Weekly Roundup: Luigi Mangione and the End of Civilization
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Brad and Dan critique Donald Trump's grocery store anecdotes and his failed claims on food prices. They then explore the concept of coalition-building to counter Trump's administration, touching upon current events including Luigi Mangione's radicalization by pain and the killing of CEO Brian Thompson, dissect a Adrienne LaFrance's article in the Atlantic on societal violence and 'de-civilization,' and analyze Pete Hegseth's controversial beliefs about the military.
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Thank you.
I tell the story about a woman who, an old woman, an old woman, no money, went to a grocery store, had three apples.
She put them down on the counter and she looked and she saw the price and she said, would you excuse me?
And she walked one of the apples back to the refrigerator and came back to pay for the two apples.
And she left with two apples.
And the woman at the counter said that was so sad.
And when I heard about the story, I said, that should never happen.
That's President-elect Donald Trump talking about food prices and the grocery store.
Not only does he reveal he knows nothing about a grocery store because he thinks the apples are stored in the refrigerator, but just yesterday he rolled back the idea that he would lower the price of groceries for average Americans, saying it's very hard and he can't guarantee anything.
Today we talk about the opening for a new approach to coalition building under Trump's administration, a way to fight back the cacistocracy and the oligarchy, the network of billionaires he's putting in charge of the country to destroy the systems that help everyday people.
We do so in a larger conversation about Luigi Maggioni and the killing of CEO Brian Thompson.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is Straight White American Jesus Weekly Roundup.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
Brad Onishi here with my co-host, Dan Miller.
How are you?
Who are you?
What's going on this week?
I am Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Yeah, I'm probably like you, Brad.
Like, it's nice to see Brad.
It's nice to have a chance to talk.
It's Not always nice, the stuff we have to talk about, right?
Another week, another set of crazy stuff, crazy stuff that's like the new normal.
Violence, I think a lot of ambiguity around violence and celebrations of violence and condemnations of violence and yeah, all kinds of stuff.
So glad to be here, glad to be with you and have a chance to help talk it out and glad to join our listeners as we do that.
Yeah, I agree.
You know, it's funny.
Sometimes Wednesday or Thursday, I'm like, oh, I don't know if I have it in me to do weekly roundup this week.
And then I inevitably do.
And when we sit down, I'm so excited actually just to have a chance to talk about things because so many things are distressing and, you know, make me full of anger and rage and everything else.
It's been a hard week for me.
I, like, threw my back out.
I've been sick.
I feel...
Man, you know, Dan, I'm not going to bore everybody because everyone came here to hear about things, but...
There's times in your 40s where you're like, I feel good.
I feel 29. I'm good.
Let's go surfing.
And then after surfing, we'll go to the rock climbing gym and then maybe I'll do yoga.
And then there's times when you're 43 where you're like, I don't know if I can bend over to get that cup my daughter just dropped and I'm going to try to pick it up with my foot.
So, you know, I feel like that's just life in your 40s.
You know, there used to be that thing about, you know, you're older when you won't bend over to pick up anything that's worth less than a quarter.
And now I'm like, nah, let's call it a five.
There's a $5 bill on the ground.
Maybe I'll pick it up.
But otherwise, it's next person can have it.
Like, you know, yeah.
So I always joke that mine is if you can hurt yourself sleeping.
If I sleep wrong, I can't turn my head, can't walk, right?
So yeah, and I've got a few years in you.
So I am your future, Brad.
Look at it and love it.
That's the new t-shirt.
I am your future.
That's the, yeah.
I feel like you practiced that.
Like you're being paid by someone to advertise that.
That was amazing.
That was really, really good.
I wish I was being paid by somebody to advertise that.
Yeah, seriously.
All right, y'all.
So we are going to talk about Luigi Maggioni and the killing of the UnitedHealth CEO, Brian Thompson.
We're then going to talk about Pete Hegseth and the military and also just the general target that Trump's nominees and Trump himself have put on immigrants and queer folks, including and especially trans folks.
So we will go there too with some updates in that whole arena.
But we are going to start today with Maggioni and I think the story that has really captivated the nation this week.
I think, Dan, in a media landscape that we have now where everyone is so fragmented, it's hard to think of a story basically being universal, like reaching every corner of the internet and broadcast news and everything else.
But this one really has.
And I feel like I haven't done story time in a while, and there's going to be a part of me here that wants to really get moving.
But I feel like we're also going to have a chance to dissect an article that came out in the last two days and do something we haven't done in a while, which is kind of our grad seminar.
Let's look at key quotes and break them down, mode of operating, which, Dan, I really miss.
And if there's something I miss about grad school, it's that, right?
Sitting in a room, breaking down texts.
It is really, really enjoyable to me.
All right, here's what's going on, friends.
You all know by now that the alleged killer of the CEO, Brian Thompson, the healthcare CEO, is a young guy named Luigi Maggioni.
He has kind of captured the internet.
He has polarized people, but some people are treating him like a folk hero.
He's saying that he's very good looking.
He's young.
He is something like Robin Hood, something like somebody who, you know, deserves to be somehow emulated or revered and so on.
One of the questions I'm sure some of you have, and I know that some of you already know this, but I think it's worth repeating, is what does the motive seem to be here?
And Robert Evans at It Could Happen Here said it this way a couple days ago.
His friend lived with him at an intentional community for digital workers in Honolulu in 2022. Confirms that Luigi suffered an injury shortly after taking a basic surfing class after moving there.
This laid him up in bed for about a week, unable to move, and his friends had to help him with a special bed for the pain.
In general, we have ample, ample confirmation that he was someone who dealt with a series of escalating health issues that changed him from an extremely active, physically fit young man into somebody who felt like they were no longer able to do or enjoy the things they had previously been able to do and enjoy.
Now, this is most of what we know about the health history of Luigi Maggioni as of December 10th.
One of the things that, I mean, we can go into his manifesto.
We can go into more here.
But I'll just summarize.
He seems to be somebody who had back pain for a long time.
It seems to have gotten worse over the last couple of years.
