Weekly Roundup: The Qanon FBI Director and the Would Be King
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This episode of the Straight White American Jesus weekly roundup, sponsored by the American Humanist Association, tackles critical issues including the nomination of Kash Patel as FBI director, SCOTUS hearings on trans discrimination, and the historical parallels to the current threat to democracy posed by Donald Trump. Brad and Dan discuss whether the current political climate is unprecedented or if similar struggles have been faced by marginalized communities throughout American history. The episode also highlights recent events, such as federal judges deciding not to retire to prevent Trump from filling their seats, and reflects on how to strategize against a potential decline into illiberalism.
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Axis Mundy Axis Mundy This episode is sponsored by the American Humanist Association.
Hi, I'm Fish Stark, the executive director of the American Humanist Association.
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Donald Trump did all the vetting they needed to do on peak headset.
And I just can't believe we even have people on our side that are saying, well, I've got to look at this, got to look at that.
What they're doing is they're throwing rocks at Donald Trump.
They're not throwing them at peak headset.
They're throwing them at Donald Trump.
Because they're saying, well, we don't believe you did the right vetting and we don't believe he can do the job.
Wait a minute.
That's not our job to do that.
That is Senator Tommy Tuberville saying that there's no need to vet Trump's cabinet because Trump has already done that himself.
Today we talk about the nomination of Kash Patel to FBI director and the idea that Trump has rubber stamped all the people that belong in his cabinet, that there's no need for a confirmation process.
And in fact, as Patel has envisioned in his children's books, Trump is more like a king than a president-elect.
We also discussed the recent SCOTUS hearing about trans discrimination and prejudice across the country in workplaces and elsewhere.
Finally, we ask a question.
Have we been here before?
Is this something that has precedent in the United States?
Or, instead of looking backward, should we be looking around to other authoritarian governments and those who have deposed them in order to find strategies and hope?
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is the Straight White American Jesus Weekly Roundup.
Amen.
Welcome to the Straight White American Jesus Weekly Roundup.
Back together again with Dan Miller, who's here.
Dan, hello.
How are you?
Who are you?
What's happening?
Brad, it is nice to be back.
Haven't seen you since our San Diego and LA events, in which, as many people noted, I did not wear cargo pants.
I got lots of comments about that.
I have a...
A story about the pants I did wear, but I don't know if...
Do you want to share why you were wearing jeans at the Thursday night event in LA rather than...
There was somebody who actually came up, a listener, who was like, you always joke around about not being cool, but you're wearing jeans and a sport coat.
And I was like, no, here's why.
So I pack my stuff.
I have everything ready.
I've got a sport coat and some...
Some khaki pants and whatever.
I fly into San Diego, then I'm getting the train up to LA to meet you and everybody else.
And if I'm putting my stuff together in my day bag and I pull out those pants and unfold them, yeah, they're shorts.
I packed a khaki pair of shorts instead of a pair of pants.
So I had to either try to be really faux California and show up with a sport coat and shorts, which I just wasn't going to pull off.
Or I wore my jeans.
And so basically I looked like a dissident youth pastor is like what I was trying to do.
No, no, no, no, no.
You were perfectly dressed for an LA event.
LA is, you know, California is a place where you do that.
It was funny though, because I say that because like I was texting my brothers on the ride up and they're like, are you trying to be a youth pastor?
Like they were kidding around with me and stuff.
And they're like, what shoes are you wearing?
It all comes down to what shoes you're wearing.
And I was like, I promise I'm wearing real shoes.
So I wore non-youth pastor shoes enough that I made it.
But no, it was awesome.
Shout out to everybody who showed up.
We had so many great conversations with folks, great time, great discussion from the panelists, both in LA and San Diego.
So it was really cool.
It's always cool to actually get to see Brad Onishi in person because that doesn't happen very often.
So it was good.
Good to be back.
Maybe not good to have to talk about the stuff we have to talk about on a weekly basis, but it was really cool.
But I'm glad to be back.
Yeah, thanks to everybody who came out.
A truly life-affirming and hopeful set of events in LA. If you were there, wonderful to meet you.
San Diego, same thing.
A bunch of us went out for a drink after the events and got to know each other and hang out, and that was really neat.
So just couldn't be more thankful for those times with everyone.
All right.
That does bring us to today.
And it brings us to, I think, three things we want to get into.
By now, a lot of you know that Kash Patel has been named as the nominee Donald Trump will put up for director of the FBI. We'll talk about that.
We'll talk about the recent SCOTUS case about trans identity and trans folks in this country, not something I think enough people are probably talking about.
And then we want to ask kind of a big question at the end today, which is one that came up at our San Diego event, which is, are we in an unprecedented time in the United States?
Is Trump a novel threat to the American Republic?
Or have we been here before, at least somehow?
And I think we had a really good discussion about this in San Diego among scholars such as Ahmaud Greenhaze and Yi Jian Lin and Matt Taylor and others.
I want to talk about that with you, Dan.
I think for me, the answer is starting to look like both yes and no, and I'll explain that when we get there.
Yeah.
Let's jump into Kash Patel, and then we'll go into the SCOTUS stuff after the break.
So, Kash Patel.
Cash Patel, I think a lot of you have heard already, you've watched an NBC clip or listen to NPR or whatever it may be, but I'll just tell you about him in very brief.
I'm not going to do his whole bio, Dan.
He's an ultra-Trump loyalist, somebody who people kind of say he will do anything for Trump.
He's a lawyer.
He has tried cases, but he really made his name under the Trump administration.
Sorry, just a pause.
When you have to set it up with...
No, he is a lawyer, and he's done legal stuff.
When that's the throw-in, and not the main selling point for people at the Department of Justice and stuff, I feel like before you even go any further, we're already like, oh, this tells us a lot.
So I didn't mean to cut you off.
