Weekly Roundup: Trump's Cabinet Picks Are Dangerous Christian Nationalists
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Brad and Dan discuss Trump's controversial cabinet nominations, focusing on Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense and Mike Huckabee as Ambassador to Israel. They explore the implications of these picks, particularly in the context of Christian nationalism, and caution against the dangers of bypassing Senate confirmations.
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We now know that Donald Trump is headed back to the White House.
There's a lot to prepare for.
There's a lot to process.
That's why we're gathering on November 21st in Los Angeles, California.
An illustrious group of thought leaders and scholars will be breaking down what happened and helping all of us to prepare for what's to come.
The event is sponsored by Americans United for Separation of Church and State and Good Faith Media.
It'll include me and Dan, Rachel Lazar, Andrew Seidel, Kyate Joshi, and other scholars and thought leaders.
7 p.m.
at St.
John's Episcopal Cathedral in Los Angeles.
We hope you can join us in person.
Doors will open at 6 with book signings and a chance to hang out with me and Dan, talk with Andrew Seidel and Rachel Lazar and others.
And if you can't make it in person, we'd invite you to join us online.
You can find all the info in the show notes.
We hope to see you there.
Hello, Dan Miller. Dan Miller.
Welcome.
It's Friday.
It's Straight White American Jesus.
It's the Weekly Roundup.
How are you?
Who are you?
What's going on?
I am, as you said, Dan Miller.
I'm Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Glad, as always, to be here.
Doing okay, like most people, still, I think, decompressing, coming to terms with election and election fallout.
I don't want to blow the punchline for anybody, Brad, but we're going to talk about election-related stuff today, I think.
So, yeah, so I'm doing, plugging along.
I will say, you were talking before, I'm doing better than I was in 2016, I think, because at least, if nothing else, this feels like sort of familiar territory at this point.
How are you, Brian?
Yeah.
I'm okay.
I'm tired.
I'm going to say two things.
One, I'm looking forward to our events next week.
So if you haven't signed up yet, now's the time.
We're going to be in LA on Thursday with Andrew Seidel, Rachel Lazar, Kiyoti Joshi, Julie Ingersoll.
So it's going to be great.
It's going to be a lot of great folks there.
Friday we'll be in San Diego and with Matt Taylor, Yi Jan Lin, Ahmad Green-Hayes, and folks you might know from our show and our feed, Leah Payne, Lloyd Barba, talking about immigration, talking about race, talking about Christian extremism.
So you can watch both those online, but come hang out in person.
I know we've heard from friends and colleagues and others that are going to be there.
I'm just looking forward to being with other people and having a chance to work through this stuff.
So check it out in the show notes.
You can still get tickets.
We're going to try to start doing something at the top of our show here.
Dan, not taking a ton of time.
A lot of you listen to this show because you're looking for analysis and you're looking for us to provide insight, and that's what we're going to do.
We're not going to turn this into story hour or whatever, the Brad and Dan show.
But one good thing, in times of despair, in times of Torment.
It's good to focus on small good things.
So, Dan, one good thing.
And I'm going to invite all of you in the Discord to go put one good thing in the Discord.
And if you haven't joined yet, I'll just say one more thing to you, Dan.
Our Discord is such a cool community.
And in a time like this right now where everybody needs as much solidarity and togetherness as they can find, our Discord is really cool.
So if you have not become a premium subscriber yet, I do want you to become a premium subscriber, but I really do look forward to looking at the Discord every day and just seeing what folks are putting in there, ways people are connecting, ways people are becoming friends, ways that people are helping educate each other, all that stuff.
One good thing for me this week, Dan, I got to go to a lantern festival with my kids and remember those we've lost.
It's really cool.
It's something that's done in various cultures around the world, mainly Asian cultures, and it was just really neat.
And I went to the Hawaiian food truck, got my Kahlua pork and mac salad, and then did the lantern ceremony, and my three-year-old loved that.
All right, Dan, one good thing.
What's your one good thing?
My one good thing this week, people know me and my metal stuff.
There was an announcement for a show I was super excited about, but I'm more excited that it's a show that my son is going to be really into.
So he and I are going to go and talk with him about that.
So yeah, I like doing this stuff and I've got two kids who are getting old enough that I don't know how much longer they're going to want to do stuff with dads.
So it's always nice to be able to take advantage of that when I can.
So I'm looking forward to that.
All right, friends, here we go.
We're going to jump in today to talking about two of Trump's cabinet picks, Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense and Mike Huckabee, who is going to be the ambassador to Israel.
There's a number that we can focus on, and we'll end up talking about all of them.
I know some of you are wondering about Matt Gaetz and others.
These two in particular have ties to Christian nationalism, and you can see in these picks a direct line to things we've talked about in the show for 700 episodes.
So we're going to focus there to start.
And we will talk about the panoply of Trump's picks and how that all goes forward.
And we'll spend the bulk of the day doing that.
We want to start, though, with just a little bit of perspective.
And again, I know many of you listen to this show for analysis.
You're a journalist, you're a lawyer, and I understand that.
And so if you want to jump ahead five minutes, go ahead.
But I just feel something's really important to say right now, and I'll throw it to you, Dan, here to say your piece as well, is we're in a place where I think last week we were mourning.
And I think, Dan, you and I talked about that.
I got so many emails this week.
So did I. It was so helpful, and I'm glad about that.
That's good.
I think what happened for me, and I think I sense happened for a lot of folks, is you get to this place where Trump starts picking Matt Gaetz and a Fox News host for Secretary of Defense, and you're like, panic, panic, panic.
Your brain goes from numbness or mourning or whatever that state is to alert.
Now I've got to jump back into the fray.
Now I've got to fight.
Now I've got to flight.