And that, in many ways, radicalized him.
The episode that they did over at It Could Happen Here was Luigi Maggioni was radicalized by pain.
And I want to hold on to that phrase.
I think it's a very apt phrase, and I think they did a great job with that over at that It Could Happen Here pod and their whole outfit.
He was radicalized by pain.
We can verify, they say, that Mezzioni suffered from chronic back pain.
He had five different books in his Goodreads that he read about dealing with back pain and healing from back pain as well as other chronic health issues.
If he is the shooter, then we can confirm he also chose to act out by targeting an insurance CEO. Dan, I think as soon as people heard us start talking about this, are we going to take sides?
Are we going to sit here and say that he's a hero and he's this or that?
I want to try to do something with a little nuance, which is something we've always gone for on this show.
I want to try to analyze something that I think is really important about this whole set of events.
I'm not going to celebrate murder.
I'm not going to sit here and say that what he did was good or right.
I'm not going to condone random interpersonal violence, and I'm not going to encourage my kids to look up to him.
Okay.
Now, saying all of that, Brian Thompson was a human being.
We can say that because of the role he played in the health insurance system, That he was perpetuating some of the worst harms of that system and so on and so forth.
There are kids though today that don't have a dad and so on.
I'm not going to sit here and say, I'm totally, you know, free Luigi.
I'm not going to do that, okay?
What I am interested in is, however, and I want to legitimize and I want to recognize and I want to see what it means.
Is the overwhelming outpouring of grief, anger, sadness, and pain by those who've either sympathized with him or celebrated him.
Dan, there have been so many memes, so many tweets, so many blue sky, whatever a blue sky is, skeet.
It's called a skeet, which I'm just not...
Dan?
We have to draw the line.
Am I supposed to call it a skeet?
Is that what we're doing?
I don't know.
That seems...
There's just a 90s kid in me that doesn't feel like that's appropriate, but whatever.
People have basically, you know...
Used this set of events to express their pain, right?
If Luigi was radicalized by pain, people have used his actions to express their pain and basically express the tragedies and ravages of our healthcare system, okay?
And what I want to notice and what I want to analyze is not whether or not he should have done this.
I don't want to ask that question, and it's not a question that I think is open for me.
I don't think that we should encourage people to sneak up on others behind them and shoot them, if that is what he did.
You know, that's what he allegedly did.
But what I am interested in is, this led to Dannon outpouring, right?
It felt like it was some kind of event that people, it was a canvas, it was a landscape, it was something where people could go find themselves, throw themselves, project themselves.
I'm going to stop.
If I get going, you're going to not be on the mic here for another 50 minutes.
So, you know, any further reactions just to the events themselves, to what I'm saying, to the kind of internet culture that's now surrounding this whole set of events and so on?
Yeah, I mean, it's not even just so-called internet culture, right?
You had the mainstream legacy media stuff reaching out and saying, we want to hear your stories about, you know, the healthcare system or how you feel about this.
And they got just flooded, you know, again, inundated with people who, even if they didn't, like, sort of condone this, they felt like they understood it.
They felt like this was somebody who reached a breaking point that I think a lot of people, maybe I would say it this way, talk about being radicalized by pain.
It appears that he reached some breaking point that a lot of people could imagine reaching.
They might not live it out.
They might not carry it out.
I think most people won't.
And again, we wouldn't condone that.
But I think for a lot of people, they understood this.
I don't know if that makes sense.
And it's a distinction I make sometimes for my students that I think is worth looking at here of the difference between explaining something and justifying it.
And I think that's what we're trying to do is explain this to try to understand it.
We're not We're justifying it.
We're not telling people, everybody who's been denied a claim by something to go out and, you know, kill somebody.
But I think that there's, I think what this does is it makes an act that in the abstract is outlandish and violent and something that nobody, you know, some regular people would never do.
And I think there are a lot of people that say, you know what?
I don't know if my circumstances were different, if I am radically different from that.
I don't know.
This isn't an act that feels completely foreign to me, that feels impossible.
And I think that, I don't know if I'm articulating that well, but I think that that's a strange, affective place to be.
And if people are listening and you've ever been in that space where there's something that, in the abstract, you'd be like, nope, not me, not ever.
And then you find yourself in a circumstance where you're like, oh, We're good to go.
I think that's a really good way to think about it is people may not have, even if they have been radicalized by pain, they may never get to a place where they're going to do what he did.
But the understanding, I'm going to make a really stupid example, and I don't mean it to be blasé, but I hope it makes sense here.
Dan, I got really little kids, right?
Three in one.
And once in a while, my wife and I get brave and we're like, let's go to some diner or something where we can eat dinner and there'll be something for the three-year-old to eat.
We're not doing fine dining or something.
We're not going to try to do anything ridiculous.
But is there a diner that won't mind if there's like a three-year-old coloring and they can eat chicken nuggets and...
And there's been times, Dan, where it's so hard to even sit down and talk or get the kids that you're just tempted to give the kid your phone.
Like, hey, I'm going to give my daughter my phone.
Let her watch some Cocomelon so I can eat my, like, you know, whatever I'm eating.
And I've rarely done it.
But I can tell you that 29-year-old Brad with no kids and, you know, total arrogance about him would have been like, oh yeah, when I have kids, we're going to like, we're going to do this and that.
By the time my kids are four, they'll speak French because I speak French, my wife speaks Arabic.
They'll be like trilingual and we'll never, we probably won't have a TV in the house.
And they won't see a screen until they're nine.
And now you're like, dude, I just want to eat this salad for six minutes.
I'm going to give the kid the phone.
And when I see parents out for dinner now, I'm just like, yep.
We try not to do that.
I totally try not to give the kid the iPad.
But I get it, man.
And I'm not mad at you.
There's no sense here of thinking that I don't get why you're doing that.
I think what you're getting at here is that the outpouring of grief and anger and resentment is the ravages of our healthcare system, the amount of pain people go through, they see their kids go through, they see their parents go through, they see their loved ones go through, because claims have been denied.
