Weekly Roundup: President Elon Musk, “Freedom Cities,” and the End of Expertise
Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus content most Mondays, bonus episodes every month, ad-free listening, access to the entire 700-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/
Brad goes solo this week to discuss the overlap between tech elites like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Christian nationalists, examining their shared vision and the implications for American society. The episode also explores Elon Musk's involvement with Donald Trump's inner circle, including attempts to influence cabinet picks, and the vision of tech moguls wanting to create sovereign 'freedom cities' on federal land. Brad gives a critical view of Musk's transformation from admired innovator to perceived supervillain and how these powerful figures aim to transcend historical limitations. He also highlights the long-term strategies of radicalized Christian nationalists attempting to build a theocratic society in Jackson County, Tennessee, drawing parallels between their goals and those of the tech oligarchs.
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
Order Brad's book: https://bookshop.org/a/95982/9781506482163
Check out BetterHelp and use my code SWA for a great deal: www.betterhelp.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Running solo this week because we have our events in LA and San Diego.
I'm actually recording on Wednesday, November 20th.
And so we're traveling.
Dan is coming across the country.
Everybody's in motion.
There's just a lot of stuff happening.
But I do want to say a couple things about issues from this week and reflect on some important issues surrounding the overlap between the new tech, namely Elon Musk, but also Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance and others, and Christian nationalists.
And I want to articulate a little bit of how I see them sharing interests and sharing a vision for the future that is terrifying, I think, for the rest of us, but also to reflect on how they digress and some of the things that might be ahead.
I also want to talk about why it's not worth it to chase every piece of rage bait that Trump has thrown out already and continues to throw out.
There's a great piece that I'll get to here in a second that really just unpacks that in a really helpful way.
Before that, let's get to Elon Musk and his attempt to be Donald Trump's co-president.
Elon Musk has been hanging around Donald Trump for a long time now.
It seems they are inseparable.
Some of you probably saw the picture of Trump and Musk and Don Jr. and RFK eating McDonald's this week, and that picture is just one that deserves Either three hours of commentary or absolutely zero seconds of attention.
I can't decide which one, but we're not going to hang there today.
Musk is hanging around so much that he's starting to clash with Donald Trump's team, according to the New Republic and the Washington Post.
The Post reports that he's been trying to persuade Trump on cabinet picks.
He's done a couple of public endorsements of folks and is really kind of getting on the nerves of longtime Trump campaigners, people in Trump's orbit, advisors, and so on.
So he's hanging around, and there's kind of a reason for that.
He gave something like $150 million to get Donald Trump elected.
He's the richest man in the world.
And so there is a sense in which Musk has bought his way into the inner circle of the president-elect's life and administration and cabinet picking and dinner at Mar-a-Lago and McDonald's eating and everything else.
He, as many of you know, was part of a call with Ukrainian President Zelensky.
Supposedly, he's been talking to ambassadors and others across the world, including the ambassador to Iran.
There's something interesting here about Musk that I think we need to notice.
And there's a lot to say here.
He's really gone from somebody that people looked up to five or seven years ago as this innovator and person who was doing Starlink and SpaceX and Tesla to somebody who's truly transformed into what many people consider a supervillain.
And I guess one of the questions that we should ask is why?
What is he after?
Because I think For a lot of people living outside of Silicon Valley, the assumption has always been that Silicon Valley tech magnates are liberal, libertarian, whether they're, let me back up, liberal in the sense that they don't care if gay people get married or, you know, social issues are not a concern, do what you want, I don't care.
They're innovators, they're trying to create a new future, and they're libertarian.
Hey, government, just leave me alone and let me do my thing.
And I think most of you listening now are pretty aware that's just not true.
Whether it's Peter Thiel and his sponsorship of J.D. Vance or Elon Musk or Marc Andreessen or any of the others, there's just a lot of tech folks in the news who are not what you probably thought.
And what I want to do today on this weekly roundup is just try to map how their interests and desires converge with those of Christian nationalists.
So I want to go from the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, and his participation in Trump's inner circle.
And I want to wind up in a small town in Tennessee where Christian nationalists are moving in order to recreate a theocratic government or at least a Christian nationalist society that they think is built on God's natural order.