Now I've got to do something.
And I understand that.
And I'm not going to sit here on this microphone and say, no, never.
Don't worry about it.
It's not going to happen.
The Senate Republicans will never vote for that.
Susan Murkowski, Collins, they're going to save us.
We're good.
Okay.
I'm not going to do that.
What I am going to say is reaction fatigue is real.
And as we move into this next phase, there's going to have to be a discipline involved of, yes, you need to be up to date.
Yes, you need to know what's going on.
But I think also hitting the panic button on every bit of news is what Trump wants.
It is what is going to wear you out.
And it is a reality show, chase the next surprise kind of presidency.
And he loves trolling.
He loves trolling the Democrats.
He loves the idea that he's a president who can unveil the surprise at the end of the reality TV show episode so you can't wait till what's next.
And the better reaction is, yes, I'm going to stay informed.
Yes, I want to learn about Mike Huckabee and his plans for Israel and who's this Fox News host that's going to be Secretary of Defense and the Borders are and Kristi Noem is in there and Tulsi Gabbard is the head of DNI, the Department of National Intelligence.
And I mean, it goes on and on and on.
But If you remember back to the first-run presidency, Dan, he cycled through so many people, Scaramucci and everyone else.
So the discipline involved is how are you going to help?
How are you going to stay where you can take care of yourself?
How are you going to find communities to work in and work with, communities that can help you and that you can help?
And what are you going to do about all this news?
None of this is to say not to stay up to date.
I just think we're in a place where if we go chasing every last headline with every ounce of exertion, You reach the point of exhaustion, and that's exactly what a wannabe authoritarian wants from you.
He has a problem because there's a lot of us.
We have a problem because he wants to be the only one in charge, but we can't allow these first few weeks to be the ones that deflate us.
So there's my little piece.
I know it's not your typical analysis on this show, but I did feel inclined to say it.
You have thoughts along these lines, Dan?
Yeah, I wanted to spend a few minutes.
I think it relates directly to that.
And that is just some reality perspective.
I think it is important to kind of stay grounded in the facts because we are.
We're in this moment where you have Trump trolling.
Everybody knows that his supporters are insufferable, you know.
They won a county in Massachusetts this year.
It's the first time a county has gone for Trump.
It was by, I think, two-tenths of a percentage point.
But they have been on street corners trumpeting how they are turning Massachusetts red, whatever.
You've got the hand-wringing of Democrats.
You've got a mainstream media that has the same narrative every single time there's an election, like midterm election, presidential election, whatever party loses, they always have this apocalyptic.
The party's in shambles.
Where do they go from here?
And there's just a lot of that.
And I think part of, as you say, the reaction fatigue and bringing that in is just to have a sense of like, where are we, like actually?
And I think that that's important.
So I wanted to just run through a few things here.
This is not me looking for silver linings, echoing the same thing you did.
This is not the, look, here's a moral victory that we can hold on to.
I'm not playing that game.
I'm playing the game of, this is an ongoing fight.
It didn't end with this election.
It isn't going to end with midterms.
It isn't going to end with whatever's going on in your local community or whatever ballot measures did or didn't pass in your state.
It's ongoing, and I think that that's the key.
So how do we sort of allow ourselves to move forward?
So I just wanted to go out with this because some of the narratives that I hear, I hear people both in media and especially on the right saying, the American voters have decisively spoken, Trump has a mandate, all of that language.
Folks, he doesn't.
He got like 50.2% of the vote, and that's a lot.
And let me be clear, it was a decisive win.
He won the popular vote, all of that stuff.
But it means that nationally, it's a coin toss how people voted.
And I realize that's distributed differently.
You live in different places.
Some places are red, some are blue, some are purple.
But I think that next time you're sitting around with Uncle Ron, who wants to talk about how the American people decisively rejected woke ideology.
No, they didn't.
There was nothing decisive about this election.
No matter where you are in the political spectrum, half of Americans aren't there.
And I think that that's An important thing to remember.
I think another thing about this, and I hear everybody from, you know, the fake liberal Bill Maher to progressives to others who talk about, again, Democrats are too focused on identities, are too focused on, you know, what they think are marginalized groups and so forth.
I don't think the numbers bear that out.
I think everything we've seen, continued analysis, exit polls, say that the big thing was the economy.
The pro-Palestinian issue was a big thing in Michigan, in particular.
And, you know, the sense of crime and immigration and things.
In other words, the things that we thought were there, were there.
And so next time somebody says, well, if you try to help trans kids, you're just feeding into the...
No, it wasn't.
Like, people aren't saying that.
People are not saying that in exit polls.
So why do I highlight all that?
I highlight all of that because it means in many ways we are, as a nation, where we were before the election in terms of the distribution of support.
We have to deal with Trump.
We have to deal with the Trump administration.
We have to deal with a unified Trump government for at least the next two years.
And I think we have to be prepared for longer.
And that's real.
But I think that we need to bear in mind that we're not alone in this.
I've talked to a lot of people this week who feel isolated.
They feel like they're the only one.
And for me, these big picture perspectives help us to see that we're not alone.
And I think that that's a part of avoiding all the fatigue and the burnout that you're talking about.
Yeah, I agree.
So I'll just piggyback on that in terms of the House of Representatives.
The House of Representatives may come down to like three seats, and it may be the three seats that are North Carolina, and there's a new gerrymander that was ruled in North Carolina.
So, what I'm getting at is the narrowest control of the House by the Republicans may come down to the fact that three seats got a fresh gerrymander a couple of months ago.
So, what does that mean?
It means, yeah, it's not like there's an 80-seat majority in the House, okay?
Now, some of you are listening like, well, that doesn't help us, Brad.
It doesn't help us, Dan.