Just want to point that out for people to think.
When you're like, you've got to be like, yes, he can tick this box, kind of.
That's already a concerning issue.
Yeah.
We're talking about the FBI. This is not somebody who's made a career in the intelligence agencies or the intelligence world or law enforcement or was the attorney general somewhere or whatever.
Yeah.
So he did work at the Justice Department and the National Security Council.
He was somebody who helped in the background with the House Intel Committee and so on.
There was a famous incident where he Seemed to take more authority than he was given and almost led to disaster with US intelligence services.
Don't want to go over all that again today.
Dan, as I was preparing for today, part of me was just like, I'm so repulsed by Kash Patel that I don't want to go into almost all of his bio because I don't...
Yeah, he doesn't deserve it.
I just don't want to do it.
But anyway, he was so ill-equipped to be the attorney general for Trump the first time when his name was floated by Trump that Bill Barr said that Patel had virtually no experience that would qualify him to serve at the highest level of the world's preeminent law enforcement agency.
So now he's been put up for the leader of the FBI. A couple of more things about Patel that I actually do want to get into.
One is he's written several children's books about the attack on the king.
And as you can imagine, in those children's books, Trump is the king.
And in the first one, he outlines the plot against the king, which is made by Hillary.
And Cash is in there as a kind of super helper who makes sure the king is not usurped and defeated by the evil Hillary who is attacking him.
Dan, there's just something so apt about somebody being nominated to lead the FBI in this country.
A high level post in this government, in this whole apparatus of a presidential administration, the intelligence services and so on.
Who has literally written about the former and president elect as a king.
I have so much to say about the idea of an American king.
Like I'm trying to put together a whole book on this.
I'm like, you know, my eyeballs have been on so many.
Yeah, I'm going to try to be nice.
So many people.
I'll just no adjectives.
So many people who just think that the idea of an American king is a great idea.
The fact that you would have somebody nominated who has envisioned a president as a king is just something we could unpack.
If we wanted to go into full scholar analysis mode, we could just do an hour and a half of like You think he's a king.
That should disqualify you from this post.
The second, and I won't go into it yet, I'll throw it to you for some initial thoughts, is Patel is a known QAnon advocate or somebody who in the past has signaled his resonance with the QAnon conspiracy.
I agree with a lot of that movement says, is a quote from Kash Patel about QAnon.
And in line with QAnon, which is really a fantasy about Donald Trump being the only one who can save the world from an evil cabal of elites, Patel is really into retribution and revenge.
So he said last year in a podcast that we're going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.
Whether it's criminally or civilly, we'll figure that out.
So we have QAnon, we have retribution, we have Trump loyalty to the point that he thinks Trump is a king.
I want to get into some of that QAnon stuff and the dangers that Patel poses to this republic and also to the FBI in general and so many people that might be targeted.
But let me stop here and just say, what are your thoughts?
Yeah, so I think we'll get to all of those are valid.
We'll get to those.
But one of the things that we talk about a lot, you talk about a lot, is Within Christian nationalism, within the kind of right-wing imaginary, is the reduction of complexity.
When people ask oftentimes why the religious imaginary, so to speak, is so influential here.
We talk about it reduces complexity.
This is a dude who wrote children's books about this.
It's that dimension of it.
You want to talk about reducing complexity?
Let's take elections and turn them into battles between good and evil and Mr. Hero Man King versus evil usurper woman.
And, like, literally, like, I've said this before, and you'll talk to people sometimes, like, I feel like you're kind of, you know, caricaturing the people you're criticizing, and I don't know that it's a straight, and, like, the dude turned it into a children's story.
That is how he understands this.
That is how simple they think it is.
That is how black and white they think it is.
That is how much this is a battle of good and evil.
It's literally a story you would tell children.
There's no complexity.
There's no nuance.
There's no reality behind it.
And I think that, again, this is one of those things that shows us what is actually going on.
It's sort of like when people drink too much and they say crazy stuff, and then they sober up.
They're like, I'm sorry.
Didn't mean that.
It's like, no, you did.
That's what happened when you were drunk.
It's like it knocked down the walls and you said what you really thought.
So thanks for showing us who you are.
That's what this is.
This is not simplifying something complex.
This is somebody who I think actually believes it's that simple.
And if we wanted to lead into conspiracism and QAnon, that's what conspiracism does.
It takes complex realities to And makes them simple and makes them straightforward and makes them easy.
They're just the grown up version of children's stories.
And that's who this guy is.
And yeah, it's terrifying if he is going to be the head of the highest law enforcement agency in the United States.
Absolutely terrifying.
And so I want to just I want to touch on more conspiracy here and then I want to get into whether or not he'll be confirmed by the Senate.
And those are questions people are going to have.
Here's what I wrote in my book about conspiracy theories as they pertain to Christian nationalists and white Christian nationalists.
And as I say that, I know some of you are like, well, Kash Patel is not white.
And I'll get to that in a minute.
There's a special ingredient to white Christian nationalist proclivity for conspiracy.
This is the group who believes America was founded as a Christian nation and who thus believes it has the right to maintain the top spots of American politics and culture.
When they feel their influence and power dwindling, conspiracies become a tool for reasserting their worldview as legitimate.
In these instances, they are a group used to privilege and they are trying to hold on to it by changing the standards of the real and the true.
They believe they have a God given right to hold power in the United States.
That belief extends beyond winning elections and making policy.
It goes all the way to deciding what is real and what isn't.
And what I go on to say in this chapter, Dan, is that to me, there's a real sense when I think about QAnon as a Christian nationalist fantasy, that it is a revenge fantasy.
Paul Joop found with a co-author that among the Christian nationalists that they found in surveys, 75% of them were QAnon.
Believers or sympathetic with the QAnon conspiracy.
So white Christian nationalism is by the data correspondent with belief in some aspects of the QAnon conspiracy.
