Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus content most Mondays, bonus episodes every month, ad-free listening, access to the entire 600-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/
In this weekly roundup, I dive into the disturbing trend of dehumanizing rhetoric by political and religious leaders. From J.D. Vance's false accusations about Haitian migrants to Mark Robinson’s shocking past statements identifying as a Nazi, we’re witnessing the mainstreaming of harmful ideologies. I unpack how these comments aren’t just isolated incidents—they’re part of a broader movement where Christian nationalists are pushing white nationalist propaganda. I also share details on an exciting upcoming live event at USC, where experts will discuss the vital topic of church and state separation. This episode draws attention to the chilling parallels between today's political discourse and tactics used by fascist regimes, underscoring why it’s critical to remain vigilant and mobilize our communities.
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
Order Brad's book: https://bookshop.org/a/95982/9781506482163
This episode is sponsored by/brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/RC and get on your way to being your best self.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes.
If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do, Dana.
You just said that you're creating a story.
Sir, you just said that you're creating the story.
What's that, Dana?
You just said that this is a story that you created.
Yes.
So, so then, the eating dogs we're casting is not... We are creating, we are... Dana, it comes from first-hand accounts from my constituents.
I say that we're creating a story, meaning we're creating the American media focusing on it.
That's J.D.
Vance, talking about the ways that he's worked to, quote, create the story about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio.
That story has only gotten worse as the week has gone on.
Not only did the vice presidential candidate admit to quote creating that story, but in the face of no evidence, no documentation, no reason to think that the idea that Haitian migrants are eating pets, Vance went on to say in the campaign trail that no matter their status in the country, he considers them to be quote illegal.
This coincides with a bombshell story out of North Carolina, where gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson has been found out to be somebody who said online that he is a Nazi.
Finally, we turn to a group of Christian nationalists, theologians, and pastors This is the State of American Politics.
propaganda, using Nazi symbols, and expressing the fact that if they had to choose, they would side with the Nazis over the leftists.
Three stories, the national, the state, and the religious, all tied together by an insidious ideology.
This is the state of American politics.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is the Straight White American Jesus Weekly Roundup.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
Brad Onishi here.
Doing today's solo because Dan Miller had a death in the family and is traveling, so he won't be joining me today.
And if you like Dan Miller or you are somebody who's been in contact with him regarding it's in the code or something else, This would be a great week.
Send him a message or ping him on Discord or something just to tell him you appreciate him because I know he's going through something that's difficult.
So that's all I'll say about it.
He's not here today, but hopefully we'll be back next week.
And I'm thinking of him and I hope you are too.
Today's a tough week because I feel like this is a week where everything we're going to talk about portends something extremely terrifying.
And we want to tie together three stories.
Basically, stories that Demonstrate how many folks who are on the American right or Christian nationalists in this country have turned to either tactics used by fascists in the past or even Nazis or are explicitly comparing themselves to those people as they move forward with their political messaging and tactics and all of this surrounds the ongoing story, the ongoing
Attacks on Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio and really across the country.
So I want to talk about that.
Before I do, let me talk about something happy and something that I'm really excited to share with you.
I can finally give you the news that November 21st, Thursday, a week before Thanksgiving, we will be at the University of Southern California and in conjunction with Americans United for Separation of Church and State, We'll be holding a live event.
And right now at that live event, we have some great folks who are slated to be there.
So in addition to me and Dan, we will have Andrew Seidel from Americans United, the author of The Founding Myth and American Crusade, Rachel Lazar, the president of Americans United, and Robert P. Jones.
Many of you know, Hidden Roots of White Supremacy, White Too Long, was just on the show a couple weeks ago.
And we're working to add a few more.
We also have Kyati Joshi, who wrote White Christian Privilege.
And it's going to be a great night.
It's going to start at 7 p.m.
I'll have more details in the next week or so.
We'll have tickets on sale.
We will have an after party.
So we're going to have an event at USC and then go hang out afterwards.
So if you are in and around LA, Orange County, anywhere where you can get to USC on Thursday, November 21, plan on being there.
And I hope to see you.
I'm super, super excited about it.
All right, let's jump into today's topics at hand.
One of the things that I think I want to try to get across today about what's happening with the story in Springfield is that many of you know this already, but J.D.
Vance said, and we played it at the top for you, that he is creating the stories that he feels need to be highlighted and centered in the American press.
Now, he's gone on to say at rallies, oh, the media always does this.
They twist my words.
When I say create stories, I mean make sure the media covers them.
But as soon as he said this, there were so many folks, including myself, who thought, there it is.
That's exactly what you're doing.
Because every time that Trump or Vance or anyone on the American right has made a claim about Haitian immigrants eating pets, stealing people's pets, and so on and so forth, the claims have been debunked.