And I think what we're trying to say is this is not Goldwater v.
Johnson in 64 where Goldwater won like six states.
That's not what happened here.
And so the idea that this is just a Trump country now and, you know, three quarters of the country voted for this man, it's not true.
What it does mean, though, is that we have to prepare because he is going to be the president.
And of course, we all got the reality check this week, didn't we?
When you started to see the nominations, RFK and Kristi Noem and Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegseth and Mike Huckabee and, of course, Matt Gaetz.
So that's all there.
But one reaction fatigue is real.
Don't let every ripple become the thing that exhausts you.
And two, as Dan said, you're not alone.
This is not a country that's wholly given over to this yet, but we have to prepare because it could be.
It could be one that is in a very different place in a year, a two, three, four years, whatever it may be.
I'm just going to...
All right, let's take...
Sorry, one more point on that before we take the break, and that's this.
Trump has to deliver now.
He's in the same role that every candidate who gets elected is, and I don't think he's going to be able to.
I think a lot of his policies are bad, and if they are bad, they're going to be bad.
And I think you talk about not letting every ripple become it.
Those are the waves.
Those are the waves that we've got to jump on and ride, the ones that when policies fail and when they hurt people, we have to amplify that.
One thing I think where the Democrats have failed and continue to fail is they just won't communicate to emotion.
They will not We're good to go.
So those are what we need to amplify.
So saving the energy for those kinds of political battles that I think can have a real effect versus just doom scrolling or jumping online and putting comments in every single time Trump announces something.
I think it's really, really important.
Yeah, and I'll just say one more thing too, because every time, I think we feed off each other and we spur thoughts.
I'll just say, Catherine Ballou had this on X like a month ago, and I think it was spot on, but...
We can't be in a place where we're, like, shocked.
There can be no more Pearl Clutch.
Oh, I can't believe he chose Matt Gaetz.
Nope, I believe it.
No, I... Believe me, it's a disastrous...
There's no...
My vocabulary is slipping here to find the word for that kind of pick.
No more shock.
No more like, I can't believe it.
Can you?
No more like articles, tweets, anything that's like, can you believe?
Look what they're, this is, oh, guardrails, norms, etiquette.
Nope, it's over, friends.
It's over.
We've done this for nine years.
No more of that kind of like shock at what he will do.
It's now fighting that and strategizing around that and educating ourselves about what's up.
And so let's take a break and we'll get into some of that education so you all know exactly where Pete Hegseth and Mike Huckabee link up with like just the dominant currents, well, predominant currents, I should say, of Christian nationalism in the country.
And we'll finish today, if some of you are wondering about it, about some of these ideas about Trump and Senate recess appointments and what that means, because that's a larger kind of meta story about this whole cabinet reality show he's been doing over the last couple of days.
We'll be right back.
Okay, Dan, let's talk about Pete Hexeth, shall we?
It's a good time.
Great, great.
Here we go.
It's the kind of thing you wake up in the day, you're like, you know what I hope I can spend time talking about?
I hope I can spend time talking about that guy, because he's just that fun to talk about.
So he was chosen as defense secretary.
This is a post that means you're overseeing 1.2, 1.3 people in the largest bureaucracy in terms of military armed forces one can imagine.
It is an enormous job that includes working with generals and high-ranking officials, not to mention Trump's cabinet and the Washington churnings and levers of the government.
And he is a Fox News host.
He is an Army veteran, somebody who got to the rank of captain.
Somebody on Twitter, and I'm sorry, I don't have this yet in front of me, and I have not been on Twitter the last four or five days.
I've been trying to stay on Blue Sky.
But somebody said, this is like putting somebody who has reached the kind of role of manager of a grocery store, which is a good job, and I am not denigrating that at all by any means, actually.
So don't take that.
But if you were like the manager of your local stop and shop, and then somebody said, hey, how about you run the company?
What do you think?
You're the manager of Stop and Shop.
Would you want to run 900 stores nationally and internationally and coordinate that?
And even if you're ambitious as a manager of Stop and Shop, you might think, I don't know if that's a good idea.
Well, that's kind of where we're at.
And so I want to talk about his politics and then I'll get into his Christian nationalism because I think a lot of people are going to see the politics.
They're not going to see what's behind him, which is tried and true.
Doug Wilson reformed Christian nationalism.
That is where he's coming from.
So, Jeff Charlotte was writing this week about him at his substack, Scenes from a Slow Civil War, and he said a couple of things.
Pete Hegseth has already declared his plans to clean house of, quote, woke generals, who he claims only have their jobs because of diversity.
So, Jeff was a little upset that the New York Times said that picking this person was outside of the norm.
It's way more than outside of the norm.
The understatement of that is just absurd.
Yeah.
Dan is laughing.
Yeah.
So, he has spent the last couple of years on Fox basically pumping up Trump and all these things, and basically being a Trump loyalist.
He looks very good on TV. He is telegenic, as you might say.
He is somebody who has many children.
There is an investigation right now because he supposedly, in the past, he has had affairs.
There's supposedly another affair and another child coming out of wedlock here, but all that to say, it's there.
So, here's some stuff from Pete Hegseth and his book War on Warriors.
Thanks to Jeff Charlotte for putting some of this together.
Our military cannot survive a long-term infection of radical left-wing social justice policies designed to isolate, resegregate, and stigmatize certain troops based on specific racial, gender, or political philosophy.
Our military cannot survive the intentional cratering of good order and discipline in the name of equity.
Standards ignored at every level and in every realm.
So, what does he mean by infection here, Dan?
Infection of these policies and infection of these things.
Well, as Jeff Charlotte points out...
Affirmative action promotions have skyrocketed, with firsts being the most important factor in filling new commanders.
