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In this weekly roundup, we discuss the recent inflammatory interview between Tucker Carlson and Daryl Cooper, where Cooper provides a sympathetic take on Hitler and Nazi Germany. The conversation touches on the sweeping implications of Russian influence in right-wing American media, as evidenced by the funding behind prominent figures like Tim Poole. We also address the unsettling stance of JD Vance on childcare and family roles, and his troubling comments regarding post-menopausal women. Additionally, the episode covers updates on Trump's legal battles and the shifting political landscape in the run-up to the 2024 U.S. election.
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Axis Mundy The definition of an Englishman has never changed and it never will change.
Not since 1066.
They're in the process right now of forever losing the only spot of land that they have on this earth that is dedicated to the flowering and the preservation of the English people.
And it's a tiny little spot.
It's true for the Dutch.
It's true for the Spanish.
It's true for the Germans.
It's true for the Belgians.
It's true for every Western European nation.
So why not have a Nuremberg trial for the people who did that?
I don't understand.
I mean, that's such a crime.
Well, we have to win first.
Louis XIV or any powerful monarch, they never would have dared imagine that they could do that to their people without getting their head cut off.
That's Daryl Cooper in an interview with Tucker Carlson talking about the effects of World War II.
And today we break down their inflammatory interview, the way that they gave a sympathetic ear and reading to Hitler's views and the Nazi regime.
Talk about that in the context of a larger controversy surrounding the American right.
Tenet Media was found out to be funded by Russian operatives.
Tenet Media is the home of Benny Johnson.
Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, those with over 6 million YouTube followers.
We break that down in addition to the latest on Trump's indictments and J.D.
Vance's comments about child care, family, and more.
I'm Brad Ronnici.
This is the Straight White American Jesus Weekly Roundup.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
We're doing this as a first, Dan Miller.
We are, at least, no, not we are, you are safely at home.
I am in the Las Vegas airport.
And before anyone gets any wild ideas about my wildlife, tell us who you are, where you work, and then I'll explain why I'm in the city of sin.
As I choke to start, my name is Dan Miller.
I am professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
I'm at home in my home office.
I am not in the airport.
I asked you earlier, I trust that like you found a safe spot.
You're not like, I don't know, like riding the baggage carousel or like in a bathroom stall or something like that.
I'm playing blackjack right now.
I'm playing blackjack right now.
Sin City indeed, bro.
I was in Omaha this week.
I got to visit two churches and part of the United Methodist Church out in Omaha and gave talks.
So I'm on my way home and this happened to fit the schedule.
So I got a layover.
We're doing it.
It's going to be great.
We're on the road and there's a ton to talk about.
It's one of those weeks, Dan, where In some sense, I'm happy and it's going to sound weird because we're not talking necessarily about Trump the whole time or, you know, something new he said or whatever.
We're not even really talking about the presidential race, which feels like a good break.
Like we need to, we need to like dig into other things.
But on the other hand, the things we're going to talk about are truly distressing.
We're going to get into Tucker Carlson interviewing a I don't even know what to call him.
A revisionist historian, I'll say generously at the moment, about World War II.
Gonna talk about the Russian-backed media network Tenet that funded Tim Poole and Benny Johnson and others and what that means.
Get into some things, more things about J.D.
Vance and childcare and family and breeding and things J.D.
Vance seems to never shut up about.
Before that, we're going to just do like a few minutes.
So don't worry, friends.
We're not going to spend the whole day on this, but we do want to update you on the Trump indictment and what might be coming.
It is confusing.
Some of you may be Fox News, like Avid Watchers, Fox News, excuse me.
There's a good chance none of you are.
Cable News, Avid Watchers, and you may have this figured out, but a lot of you are probably confused.
So Dan, would you give us like the very quick rundown of like what happened this week so people just have an understanding of where we stand?
Yeah, so the real quick rundown.
People know Trump was indicted on charges for election subversion charges.
That's the case that went to the SCOTUS.
Trump was claiming that he had immunity because he was president when he did these things.
You had the SCOTUS decision that said that the president has absolute immunity when doing things related to core constitutional duties, but Didn't define exactly what that is.
And the idea was that things that he does as a private citizen, basically, he was not immune from.
That started this all over.
And so this week, the prosecutors filed a superseding indictment of Trump's J6 trial.
And what that means is they presented evidence to a new grand jury.
So they got a new indictment that basically aims to meet the standards set by SCOTUS and to confine the charges and the accusations made against Trump to that sphere of things that are not covered by absolute immunity.
So it presses forward with the charges, essentially, against Trump, but it narrows the scope.
And so first, for example, most notably, it removes the accusation of Trump trying to use the Department of Justice to overturn his election loss because the SCOTUS ruling said he's the chief executive.
That's part of the executive branch.
So what he does with the DOJ is covered by absolute immunity.
So that disappeared.
Interestingly, it's also notable that they referred to Trump as a candidate for president, not as former president or, excuse me, current president at the time.
So sort of playing with that.
So you got this indictment, and then this week there was a preliminary court date, and what this was was basically to lay out the timeline.
The judge has to determine now, does this meet the standard?
Does she think that it, you know, meets what SCOTUS was doing and so forth?
We don't know how that's going to go.
That's one of the takeaways from this.
This is the first time this has ever been Adjudicated, and SCOTUS did not specify in any way like kind of how to move forward.
What happened this week, the Trump campaign, or Trump lawyers, but it's all a function of the Trump campaign, argued that this should not happen until after the election, until like 2025, this having to submit evidence to the court.
The judge rejected that, said that the election is irrelevant to the court case.
And so the long and short of it is, end of September, both sides have to submit their evidence to the judge, who then makes a determination on, you know, does she think that this works, that it meets the SCOTUS standard?
I've read varied opinions about whether or not people think that it will.
One other big takeaway from this is that obviously there won't be a trial before the election, but It's possible that evidence that the public has not seen, that has not been included in the indictments, might be made public before the election, and so that could be a significant factor.
So, last takeaway for me is that I think people weren't sure how the DOJ was going to respond to the SCOTUS ruling or how long it was going to be.
I think Trump hoped it would just go away.
It didn't, and I think a lot of people think that this moved a lot faster than they thought it would.
I think they thought there was going to be a lot longer period of time before the Department of Justice basically sort of recalibrated and moved forward.
So that is, I hope, a quick and dirty recap of the last week or so.
I think the only two things I want to add here before we move on and keep our promise to keep this brief is One of the interesting things that's happening in this case seems to be around Mike Pence and his role.