Dan, we live in a country, this is according to the American Hospital Association, This is a July 10, 2024 figure.
U.S. residents owe at least $220 billion in medical debt.
Approximately 14 million people, 6% of adults in the U.S. owe over $1,000.
3 million people owe medical debt of more than $10,000.
So I think that's what we're talking about here in terms of the, like, why would you have this kind of outpouring, okay?
I mean, and this coincides with Anthem Blue Cross threatening to put limits on the anesthesia coverage.
coverage.
So if you were in anesthesia for surgery and it goes certain amounts of time, Anthem Blue Cross is going to be like, yeah, your surgery for hip replacement took six hours.
We can really only cover four.
So that last two hours of the anesthesia at $1,900 an hour, that's on you.
Sorry.
You could tell them to hurry up maybe or whatever.
So this is all I think why I don't think we have to go over this.
I mean, we can talk about women dying in childbirth.
We can talk about the fact that if you are sexually assaulted, you often go to the hospital to get care and you have a $4,000 bill because maybe you don't have the right insurance.
You don't have insurance at all.
Your insurance won't cover it.
I could go on and on.
Yeah, just to jump in on that, because what I think you're highlighting is one of the overarching things are the big structural issues, right?
We all know, I've talked about it, you've talked about it, everybody knows and experiences that the U.S. is the only major wealthy country that has the kind of healthcare system we have, where it's essentially for-profit healthcare.
If you're lucky, it's subsidized somewhat by your employer, but that's the main option.
And people complain about Obamacare, but until Obamacare came along, that was it, right?
There were places where you couldn't even get it.
Private individual health care if you needed it.
But here's the point, and this is part of what you're talking about, is everybody can identify with the denied claims.
Everybody can identify with caps on things that are ridiculous.
Everybody can identify with the bureaucratic hoops that you have to jump through when you need pre-approval for stuff, but you need it every time.
And the long waits and the hit this button if you want us to call you back instead of waiting.
And then all of that stuff.
But here's the thing.
In a for-profit system, those are all features, not bugs.
And I think that's the brokenness of the system that so many people experience is that the purpose of a for-profit company is profit.
Insurance companies that are for-profit companies exist to maximize profit.
They don't exist to provide healthcare.
That's a product that they sell, and if it becomes unprofitable, they'll quit selling it.
So, in my view, all the bureaucratic hoops...
They're features for them.
You are less likely to keep pushing for what you need if you've got to jump through a bunch of hoops to do it.
Here's another stupid example.
Not healthcare related.
This is my cell phone company.
Every single month, there is this charge that comes up on our bill.
Every month, we spend like an hour on the phone with the company.
Every month, they remove it.
It's not supposed to be there.
They assure us that it's removed for good.
And every month, it's back.
I am cynical enough, Brad, that I am quite convinced that the reason it's back all the time is because lots of people are going to give up calling for an hour every month, and they're just going to pay the extra $10.
And multiply that by, I don't know, a few thousand, a few million.
It's a lot of money.
So I think that that's one of the big structural features that's here.
And I think one of the things that makes this, as you say, as we're saying, kind of understandable for people is...
This person who is targeted represents more than that person.
They represent the entire industry.
They represent all of this kind of shapeless, amorphous rage that people have.
And I think that everybody who's experienced this, the concrete examples you're giving, we could go on and on and on.
But I think that that's the part that makes this feel sort of bottomless.
Is that it's a structural feature of our healthcare system that just, there's no sign that it's ever going anywhere.
And I think that this is another driving force of this.
Well, and those comments really set up what I want to do next, which is I want to talk about an article by the executive editor of The Atlantic called Decivilization May Already Be Underway as a reaction to this whole internet phenomenon.
And then I want to talk about, Dan, how I think that this opened my eyes a little bit To ways that one might think of the next phase of resistance to and kind of fight against the Trump administration and authoritarianism.
And I think that may sound weird and you may think, Brad, you know, you're stretching here, but I promise I'm going to try to make that connection.
Let's take a break and we'll come back and keep going.
Okay, Dan.
Adrienne LaFrance.
I knew I was going to say it.
I knew I was going to say it.
I don't know how to say Adrienne's last name.
I don't.
Because everything in me wants to say LaFrance.
And you're already laughing that I said it that way.
I'm laughing because we had this conversation, right?
We had this conversation in our supplemental about not knowing how to pronounce things and how, for me, it's always that I read them and I don't know how to actually say them.
So...
No, here we are with a prime example of not being sure how to pronounce the name.
I mean, I know how I would say this in France, but like, how does...
And I've never heard Adrian's last name pronounced in English.
I'm not cool enough to hang out at Atlantic dinner parties and cocktail hours and stuff, so I don't know.
But anyway, it could be La France.
It could be La France.
Maybe it's La France.
I don't know how you say this in the United States of America.
I'm not making fun of the name.
I'm saying I don't know...
How one is supposed to render this name in English.
Okay.
This article, Dan, created a sense of complete outrage online.
There were so many people angry.
And I think this is an article that you can read the headline and just get super angry and start being snarky without reading it.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like this article at all, and I don't like the argument here.
But I want to go through some key points and see what you and I come up with.
So here's the first bit.
The line between a normal functioning society and catastrophic de-civilization can be crossed with a single act of mayhem.
This is why, for those who've studied violence closely, the brazen murder of a CEO in Midtown Manhattan, and more important, the brazenness of the cheering reaction to his execution amounts to a blinking and blaring warning signal for a society that has become already too inured to bloodshed in the conditions that exacerbate it.
Now, I do think there's some nuance in this article, and I do think there's a little bit of trying to recognize certain factors and conditions.
But I will say, Dan, that this opening line did not evoke sympathy for me for the argument because you're talking about one event leading to catastrophic breakdown of society.
And the example here is, of course, what happened in Manhattan this past couple of weeks.
And the cheering reaction to that.
It's the same week Daniel Penny was exonerated for killing a man on the subway.
And as many people have pointed out, we live in a society where people are, you know, cheered on for killing protesters.
Does anyone remember Kyle Rittenhouse?
