Weekly Roundup: Kamala Harris Rises Despite Jezebel Attacks from the Right
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In this weekly roundup, we discuss the unexpected shifts in the political landscape following Joe Biden's decision not to run for re-election and Kamala Harris emerging as the presumptive Democratic nominee. We analyze the excitement around Harris' campaign, the contrasting positions and controversial remarks of JD Vance, and how his views on natalism and abortion rights could impact the election. We also explore the underlying influence of radical conservative Catholicism in American politics, particularly through connections like Kevin Roberts and Project 2025. The conversation includes the broader cultural implications and public reactions, highlighting increased voter registration and widespread support across various demographics.
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Okay, look, here's the situation.
Let's say Roe vs. Wade is overruled.
Ohio bans abortion, you know, in 2022.
Let's say 2024.
And then, you know, every day, George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately black women to get them to go have abortions in California.
Of course, the left will celebrate this as a victory for diversity.
That's kind of creepy.
House Justice is only exterminating working class black people.
Something like that could be a really weird turn of events that could happen, yes.
And it's like, if that happens, do you need some federal response to prevent it from happening?
Because it's really creepy.
And, you know, I'm pretty sympathetic to that, actually.
That's J.D.
Vance, vice presidential nominee of the Republican Party, talking a few years ago about how he would like to prevent women from leaving their states in order to get reproductive care and access to abortions.
These comments come in the wake of the public coming to realize his stances on family, on natalism, and his understanding that people who have children should have their vote count more than those who do not.
It also comes in the wake of him calling women who do not have children miserable cat ladies.
It's not the only bonkers and dangerous comments from right-wing figures that we've unearthed or seen this week.
In a clip from a few days ago, Lance Wallnau talks about Kamala Harris this way.
She is more radical than Obama.
And the problem is, she's already stated it.
However, there's such a hubris and such a kind of like aggression on the handlers on the left that they want her in.
And what makes me concerned is if her unelectability doesn't stop them, then they think that she's going to stir up the race wars by playing the race card.
She's going to stir up the gender wars by playing the woman against man.
She's going to go back and tear open the wounds in America to say Trump is an angry, white racist with a dangerous mag of movement in order to rupt... This is what the devil's choice is.
Today we analyze the incredible energy that the Kamala Harris campaign has brought to the Democratic Party in just a short time, the ways that black women, white women and others are mobilizing behind her.
We also analyze the various levels of the Jezebel attack on Kamala Harris and the ways that J.D.
Vance is becoming, for many reasons, a suck on the Trump campaign.
I'm Brad Onishi and this is the Straight White American Jesus Weekly Roundup.
Hello Dan Miller.
Good to see you this week.
Who are you?
Where do you work?
What concerts are you going to this weekend?
My name is Dan Miller.
I am professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
And a week from today, I'm going to see Metallica with my kids, which I'm super excited about.
I love that you're taking your kids.
Like that's, that's, that's good stuff.
Like that is parenting at its best.
You know what I mean?
It's funny.
It's funny because when you tell people, the people are like, oh, that's awesome.
And then people are like, huh?
Sort of like, let it sit.
You can kind of tell where, I don't know, probably what their parents thought of, like, bands like Metallica when they were kids, but anyway.
No, I've been, like, stupidly excited about this show for... Yeah, it's awesome, so.
It's awesome.
I'll be up in the nosebleeds, but, you know, it'll be cool.
I don't... I'm not gonna... Who are you, Brad?
I'm Brad Ornishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, and I'll just... I didn't want to forget to do that.
I'll just say quickly, there's a lot of J.D.
Vance couch jokes out there right now.
We're not gonna make those jokes, because we're professionals and leaders, Dan, and respectable.
We're too high-brow.
We're just too... We're too serious to be doing that.
I am sectionally frustrated that I'm not able to make those jokes, but...
So this is how the maturity works as you enter middle age, right?
I'm mature enough to know what not to say, but not so mature that it's not the first thing you want to say.
It comes to mind.
I have a kid who's old enough that we can start telling kind of adult jokes around her sometimes.
And the funniest thing is I think the look that she gets that I remember having when I get that age and I'm like my parents knew what that meant or like my parents get that or like and yeah so I have I'm with you I have not matured to the point of not not wanting to make some of the comments that we made.
All right.
So today we're going to jump into the incredible vibe shift that is the Kamala Harris campaign and also some of the attacks on Kamala Harris coming from Christian nationalists and dangerous extremists.
And then we'll talk about J.D.
Vance a little bit more.
And we've been doing a lot of J.D.
Vance.
Dan, I had this moment where I was like, I've been writing and reading and talking about J.D.
Vance so much that I looked in the mirror and I was I kind of looked like J.D.
Vance.
And I was like, oh, no, I'm like a man.
He and I are about four years apart in age.
I have a beard, I have brown hair.
Like, am I Japanese J.D.
Vance?
I had this moment the other day.
So we're going to talk about J.D.
Vance.
And then we're going to talk about connections of Project 2025 to Opus Dei, which I know all of you need in your lives.
And yeah, it's just one more aspect of Project 2025 that needs to be fleshed out.
All right, Dan, take us away.
Let's talk about Kamala Harris's brat, Kamala Harris and the coconut tree, Kamala Harris and the campaign that is invigorating people all over the place.
First, I just want to say, by the way, that the Japanese J.D.
Vance is maybe like, I don't know, you really have a knack for the turn of phrase, I think.
J.J.
and J.J.D.
Yep, J.J.D.
So there it is.
All right, so shifting to this.
Yeah, so what a difference a week makes, right?
You know, Biden announces over the weekend that he is not, that he's not going to run for president, that he's going to step down.
Excuse me.
And as widely speculated, Kamala Harris emerges as, you know, the presumptive, I won't even say at the time, presumptive nominee, like she gets Biden's nod and so forth.
But she like, immediately sort of took off.
And as you say, the vibe, everything has completely shifted in the last week.
And it's caught a lot of people off guard.
I think it's caught a lot of Democrats off guard in a good way.
It has completely thrown the Trump campaign, I think, into some disarray and also related to JD Vance, which we'll come back to.
But if I have two words for this week, it's arrogance and energy.
Like those are the two on the flip sides.
And so this is the energy piece, right?
Kamala Harris and the energy that she brings in.
And I read this to capture some of the arrogance.
I came across an interview with Mark Caputo, a political reporter, who had talked with some people in the Trump campaign and insiders, the anonymous insiders who speak on the condition of anonymity, all that.
And he said that, you know, Trump advisers thought that Biden dropping out would hand them the election.
They said they thought it would be a Democratic bloodbath, that it would be sort of a great thing for them.
They expected a kind of protracted open convention.
They expected a lot of Democratic backbiting and infighting.