That leads me to Patel, who has signaled his sympathies with the QAnon conspiracy.
The idea that Trump is the only one who can save the country from this cabal of elites who are pedophiles, the secret Q drops, the ideas of groomers all around us and everybody from the Clintons to the Obamas to other global elites being part of this whole conspiracy.
Patel is about revenge and retribution, and he thinks Donald Trump is a king.
A king has the right to power, Dan, absolute power.
The king decides what is real and what is true.
The king decides what is actual.
The conspiracy theory and the revenge theory are all one in the same here.
I don't care about data.
I don't care about facts.
I don't care about studies.
I don't care about processes or laws.
I don't care how it's supposed to work.
The only way it's supposed to work is according to the reality of the king.
And I, Kash Patel, will carry that out for him.
That is how it works.
Period.
And so, you know, when I saw that Patel was such a kind of QAnon adjacent person, it all clicked for me that this is part and parcel of the whole cosmos of Trumpism, of Christian nationalism, and so on.
Now, I'll just say briefly, Patel is not white.
Patel and Ramaswamy are both kind of these very visible Trumpist figures at the moment.
And I will say that there is an aspiration, I think, among...
There has always been the promise to racial minorities in this country that if you just act the right way and fit in, then you can have all the privileges of whiteness, even though you're not white.
There's always this seduction of like, well, maybe I can be part of that club.
Even if I'll never pass when I walk in the room.
And we've seen Ramaswamy get treated so poorly.
And I mean, poorly is the wrong word.
Prejudicially and viciously by Ann Coulter and other people who've said, I wouldn't vote for you because you're brown and you're Hindu and all this kind of stuff.
When I think of Kash Patel, I think of, A, somebody who's just ambitious to the point of destructive.
I think of somebody who is retributive to the point of viciousness.
I also think of somebody who thinks that loyalty will allow him to pass in a kind of culture of MAGA-ism that is built on whiteness and white supremacy.
And so I will say that there.
I want to get to the Senate stuff.
Do you want to talk about anything I just said though?
Just briefly on the whiteness.
There are a lot of people who say this, but I'm thinking of Miguel de la Torre, who people have heard me reference before.
But he makes the point, I think he's right, that whiteness, if we use like a W, you know, capital W whiteness, it's an ideology.
It's not about skin color or skin pigment or whatever.
Any more than like, I don't know, being a feminist is necessarily about being a woman.
There are lots of anti-feminist women.
There are lots of feminist men.
So there are plenty of people who adhere to the ideology of whiteness.
as you say, they use the language of passing, they walk into a room and visibly they don't pass, but if they can adopt that ideology, and as you say, if people like Ramaswani and Patel can show their credentials to the white MAGA movement through loyalty to Trump, that is still participating in the whiteness of if people like Ramaswani and Patel can show their credentials to the white I think that that's really important for people to understand because when people say, "Well, Race is about more than skin color.
It's about much more than that.
So I think that that's an important thing to understand as we talk about these figures.
Because people, like, I don't know, Uncle Ron, someday he'll talk about the white MAGA movement.
He'll say, why do you say it's white?
What about Ramaswamy and Patel?
That's how it works.
They become the token figures that are supposed to show that it's not white.
When they only got into the club, By having to try to tick enough boxes, they could be accepted into the Whites Only MAGA movement.
Yeah, well said.
Dr. Kiyoti Joshi gave a great personal example of this at our event in LA and talked about how this has worked in her own family.
So let's go to the Senate.
Here's Michael Tomoski writing at the New Republic.
He likely will be confirmed.
He has enough of a resume to make it through.
He's worked at the Justice Department, the National Security Council, and the House Intel Committee, federal prosecutor.
How professionally he performed in those positions is a matter of debate.
So I think we need to notice something, Dan, which is I resisted.
I got calls from journalists about Matt Gaetz.
People were like, you're going to write an op-ed about Matt Gaetz?
And I was like, I'm not.
Because I have a feeling Matt Gaetz is cortisol candy.
Like, nominate him and everyone, including us, is going to just feel anger, despair, anxiety, rage, all of it.
And I sat on this show a couple of times and I said to people in person, like, we could spend the next three weeks on Gates.
We could.
I kind of think we should just bide our time.
And the night of our event in LA, the Gates nomination fell apart.
What I want to notice, though, is like when you when you nominate enough Gaetz's that are just cortisol candy, then you can also then start to nominate those that start to look as if they're qualified in comparison to Matt Gaetz.
Matt Gaetz has no right business being a G and everybody, even even Republican senators said that publicly.
Mm hmm.
But then you start asking those Republican senators about dozens of other nominees, and they don't have the spine or the will to keep saying no.
They're not going to just publicly, as politicians, with their staff in their ear telling them what sounds good and what doesn't.
That every time Trump puts somebody up, they're like, nah.
Like, do you really think Susan Collins is just going to, for 28 times over the next three weeks, be like, nope, not that person.
Like, she knows that that's not going to play well for her as a Republican, but she also just doesn't have enough of a spine to do that, period.
So my point here, Dan, is we might think of Patel as equally unqualified, and don't get me wrong, I think he is.
But in terms of his resume, The Republican senators are going to find a way to be like, well, this guy, yeah, he worked at the House Intel Committee, National Security Council, Justice Department.
If you squint real hard, you can kind of see the shape of that.
Yeah.
It is, and it's so different than Gates, where they can be like, even Susan Collins can be like, no.
And I just think that's something to keep in mind here is, and we played at the top a clip of Tommy Tuberville, of Tubby's Flubby's fame, saying like, I think we don't need to vet these guys because the vetting has already been done by Donald Trump, the king.
So I just want to throw that out.
Now, I don't think this means we should all just give up.
I'm not leading us towards nihilistic surrender.