So there is, I'm not going to lie, from paragraph one, seemingly to me a disconnect.
There is one of those moments where you're like, this sounds like an elite.
Who is zooming in to American life.
And there's a lot of folks who are going to think about school shootings and the killing of migrants, the killing of trans people.
I mean, all kinds of murders and violence that is cheered on that is not this one.
And so that's my reaction to that first paragraph.
We're doing our grad seminar.
You want to jump into the conversation here?
Yeah, I agree.
It was going to make essentially the same point that it reads like the elite who suddenly scared shitless because, oh, this was an elite who was shot.
This wasn't kids in a public school where I'm not going to send my kids because I'm an elite person.
This wasn't somebody on the subway that I don't ride because I'm an elite person.
This isn't somebody who lives in a dangerous neighborhood that I'm not going to live in because I'm an elite person.
I think there was a strong dose of that, as you say, And, you know, I think it's always worth questioning when people decry, quote unquote, violence, what violence is being decried and what violence is being overlooked as just the price of being an American.
And you listed a whole bunch of those.
And on the political right, many of those are actively celebrated at present.
So I think that I shared that same disconnect with you when I first read it.
I was like, oh, so this is the act.
Of de-civilization.
This is the warning signal, not the mass shootings that don't even make the news anymore, not the targeting of migrants, not the threat that's going on right now that, oh, well, hey, Donald Trump says we might just need to deport families, including the citizens.
The whole family might need to be deported.
All of that.
None of that's de-civilization, but this event is.
That question, I think, of what makes somebody take an event as the seminal defining event, that's always a point that should be questioned, and I think that it stands out here.
Well, Lindsey Graham saying that, you know, should turn Palestine into a parking lot.
So, you know, come on.
Okay.
This leads to a paragraph a little further down in which the author defines what they mean by civilizing.
These conditions and the conditions she mentions before this are wealth disparity, which I agree with, declining trust in democratic institutions, yes, heightened sense of victimhood, intense partisan estrangement, rapid demographic change, Flourishing conspiracy theories, violent and dehumanizing rhetoric.
So these are things that can create conditions like that of the Gilded Age or ours and a society that is kind of on the brink of unraveling.
These conditions run counter to spurts of civilizing.
Don't think I ever thought I would say the words spurts of civilizing.
That would be a really good ska band, Dan Miller, if you want to talk to me later about a little side project.
Spurts of civilizing, in which people's worldviews generally become more neutral, more empirical, and less fearful or emotional.
I hate this sentence so much.
I am trying to be professional, and I'm not trying to like, but...
I am so suspicious of the word civilizing to start because it carries such colonial overtones of British, you know, India, the Southeast Indian Company, the- White man's burden.
Yeah.
I mean, all of it.
I mean, you know, Algeria.
So civilizing to me is a word that I'm always like, do we need to be?
Is that the word?
Is civilizing really the word to use?
And then when you define it as people who are neutral, empirical, less fearful and emotional, it's I totally I understand what you mean by empirical.
Yes, I'm somebody who would like us to be empirical in terms of following science when it comes to vaccines and pandemics and and gun violence.
I don't know.
But You want people to be neutral?
What does that even mean?
I mean, Dan, we spent so much time talking about emotion and the disconnect with emotion that leftists and progressives, and leftists is the wrong word, mainly liberals and neoliberals have with the American public.
Anyway, I'm going to stop.
I hate this sentence.
What do you think?
It's why I laugh.
My students, like, in some of my classes, it turns into this kind of Running joke, because they like to see me just sort of go apoplectic about a sentence that some author writes or something, and this is one of those that would do that.
I often say this, like...
I don't want to fall too far into the rabbit hole here, but I think that neutrality is maybe the most pernicious concept there is when it comes to talking about our social life together, when it comes to thinking about ethics, when it comes to thinking about politics, because I don't think that neutrality is a thing.
I don't think it's real.
And we know this.
We know that being, for example, empirical or data-driven or saying, I don't know, should we mandate vaccines?
Maybe let's understand the science of it and public health and so forth.
If there's anything the last few years have shown us, there's nothing neutral about that, right?
Anything can be politicized.
And so even the notion that we should value all lives equally, that's not about neutrality, right?
Because there are lots of people who don't value all lives equally.
The notion that, I don't know, everybody should be able to use a locker room or a bathroom where they feel safe that fits their identity, right?
A place that they don't have to worry about being assaulted or accosted or something like that.
That's not neutral, right?
That's a highly, I don't know if partisan is the right word, but it's a highly invested position to take.
What neutrality often does is mask the fact that social life is always about power dynamics.
It's always about the distribution of resources.
It's always about who gets to count as part of that society and who doesn't, who has access to rights and who don't.
And whenever I hear somebody decry a loss of neutrality, what I think that they're actually decrying is some structure of privilege that has now been threatened that was masquerading as neutral.
So I'm really, really suspicious when I read that.
I can't say all of that is present here, but if we had a lot more time and wanted to dig into this, I think we could.
So I'm so suspicious every time I hear appeals to neutrality or objectivity for all of those reasons.
Yeah, and it doesn't get that much better, I don't think.
So, author goes on to say, over the centuries, humanity has become more civilized, largely drifting away from violent conflict revolution.
And to be clear, I mean, civilized in the spirit of Elias' definition, the process by which the use of violence shifted to the state and de-civilization to suggest a condition in which it shifts back to individuals.
So just to be clear, if you read the article, the main source here is a 1939 book by a medieval scholar, a scholar of medieval Europe.
So, A, there's been a lot of books written about medieval Europe since 1939.
And it really is one of the, if not the only source that's referenced in the entire article.
Nonetheless, this idea of violence being shifted to the state, I think, reflects the privilege you're talking about.
Because you're basically saying, well, society is civilized as long as the violence that the state perpetrates is not aimed at me or people like me.
It may be aimed at those incarcerated at rates that are disproportionately high.
It may be aimed at those who the state sends...
To bomb or to drone.
It could be any number of people.
But as long as the state is doing the violence, it's okay.