Most of you have probably heard by now that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are supposed to be leading something called the Department of Government Efficiency, which is the acronym DOGE, which is of course related to a crypto product related to Musk.
A bunch of people, including Elizabeth Warren, have pointed out it's not very efficient to have two leaders of the Department of Government Efficiency, but there you go.
The Department of Government efficiency may or may not exist.
It may or may not be a thing.
It may or may not actually come to bear, manifest itself in reality when Trump is president.
It's an idea.
There's no established Department of Government efficiency.
There's been no funds allocated.
There's been no budget lines.
There's been none of that.
So, nonetheless, these two men think that they can cut $2 trillion from the federal budget.
That would, of course, have drastic effects on everything, everything in this country, from Medicare to education to infrastructure to everything.
There's no way to overstate that.
So, what is Musk after?
And not just Musk, but Peter Thiel and many of the tech bros and the tech luminaries who are now full-throated supporters of Donald Trump.
Well, Gil Duran is a great writer who covers this beat and has been covering Musk and this set of folks for a long time.
And he's pointed out a couple things that I think are worth noticing.
I want to start with a quote from a recent article that he wrote at the NerdWrike.
If there's one thing we know about these guys it's that they have no sense of limitation.
They believe they can do anything they want even when reality proves otherwise.
They mistake their success in certain areas of business for a universal kind of genius and this creates a tendency to overreach.
But our would-be Silicon sovereigns don't believe in history.
They believe they are bigger than history.
They believe their destiny is to hoard infinite wealth, rewrite the code of civilization, establish themselves as the supreme leaders of the universe, and, as crazy as this may sound, defeat even death itself.
Increasingly, you will find them wrapping their tentacles around religion, trying to redefine God, spirituality, and the concept of eternal life to reflect their own pernicious self-importance.
Indeed, you will catch Peter Thiel talking about religion, talking about the Antichrist, talking about Christianity.
Musk himself did this from the stage and talked about his Christian values and the ways that he believes in those just recently.
I'm not actually as interested in that though right now as I am something else in this paragraph.
The idea that Gil Duran articulates that they have no belief in their own limitation, they have no sense of limitation, he says, and they believe they can do anything they want even when reality proves otherwise.
There's a sense here in a kind of transcendence of all that has come before human beings.
There's a sense that if you are the creator of SpaceX or Tesla, if you are the creator of PayPal or Venmo, if you are Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, if you are those who created Meta or anything else, you have no limit.
That your genius in these areas must mean that you are a genius full stop.
That you are something different from the rest of us.
And that belief goes beyond even believing that you're different than your peers, but believing that you're different than humans throughout the entire history of the species.
You are above.
You are different.
And so you see all of these attempts by tech people to overcome death, to live forever, to biohack, and we've covered that.
There's a great series by Susanna Crockford that we put out called Misinformation.
You can hear all about it on that series.
Go to accessmooney.us.
There's a sense that they can rewrite how we do everything from eat to learn to govern.
And there's just this sense that if you let them have control, that if they can implement their vision and their plan, then everything will be how it should be.
And so, there's a really kind of easy assumption here, and it's probably one that some of you are already thinking, that, well, they've put themselves in the place of God, and they think that they are gods or deities or divinities, and they can kind of do things that are superhuman, along the lines of the Greek deities or the demigods of ancient myth.
And that might be accurate, and there's definitely a conversation to be had there.
There's definitely this sense of narcissistic self-importance that goes beyond even the most self-interested person, and that's fine.
But what I really want to focus on today is this idea of no limitation and doing what you want even when reality proves otherwise.
That's the goal.
The goal is to say, take away all the limits, take away all the obstacles, So that we can do what we want to do because what we want to do is right.
It's better.
It's transcendent.
It's different.
We know better than the other people.
We created the platforms you use.
We created the technology that runs your life.
So we are the ones who deserve To have the say, the authority, in terms of the public square, in terms of how the country and the world are run.
We are the ones who get to determine how this should all work.
We are just different.
Oligarch, aristocrat, whatever you want to say, Whatever terminology, whatever reference you want to give to it, but there is this sense there that they have something that's different.