So, like, if you think about Trump badgering Mike Pence not to certify and Mike Pence is over there at the Capitol, is Mike Pence over there as vice president or is Mike Pence over there as president of the Senate?
Because depending on the role Mike Pence is playing, it might depend on how you classify Trump's communication with him.
Because there's no formal reason for the president to communicate with the vice president during those hours in terms of their functions of government.
Then it really is candidate Trump badgering the president of the Senate to overthrow the election, right?
I mean, this is the weird, messy place we're now in as a republic and in part because of SCOTUS, honestly.
And we could be talking about SCOTUS today, Dan.
There's more here about...
There's a whole story about Ginny Thomas this week, cheering on right wing legal organization that has argued numerous high level Supreme Court cases in the past years.
And her saying that they're working against an ethics code for SCOTUS has filled the cups of many judges, meaning one can only assume Justice Thomas and then perhaps Alito and others.
So all that to say, SCOTUS has put us in this position.
The second thing I'll just say is Judge Marshawn seems like he is going today to tell us about sentencing for the 34 felony convictions in the other case.
So that is up for grabs.
We don't know if the sentence is going to come next week.
We don't know what that sentence will be.
And of course, Dan, by the time we get here next Friday, we will be post Kamala Harris, Donald Trump debate.
So a lot happening.
And I think next Friday, There will be a lot to talk about in terms of the presidential race.
So, any quick, dirty thoughts left about the Trump stuff, the indictment, before we go to the Tenet Media thing?
Just again, to reiterate that point, that this is really a SCOTUS invented thing.
And what you're highlighting with the Pence issue is, to put it in perspective for people, if Pence is operating as the president of the Senate, he's not sort of part of the executive in that role.
So it just gets messier.
It's not just, when is Trump doing his core capacities?
It's like, oh, so the vice president has this weird role where he's part of the executive, but also part of the legislative in this limited capacity.
How does that work?
And yeah, it'll be interesting to see how this plays out.
All right.
Let's go to something that is just a really big story, I think, and we'll see how it plays out.
But this week, we got allegations from the Justice Department that were made public.
And they were about Russian operatives working as part of a Kremlin-orchestrated influence operation targeting the 2024 U.S.
election.
And this is from a CNN article.
Now, Tenet Media, Dan, is the platform for Benny Johnson, who's a huge, huge kind of right-wing talking head.
Tim Pool, if you don't know Tim Pool, he's always wearing a beanie.
But once again, just tons of followers, tons of influence.
These guys often have folks who are in the kind of American rights Top echelons on their shows.
So here's more from the CNN article.
The indictment unsealed the New York Southern District accused two employees of RT, the Kremlin's media arm, of funneling nearly $10 million to an unidentified company described only as Company One in court documents.
CNN confirmed that Company One is tenant media.
So, here we have basically money flowing straight from RT, which is an arm of the Kremlin, into Tenet Media, going right to these right-wing personalities, Dave Rubin, Tim Poole, Benny Johnson.
And as many of you might know already, they have together about 6 million followers on YouTube, okay?
That's a lot of people, Dan.
If you haven't seen them yet, there's clips showing the ways that people like Tim Pool have said vehemently, pounding their fist on the table, that Ukraine is the enemy of the United States, that Ukraine is the biggest threat to the United States today.
I mean, those are the kinds of things you would hear on these channels.
And since then, Pool and Rubin and And those guys have said, we're victims.
We didn't know the money was coming from Russia.
We were not the whim of the Kremlin.
It's not like that.
You know, we didn't do anything wrong.
OK?
So, Dan, I will say that these folks, at least one of the social media creators, agreed to a contract of $400,000 Per month.
Per month, Dan, to create four weekly videos.
Four videos for $400,000 a month.
Okay?
I'm just gonna throw in, I think we're underpaid here, but you know, whatever I am now demanding for my episode, Brad, I'm going to give Straight White American Jesus a cut rate of like $100,000.
I'll do it for $100K.
I'll even do the weekly roundup.
I'll throw it in.
So, I'll look forward to my check coming in the mail soon.
So, you know, a couple more comments on them.
I'll throw it to you, and then we'll go to Tucker Carlson, because Tucker Carlson isn't in there.
You know, here we have these guys who are tremendously influential on the American right, and they're getting paid these enormous sums of money.
A couple of things about this.
One, I thought Travis View had a very good tweet.
Travis View is one of the hosts of the Q Podcast, the QAnon Podcast.
He's quite insightful.
He said, I feel like if people are unable to solve the mystery of why am I getting paid six figures per YouTube video, then they may not be equipped to provide useful analysis on more complex political, cultural issues.
So Dan, like I will say, you know, you're joking about money there.
Like if somebody approached me and was like, Hey, would you and Dan want like 400 grand a month to do your show?
And I was like, I think yes, but why?
In the abstract, sure.
Why not?
But Dan, imagine one of us going home to our wives and just being like, hey, just got offered $5 million a year to do the pod.
Pretty cool, right?
Don't you think the next question would just be like pouring myself a stiff diet Coke and being like, why are they offering this much?
This is work.
This is a lot.
Oh, look at these talking points that they're handing to me.
Like, all you got to do is read from this script.
Just make sure you put this in there and the money is yours.
It's just, it's not subtle.
Well, and one of the things Tim Pooles says, he's like, well, I maintain editorial control.
Well, editorial control is one thing.
So they didn't make you say certain words.
But it doesn't mean that there's not meetings and ways of the production, like the executive producers, the people in charge of your media company, sort of saying, hey, this week, we'd really love some discussion of this.
What do you guys think about these issues for this week?
I mean, there's even a mention in the thing about how they were cringing at the that the Tucker Carlson.
I'm in Russia.
Look, there's there's like grocery carts and bread here.
It's the best country in the world.
Y'all remember that video?
We talked about it like at length on this show.
And even some of these creators were like, we don't want to do this.
This sounds like so weak.
Do we have to?
So it's one thing to say, yes, we had editorial control.
Editorial control is fine.
I mean, it just means they didn't make you say anything.
It doesn't mean there wasn't like heavy suggestion.
And hey, guys, here's some talking points.
Hey, I did some research.
Here's the here's the statistics, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So that's that's one point.
Number two is Marco Rubio has already come out.
To downplay Russia paying these folks five million dollars a year or in that orbit.
And here's what he said.
We're talking about pre-existing political opinions in the States.
They legitimately believe in the views they're espousing.
They were victims.
I just want to parse pre-existing political opinions in the United States.