There's nothing here that questions whether or not the state itself might be uncivilized because of the way that it commits acts of violence, whether internally or abroad.
So I think that's there.
The author goes on then to talk about society reaching a point at which people publicly celebrate the death of a stranger murdered in the street.
That is the point, Dan, of de-civilization.
And they do mention January 6th, the U.S. Capitol, and people playing that down.
But I'll just go to the end because we're going to run out of time.
So, you cannot fix a violent society by simply...
Let me...
Let me actually read a different quote because it's just too important.
So let me just back up.
Here we go.
In the weeks after a sharply divided election ahead of the return to power of a president who has repeatedly promised to unleash a wave of state violence and targeted retribution.
Sorry, a wave of what kind of violence?
Yeah.
Civilized.
State violence.
Civilized violence.
Yeah.
Civilized.
Civilized violence and targeted retribution against his enemies.
Also civilized, since he is the state.
Americans have a choice to make about the kind of society we are building together.
Now, who's the we and who are the Americans, if not the state?
Is the state not the Americans?
Okay.
After all, civilization is, at its core, a question of how people choose to bond with one another and what behaviors we deem permissible among ourselves.
So, the state is civilized if it does violence, but we have to be civilized apart from the state and bond with one another and among ourselves, like some kids in a treehouse whose parents are gone for the weekend, you know, figuring out what's permissible and what's not.
There really is this sense here of the kids need to behave if we want civilization to survive because the state is going to do what it needs to do to survive.
And that may mean violence and retribution, as just mentioned.
But we are the ones that really need to stick together here and not let things get uncivil.
Let me read one more sentence, Dan, and I'll shut up and it's all yours.
The process of de-civilization may begin with profound distrust in institutions and government.
But children, sorry, the children was me.
That distrust gets far worse in a society where people brutalize one another.
Take it away.
I don't even know where to start.
So if I was looking, I mean, you mentioned grad seminars, right?
One of the things you would do is, one of the things I say, this is not grad seminars.
I work with undergraduate students.
But one of the things I often say is, don't make huge, grandiose claims you could not possibly defend, right?
I teach in religious studies.
You teach in religious studies, which means you've gotten essays, Brad, that start the same way that mine do sometimes from students to say, for as long as human beings have stared into the sky, they have pondered the...
I'm like, stop.
Stop.
You don't get to say things about all human beings.
You don't get to say things about all time.
You don't get to make big statements about...
Right?
So...
What the hell is civilization here?
We've seen it's equated with the state.
Here it seems to be equated with the people, which seems to imply some sort of notion of popular government or maybe democracy.
That would lead into what Rousseau and others identify as the paradox of democracy and the people, right?
That a democracy can only work with the authorization of the people, but the people itself is constituted by democracy.
So you have this kind of chicken-egg thing that comes along.
We're making fun about the statement of Trump, right?
He's going to use state violence.
If you're going to say that violence by the state doesn't count as uncivilized violence or somehow not violence, how can you criticize Trump if he has the mechanisms of the state?
On and on and on and on.
Another sentence that you didn't get a chance to throw in there says, you cannot fix a violent society simply by eliminating the factors that made it deteriorate.
Really?
It seems like that would be a really good place to start fixing a violent society, to me.
You identify the factors that made it deteriorate, and you address those factors.
I mean, maybe it's not going to be automatic and things like that, but it sure sounds like that would be something that you could do.
So just on and on and on.
This is just a bunch of, I think, you know, words that sound good.
Civilization, violence, choosing to bond with one another, what behaviors we deem permissible among ourselves and so forth.
A last point, back to this point about elitism and what counts, is a lot of Americans seem to deem mass shootings as permissible.
They don't want to do anything to stop them.
A lot of Americans deem transphobia and violence against queer people as permissible.
They don't want to do anything about it.
Right?
So don't give me this stuff that that just automatically makes us a civilized society just because there's some sort of majority view or consensus about what is permissible among ourselves.
That's why I say this is not about neutrality.
Or any of that.
My vein's going to pop on my forehead, so I'll throw it back to you to let you go apoplectic now.
When a police officer shoots Philando Castile.
Yeah.
When a police officer shoots any number of folks that...
Breonna Taylor.
When a vigilante shoots Trayvon Martin.
I mean, and I guess we could go on and on.
I think that the takeaway for me is...
This felt a let them eat cake kind of essay.
And we can bemoan this essay and decry it, Dan.
I think I want to just, before we go to another break, do some takeaways and then get into another story.
What did the Luigi Mangione story, the CEO, Brian Thompson story, what did this cause me to reflect on?
It caused me to reflect on the fact that I think, and I'm going to put myself in this camp, That because Trump won the popular vote, there has been a sense of impotence for those who are anti-Trump, whether they are Republican, never Trumpers, whether they are liberal, whether they are progressive, whether they are leftist.
There has been this sense of what are we supposed to do now?
He won the popular vote.
And he's threatening to do all this stuff.
So Morning Joe and Mark Zuckerberg and everyone else are just going to kiss the ring.
And Elon Musk is over here saying he's going to do all this and that.
So we're done.
We can't do anything.
One of the things that I think, thinking about CEOs, thinking about people who make lots and lots of money every year, Trump's cabinet is full of billionaires.
We know about Elon Musk.
We know about Vivek Ramaswamy.
But Linda McMahon, Howard Lutnick, Doug Burgum, Scott Besant, Jared Isaacman, Stephen Whitcoff, Warren Stevens, all billionaires.
More billionaires than...
I mean, it looks like a billionaire's club.
We are really starting to see the outlines of a kind of Putin-esque inner circle.
That if you are an oligarch with a billion, billions of dollars in a kind of empire, then you are going to be part of the Trump orbit.
And Trump likes that because he thinks that will bring him status and money.
Okay?
He has said that...
He said this came out yesterday in his interview.
He's not sure he can lower food prices, which is the whole...
Spiel he gave people.
That it's hard to lower food prices.
Okay?
I mean, we played at the top.
He's the only one who could do it.