There have been the original Facebook poster Has basically said whoops I messed up, but there was somebody who was missing a pet and Vance and and others said oh There's the proof and take it to the police and in fact they found that pet and that pet is safe and sound at home This is not a story that has borne out this is not a story where we have verifiable facts This is this is none of that
And yet, Vance and Trump have gone on to just talk about this, to highlight it, to use it, and to double down on it.
So Vance talked about the creating the stories, but then he went on and answered a question this week where he said that he believes that Haitian immigrants are illegal immigrants or migrants despite the fact that they have protected status.
So let me play that clip for you right now.
Hi Senator, Mia McCarthy with Politico.
Question for you about the Haitian migrants in Springfield.
So I know you've talked a lot about how we need to deport illegal aliens, but I wanted to ask you, the majority of the Haitians in Springfield came under TPS, so they are here legally.
And I know you've expressed a lot of your issues with the TPS program and wanting to change that under a Trump-Vance administration.
But I guess my question for you is, if you become the vice president under a Trump administration, what will you guys do about the migrants that are already there, since they did arrive legally?
And a follow-up to that, if you plan to deport them, how would you do that legally?
Well, look, this is a media and Kamala Harris fact check that I want to clarify and clear up right now.
And here's...
Now, the media loves to say that the Haitian migrants, hundreds of thousands of them, by the way, 20,000 in Springfield, but hundreds of thousands of them all across our country, they are here legally.
And what they mean is that Kamala Harris used two separate programs, mass parole and temporary protective status.
She used two programs to wave a wand and to say we're not going to deport those people here.
Well if Kamala Harris waves the wand, Illegally, and says these people are now here legally, I'm still gonna call him an illegal alien.
And illegal action from Kamala Harris does not make an alien legal.
That is not how this works.
Now, what Vance says in that clip is that, you know, he says Kamala Harris waved a wand, and now the Haitian folks who are here have protected status And guess what?
I still consider them illegal.
So I want to dig into that because first of all, it's everything Dan Miller said last week.
Dan Miller said, look, there are so many folks when you talk to Uncle Ron who say, oh, I don't mind immigrants as long as they come here legally.
And Dan, you know, says, really?
Because I don't believe you.
And then J.D.
Vance just says it out loud.
Somebody says, look, these folks are here legally.
And he says, well, yeah, but I still consider them illegal.
Think about that.
So first, make up stories.
Double down on claims and even say, I created the stories.
Then, when you're called on it, Double down without evidence and proclaim that the folks who are here are illegal.
Like you've gone from no evidence and a nothing burger story to a status of hundreds of thousands of folks who are in the country under an immigration program.
Now, I'm not going to dig into the details of that program, but the protected status program that many Haitian immigrants have used to migrate to the country is one that protects folks who have threats of violence in their home countries.
So if you look at the statistics, folks from Venezuela and El Salvador are also here under the same program.
Now, there are aspects of the program that have been challenged.
There's components of it that have been in the courts.
There's been appeals and so on.
I'm not going to go into the details because we're going to lose ourselves there.
What I'll say is, that's democracy in action.
Okay, so the Biden administration puts forth a certain dynamics related to this protected status immigration program, and some folks challenge the legality of it.
Some of the things are in the court, some components, some dynamics, some aspects, and it's all played out.
That's called democracy in action, and that's how things are supposed to work.
There's a process.
Congress has taken no action against it.
My point here is that Vance is not only smearing the Haitian immigrants, he's not only doubling down, he's not only saying out loud that I created the story, but he's also saying that I consider them illegal.
I'm calling into question the process.
I'm calling into question the very movements of democracy.
Like, when Trump put in place the Muslim ban, he put down an executive order, and then it was immediately challenged in court.
It was immediately put forth.
The president is allowed to make executive orders.
Whether or not those will stand the test of time as a result of their challenges in the court is one thing.
This whole program has been put through that set of processes and nonetheless, Vance just comes out and says to anyone who will listen, well, they're still illegal.
And what's important there is that there's a complete lack of nuance or detail.
There's a complete lack of reflection on the process or anything.
There's also a complete lack of reflection for Vance.
And anyone who's listening to him of like why folks from Haiti would come here?
Why would people want to be in the country?
Like there's these assumptions of the lack of humanity.
There's this assumptions of the nefariousness and the insidiousness.
There's this assumption of like they're here to ruin.
And there's no reflection on, like, why would you want to be here?
Why would folks from Haiti or Venezuela or El Salvador need protected status?
Well, this came up this week with Matt Walsh, the infamous provocateur, Christian nationalist, who is making a documentary about racism, and he's been walking around in a disguise.
He was at the DNC in a disguise.
But Walsh is just known as a kind of internet provocateur.
He has a ton of Twitter followers.
If you listen to the show, you probably are very aware of who he is.
He's kind of a ringleader among a group of right-wing Christian nationalist types who are always taking the most incendiary views on family, on gender, on sex, hateful speech towards trans people, and so on.
Well, he went on television this week and talked about Haiti and talked about how, as a country, Haiti needs to really figure its stuff out.
And he got a very quick and succinct history lesson.