And this next part is really important to me, even when reality proves otherwise.
That even when reality says this is not going to happen, there's a sense that they can hack the system.
They can rewrite the code.
They can change the DNA. There's enough self-belief that any signals that this is not how things work or that reality will not bend or that the simple matter of fact, the simple matter of of existence, will not allow for this, is not enough to convince them.
That is something you have to keep in mind when you think of how they got in bed with Donald Trump and how they are, at least in ways surprising to many of you, convergent with the vision of Christian nationalism.
One example of this are the so-called freedom cities.
Freedom cities are something that Gil Doran calls part of the network state.
Or he says it's the network state.
Sorry, I can't talk.
The network state tech cult.
And there's this idea, coming from Peter Thiel and others in the network state tech cult, that one could put freedom cities on federal land.
And Donald Trump has made this part of his platform.
Duran says it's a clear indicator of his willingness to sell the country to his far-right Silicon Valley benefactors.
In fact, Thiel and Marc Andreessen are funding an entire company, Pronomos Capital, So pro-nomos, let's just stop for a minute.
Y'all ready for Vocabulary Friday?
It's my favorite part of the day.
It's my favorite part of the week.
Vocabulary Friday.
So pro, P-R-O. It's a pro is for or toward.
And then nomos.
And I know many of you out there know this, right?
That means law.
Pro-nomos capital.
For law, pro-law, in favor of law capital.
Dedicated to building futuristic tech cities around the world.
And in this country, they would be on federal land.
So, Trump has said that he, and this is from a political article, would host a contest for the public to design and then build freedom cities on a small portion of federal land to reopen the frontier, reignite American imagination, and give hundreds of thousands of young people and other people, all hardworking families, a new shot at home ownership and, in fact, the American dream.
And that sounds nice, but this is really coming from tech oligarchs who want to build cities without any oversight, without any sense of codes or zoning or all the pesky bureaucracies and the pesky processes and the pesky policies that get in the way of normal human beings who are not deities and demigods like them.
So here's Gil Duran again.
The network state cult calls for the creation of new tech-controlled sovereign cities that would essentially act as miniature countries.
These independent territories can be created in one of two ways.
The first is called voice.
This entails using the political system to take over existing city governments.
Okay, that might work.
Then there's exit.
That involves finding a bare piece of land that can be built up into a new tech city, ideally with tax breaks or other exemptions from host governments.
One of these has already been tried in my state, California, forever.
A lot of problems and a lot of issues I'm not going to talk about right now.
I just want to dwell on a point here.
Here we have Musk, we have Teal, we have these tech oligarchs who are really interested in being in Donald Trump's inner orbit.
They see him as a proxy, as a way to power, as a way to a limitless existence, to control, and they believe they have the right.
To determine how these things work.
To me, the tech city is just a perfect example of, hey, if you can just give us some federal land, land that's supposed to be for everyone and is designated as a place where we won't build and develop and people can hike and camp and explore and we'll preserve it and blah, blah, blah.
If you can just, I don't know, give us that.
And then, yeah, don't make us follow codes and laws and policies and processes and zoning like you have to do in other cities and places and understate law and county law.
Just exempt us from all that.
We'll create the perfect tech utopia.
We will be the oligarchs in the pantheon overlooking these wonderful new cities on the wide-open American Front Tour.
Here's a little bit from the website of Pronomos.
When institutions are outmoded, corrupted, or failing, the result is untold human suffering.
Workers are trapped in low-wage jobs.
Children don't get educated.
Adults can't get quality health care.
People can't start businesses to support their families.
Yet upgrading national institutions is notoriously difficult and consensus on country-level changes should be slow and deliberate.
That means we should have freedom cities.
The basic idea is, of course, as I've said, to create sovereign company cities with different laws to help a chosen few escape the problems of wider society.
Trump put this in his official campaign platform and now Elon Musk is hanging out in Mar-a-Lago non-stop and acting as the co-president.
Now, I want to stop and say something before we go to break and before I tie all this to Christian nationalism is that I totally understand one part of this.
What I understand is that there's a lot of folks who feel like the system doesn't work for them, it's broken, it's slow, it's corrupt.