Where he said, there was a woman who went to buy apples and then she couldn't afford them, so she went back and put them in the refrigerator.
And I was like, tell me you've never been to a grocery store before there, Richie Rich, because you think the apples are in the refrigerator at the grocery store.
Good one.
Man of the people.
The tariffs will hurt everyone except the 1%.
We don't have to go over that, I don't think.
Dan, here's what I wrote down this morning.
The Trump administration is going to fundamentally change this country from tariffs to using the FBI and DOJ as a personal weapon to making money out of Saudi Arabia and other Middle East countries while supposedly working as the American diplomats in negotiations with them geopolitically, promising billionaire investors they don't have to abide by environmental regulations.
If they contribute a certain amount of money to the American economy, putting anti-diversity people in charge of the Civil Rights Department, attacking the media, and so on.
They're talking about rolling back FDIC protections, which comes right out of the New Deal and the Great Depression.
Why do you have that?
Because of catastrophic events.
And RFK, I read this morning, wants to repeal the legality of the polio vaccine.
So one way to interpret Trump is this.
I think there's a two axis thing for me that is really being shown to us as we get ready for the next Trump administration.
Trump is always and Chris Hayes, I think, said this, and I want to make sure I recognize that.
Is system versus anti-system.
He's going to pick the person who is anti-system to run the system.
That's his way of inversion, right?
And then the other factor involved is always, what can I steal?
It's a cacistocracy.
It's a, I want to get as much as I, I want to extract as much as I can out of the system.
Putin has done that.
We've seen that over and over again with autocrats.
They take so many of the resources away from their nations.
And, however, one of the ways to do that and one of the ways to maintain power is to put people in charge of the system who are anti the way the system works.
What is the takeaway here?
I'll give you one takeaway and then I'll just see what you think and we can move on to the next story.
What I want to take seriously, and just everyone brace yourself, I am not, this is not a New York Times piece where I'm at a diner in Iowa being like, we should listen to Trump voters.
Liberals.
I'm eating a grilled cheese, talking to Hank.
Hey there, Hank.
All right.
Tell me why you voted for him.
Oh, you hate immigrants?
I'm listening.
Tell me again.
Okay.
Nope.
Not doing that.
I'm not doing it.
Okay?
Here's what I am taking seriously.
And this comes from the reactions to what happened with Brian Thompson and Luigi Maggioni.
This is also a reaction to people who think Trump will help, is that for a lot of folks, The system doesn't work.
And I think there's a way that if you said to me, what died when Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris lost the elections?
It was the idea, and especially Kamala Harris, that you could run somebody who instilled joy and hope, who instilled togetherness and solidarity, somebody who represents the country as it will be going forward, mixed race, interfaith marriage, a diverse background.
And it's not enough because the fundamental systems don't work.
People don't make enough money.
Our healthcare system is dehumanizing and it is degrading.
The ways that the economy, the ways that our senses of what's important, the way that we take care of our bodies have broken down.
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of people who recognize RFK Jr. for the kind of like absolute threat he is to people's health and public health in general.
But when you have somebody being taken seriously to like, who's like, yeah, let's, should we get rid of that polio vaccine?
Should we stop like putting fluoride in the water?
What you have is a sentiment, at least of certain people that are like, the system is broken.
So here's my takeaway.
I don't have much time left.
I've been dialoguing.
I'm sorry, or monologuing.
I'm sorry.
The Trump second term is going to break our system, at least in parts.
I'm not saying the whole thing, but there are going to be parts that are fundamentally changed if not collapsed.
Our goal now is to envision a better system that works for more people in more humane ways.
And that is where the mandate comes from.
We are going to see very clearly that it is the 1% and dictator Trump versus everyone.
If you're a billionaire, if you're Mark Zuckerberg, if you're Elon Musk, if you are Linda McMahon, if you are whoever, you get a pass and you can be in the inner circle and none of the stuff that's going to hurt everyone else, the tariffs, the higher food prices, the rolling back of public health, the destroying of civil rights, the destroying of education, it won't hurt them and their families.
And we're going to see the kind of things that happen in autocracies and other places all over the world, which is there is a sense of 1% versus 99%.
And we already had a present to this in Occupy and in Bernie Sanders and some of the movements of the last 15 years.
I just am wondering in this moment, I don't have definitive answers and I need to shut up.
I'm just wondering in this moment if we can't say this is the opening for a new American kind of coalition of thinking about a system that works for everyone.
And I know some of you are going to email me, you're like, Brad, I've been an activist working on this for 20 years and I'm going to say, I know, I'm not inventing anything.
I'm not trying to say that I have a new idea, please, 9.99, just come and, you know.
What I'm trying to say is there's a zeitgeist And there is a political opening here that may have not been opened before where more people in the next year or two years or three years are going to see the systems that help them collapse.
And there's a chance they might say, what do we do about that?
And if you can tell a story That offers to build a different system, then there's a chance, right, for not only getting past Trump, but getting to some kind of new understanding of what it means to live in this country.
Okay, I'm done.
I feel like Aaron Sorkin.
I'm not trying to write some sort of West Wing BS, but there you go.
There's my takeaway for today, okay?
All I want to add to that is the MAGA movement has worked remarkably well of having a billionaire and a kind of oligarchical model of society and managing to convince millions of Americans on a deep, visceral, fundamental level that that's not what it is. visceral, fundamental level that that's not what it is.
And they've been able to do that by tapping into other emotions, right?
Anger, fear, resentment, right?
Don't look at the oligarchs and the wealthy corporations doing these things.
Look at the brown people at the border or look at the, I don't know, the kid who wants to play soccer on the girls team and not the boys team because she identifies as a girl or whatever, right?
I think what you're opening up or the big contingent factor here is, I think two features.
Number one, will things, all the promises of that MAGA movement If they don't materialize, will that be recognized by its supporters?
And that might sound like an obvious point, but people have a huge vested interest in political scientists, political psychologists will say this, people have a huge vested interest in not seeing the failings of the party and politicians that they vote for.
Right?
So when food prices don't go down, as you say, Trump backpedaling and being like, oh, it turns out it's really hard to bring down the food.