And it was pretty devastating.
So I want to play that for you right now.
Nobody thinks that it will benefit America to become more like Haiti.
Nobody thinks that.
Or I would challenge anyone, if they do think that, to explain how that's the case.
Like, in what way could this country be improved by making it more like Haiti?
When you look at Haiti, what part of Haiti are you saying to yourself, we need more of that?
Beaches.
Well, we have more beaches than them too, right?
Don't we?
We're a much bigger country.
We don't want a marine invasion and occupation of The United States that constantly decapitates governments and takes the money out of the country and saddles us with debt from a revolution.
We wouldn't want to be basically a colony that the entire West spends 200 years punishing after the Haitian revolution.
I get that.
I understand that, but also, at a certain point... We wouldn't want that, no, yes.
We wouldn't want that, but I would also say that that's not entirely why Haiti's in the position that it's in.
I mean, at a certain point, as a country, you have to stand on your own two feet and take care of yourself.
But at what point is that?
They elect Aristide, and we overthrow Aristide.
Then they elect Jovenel Moise.
Jovenel Moise has assassinated a bunch of people with American connections, and then we install In 2021, like the United States installed the prime minister that we just ousted.
Like, so we could say, okay, yeah, you gotta get over the, you know, 200 years ago, but like, we're still doing it.
Yeah, I mean, and I'm not in favor of, I'm very non-interventionist in my policies, so I'm not in favor of most of the things that we're doing in other countries.
We just made the new government in Haiti, in a hotel room in Jamaica.
And then we insisted that whatever government we made in Jamaica had to allow Kenyan police, Kenyan troops to come in under the flag of the UN in order to go to war with the gangs.
Yeah, I'm not, look, I'm not interested in, if it were up to me, I'm not interested in doing anything in Haiti.
Like, let Haiti be Haiti and take care of them.
That's sort of my whole point here.
Let them take care of themselves and their own problems.
I'm also not saying that there's like never a scenario where we let someone from Haiti into the country.
Uh, but what, and it doesn't have to just be about Haiti, but when you're throwing open the gates and just inviting anyone, uh, in particular, you know, I guess, I guess your assumption there was that it is Haitian people that are creating the conditions on Haiti and that if the Haitian people come to Springfield, they will recreate The conditions in Springfield, whereas what I'm saying is that it's actually the U.S.
All right.
So, so far today, here's what we've got.
We've got Vance saying he created the story, and then he says they're illegal.
Now, no person is illegal.
Someone might be undocumented, but they're not illegal.
There's no illegal human being in the world.
Nonetheless, Vance says, I consider them illegal.
It's so dangerous because it's a permission structure to use a concept from Peter Manceau and Andrew Seidel.
It's a permission structure for anyone who encounters folks who are migrants from Haiti to say, you know, you might have papers or you might have some document that says you're allowed to be here, but guess what?
We don't think you're actually illegal.
I want you to stick with me on that.
I want you to stick with me on the idea that regardless of what the government says, or regardless of what Joe Biden says, we don't consider you to be somebody who's allowed to be here.
And we actually consider you subhuman because you eat pets.
And that's coming directly from a leader of our political party, somebody we look up to, somebody who's running for president or vice president or, and so on.
This week, Rich Lowry, the editor-in-chief of the National Review, went on Megyn Kelly's podcast, and they were recording.
And I'm not going to play this recording for you, because I'm just not.
But he was talking about Haitian migrants.
And he started to say one word, and then he stopped and said, immigrants are migrants.
Now, I will say I've listened to it many times, And I'll just come out and say, he seemed to at first say the N word.
He's talked about when you, when you have these N words up and then kind of caught himself and said migrants and Megan Kelly kind of just looked at him blankly smiling.
Now there's a plausible deniability there.
Oh, that's not what I said.
I was trying to get the word out.
I stumbled, whatever.
Rich Lowry using the N word, at least for me, that's what it sounded like.
Okay.
Really recall something about this whole set of events.
Hey, let's spread rumors about you that dehumanize you.
Let's then say that despite whatever papers, whatever legality, whatever status you have, we're going to consider you not legal.
Keith Boykin tweeted this.
This is how black people got killed in the Jim Crow era.
Something quote bad happened to a white person and a lynch mob rushed out to string up a black person.
It's how Emmett Till got lynched, how the Central Park Five got framed, and how Haitian immigrants are being targeted.
Boykin was responding to Justin Barragona who noted that the Vance campaign provided the Wall Street Journal with police report to prove their claims about cat-eating Haitians in Springfield.
The Wall Street Journal spoke to the woman who filed that police report, and she later found her cat, alive and well, in her basement.
So think about it.
I'm going to create stories.
I'm going to say you're illegal.
I'm going to come up with some sort of police report that says, well, here's the proof.
And guess what?
The woman who said her cat was missing, she found him.
Doesn't matter at this point.
Because when Vance is asked, he's like, I'm still going to call him illegal.