I get it.
And the more I read, the more I reflect on the ideas of liberalism, post-liberalism, the more I investigate those who are calling for these radical new futures, I find myself doing two things.
One, I disagree With vehement repulsion to their ideas of what we should do.
The rule of few, that the demigods who believe that they should control all of our lives should have control giving ourselves over to an authoritarian leader.
Nope.
Don't believe in any of that.
Believe in that less every day if that's possible.
It just doesn't get better.
But what I do see is just like this feeling that it's not working and a need to articulate that and figure out how to do something different.
So I see that.
But to me, the takeaway is not to give control to the Elon Musks of the world and the Peter Thiels of the world who think that they are the ones who are better than all of us, who have things that are ways of seeing the world that are just, you know, should be listened to full stop.
That's just not anywhere I'm willing to go.
Now, this may sound terrifying, and I think it is.
And before I tie this to Christian nationalism and look at the overlap, I want to talk about the kind of difficulty of this on the ground.
So I think one is that Elon Musk is already wearing on people.
And Donald Trump cycles through people fast.
And we've referenced this.
If you go back to his first administration, it happened over and over and over again.
And there's always these like eras of Trump's kind of leadership that for other people would last two years and for him they last three months.
Could be Steve Bannon as an advisor.
It could be Scaramucci.
It could be Kellyanne Conway.
It could be whoever.
Okay?
You know, he had John Kelly.
He had Rex Tillerson.
He had blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
We can just go through all the characters that cycled through.
You know, Laura Loomera came and went.
Remember that?
She was on the plane.
Then she wasn't.
Okay.
I think there's a very real chance that Donald Trump and Elon Musk don't make it as a couple.
And there's going to be a breakup.
And I don't know what that looks like.
And I'm not telling you I know the details.
I don't know the future.
I do know that they're both narcissists.
Kara Swisher has said this.
Kara Swisher is a tech writer who's been covering the tech beat for decades and knows a lot.
I mean, not a lot more.
She knows one million times more than I do about any of this.
But she said this recently in an interview that it just doesn't seem like you can have two narcissists like Elon Musk and Donald Trump existing together.
And Donald Trump is not somebody who is going to give up the spotlight.
Now, I will say, if there ever is a scenario where Donald Trump is not the president, where he is somebody exercise the 25th Amendment, he gets sick, he dies, whatever.
And J.D. Vance, who we have not heard from, where'd he go?
He's off ordering donuts somewhere.
I don't know what he's up to.
J.D. Vance becomes president.
In that scenario, I have full belief that Elon Musk and Peter Thiel will be our shadow presidents.
Yes, I do.
I think that's the play, for sure.
With Donald Trump in the way, though, he is as much or more of a narcissist than Musk, and it's just hard to see them lasting.
So you will see what happens there.
There's also what this looks like on the ground.
And the editor of The Verge, Neelay Patel, spoke with Oliver Darcy recently in an interview.
And in that interview, he laid out some of the ways that, like...
This is just tough.
What a lot of these tech folks want, not only Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, but also like Tim Cook of Apple and Mark Zuckerberg and everyone at Google and so on, is they want a tariff exception.
If Donald Trump's going to do his tariffs, they want an exception to that.
They want to be let out of that.
So they got to play nice and they got to do all this stuff.
Same with Jeff Bezos.
Patel says, all that money for yachts and rockets comes from Amazon's huge ecosystem of alphabet soup dropshipping companies.
So there's a need to kiss up to Trump.
But he says, look, there's just like ways that this is going to be really hard on the ground.
So Tim Cook of Apple is already asking Trump for help navigating EU rules that would help open up the App Store.
But Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen also want to bypass the App Store so they can sell NFTs on phones without paying fees.
How's Tim going to tiptoe all of that while still getting his tariff exception?
That's difficult.
And so, you know, that's just a little window into, it's not as easy as Elon Musk taking over the world or the nation.
There's stuff on the ground that's going to be tricky.
And so we'll see how that plays out.
Let's take a break.
We'll be right back.
Alright y'all, I'm going to come back to the tech side of things in a minute, but first I want to go to Jackson County, Tennessee.