I know I said I could do that.
I'm the only one who could, and I would do it on day one and whatever.
But now that you've elected me, I'm resetting expectations here.
Is that going to resonate with those folks as the truth that it is that this dude didn't have anything to sell you, number one?
But number two, are those who are not part of the manga movement going to figure out how to tap into that, how to give shape to that, right?
You described this as an opening.
I think that's a great description.
The question is, will the people who have the power and the ability to make use of that opening, will they effectively do that?
Or will they not?
And I think only time is gonna sort of tell us that because I'm with you.
I don't think Trump can deliver on the promises he made for a number of different reasons.
Will that create enough space Within those who voted for him for some alternative account, some alternative political vision, some alternative model of the social to take root and be cultivated, and will people rise up who can cultivate it?
I think those are the two really big questions that open up out of this.
And I think that there's great promise there.
I think that there's also a lot of peril there, a lot of chances for missed opportunities.
We mentioned Occupy Wall Street.
Yeah, where is it now?
Or I remember years ago, I was thinking about this today, and I'll close on this sort of depressing note, but there was a film, I had to look it up, it was 2002, called John Q, Denzel Washington.
He's a working class guy, his son has a heart problem, and coverage is denied, and he takes over the hospital.
And I remember when that came out, there was a lot of media stuff about how concerned people were that in theaters, people were cheering for him.
They were bursting into applause, you know, and it was the anger at what?
The insurance system, the medical establishment, and so forth.
Almost a quarter century ago, and that system has not sort of fundamentally changed.
So the opportunity is there.
Will people with the charisma and the power and the vision to tap into it and make use of it, will they step forward and do that?
I think that that's the really key point or key question for me.
I got a comment on that, but I'm going to hold it.
We're going to take a break and come back and talk about something else, but I'm coming back to it, people.
We're going to tie it all together, so don't forget.
We'll be right back.
All right, Dan, lay it out.
Let's talk about what's going on with Pete Hegseth, the military, but also trans folks and the Trump administration as it looms here in the next few weeks.
Yeah, so I think one of the things that's emerging, when Trump won the election, I think all of us, you know, we talked about this, lots of people talked about it, I think, of if one thing was different this time around, it was not jumping at everything Trump does, but trying to figure out, like, what are the real things?
What are the real moves?
I think it's clear that I think for my money, and I'm interested in your thoughts on this, that the two big targets that are going to come out, that the two that of all the promises that Trump makes that I think he's most likely to go after first, I mean, maybe the tariffs on the economic side, but I think it's immigration.
And I think it is the demonizing and targeting of the queer community, and in particular, trans people.
And I think that those are the two that are emerging.
So, you know, we talk about healthcare here, and we talk about the military.
Both of these things come together with our friend Pete Hegseth, who we've talked about before, right?
A couple articles.
There was one last week that came out.
Brad, you know this, and you talked about this when you talked about his tattoos that are understood by most to be white power tattoos and the whole thing about how he was basically relieved of duty from helping to guard Biden at his inauguration because people raised concerns about these tattoos and so forth.
Well, Articles that have come out the past week or so have highlighted this new book that Pete Hegseth has out, sorry, called The War on Warriors.
And in it, what does he do?
He decries, in particular, the role of queer folk in the military.
So it says that they erode readiness, that the only reason they're there is because it's all part of a Marxist plot, Brad, a Marxist plot to bring about social justice in the military rather than readiness and so forth.
But there was an article last week that said Pete Hegseth, he has this vision of what?
Of a Christian military, right?
A Christian America with a Christian military, and within that vision of America, there's no place for queer folk.
And so we see the targeting of queer folk In the military, we see this now.
Today, there was an article that just came out about all about Pete Hegseth walking that stuff back now as he seeks confirmation.
And this was sort of interesting.
There was a statement that our friend Tommy Tuberville made that I thought was telling.
This is what he said.
He said, I heard he was changing his tune a little bit on women in combat.
It was women in combat and gay folks in the military because he's been talking to all these senators who are really concerned about this.
So he's been walking this back.
Yeah.
Here's what Tommy had to tell us.
He said, this is a quote, okay?
I'm not making this up.
Sometimes you make comments you don't really want to stand by.
Sometimes, you know, when you're not up for confirmation.
The best that one of his MAGA supporters can do is say, well, yeah, you say stuff, but then it turns out to get through confirmation, you got to say other stuff.
Tammy Duckworth, Democrat, veteran, lost her legs in combat.
We know who Tammy Duckworth is.
She had this to say.
She said, Trump nominees lie all the time in order to get confirmed, don't they?
So I don't trust him.
I'm more in that boat.
I don't think that he's suddenly going to turn around and say that queer folks should have a place in the military, that women should have a place in the military.
But what it highlights, to your point that you made before about Trump's cabinet Who these people are, the kind of vision of America they have.
And here these things come together with, first of all, we talk about visions of masculinity here all the time, right?
That men are cisgender, they're straight, they are warriors, and that is what the military is for.
It's not for women, it's not for queer men, it's not for trans people, it's for all of those.
And this is that vision of America that ties in, I think, a number of the things we're talking about.
Want to tie this into the defense spending bill that came up or was passed by the House in a minute as well because it's relevant, but I'll throw it to you because I know that you always have thoughts on Hegseth.
Well, I want to give a shout out to Spencer Kuntz at Florida State, a PhD student who gave a great presentation on this at AAR this past year, and I have the opportunity to read some of that.
And I'm going to have Spencer on the show here soon.
But what Spencer has shown is that those who don the Crusader tattoo, the Davies Volt tattoo, like Hegseth, they're taking part in a kind of community and a symbology that really puts them in a kind of place of self-knighting, knighting themselves as defenders they're taking part in a kind of community and a symbology that really And I think everything that Hegseth writes in the book you're describing or referencing and the worldview that he holds leads one to think that.
So this is just one more reason that I would not discount the tattoos.
Additionally, I would say he is a follower of Doug Wilson.
He talks about Doug Wilson as a spiritual mentor.