But I will say, don't be surprised if Kash Patel does make it through.
Because as you say, you can squint at his resume and be like, well, I think he's a good pick.
And oh, you don't want people of color?
Democrats?
Woke people?
Oh, I thought you liked that.
Right?
And there it is.
I think the other piece of this is that the Gateses of the world also give those Senate Republicans cover.
They can be like, what are you talking about, Rubberstone?
We're not approving everybody Trump put forward.
Look, we shot down Gates and Hegseth may be in trouble.
We're not sure about that.
So you can get a couple notches in their belt that they can be like, I don't know what you're talking about.
We stand up to Trump.
We're an independent branch of government.
And so it's kind of a win-win for everybody in the MAGA orbit.
Trump gets the people he wants.
Republicans get to stay loyal to Trump and approve all of his picks because he's thrown out a couple sacrificial figures that can then be shot down and they can try to say, see, we were serious about confirmation and so forth.
So Trump, it turns out, no, he's not really a king.
It's like, despite the fact that, in fact, that's exactly how they view him.
And I think that the Hegseth nomination also may fall apart.
I think there's a world where Hegseth, all of the reporting about his drinking and the sexual assault and everything else, it becomes too much and he bows out.
And if he does, it will be him bowing out.
Because again, if you bow out, the Republican senators don't have to reject a Trump nominee.
And it's not like they had to go to bat publicly in a brutal Senate confirmation and be like, I, John Toon, or I, Lisa Murkowski, or I, whoever, are going to stand up publicly and say, I just don't approve.
And I will then receive the entire vote.
A brunt of MAGA world's anger and viciousness and threats of violence and death threats and bomb threats and everything else.
That's how this works.
Senator Mike Crapo said, if you...
Dan, Dan, grow up, Dan.
Grow up.
He said that my position is we should do whatever Donald Trump wants to do.
That's exactly the same attitude they had toward Biden.
Like all these senators who are just like, we should just do what the president wants because they're the president and they've done all the vetting.
All right.
Any final thoughts before we go to a break?
I think just to hold on to that last point, just holding on to the idea of hypocrisy of the GOP, like, you know, I know everybody plays politics, Republicans, Democrats, they're all loyal to their own party and so forth.
But Republicans, you know, since the election, leading up to the election, the whole Trump thing, it's just so beyond the pale of like any pretense of anything other than just, you know, being lick spittles for Trump that it's really, really just sort of maddening at this point.
Let's take a break.
We'll come back and talk about SCOTUS. All right, Dan, give us the rundown.
I don't think enough people are talking about SCOTUS from yesterday.
I did see Aaron in the morning do great work on this and some others who were talking about it online, but take us through it.
Yeah, so as people might know, or maybe they don't know about the numbers, I think everybody's aware that there have been a lot of GOP-led states that have enacted bans on gender-affirming care for trans youth.
And so primarily what's in view here is medical and or surgical treatments for minors who are trans-identified.
The surgical treatment thing is largely a red herring.
That almost never happens for minors anyway for lots of reasons, but we're talking about hormone blockers and hormone replacement therapies and so forth.
People may not realize, and we hear this all the time, is that around half of the US states have now implemented some kind of bans and or penalties for providing gender affirming care for minors.
And so this week, before SCOTUS, a challenge to Tennessee's ban came up.
So the plaintiffs are challengers to the ban in Tennessee.
Obviously, this is like a proxy for all of these other states.
And it came up and it was sort of interesting.
So there are a lot of fears of what happens if these bans are upheld.
They think it could lead to more broad and sweeping state bans, where states will be emboldened if these come up to expand those bans.
And people also fear a national ban.
They fear Congress passing laws that will create bans for gender-affirming care for minors.
And it's sort of interesting.
We could get into all the medical stuff and things like that.
We've talked about that before.
But I want to think more about the strategies and the rationales that are on display here.
So opponents have had a couple strategies here that I think are important.
And I think that is opponents of the ban.
So people who oppose the Tennessee ban.
The first is that they argue that it was discrimination on the basis of sex.
And the reason that they did this, as folks may remember, it was, what, 2020?
That there was a ruling.
And Neil Gorsuch and like John Roberts, you know, it was kind of a shock ruling because some of the conservatives argued that in employment contexts, the discrimination on the basis of gender identity was a discrimination on the basis of sex.
They argued that trans identity violated anti-discrimination on the basis of sex.
So that's one reason why opponents of these bands have adopted this strategy is to say that you're essentially, it's the same logic.
You're discriminating against people on the basis of their trans identity.
They also argue that these bans violate parental rights.
And here they're just taking a card.
That's a buzzword that the right has used every time they want to enact bans or ban books or whatever they do so in the name of parental rights.
And so they've said that this violates the rights of parents to coordinate with medical professionals and others to give kids the health care that they need.
So they've used these two strategies.
And I think there are a lot of people who hope that this parental rights strategy in particular, things that I've read, I said, even if it doesn't work in this case, they think it opens avenues in other dimensions of challenging these bans and other things like this.
So that was what they essentially argued.
They went to court and they said that this violates discrimination on the basis of sex and it violates parental rights.
It didn't seem to go well.
It seemed to go the way a lot of people would think it would with a majority of conservative justices.
John Roberts and Kavanaugh, two of our favorites, they argue that courts shouldn't second-guess legislatures.
Any time on any topic that the Supreme Court says that, I think it's ridiculous because that is the right they abrogated to themselves centuries ago.
What is your job?
Yeah.
Dan, look, I'm not a law scholar, and so I'm sure someone's going to email me and be like, well, actually, the job is okay.
But I'll just say my first reaction to what you just said is, isn't the job of the judicial branch to review laws passed by the legislature and, of course, by the executive if it's the Supreme Court, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah?
Is that not your job?
Is that not checks and balances?