Phil Williams, who is an investigative reporter out of Nashville at Nashville 5, has a new story come out this week, and he talks about the Christian nationalists who want to radicalize Main Street by taking over tiny Jackson County, Tennessee.
They want to go back to an America before the civil rights movement ruined everything.
They want to kick out legal immigrants even if they became U.S. citizens decades ago.
They want to put women back where they think they belong.
If necessary, to achieve their goals, they are prepared to accept a Protestant dictator who will rule according to their own interpretation of what it means to be a Christian.
That's Phil Williams writing about Andrew Isker and C.J. Engel leading a movement to make Jackson County in Tennessee, which is about 90 minutes from Nashville, and its county seat, Gainsborough, into a Christian nationalist haven.
Some folks liken it to a new Moscow, Idaho, or a new American readout.
Andrew Isker may be familiar to you because Andrew Isker is the author, along with Andrew Torba, Christian Nationalism, a Biblical Guide for Taking Dominion and Discipling Nations.
Isker and Engel want people to move to Gainesboro in Jackson County because they say, we're building a town, we're building a community.
The question is, is there room for like-minded Christians and patriots in Tennessee?
Yes, there's an imperative for like-minded Christians to gather and fight with us.
We need Christian nationalism in one state.
Alright, it keeps getting worse.
So, the real estate component of the project is led by two related companies, New Founding and Ridge Runner, that promise buyers the potential to be, quote, part of building a community with people who share your values.
The companies began with an initial project in nearby Berksville, Kentucky before announcing the Jackson County phase earlier this month.
This is all Phil Williams writing in his piece at News Channel 5, and he then goes into some things that Nate Fisher, who is the CEO of New Founding, the real estate company, has done in the past.
He said that the U.S. Constitution is long gone.
Christian nationalism represents a positive vision for government.
His partner is Josh Abattoi, so we've talked about Abattoi in this podcast, but he says at one point America is going to need a Protestant Franco.
Now, one of the things that Isker and Engel, the two podcasters and kind of front men for this whole operation, are clear about is that they believe that only people who have a legitimate right to a homeland in the United States are, quote, heritage Americans.
They usually depict these folks, heritage Americans, as like those from a Norman Rockwell painting, white guys from the 1950s and the 1920s and the late 19th century and so on and so forth.
Now, they do say that if you're black, you can stay in the United States, and black pastor Chris Williams says, according to them, if you're a descendant of slaves, you get to stay, which is something.
Others pretty much have to go.
There is a sermon that Isker gave recently at a church where he said that not only can Kamala Harris not be president, but she can't be president for a number of reasons, and one of them is she's the child of immigrants and a stepmother with no biological children.
One of the candidates for president, he said, has no children.
Neither of her parents are from America, right?
She was born in California, but they were both on student visas.
She doesn't have a connection to the history of this people.
If you think about the principle of what this is teaching, she is not connected to the past of this country whatsoever.
She doesn't have ancestors that fought in the Civil War or ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War.
It's insane, really, that this person, who is without a future and without much of a past, at least here, is attaining the highest office in the land.
In the past, Isker has said you can have either women's liberation or civilization, not both.
And no one can give me an argument why universal suffrage is good.
I think it's politically best to have conservatives in power and blacks and women vote liberal more often than white men.
He also says that Jew and Gentile as categories of people has ceased to exist.
There are now only Christians and unbelievers.
Jesus was the final true Jew.
I could go on.
They both have said that they hate democracy and that democracy destroyed my way of life and my heritage and my freedoms.
I could go on.
I don't want to subject you to everything they've said that's terrible.
I haven't even gotten to the LGBTQ stuff.
I mean, I could just...
I don't want to.
What's the point?
The point is that they have targeted Jackson County as a project of building a Christian society.
What it seems like is they think that there's this tiny county with very little attention, very little money, very little fanfare.
There's not a lot of people.
And there's not a lot of leaders there who are going to stand in their way.
So this is a place that's ripe for the taking.
They can revolutionize the government, they can basically form it in their image, and they can do whatever they like.
They can make it something without the pesky influence of all those others that they see as not real Americans and as destroying their way of life.