When the editor-in-chief of the National Review starts talking, he starts using the N-word.
At least in my view.
There's plausible deniability, and I'm sure if he were here right now, he'd say, it's not what I said.
You can listen to the tape yourself.
The original dehumanizing word in the United States, the N-word.
The original word that says you're not human.
You're not like me.
I'm allowed to use violence against you because your status is one.
That means you're not worth the dignity or respect of a human.
So I can enslave you or own you or maim you or kill you because you have no status.
When Keith Boykin notes, this is how things work in the Jim Crow era, it brings something into focus.
Last week I talked about Asian Americans and the whole history of the idea that Asian folks or any other minority racial or religious group in this country eats pets or eats cats and eats dogs.
Well, today I want to bring this into focus because it also touches on, and I think many of you know this already, right?
The long and tried and vicious anti-black racism in this country, and also relates to Nazi ideology.
So I want to go to something that Lydia Pilgrim wrote at the New York Times this week, talking about the insidiousness of this whole line of attack and rhetoric from Trump.
Talked about how we should not see this as just one more attack in a long line of attacks by Trump and his allies on vulnerable people in the United States.
That there's a way that this event really crystallizes every kind of strand of the hatred that has been shown towards immigrants, towards racial minorities, religious minorities, and others.
There is a way that what's happening in these attacks on Haitian migrants brings together, as I talked about last week, long-standing attacks and dehumanizing rhetoric on Asian Americans.
It of course, and obviously, brings into focus the centuries-long dehumanization project against those of African descent.
And as I'll explain in a moment, it also brings in to play tactics that have been used to justify horrific violence against Jewish folks.
There's a way here that this focus on the Irish community, or excuse me, the Haitian community in Springfield brings together in a dynamic, tragic, disgusting way, all three of those strands.
It cannot be an accident that these residences have been fused in an allegation against Haitians, a people who have long stood in for a kind of universal other in America, a completely racialized symbol of dark, chaotic forces that must be held at bay by the forces of white civilization.
Paul Green's phrase here sticks with me, a universal other in America.
A universal other in America that symbolizes chaotic forces that must be held at bay.
There it is.
When you think of claiming that Chinese migrants eat dogs, when you think of the ways that African, those of African descent have been labeled and viewed in this country,
When you think of the ways that Jewish folks were seen, and also others during the Nazi regime, those of different abilities, those who were queer, those who were Polish, those who were other in any way, you think of an other who represents the dark chaotic forces that must be held at bay.
Not humans, Not neighbors, not newcomers, but dark chaotic forces that must be dealt with.
Now you might be thinking, well, what does this have to do with the Nazi party in Germany?
Well, there's a piece this week by Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times where he talks about the ways that the tactics used when it comes to making up stories or creating stories, as J.D.
Vance says, come straight from the Nazi playbook.
So let me just read that for you.
One that came up was a judgment by the Nazi Party's chief racist ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg, about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic tract wholly fabricated by officials in Tsarist Russia.
In 1934, Rosenberg wrote that the issue was less the so-called authenticity of the Protocols than the inner truth of what is stated.
Now, folks other than Hiltzik have been talking about this.
Joel Swanson, who is Professor of Jewish Studies at Sarah Lawrence College, was also discussing this online this week.
But here's the basic idea.
In 1934, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a thoroughly anti-Semitic work, was fabricated.
It was a created story.
It was used to talk about the ways that Jewish folks were not human and that they were a chaotic force that had to be held at bay.
Now Rosenberg, the chief ideologue, as Hilze calls him, of Nazi Germany says, you know, what's less important is the authenticity of this work than the inner truth.
And there it is.
Paul Green says this week in the New York Times that the Haitian person in the United States and in the European gaze is seen as a universal other who represents a chaotic force that must be held at bay.
And what's important to J.D.
Vance is less the authenticity of the stories about what's happening in Springfield and more the inner truth.
What's the inner truth to him?
They'll always be illegal.
They'll never be American.
They'll never be welcome here.
They'll never be one of us.
And you know, in the history of this country, as I talked about with lynching and with extra legal forms of violence, that's grounds for attack.
That's grounds for people to feel like they have the permission to go in and to take matters into their own hands.
Here's Hiltzik at the LA Times again.
When I first encountered this quote, I found it so over-determined that I thought it must be apocryphal.
It's not.
It has been documented by Holocaust historians.
Indeed, Rosenberg's thinking reflected the general approach to the protocols among Nazis.
They included Hitler's propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, who wrote in his diary in 1924, I believe in the inner but not the factual truth of the protocols.
The Jewish community will recognize these statements as related to the blood libel, the persistent assertion that Jews use the blood of Christian children to bake matzah or for other religious purposes, a core tenet of Nazi anti-Semitism.
It was designed to stir up anti-Jewish reaction with a visceral intensity.
Of course, it was completely fabricated.
It was designed to stir up anti-Jewish reaction with a visceral intensity.