We will not stop until trans, lesbian, black females run everything.
That's an actual sentence from his book.
So he has gone on to say recently that he does not think that women should serve in combat.
This led to Senator Tammy Baldwin saying, where do you think I lost my legs in a bar fight?
And so there's that.
Here is more of his writing.
And he talks about San Francisco and Seattle and Portland and all of that stuff.
He goes on and talks about the infection further.
After fighting against an external radical Islamist ideology for 20 years, America's veterans were exhausted and our ranks thinned and confused by fighting a war on two fronts.
On the one side, many of us fought in a foreign war, making temporary allegiance with neoconservatives who in the moment defended a war we believed in.
But on the home front, the left never stopped.
So he talks about enemies within, Dan, and he talks about folks who, within the country, are seen as not real Americans, and even beyond that, to be seen as enemies of the republic.
Who are they?
Antifa, BLM, Hamas supporters, and other progressive stormtroopers who've done their best to create Little Samaras, the Iraqi town I was deployed in, in the center of cities like Portland, Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle, New York, and San Francisco.
He says that Marxists are our enemies.
He says that Islamists are ruining the country.
So, Dan, he's not somebody who sees all of the country as real Americans, and that's part and parcel of what we talked about forever on this show.
He's also someone who thinks that the military should be purged.
He thinks you have to fire a lot of people.
He thinks you need to get rid of a lot of the generals who have given in to this DEI ideology.
He wants to get wokeness out of the...
Of the military.
He does not think women should serve in combat.
There's more to say here.
I'll get your initial reactions, and then I got more.
I just want to hit the element of white supremacy here.
That was next.
That was next.
Go ahead.
You take it away.
Yeah, so whenever you get the language of being anti-woke, of how do you say the generals are there only because of diversity, that is all code for white supremacy.
And the white supremacist is going to tell you that it's not.
They're going to say, like John Roberts said, they're just going, what?
I just, you know, you say that you should be colorblind and not take account of race.
That's all I'm doing.
So it's not about white supremacy, but see, the logic of this, and Brad, you know this, right?
Everybody who thinks about this can know it.
The logic is then, anytime anyone is appointed to a position who isn't white, who isn't straight, who isn't male, who isn't whatever all those favored categories are, and all you have to do is take the opposite of this supposed black, trans, lesbian, you know, whatever and all you have to do is take the opposite of this supposed black, trans, lesbian, you
Anytime anybody is elevated who doesn't fit the white man's model of the military that he's putting forward, well, that's just diversity.
So the logic is that only white men should run the military, and only white men who are straight and white men who have a certain ideology, all of that, all the purity test stuff.
So the white supremacy is baked in and fundamental here, and you want to get angry about stuff, that's something to get angry about.
That's something to watch about.
The other piece of this, I did not serve in the military, and I'm aware of that, but all of this language about good order and readiness...
You actually think firing lots of generals and lots of commanding officers and people who have spent decades learning how to operate in this context, like, yeah, that's what's going to help readiness.
That's what's going to help unit cohesion, all of that other stuff that they talk about.
So for me, the white supremacy here, it's not below the surface.
It's right on the surface, and it's always that coded language of, They're only there because of diversity.
Anytime you hear somebody describe something as a diversity hire or they're only there because of diversity, the logic is that anytime somebody who isn't white is appointed, that can be dismissed and challenged on the basis that it is somehow discriminatory in its own right or something.
The logic is this is only a white country.
This is only a white military.
And so, yeah, that's the first thing that just screams at me with this is that it's all code for whiteness.
So he went to Princeton.
This is not a guy who's coming from...
This is not Hillbilly Elegy.
This is not whatever J.D. Vance is trying to claim.
He went to Princeton.
He's an Ivy League person.
And...
The military, I'll just say quickly before going back to some of the stuff about him, the military is one of our most diverse institutions.
I mean, the people of color in the military, the diversity in terms of class and in terms of geography.
I mean, if you are in the military, there are people from Hawaii and from Washington and from Georgia and from Maine.
There are men, there are women, there are black, brown, Asian.
There's...
And to have that kind of white supremacy at the top is something really bad.
So one of the things that I think is worth bringing out is the fact that Hegseth comes from and is cultivated by a Christian nationalist church culture that really comes downstream from Doug Wilson.
Doug Wilson is, of course, the figure in Moscow, Idaho, who has become an enormous influence.
If you listen to the show, there's a good chance you know who he is.
He has a podcast empire.
He has a publishing empire.
He has started a seminary.
He started a school.
He started a network of classical academies across the country.
And he has started a denomination, the Christian Reformed Evangelical Denomination, CREC. And so Doug Wilson was on stage this July with Al Mohler.
We've talked about that at length on this show.
I have written about it.
I have talked about it all over the country.
Doug Wilson is the figurehead of Reformed Reconstructionism.
He sees he and those who follow him, they see the goal as constructing God's kingdom on earth.
They do not think Jesus is coming soon.
They think they are going to make earth into God's kingdom and then Jesus will come, meaning they have to control every aspect of society.
They want a society that is controlled by biblical law.
Most folks in Doug Wilson's circles homeschool their kids or they send them to a classical academy.
I've had many friends reach out and be like, hey, there's this new school in town.
It's like a classical academy.
They teach Plato and critical thinking.
That seems cool.
Should I send my kid there?
And I'm like, that is not what you think.
That is coming right from very extreme Christian nationalists.
Hexeth supposedly attends a church in Tennessee called Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship.
And it, again, is a direct relation to Wilson and the denomination he helped to form.
A couple things.
He's been a guest on Josh Hame's podcast.
Josh Hames is part of the leadership at the church I just mentioned.
And there is a bunch I can say about Josh Hames.