If you have towns that we're going to be building where there are a lot of people that are very politically motivated and very well organized and are out punching, you know, their weight class in terms of influence, you can have as much influence as one of the big cities in Tennessee.
This brings me back to Gil Duran and the tech bros and the tech oligarchs.
July 29 on X, Gil Duran said, the overlaps between MAGA and tech are this.
They believe in an impending societal collapse.
So this is true for the Christian nationalists.
They believe that the civilization, the United States government is going to collapse.
Not all of them, but many of them.
The two folks we're talking about here in Tennessee today, Isker and Engel.
They sound a lot like those of the American Readout, the people I write about in the very last chapter of my book.
People who've moved to Idaho and Montana, who've become preppers, and have really built their life around getting ready for the end of civilization.
Not because they think Jesus will return, but because that'll be their chance to rebuild civilization according to God's law, theocratic government, and so on and so forth.
The tech folks think much of the same thing.
There's a sense of doom.
I mean, just recently, Peter Thiel was talking about the Antichrist and the end of civilization and all this kind of stuff.
So, there's an overlap there.
There's also a messiah complex, Gil Doran says.
They believe they alone can save humanity.
They alone can fix it.
And that is, I alone can fix it is, of course, a line from Donald Trump.
This is where both of them see in Trump hope for the future they want.
Yeah.
Elon Musk thinks I alone can fix it.
Peter Thiel.
Mark Zuckerberg.
There's this sense of a God complex, sure.
And the Christian nationalists have their own God complex in the sense that they believe they're doing what God wants.
They may not believe they're God.
They may not believe that they're rewriting history because they're transcendent above humanity.
Some of their tech counterparts might.
But they believe they're doing what God wants in ways that no one else will, in ways that others don't have the guts or the gall or the bravery to do.
They're willing to say things like, women shouldn't vote, and I don't care for your illegal immigrant.
You've destroyed my way of life, and I hate democracy.
I can fix it because I'm the one who's willing to stand up and say what's real and true.
And supremacy.
They share a belief in the supremacy of rich white males over everyone else.
And you can see that.
You can see in the ways that Musk and Thiel and Trump work.
You can see the supremacy at work there.
But you can also see it in the Christian nationalists I talked about.
They believe they're superior.
I mean, Iskar and Engel are very wary of Vivek Ramaswamy because he's Indian, even though everything he says they agree with.
So there is a sense of supremacy.
Matt Taylor talks about this all the time these days, Christian supremacy, the idea that if you're a Christian, you are supreme, that you are superior to others.
And the thing that you should do is control the world.
You should have dominion over the world.
You should dominate the world because you are a Christian and you are sent from God.
And I know it seems like diametrically opposed.
Well, the tech guy thinks he's God and the Krishna Asha thinks he's sent from God, but it's really the same thing because the man who's sent from God and thinks that he and only he speaks for God is really the one who thinks that he has the divine authority on earth.
Functionally, they're the same.
If you're the messenger of God and only you, if you're the only one with access to the right way of life, And everyone else is inferior.
You're functionally acting like God on earth.
And so the tech guy and the Christian nationalists, whether it is the Freedom City of Peter Thiel or Gainsborough, Tennessee of Andrew Isker, there's deep resonances here.
And this is why, as Gil Durant points out in his thread from July 29th, both are against empathy because caring for others is putting yourselves in the position of people who are weak and inferior and not worth your sharing in their suffering.
They're anti-public because they don't want everyone to participate in the public good and common good.
They don't believe everyone deserves it.
They don't believe society is built for you and for everyone.
They believe it's built for a certain amount of people who are in the right order or have the right kind of status.
Workers are not important.
This one is a little more nuanced, I think.
I'm not going to go into it.
But again, I just wanted to end today by coming to this sense of here's resonances between the tech dystopians and the Christian nationalist homesteaders.
Both of them see in Donald Trump something that's really key.
And this goes to his cabinet picks and everything else.
They believe that Donald Trump's going to clear away all of the stuff, the bureaucracy, the processes, the institutions that keep limiting them.
Remember what I started with today.