This is what I think about when I think of JD Vance on the, on the, on the campaign trail saying, I consider them illegal.
When they talk, when Trump says from the debate stage, they're eating the dogs.
This is a way to unleash all of that fear, all of that hatred, and to say the visceral intensity that you have in your heart, the inner truth that you believe these people are not actually human and could never be one of us, Americans, neighbors, part of our community.
Let it all out.
Activate it.
You're allowed to feel that.
Go there because they're coming for you and your children.
They're going to destroy your community.
They've already done it.
Look across the country.
Here it is.
It's incredibly, incredibly, incredibly damaging to any public square.
One of the things that Vance keeps doing when asked about this, when he's pressed about it by Dana Bash or anyone else, is that he's heard about pet kidnappings.
He's had people call him his constituents, he says.
But these aren't verifiable.
We don't have, we don't have the proof.
We don't have the evidence.
We don't have the documentation.
We don't have the police chief or law enforcement or local politicians on the ground in Ohio saying they can document this.
You know why?
Because for Vance, it's about the inner truth.
It's about the inner truth that these folks in his mind are really the kinds that would do subhuman things.
Remember what I said last week?
This is a man who blurbed a book by Jack Posobiec that claims that leftists are unhuman.
So this is not hyperbole.
It's not off-brand.
It's not something that is unthinkable for someone like this.
Let's take a break.
We'll come back and talk about what's happening in North Carolina.
I'm Leia Payne, a historian and expert in Pentecostal and Charismatic movements in the United States and beyond.
Welcome to Spirit and Power, a limited series podcast where we do deep dives into how Charismatic and Pentecostal movements are shaping the American political and social landscape.
As the 2024 election approaches, I'll be tracking key stories and highlighting critical data from leading experts to keep you informed.
Beginning September 26th, join me every Thursday for in-depth conversations with journalists and scholars exploring this critical intersection of religion and politics in America.
Now to North Carolina, where Mark Robinson, the GOP candidate for governor, is under fire to drop out of the race.
And I think some of you have heard about this story already, but I want to just start by going over some of the things Mark Robinson has said in the past and things we've known about for quite some time.
Here's a CNN article that goes through some of these statements.
Campaigning for lieutenant governor in 2020, Robinson advocated for a complete abortion ban without exceptions.
He later expressed regret in 2022 for paying for his now wife to have an abortion in the 1980s.
The governor says he supports a so-called heartbeat bill that would ban abortion when the heartbeat is detected.
He has also talked about how he denies the Holocaust.
He said that once a woman is pregnant, it is not her body anymore.
He talks about folks who are trans or gay as filth.
He said that in a 2021 sermon.
Talked about LGBTQ plus folks as maggots and flies.
Talked about how Michelle Obama is secretly a transgender woman, which is a common trope on the American right.
Said, quote, half of black Democrats don't realize they are slaves and don't know who their masters are.
said that homosexuality will lead to society's collapse.
Said after the Pulse Massacre.
Homosexuality is still an abominable sin and I will not join in celebrating gay pride nor will I fly their sacrilegious flag on my page.
Said that Jewish bankers are horsemen of the apocalypse.
Questioned whether or not 9-11 was fake or an inside job.
And just recently said, we now find ourselves struggling with people who have evil intent.
You know there's a time when we used to meet evil on the battlefield and guess what we did to it?
We killed it.
Kill them.
Some liberal somewhere is going to say that sounds awful.
Too bad.
Get mad at me if you want to.
Some folks need killing.
It's time for somebody to say it.
So, Robinson has said all these things in the past, and he's Used this rhetoric, denied the Holocaust, talked about 9-11 as an inside job, called people who are LGBTQ, trans, and so on as filth and maggots.
And he's also said some people need killing.
None of that was enough for him to be called to drop out of the Republican nomination for governor.
None of that was enough for the Republican Party to say, yeah, maybe not our guy.
Donald Trump Up until a couple of weeks ago said he's a great guy.
He said even that he's Martin Luther King Jr.
on steroids.
Robinson, and I want to say this plainly before anything we go into about what has just come to light at CNN.
Robinson was a mainstream politician in 2024 GOP politics.
Robinson was not an outlier.
Robinson was someone who was in line in many ways with Trumpism, with MAGA, with things that are happening.
Who is the Republican nominee up in Minnesota for Senate?
You're saying some of the same things.
Saying some of the, the, the quotes that could be given to Robinson.
This is, this is not, this is not like novel in 2024.
Nonetheless, we come to these things that have just come to light.
And one of them is this.
It's Robinson saying on a public forum of an adult website about 15 years ago, I'm a black Nazi.
Now he said many other things in the CNN article.
I'm sure many of you have seen the headlines already.
He talks about spying on nude women.
He talks about his affinity for certain kinds of pornography that include trans people, even though he says publicly that he hates trans people or thinks that they're filth.
He talks about the ways that, yeah, I don't even want to go into it.
Here's what I do want to say.
Here's the point for me about the Robinson issue.