Like, these are not static elements, Marco Rubio.
People's ideas of things like wars and Russian invasions are shaped by people they trust and people who have influence.
Pre-existing political opinions in the United States come from places because they're formed, they're cultivated, they shift, right?
We all think differently about issues as they evolve and as they form.
And so that's one.
But two, Matt Ortega said this on Twitter, Rubio would be at DEFCON 1 if the Chinese Communist Party was funding like Pod Save America or any of these like Rachel Maddow.
Like, what if we learned Rachel Maddow had a podcast and, like, the Chinese Communist Party was, like, funneling money to that podcast?
And Rachel Maddow, like, got on TV and was just like, I had no idea that the Communist Party was paying me five million.
It's not it's not my fault.
I'm sorry.
What do you think Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Dan Bongino, Marjorie Taylor?
Well, they would have already, like, their heads would have already exploded.
Like, period.
So for him to say this is like ludicrous to me.
And then finally, I'll throw it to you after this, is that there is an FBI memo out that says there is 2,800 other influencers in the United States, whether social media or political or cultural, who are pushing Russian disinfo.
And are perhaps being used unwittingly or wittingly as Russian propaganda mouthpieces.
We don't know who they are.
But Dan, I just want you to think about that.
Our own FBI has already told us there's 2800 others.
out there like what's happened at Tenet Media.
So when people say that, like, there was no Russian influence on the 2016 election, when people, when you bring that up, and Uncle Ron's like, "It's old news, it's debunked.
"Get over it, Lib, I can't believe "we're still talking about it." That's this, A, but B, I hope that this whole thing lays bare for people the mechanics of how the disinfo is shaped.
Because it's one thing to be like, well, what did they do?
They, like, created fake Facebook accounts and people like those?
What's the big deal?
That's not a thing.
But, like, it's easier to see Tim Pool and Dave Rubin and Benny Johnson with six million YouTube followers saying all this stuff, anti-Ukraine stuff, on YouTube all the time.
And then realizing that the only reason they have such a big platform is because of money coming straight from Russia and going, oh, it seems like Russia is influencing the United States in a very crafty way.
And it happened.
It's happening now.
There's 2,800 others we don't know about yet, or we don't know their names.
And it kind of like gives you a clue of what happened in 2016 when Uncle Ron was on Facebook, liking all those pages.
So what are your thoughts?
Well, one was sort of with that point, the evolving nature of the Russian influence, right?
I think of the — some will remember the old graphic novel Watchmen, and you had the HBO thing, and they had that graffiti that's like, who watches the watchers?
Who influences the influencers?
Like, and that's a real question.
Another thing, as we often say, we're not legal experts, but when these things do go to court, often that legal standard is, would a reasonable person have, say, asked, why are you going to pay me that kind of money to do this?
Pretty high above the going rate, you know, or whatever.
And I mean, that's a pretty clear part where I think to any just reasonable person or reasonable observer, it doesn't pass the smell test.
Like, okay, I get it.
Like, yeah, you don't ask.
We have subscribers.
I have not done a background check on every subscriber to see if anybody might be, I don't know, an agent or something, but it's like a few bucks.
It's not, as you say, somebody who's like, I'll tell you what, I'm going to start paying you like, you know, an astronomical sum of money to do what you're already doing.
I think it looks to anybody, it's strategic not to ask why.
Like, it's a very clear, I'm going to, like, don't ask, don't tell.
I'm going to, so I can act ignorant later.
And I think that that really stands out with this.
But yeah, I think for me the big thing is just the ongoing evolution of how that influence works.
And I don't know, just something about the weirdness of the American mediascape when we have this category of people who are called influencers.
That's what they do, is influence.
What a shock that one of the more sophisticated intelligence and counterintelligence agencies or organizations in the world is like, hey, maybe that's a good way to sway people without knowing that they're being swayed.
And I guess one last point is this is also done in a way where it clearly helps one political party or one political wing in America, but nobody can say, Well, they helped the Trump administration.
The language has had to shift from what it was in, say, 2016, 2020.
I think that that's really notable.
So just a couple more things to mention here is if you do want an example of a politician who's been caught up in Russian influence scandals, it's Rand Paul.
Rand Paul's campaign advisor and another part of his team have been shown to be connected to Russian money and willing to push Russian talking points.
The other one that we don't really have time for today for like an exhaustive kind of analysis, but it may be coming in future weeks, is Elon Musk.
Gil Doran's a journalist, he's done great threads, just showing how many times headlines have appeared that's like, Elon Musk is all about Russia.
Elon Musk, once again, promotes the Kremlin over Ukraine.
And so Elon Musk is another one.
Now, I'm not out here talking about money flowing to him or anything else.
Don't put words in my mouth.
I'm just saying, when you see things like this laid bare, In addition to things like the Rand Paul situation and someone like Tucker Carlson, who we'll get to in a minute, you start to think like, why is Elon Musk always talking about Russia?
And why are others doing that too?
When will we know the 2,800 folks on that list?
Who are they?
I want to know.
I want to know how many of the top-rated podcasters, YouTubers, political pundits are in the same boat as Benny Johnson, Dave Rubin, and Tim Poole.
So that's on my mind.
All right.
Anything else before we shift to Tucker and his Nazi revisionist history?
I guess this is the last point in this.
I find it's also interesting, or why it stands out, or I'm with you in wanting to know, is why you have figures who are not influencers or not political commentators.
This isn't what they do, and yet they constantly insert themselves into a particular kind of discussion.
I think it does raise questions as to why.
It doesn't mean they're guilty.
They could be just civically minded, and this is what they believe, and they want to share their views.
But I think it's worth asking those questions of figures like Elon Musk.
Let's take a break.
We'll come back and keep going.
Be right back.
This show is sponsored by BetterHelp.
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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 over the 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 Prophet by Jeff Fulmer.
That's American Prophet by Jeff Fulmer.
This week, Dan, Tucker Carlson sat down with Daryl Cooper and he praised Daryl Cooper as one of the most important historians in the country, doing the most honest work and going places no other historian dared to go.
Dan, it felt honestly like Some sort of magic show?
Like, you know, we were gonna, like, be subject to, like, somebody disappearing off of 5th Avenue, like, in a cage, hung over the street, or... The Statue of Liberty is gonna, like, pop up in Nebraska or something?
Like, yeah.
Like, then this shows how old I am.
Like, Geraldo was gonna go into Al Capone's vault and like find everything.
Do you remember that?