And they made the same mistake that many Democrats did, which is that they thought Kamala Harris would Be a terrible candidate that, you know, she pulled poorly, that she, you know, wouldn't get support behind her and so forth.
And, you know, as I say, a lot of Democrats made that same mistake.
And she's completely flipped the script.
Within like 36 hours or something of getting the nod, she had basically tied up the nomination.
She had won over enough verbal commitments from delegates.
That she is now, I think everybody can comfortably say, the presumptive Democratic nominee.
She's becoming a social phenomenon, as you indicated.
memes, you know, online kinds of things, like just kinds of internet traffic, pop culture icons talking about her and addressing her, different kinds of things like this.
I don't know how many cat lady, like pro-Harris cat lady memes have been sent to me in the last couple of days of like just picking up these things that are intended as insults and like sort of spinning them around.
She has drawn celebrity support that Biden never would have.
And an example of this that I think got a couple of pop culture examples today of things is really, I think, were noteworthy.
As you know, she, that is Kamala Harris, was attacked on the right, has been attacked, and you're going to take us through more of this in detail, for her dating history, right?
Dated Willie Brown, Well, I was in like a decade-long relationship with him.
And for those who don't remember, he at the time was the Speaker of the California State Assembly.
This is in the early 2000s.
And then in, I think it was what, 2004, she was elected, that is Kamala Harris was elected DA of San Francisco.
And so the line is basically that she slept her way into power and so on and so forth.
None other than Cardi B comes out in defense of Kamala Harris, and she said, she wrote, she said, what does Kamala Harris' husband and relationships have to do with her credentials?
And she fires back, she says, do y'all hire people based on who they're effing?
Like, it was just like this kind of mic drop thing of like, so wait a minute, if you think that's what happened, are you saying that's how you hire people, Republicans and conservatives, that this is what you do?
What does that mean?
Is Cardi B going to win an election for Kamala Harris?
No.
Is Cardi B going to take Trump down?
No.
Would Cardi B have gone and, like, done this for, like, Joe Biden on something?
Would she have generated that kind of interest or support or anything that Biden did?
No, right?
It's just that kind of energy.
There's also other aspects of this.
Kamala Harris seems so sharp and energetic.
And I don't know.
I don't know how much of that's perception because we've had years of Joe Biden and how much is, you know, she's really sharp.
I think she is sharp and energetic, but I think the contrast really stands out.
Stronger.
I didn't say strong.
I didn't say perfect.
I didn't say agreeable, but stronger, stronger for many liberals and progressives on Israel-Palestine than anything Joe Biden said.
If Joe Biden had come out and said, I'm not going to be silent on what's going on in Gaza and, you know, It's not hard to do.
And, you know, she did that.
Pushed Netanyahu hard.
Also, as an aside, I think it's worth noting that we might see Biden be different now, that he's not running for re-election when it comes to Netanyahu, but that's a separate thing.
She has wide-ranging support, I think.
That's important.
Gen Z is excited.
You know, all these cat memes and stuff, it's not usually people my age that are reading those.
My mom's age that are reading those.
It's not our grandparents, right?
It's Gen Z and young millennials who are reading those and who are excited about those.
Polling shows this.
She has support from voters for Nikki Haley who have like thrown their support behind her.
Nikki Haley even had her attorney.
Write a letter to them with a cease and desist saying to stop using Nikki Haley's name They had their attorney write a letter back saying this is the First Amendment, bro We're gonna keep this going and keep doing this and so she's got that I read a series of interviews that somebody did With you know sort of like boomers and greatest generation folks in Pennsylvania asking what they thought about this To a person.
They said Biden stepping down was the right thing to do.
Most of them supported Harris.
The ones who didn't sounded sincerely like they're just kind of waiting to learn more and whatever.
So wide range support.
Lots of energy.
And the Trump team is on the defensive.
As I said, Trump is backtracking on debates now.
He had originally even said, it's important for presidents to debate.
I look forward to debating her.
And now he won't commit to doing debates with Kamala Harris.
His campaign says it would be inappropriate to schedule debates with somebody before there's even a named nominee, even though they had scheduled debates with Joe Biden before he was a named nominee.
As we know, the first debate took place before he was a nominee for the Democratic candidacy.
They're throwing everything at her to see what sticks, and it's clear that they don't really know what that is yet.
I think the racist and misogynistic attacks are only further alienating the people that they ostensibly want to bring in.
You had the Speaker of the House have a closed-door meeting with Republicans saying to stop it.
But they're not.
You had Nikki Haley saying it's not productive, but it hasn't gone anywhere.
The Trump campaign notably declined to say that racist and sexist attacks on her were off limits.
They said, the spokesperson said, that's not what they're doing, but would not say that that was off limits to do, including some similar things to Obama, some birther kind of stuff and stuff about her parents and things like that.
Finally, the age issue has flipped on Trump.
Trump is now the oldest presidential nominee in U.S.
history.
He was only three years younger than Biden, is only three years younger than Biden.
And that has flipped.
So just tons and tons and tons of energy and momentum.
The last point I'll make about this, I've had a lot of people who've said, you read a lot of people who are surprised by this, because Harris polled poorly as a very unpopular VP.
And I'm interested in if you have thoughts about this as well, if we have time to get to it.
I think regular people, most people who vote and kind of follow politics, but they're not nerds like us who look at it all the time.
They're not political analysts.
They are not political strategists or journalists.
Most people, I think, don't really differentiate between the president and vice president that much.
They're like a package deal.
So if you don't approve of the president, you're not enthused about the president, you're not enthused about the vice president.
And people can email you.
There's some really notable example of super popular vice presidents When presidents weren't, but I think the past polling on Harris doesn't actually tell us that much.
And the last point is, there was an article in Politico where they interviewed, I think, a number of different, I lost where I was in my notes, but different political strategists and folks who had run different presidential campaigns.
And they asked them, you know, why she was doing so well, if there was this line that, you know, she didn't have a, she had a poor campaign in 2020 and so forth.
And one of the respondents, who was Mitt Romney's campaign manager, said that he rejected the premise.
And he said, basically he said, only one person is going to win the primary.
So because you don't win the primary, it doesn't mean that you had a bad campaign.
He said she won a hard battle for DA at the time and an attorney general.
She became vice president.
She has now sewn up support to be president.
He's like, that's a bad politician.
Imagine what she'd be if she was a good politician.
So I think there was a lot of underestimating there.
So lots of stuff going on.
You and I were talking before the show and I said, you know, I feel more energetic about This election, you know, this week than I have in, I don't know, maybe ever.
So, yeah, lots more thoughts.
I'm going to throw it over to you and just your impressions of kind of a whirlwind week.
Yeah, it is.
It is.
It's a week we'll remember.
Maybe not.
Who knows what will happen in November and what else?
But especially if Kamala Harris wins, this will be a week of I think, you know, I think people remember certain times what they felt.