Anyway, I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
I'm going to try and...
Yeah, judicial review.
A non-specialist could be forgiven for thinking that that's kind of the whole point of the Supreme Court.
Anyway, yeah, so he argued that.
He confronted that issue of backing that position that discrimination in the workplace against trans people was not allowed.
It was not constitutional.
But he said that this case was different because of, quote, medical considerations, that the medical considerations were there.
I'm going to come back to that.
Kavanaugh argued the need to weigh the potential harm of supporting the ban, and so denying care to some, and basically said, yeah, that could harm some people.
Acknowledge that, which I think is significant.
Of course, opponents of these bands, including me, will argue about high rates of depression, suicidality, self-harm, sexual assault, all kinds of things that confront trans youth, and that these are real harms that come if they cannot access this kind of medical care.
But he said that they have to balance that with the harm of people who receive care that they later regret.
That there can be people who, you know, receive care and as they get older, they're like, oh, it turns out I shouldn't have transitioned or whatever.
And I'm going to come back to that too.
And he said that legislatures are better positioned to weigh those considerations than the court is.
And on that note, Alito also jumped in on the so-called detransitioners.
So people who transition and live out a different gender identity and then later voice regrets or say that they shouldn't have done that or that they were coerced into it or whatever else.
Okay?
Here's the trick.
Just looking at those arguments.
I see faces that Brad's making that are like, what?
The first thing is the dismissal of the sex discrimination reasoning is just illogical.
It doesn't make sense, and we shouldn't expect it to make sense.
John Roberts and the conservatives, they are not people trying to consistently apply the law.
They are people trying to find ways to make the law say what conservatives want it to say.
The decision is made.
And they will come up with a rationale for it after the fact.
And I think we just have to understand that.
The appeals to medicine are just sort of Orwellian doublespeak.
I've talked about this a lot, but every major medical association in the United States affirms the use of these treatments for transgender kids.
Here's the other thing though, Brad.
Nobody is trying to ban the use of hormone blockers as such.
It's only hormone blockers for trans kids.
Kids with other medical issues, like kids who start puberty really, really early, like somebody starts going through puberty at like six or seven and their body's not ready for it.
What do they do?
They prescribe the same hormone blockers to stop that process until the child is older.
Other medical reasons why they do this.
Hormone replacement therapies used for lots of people, including minors for different kinds of things.
Nobody's banning the use of those medical technologies or practices as such.
They are only targeting trans-identified kids.
So the discriminatory nature of this, I think, is really, really clear.
This issue of detransitioners, people have studied this.
The vast majority of studies have shown that those who transition don't later regret the decision.
In 2020, just as one example, there was a big study in the Netherlands that found that 98% of transgender youth do not, within like five, six, seven years, wish that they had And there's also complex issues to this.
There's a whole debate about the so-called detransition movement, whether it's a real thing and different diagnostic criteria that were used in different times medically and so forth.
The point is that none of this really holds up.
So I want to jump into what Ketanji Brown Jackson said as the last sort of counterpoint to this, but your thoughts on the conservatives, the arguments that are put forward, just the stuff I've talked about so far, especially given the faces that you have made that I wish the world could see.
Well, I just, again, so there's a couple of things here.
I think one is The idea that it's not your job to second-guess legislatures is...
Again, friends, Dan, you and I are trained in religious studies and theology and philosophy.
So if people want to email me and say, this is why you're wildly wrong about everything, that's okay.
Feel free.
That seems like a cop-out in a time when the Supreme Court is willing to weigh in and say, for example, the president has blanket immunity as long as he's acting as the president, which I know is a case pertaining to the executive branch nonetheless.
It's a really strange argument.
I also think that this continues just to exemplify something that we have highlighted.
And of course, you have done so well over the years, which is trans people are like, and you probably have numbers on this, Dan, but something like 1% of the US population.
And if you ask folks on the street, How much, what percentage of the United States population is trans?
And if you ask, especially those who lean conservative, you get answers in the like 20%, right?
The 30%.
The hysteria is the hysteria about sports and especially girls and women's sports.
This to me is just an example of, this just exemplifies that hysteria that there's just no world Where, despite whatever claims to objectivity, despite whatever claims to, like, reason and jurisprudence that any of the conservative judges might claim, that they are ever going to come out on a side that protects trans people.
It has become such an anathema.
And it's reaching the point where I think folks who five and six and seven years ago were just like, yeah, trans people just, I don't know.
Leave them alone.
It's reached the point where the current climate, I think, is one where those people who are not personally affected by trans lives and who are not politically invested, perhaps, I should say, like some of us, and are not thinking about these things all the time.
And politically literal.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're able to be swayed by the kind of zeitgeist of like, yeah, you know, and they hear...
I don't know if I'm making sense.
What I'm trying to say is, all of that has now reached the Supreme Court to the point where I cannot imagine a place where, regardless of precedent, jurisprudence, coherent legal arguments, Roberts Gorsuch, Thomas Alito, any of them would ever, ever Like, somehow rule to protect trans people in any case, period.
And, you know, they can prove me wrong, but I stand by that.
Yeah, the one interesting piece to tie into that before I get to Ketanji Brown-Jackson is Gorsuch was, like, weirdly silent.
Yeah.
In this, they kept kind of looking at him like he didn't say anything.
And nobody knows exactly what to make of that.
If that's because he's painted himself into the same corner that Roberts has, where he's argued that it's a violation of discrimination in one place or what.
But yeah, the just lack of nerve, the failure to exercise any authority in a case like this.
When again, the ideal of the judicial branch Is that it's supposed to be the branch that is not part of all of that, that stands above this.
And Roberts in particular likes to think that the court is still that.
Everything you read about Roberts talks about how dismayed he is about the public perceptions and so forth.
But here he is playing these games and doing exactly the same thing as the Alitos of the world.
