two.
There was a leader of that movement, Léon Blum.
The Popular Front was supposed to stand up to German invasion and German hegemony.
It's not always seen as a kind of decisive military or political power.
Nonetheless, what it stood for was standing up to fascism.
So this current iteration sees themselves as standing up to fascism.
The Popular Front inspired other movements around the world, whether it was socialists or others in Spain and other places.
Now, what happened here is that very quickly, in the wake of those far-right victories a couple of weeks ago, you had these parties scrambling to find a way to work together.
The Greens, the Socialists, the France Unbowed.
And they did.
And they said to themselves, what's more important Then anything is preventing the far right, in essence, what represents a version of proto-fascism, from taking root in France.
Marine Le Pen, the Le Pen family, has been at this for generations.
They keep knocking at the door.
I just think, Dan, that this was a reason for hope.
It was a way to say, people who have different priorities, these parties are not the same.
They have different histories.
They have different pipelines.
They came together and said, you know what's important?
Not having fascism, not having the far right in power in our country.
I will also say that in the UK, a place both of us lived and studied, Labour Party is now in power decisively and beat the Tories.
The Tories are now out of power after 14 years of being in control.
And there seems to be a new chapter there after Brexit, after a lot of the kind of conservative far right impulses and traction we saw take place over the last decade.
My hope is that we can take something away from this in the United States and say, look, as I said earlier today, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, I don't know what's going to happen here the next two weeks.
What I do know is I know enough about Project 2025.
I know enough about Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, the Heritage Foundation, all the players on that side to know.
There will be no more system.
There will be no more American Republic as we know it.
If this goes through, I understand that the the system as it's constructed is unequal.
It's disparate.
It does not serve all people.
It has hurt people and so on.
I also know that the other one will hurt more people in worse ways.
And I think the French example to me was hope that it's possible to get there.
Just to tie in with that, and then I'll do mine real quick, is how fast it happened.
Because it's easy with what's going on here to be like, well, something happens, there's not much time.
They did this like lightning quick.
And I mean, it can be done if people just have the political will to do it.
My reason for hope, I think, is related to all of this.
It was already, we talked about Project 2025, but it was the growing visibility of that, the growing awareness.
I think that there are regular people who are, you know, for the first time, there are kind of alarm bells going off of like, oh, wow, this really is extreme.
There are things that really matter to me.
There are things that are really important.
There are things that really scare me that these people are actually advocating.
And I think that The more that message gets out, the more mainstream that becomes.
I think the more likely we are to see the kind of unity against this proto-fascism that we have knocking on the door, I think the more likely that is.
So I continue to take hope in that.
I had a family member after the John Oliver segment was like, hey, have you heard of Project 25?
I was like, yeah, I've heard a lot about it.
And they're like, it's really scary.
I was like, sure is.
And it was just one of those moments where, like, Dan, as you're saying, more people learn and they get really motivated to not vote for that person.
So.
All right.
I mean, it sounds like stuff you'd make up, right?
And like, no, it's there.
It's in black and white.
You can show it.
Like, here is their stated position.
We're not making it up or being alarmist.
They just said it.
All right, friends, thank you for listening today.
Thanks for supporting us.
If you're a premium subscriber, we're so grateful for you and thankful for your ongoing support of this show.
We'll be back next week with a bunch of things.
We'll be back with It's in the Code, the weekly roundup.
We'll have NARWATCH, my monthly sit down with Matt Taylor.
We'll also have our regular Monday programming.
So tune in, enjoy the summer.
Dan, sign off, go buy some shirts and order some souvenirs and I'll see you next week.