I remember what I felt when Joe Biden beat Trump and it just meant we weren't going to have four more years of Trump.
I've talked about how I felt when Barack Obama became president.
You know, Jessica Tarloff, who's the kind of liberal voice on Fox News from time to time, was saying that she had seen social media and talked to people who put it this way.
It felt like A long goodbye to Joe Biden and mourning his political career.
And then once he was out and Harris was in, it was like the vibe at an open bar wedding.
You know, everyone just like ready to go and in a kind of, you know, frenzy of enthusiasm.
So, I think that's there.
I want to mention a couple more data points on the enthusiasm.
So, there was a Zoom call with black women and I've mentioned this this week.
40,000 black women joined to support Kamala Harris.
Well, last night, there was an organized meeting on Zoom for white women, and it was specifically as a response to the, you know, like, look, black women have shown out for Kamala Harris.
White women need to answer the call.
They broke Zoom.
There was over a hundred thousand people on that call.
And it's a marker of something that I think is would have never happened for Joe Biden.
I mean, if we want to use that lens, I think that's that's kind of like a good place to start.
Somebody on X, Amanda Becker.
I've covered national politics for 15 years, including close to two embedded covering Clinton's campaign, and I've never been at or listened to an organizing event quite like Answer the Call, a grassroots effort that has attracted 130,000-plus white women on a Thursday night.
So there's that.
Voter registration is up over 35% in Virginia.
Quoting from a piece, data shows that on Monday and Tuesday, the first two full days of Harris's campaign, nearly 5,000 Virginians registered to vote, a 38.5% increase over the same time the week before.
So that is all there.
And I agree that her statement on Gaza and Palestine yesterday was not one that Joe Biden would have ever made.
I also think Harris now appears as the opposite of Trump, like Joe Biden and Trump were both like 80 year old men.
Joe Biden's Catholic.
He grew up at a time when, you know, a certain kind of Catholic politics was really ingrained in him.
Biden was never going to be the guy that was able to go after J.D.
Vance or Trump on reproductive rights.
He was never going to try the case on abortion.
He just he's not going to do that.
He doesn't.
And and Kamala Harris can do that.
Kamala Harris can do that in a way that Joe Biden would have never done.
So I think that's all there.
And I think that's all something to to keep an eye on.
One, you know, one last thing I think on Harris is just we're at a place where I think everyone feels confident when the Democratic presidential presumptive nominee goes out to speak.
That they are aggressive, they're enthusiastic, they are charged and ready to go.
You know, there's not a feeling of How's this gonna go?
Is this gonna go okay?
Is he gonna say the wrong thing?
Is he gonna look like he doesn't know where he is?
And I think that's just part of the enthusiasm and part of it.
So, I think that's there.
Overall, Dan, I think there's two people I'm watching in this.
I think, actually there's three.
I think black voters seem to, there's a tremendous energy and I was worried about black voters, at least a percentage of them, going for Trump in a way that would have been impactful.
So I'm going to watch that.
I'm going to watch the white women who are organizing in these calls.
And especially the white women who are turned off by somebody we're going to talk about in a minute, J.D.
Vance, talking about cat ladies, talking about people with kids having more of a vote, talking about stopping people.
Who are on the highway trying to go from one state to another to get an abortion or other care.
I think those women and those voters are listening.
So I think that's something to take heed of.
And then I think Gen Z. When I think of that number from Virginia, I think of a worry that I had with Biden was not Are there these mythical, persuadable voters out there that are just like ready to like switch from Biden to Trump?
There's some.
There are.
There totally are.
And if you listen to Sarah Longwell and her podcast and her work, she makes a very good case.
She's in, you know, panels and she's with undecided voters all the time talking to them.
But there's also, Dan, all these people that could stay home, right?
Like if Joe Biden is the lack of enthusiasm, the enthusiasm gap.
Like, Dan, you and I know college kids.
Like, they'll stay home.
Like, you know, there are people that will stay home.
There are people for whom the system does not work that will stay home if they think the system is not going to continue to even try to work for them.
Whether that is a black person in the country, whether that's a woman, whether that's a trans person, whether that's an immigrant, right?
There are reasons people stay home.
It's because they feel like, what's the point?
The system's not made for me.
The system doesn't work for me.
Nobody in the system cares about me.
And so that enthusiasm is that's what it's about.
Is it worth my time to care?
Because do these people care about me?
Kamala Harris has a chance to signal to some of those people.
Yeah.
We're ready.
Let's go.
And I think that's a major thing I'll watch too.
So, last thoughts before we go to some other things.
Just tied in with that, two thoughts.
Number one, I still believe that lack of enthusiasm is what put Trump in the office in 2016.
I think a lot of people thought that Hillary Clinton was going to win.
It seems weird now, but we can all remember the polling.
She was ahead on whatever.
But she was not an inspiring candidate for many.
Then you had the whole FBI reopening the investigation thing and so forth.
I think there were a lot of people who just weren't excited about Hillary Clinton, who would have voted for Hillary Clinton, who didn't vote.
And gave it to Trump.
Again, I say Trump in 2016 came in third in a two-person race.
He did not win a plurality of the votes.
A minority of registered voters voted, and Trump lost the majority of those and became our president.
I think one of the reasons this matters is not just for the Democrats, but I think one of the reasons people misread this, including, I think, the Trump campaign, is I think that the Trump campaign had mistaken lack of enthusiasm for Joe Biden as support for Trump in certain key areas.
I think they knew that there was a lack of enthusiasm for Biden, but I think they also misinterpreted that in places as support for Trump, and we're seeing that, I think, shake off now.
And just real quickly, you know, we're gonna get to reasons for hope, and this whole thing was really my whole reason for hope.
I think Kamala Harris still has upward trajectory.
Like, I don't think that she's peaked or plateaued yet.
I think she's still got, you know, some elevation to gain here.
So I think it's really positive.
I think that enthusiasm issue that you're naming, It's huge.
And I think that that's why all the social media stuff and the pop culture stuff and things like that is a kind of barometer, because I think it communicates that enthusiasm.
And it is the way that people that we need to be enthusiastic about the election.
It is the way of communicating to them.
It is how they digest or become aware of some of these kinds of things.
And so she she has to be in that sphere.
And she is.
Let's take a break.
We'll keep talking about Kamala Harris, but we'll talk about some of these attacks on her that are racist, sexist, about spiritual warfare.
Be right back.
Almost as soon as Kamala Harris launched her campaign, Dan, we began to see, as you mentioned just a minute ago, the sexist and misogynistic diatribes come her way.
And so I think it's it's worth kind of going through some of those and trying to decode some of them.
This is from Rolling Stone.
Trump White House veteran Kellyanne Conway blasted Harris on Fox News as lazy, doesn't work hard and inarticulate.