Well, and Gorsuch is the only one who's not.
We don't really know if he's Catholic.
He's the only one whose religious sort of identity is a little bit mysterious, like Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett and Alito and Thomas and Roberts.
We know exactly where they stand.
So Gorsuch does sometimes become the peculiar one on the bench.
Does that mean I expect, like, should we take a bet, Dan?
How many, like, Republican senators are going to have a spine?
Or is it Neil Gorsuch?
Should we, like, let's put 100 bucks?
It'd be a pretty rough betting line.
You know, the over-under on that is going to be, yeah, it's going to be pretty high.
Yeah, so just briefly then, on the flip side, not surprisingly, the liberal justices were much more sympathetic to the plaintiffs.
But Ketanji Brown Jackson, in particular, took a position that's worth noting.
She was critical of these bans, but she argued that the bans paved the way for undermining other established precedents for civil rights.
That was her line.
And she specifically pointed, and you've talked about this SCOTUS decision before, in 1967, Loving v.
Virginia.
And that was the case that a unanimous court struck down interracial marriage bans.
I think strategically she chose a unified SCOTUS decision.
She chose something that I think even Clarence Thomas, who wants to go back and redo everything, isn't going to do because he's in an interracial marriage.
So presumably even Clarence Thomas isn't going to want to overdo this.
But she argued that this had parallels, dangerous parallels to this.
And Virginia had argued that That its marriage ban was not discriminatory because it appealed to both whites and blacks.
So they were like, we're not discriminating against anybody because it applies to everybody.
And in this case, Tennessee argues the same thing.
It argues that its ban is not discriminatory because it applies to both boys and girls.
I'm just going to throw out the, by the way, that's like the thoroughly question begging thing, because you're like, yeah, the trans identity disrupts the notion that it's just about boys and girls.
It's not about Boys being girls or girls being boys.
This is something different.
But that's their argument.
And Jackson suggested that on that reasoning and on conservatives' reasoning of like, oh, we're just going to let the legislatures do it.
Legislatures can do it.
Who are we as the court to challenge legislatures?
That it would undermine and contradict precedents like Loving.
And it was a very, I think, telling and impassioned argument.
She got some of the conservatives like, what are you talking?
This is different.
She really pushed back, was like, it's not.
And I think that she's right.
I think it's a parallel.
I don't think it's an accidental parallel.
I mentioned Clarence Thomas.
He has said That he thinks they should go back and rethink things like same-sex marriage, like the legality of sex between consenting adults of the same sex, that all of these are precedents that should be rethought.
So she brought that up.
And I think that that is one of the fears that, beyond issues of gender identity or sexual orientation that folks have about this, is that the Supreme Court is setting it up To give themselves precedent to go back and undermine all kinds of civil rights.
So the Loving case happens in 1967, and it happens right around the time of the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act.
And all of those, right?
64, 65, 67. They've all been weakened.
They've all been weakened.
But they're all good reminders.
And I think that some of you out there know this, but there's really a need to remind folks like when SCOTUS or Trump or anyone else is like, oh, let the states decide.
Don't get me wrong.
States have rights.
We have 50 states.
Those states are different.
I mean, Arizona is a much different place than Vermont.
So I'm not arguing here to take away the kind of federalism of the United States in any radical way.
But what I am saying is those Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Loving Case, they're really good reminders of how federal rulings or laws can protect people in various parts of the country from localized or state level discrimination such they're really good reminders of how federal rulings or laws can protect people in various parts of the country from localized or state level discrimination such that, right, if Or, you know, back in the cases of the Voting Rights Act
that, yeah, you need to take this poll test or you need to, right, you know, pay this poll tax, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
It's just a good reminder of how those things work and how they have created the world that we have lived in as imperfect and in many ways terrible as it is for the last 70 years.
I think one of the things we're facing as we go forward, talking about Kash Patel and Donald Trump and everything else is The foundations of that world are being thoroughly threatened and there's a lot of momentum to do it because people think that would be better.
And I think that's just something that we'll be investigating over the next year is like how people have basically said everything that happened after World War II in terms of the end of Jim Crow, the Loving case, Oberfell, Stonewall,
you name it, was Yeah.
Yeah.
out there.
Imagine how interesting it would be if, I don't know, the religious identity of justices was something that actually had to be taken into account when they're ruling on these things.
Like, you know, "Oh, gee, what a shock.
This is an issue that might be at odds with your deeply held convictions, and maybe you're supposed to rule on law and not your religious beliefs.
But we know, obviously, there's no authority above the Supreme Court.
There's no ethics system that they have to hold to.
There is no criteria for not considering a case or anything like that that can be brought to bear.
And I think this is another one of those instances that illustrates the significance of that.
Yeah.
There's so much more to say on this.
Let's take a break.
I want to talk about this next question, though, and make sure we have time for it.
Be right back.
All right, Dan.
So at our San Diego event, Matt Taylor posed an idea that I think is worth considering.
And we actually, on Monday, played his remarks as our Monday's episode.
So if you've listened to Monday, you know what I'm talking about.
If you haven't, you can go back and listen to that right after you finish this episode.
But what Matt put forth was an idea that I think a lot of people agree with and kind of have just assumed, which is we're facing a situation with Donald Trump as a threat to democracy that we've never faced before.
That this is not a time for us as Americans to look backward and say, oh, it's like 18 this or 17 that or 19 whatever.
This is a moment that is unique, and instead we need to look around, not back.
We need to look to how people like Modi or Orban were able to take power.
But additionally, and I would just add this, we need to look at places where totalitarian states and autocratic leaders were deposed, whether that is the Velvet Revolution in the Czech Republic or other places around the world.
We just saw, and I'll just add this quickly, not going to dwell on it today, and I don't feel like we've prepared to talk about it.
