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In this weekly roundup, we discuss Donald Trump's repetition of a conspiracy theory about immigrants eating pets during a recent presidential debate. We analyze Kamala Harris's impressive and composed performance, the strategic implications of the debate, and the damaging effects of Trump's rhetoric. The episode also covers Taylor Swift's political endorsement of Kamala Harris, a viral debate moment involving Charlie Kirk, and the historical context of xenophobic conspiracy theories. We reflect on the significance of these events and their broader impact on American society and politics.
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Axis Mundi And look at what's happening to the towns all over the United States.
And a lot of towns don't want to talk.
It's not going to be Aurora or Springfield.
A lot of towns don't want to talk about it because they're so embarrassed by it.
In Springfield, they're eating the dogs.
The people that came in, they're eating the cats.
They're eating They're eating the pets of the people that live there.
And this is what's happening in our country.
And it's a shame.
That's Donald Trump at the presidential debate from earlier this week.
Repeating a conspiracy theory about immigrants eating household pets in Springfield, Ohio.
Today we break down what happened at the debate, the ways that Trump repeated dangerous rhetoric, how Kamala Harris appeared to be in charge and presidential, and the damaging effects of conspiracy theories that dehumanize immigrants and newcomers to the country.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is the Straight White American Jesus Weekly Roundup.
Hello, Dan Miller.
Welcome.
It's Friday.
You've made it through another week.
Who are you?
Where do you work?
What are you doing?
How's it going?
My name is Dan Miller.
I'm professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Glad to be here.
Always a little hectic at the end of the week, but I made it.
I'm in.
It's unseasonably warm and I can't use a fan when we record because it sounds really loud with the mic.
So we'll see if I melt before the end, but hopefully I'll survive.
But I'm glad to be here with you.
I am not in a casino this week.
If you've ever been to the Las Vegas airport, it doubles as a casino.
So I learned something last week, Dan.
It's easier to do a podcast in your home than it is in a casino.
But I think we made it.
I feel like that's one of those things, you know, like when they do studies and like somebody got a grant to do a study to prove something that you didn't really need to study to know.
It's like parents with babies sleep less or something like that.
Focusing on topics and doing a podcast is easier if you're not in a casino.
But thanks for confirming that for us.
No, I want to get an $80,000 grant to study that.
That's fine.
We'll see.
So we need to debrief from the debate.
The debate leads into a really big, and I think really dangerous story, which is coming out of Springfield, Ohio, and what Trump and Vance and the American right are saying about Haitian immigrants there.
And then we'll go briefly to Charlie Kirk.
And the question of, what is a man?
And Dan, it gets really theological really quick, and it's actually really fun.
So stay tuned for that.
Let's go to debate.
We could talk about this for three, four hours.
I think there are themes in here.
There are aspects of the debate that could, I mean, truly, Dan, we could do an edited volume on it because of the kinds of themes and mentions.
So I'll just say to open I don't know what this means.
The last debate between Biden and Trump was surely significant.
Biden dropped out, essentially.
So to say that debates don't matter I think is foolish.
No matter what happens, those who are already supportive of Trump, I think, are going to remain that way.
They can always spin it to say the moderators are biased.
It was three on one.
Yeah.
The refs were out to get us.
That's why we lost.
So what does this matter?
I think there's reasons it does matter.
I think people will take some things away.
But I'll just say that for me, I think it matters most for Kamala Harris, who looked Cool, calm, collected, looked like she was in charge, looked like she was a president.
And I think that might have been the most important thing is like, if you were one of these mythical undecided voters, or if you just were waiting to see if she has what it takes to be president, I think the debate was a pretty good showing by her on those grounds.
We're going to jump into all the other themes, but that's my first takeaway.
What's your first takeaway?
Go anywhere you want.
Yeah, so I think one of the things that stood out, and a lot of people said this and I think it was true, is I think this was high risk, high reward for Kamala Harris.
She had more to lose in this than Trump did because nothing's going to move the needle with his followers.
But I'll use an analogy because it's what I do, I do analogies.
I'm married to a real estate agent and so one of the things they talk about is like, What improvements do you make to your house to make more money and stuff like that?
So let's say that your furnace, you've got to replace your furnace and you put $5,000 into it.
When you sell the house, you don't get to add $5,000 to your asking price.
Nobody's going to pay for it.
But if your furnace doesn't work when you go to sell the house, you're going to lose money.
I feel like that's where Kamala Harris was.
I don't think there's going to be a big bump.
The bump thing just isn't going to happen in a place as polarized as we are.
But if she had tanked on this, That tiny sliver of undecided voters.
I saw a number this week that I think makes complete sense, estimating that this election will come down to like 200,000 voters across like seven states total.
That's a tiny, tiny, tiny sliver of the US electorate.
If she had bombed this, She loses that.
She's the person who didn't fix the furnace and they made less money on the house.
And so I think that what looks like, oh, she stayed level or she plateaued or whatever, that's a win.
If you are her and have all the hurdles and all the, can she stand up to this?
Can she do this?
Can she be presidential?
Will it be a repeat of 2019?
Whatever.
Tied in with the fact that the Trump team narrative, and I keep harping on this, but it's been the narrative all along.
She's inept.
She's going to fall flat.
When they nominated her or she appeared as a person to get the nomination, oh, she's going to fall flat.
She didn't.
Coming into the DNC, she's going to fall flat.
She didn't.
Oh, she doesn't do interviews because she can't do it.
She's afraid of being called out or whatever.
Goes on CNN and it's fine.
The debate, she's going to fall flat.
She's going to be worse than worse than Biden was.
Trump's going to mop the floor with her.
You can't prepare for Trump.
All of that.
She passes it, you know, so I think that I think for me that was a huge takeaway.
I think even an okay performance, a competent performance would have been really good.
I think her performance was superlative in the sense that, and I'll throw this out too, all the people out there, they didn't talk about issues, she didn't talk, that's fine.
I don't remember in my life since I started paying attention to politics somewhere around like probably 2000 that people don't complain about that with presidential debates.
Yes, there is spin.
Yes, people try to shift away from weaknesses that they have.
Yes, they try to come back around to their strengths.
All of that.
She did that masterfully.
She did it because she was able to play Trump.
We have lots more to say about that, but I'll throw it over to you first.
I think we're just going to sort of ping pong back and forth here because there's so much to say, but I think it was high risk, high reward, and I think she cleared the bar easily.