She does not speak well.
Wyoming GOP Rep.
Harriet Hageman claimed Harris is intellectually the bottom of the barrel, while also insisting she was chosen for Vice President as a DEI hire, something Dan, you talked all about on Wednesday, if people would like more on that.
Other Republicans have claimed Democrats would rather rally around another stand-bearer but are supposedly saddled with Harris out of demographic obligation.
A lot of Democrats feel they have to stick with her, said Rep.
Glenn Grotham from Wisconsin, because of her ethnic background.
So I'll just kick this off, Dan, by saying these are very clearly for anyone listening, racist dog whistles.
These are the kinds of things, lazy, does not speak well, that are code for slurs and Inarticulate, right?
That's the racist slur for years, right?
Somebody would talk about the quote-unquote articulate black person, the notion that if you're a person of color, you're naturally inarticulate.
And so this is just the flip side, the slight nuance of that.
It's the same old thing in slightly different dress.
It's also just, you know, one of those moments where you ask yourself, well, why would they say these things?
And they would say them, Dan, because There are people for whom this will have traction.
There was a person at a rally I saw interviewed recently, this week, and the first thing that woman said about Kamala Harris is she's not smart.
And then the interviewer was like, well, okay, have you heard her speak?
What has she said?
What policies does she hold that make her not smart?
And the woman was like, I don't know.
And so very clearly these these comments from Conway from elected representatives are just trying to play on well-worn racist stereotypes about black people that are Going to resonate somewhere in that MAGA base.
Now, will they resonate with the the suburban women, with the Gen Z, with the other folks that we've been talking about?
I'm not sure.
And I'm not sure that that's that's actually going to work.
But we've also had the rebirth of birtherism, saying that she is not eligible to be president because her parents were not naturalized citizens when she was born.
And of course, we have had the sexist attacks on her that you've already mentioned, that it's all about, you know, how she somehow slept her way to the top and so on and so forth.
So these are all tried and true racist, sexist attacks that have been present in American history.
Now, one of them that many of you might have seen already that also came forward this week was from Lance Wallnau, the New Apostolic Reformation figure, the
In many ways progenitor of the modern seven mountains mandate meme and He came out and said he believes that Kamala Harris is a Jezebel figure He says that she represents the spirit of Jezebel and in a way that will be even much more ominous than Hillary Because she'll bring a racial component and she's younger writing at The New Republic, Melissa Gira Grant had the, I'll throw it to you.
I'll just let me read what Melissa said and then I'll throw it to you.
She said, the predictably racist and misogynistic attacks on Kamala Harris came from equally predictable sources, as we just said, but then you get this thing from, from Wall Now.
Grant says, To call a black woman a Jezebel harkens back to America's racist and misogynistic history of casting black women as insatiably sexual, which served to justify slave-holding men's systematic sexual assault of enslaved women.
But for right-wing white Christians of the sort, like Walnau, to say a woman is a Jezebel spirit is also to say she is a danger to them, a barely human being hell-bent on seducing men to their destruction and assuming their power.
He clarified, thanks so much Lance Wallnau, and said he has nothing personal against her.
It's just the demon that is speaking from within her.
So that's a classic hate the sin, love the sinner trope.
I got more to say, but I'll throw it to you.
You've been laughing.
I mean, you've been in sort of disbelief as I've been talking, so...
Yeah, the history of it, and folks can look at this, I mean, you don't have to extrapolate, this is like the literal history of representing feminine black sexuality in American history to legitimize this.
The other thing, and people will point this out, and this is like when people are like, you know, people know I rail against calling biblical literalism biblical literalism because they don't take it literally.
Jezebel is, for those who don't know, once again, is this figure in the Hebrew Bible who gets involved with one of the Israelite kings and is not sort of practicing proper Yahwistic worship and so forth and, you know, falls under judgment and is blamed for, you know, leading this king astray and so forth.
And I've had people email me about this.
I've read books where people write about this.
Women who sort of come out of high-control religion, and part of the reason that they do is because they start reading the Bible, and it doesn't say what they were kind of told it says.
You go and you read it, and there's nothing about sex in the Jezebel story.
Nothing.
It is completely this, like, masculine fantasy of being able to displace Their own lack of morality, their own sexually predatory behavior, their own, you know, whatever, onto a woman to somehow become the victim, right?
You are the sexual aggressor in some way, and yet you're victimized because she made me do it, she led me on, she was asking for it, right?
If those tropes sound familiar, it's because that Jezebel logic, not in our explicit religious terms, but that Jezebel logic is still just part of a general misogynistic culture that we live in.
And I only laugh because it's been with us for hundreds of years.
It's been in the West for thousands of years.
It's still there.
It's still tracking out.
And again, I'm with you.
This communicates to MAGA.
MAGA loves this stuff.
They love to hate it.
It's going to be a theme when we come back to J.D.
Vance here in a minute.
But I am just not sure.
It's not that I'm not sure.
I don't think this is going to track well with Black women who have grown up Hearing this kind of racist language directed at their community, I don't think that this is going to track well with any women.
I don't think this is going to track well with a lot of men who have grown up in a time where they're like, hey, guess who's responsible for my sexual acts?
I am, not anybody else.
There are a generation of men who didn't grow up With what Trump called locker room talk and, you know, and casual victimization.
But it just, it's also just so predictable.
We knew that this was going to happen.
It's completely predictable.
And there it is.
Yeah, on so many different levels.
Whether it's the softer version, the she was having an affair with Willie Brown.
Willie Brown was separated at the time and so forth and it was a long-term relationship.
Or the much more explicit, it's the demon acting in her who's doing this.
It's the same logic and it's tired.
And I don't think it's going to work outside of the band that Trump already talks.
Well, it's it's I think for me what what it calls forth is it's it's it's dehumanizing on two levels.
So if you if you say that Jezebel Spear in the context of a black woman.
You're dehumanizing her as a sexually voracious animal.
That is the trope that was used during the times of enslavement, the 18th century, 19th century, and so on, in relationship to black women.
That you're not a woman.
You're not a real woman.
You're not a human.
I mean, this goes back to Sarah Mosler's work of Origination and a podcast we made called Pure White that the idea of purity could never be achieved by a black woman because a black woman was always already sexually sinful and sexually Compromised, right?
By nature.
So if that is true, then you are able to treat her as such, okay?
So it is dehumanizing to talk about Kamala Harris as a black woman, as a Jezebel, but it is also dehumanizing to say, and this is really dangerous, to say, well, it's just the demon inside of her that's a Jezebel.
I don't mind Kamala Harris, it's just that she's controlled by a demon.
So what that justifies is, well, if she's controlled by a demon and there's no way to get that demon out, Spiritual warfare and prayer are not working, then you might have to stop her by other ways.
Right?