Do you remember when Geraldo was like, well, there's nothing in here.
Do you know how old you have to be to remember that?
But anyway.
One of the worst unveilings ever.
Yep.
So we, we, go look that up y'all.
If you don't know it, go look it up.
So, um, We played a clip for y'all at the top of Daryl Cooper talking about things.
I know Dan Miller's angry about that quote, so we're gonna do that.
I'm gonna read y'all another...
You know, Germany, look, they put themselves into a position, and Adolf Hitler is chiefly responsible for this, but his whole regime is responsible for it.
So, it's not just the guy at the top there.
That when they went to the East in 1941, they launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners and so forth, that they were going to have to handle.
They went in with no plan for that and they just threw these people in the camps and millions of people ended up dead there.
Millions of people ended up dead there.
That's like passive voice all of a sudden.
There's no action, active verb.
If I was the writing coach here, I'd be like, hey, active verbs are really helpful.
Do you want to like give us a couple of those?
And passive voice is what it does is help you avoid agency, right?
So we want to be all grammatical.
There's not a subject of the verb.
And so When somebody does that, what it does is make it so you're not assigning responsibility to anybody.
Nobody's doing the verb.
Yeah, the people just died.
There were people who died.
There was a lot of dying.
That's just how it happened.
It's like in the UK when folks say she fell pregnant, and you're like, well, did she?
I don't know.
What?
No?
All right, so here's Zeeshan Aleem at MSNBC.
There are some Republican voters who are sympathetic to their party's ultra-nationalist turn and don't believe the party's attitudes toward issues like immigration and crime are the products of racial animus.
But over and over again, right-wing leaders and thinkers reveal that white supremacism is an engine of this movement.
The latest example comes in this interview with Tucker Carlson and Daryl Cooper.
Carlson called him maybe the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.
But, Cooper has made clear that his intellectual project regarding World War II includes Holocaust revisionism.
So, as we've already discussed, Dan, and I'll let you jump in on this quote, he says that Winston Churchill was the chief villain of World War II.
He calls him primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did.
He says that Hitler entered the war unprepared, and as we just quoted, millions of people died.
Cooper's account is offensive as it is inaccurate.
We'll get to that in a second here, Dan.
You know, this is not new for Cooper.
He has suggested sympathy for Nazism in the past.
He has talked about how the British did not negotiate with Hitler, quote, over a solution to the Jewish problem.
And as we just mentioned, Elon Musk enters the chat once again, and he said that the episode was very interesting and worth watching.
OK.
Now, we're going to get to some others who have been fans of Daryl Cooper in the past.
Surprise, surprise.
One of them is J.D.
Vance.
But I want to just highlight a couple of other things before we do.
One is, who is Daryl Cooper?
So, Dan, I couldn't find much on Daryl Cooper.
If people are out there, experts on Daryl Cooper, let me know.
But he, from what I can tell, was born in California.
He moved around a lot.
Single mother, so on and so forth.
OK.
He joined the Navy after high school.
He was a libertarian in his youth.
And in 1993, his politics were shaped by the 1993 Waco siege.
David Koresh and so on and so forth.
Okay.
He also worked for the United States Department of Defense as a logistics specialist, including in Israel.
The comment I want to make right now and the comment I'll, I'll jump, I'll leave off for you is This is not a historian.
It's not.
Now, there's a moment here that's going to sound very elitist, and just let me explain myself.
From what I can tell, Daryl Cooper does not have a master's in history, does not have a PhD in history, does not seem to be somebody who has studied history formally.
Now, that does not mean that there are not folks out there who do great work, and as folks who are not formally part of the academy.
I'm not denigrating that.
But what I am saying is when Tucker Carlson brings him on and calls him an historian and says he's the most honest or most tantalizing historian or whatever the words he used in the United States, it sounds like this is somebody who's trained formally as a historian.
And look, friends, whatever profession you do, it requires training.
It requires a guild.
It requires going through certification.
So please don't take what I'm saying as elitist.
What I'm saying is this, Dan.
For all of our willingness to complain about the Academy, mock the Academy, what happens in the Academy is when you're a historian or a scholar of any kind, you go through peer review.
You have to write a thesis that is then judged by other scholars.
You have to write a PhD dissertation that is grueling and go through exams that are grueling.
When you publish anything, it's peer reviewed and people are often harsh in their criticism of you.
Now, do scholars make mistakes?
Yes.
I make mistakes, of course.
But this is not somebody, Dan, who's been subject to that kind of formal review in coming to these conclusions.
These are not conclusions that came out of the other side of a PhD dissertation or peer review.
These are somebody who's been podcasting for a long time about Historical issues that he thinks are important.
Again, there's people who do good work on these things.
I'm just saying, when you call him a historian, it's not like this guy works at like SUNY Buffalo or Cal State LA or, you know, anywhere else and came to some provocative conclusions that the other historians in his field don't agree with, right?
He's not even in the field formally.
I just think that's worth pointing out.
I got a ton more thoughts on this, but you go ahead.
Yeah, so a few thoughts.
I mean, I'll pick up on that peer review thing.
And I teach a class on interdisciplinary research methods, and I'm teaching it this semester.
And one of the things we talk about in a class is, what are disciplines?
And we talk about scholarly communities and credentialing and standards and peer review.
And one of the things—I smile when you say that peer reviews can be brutal because, yeah, they can be pretty awful.
But another thing about peer review is, because students ask this, they're like, does that mean that the reviewers have to agree with what you're saying?
I'm like, no, it doesn't, actually.
And I've had peer reviews where it gets back, and like, they really don't like something you say, and so what do you do?
You do more work.
You go find more evidence, you strengthen your argument, you rethink it, you tweak it, sometimes you adapt it.
But you resubmit it, and good peer reviewers, and there are a lot of them out there, and I've been on both sides of this, and you know, trying to be a good peer reviewer, it's not about Do I agree with it?
It's like, okay, this person's making a good argument.
They're using good evidence.
I'm not sure I agree with their conclusions, but I think this is something that people should listen to and should pay attention to.
So, somebody can still reach provocative conclusions.
They can advance novel theses.
They can challenge historical orthodoxies within the field of history, because that's the argument somebody's going to make.
It's like, it's the kind of like, well, he's just, he's too real for the historians.
He's too honest for what they're doing.
They won't, you know, That's not how it works.
So to your point that he is not within that field, and so it's very disingenuous when we say it was an important historian doing honest work and so forth.
No, he's a dude who likes history and draws weird conclusions.