I'll just go quickly.
This is from angrywhitemen.org, which is a great site that covers angry white men.
So Hames says that Christian nationalism is simply the outworking of the Christian faith and politics in the public square.
Hames declared that Christian culture is a superior culture.
Christians need to learn to say this often without apology.
Hames accused women who've had abortions of sacrificing your children in the altar of convenience and comfort.
James referred to abortion providers as serial killers, compared abortion to slavery, and called for giving the death penalty to anyone who, with malice and forethought, murders or helps to murder a baby in the womb.
Wants to ban pornography.
Homosexuality is disordered.
Says that same-sex marriage doesn't exist somehow and that overfell will fall soon.
And says that an anti-trans slur that I won't repeat is the right word for naming that phenomenon.
He even said that doctors who provide gender-affirming care should be executed by drowning.
So again, angrywhitemen.org.
I appreciate your work here and compiling all of this.
You should check that out now.
But that is Pete Hex's church home and the kind of people who are leading his church, Dan.
So that is there.
I want to just make one more point about him and his tattoos.
So let me just go to his tattoos.
Some of you've noticed this already.
I've gotten outreach by journalists and others, but he has two tattoos, and Matt Taylor, in his thread on this, does a great job, so I'm going to read what Matt wrote about this.
He has a Jerusalem cross, the symbol of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, on his chest, and Deus Volt, the Crusader's theological cri de corps, God wills it, on his bicep.
Deus volt means God mandated crusaders' violence.
These crusader tattoos are part of a Christian far-right iconography, and when his National Guard unit was called up to serve in D.C. for Biden's inauguration, he was supposedly deemed not able to serve because of these extremist tattoos that he has.
So, Dan, I'll just sum up, because I don't want to get lost here.
We have a man who's been tasked to lead our armed services, our military, 1.2, 1.3 million people, who has Christian nationalist tattoos where he believes that crusader violence in the past was justified and that it is something who has Christian nationalist tattoos where he believes that crusader violence in the past was
Somebody who thinks that God wills it is a kind of battle cry for soldiers in our military, but also those fighting a holy war against evil and wanting to create biblical law on earth.
These tattoos, of course, travel.
They're not just in Christian nationalist circles.
These circles are always Venn diagrams because a lot of far folks, Nazis and others, white nationalists, I should say, really like these kinds of symbols and tattoos because it gives legitimacy to their idea of superiority and justifying violence.
He and Matt Taylor, again, was really good on this the other day.
He echoes a lot of far-right talking points about Muslims.
He calls for modern crusades.
He sees Islam as the enemy.
And he even says in 2018, about six years ago, there's no reason why the miracle of the reestablishment of the temple on the Temple Mount is not possible.
And so what he means by that is raising the Dome of the Rock and building a third Jewish temple on top of it.
So I will stop there and get your thoughts.
I have one more thought about him, but this is also a good segue into Mike Huckabee, ambassador to Israel, who we will get to in a minute.
I'm just going to say, like, if you've got a, I don't know, you're at the cookout or something and somebody sees your tattoo, like, oh, that's interesting.
What's that tattoo?
If you have to start with, first, let me say it's not a Nazi tattoo.
Like, if that's where you've got to start or you've got to start with the, I don't have this because I'm a white supremacist, I promise.
That's the sign of like kind of where somebody's at.
And, you know, as you say, those tattoos are often, they often figure within that framework.
And I think that that's just a piece that stands out again, is just how much white supremacy and Christian nationalism are linked generally and in the figure of this particular individual.
I'll wrap this up and then I'll throw it to you about Mike Huckabee.
Hegseth is, in essence, the emblem of so much of what we've talked about on this show, Dan, with Christian nationalism, Christian patriarchal masculinity, and the penchant for violence in the name of God.
Here's a man who's been tasked to lead the military.
He's somebody who He articulates this idea, let me back up, who participates in a culture that wants to build a society based on biblical law.
There's no room for pluralism, no room for dialogue, no room for the Christian and the Jew and the Muslim and the Hindu and the Buddhist and the atheist to live in a multiracial democracy in that kind of worldview.
He's also this guy who, when he takes his shirt off, has crusader tattoos that speak to the violence he thinks Is necessary for the Christian soldier and so on to overcome the enemy, which is Islam and wanting to defend Western civilization.
All the war games at the church men retreats, all the stuff about toxic patriarchy we've talked about for weeks now, the bro vote, he's an embodiment of that.
In addition, he's a Fox News host.
He looks good on TV. And so, of course, Donald Trump thinks he's the right guy for the job.
He's not an accident.
He brings together these strands, this Venn diagram of Christian nationalism, toxic patriarchal masculinity, and this idea of a kind of telegenic, looks good on TV, reality show presidency.
And now he's supposedly going to lead the entire armed forces of the United States.
We'll see.
Envisioned as a Christian crusader army.
I mean, that's the vision.
That's the American vision.
That's what this so-called purging of the military is supposed to be.
The U.S. military is a Christian army set to carry out the Christian vision of America to the world.
That's what the vision is.
All right, let's take a break.
We'll come back and we'll talk more about this idea of a crusade and Mike Huckabee as ambassador of Israel.
Be right back.
All right, Dan, some of us are old and remember Mike Huckabee as governor of Arkansas.
Some of us remember he ran for president in 2016 when Trump first ran.
He flamed out then.
He really felt like on that campaign, if any of you remember that campaign, it was the Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz.
You had like 12 people on stage.
And he felt like the guy who just kept giving dad, like the dad joke guy at the barbecue, always doing the dad jokes, like finger guns and, you know, like, give me five.
And he moves his hand.
He's like, oh, you missed.
And you're like, all right, dude.