Well, one of the things that you've pointed out to me repeatedly off air, and as we've talked about these things, has been that the GOP continues to think that Kamala Harris is going to fail on her own, that she's going to fall flat, everything you said she didn't do.
So their strategy, I think, was let her talk.
And in fact, what the debate ended up being was, Harris duped Trump into talking too much, and the numbers show that.
Five minutes.
It wasn't about five minutes more that he had than she did.
Now, we can talk about that.
We can talk about men talking more than women in meetings.
We can talk about he seemed to always get the last word, which bothered me.
He always seemed to be the one who was screaming and they turned his mic on because he wanted to say something else.
If you've got the muted mic, use the muted mic.
I agree.
Nonetheless, he just took the bait every time she said it, the trap, and he did things.
He talked embarrassingly about the crowd sizes at his rallies, all that.
We can hover on all those points.
The point I want to hover on, though, first is...
When Harris addressed him, she addressed him as a disgrace to the country.
Somebody who is an embarrassment.
And I think that did two things.
It hit Trump where she knew it would hurt him.
But once again, it's a slightly different tactic than we've had in the past.
It's not that he is unserious or he's stupid or that it's, you know, it's democracy at stake or we're trying to, like, get everyone in the middle to come to our side.
It was more like, I'm looking right at you, man, and you're a disgrace and you're laughed at by generals and by world leaders.
And when she said that, I want to make two points on this.
A, he said, world leaders respect me.
Who's my example?
Victor Orban.
And we've talked about Victor Orban at length on this show.
I think most people listening will know that Victor Orban is the sort of fantasy of the American right at the moment.
He leads a government that most consider illiberal.
There are elections, but they are gerrymandered at best.
There is a legislative branch.
There is a judicial branch.
They are under the control of the executive branch.
Do you know who kind of like got their ideas for Project 2025?
The Heritage Foundation did from a lot of them from Hungary and Viktor Orban's governance.
Like Project 2025 is kind of like the dream of implementing Orban's Hungary at home.
So when Trump says that you're like.
You know, you didn't talk about NATO allies.
You didn't talk about strengthening security with, you talked about Viktor Orban.
And then when asked about Russia and Ukraine, you know, she talked about ending the war.
She talked, and he made all these things up.
He talked about how she met with Putin and then Putin did it anyway.
And if I had this, something commentators have not zeroed in on was When asked about this war, this attempted invasion, I should say, by Russia, he said, you know, Putin would be much happier right now if this hadn't happened, or if we had not given arms so that Ukraine could defend itself.
And it was a striking moment in the debate.
I have not seen anyone write about it or anything.
He did not talk about the dead civilians in Ukraine.
He did not talk about the people bombed.
He did not really even hover on Russians who have been affected and displaced and undergoing their own insurgencies as a result of the war because Ukraine is making entry way into Russian territory.
He talked about Putin would be happier if this hadn't happened.
And it was just like this little moment, no one's talking about, but it was a window into how Donald Trump thinks.
He is totally acquiesced to Putin, but who does he think about in these situations?
Only the guy at the top, only the guy sitting on the throne, not anyone else out there.
We got a lot more to say, but what's your, what's your next thing?
Yeah.
So to the, what I'm calling Kamala Harris's rope-a-dope strategy, that, I mean, like, She said, like, baited Trump over and over and over and over again.
The most obvious one was the crowd, the people leaving the rallies thing.
That was the most transparent, like, I'm saying this to try to get you to just lose your cool and freak out and whatever.
And he did it anyway and whatever.
But one of the things I think it shows related to that, sort of zooming out a bit, is, number one, as you said, Hillary Clinton couldn't do this.
Joe Biden couldn't do this.
Nobody has been able, I don't think, that I remember, to rattle Trump in a debate the way that Kamala Harris did.
I think that's partly a mix of people know Trump better now.
You've seen a lot of failed debates and failed attempts to do that.
I think a lot of it comes down to Kamala Harris and some really tremendous preparation and things like that.
But I think what we also saw is we saw what Trump does when he feels cornered or rattled Which is he goes to crazy town.
That is when he goes to the crazy conspiracies, the self-aggrandizement, all of that sort of stuff.
We've seen this before.
People have talked about this.
RNC when it looks like Trump's just going to walk to a second term and he's talking about unity and he sounds a little more presidential and all of this sort of stuff.
Kamala Harris comes in and he goes crazy.
But this is when he went to all the conspiracist stuff.
We're going to talk about some of this more as we go along, but all of a sudden you've got a dude running for president trying to convince persuadable voters, this tiny block of voters who might actually be persuadable.
And he's talking about immigrants eating pets.
He's talking about post-term abortions, which wouldn't be an abortion, that would be called murder.
And as the fact checker said, there is no state where that's legal.
He's talking about Venezuelan gangs taking over cities, all of which provoked, you know, responses from places around the country, including, you know, conservative mayors in cities in Colorado who kind of started this stuff, being like, no, actually, it's not like he said at all.
But I think that this showed two things.
Number one, we know who Donald Trump is.
It's like when somebody has too much to drink and they say crazy stuff and then later they're like, I'm sorry, that's not who I am.
It's like, no, that actually is who you are.
That's what happens when you let your guard down, when you're stressed and the real you comes through.
That's what we saw was Trump.
That's what we saw there with Trump.
And I think that it effectively highlighted all of those things.
And there's so much more we could say about all of that.
He'll win if we stick on issues, we'll win if we, you know.
I've got other traps that he walked into, but I think that the conspiracism is what really stood out.
Especially when, just as a side note, somebody who's really significant with this puts out racist tweets about Kamala Harris this week, and even Marjorie Taylor Greene is now suddenly like, We need to pull back from this.
This isn't what MAGA is.
Yeah, you've got everybody in MAGA except Donald Trump now having to clean up the mess that he made.
I think all of that is true.
67 million people watching.
Related to the conspiracies, you know, one of the conspiracies has always been about immigrants.
And I think, you know, Dan, we've had Trump now for eight, nine years running for president, being president, whatever.
You tune him out, you get tired of it, you get tired of listening.
And I'm not one of those folks in this, like, you know, I study this stuff every day.
I'm not somebody who studies Trump rallies every day.
Like I have colleagues, you have colleagues, right, who they, They watch every Trump rally and you're like, Oh man, I'm sorry.
I hope you get frozen yogurt later.