The other one I would say is that what I hear and what he's saying is the thing that people do, and sometimes it's intentional, sometimes it's not.
Here I think it's very intentional, of picking kernels of historical accuracy And wildly misinterpreting their significance or scope, right?
So, somebody argued that Hitler was unintended, or sorry, unprepared for the full... Yeah, of course!
Like, I don't... I'm not a war historian, but I'm pretty sure that, like, lots of people would be like, you know what?
Hitler really miscalculated when he opened a second front in the war and when he invaded Russia.
That was a... or the Soviet Union.
That was a mistake, strategically, tactically, whatever.
So, was he unprepared?
Sure, in that regard.
Other kinds of complicated things.
People know the history of sanctimonious countries sometimes decrying what Germany did to the Jewish people when you had, you know, Western nations and countries refusing boatloads of refugees and things like this.
And so, Is that what gets twisted into, you know, somebody like Winston Churchill's responsible because he wouldn't negotiate on the... No, like that's not the same thing.
So you take what are legitimate questions, complexities of the situation, and you sort of distort them and blow them up.
It's like taking something into a hall of mirrors with like everything is just kind of distorted and weird.
And that's what peer review would pick up.
Peer review would be like, well, yeah, so this is true, but your conclusions are completely ill-founded, or here's this treasure trove of documents or whatever.
And the last point about this that picks us up, he went in with no plan, he says, and he just, he threw these people in camps.
You're like, cool, wow, yeah.
Where'd the camps come from?
We've been to, like, they're still there.
We can look at them.
These things were complex.
They took a lot of money.
They took a lot of resources.
You had like trains going there.
You had huge numbers of personnel.
Like, wow, it's weird that those camps were just there for him to throw people into them to start with.
You know what I'm saying?
This wasn't like, you know, tent city that pops up, you know, across the English Channel with like refugees who don't have anywhere to go.
And so they sort of camp out and it happens organically or something.
It wasn't that.
It was prepared and of course historians are going to say this was well thought out, it was sophisticated, the Germans were really good record keepers and we have lots of their records and the documentary evidence on and on and on and on.
I think the last thing about this that is really striking to me is People know Tucker Carlson's history better than I do, but like, you know, the dude just, every time you're like, he's about as far right as you can get, he like, it's like, here, hold my beer.
I'm going to, I'm going to jump further to the right.
This is just straight up neo-Nazi white supremacist.
Indoctrination that is going on.
It's in the code.
There's nothing to decode here.
This isn't sneaky.
It's nothing to decode.
And it's right on the surface.
And I know that people in the Republican Party are going to say, oh, this has nothing to do with us, Tucker Carlson.
And you're going to walk us through in a minute why that doesn't hold water.
But this is, once again, something that used to be radical and extreme and is now mainstream or mainstream-adjacent to what the American right now is.
Well, and it comes in the week that the first time a far-right candidate is elected in Germany since World War II.
Since 1945, yep.
And so it's just even more distressing.
But you made a point about distorting history.
Megan Garber writing The Atlantic put it this way.
Yeah.
If you want to offer a clever reading of history rather than a true one, World War II is serve you well.
Excessive documentation is fertile ground giving you many cherries to pick.
Provide the fodder you need to suggest that the Holocaust was, essentially, an unfortunate accident.
And then it will allow you, if you choose, to treat the suffering of the people of the past as evidence of your own victimhood.
That line is so poignant.
Because here he's using the passive voice about people dying.
The passive voice about six million people dying.
But why are Tucker and Daryl Cooper there to say that we're the victims?
We can't even talk about this.
It's forbidden.
We've been blackballed.
We're the ones on the other end of the culture war being put to the side just because we're willing to question, bro, and ask stuff that others won't.
The other historians, they won't even go here.
It's forbidden fruit.
This leads me to somebody else, and that's Mary Harrington writing it on her.
Now, I'm not a fan of this particular outlet, and I'm going to tell you why in a minute, but Mary Harrington makes one good point here, and I want to point that out.
What interests me about the discourse is the way that it reveals an evolution among the right towards an analysis of power and ideology broadly consonant with that already well established on the quote, woke left.
What Harrington's saying there is like, they're kind of doing a power analysis saying, well, we don't have the power in the academy, so we've been pushed out.
And that's why these ideas, the ideas that we kind of think hold some water, aren't getting any play.
What they're doing, Dan, is analyzing systems, asking who has the power, and saying, I wonder if we should think about these systems.
That's exactly what folks all across the world have been doing when they talk about decolonizing.
That's what you do when you do a power analysis of the ways institutions in this country or others work.
But I want to make a point about that.
Like, Dan, why is the American so willing to provide nuance and complexity to do power analyses and evaluations of systems when it comes to Nazis?
Like, every time we turn around, it's like, well, we should probably dig in here.
A lot of complexity, a lot of details.
We really need to get the story.
I mean, it's not a straight line if you really look into it.
And then you're like, cool.
Hey, what about the United States?
Oh, Christian country.
No, but I mean, like Thomas, you know, Thomas Jefferson kind of like took the miracles out of the Bible and like, you know, Roger Williams, like a century and a half earlier than that, like left the Master's Bay Colony because like he was dissenting to their Christian nation.
Nope, Christian country.
Well, like James Madison has like really complicated relationship with.
Nope, Christian.
Well, like a lot of like Anglican priests and bishops like call George Washington godless all the time because they like that's kind of how they thought of him is like godless.
Nope, Christian.
Like, why is it?
They have time to do all the details with the Nazis.
They don't have any time to do any details when it comes to asking about the complexity of the American Revolution or the founding of the United States.
That part is really telling.
OK.
I got I got one more thing.
Jump in here at any point if you want to jump in.
So, what Harrington goes on to say is Cooper's revisionism represents a right-wing equivalent of the 1619 Project, a radical re-narrativization with a similarly tendentious relation to factual accuracy.
Now, this is where Harrington, to me, is dead wrong.
And the comparison falls apart.
Why does it fall apart?
Because the 1619 Project was done by historians and professionals who have their chops in these fields.
Those who can show you the evidence.
Those who can show you the argument.
Those who can make the case in a way that they understand it needs to be made according to certain argumentative practices.
Those are people who have been through the rigor of peer review.
They have had editors.
They have had PhD supervisors.
They have had reviewer number two writing in the margins saying you're dead wrong.
Strengthen the argument.
Where is the evidence?
All of that.
So to claim that this is just the 1619 Project of the right is actually really telling.
Because the right's re-narrativization of history is based on Daryl Cooper.