Okay, I'm not six.
And then he would like try to get serious.
And it's like really hard to take him serious because he's the guy at the barbecue who's just doing finger guns and fake handshakes and fake high fives.
But here he is.
And of course, his daughter has gone on to be Trump's spokesperson, press secretary, and then is now governor herself.
Mike Huckabee's back with his retirement gig as ambassador to Israel.
There's a lot to say here about Christian Zionism, Christian nationalism, and Mike Huckabee.
So, take it away.
So first, Brad, I don't appreciate how much you made Mike Huckabee sound like me at the cookout.
So, you know, I take that personally.
First of all, look, you always say you're not cool, and that's fine.
You can say whatever you want.
But I've been with you at a lot of public events.
I've never done the finger guns.
No, I've never seen finger guns, and I've never seen it.
Like, you may not be Mr.
Showoff, and that I'll accept.
You are not Mr.
Showoff.
But you are not like Mr.
Corny, like, hey, how we doing, finger guns, and then, you know.
So here's the real question.
What are the odds that next week, after the event, we're all out, somebody doesn't ask me to do finger guns.
I'm just going to like, you know.
So that's the real reason for people to come up, is for me to be like, hey, and finger gun, and yeah.
All right, so Mike Huckabee for real, okay?
This choice was praised—this will get us started—it was praised by an organization called Christians United for Israel, or CUFI is what it's often to—and it is chaired by a person named Sandra Hagee Parker.
And Brad, for people like us who, as you say, are getting along in years and also just have been in evangelicalism for a long time, Her dad was a guy named John Hagee.
John Hagee was a well-known televangelist and big figure within the religious right and American evangelicalism who was all about the end times.
We've talked about the end times before.
Folks will be familiar with that.
But the end times view, when people use this, for those who may not be familiar, it's this This discourse within conservative American Protestantism that really focuses on this notion that at the end of time, you'll have all these series of events that will happen, and they're all focused around Israel.
And among other things, you will have the rebuilding of the temple in Israel.
That's why Hegseth is talking about this with his crusader vision.
You will have Jewish people converting to Christianity and, you know, finally coming to their Christian vision that they're supposed to have and so forth.
Lots of people criticize this, including us.
We've argued for years that this is an anti-Semitic articulation of Christianity because it denies any value or legitimacy to Jewish identity.
Jewish people are just simply mistaken because they didn't accept Jesus as the Messiah, and that'll be rectified then.
But this is what drives huge amounts of pro-Israel sentiment among religious right-wing figures in America.
So we've talked about that for a long time.
Why does all that matter?
It matters because that's Huckabee.
Huckabee is a real believer in this stuff.
That is his understanding.
That is his religious ideology.
And what is the position he will be nominated for?
I guess he's not technically nominated because Trump isn't actually president yet.
He's an ambassador to Israel.
And folks might remember that in the first Trump term, what did he do?
He moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
Now he is appointing somebody who believes and buys into this entire end-time prophecy.
It's like if you took the Left Behind series and decided to update it for 2024, this is how you would do it.
So that's Mike Huckabee.
That's who he is.
He has long rejected, if we get into the politics of this, and it's because of, in my view, these religious views, he has long rejected the two-state solution and has said that there should not be a Palestinian state.
He has said that there's no such thing as a Palestinian, that that's not even a real category.
He has said if they want a state, they should be able to carve out a space in like Jordan or Egypt or someplace like that, but not Israel.
He is an unwavering supporter of Israel and their foreign and domestic politics.
And when I say unwavering, folks, you need to understand this is not about supporting the Jewish people or the right of Jewish people to exist or the right of the Jewish people to have a place where they can call their own or where they can be safe or something like this.
This is about unwavering support of a state, a political state, And saying, apart from any discussion, apart from any considerations, no matter what they do in the world, we will support it.
And I'm just going to throw out there that I refuse to give that kind of support to anybody or anything, any entity.
There's nothing that I'm going to be like, yep, don't worry about it.
I don't need to know anything about the background or why you're doing what you're doing.
You've got my support.
That's the vision.
This is like that scene in The Town.
So there's this movie with Ben Affleck and Jeremy Renner called The Town.
Do you remember this movie?
I do, yeah.
And Ben Affleck shows up to Jeremy Renner's apartment one day and is like, we need to go hurt people right now.
You can never ask me who it is.
You can never ask me why.
And you can never ask me ever again about the details or anything about why we're doing this.
Are you in?
And Jeremy Renner's like, I'm in.
And I feel like that's exactly what you're describing with Mike Huckabee right now.
Which is a way not to live your life.
Like as a general rule, I think most of us recognize this.
So that's the guy.
So what does this mean?
It means that the Christian nationalist views of Israel are now going to be official U.S. policy.
Like that's who this guy is.
And to me, if you wed that with the Secretary of Defense and his views, that can go in a lot of really, really problematic directions.
I think it could also move the U.S.
I don't think it could.
It will move the U.S. further away from those pro-Palestinian concerns that we've been hearing about and sympathetic to for so long.
I don't think you could find a way of...
Moving the U.S. further from any kind of humanitarian response to Gaza, any kind of effort to rein in the things that Israel does and its treatment of Palestinians generally and people in Gaza specifically— And I think you can also,
if we look domestically, if we thought that, you know, universities and police departments came down hard on like pro-Palestinian protests before, I think we just wait till Trump's in office and this is like official U.S. policy.
Of this kind of apocalyptic end times vision.
So I think there's a lot of stuff to say there.
Again, the shock, people get the shock and the outrage of this, including people on the right.
I read yet another article.
Where it talked about GOP insiders who were dismayed, and they thought that this, you know, was a more professional Trump.
And I'm like, you've got to be kidding me.