Cause that sounds terrible.
But watching Trump at length the other night, it was jarring to hear him, no matter what she said, his response was immigrants are destroying the country.
Immigrants are dangerous.
They're coming in by the millions.
They're coming from places nobody's ever heard of.
They're coming and they have diseases and they have, and it was like, No matter what, and you even saw the moderators be like, "Well, we're gonna talk immigration later." And Harris called it out.
She said, "No matter what I say tonight, "he's just gonna go to the border.
"We're supposed to talk about plans for healthcare.
"We're supposed to talk about reproductive rights.
"We're supposed to talk about Ukraine." And he's going to go to, "They're coming to kill you." And in some sense it was just par for the course.
In another sense it did feel even more pressed and even more desperate than usual.
Like, my only tactic is just to scare anyone who will listen to me that these folks are coming from, I mean, he said the insane asylums, he said the prisons.
There's now this whole, like, lie on the right that, like, crime rates in Venezuela have plummeted because all the criminals are here, miraculously.
Like, this, like, there's a clip, Dan, of Stephen Miller, like, losing his mind talking about Venezuelan crime rates.
And he gets called on it.
Someone's like, well, where are you getting the numbers?
And it turns into this shouting match, and he looks like a child.
But, like, it also shows this weird fever dream fantasy world that people like Stephen Miller and Donald Trump live in because it's like...
Dan, if you think about gang members in any locale, this could be Los Angeles, this could be Caracas, they could be anywhere.
And you go to like 40 of them and you're like, hey guys, you know what I was thinking about?
You guys ever think about maybe...
Getting a little break from Caracas and heading over to LA.
What do you think?
Should we just all go together and start completely new lives in places where they speak different languages?
And you know, we'll just like, yeah, we'll just make our way over there and set up shop like we do here.
Like the idea that Caracas or like any other place would like have drastically different crime rates because they have sent all the criminals.
It sounds like effing Scooby-Doo, man.
You guys sound like my seven year, you know, my three year old watching these like like little kid cartoon, like superhero things.
And this is not the anyway, there's just there's these times when you're like, it's like think it's like Lord of the Flies has taken over the American right.
And people like Stephen Miller have overwhelming influence on us.
And it's terrifying and also comical at the same time.
Other thoughts on the debate before we head over to something else?
Yeah, just a couple other, I think, strategic things.
So it was really—I like the strategy of it.
Again, yes, as an intellectual person, I sometimes wish there was more substance.
Yes, whatever.
But it's interesting because one of the things people have pointed out is that Harris, together with just Trump's psychology, kept him from capitalizing on what could have been strengths.
So when she says, no matter what, he's going to come around to immigration, she's also hitting the fact that most people think that she is vulnerable on the issue of immigration.
So she's able to foreground that he's going to do it and make it so that his attempts are all like really ham-fisted and like awkward and don't work.
And I think we saw that over and over.
I think another piece that we saw was the hang-up that he still has that he's not fighting Biden.
We have heard him talk about this.
We've heard him describe it as unfair.
He's complained about how much money the campaign spent, you know, with Biden and on and on and on.
And he kept bringing that up, right, about how, you know, you can hear pieces of, like, what his strategists want him to say in there.
If you sift through all the noise, you can hear him trying to say, They claim to be about people's rights and they nominated somebody who didn't win a single primary vote, but he couldn't say that.
He's just got like, they took it away from Biden and he really hates her and all this other stuff.
That moment when he was like, he hates her.
It's like, I'm running for president of eighth grade and I want you to know, Brittany, she hates Jennifer.
So if you want to vote for her, go ahead.
But Brittany hates Jennifer.
It's that.
And like, and so in the meantime, I'm waiting and waiting and waiting.
And then Harris unloads it when she says, you're not running against Joe Biden, you're running against me.
And I was like, you walked into that for like the last hour or whenever it was that she said it.
And I was like, every one of your advisors, this is one of their worst nightmares.
You're going to walk into that.
And then I think tied in with that, there were the subtle ways that the reversal of fortunes with his age come in.
And so there was this, maybe you're confused about that subtext to this.
There was the 81 million people fired Donald Trump, and he's still trying to process that.
There was a reference to him being confused, which all of which could be plain obvious sarcasm or whatever.
But I think there are also those reversals that this was another piece That he looked like the guy who's up there meandering, those things where he's going off on like the student loan stuff.
And again, somewhere somebody said, they're vulnerable on this.
If you get a chance to turn the conversation that way, you should, but he didn't do it effectively.
And so everybody in the room is kind of like, what were we, sorry, what was the question?
What were we talking about?
So I think all of that was effective as well of, again, flipping the script on him, putting him on the defensive.
But I thought that that was a really big moment when she was able to say, you're not running against Joe Biden.
And I'm not sure if you know that kind of thing.
And it really hit him pretty hard.
Well, she also got, I mean, part of this was moderators, but he said, I have concepts of a plan.
And so that line itself is like, you can play that on ads, but the preceding to that that a lot of folks again are not talking about is In the run-up to saying that, he said, well, I'm not president right now, so I don't have a plan.
And that was a really interesting moment, because according to a lot of MAGA-ites, he is president right now.
And he's supposed to be president.
I mean, there was a lot of equivocation on that in the debate.
Places where he'd appeal to not being president, but then he was pressed.
So you're saying the election wasn't rigged?
No, no, no, no.
It was.
And I didn't lose by a whisker.
I was being sarcastic.
I didn't mean to cut you off.
But it's to that point that there was a lot of waffling from him.
When it was convenient to say, I'm not president, he would.
And as you say, for MAGA folks, that's blasphemous.
Well, in addition to the, I have concepts of a plan line, the other one that we played at the top and that other people I'm sure have heard a lot by now is him saying they're eating dogs.
And I want to talk about that.
The way he said it just sounded, I have to, I don't know what to say about it.
I don't want to be adolescent about this, but the way he said it sounded desperate.
Like they're eating dogs.
Like he sounded like an old man trying to like make a point.
In a desperate sort of way.
Anyway, let's take a break.
We'll come back and dig into that comment and the whole conspiracy theory behind it.
Be right back.
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All right.
As everyone knows by now, if you are watching news, listening to podcasts, listening to NPR, you know that when Donald Trump talked about their eating dogs in Ohio, it came from a conspiracy theory that has been floating around for the last week or so.