This is a man who said 15 years ago, I'm a Nazi.
And I just spent 20 minutes talking about the ways that the attacks on Haitian immigrants recall not only the centuries-long traditions of anti-Asian hate, of anti-black racism, Jim Crow, chattel slavery, the Middle Passage, but also just to make the trifecta, the ways that the Nazis expressed the inner truth
the symbolic truth of the protocols of Zion, even if they weren't factually true.
The attacks on Haitian immigrants recall the worst anti-Black racism of this country and its founding.
They recall the Chinese Exclusion Act, the lynching of Chinese people, the anti-Asian hate that we saw in the 19th century, all the way to the pandemic.
And they also bring into focus the way that what's happened with the Trump-Vance campaign are, and it has to be said, tactics used by Nazis to justify violence and hatred and exclusion tactics used by Nazis to justify violence and hatred and exclusion of Jewish people and
And here is a governor, or at least a gubernatorial candidate, a lieutenant governor, a gubernatorial candidate, who once said, I'm a Nazi.
I just want you to think about the things you've said in your life.
And we've all had things that we don't, are not proud of.
We've all had things that we have uttered and we go through it.
But to say in a public forum, I'm a Nazi, I'm a black Nazi.
What does that, what does that say?
Now he's going to, he's already said he, none of this is true.
He disavows it.
It's not, it's all made up, whatever.
Some might say, well, this was 15 years ago.
Who cares?
And I would say, I do care.
Not only because he said this out loud and said it like in a public forum and expressed it.
But because there's no change in his policies.
This is not a moment where somebody said, look, I used to be this and now I'm that.
Right?
George W. Bush had his story of redemption, right?
Alcoholism, alcohol abuse, and then God saved him and Jesus Christ became his savior.
Okay.
I'm not going to go into the George W. Bush phenomenon today, but I'll just say that's a like conversion story.
That's a repentance story.
That's a transformation story.
Whatever you want to say about it, that's what it is.
Tim Walz also arrested for DUI about 30 years ago.
Transformation story.
No, we can go into that.
Maybe that should be scrutinized more.
Maybe we should think about Tim Walz more in that light.
Okay.
Nonetheless, there's like a transformation.
Well, that happened and it was the low point.
You know what Robinson is not saying?
Oh, that was my low point.
And I changed.
Look, and look how that's expressed in my policies and how I view people and how I want to govern.
Nope.
What I see now is just like, well, The guy who said I'm a Nazi 15 years ago continues to say LGBTQ people are filth.
Continues to say that a woman's body is not her own.
Continues to say that some people need killing.
That sounds kind of like, I don't know.
Which you might think of as fascist ideology masked in what has become acceptable, somehow, Overton window, GOP, American right rhetoric.
Somehow that stuff is stuff you can say.
Some people need killing or the Holocaust didn't happen and you can still be the candidate for governor.
So when I see I'm a black Nazi from, you know, 2011 or so, and then I compare that to today, I'm like, well, that was a person who had a dramatic change in their life.
Maybe I should give them a benefit of the doubt.
I see somebody who has continued to see the world that way, continued to express that kind of authoritarian hatred and subhuman view of many people in his community.
He's just doing so in rhetoric that is inflammatory and hurtful and disgusting, but somehow acceptable if you're part of the Republican Party or you're on the American right.
Here's a point that I just don't want to lose today.
It is September, late September, 2024.
And as we get closer to this election, it seems that we get closer and closer and closer to at least some forces, maybe not an entire party, but at least principal forces in one of our parties who are using tactics, who are speaking like, who are acting as if they are trying to replicate
A regime that committed some of the worst atrocities in human history.
When you think about the promises made by Trump when it comes to deportation, when you think about an RNC that had signs were smiling, happy people literally lifted a sign up over their head that said mass deportation now.
When you think about Stephen Miller or Russ Vought talking about using the Insurrection Act and the military on American citizens.
When you think about J.D.
Vance saying that women on the highway traveling to get an abortion should be punished.
That maybe you should have less of a vote if you're not a parent.
When J.D.
Vance said at the Republican National Convention and other speeches that America is about a people, not an idea, that it's about land.
I don't know about you, But I'm taking that seriously.
I'm taking that as this is who they are.
This is who they're replicating.
This is who they want to be.
And we see the effects in Springfield, Ohio right now.
A community completely torn apart, upended by rumor and conspiracy that J.D.
Vance thinks are the inner truth of Haitian immigrants.
And then we see, Down in North Carolina, a candidate who said who he was 15 years ago, a Nazi.
And his politics haven't seemed to change since.
We'll be right back.
All right, yo.
This is a show about Christian nationalism, the religious right, religion and politics.
It's a show where we often zoom into stories that you won't hear anywhere else.
And sometimes we have to discuss national stuff, right?
And we do that often, right?
Whether it's Trump or gubernatorial candidates.