Trump said he was going to do this.
He's doing it.
You know, we have to adjust to it.
But that's a lot of who Mike Huckabee is.
I'll throw it to you for your reflections on, you know, our favorite Huckabee, the original Huckabee that we like to talk about.
Well, I'm going to zoom out.
And here's what I'm going to say is that I know a bunch of you have this thing on your mind, and that is Trump wants to bypass Senate confirmation, and he wants to appoint everybody in recess.
Trump has tested the boundaries before on whether or not he's able as president to adjourn both houses of Congress.
So that they are in recess and he can therefore appoint whoever he'd like.
The reason I'm zooming out, Dan, is because Pete Hexth is not a serious, that is not a serious nomination.
It's a Fox News host who got to the infantry captain in the U.S. military.
Mike Huckabee, okay, ambassador to Israel, he's a former governor.
I mean, on paper, you can say he has the chops or whatever.
But the thing for me here is, if you're going to pick people like Hegseth, and Huckabee's one thing, but Matt Gaetz to be AG... You're basically saying, I don't want there to be the normal vetting process.
I don't want 51 senators to have to vote for this.
And so the reason I bring that up is that Trump is basically testing any notion of checks and balances already by pressuring Senate Republicans to basically adjourn so that he can just appoint everybody and they can be in place for a year, year and a half until it's time to confirm them.
This was originally set up in the Constitution because people traveled by horse and you can't get Congress in session, so the president's got to appoint somebody.
So here we are, 250 years later, and that's what he's pushing for.
The reason this is a big deal is if you can push through Pete Hegseth gates with no Senate confirmation.
And if the Senate is not going to stand up and say, yeah, that's actually our job.
Our job is to vet the people that are going to be in the top posts of the United States government when it comes to your cabinet.
People who are not elected.
People who have not been put in place by the people.
That's our job.
If you are a serious political party.
You will do that job.
And that that doesn't mean you're not going to confirm those people because we all know that's going to happen in most of the cases.
But if you are Mitch McConnell, if you are any Senate Republican that is supposed to have any kind of something that is not in a line with full-on Trump authoritarian monarchical power, you have to say, we're going to just do our job as the Senate.
That's what we're supposed to do.
And as the Republican Party, we're going to have 53 senators.
We only need 51.
We can probably get them through.
Well, and I'm just going to dive in.
If you're Trump, I mean, this is how outside the norm, quote unquote, how crazy these are, that I think there's also concern that he can't get it through a Trump MAGA-aligned GOP Senate.
Like, that's...
That's a marker to lay down.
And I'm going to throw this out, not just for senators and the notion of doing your job, but just if you're the GOP Senate, do you really want to be that marginalized?
Regardless of who's in the White House, do you really want to cede That much congressional authority and make yourself that irrelevant?
Just lots of layers of this, but I think it's a telling point that Trump is trying to bypass a Congress that he controls as president and given how MAGA center the GOP now is.
So- If they become that irrelevant, what you just said, Dan, is that Congress becomes irrelevant and we're in a place where Congress is going to just let the man who is president do whatever he wants.
So let's just play it out.
Matt Gaetz has been mentioned as he's supposedly the nominee for attorney general.
He resigned his post in Congress.
The ethics investigation is not going to come out, the whole thing, the whole set of dominoes.
There are so many people in the Senate, Dan, that are Republicans who do not like Matt Gaetz, who thinks he's slimy, who think he's a child molester, dates underage people, takes him to parties, and just does really bad things across the board.
There's a lot of senators that are like, nope, not going to be the attorney general.
He's never tried a case in his life.
He's never been a serious law person.
Never been a high-level legal mind, legal operator, legal anything.
And he's going to be the Attorney General.
There's a lot of Senate Republicans that would ask him hard questions.
And if they just say, we're not going to do it, They're saying we're not going to do it.
Meaning, could be Social Security, could be other things.
We just, we may just let him, yeah, Trump, either we won't, we'll just pass whatever you say, we'll just vote on it straight down the Republican line.
Or, yeah, you want to appoint people who are...
Like, Tulsi Gabbard as the Director of National Intelligence?
Yeah, we don't need to...
You know, I don't need to check your work.
I'm supposed to go over this and see if you did well here.
I don't need to.
You're so awesome.
I'm not even going to check the homework.
A+. Tulsi, you're in.
That's what they're saying.
So...
This is the big deal, and this is the place that a lot of us are watching right now because it's going to signal, Dan, whether or not the legislative branch is going to sit this out and basically let Trump from day one start to assert power.
I'll just say one last thing, and that is supposedly Elon Musk visited the Republican House caucus and said, unless you vote with Trump down the line, I, the richest man in the world, will fund a primary challenger to you.
What we have on deck here, and I know we haven't really focused on this today, and we don't have much time to expand here, but we will get to it in later episodes, is we have a cacostic...
Oh my goodness.
Dan's face.
That was the best face I've ever seen in this whole podcast.
Kakistocracy?
Did I say that right?
I think I did.
Wow.
Dan really thought I'd lost it and was saying who knows what I was saying, which is that we're being led by the stupidest, the worst people is really what it means.
And an oligarchy.
And I think that is coming into play, that loyalty and pilfering of the United States, loyalty to Trump and oligarchy control is what we're seeing play out in front of us.
We'll have way more to say on that.
But Hexeth, Huckabee, Gates, Noam, Tulsi Gabbard, these are the picks.
We'll see what happens and we'll have more to say.
Any final thoughts, Dan, here before we go to Reasons for Hope?
Just real quick, when you talk about having more to say, to circle back around to kind of where we started, one of the things I think people struggle with right now with all of this is people feel almost guilty if they turn it off for a while, if we're not up on everything, if we're not reacting to everything.