It was bolstered by his running mate, JD Vance, who tweeted about it.
Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn't be in this country.
Where's our borders are?
So that was JD Vance.
Now, I just will say quickly, I think most of you know this by now, I'm not going to do the full summary.
This has been thoroughly debunked.
It's not true.
It's not happening.
This is not a moment where I want to spend 25 minutes proving it's not true because it's not and I think a lot of you listening are the types of folks who've already heard this on other outlets and you know that.
What I want to talk about is why this is so dangerous and why this is so nefarious and gross and truly dehumanizing and I want to link it to both Trump and Vance.
Springfield, Dan, it's a small city, 60,000 people.
And what's happened over the last four years is 15-20,000 immigrants have come in, mainly from Haiti, and they've come in because there are blue-collar jobs there.
Now, these immigrants, for the most part, largely, are here with documentation.
And so, when Van says they're here illegally, that's largely, for the most part, on the whole, untrue, okay?
Now, I want to say at the start here, Dan, I totally understand there being an adjustment period.
If you have a city of 60,000 people, that adds 20,000 people.
That's an adjustment period.
That could just be 20,000 people who came from a town across the river because of taxes, home prices, jobs.
Anytime you add like 25% to a new city or to a city, that's going to take some time to adjust.
Okay.
Now, a lot of the folks coming are from Haiti.
All right.
Not speaking English, are new to the United States, are new to Ohio, adjustment period.
I don't think there's anything wrong with admitting that if you have this many folks coming into a small town, it takes adjusting.
What I do think is wrong, what I do think is really sad and has played out in American history so many times, is you take the folks who are coming and who are new, And you spin a myth of them as so different that they're barely human and therefore they should not be here and we should not treat them like our neighbors.
That is what is wrong, okay?
So, let me go to a CNN article.
How did these folks get here legally?
Well, it's through Biden's administration's parole program, which requires a local sponsor.
And a lot of folks in the Caribbean see this as a brain drain because it takes folks who are educated, upper middle class, and it gives them basically a way to come to the United States in a pretty expedited manner.
So most of these folks are here legally, but they're coming from a certain kind of class of person in Haiti and elsewhere.
CNN spoke to one of these folks, and this is somebody who speaks English, French, Spanish, and Creole fluently.
Okay.
And they left after receiving threats in their own country.
Okay.
Wilburn Dorzainville is a physician and they arrived in this country just a little bit ago.
He began working a blue collar job, but is now able to work as a nurse, even though he's a doctor, they're a doctor back home.
Okay.
And he even says, he says, look, about the folks in Springfield, he says, they were not expecting this.
I might feel the same way.
And then comes this like gut punch line, Dan.
Later taking stock of his new life and the polarization of Springfield's Haitian community, Durzainville shrugged, seeing little choice in the matter.
If it was not a matter of death or life, it would be better to get back home.
And it's like, that really hit me.
Because I just finished making a podcast series with two great historians, Sergio Gonzalez and Lloyd Barba, about the sanctuary movement.
People coming to the United States in the 1980s and 90s from El Salvador, from Guatemala, and they were coming because of the same reasons.
And they were treated with much of the same disdain, okay?
But I want to hit on something even further beyond this.
And that is that this idea that folks are unhuman, subhuman, is a way to not welcome them.
And it's a way to treat them with unhuman action.
If you can convince yourself that a group of people is not human, then you can treat them not as your neighbor, not as someone with rights, a community with rights, but just as someone who can be Incarcerated?
Killed?
Maimed?
Whatever.
That's what dehumanizing language does.
I have a ton of thoughts on this.
I want to do a little bit of like history, but you know, let me stop.
What are your thoughts?
Where are you on this?
So just a couple things about this.
Number one, as you say, most of these folks are there legally.
And we hear, I think we hear the doublespeak in somebody like Vance, who's like, who should not be in this country right now.
Notice that language, shouldn't be in this country.
They don't always say illegally, shouldn't be.
I think you hear sometimes you press the MAGA folks.
No, no, we got no problem with legal immigration.
We've got no problem if people are allowed to be here and they're here legally.
Of course, this is America.
We welcome them.
And I've said for a long time that that's BS.
They don't welcome them.
They don't think that non-white, non-European immigrants should be coming to the U.S.
Like, period.
And if you look at the history of American immigration law, that's how immigration law worked up until the 1960s.
Like, the entire history of the United States until the 1960s favored white European immigrants Often explicitly, as you know better than I do, with your family's history and background and the response to them, and you've talked about this at length.
Why does that matter?
It matters because when they say they shouldn't be here, they have that escape hatch to be like, well, we're talking about illegal immigrants, or people are here illegally.
They would say illegal immigrants.
My response is, no you're not.
And this shows it.
We will always frame them as somebody who doesn't belong here, and their visa status does not matter.
The skills they bring do not matter.
You mentioned the skill capacity of these folks, the brain drain issue.
These are people who bring positive net resources to the place where they are.
It's why somebody sponsored them.
It's why they bring them here.
They have skills, abilities, they're smart, they're educated, and so on.
Another piece of this is whenever you have this like vision you mentioned the GOP fever dreams and this is another one of like All of America being run by, like, you know what people who have, like, no skills, no education, no money, who come into the country illegally, you know what they're not able to do?
Travel all over the U.S.
It's hard to do.
If anybody who's had to, like, I don't know, figure out how would you get from, say, I don't know, the southern coast somewhere where somebody's going to make landfall or, you know, if they're coming over on a boat or something, How are you getting to Ohio or Wisconsin or Michigan or wherever?
Like if you don't have money and capacity and means and you can't travel legally and stuff.
You speak no English.
And so I think that's just like, yeah, that's just another piece of it is this The illogic of this, that they're everywhere.
How do they get everywhere?
How do they get all the way up to Ohio with nobody noticing on the way that these terrifying people were, I don't know, traveling en masse through the United States?
I don't know if I'm making that point well, but it's just...
It's that notion that you get this fear that they're everywhere but like they can't be these scary terrifying people you think that they are because those people are not going to be traveling freely through the U.S.
and getting everywhere.
So there's just like lots of layers that if I peel all those away what I find is basic xenophobia.
We are just racist and we don't want anybody who's not white in this country and so by definition for us none of them belong here.
And we will come up with reasons to support what we already feel about them after the fact.
And that is very much what this is.
And if it has to be ridiculous, long-standing racist appeals, dehumanizing and they eat pets and so forth, then so be it.