But if there's a theme today, it's that there has been a kind of overwhelmingly disturbing turn in conservative politics in the country, whether it's Trump and Vance, whether it's Mark Robinson, and these are just a few examples.
Now, today we could be talking about so many things, like in Oklahoma, a fifth of the voters in that state were just purged from their voter rolls.
Like 50 days before the election.
We can talk about the fact that Nebraska has a very peculiar system when it comes to how their electoral college votes are tallied and distributed, and that there has been one electoral vote up for grabs in Nebraska, and that electoral vote is in a place that very much could go for Kamala Harris, but Nebraska is talking about changing that again about 50 days before the election.
There are so many things we could be discussing this week.
We could be talking about some other kind of issues in the SBC and sex abuse survivors and so on.
But I want to round out in the most unfortunate ways, the themes that I've been talking about today, as it relates to Nazi ideology, propaganda and tactics.
So I'm going to read something from someone.
I'll tell you who in a minute.
About certain Christian leaders, somewhat prominent Christian leaders, people who have followings, people who have 30,000 and 40,000 Twitter followers, who are leaders of publishing houses and have popular podcasts, and people that certainly have an audience.
So here's a tweet.
You ready?
Recently, Eric Kahn, and if you don't know who Eric Kahn is, Eric Kahn is the founder of New Christendom Press, which is a Christian nationalist press.
Their latest book is Honor Thy Fathers.
It's about the, quote, anti-feminist theology of the Reformed thinkers.
He also hosts the Hard Men podcast and co-hosts the King's Hall podcast.
He is somebody with 30,000 Twitter followers and often shows up when you look for Theo Bros on Twitter.
There was just a piece at Mother Jones about Theo Bros and Eric Kahn and his cohorts, Brian Suave and others are often kind of the exemplary figures on X of Theo Bros in the Reformed tradition.
So these are people that have a following.
They're not somewhere obscurely leading a church of six people.
They are people who are listened to.
So here's another person writing about Eric Kahn.
Recently, Eric Kahn wrote, By God we shall have our home again.
By using this slogan in the context of a video from Samuel Holden that uses explicit Nazi propaganda, the anthem of a white nationalist group, Kahn and his peers have crossed the line.
They're openly promoting white nationalism.
Now for those of you who are not hardwired into Christian Nationalists Online and what they're doing, this week Samuel Holden, who is a relatively obscure figure and is not somebody with 30 or 40,000 followers or is not somebody that has the reach of Eric Kahn or Brian Soave, made a video.
And the theme of that video is, we will have our home again.
It's basically a white propaganda video that shows the supposed war on white people and the ways that white people have been attacked and discriminated against, and yes, have lost their country.
Now, what the person whose tweet I just read is noting is at the end of this video, there is propaganda.
There is images.
There is symbols used by Nazis.
And straight actually from the Nazi regime.
And so the person who wrote this is this tweet that I read about this whole thing is Owen Strachan.
Now Owen Strachan himself is a terrible misogynist Christian nationalist.
He is the director of Dobson Culture Center.
Yes, that Dobson.
He's the author of The Warrior Savior.
Owen Strachan is someone who is like a tried and true misogynistic James Dobson Christian nationalist.
And he is calling out Eric Kahn and Brian Soave because they are sharing videos under the title, By God, We Shall Have Our Home Again.
He's calling out the explicit Nazi propaganda and the anthem of the white nationalist, uh, the, the white nationalist anthem that's being used in the video.
There's another Christian nationalist who hangs out in these circles, again, not as influential, but they go by the Jolly Brawler.
The Jolly Brawler tweeted on September 17, 2024, because of the work of Christ, God is both faithful and just to forgive you of all your sins and cleanse you of your own righteousness.
Turn to him.
He is more willing to forgive than you are to ask for forgiveness.
Okay, well, that's kind of boilerplate, you know, Christian evangelical stuff.
Like, could have seen that anywhere.
On a tract, in church, whatever.
Okay.
The Jolly Brawler also tweeted, or in a response just recently, that if one had to choose between the leftists and the Nazis, we could all agree that the Nazis were better.
So, I just want to stop and notice something today.
We've gone from national, Vance and Trump, attacking Haitian immigrants, and calling upon anti-Asian, anti-Black, and anti-Jewish tactics, traditions, sentiments.
We've gone to North Carolina, talked about Mark Robinson, who says, I'm a Black Nazi, who doesn't seem to have had a change of heart, who denies the Holocaust, talks about people as filth and maggots, says some people need killing.
And now we zoom in on the Christians.
Now, not all Christians.
This is not representative of Christianity America.
But we zoom in on the Christian nationalists.
We zoom in on a group of influential white pastors.
People who are touting themselves as bringing back the true form of faith in this country.
Folks who have a reach.
And you can see them going the same way.
You can see them saying to themselves, if we have to choose between the leftists, who Jack Posobie calls unhuman, or the Nazis, We'll choose the Nazis.
People who killed 6 million folks.
People who killed probably more, like 10 or 11 million folks.