I mean, that's basically what we see with this kind of rhetoric, this Christian supremacist, Christian imposition is, you're controlled by a demon, Dan.
Sorry.
And the demon won't leave.
So I just have to like stop Dan, because that's the only way to get rid of your host.
That's a really dangerous rhetoric.
To call someone and say, it's the demon inside of them.
Now, that's standard fare for the New Apostolic Reformation.
It's standard fare for many Christian Trumpists.
But the Jezebel language is two-fold there.
One more comment, and I don't want to miss, and I talked about this on bonus content for our subscribers Tuesday.
Kamala Harris is an Asian American woman, and I want to make sure that everybody knows that there are long and deep tropes about Asian American women as highly fetishized and sexualized in American culture.
In 1875, the Page Act was passed basically out of the idea that the Chinese women arriving to the United States on the West Coast were all prostitutes.
And so it was passed as a law that basically said, there's a really good reason to think that any Chinese woman in the United States, any Asian woman in the United States is a is a prostitute.
And so this all played out in deep and tragic and disgusting ways at the Atlanta massacre when Six women of Asian descent were killed by a white evangelical gunman who had highly sexualized and fetishized them.
So I don't want to miss the Asian American aspect of the Jezebel designation either, because that is also present.
So more on this, Dan, or do you want to take us into, because it really does segue, unfortunately, into some other aspects of J.D.
Vance's profile and policies and some comments he's made.
Yeah, I'll move into Vance, because if I don't, we could spend the entire session on this Jezebel.
Like, everything this week, I feel like we could spend, you know, an entire session on.
But I know we've talked about Vance a lot, and you've done a great job of walking us through some of the intricacies of the kind of behind-the-scenes, or sometimes they're kind of out in the open, but the linkages and connections.
You're going to walk us through some more of that.
You know, and why maybe he was selected by Trump.
But the other thing that has emerged this week, and I want to look at more concrete terms, is the drag that in like the 10 days or two weeks or whatever it's been since Vance was officially named as the VP, VP nominee rather, has become a drag on Trump and the GOP generally.
So I want to just sort of highlight some of these and it's going to tie in with some of the same stuff about the Jezebel and everything else.
So looking at the strategy behind the pick, right, we've heard in just pragmatic terms, you talked about Teal and Elon Musk and those things are real.
In pragmatic terms, the reason it's going to be given is, oh, Ohio, right, he's going to help with the Rust Belt.
He's going to help do that.
Except that he doesn't really help in Ohio.
We've talked about that.
He polls poorly there, underperformed other Republicans.
He's wildly popular with the MAGA crowd, but nowhere else, right?
They picked somebody who fit their guaranteed voters and not anybody else.
But not only that, he's gone from, I think, people saying, strategically, how does he broaden the appeal?
How does he counterbalance Trump?
My daughter was asking me today, she's 15, just turned 15 and starting to kind of follow the ins and outs of politics more and was asking about stuff.
I talked about the notion of candidates balancing themselves with their VP pick, right?
That that's what you're trying to do and that it didn't do this.
Just some of the things that have happened or the ways that he's dragging this down, and I invite you to jump in anywhere or wait till the end, but post-convention, right, he is the least liked non-incumbent vice presidential nominee since 1980.
That's how badly he's polling.
He is the first ever to have a negative favorability rating.
So he's just coming right out of the gates.
Americans don't like him.
He has extreme and misogynistic views, right?
This is the stuff that we've been talking about.
The cat ladies line that probably everybody by now has heard about.
In 2021, in an interview with Tucker Carlson, this was not a hot mic thing.
This was not a, oh, there's a liberal filmmaker who bought a ticket to the dinner and, you know, got somebody on tape, you know, is what happened with Alito or whatever.
No, he's in an interview with Tucker Carlson, And makes this statement about how the left is full of childless cat ladies and because they don't have kids and people without kids don't have a real stake in the political system and so forth.
And he included Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg, right?
So he didn't just offend women.
He's got queer folk in view here.
Just, you know, you name it.
Alienating broad swaths of the population.
Back to the pop culture piece, the Swifties.
The army of fans loyal to Taylor Swift have been all over this.
And we talked about this a little bit, you know, in other contexts, right, of this unmarried, successful woman, right, who doesn't have kids, doesn't have a family and so forth.
And, you know, the role that this plays.
Harris' stepchildren.
came to her defense, and I think it was her stepdaughter.
No, sorry.
Said that she loves all three of her kids.
Well, and Doug Eam, and I don't have her name in front of me, and I'm not trying to not name her name.
I don't, so I apologize.
It's not in my notes.
I know where you're going.
But Doug Eamhoff's ex-wife, the biological mother of those stepchildren, came out and was like, we have all parented together.
Like, she has the endorsement, Dan.
Kamala Harris has the endorsement of her husband's ex-wife.
That's a lot.
I just also want to say... When talking about momentum and energy, like, there it is.
Do you know how hard that endorsement is to get?
Also, I just want Taylor Swift to come out on stage, like, with Dolly Parton and Jennifer Aniston, and I just want them to break the internet.
I want them to, like, have a five-city tour.
Call it the Cat Lady Tour.
I want it to be Swifties meets Dolly Parton meets the like, you know, older millennial Jen Aniston group.
Like you have every generation there, right?
You have like 34-year-old Swift, you have whatever Jennifer Aniston, I don't know how old she is at this point, but like everyone who grew up in the 90s and 2000s, and then Dolly Parton, the legend, the gift, The deity that is Dolly Parton.
I mean, it would break the Internet.
It would break the Republic.
I don't think the Republican Party would exist after that.
I think they would just have to start out like we'd have to re-resurrect the Whigs or the Know-Nothings or something because there would be no more Republican Party.
All right.
I apologize for that interjection.
Go ahead.
Yeah, well, I mean, it's just another example.
You mentioned Jennifer Aniston, who was on fire, in my view.
She has been very open, discussing her own fertility issues, her own successful attempts with fertility treatment and to have children, her own accusations, accusations people leveled against her that she was selfish.
By choosing not to have a family and so forth, not knowing that this is something she valued and wanted.
She said on Instagram, she said, quote, I truly can't believe this is coming from a potential VP of the United States.
And then she goes on and she says this, she says, all I can say is Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day.
I hope she will not need to turn to IVF as a second option because you're trying to take that away from her too.
Just like, okay, drop the mic, Jennifer Aniston.
Again, like, this is the kind of traction, this is the kind of statement that you're drawing out if you're Vance.
Not statements in support, not expansion of anything, but I mean, you're getting the Jennifer Anistons of the world and the Swifties coming after you.
Project 2025 is not going to go away.
Trump has tried to feign ignorance and say that he has nothing to do with it.
But Vance is hip deep in Project 2025, as we've talked about.
But Kevin Roberts, who we'll hear more about here in a bit, Head of the Heritage Foundation, the group that put out Project 2025.