They want a life without limits so that they can fix it even if reality doesn't And so you're probably thinking, like, how can Trump pick RFK, who has such terrible, toxic, disgusting, hurtful views on everything from autism to water to food to whatever?
How can he pick Hegseth for National Defense Secretary?
Dr. Oz?
Linda McMahon?
Not to mention Matt Gaetz?
Part of it is clearing away everything that they see is in their way.
That's what Gates will do.
That's what Ramaswamy wants to do when he wants to cut $2 trillion from the budget.
But they also are people who represent this idea that we're going to make reality conform to us, rather us conforming to reality.
I don't care if it's not real.
We're going to make it real.
We're going to live in a fantasy world.
We're gonna live the fantasy.
Even if it means immense suffering.
Even if it means it just doesn't work.
We don't care.
Stop.
Stop talking to me.
I'm gonna do what I want.
Both the Christian nationalists and the tech bros see in Trump their hope for that.
The Christian nationalists want a vision of society they think is real, even though it doesn't match up with the realities of their being trans people and gay folks and queer folks of all kinds, of their being...
I mean, I could go on and on about race, about religion, whatever.
The tech bros want the same thing.
Let's take a break, come back, and finish up by talking about how to respond to nonstop bad news.
Alright, y'all.
Over the last two weeks, I've been talking about mourning and grief and how to deal with the onslaught of Trump's coming back into power.
And there's just this great article at the New Republic this week by...
Kate Aronoff, who writes a lot about climate, but I think just had a great overall point about responding to this new Trump era.
And I want to kind of just finish by digging into a couple of those points.
This week has been especially tough.
If you're on social media, if you're paying attention, if you've got the notifications turned on your phone, you're getting one every 20 minutes.
Linda McMahon, Secretary of Education.
Dr. Oz is somehow in here.
The Matt Gaetz scandals get worse and worse and worse and the information about what happened with the ethics investigation is grotesque.
We're hearing more about Pete Hesketh and what is going on with him and his scandals.
The things RFK Jr. wants to do sound absolutely horrific.
Elon Musk, as we've talked about today, is everywhere.
I could go on and on and on.
We haven't even talked about Kristi Noem.
We haven't talked about All kinds of things.
Lohmann, the borders are, so on and so forth.
There's just a lot.
And I think this is one of those moments where you have to strategize about how you're going to live through this.
Because one of the things that Donald Trump wants to do, and I said this last week, is he wants to troll.
He wants to treat this like a reality show.
And he wants to treat it like television.
And as such, he wants you on the edge of your seat, but instead of wanting to know what's going to happen in the next episode of your favorite reality show or drama or true crime series, it's the Republic of the United States.
And it all sounds terrible.
It's not dopamine, it's cortisol.
So here's Aronoff writing at the New Republic.
Responding to every new and terrible thing Trump says isn't the way to defeat him, particularly given how little leverage Democrats will actually have over the next four years now that Republicans hold both houses of Congress.
Reacting to announcements and actions designed to anger Trump's political opponents shouldn't distract from longer-term strategizing around how to build a political force that's capable of beating the right-wing movement that brought him to power.
There's a particular risk that establishment Democrats who just lost the election may treat the frenzy over everything Trump does and says as an excuse to double down in their losing strategy.
Those eager for a more durable defeat of the GOP should resist getting sucked into this.
And I think, one, getting sucked into the blame game is one thing.
But for me, the real point is, resist getting sucked into a full-on reaction to every bit of news.
And again, it doesn't mean you're not paying attention and it doesn't mean you don't care.
But for example, the Pete Hesketh pick is one that may or may not happen.
He may or may not be the Secretary of Defense.
I don't know.
We could go blow by blow, point by point about whether or not this is actually going to happen.
Will they confirm him in the Senate?
Will the sex scandals and the assault scandals destroy him?
Will the fact that he wrote something in college saying that if a woman is passed out, she cannot be in duress and thus it's not sexual assault?
That sounds pretty bad.
I don't know though.
I have no idea.
Here's what I do know.
There's a chance he may not be, and there's a chance that this is just a preparation for someone who's going to be like him, but less overtly terrible.