People who systematically tried to exterminate the Jewish people.
Those with different abilities.
Those who were queer.
Those who were Polish.
I mean, they attacked anyone who they didn't see as part of their Aryan race.
Who didn't fit into the pure society.
You are saying that it's better to be them, and it's not an isolated incident.
So you're sharing videos, whether it's Eric Kahn or others.
And these are folks that are tied into people like Stephen Wolfe.
And I've talked about Stephen Wolfe on this podcast.
He's the author of The Case for Christian Nationalism.
Stephen Wolfe published that book with Doug Wilson.
Doug Wilson was just at NatCon and shook hands with Al Mohler.
So I know I'm sort of doing seven degrees of separation stuff now, but I'm trying to show you that, like, the circles of the folks sharing the, like, by-God-we'll-have-our-home-again that includes Nazi ideology, they're not, like, isolated folks with, like, six followers and ten people in pews somewhere in a very obscure rural part of the country.
These are folks who are often, like, sharing stages or microphones or platforms.
With people like Doug Wilson, who was just at NatCon shaking the hands of Al Mohler, the leader of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the largest Protestant denomination in the country.
So when we zoom in on Eric Kahn, when we zoom in on Brian Suave, we see the inner debates with Owen Strachan.
I mean, there has been so much blowback on Owen Strachan for tweeting this and going this way.
And Owen Strachan is like a tried and true James Dobson misogynist Christian nationalist.
When we see these internal fights, what I see is the willingness on the part of so many white Christians in this country to say, I'd rather be a Nazi than a leftist.
How are you supposed to respond to that?
Except for with fear and a realization that we have to understand the situation we're in.
That when we face this election, when we face what's happening in our communities, not just, I'm not talking about presidents, I'm talking about mayors, I'm talking about county supervisors, I'm talking about state legislatures, I'm talking about dog catchers, I'm talking about PTA and school board, I'm talking about it all.
That if we are not vigilant and not willing to kind of understand where we are, these are the kinds of voices and forces and people that will step into that void.
It could be for president.
It could be for governor.
It could be the pastors in your local community.
That's where we're at.
And that's why we do this show, is to bring awareness to what is happening from the local to the national, from the religious spaces to the political elections.
And that's what I see in this whole set of events that's taken place this week with the Theo Bros online.
All right, y'all.
My reason for hope today is the fact that I get to share with you that we will be in Los Angeles on November 21st.
It's a reason for hope for me because it means we get to gather with really important voices.
Andrew Seidel, Rachel Lazar, Robert P. Jones, and others.
But it also means that I'll get to see a lot of you in person and shake your hands and talk to you and hear your stories.
And I don't know about you, but being together makes me hopeful.
And I want to leave that with you today.
That despair is easy.
The better response is to gather, to mobilize, and that generates momentum and hope.
That when we're in the same space, working toward the same goal, we feel good.
And we feel like we have a chance.
We have a chance to build communities that can flourish, where everyone is respected, where everyone is safe.
And I love those opportunities.
So gathering with people in LA is going to be great.
Going to do some more of that here soon.
But that's a reason for hope for me, is just all of you.
And every time I encounter anyone who's doing this kind of work, who's doing anything they can to move us toward a place of a society where everybody can flourish, I feel hope.
And so I kind of can't wait for November 21st.
I'll also be speaking before then, coming up.
So I'll be at, next week, I'll be at the Freedom from Religion Foundation National Gathering in Denver.
Come on out.
October 1st, 4 p.m., I'll be at Cal Berkeley.
So, giving the endowed lecture on religious tolerance.
And so, if you'd like to come by then, 4 p.m., we will be there October 1.
We'll be a couple of other places—San Jose State, October 3, and then online with Princeton Theological Seminary, October 7.
We'll try to get those links out as I have them.
For now, I'll say thanks for being here, thanks for listening, and don't forget, next week On Thursdays, we have Spirit and Power by Dr. Leah Payne, a focus on Charismatic and Pentecostal Christians and their politics and culture and history.
This is really This American Life meets Pentecostalism in America and Charismatic Christians in America.
It's a fantastic show.
Leah is a true professional.
She's podcasted on PRX.
She's written great books.
So, every Thursday, we are going to be lucky enough to have her on this feed until the election.
And next week, in the very first episode, she has Sam Kestenbaum, who just wrote a bombshell, amazing cover story for Harper's Magazine about Greg Locke, the incendiary pastor from Tennessee.
You need to tune into that and check it out.
And if you're a subscriber, a premium subscriber, you get bonus content, not only from us, but also from Leah and from Spirit and Power.
It's going to be really good.
Next week, too, we have the debut of Sanctuary on the border between church and state, a new series about the sanctuary movement that will change your understanding of faith and immigration in the United States.
And that's by two historians, Dr. Sergio Gonzalez and Dr. Lloyd Barba.
Who trace a history that many of you will not know, but will be tantalized and just completely compelled by.