A podcaster with no formal training in history.
The 1619 Project is uncomfortable and unpopular in the American right.
But it's done by people who are, like, we're talking about Princeton historians.
We're talking about Anthea Butler who works at UPenn.
People who have done this for decades and are exercising their professional skills.
Does everyone agree?
No, that's history goes.
But you can't say that it's not done.
Just to jump in real quick.
Yeah.
The reason why it's so discomforting for people on the right is because it's done by professional historians.
Boring.
at prestigious institutions, and it's because, to use a phrase you use, they've got the receipts.
If somebody, and this has happened, right?
This is the thing.
People see the book, but if you're like in the academic world, there are conferences that go on, there are presentations, there are journal articles that are written, things that are, is part of a specialist literature and discourse that regular people are not usually privy to and wouldn't want to be because to non-specialists, it's usually pretty boring.
Yeah, but they can show you.
If somebody's like, you know, sorry, I can hear the conference thing now.
In the 1619 Project, you said this.
I'm wondering if you could take us a little deeper into why you say this.
And they've got their, like, you know, long response, and they're like, email me later and I'll send you the bibliography, right?
So that's why it provokes the response that it does on the right, in my mind, because it's actually a threat.
It's a threat because it's not just some dude on YouTube saying stuff.
It's not — I had a student one time in class, freshman student, first day of class, and he's like, I want you to know that I'm an expert historian already.
Like, he literally said that.
I said, oh.
That's cool, like you have an area, he's like Civil War, like the American Civil War, he's like yeah.
I'm like, cool, like what brought you to that?
He's like, I've read every Wikipedia page on the American Civil War.
And that's what he said.
And so first of all, I'm like, you have not read every Wikipedia page on the American Civil War.
That's got to be like thousands.
But I just like, hmm, all right, cool.
I mean, this was like a Western Civ I course, so it starts in like the ancient world and it goes to like, you know, 1500 or something.
But it's that, it's that person who, you know, thinks they're an expert.
Maybe legitimately, like, actually thinks he's an expert.
Maybe he's not just a, you know, doesn't know he's a charlatan.
I don't know.
I don't care.
But that's the difference, and that's why that professionalism and that training matters.
And I think another piece of this that inflects so much anti-intellectual discourse in the U.S., whether it's about vaccination, whether it's about climate change, whether it's about this, is that so much of that professionalization, it is.
It doesn't happen front and center.
People don't see it.
People don't know how it works.
And so you do get people who hear this stuff and they think, oh, this is almost beyond the same, you know, same level.
It's on a level playing field.
It's not.
And so I'm with you where I reject, again, this kind of both-side-ism stuff of, oh, well, these must be equivalent, these two discourses.
Yeah.
So let's just close this out by going to the J.D.
Vance piece.
So J.D.
Vance has an interview coming.
Like soon with Tucker Carlson.
And he, you know, his people were asked about this and he said, well, we're not going to condemn Tucker Carlson because we don't believe in guilt by association.
Yes.
All right.
So let's just, let's just think about this, Dan.
Like Tucker basically came out with a interview with somebody that has widely been perceived and understood.
And I think rightly so as like, Giving a sympathetic reading of Nazism and Hitler, okay?
I mean, explicitly calling.
Churchill, the villain of World War II, saying in the clip that we played at the top of this show that because of Churchill, you know, Europe is being overrun and the precious piece of land that, you know, English people have is being taken over.
Not to mention the whole history of colonization and, you know, what's happened, you know, Europe's colonizing efforts and the way, I mean, there's just so much to say there.
Okay?
Basically saying that because of World War Two, Western Europe is now a multicultural place where there are French people who are black, French people who are brown, French people who are Muslim and the same in England and the same all over Europe.
That's and that's what that's what Tucker and Cooper were really doing, victimizing themselves and everyone else who says, oh, all right, great.
But Dan, I just real quick, I want to say this.
This is not a situation where like an interviewer Ask questions of a controversial figure in order to understand their perspective better.
Right?
Like, if you think about Terry Gross on Fresh Air, Terry Gross usually is just asking people, tell us about this.
And that could be Bruce Springsteen.
That could be, you know, whoever.
But you rarely get Terry Gross talking about, like, the best, most interesting, provocative historian in the country is going to join My point with this, Dan, this is not guilt by association.
This is guilt by promotion.
I was going to say, this is guilt by endorsement.
This was not, I'm interviewing somebody who's controversial because then you get the questions of like, is there value to that?
Are you giving oxygen to something that shouldn't have it?
Whatever.
Fair question.
No, this is like full-throated endorsement and Tucker Carlson doing that smarmy thing he always does where he's like, All we're saying is, I don't understand why that's such a big deal.
You know, and yeah, it's like that thing where he sets it up to slow pitch across the plate so the interviewer can like, you know, look like they hit it out of the park, all of that.
He's endorsing these views.
He's like, he's like fawning on this figure in the interview.
That's where the quote-unquote guilt comes from, is the agreement and the endorsement, not just the fact that he talked to this person.
All right, let's take a break.
We'll come back and talk about J.D.
Vance and some more of this stuff.
Be right back.
All right, Dan.
Capitalism, family, birth, pregnancy, J.D.
Vance.
He can't help himself.
It's like he just can't stop.
You know, he just it's like somebody said, don't think of a pink elephant.
And now he's just thinking of a pink elephant.
And like instead of a pink elephant, it's just like regulating women's bodies and punishing people who don't get in line with reproductive practices.
So tell us about it.
Yeah, so, you know, we've all been thinking about hearing a lot about this fixation that Vance and others have with families and babies and women having babies and mothers and motherhood and all this sort of stuff.
And talking about this, and, you know, we've talked about the theological and the ideological reasons behind this.
We've talked about the radical Catholic patriarchal vision of the family and gender.
We've talked about this idea that only those with biological children have a stake in the country and so forth.
But there are other dimensions of this, and this week I came across an article by Nasreen Malik at The Guardian that highlighted something that, you know, I think We're aware of, people are aware of, but I'm not sure that, I don't know, regular people sort of think about this and see this.
And fortuitously, this week, this came out, and it's a little more theoretical stuff.
And then JD Vance came along and was like, here, let me show you how this works in practice.
Let me say JD Vance things and show you that this is...
What kind of donut you want?
Like, Dan, it's so easy to get excited about a donut.
It's like... I get upset about the cheese on the Philly cheesesteak.