We'll go that direction.
That's where I want to focus right now.
What do these conspiracies do?
That's what I, right?
I'm very interested in that question.
I always want to know what things do.
What does the belief do for you?
What does the theology do for you?
What does it do?
What does it accomplish?
And here's what it accomplishes, is it makes you think that these folks, these communities, are less than human.
That only a non-human, only a sub-human, would eat a pet like a dog.
Okay.
And so we could come at this through the whole like angle of like, what does it mean to eat meat?
And we could talk about, I mean, there's a, there's a lot of vegans out there that could come on the air right now and be like, well, actually eating flesh of any kind seems, I don't know why you're like picking and choosing what's the difference between a chicken and a dog.
That's fine.
And, and I'm, I'm, I'm not dismissing that whole debate or discussion and whole issue.
What I'm saying though is, In this case, if you say someone eats a dog and you have dogs as pets, you're saying, who would do that except for somebody who's not human?
That's what you're doing.
And there's now, Dan, all these TikToks, all these Instagram reels, there's all these funny memes of, you know, somebody's walking their dog or a little skit while I'm walking my dog in Ohio and someone's like, nice dog.
And I'm like, pick him up and run away.
Cause I'm like, oh, are they trying to eat my dog?
There's a lot of memes of like the aliens from the alien movie, the Sigourney Weaver movies.
There are people in Ohio right now afraid.
There are people who are staying home from work.
You know, cute.
But I think for me, the reason I wasn't laughing at those this week is like, there are people in Ohio right now afraid.
There are people who are staying home from work.
There's kids who don't want to go to school.
There was a bomb threat at Springfield, Ohio's city hall yesterday.
It had to be evacuated.
So we don't, and I'm not reporting this in terms of like, I don't know who called it in.
I don't know their motive.
So I just want to be very clear.
I will say that Tuesday night, the former president and the presidential nominee of a major political party said, they're eating the dogs.
And then Thursday, the place he was referencing had their city hall evacuated from a bomb threat.
I will say that.
I will also add that both Trump and Vance were fact-checked on this.
Trump in real time, who downplays it.
Like, we talked to the city manager, and they don't have any evidence, and it's like, well, you know, whatever.
Vance spins it the next day, too.
There's an ongoing investigation, and not all the evidence is collected.
So it's not as if—just so people—it's not as if they don't know this.
It's not as if there aren't people to ask.
They persist despite clear evidence from people on the ground in that place.
So I want to take you for a minute to Fresno, California.
Fresno's in the Central Valley.
It's a city that's kind of away from the coast.
It's not where you go on vacation in California.
It's not that place.
But there's a man named David Razivong and David opened a restaurant there a couple of years ago.
And just last year he had to close that restaurant because so many people were calling or threatening or spreading lies online that he was serving dog at the restaurant.
Now David's family has come from Laos to the United States.
David opened a restaurant called Love and Thai.
Like it's a Thai restaurant with Laotian influence.
It's one of those things Asian Americans know.
That like most Americans don't know things about Asian cultures, except for like in certain categories.
So like if you have a Thai restaurant, people are like, I like Thai food.
Right.
If you have a Laotian restaurant, a lot of people are like, I don't know what that is.
I'm not going there.
So a lot of times you're going to see somebody from Laos open a Thai restaurant and then there's a lot of like Laotian dishes on the, on the menu.
Right.
Okay.
That's how it goes.
Okay.
So he opens this, this, this place, Love and Thai.
And somebody spread on Facebook that they saw a pit bull tied up next door.
And said it's going to be served on the menu.
And that turned into him having to close the restaurant because so many people were threatening him and his family online, calling the restaurant, etc.
This was last year.
I bring this up because, Dan, this is a longstanding slur and conspiracy that Asian Americans have faced for centuries.
During the Chinese exclusion movement in the 1880s, 1870s.
Of course, people said, Chinese people eat dog.
They're not human.
They're disgusting.
They're dirty.
They're bringing diseases.
They're an infection on the country.
Okay?
And that led directly to violence.
The feeling was the Chinese don't deserve to be here.
They're not real Americans.
There was a riot in 1877 against the Chinese immigrants.
Okay.
Resulted in four deaths, 1886 in Seattle, 1885 in Tacoma.
There was widespread violence throughout the entire decade, all over my state.
Chinese men were lynched in LA in 1871.
And there was a massacre of Chinese minors in Wyoming territory in 1885.
All of this coincided with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
And Dan, as you already mentioned, this led to, and was part and parcel of, an immigration program of this country that didn't change until the 1960s, such that unless you came from a Western European country, you had a very low chance of coming here, whether you were from Japan, whether you're from China, or anywhere else.
Why do I bring this up?
This is not new and there's a track record of violence.
So it might be funny to go on IG and see some of these memes.
It might be funny to laugh at Trump because he said they're eating dogs.
Okay.
This like hits super home for me because if you want to, if you want to justify violence against people, all you have to do is say that they're subhuman.
And I just want to remind everyone, okay, Dan, before I get going too much and then I'll throw it to you.
There is a new book out.
Uh, I don't know if anyone's seen it.
Anyone seen this book?
It's called Unhuman.
Yep.
That's right.
Unhuman.
Yep.
That's it.
Let's see here.
By a band named Jack Posobiek.
Just happens to be like a right-wing talking head.
Two million followers on Twitter.
Works for TPUSA.
And he talks about leftists and other people in this book as unhuman.
And I'm trying to look here at the blurbs, Dan.
I'm just making my way through here.
Look at this.
Who blurbed the book for this man who's worked with neo-Nazis?
Who's published books with… Wait a minute.
I'm seeing some names.
They're coming on the screen.
A man named J.D.
Vance, it seems.
J.D.
Vance blurbed that book.
Like I've heard of that guy.
Yeah.
He blurbed that book.
So the book is full of things.
That Jack Bosobeak is known for.
I mean, Jack Bosobeak is a great replacement theory, pizzagate, proto-QAnon, like, talking head.
He's the guy, I mean, he's the guy.
And I'm not, I'm not making this up, Dan.
I quoted this at a speaking event the other day and people looked at me like, nah, this guy's lying.
I'm not.
Jack Bosobeak said at CPAC this year, where he, I'm quoting now.
I'm going to quote.
I'm not paraphrasing.
I'm quoting.
Welcome to the Inn of Democracy.