And the bad news is the world's not going to get fixed by tomorrow.
It doesn't matter if we talk about Tulsi Gabbard in detail today or Elon Musk today, because guess what?
Next week, we've still got the same people in front of us.
And so, again, I think just to sort of bring this discussion back to that, because I know, and invite all the emails and comments, people will be like, you know, what about this?
What about this?
What about this?
We'll get to all of those.
Because the sad fact of the matter is, and this is why we have to be in it for the long haul, they're not going anywhere.
None of that stuff's going away.
So we hit a couple in depth today.
We'll hit the others, but this is a real thing that's going to be with us, and this is what we have to sort of settle in for for the long term.
And none of that is to say, turn it off.
None of that is to say, like, don't pay attention.
It's to say, pay attention to the point that you can, that is healthy, and be alert, be awake, be attentive.
But also put energy into preparing, into mobilizing, into participating, into call your senator.
Tell them they need to not let recess appointments go through.
Think about how you're going to get involved.
And we're going to talk a lot about this at our event on Thursday.
All right, Dan.
What is your reason for hope this week?
One is, you know, articles that came out in a few different places in a few different contexts.
I was looking at, you know, I live in Massachusetts.
I was looking at MassLive, had an article about this, but it was about blue state governors, you know, forming coalitions and lining up to do things to try to enshrine rights, to try to counter what they anticipate will be Trump administration policies, to slow roll those policies in court.
We have seen Trump I think that's going to be important,
important, not just for those states, but for America generally, because I think some of those state policies are going to involve things like abortion access.
They're going to involve things like, you know, freedom of information and, you know, different kinds of things like that.
So I, I took a lot of hope this week, just seeing as you talk about preparation, that there are states that have had this in the works for a period of time and are now sort of kicking that into high gear.
I was telling my partner that Gavin Newsom is going to be the new face of the, the anti-Trump whatever.
And as soon as I said it, I got a notification on my phone that's like, Gavin Newsom calls a special session of the California legislature.
So we'll keep an eye on all that.
I read a Substack article by Kim Wella at Simple Politics with Kim Wella, W-E-H-L-E. Kim, I don't know how to say your name, so if I said it wrong, I apologize.
It talks about what Trump can actually do quickly, and I think this is actually good for me to remind myself of.
And there are some things that could go quickly, and I think immigration is one of them.
But she talks here about the military, so I'll just read a little bit.
Enlisted officers take an oath to the Constitution and to obey the orders of the President and superior officers.
However, those with higher ranks only take an oath to the Constitution.
This means that higher ranks are not required by oath to follow the President or superior officers.
In fact, they are bound by oath to reject any illegal, criminal, or unconstitutional directives they may receive.
As of 2022, the military had 372,244 officers.
Not all of those are of higher rank, of course, but we will see about the folks in the military who don't want to follow whether it's Trump or Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth when they want to do things that are against the Constitution and illegal.
When it comes to Schedule F and replacing folks on that, people who work for the federal government and putting them on Schedule F so they could be fired at any moment, you know, if this happened and they tried to fire 100,000 government workers, it would be challenged in court, okay?
And so...
For the time being, Kim Willis says, the approximately 2.9 million federal employees across hundreds of agencies will continue to do their job on behalf of the American people, the vast majority of them in compliance with the law.
And the Biden administration is erecting roadblocks and things that the Office of Personnel Management to stop Trump from doing this kind of stuff.
Will it happen?
It could.
It's going to be hard for it to happen on day one, in month one, even in year one.
There will be roadblocks.
There are ways people stand in the way.
So if you're good at getting into the doom thing, January 2025, every federal employee fired, every general in line with Trump's thing, every officer of the United States military, just a Christian crusader fighting demons in Islam all over the world.
This is not necessarily what's going to happen and resistance at every turn is going to be there.
It's a matter of how do you want to participate in that and how are you going to find community?
We are the problem.
Us.
There's an us here.
There are millions, tens of millions of people and I shall say hundreds of millions or at least a hundred and something million people who are not on board with this.
So we are the problem.
And we are the ones that stand in that way.
And I think we have to remember that.
All right, Dan, anything else before we go?
We're going to see everybody next week in Los Angeles and San Diego.
Look forward to that.
If you haven't subscribed yet, I'll just say I am not lying and I'm not just saying this so everybody goes and signs up.
I really do look forward to our Discord.
If you need a community, If you need people that you want to just be able to talk to about this kind of stuff who are really into it and really want to learn and help people kind of make their way through, I feel like our Discord right now is a really good place for that.
So subscribe and you can access it.
If you can't afford it and you're just like, I really just need that, just email me.
We'll make it happen.
It's all good.
Anything else, Dan, before we go?
Just to echo how much I'm looking forward to next week.
Just some good discussion.
Not about great topics, but good discussion, important discussion.
And I think, you know, in many ways, even more just getting to kind of hang out with some people and have like, you know, real in the world community with listeners.
It's something I wish we could do more.
So really excited about that.
Really looking forward to it.
I've been saving my Diet Cokes up.
I'm probably going to have three or four Diet Cokes on Thursday.
Just want you to know that.
I'm going to finger gun them, so it's fine.
That sounded creepy, and we're going to be done now.
Thanks so much, Dan.
Thanks for that.
See you next time.
See you, Brad.
All right.
Don't forget, y'all.
Two live events coming in November.
Some straight white American Jesus.
One at the University of Southern California and LA with Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
And then the next night at the San Diego Convention Center.
Tickets are available now and you can find everything in the show notes.
You can also watch online if you can't be in LA or San Diego.
November 21 and November 22.
Two chances to be with us at Straight White American Jesus and a number of other great scholars and leaders.