We just saw an attempted coup, in essence, in South Korea, and the parliament got together and voted 190-0 to say, we're not doing that.
And they're now trying to impeach the president.
So there's that.
And here's where I've come down on this, Dan, is because when Matt gave those remarks, there were some other scholars there who I think can vary the best kind of dialogue you can have as human beings.
Push back.
There was no...
Name-calling, you're an idiot.
It was just really good discussion, how you should discuss really complex and difficult things.
There were no children's books produced about the topic.
Yes.
No children's books.
It's just grown-up discussion.
There was no Marjorie Taylor Greene, hand on her hip, yelling at people, none of that.
It was really good discussion.
And several scholars pushed back and said, you know, Especially for people of color, there have been times in this country where this country has been for them a thoroughly, thoroughly undemocratic place where they had very few human rights and very few liberties.
And also, and this is the part that actually I think is really important for me to talk about today, where the future seemed absolutely hopeless.
And so the question I want to address just briefly here in our last segment is, well, who's right?
Is it Matt's idea that we've never been here before?
Or is it some others, Maude Green-Hayes and Yijan Lin and others that are like, no, it just depends on who you ask.
Because some folks might tell you we have been here before.
Call me a squishy middle or whatever you want.
But I'm going to say I think it's both.
And I'll be really brief and I'll throw it to you.
I think it is absolutely right to say that in terms of the Constitution, checks and balances, the idea of a democracy writ large, the notion that the Department of Justice, the FBI, are not your personal attack dogs.
The idea that you would use the military on citizens.
Now we can come back to that one, actually.
The idea that you would do all kinds of things.
I do think Donald Trump is a unique threat to the American Republic, period.
I think Matt is right on that.
In terms of What can be considered a soft coup from within the American government, an expansion of the executive branch to the point that you have senators saying, whatever the king wants, we should do.
As a legislative body, we will simply rubber stamp whatever comes across our desk.
That is not checks and balances.
Okay?
I do think we are in a unique position.
The idea that you would put tariffs, crash the dollar, destroy NATO, whatever.
We can get into the specifics.
On the other hand, and I think this is strangely a place where folks listening might gain some hope, and it's going to sound weird to start.
Please, please just give me a second.
If you are a Black person in this country, you're thinking, well, yeah, there have been times when I was not, where my ancestors and people who look like me were not considered a human, where we were considered property.
What do you think the future looked like then?
Was that a democracy?
Was that a place where human rights were abided by?
No.
If you think about Chinese exclusion, which is, as Yi Jianlin points out in her great book, and I just interviewed her two weeks ago, you can listen to that interview.
A professor at Yale talks about the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was the first sort of categorical exclusion of one people from the country.
So if you're in 1882 and you're a person of Chinese heritage living in San Francisco and hoping that your family can come and this and that and whatever, if you're an Asian person at all, This does not feel like a democracy.
It does not feel like a place that wants you.
It does not feel like a place you have rights.
It does not feel like a place where you're safe at all.
We could go into, of course, my family's history and Japanese America with incarceration during World War II. Executive Order 9066, there was no due process.
120,000 people in this country were put in camps from Arizona to Arkansas and kept there for years.
Many of them had relatives serving in the U.S. Armed Forces as they were put in a camp in the middle of nowhere.
Many of them, when they went home, had no more home, no more business, no more property because it had been taken over by their neighbors.
Here's the point is, in many ways, This country, and I'm not saying anything revolutionary here, has not been a free democracy for every and all people.
Not even close.
Dan, we just talked about the fact that you couldn't have interracial marriage and be protected before 1967. Women couldn't vote up until just a little over a century ago.
And I'll throw it to you.
Before I give my answer on why I think this is strangely a kind of window of hope, which may sound morbid and I don't mean it to, but what do you think on this question?
Where do you weigh in, you know, and what does it mean for us moving forward?
I think I largely agree with what you're saying.
I think that there is a sense in which certainly, and I'm not speaking in universal terms here, and I don't want to get lots of upset emails, but I think that there is a sense in which For a lot of white Americans, a lot of Americans who can tick a lot of privilege boxes,
this feels threatening in a way that Americans that fit that demographic, let's say, have not experienced that kind of threat, that kind of anxiety, and certainly not in their lifetimes.
Even lots of young queer folk now Lived in a post-Stonewall world.
They've lived in a post-Ellen DeGeneres world.
They've lived in a post-Will and Grace, you know, like the popular culture, broader acceptance.
And I don't mean that they've had it easy, but what I mean is that I think that what this has done is expose ranges of the population that don't have that history.
They don't have that family cultural recollection of having had these experiences, the kind that you're talking about with your own family in Japanese internment, Japanese-American internment.
And I think that that has created a sense of anxiety for many for whom it is new.
It is unprecedented.
It is not a part of the kind of cultural memory or a story that their grandparents are going to tell, you know, as they sit around at holidays or whatever.
So I think that that's a real piece of this.
I think that, and I don't know if this is exactly where you're going, and you'll tell me in a minute, but what I think that that means is that those real histories, those lived histories of people who are like, what are you talking about new?
This isn't unprecedented.
We've seen this.
That becomes the resource.
I shared a story of a video that I saw in our LA event, and I know some people will have heard this, but it was a It was a TikTok video.
I think it was a TikTok video that somebody made before the election.
And it was an African-American activist.
And he was asked, when people say, what are you going to do if Kamala Harris loses?
And he said, well, I'm going to do the same thing I would do if Kamala Harris won.
I'm going to get up and I'm going to fight for people whose rights are taken away.
I'm going to advocate on behalf of the marginalized.
And there's a sense in which...
that is American history.
That is what has been going on in American history.
And so I think if there's a positive that comes out of this, it's that recognition that, okay, yeah, a bunch of people who maybe grew up taking for granted that certain rights were locked in, that they weren't going to come under threat again.