We didn't get all the way there on January 6th, but we're going to.
Can you imagine J.D.
Vance blurbing that man's book?
He did.
So when you say that people are eating dogs and you blurb a book by someone who calls people he doesn't agree with politically subhuman or unhuman.
You're not being funny or cute.
You're not being coy or transgressive.
You're a danger to so many people in this country.
You are going to be directly responsible for the kinds of things I just quoted happened in the 1880s, whether it's massacres, whether it's people getting attacked on the street.
And I'm getting going here now because this hits my Like my buttons, because Asian Americans know what this feels like.
And Asian Americans, if you're listening, you should stand in solidarity with Haitian folks and anyone else, any chance you can now and always.
But I just want to remind everybody what happened during the pandemic.
Reading from a New York Times Magazine article.
An Asian woman pressed an elevator button with her elbow.
A man in the elevator asked, oh, coronavirus?
She said, no.
And he said, don't bring, don't bring that.
Here comes a slur.
Here comes a slur that this whole article is about.
Don't bring that chink virus here.
An Asian woman walked into the park and a group of mothers screamed for the kids to get away from her.
A middle-aged Asian woman wearing a mask was going for a walk.
A woman screamed to get away from her.
A man spat on an Asian man waiting for the subway.
A man spat on an Asian woman walking to her gym.
A woman refused coffee from a barista because she thought the barista was Chinese.
Elders were clocked on the head from behind.
I bring all this up because A, to be Asian American means everyone's Chinese when they need them to be.
Doesn't matter if you're from Laos or from Thailand.
Doesn't matter if you're from Japan or from Korea.
Everyone's Chinese.
And when they need to be afraid of you, they will.
So if you're a Haitian immigrant, if you're a black person, if you're a person who is black and speaks with some kind of accent, I guarantee that this week, you are afraid.
And that's why I am so not laughing at any of the memes or any of the reels or any of the TikToks, and why seeing J.D.
Vance's smug frat boy like, I'm just saying that all the evidence isn't collected.
Dude, you are taking part in a centuries-long tradition.
That leads to people being lynched and executed and attacked and excluded.
And it is completely and absolutely unacceptable from anyone, including somebody who wants to be a leader.
All right.
Taking a breath.
Your turn.
Sorry.
Go ahead.
It'd be a lot to say.
I agree.
I mean, everything you say hits it all right on the head.
I want to bring this back to the debate because Trump, the guy who wants to be President of the United States, former President of the United States, saying this in the debate and other things.
He repeated the stuff about Kamala Harris, right?
So many elements of racism in what he said.
But he was fact-checked, right?
On the spot.
And people have said, well, how come Trump was fact-checked more than Kamala Harris?
And it's true.
Kamala Harris said some things that could have been fact-checked and weren't as much.
One of the reasons is Trump lies more, and he lies all the time.
And I want to just note that I was really, really, really, really glad to finally feel like we saw, in a debate, moderators who were prepared for that.
And yeah, they're going to miss stuff.
They're going to miss stuff from him.
They're going to miss stuff from Trump.
This was planned ahead of time.
They knew that Donald Trump The guy who wants to be president, former president of the United States, might well trot out this line.
And so they had reached out to the city planner in Springfield, Ohio.
You can imagine the phone call.
Like, we don't actually think this is happening, but we have to do our due diligence and ask you if this is happening so that we have basic facts to give.
The point is, they knew that they needed to prep this because that's who Donald Trump and the GOP is.
And to their credit, I think the reason they wanted to prep this, among other things, is that I think they know how dangerous this is.
I think anybody who knows the history of race relations in the U.S., racial stereotypes, racist stereotypes, the rhetoric, knows at least part of that history that you're sharing, right, and the elements of that.
So I was It's awful, right, to hear it.
It was not surprising.
Maybe the way to say it, it was shocking, not surprising when Trump did this.
But I think it was really good and I appreciated the fact that you now have at least some elements in the mainstream media, not just letting people talk because they're a big person and we're here to report what they say, not to tell them what they should think or, you know, whatever the line used to be.
And I'll just point out, when the best response to the Stephen Millers And the J.D.
Vance's and the Donald Trump's can have to this is to get upset that somebody asked them where they're getting their information.
That tells you something, right?
When all somebody can do when you're like, so, wow, that's interesting.
Like, where's that coming from?
And you've got to get mad at them for asking you that.
That tells you a lot.
I'll sum up my, my, my thoughts on this.
And then I think you should take us into the, the land of T Swift and the Swifties, because I know, you know, you're a music connoisseur.
You've been in the discord recently.
People are like lauding your musical taste.
Dan stream, Dan, Dan Miller's now mainstream because so many people have told him how amazing his, the bands are that he likes.
And so he's.
That's exactly how everything has been.
He shops at Old Navy now.
It's a whole thing.
All right.
So here's somebody, Dan.
I'll just, you know, I got upset earlier.
I was, I was really kind of feeling pretty, pretty upset.
So I'll just, I'll just coolly read a tweet that I think expresses what a lot of people feel.
Trump makes people I care about afraid.
Immigrants, Muslims, etc.
Because of this, I find him reprehensible.
God wants better of us.
Let me see who that was.
Is that Reverend Barber, Poor People's Campaign?
Nope.
Let's see here.
Is that ... Who is this?
Oh, J.D.
Vance, 2016.
J.D.
Vance, 2016.
Trump makes people I care about afraid.
Immigrants, Muslims, et cetera.
Because of this, I find him reprehensible.
God wants better of us.
I agree, J.D.
I agree.
Dan?
With 2016, J.D.
Vance.
Tell us about T-Swift.
Give us a little jolt here.
Let me shake it off.
I'm going to go shake it off, Dan.
For those who perhaps live under a rock or something, T here would be Taylor Swift.
I've said before, I'm not into pop music.
I'm not into much of Taylor Swift's music.
Now I got to edit that out, Dan.
Okay.
There went half the audience.
All right.
All right.
I guess you like getting mail.
Yeah.
All right.
Taylor Swift is, she's brilliant.
I love Taylor Swift's music.
Everyone, please know that.
Okay.
Thank you.
I think she's a brilliant musician.
I think she's a brilliant entertainer.
I think she's a brilliant business person, but I've talked before in the past.