He has called himself the head of Project 2025.
He has a book coming out in September.
And guess, Brad, just guess who wrote the foreword to the book, right?
None other than Vance.
And this is something that was already known when the Trump campaign named him, when Trump chose him to be the VP.
Extreme anti-abortion views, as you've talked about it, and might walk us through in more detail, you know, stopping people at the border and initially endorsing abortion views that don't allow any exception for rape or incest or anything else.
He's also performing poorly.
He's not a good speaker.
He's not engaging.
He's falling flat on the stump.
He said in 2016 that he believed the sexual assault accusations against Trump were true.
If I'm the Democrats, I'm just going to start playing that.
Just on and on and on and on and on and on.
So the question that comes up is why the hell Did they pick this guy?
Why did Trump pick this person?
And again, I think all the things you've been highlighting are a significant part of this.
But something else I came across this week was an interview, and I apologize.
I read so much stuff this week that I didn't make good notes always about where I read it, and so I'm not sure who had it.
But somebody had interviewed insiders in the Trump campaign.
And one of the things that they said is that they wanted to pump up the MAGA base.
They believed that they had the election basically sewn up and they wanted to run up the score.
Yes, they wanted to do better in the Midwest, but they wanted a Trump acolyte.
They wanted really kind of an heir apparent.
They wanted somebody who was going to keep the Trump base fired up.
And they chose this person.
And that's why my theme for this is arrogance.
It was, among other things, a pick of arrogance.
We have this.
We have it won.
We don't need to expand our base.
Again, I think that there was a lot of misconstruing, a lack of enthusiasm for Biden as support for Trump, thinking that the support was greater than it was.
So Vance, in the last 10 days, has just been, you know, sort of a disaster.
Last point that I'll make, of course, this brings up speculation.
Might Trump dump Vance and go for somebody else?
I think that that's unlikely for a number of reasons, but I welcome your thoughts on that and anything else related to just the drag that Vance has become on Trump and the Republican ticket in the last week.
Yeah, so a couple thoughts here.
If you compare him to Sarah Palin, that makes sense.
I think Sarah Palin and J.D.
Vance are very different, of course, but neither of them were really in the prime time scrutinizing Spotlight that they are now, that Vance is now, and Palin was.
Palin, however, Dan, was electric to a certain crowd.
Like, when you put Palin in front of certain people, the hockey moms and the white conservative Christian moms and all that, she played, man.
I mean, she played.
She played, and she also balanced McCain.
Like, McCain wanted that populist appeal.
He wanted the evangelical appeal.
He wanted all the stuff that he wasn't.
So there was a logic.
I think she was poorly vetted, as it turns out.
But there was a logic.
And there was.
And she was.
She was dynamic and charismatic.
Yeah, so she was a value negative when it came to like, you know, she didn't really seem to know that much about geopolitics.
She didn't know anything about foreign policy.
She didn't know, you know, it was very clear.
But you could put her on the stage in front of certain audiences and she could preach.
I mean, she really could.
Vance, what we're finding out, and I'll admit, I'm not somebody who'd really followed like J.D.
Vance's public appearances before this, I'd known about his policies and his life.
He is just not preaching.
You know, there are more everyday awkward clips from J.D.
Vance out on the stump, out trying to kind of connect with people.
So that is not going well.
And I think that's a markedly different aspect of these two vice presidential picks.
So I think that's something to keep in mind.
Somebody on Fox News asked Trump, you know, are you thinking about dumping Vance?
And he was like, no, no, no.
And you know what he said?
He said, he's for the worker.
He's for the worker.
He's great.
He's for the worker.
And I think that was a little insight into like Trump's mindset.
Trump, the like, you know, trust fund kid.
Trump the like, you know, faux populist, Trump the faux champion of the working man.
I think perhaps too, just to add in one more slice of this, I think this was a Silicon Valley money pick.
I think this was a Catholic networks behind the scenes pick.
I think this was a, he helps us in the Rust Belt pick.
I also think it was like a, a Midwestern, uh, worker pick that.
I mean, I think that's like, if you would have asked Trump, that's what he would have said.
Oh yeah, the worker.
The workers like him.
Let's get him.
The workers.
He's a hillbilly.
Get the workers here.
And I think, there's, like, last night, Don Jr.
interviewed J.D.
Vance, and Don Jr.
did not seem well.
I'll just put that, I'm not going to comment further, but he did not seem well.
But supposedly Don Jr.
was one of J.D.
Vance's biggest fans in the Trump campaign because John Jr.
supposedly read Hillbilly Elegy and loved it.
And I'm thinking Don Jr.
the like trust fund kid of the trust fund kid who is like Kendall Roy from Succession read Hillbilly Elegy and like was like found himself in there.
Like what is going what is happening?
So that's a little weird too.
So I think all these aspects are are important.
Here's what we're finding out about Vance on a regular basis.
Vance is a natalist.
Like, Vance wants to ban abortion.
Vance did not vote to support IVF when the bill came up a couple of weeks ago.
Vance, there is tape out there of Vance saying he wants to stop women from traveling across state to get reproductive health care.
Vance is on tape saying he thinks that if you have children, you should get more of a vote.
Your voice should matter more.
And if people are wondering, this goes back to everything I talked about Monday, everything I talked about last Friday, and everything I talked about the Friday before, which is, if you understand Vance as a radical Catholic conservative who converted just a few years ago, and who is close to the likes of Kevin Roberts from the Heritage Foundation,
And other reactionary Catholic influences, you start to realize that, Dan, this is another chapter of the insurgency of rad trad Catholic morality into American politics.
This is not Jerry Falwell.
This is not the Southern.
This is not George W. Bush.
This is a guy that seems to follow the line of no IVF, no abortions, maybe no contraception.
We're going to get to Kevin Roberts in a minute, and Kevin Roberts wants to get rid of contraception.
This is a guy who called Kamala Harris a DEI candidate.
And so there are just ways that Vance, if you read him, is predictable as a rad trad natalist candidate.
And once again, that doesn't do anything to balance out Trump at all.
Trump could have chosen Nikki Haley.
He could have chosen Byron Donalds.
He could have chosen Marco Rubio.
All of them would have provided something at this point, I think, on the stump.
That would have added like Nikki Haley would have added something as a as a woman candidate as a person of color.
Right as a former governor like there's a lot about Nikki Haley.
That's not Trump.
She's from the South Byron Donald's right black man and and so on Marco Rubio also a person of color right a kind of Wall Street darling.
And what we're finding is, at least with Harris at the top of the ticket, Vance is, it's hard to find an ad right now other than the behind the scenes, back room, Catholic networks and Silicon Valley luminaries.
One more thought and then I'll throw it back to you is, Vance is 39 Dan, he's been on the internet for like 15 years because he's not Trump.