Somebody who doesn't look like him, a brash, slick back hair, Fox guy who is always trying to be a provocateur.
It could be somebody who's a lot more quiet, a lot more staid, but just as bad politically.
And you know that second person might get in because they're going to look like Mike Johnson, not Matt Gaetz.
So here's the point, is you can get so caught up in every new terrible thing.
You can do a full profile, do a full reaction, and a full investment in every bit of news.
Stay up on the news, stay informed, and decide how you're going to strategize long-term around issues and communities that matter to you.
The example that Aronoff gives in this piece is the Sunrise Movement.
And the Sunrise Movement, if you're not familiar, is a group of young people.
Here's what their website says.
We're a movement of young people fighting to stop the climate crisis and win a Green New Deal.
And what Aronoff points out is that they spent the better part of the first Trump term strategizing, figuring out what to do.
And they did a sit-in at Nancy Pelosi's office.
They put the Green New Deal basically on the map and helped bring it forward into public consciousness.
And that led to results.
And you're like, well, we don't have a New Green Deal.
You're right.
But we do have the Inflation Reduction Act and the Civilian Climate Corps.
And, you know, those are wins.
These striking successes occurred partly because, Aronoff writes, the Sunrise Movement spent much of the early Trump administration quietly figuring out how to galvanize thousands of people to demand transformative climate policy and why previous attempts to do this had failed.
And I think for me, that phrase is just really important.
Quietly figuring it out.
Okay, yeah.
Gonna stay informed.
Totally not gonna lose the thread.
Not gonna let go of the rope.
Not gonna just go hide in a cave.
Nope.
But instead of reacting, instead of always the cortisol and the tweet, the thing that says, I can't believe this.
Can you believe that?
This is overtly terrible.
It is.
All of it.
All of it.
That doesn't mean to accept it.
It means how are we going to figure out strategically for the long term how to defeat white Christian nationalism, white supremacy, Authoritarianism.
Oligarchy.
All of the things we talk about every week on this show.
And that's the challenge, is where is that going to happen for you?
In what community?
And around what issue?
Is that around climate?
I think of folks in our Discord who are working tirelessly for public education, people in Ohio who just seem to never sleep and are always organizing and mobilizing others around education.
I think about people who are working for reproductive rights, separation of church and state.
Where are your people?
Where is your issue?
And how are you going to get involved?
I think back to the Indivisible movement that started when Trump first won.
And you can say, what will that get us?
And I'd say, well, a lot of congressional wins.
A lot of things that would not have happened otherwise.
But the point is that it takes organizing and mobilizing.
It takes strategy.
And if I can just leave you with something today, it's this, and it's something we talk about at our events this week, is the other side, whether it's the white Christian nationalists I talked about today, Whether it's the New Apostolic Reformation, they don't see this as a short-term situation.
This is not a, hey, if we can do this, we win, and then it's over.
This is a cosmic battle for them.
And that sounds like really daunting.
But I think if you want to think about freedom and democracy in a real sense, if you want to think about a country that somehow functions In a gesture towards equality.
If you want to think about a country that doesn't give itself over and surrender to all of the things that have been proposed by Trump in the run-up to his next administration, then strategy is really important.
Quietly figuring out together.
Yes, gonna react, gonna keep our fingers on the pulse, sure.
But instead of just react here, react there, throw our hands up once, screech twice, scream three times, how are we going to figure it out?
And where are you going to get involved?
Is that indivisible?
Is that the Sunrise Movement?
Is that public education?
Is that school board?
Is that local elections?
Is that local issues?
That's to me what's really, really the takeaway.
And I'll leave you with that today.
Thanks for listening.
Sorry for a truncated episode and one without Dan, but it's an incredibly busy week over here at Straight White American Jesus.
I appreciate all of you.
I want to say thank you to all of our new patrons who've joined and are in our Discord.
Our Discord has really become a place of support and community, and if you'd like to join up in that, you can see that in our show notes and join Swatch Premium.
If you want to do that, it's really important to you and something you think you'd value and you can't afford it, just reach out and I can help with that, no problem.
But I will say, I think our Discord's becoming something I'm really thankful for in terms of community and solidarity and encouragement.