Doug Wilson has said openly, talked about this on the show many times, that he doesn't think if you're a non-Christian, you should be able to hold position of power in the country.
If you're Hindu, you can't be mayor.
Okay.
Well, what does that mean for the military?
If you're Pete Hegseth and you have a Muslim or an agnostic or an atheist who wants to be captain or wants to be sergeant, what are you going to do there?
Now, you know, you might say, well, Hegseth can disentangle his personal views and his roles of service, but nothing he's written or said has ever made me think that he wants to do that, right?
This is not the kind of guy who's like, well...
It's not Jimmy Carter or someone else saying, well, I have personal beliefs about this, but when it comes to the law and the Constitution, I have to act that way.
So Hegseth is unfortunately an archetype of the bro culture that we have talked about so much on this show.
He is accused of sexual assault up and down, accused of drinking in inappropriate ways.
He is somebody who's had multiple marriages fall apart because of infidelity.
And supposedly that has nothing to do with the Christian virtue.
And now that he's turned his life around, he is an exemplar of Christian manhood because he is so anti-gay, anti-queer, anti-immigrant and everything else.
I think everyone listening knows people they went to high school with or they see in their town who falls into that same category that all of a sudden Jimmy's the great Christian man over here Because he's anti-gay folks and wants to make sure there's no undocumented immigrants in the country, not because he's really into the Beatitudes or the Sermon on the Mount.
So probably doesn't even know what the Sermon on the Mount is.
But nonetheless, back to you before we go to Reasons for Hope.
Yeah, so just one more example here to tie into this, because I think the military is a key part.
I think the military is key for this in two things.
Number one, I think it shows us so much of the MAGA mindset of what matter, right?
This notion of a kind of virile, violent masculinity, and the military is a model for that, I think, in Trump's imaginary, in the imaginary of so many people who are there.
And I think it also is...
Because of that, maybe the sort of testing ground for some of this, right?
A place where they can try to put into practice these policies they want.
The House passed this week a defense bill that it has to pass, right?
It's a must-pass bill that sets defense policies before the end of the year, right?
Standard practice.
But it included a ban on gender-affirming care for children of service members.
And this made its way into the bill.
Now, lots of contention about this.
The top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee and others opposed the bill on these grounds.
Mike Johnson, on the other hand, had publicly and privately lobbied for this, and his critics say that what he's really doing is trying to appease conservatives so that he can remain Speaker of the House once Trump comes into office.
But this brings together the things we've talked about with SCOTUS, the things we've seen in 26 states, the war against trans and queer individuals, the headsets of the world and their views on how that fits in the military, to wrap this in together so that it's not just service members, but service members' families who have no space for this to bring those kind of social views in.
And I think that this was worth noting.
I don't think it got some attention this week.
I don't think it got the attention that it should have.
It'll be interesting to see Moving forward, how significant this is in terms of like opposition or different things like this.
But the Trump administration, through its surrogates already in Congress, is actively working to target queer and trans folk, and in particular to reshape the military into the vision of Christian America that is at the heart of American Christian nationalism.
So I think we see these things with Hegseth.
We see these things in something as sort of mundane as it would have been as a defense spending bill.
Yeah, and we've already seen Manchin and Sinema derail some things this week.
We don't have time to go into them, but it just makes me think the Dems are not going to throw up a full-fledged fight here, and they're always kind of hedging their bets.
So anyway, that's for another time.
My reason for hope this week is the fact that it seems as if Representative Ocasio-Cortez is going to take the top spot on the oversight committee in the next Congress for the Democratic Party or the Democratic Caucus in the House.
AOC is somebody who is, you know, and now been in Congress some time and has kind of earned her stripes with some of the leadership.
But I don't really care about any of that.
You know what I care about, Dan, is If the opening I talked about earlier, if the reimagining a system is going to happen, the Democratic Party needs AOC and people of her generation.
And I don't often sort of come out with these full-throated, you know, whatevers, but We cannot have a Democratic Party, which is in essence an opposition party at this point because of Trump being in power, that's led by millionaires who are in their 80s.
I'm just going to say it.
I just don't think that's viable.
And I think if you want to think about reaching people who are feeling like they're forgotten, Having folks who have been in the system and benefited from it to become hundreds of millionaires like Nancy Pelosi and others.
Now, I'm not saying Nancy Pelosi is not a highly effective politician.
Overwhelmingly so.
This is not saying that everything she's done in her career...
Don't email me that.
Not what I said.
What I said is, right now, in 2024, in the circumstances we live in, whether it's healthcare, whether it's a Green New Deal and a new approach to environmentalism, whether it's raising the minimum wage, whether it is what a housing policy People like AOC have to be the face of the party,
otherwise you're really just in danger of completely losing any sense that you know them, that you're in touch with them, that you have any interest in their pain.
If people are radicalized by pain, we have to take their pain seriously.
And I just think someone like AOC is much more positioned to do that than some of the others that we have in democratic leadership at the moment.
So I think that's a good thing.
Yeah.
My reason for hope relates again to queer and trans issues, just so many of them in the news lately.
But this week, the Montana Supreme Court blocked that state's ban on gender-affirming care.
They upheld the decision made by a lower court.
They blocked it on the grounds that it likely violates the right to privacy enshrined in the state constitution.
We've talked about, excuse me, Zoe Zephyr, whom we've talked about before, who is the first out trans member of the Montana State Legislature.
She had great statements about this, worked to fight the ban, encouraged people to go take a look at this.
What I think it highlights is the significance of state battles.
We talked about 26 states banning care for minors.
Last week, we talked about SCOTUS appearing poised to uphold Tennessee's ban.
The reason I take hope from this is not just that it's not a done deal.
This would not be affected by the SCOTUS decision because it was a decision based entirely on the Montana state constitution.
And I think that it just shows that the strategies that are there, the strategies that exist, they won't work everywhere.
They're not going to work in every state.
But I found this to be a hopeful sign, especially after watching and seeing and hearing the targeting of trans miners in particular so much in recent weeks.
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