I think she's also, it's been interesting to watch her political evolution as she has Because the safe thing for lots of celebrities, right, is to not endorse somebody.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
There were lots of athletes that I followed this week who were asked, basically after Taylor Swift did this endorsement, they're like, who do you endorse?
And they would, you know, just take the line.
And it's fine.
They would say, I'm not going to endorse anybody.
I really encourage people to do your research, vote, register to vote.
Cool.
But Taylor Swift did more than this.
Nothing but respect for her.
And she had this long post clearly coordinated with the Harris campaign after the debate where she endorsed Kamala Harris, said she had done her research, encouraged other people to do the same thing and so forth.
But a couple of things that stood out for me is one, this is the savvy nature of Taylor Swift.
It is also the Taylor Swift will come and get you if you're just in the wrong.
And I remember the case that she had for sexual harassment and things like that.
Weeks ago, we remember the AI generated image of Taylor Swift endorsing Donald Trump, right?
And nothing, no anything.
And here, she just very subtly and very appropriately is like, oh, I was recently made aware of this AI-generated, like, turned it around and is like, hey, Trump campaign, here's what I'm gonna do.
Not because, I don't think she endorsed Harris just because Donald Trump had this image, but she's not gonna let it slide and she's gonna call him out.
She signs it as, you know, the childless cat lady, an obvious reference to Vance.
I think that that was brilliant.
I think the coordination is brilliant.
But here's the other thing.
A couple weeks ago, we talked about this study that found that, lo and behold, celebrity endorsements affect people, right?
Taylor Swift is like, she's a gravitational force.
I mean, she's like her own center of gravity, you know, with huge pull.
And she had a link on her website and social media and stuff that people could click on to register to vote.
Takes them to vote.gov.
400,000 plus clicks on that link in the 24 hours after she endorsed Kamala Harris.
It has real force.
I think there's, you know, Trump tried to play it down.
He said that, you know, she's going to take a hit in the market for doing this.
Says he prefers Brittany Mahomes, bigger fan of Brittany Mahomes.
Brittany Mahomes is, I guess, probably a nice person.
She's married to Patrick Mahomes, has lied to a couple Trump things.
She's not an entertainer.
She's not...
They didn't sit together at the last game.
They did not sit together at the last game.
We'll see what happens this Sunday and so forth.
Patrick Mahomes was one of the people who was careful not to endorse anybody.
I just think, I think it's significant.
I think it matters.
There was another survey, not survey, a study that I saw this week that said that American women Have become more liberal.
They are more liberal as a bloc.
Now, that's a really big bloc, and there would be lots of divisions by age and region and lots of other things, but that American women as a whole are more liberal and progressive now than they have been for decades.
I think all of this matters.
I think it's significant, and I think it does say, like, remember that time when a big thing of the Trump campaign was to broaden his appeal to who?
To women!
I think this is just one more indicator of how much that is not happening for the Trump campaign.
By somebody who, yeah, I'm not super into Taylor Swift's music, but as a person, as a professional, as a spokesperson, I think she's absolutely phenomenal.
And I think it's significant that she did this.
I don't think people should vote for Harris because Taylor Swift endorsed her, but I think the fact that she did says an awful lot that needs to be said about Harris and her campaign.
I think it says even more about probably Donald Trump.
Dan, we got to stop saying what you're saying.
Okay.
It's like, you don't just, all right, let's take a break.
We're going to come back and sometimes Dan, something happens that feels divine.
And I'm going to explain that in a minute.
Be right back.
All right, Dan.
So Charlie Kirk did this really weird thing where he sat down and like young people, college students were able to run up to a chair across from him and basically debate him for like three minutes.
And these are online, but I want to play a clip for y'all of a young man, a young person who sat down across Charlie Kirk and just listen to it and be amazed because this feels like a divine revelation.
Here it goes.
All right, Parker, what is a woman?
A woman is an adult human person that has a desire to be in accordance with a particular set of social and cultural norms that are typically associated with a female sex.
Define a man.
You're looking at one.
XY chromosomes.
Okay, but does God the Father have XY chromosomes prior to incarnation?
A man is someone with XY chromosomes, but he doesn't have XY chromosomes, and he's still a man.
He still uses preferred pronouns.
In the original Hebrew, Adonai.
Do you know what Adonai is?
It's the Hebrew word for God.
It's actually genderless.
Wrong!
And actually, in the scriptures, they use he.
Right?
And they use the masculine.
Jesus Christ came to Earth as a man, not as a woman.
But God the Father's a man, right?
Because all fathers are men.
Well, first of all, there's a trinity.
So God the Father is neither man nor woman.
He is omniscient, omnipotent.
He is all being on top.
So why do you use he?
Well, I did not.
The scriptures do.
You could use woman.
You could say her.
Again, because you have to make a choice.
Either him or her in the original scriptures.
Some fathers are men and boys.
So some fathers are not men and boys.
Not men or boys.
I'm sorry.
Some fathers are not male.
Wait, so God the Father is a male?
God the Father.
So where do we get God the Father from?
What Greek word?
From your scripture.
Because he's not a man.
You know he's not a man under your worldview.
You still use his preferred pronoun.
You still call him a man.
Christ is a man.
You don't do that with trans people because you're transphobic.
That's why.
Before incarnation, he's not.
Before incarnation, there's no p***, there's no XY chromosomes, there's no small gametes.
What biology does your God have?
I meant before incarnation.
You don't know?
- What does your God have?
- Well, the one of Christ our Lord. - No, I meant before incarnation. - Well, to be honest, I don't quite know. - You don't know? - So you don't know what a man is?
- Well, there are-- It's a little opaque.
Again, you're looking at a man.
But your video, the largest video on TikTok is, what is a woman 20 million views?
You don't know what a man is in your own worldview?
I said you're looking at a man, right?
Wait, but God the Father doesn't meet that criteria.
Am I looking at a man?
Yes, you are.
Okay, good.
Just make sure.
A man that's defeating you in a debate right now.
Okay, that's fine.
So, Dan, you know, this question, what is a woman, is one that Charlie Kirk asked wherever he goes.
He thinks it's a sort of trump card.
It's a gotcha.
It's a gotcha question.
And this young guy sits down and he's like, well, what's a man?
And it's so amazing, the unraveling of the logic, because Charlie Kirk's like, well, XY chromosomes, that's easy.
It's like, cool, cool, cool.
All right.
What about God the Father?
Is He Him?
Is God He Him?