And now that they are, or they didn't have those family histories, we can look to all the people around us who do have those histories, who do have that, that, what that, let's call it a kind of social justice muscle memory and learn from that.
And it becomes a resource that we can tap into precisely because it is not unprecedented for everybody.
Okay.
Yeah, I think that's where I'm going with this is that the way I would characterize it is we are in a unique situation in the sense that I think there are forces at that, not only in the presidency, but surrounding the president that are really willing to move us towards something like a post-constitutional America.
Yeah.
And that is unique.
We can talk about Andrew Jackson.
We can talk about Whatever.
The worst presidents we've had, Richard Nixon never got close to that, Dan.
You know what I mean?
And we never give homages on this show to George W. Bush, or we never reminisce for the days of Ronald Reagan.
We don't do that here.
But they did not get close to that end of the spectrum.
What is unique about this moment is that, that the very idea of the United States, even as Matt Taylor said in his remarks, democracy in kind of name, There is a sense where the FBI director is like, nah, he's a king.
And you're like, well, is he?
Okay.
I thought he was an elected official who represented all of us.
There's footage of Pete Hegseth this week and talking to reporters and others saying, I don't answer to any of you.
I don't answer to you reporters or anyone in this building.
I answer to Donald Trump.
And like Molly John Fass and others on Blue Sky and other places were like, actually, you answer to us, don't you?
Or yeah, it's the people.
Don't you serve the people?
What we hear now is like, no, I serve Trump.
Okay, but don't you serve the people?
Doesn't Trump serve the people?
Take an oath to defend the Constitution.
Yeah.
Isn't there a difference in a democracy between an office and an office holder?
The office is the one with the power, not the office holder as such.
Here's the point, Dan, is that's unique.
What I think that came from the discussion in San Diego that I'm holding on to Is that what's not new are people in this country facing thoroughly brutal, anti-democratic, and violent regimes that have tried to dehumanize them and dash them of all hope.
And that is where I think what you said is, therefore, what should the response be?
The response should be to learn from those people, those movements, those communities, to learn from how They, A, were able to persist, able to strategize, and able to overcome.
I'm going to interview Aaron Robertson about his new book, The Black Utopians, here in a few weeks.
And that's for me just one example of a way that one of the responses in this moment should be There's no hope.
We can't stop him.
There's nothing we can do, right?
we can take that tack or we can say, and I think this is, as you said perfectly, one of those moments where some folks need to kind of think about their privilege in this moment is, or we can learn from those in this very country who have faced down the dehumanization regimes and the violence or we can learn from those in this very country who have faced down the dehumanization So I want to go to reasons for hope.
Any final thoughts on this?
And then what is your reason for hope?
No, I think you said exactly what I was trying to intimate with this probably better than I did.
So my reason for hope is a story that made Mitch McConnell really upset.
It's about a couple, two in particular, but federal judges who are reversing decisions to retire because of the And there's concern on the right that there's going to be a wave of judges at different levels that won't retire because of Trump.
And I say this, I have to say Mitch McConnell was super upset about this.
He said, this sort of partisan behavior undermines the integrity of the judiciary.
It exposes bold Democratic blue where there should be only black robes.
And I just...
Mitch...
Cool story, Mitch.
Cool story, Mitch.
Yeah, Mitch, who's been so into a nonpartisan judicial branch, who had nothing to do with making sure that a bunch of red-robed justices are on the Supreme Court.
But I took hope from that, that there are people in the judiciary who are like, you know what?
I'm going to stick this out for longer because if we step down, we know what's going to come from that.
So I found that to be a really hopeful story this week.
I agree.
I had something similar, and I feel like this is something that we need to say, and I want to say this the right way.
Dan, I have noticed a thoroughly different climate surrounding the impending Trump presidency than last time.
Last time Trump was elected, there was this sense of like, He might become president, but we're not going to accept the legitimacy.
And that doesn't mean not saying he didn't win fair and square or whatever.
It meant saying he didn't win the popular vote.
It meant that there were so many questions about what happened with Russiagate.
And it also meant James Comey.
But there was this feeling, at least morally and emotionally, You might become president, but you're not somebody who has the upper hand.
You're not the majority.
You don't have the will of the majority of the people.
You lost the popular vote by millions to Hillary Clinton.
Millions more of us voted for her than for you.
Now it's like, well, this is what the country wants.
What are we supposed to do?
And SCOTUS gave him immunity.
SCOTUS gave him immunity and oh my goodness.
Dan is like losing his mind right now.
I'm just coughing, Dan.
I'm a human being, okay?
God, grow up.
We accept you with your infirmities, Brad.
Yeah.
And there's also this sense of like, well, there's nothing you can do to stop him.
I mean, who's going to get in his way?
And I have seen this over and over and over again.
And I think what I want to say is like, and I've seen this online and I've seen this from other people, is like there were so many times In the previous administration that he lost.
There were so many times that courts at every level ruled against him, that people doing their job in the federal bureaucracy stood up, that the will of the people that made a difference, that protests and other things.
And I just want to reiterate that my reason for hope Is the fact that judges like this are not retiring.
And there are so many cogs and levers and different components to the American democratic machine that now is not a time to just say, well, it's over.
He's intimidating journalists and Morning Joe has already kissed the ring, so I guess we should give up.
Elon Musk is out here saying he's in charge of some new government agency that doesn't even exist, and he's going to defund ACLU and everyone online has no authority, right?
Doesn't even get any federal money.
How are you going to defund that?
What are you talking about?
My point is, this does feel different than last time.
I'm not going to deny that.
But it's not a moment to say, well, it's over.
It's just, we have a king now.
It's a moment to say, where are the places where we can strategize, right?
And not allow a full-scale descent into illiberalism and to something worse.
Anyway, just wanted to get that off my chest.
All right, friends.
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