Dude, I have a picture of my daughter the first time I took her to the donut shop and showed her the whole row of donuts, and the picture on her face is the epitome of sheer ecstatic beatific delight.
When J.D.
Vance walks into a donut shop, it's like, yeah, I don't know, whatever makes sense, guys.
It's like, bro, it's over.
I mean, I'm sorry.
Just go ahead.
Yeah, he just comes along and is like, let me show you that what you're saying is not a caricature of me, because here I am.
It's like you're eating the donut and he's like, yeah, it's mostly sugar.
It's actually made through this process.
And you're like, dude, shut up.
I'm eating a pink donut with sprinkles on it.
Leave me alone.
I'll tell you what you could do.
So if you could mix, you know the Geico commercials of the whole You're Becoming Your Parents thing?
If you could mix that with radical misogyny, that's J.D.
Vance.
It's that dude, the dudes in that commercial, except like, you know, racist and misogynistic, and then you've got it.
Like, that's what he is.
So anyway, I want to walk through some things that Malik said and what she highlights.
What she highlights basically is says, we live in this kind of, you know, capitalist society and have for decades.
And she's saying this whole discourse is a part of that.
So this is what she says.
I'm just going to read this because basically what she says is we need this socially, the Republicans and the right need this because it's free labor.
That's what it is.
That's what our so-called market economy actually relies on.
So I'm quoting from her article.
She says, A mother is an option, a floating worker, the joker in the pack.
No not-mothering creates a hole for that quote-unquote free service, which societies increasingly arranged around nuclear families and poorly subsidized rights depend on.
The lack of parental leave, child care, and elderly care would become profoundly visible, disorienting, and disturbing if that service were removed.
Motherhood becomes an economic input, a public good, something that is talked about as if the women themselves were not in the room.
In other words, what it's talking about is how you have to have this free labor.
You privatized everything.
The state has no role in this.
The state isn't there to help people.
And what takes up the slack traditionally in a society like ours, it is unremunerated women.
And I think that that's part of why when, you know, you talk about Make America Great Again, it's not just about economics.
It's also about this leave-it-to-beaver image of the family with the happy homemaker who's there raising the kids and doing all of those things and so forth.
And so this is part of what it is.
And so women who choose not to have children, we've talked about this too, this, you know, the best that Usha Vance can do is talk about people who aren't able to have children, but women who don't, who choose not to, They are specifically a threat.
They are a threat to that social order.
They are a threat to the social order, not just because they're not good Catholic women, or not just because they don't have a stake in the country or whatever, but because they disrupt the economic model that the right has also been built on for decades.
So, Okay, that's all weird theory stuff.
Capitalism.
Are you saying we can have a non-capitalist society or not?
Let's just enter Vance.
So let's say, I can hear my students now.
Can you give an example of what that might look like in more concrete terms?
Cool.
Here's J.D.
Vance.
This week he does an interview with Charlie Kirk at a church in Mesa, Arizona.
And Kirk read a question submitted by an audience member, okay?
Real question, as a parent of young children living in an expensive state, I know this is a question you would like to have an answer to, right?
What can we do about lowering the cost of daycare?
No easy answer, in my opinion.
There are reasons why.
Okay, whatever.
But Vance's answer Yeah, just have family members do it for free.
That's what he says.
It's like, we'll not worry about all the capitalist theory stuff.
Yeah, just have family members do it.
So here's what he says, and I'm quoting Vance: "One of the things we can do is make it easier for families to choose whatever model they want.
One of the ways you might be able to relieve a little bit of the pressure on people is maybe grandma or grandpa wants to help out a little bit more.
Or maybe there's an aunt or an uncle that wants to help out a little bit more.
If that happens, you relieve some of the pressure and all the resources that we're spending on daycare.
So that's the best that he has.
I want to pick up on this when he's like, whatever model they want.
This is like the classic right-wing thing where it's like, yep, everything's broken and we're going to make you take care of yourself and you are going to take responsibility for the fact that you don't have the resources to be responsible for yourself by design, but we're going to call that choice.
So he situates it in a kind of free market thing.
It's sort of like, well, you know, people should do whatever they want.
So instead of paying, they should just have grandma do it.
He's definitely pro-choice, Dan.
It's right.
Yeah.
But then, like, so that's not enough.
J.D.
Vance is like, I can double down on this.
I can be, like, even more out of touch.
So he says all of this.
He illustrates this.
I think that this is a crucial part of, like, what all this is really about, is you need moms at home to take care of the kids, to take care of the house, to do all of this, to stay in line, etc., etc., etc.
But J.D.
Vance, champion of the people, champion of Appalachia, positioning himself as the voice of workers and hardworking people everywhere, decides that that's not enough.
He's going to show that not only does he not understand just the joy of eating a donut, and yes, maybe the self-recrimination that comes later for those of us who might eat a donut too many from time to time.
Okay, fine.
Nope, that's not enough.
He's like, I'm going to show you just how out of touch I am.
So he goes on to say this.
What we have to do is actually empower people to get trained in the skills that they need for the 21st century.
We got a lot of people who love kids, who would love to take care of kids.
J.D.
Vance is like, the problem is, Brad, we've got all those Americans who want to be full-time childcare workers, and it's just too hard of a field to get into.
And then he says, he said people are driven away from the profession because, quote, they don't have access to the education that they need.
Or because they're forced to obtain, quote, a ridiculous certification.
People on on X rip this up.
Like, yeah, those needless CPR certifications and first aid certification that has nothing to do with taking care of kids.
And then he says this.
Don't force every childcare specialist to go and get a six year college degree.
So So first, every state has different requirements and so forth.
Most do not require a college degree to be a childcare worker.
Some agencies, yeah, the person running the agency might well have a master's degree or even a doctorate in, you know, administration or maybe early child development or something.
Average worker is not a six-year college degree.
Here's the other thing, Brad.
You know this.
I know this.
Anybody who engages with daycare knows this.
We fork out tons of money It's not going to those daycare workers.
The worker we love, that our kids love, that they're excited to see every day, that worker is not getting the money.
That's our capitalist system at work.
The money's going to the agency, or it's going to the director, or it's going to some overarching board.
That's where the costs are going.
And so the problem is not that there's an influx of people who love to work with kids who can't because they don't have the right training.
It's because you can't make a living.
Providing full-time care for somebody else's kids.
So it just sort of circles around and around and around.
We have JD Vance once again being like, let me prove all you academic eggheads by like walking into the room and embodying exactly what you're describing.