Well, and then Charlie Kirk goes to the scriptures, and you all heard it, and it unravels into Charlie Kirk trying to yell about the Trinity, and the scriptures, and God, and basically the young guy catches him and he's like, so you're telling me God the Father does not have XY chromosomes, does not have male-assigned genitalia, but God the Father asked you to call Him He Him, so you do.
So you just call God by his preferred pronouns, even though he doesn't have any of the things you say define a man.
And Charlie Kirk is destroyed at this point.
What are your thoughts on this?
I just, I don't know.
Sometimes instead of us saying things, you should just let other people say them.
And this is one of those moments where I was like, we got to play that clip.
Yeah, I think what is significant about—I've said these things.
I've played these games in classes.
I've done these things.
You walk people into this.
I've had conversations with evangelicals who are like, you know, God doesn't have a gender.
God's beyond gender.
And you pull the strings of how that unravels gender essentialism.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But this kid, man, like, and he's a young man.
I'm old now.
I'm middle-aged.
I'm looking at him, I'm like, bravo, man.
And the venue, I think, is what really matters here.
Because Charlie Kirk is one of those figures who is, to me, the example of the pseudo-intellectual.
Yeah, that's right.
The dude who thinks that he's the smartest one, thinks he knows his stuff, thinks he's young and savvy and, you know, I'm going to do this on TikTok, I'm going to do this on Instagram, I'm going to do this, you know, these formats that are not traditional venues and so forth.
And as you say, he gets destroyed publicly, visibly, as a part of, you know, a kind of entertainment discourse.
And I think for me, the publicity of it and the format is what gives it the real teeth here.
The content is there.
The content is real.
I think for a lot of people, maybe the content is something they've never thought of because, you know, they don't listen to straight white American Jesus enough.
But I think more like what really sort of gave it the punch effect is the age of the person doing it.
As you say, this young man just walks up and like tears him up.
But I think it's just, it's like, All right, so real quick, I got a brief story.
Once upon a time in high school, maybe I can elaborate on this sometime in an other episode, I got beat up in front of the entire school.
Oh my lord.
Like at a football game.
Oh my goodness.
Oh no.
Thank you for your concern, Brad.
Um, just, just got completely wailed on.
I had braces, my teeth, like, my lips were, like, stuck to my braces, bloody nose, the whole deal.
That's basically, rhetorically, what happened to Charlie.
Like, just in front of everybody in front of the whole world to see it.
And I think that that's what gave it real force.
And it was, as you say, it's just one of those things you're like, If I had my last birthday, closed my eyes and blown out my birthday candles and played a wish of what I would want to see happen, I don't think I could have imagined seeing that.
It was that gratifying.
I'm sorry that happened.
I didn't know that.
You've never told me that.
I don't think I have.
It's a story.
Okay.
We'll talk more about it.
I'm going to send you a gift basket right now.
Um, I, no, I mean that, that's, yeah, anyway, that's terrible.
Um, I wasn't saying for like sympathy.
I know, I know, but I'm not, I know.
It was embarrassing.
It's just, my reason for hope is a lot of things.
I think I'll zero in on this whole venue with Charlie Kirk.
The people there are young people.
They're, they're in their early twenties.
There's another young person.
I think she, her could be they, I don't know their pronouns, but they, Talk to him about abortion.
And it's almost the same effect.
She's able to dismantle this logic that he has cultivated within this echo chamber and really just make these severe gut punches into his kind of whole worldview on abortion.
And it happens over and over again, whether it's abortion, whether it's gender.
And watching young people Do that in that venue as a reminder of the ways folks are moving in this country.
The way that folks are signing up to vote, the ways that people are mobilizing, energized, and I think that's hopeful.
And I'm not one of those people that thinks the kids will save us by default because There's always kids and we haven't saved ourselves yet.
Dan, you and I were kids once and there was kids in the 1880s and the 1980s, but I do think we are seeing some super encouraging engagement across the country.
And the numbers show that in terms of voter registrations, in terms of people visiting vote.gov after Taylor Swift's endorsement, so on and so forth.
How about you?
Yeah, remember when Gen X was going to change American evangelicalism?
I remember that as a Gen Xer, so anyway.
Emergent Magazine.
Anyway, go ahead.
We have a whole supplemental episode lined up by the time we're done here.
Yeah, so I keep coming back to it, but I really, I was nervous about the debate.
I didn't think Kamala Harris was going to like fall flat.
I didn't think that she was going to, you know, just face plant.
But I did feel the risk of this and I did feel the, you know, let's see what happens.
I felt that there were unfair expectations on her because everybody knows what Trump is and what he's going to do and that it's not going to move the needle.
And so there was, I think she was the unknown.
And I think it's huge that she cleared that hurdle and that now we're sort of like, okay, now it's kind of the homestretch to the election.
It appears for now that there won't be another debate.
Anyway, I just thought that her clearing what appears to be right now one of the last of the hurdles that were thrown up before her of like, Whether it's undecided voters, whether it's the media, whether it's political insiders who are just like, you know, Kamala Harris can't do this.
I think it was hugely helpful that she's, I don't know, she's passed with flying colors, everything has been put in front of her.
And I'm very, very hopeful.
And I guess what I'll say is it moves me beyond hope to confidence, if that transition makes sense.
And I think that that's significant.
Well, speaking of debates, the vice presidential debate is October 1st.
I'll be speaking at UC Berkeley that day at 4 o'clock.
So that's a doubleheader right there, Dan.
Me speaking about Christian nationalism and the desire to return to Christendom at 4 p.m.
in Berkeley, and then half an hour break, get a Diet Coke, go watch J.D.
Vance and Tim Wells.
So I'll be there on October 1st.
September 26th, 27th, I'll be out in Denver at the Freedom from Religion Foundation.
I want to invite everyone to, if you're around, to come hang out.
Catherine Stewart will be there.
Josh Cowan, who I just interviewed for Straight White American Jesus, will be there too, and a bunch of others.
So those are coming up.
I want to thank everybody who was in Omaha, everybody who's in Sonoma.
I had a great time with all of you.
We'll be back next week with a bunch of stuff, including It's in the code and weekly roundup, but we'll have a bonus episode of the series I mentioned earlier, Sanctuary on the Border Between Church and State.
We'll be giving you a preview of that.
It's outstanding.
It will change how you think of faith and immigration and radical hospitality in the country.
It's inspiring and I can't wait to share it with you all.