All the things that we've had about Trump in the past, I'll give you Access Hollywood tape as an example.
We're hot mic moments.
Right now, not all.
As soon as I said that, I'm sure the emails are started flying.
Well, what about Charlottesville?
What about?
Okay, fine.
I'm talking about things from like Trump's past that like got Trump in trouble.
So Access Hollywood being Exhibit A.
Trump was able to turn that around as locker room talk in a manner that was not supposed to be for, you know, public policy and governmental philosophy.
It was just me being a macho man talking in the locker room.
And then he turned it around and he said, it's actually Hillary.
Does anybody remember, like, the speech, the video he released right after Access Hollywood?
Go look it up.
He talks about Hillary Clinton's actually the one who is sexist and is this and that, right?
All of these clips of J.D.
Vance from 2021, 2022, talking to Tucker, talking to others, they're J.D.
Vance outlining how he wants the government to work.
It's not like, oh, we caught J.D.
Vance talking to his college pals and they said some things that were not nice about this.
No, it's like J.D.
Vance talking to people and being like, the government should do that.
We should pass a law for this.
If you're a woman, you shouldn't be able to cross state lines to get an abortion.
I kind of think that if you don't have kids, you should get less of a vote.
Like he's telling people what the government should do.
It's weirdly harder to get out of that than it is Access Hollywood.
For whatever that says about our politics in our public square, I don't see how JD Vance wiggles out of that without just flat out saying, I've changed my mind.
And that's not going to play well, because everyone thinks of JD Vance as a guy who changes his mind all the time.
So that doesn't help him either.
Throw it to you for any final thoughts.
What happens if Trump does dump him is a question I have, because I don't think he can he can do that without a reason.
And he would have to probably manufacture one of those to get rid of Vance right now.
So anyway.
Yeah, I'll just I'll just touch on that briefly because it's a thought that I've had as well is number one.
If you're Trump, you either have to admit that you're wrong, it's never going to happen, or as you say, you got to manufacture a reason.
And then who do you go with?
The obvious pick is Nikki Haley, right?
That's like, I think everybody right now is like, that would have been the smarter pick.
You outlined some of the reasons.
But of course, then you've got the issue of, okay, so number one, does Trump pick a non-loyalist?
Is he capable of picking somebody who, you know, yeah, of course not, right?
And if he did, you and I, again, we were talking before this, we were talking about, can you imagine the debate with Nikki Haley and whoever the Democratic VP candidate is, where every time they say something, you'd be like, yeah, you know, I heard Nikki Haley once say this about Trump.
And just everything she said when she was running against Trump, you just kind of keep churning that out.
And so in a lot of ways, It's better, but, you know, just like Vance in 2016 was saying anti-Trump stuff, you're going to have the same thing with Nikki Haley in 2023 and 2024 saying anti-Trump stuff.
So, yeah, I don't think it'll work.
Never mind the fact that he is already the nominee and you get into the ins and outs of, like, whatever the rules in the RNC are and things like that.
Election ballots actually start going out in September for places that have voting by mail and early election.
So there's not a lot of time, et cetera, et cetera.
I think it's a long shot that he switches, but we'll see.
Let's take a break, come back and talk about Project 2025, Kevin Roberts and Opus Dei.
So one of the cases, Dan, that I think we've been trying to make here for the last couple of weeks is like if you interpret Vance as a radical reactionary Catholic convert of a certain stripe, a lot of things start to make sense.
And that's been my story time here, right, for the last two Fridays and so on.
One of Vance's close associates and friends is Kevin Roberts, leader of the Heritage Foundation.
So I want to do a mini story time if you'll allow it, Dan.
I will allow it, Brad.
Thank you.
All right.
So, I'm going to introduce my evidence then.
The Heritage Foundation was started in 1973 by Paul Wyrick.
Paul Wyrick is the guy that most people know as the kind of political operative who helped Jerry Falwell form the Moral Majority.
And in that story, Wyrick is often seen as a kind of political connector and dealmaker, and Falwell is the religious guy out front talking to the masses.
What's often forgotten is that Weyrich himself was a rad trad Catholic.
He rejected Vatican II, and he actually started to commune with a faction of the Catholic Church that had broken with Rome over Vatican II.
There's a great new book from a scholar named Chelsea Eban, who I'll be interviewing soon, called The Radical Mind, and it really shows how Weyrich's worldview was motivated by A radical, conservative, reactionary, Catholic politics that saw the heteronormative patriarchal family as the foundation of every society, a patriarchal dad and father as the leader of that.
What's the point?
People often think of Heritage Foundation as this sort of legacy think tank that goes back to the heyday of like the religious right.
There is a long and deep reactionary Catholic foundation to the Heritage Foundation and it leads us back to an often forgotten plank of rad trad Catholics who were part of that Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Tim LaHaye.
Religious.
I mean, I'm mentioning Wyrick here, but we could talk about Phyllis Schlafly as one of those people.
We could talk about Richard Vigery and so on.
Why am I bringing that up?
Well, Kevin Roberts is the current leader of the Heritage Foundation.
He is, in essence, a 21st century Paul Wyrick in some degree.
He just wrote a book.
Guess who wrote the foreword?
J.D.
Vance.
Guess who he calls a good friend?
J.D.
Vance.
Guess when he learned that J.D.
Vance had been chosen?
He said J.D.
Vance was Heritage Foundation's top choice.
Okay.
Now, Kevin Roberts, of course, is the institutional leader of the Project 2025 publisher, which you've said on this show.
That is something not to lose sight of.
When people are up in arms and enraged about Project 2025, they should see behind that.
The Rad Trad conservative Catholic morality that has been taking shape in our politics for the last year.
Friends, think about the IVF controversies in Alabama and in the SBC.
Think about the ways that we've seen calls for a national abortion ban, right?
Think about so many of the things from Clarence Thomas, a conservative Catholic, Samuel Alito, a conservative Catholic, all the stories you've heard about Leonard Leo.
Friends, Project 2025 comes from that worldview.
It is not a white evangelical movement or a phenomenon, okay?
Ruth Bronstein had a great piece about this this week.
Laura Field had a good piece.
And so the point of this is that there's a new book out that really connects Roberts to none other than Opus Dei.
So this is at The Guardian, and it came out the other day from Rachel Leingong and Stephanie Kirkgesner.
Sorry to both Rachel and Stephanie for stumbling over your names there.
They say this, Kevin Roberts acknowledged in a speech last September that for years he has visited the Catholic Information Center, a K Street institution headed by an Opus Dei priest and incorporated by the Archdiocese of Washington on a weekly basis for mass information.
Or religious guidance.
Opus Dei also organizes monthly retreats at the CIC.
Roberts recently gave a speech at the CIC, and he spoke candidly about his strategy for achieving extreme policy goals that he supports, but are out of step with the views of a majority of Americans.