But also being so out of touch and obviously out of touch with anybody who has actually struggled to pay for child care or lives in a mobile society and doesn't have family members nearby who can or just doesn't have family members.
Yeah, we're going to run out of time.
I'll be brief and just say, I mean, this really is infuriating.
in the same house where they're caring for their kids, or what have you.
On and on and on, J.D. Vance at his best once again this week.
Yeah, we're going to run out of time.
I'll be brief and just say, I mean, this really is infuriating.
I mean, if you want to talk about family values, you'd want to talk about making families able to contribute to society, to pursue their dreams professionally.
You want to talk about a workforce that's cutting edge and a global leader.
I mean, I'm right in the thick of this, of course, Dan.
I have two children under three.
My wife and I both work a lot, but I am the one who's primarily more flexible in terms of like taking my kids.
To daycare, my older one at least.
I'm the one who, you know, often will pick them up or will like, I'm the, I'm the one who's often kind of more visible to society as the like weekday caregiver.
And I will say, even where I live in California, people are still shocked to see a man as like, oh, you again, where's mom?
And it's like, I don't know where mom is.
She's working.
It's me, man.
You're going to see me every day.
Like, sorry.
And I guess I point that out just because of the expectation that you're talking about here of like women as, right, doing labor that they're expected to do, not compensated for.
And JD Vance is only exacerbating that whole preconceived notion and making it something that he says people should live into and then saying, I mean, Dan, this is all in addition to comments about post-menopausal women's whole mission in life is to take care of their grandchildren.
He's talked about that.
If you don't have kids, you get less of a vote.
I mean, on and on and on and on.
And so it all fits a theme.
I will just say quickly, the very first times I was asked to do radio interviews on like national radio shows, I did them from the parking lot of my health club that I joined.
And I joined that health club, which costs more than I would normally pay for like a gym.
Because Dan, they offered unlimited daycare every day for four hours.
And it was like really good daycare, like highly rated people all over the region are like, these people are great.
So I would like put on my gym clothes every day, pretending I was going to go work out.
And then I would take my daughter when she was like one and she would go hang out at the like gym daycare for like two, three hours.
And the people were great.
They were, she loved them.
They loved her.
There's a lot of crying.
And when we, we stopped going and stuff, but then I would like race out to the parking lot.
And, like, be on NPR.
That was all because, like, money, daycare, costs.
And I was just hoping they didn't, like, come out to the parking lot and be like, hey, Mr. Onishi, like, she had diarrhea and there's no clothes.
You got to take her home.
And I'm like, OK, I'm on live on NPR, but right with you.
A segment's over in three minutes.
You know what I mean?
That's just.
Anyway, that's all that.
All right.
Any final thoughts and then reasons for hope?
Yeah, just again, the out-of-touchness.
I hope the Democrats pick this up and turn this into an ad of him talking about how, you know, it has to be grandma and grandpa.
And I guess the last thing I'll say is how deeply ingrained this is in culture, as you say.
Number one, there are lots of countries that have figured this out, like that provide pre-K and all these things, and there are really good Right-wing-y economic reasons to do that.
Everything you said, you want to talk about a trained workforce, etc., etc., etc., do that.
So Americans always have this perspective that it's like this unicorn thing that doesn't exist.
It does, but it's also a part of the culture.
I can't tell you how many times we, who don't have family nearby, people would be like, well, isn't there anybody in the family that can help you?
I'd be like, no!
Like, my relatives are like half a country away.
That's just how it works.
And so it's a broad cultural thing.
Reason for hope this week, we'll bring a little bit of election stuff into it, comes from my neck of the woods, where it came out that apparently Team Trump has basically conceding New Hampshire, right?
Now, New Hampshire was maybe not going to go for Trump.
It's a purple state, but Biden won it handily.
But Trump had been expanding his map prior to Biden coming out, and there was this big thing this week where some staffer sent an email saying basically, like, we're pulling support out of New Hampshire, and they lost their job, and the Trump campaign says we're still active there.
But there's been a lot of reporting this week about certain states where the Trump campaign's just not there to be seen.
The map is narrowing and I take a lot of hope from that.
Virginia, that's one.
Yep, Virginia's another one.
Virginia and New Hampshire were two of like the really big ones that have figured prominently this week.
So, again, that's like, you know, right across the river from my daily commute.
And so, I found that hopeful and obviously more broadly than just the New England region.
My reason for hope is the Urban Abbey in Omaha, Nebraska.
I had a chance to do a short talk there yesterday.
The Urban Abbey is a kind of church and a bookshop with a coffee shop, and they are just awesome.
They're doing great work affirming and seeing and welcoming Omaha's LGBTQ community, trans community, welcoming and providing a space for multiracial conversations in Omaha.
And they're being rewarded with bomb threats.
I was told that they once had to do communion outside because during church there was a bomb threat, and so they went out to the parking lot to do communion.
Yeah.
And it was just really amazing to visit there.
And it was something that I think a lot of us, some of you listening, might think, you know, if you go to Nebraska, if you go to Kansas, if you go to places you consider red, whether Missouri, Tennessee, you're not going to find those things.
But there are people who are working, putting themselves Out there.
They're vulnerable.
They're getting death threats at their homes and their churches, but they're welcoming those who are unwelcome in most parts of their cities and states and communities.
And it's really inspiring to see it.
I also, Dan, had one of the most delicious drinks I've ever had.
It was called the Stacey Abrams.
And it was black tea, white mocha, peach puree on ice.
And Dan, as somebody who does not drink alcohol, I will be like dreaming of that drink for a long time.
Like if I ever go to like a resort or some, if I ever take a vacation, which doesn't seem to be a thing I do very well, um, I will be trying to get somebody to make me a Stacey Abrams drink.
So it was, it was amazing.
All right.
That's my reason for hope.
Um, Thanks to all of you out there who are subscribers.
Thanks to all of you in our Discord.
Our Discord is lit.
I'm just not gonna lie.
It's awesome.
I love seeing everyone in there.
I got to meet Rowan from Discord in Omaha.
And Dan Miller's getting a massive head because everyone in Discord is affirming all of his music choices.
I did meet John from Omaha yesterday, Dan.
We said he is not a fan of your music, though he is a fan of you.
So, I'm just trying to take you down a notch, okay?
We have some big things coming up.
You're going to hear some announcements about some weekly installments and some other things, but next week we'll have an interview with Robert P. Jones.
It's in the code.
We'll have the weekly roundup.
If you haven't subscribed yet, today's the day.
Think about doing it.
It costs less than that latte you bought on the way to work today.