One of those, Dan?
Remember who's Kevin Roberts?
The guy who helped bring Project 2025 from the Heritage Foundation?
The guy whose book is forwarded by J.D.
Vance?
What does he want to do?
He wants to outlaw birth control.
Gareth Gore has a forthcoming book on Opus Dei, and he says that Opus Dei is a political project shrouded in a veil of spirituality.
Their followers, Gore says, see themselves as part of a rising militia.
Like Project 2025, Opus Dei at its core is a reactionary stand against the progressive drift of society.
For decades now, the organization has thrown its resources at penetrating Washington's political and legal elite, and finally seems to have succeeded through its close association with men like Kevin Roberts, Leonard Leo, and I would add, that's Gareth Gore who I was just quoting, I would add J.D.
Vance to that mix.
So all of this stuff about cat ladies and banning abortion and Anti-IV, right?
If you think about it through the lens I just gave everybody, makes complete sense.
And it's even more radical than you might suggest.
And I'll just give you one more thing.
When you go and see Uncle Ron at the cookout, when you read things about Project 2025 and your blood boils, realize that that is something that's coming straight from what I would call a resurgence of Reactionary Catholicism in American politics over the last, like, two years.
That the dominant religious right actors and networks right now, to me, are not the white evangelicals.
They, I think, are taking their cue from the traditional Catholics.
Like, when the SBC bans IVF, they're, like, downstream from Kevin Roberts and Opus Dei and Leonard Leo.
Or when you have Al Mohler, we talked about this a couple weeks ago or last week, whatever it was, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, taking part in political, you know, conservative conferences and defending natural law and so forth.
He is jumping on board with a theology and an approach that has its origins in Catholicism, not evangelicalism or Baptist thought or something like that.
I think you're right.
It doesn't mean, and we know this, right?
Millions and millions and millions of card-carrying white American Christian nationalists will jump right on board.
It doesn't matter if it's Catholic or Protestant or whatever.
So on the grassroots level, it's all just Christian nationalism.
But the intellectual and spiritual and theological formation is taking its cues right now from this radical form of Catholicism.
Yeah, it is.
I have more to say about this, but we're going to run out of time.
Any final thoughts on those issues, Dan?
My last thought on this, because you have conversations about Project 2025 where you say that they want to ban, you know, like just fully outlaw contraception.
And a lot of regular people are like, that can't be true.
What?
Like, that's crazy.
And it's dismissed as the craziness.
So when people say, number one, point them to the actual sources, right?
Show you're not making it up.
It's not just a weird thing you read.
It's not, you know, something that's going to get debunked later.
Point those to it.
But what it tells us is it's not so crazy to not be real.
It's crazy enough that it tells us something really significant about this kind of religious ideology.
And how dangerous it is, right?
We're not anti-religion.
Joe Biden is a Catholic, right?
This is not all Catholics.
This is not all Christians.
But this is a real thing.
And the craziness about it is not that they have these views.
It's that this is completely consistent with this brand of religious ideology.
How many millions of articles have we read in the last week, Dan, about all this stuff?
Have you heard anybody couch it as, look, Joe Biden was vice president for eight years and president for four and he's leaving and with him leaves a certain moderate working class pro-union Catholicism.
That is largely unseen in terms of like being represented on the American national scene anymore.
Like Joe Biden represents a kind of vestige of a 20th century center-left, pro-union, pro-labor, ethnic Catholicism made of Irish Catholics, Italian Catholics, Polish Catholics, right?
Who's entered the chat to be vice president?
The office that Joe Biden held for for eight years, a rad trad convert, masculinist, natalist Catholic who represents the sort of new wave of what Catholicism is becoming in terms of a brand, at least on the the American political scene.
Nobody's written that yet.
So if you want to write it, there's a free one for you.
There's your prompt.
Go for it.
But I just think nobody's noticing that out went Biden.
A Catholic probably like we won't see for a long time in the White House or on the presidential ticket.
In comes Vance, a Catholic in step with Opus Dei, Heritage Foundation, Leonard Leo, Sam Alito, Clarence Thomas, and carrying on the legacy of Paul Weirich and Phyllis Schlafly.
And nobody seems to see that the story is that.
Right?
Largely.
So that's the... I'm still going to beat my drum.
I'm still going to tell my stories.
And if anyone would like to listen, I invite them.
And if not, my three-year-old daughter will have to suffer.
And we're not watching Bluey tonight.
She's going to hear about this.
So everybody can make their choice about how they want this little girl's life to go.
What's your reason for hope, Dan?
I think it's just the general, the just general feel.
This was, as I say, the most hopeful week that I've had for a long time.
And I think it is that I think that there is still room for improvement.
I think that, um, I think there's some concern that, you know, what if this is the flash, right?
Kamala Harris sort of flashes and then declines.
There's not much time between now and the election.
I think all those things are working in her favor because She didn't have to go through a primary because it didn't bloody it up the way that it often does.
I think that there's room for this to get stronger.
It doesn't mean it will.
Social media and Cardi B and Jennifer Aniston are not going to win the election.
But I think that it all is tremendously hopeful.
You know, I say all the time that I think the real teeth of the election happens, you know, kind of Labor Day forward when people begin really focusing.
That's not very far away.
And there's a lot of positive momentum coming.
Well, and that's my reason for hope, too.
And I actually think they do.
I think those those figures do have an effect.
Like, I think there were people in 2020 on TikTok who helped Biden.
I really do think that, you know, when Barack Obama.
I know they help.
I'm just saying, like, obviously, there's more than that, but they're there.
Yeah.
No.
Yeah, I totally agree.
I guess I'm just thinking of, like, You know, I think there were some moments this week that felt like some of those days of the Obama campaign when he was about to fake McCain.
And I don't want to overstate all this and I don't want to get out of, you know, I'll be on our skis in terms of the Kamala Harris momentum.
But yeah, you know, when you have 40,000 black women on a Zoom call, when you have 130,000 white women on a Zoom call, when you have Cardi B and the Swifties, when you have Charlie X-I-X-E-X.
X-I-X.
Dan, I'm going to get it wrong.
We practiced this, Dan.
We went over it.
We saw the Roman numerals.
When people like that, when Jennifer Aniston, that does things.
Now, I totally agree.
Does that win you the election?
No.
But it does things.
We haven't mentioned that Kamala Harris is walking out on stage these days at campaign stops to Beyonce's Freedom, which is You know, that's not something Joe Biden was going to do.
Was Joe Biden going to call?
She's like got recorded pieces trying to get people to register to vote on RuPaul's Drag Race.
I mean, like all over the media landscape.
Yeah.
It's just a much different approach and feel.
And so all that to say, we'll see how this plays out.
Be back next week with That's In The Code with the great content on Monday and it's in the weekly roundup.
