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In this episode of Straight White American Jesus, Brad and Dan reflect on the political legacy of the late Jimmy Carter, examining his commitment to the separation of church and state, his dedication to social justice, and his consistent evangelical values. They contrast Carter’s humble integrity with the modern complexities of figures like Elon Musk, whose wealth grants him outsized influence in government.
Brad and Dan also analyze the fractures within the MAGA movement, highlighting the growing tension between traditional populist factions and technocratic elites. The episode concludes with a discussion on Chief Justice John Roberts' concerns regarding judicial independence amidst the potential for authoritarian overreach by the Trump administration.
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Axis Mundi Axis Mundi In terms of the political aspects of what he wants to do on the hill.
And he has outsiders.
And as much as people say, well, Elon is a billionaire outsider.
First, I don't mind that they're billionaires.
I like people that are successful.
What are the difference whether they're a billionaire or broke?
I'd rather have someone successful.
And I like that it's an outsider and an engineer and not a politician and not looking for anything out of the game.
He's not that much of an outsider.
In fact, one of the criticisms and the concerns is that he has billions of dollars tied up In government contracts.
You don't see a conflict of interest here?
Everyone has a conflict of interest.
But that's like a pretty big one.
The guy's worth $450 billion as of today and this month.
So I don't think he's doing it for the money.
He's doing it for the bigger project and the bigger vision of America.
He doesn't need the dollars.
He really doesn't.
So it's not about, oh, if I get involved in this, I'll get another little contract here or there.
That's nothing to him.
So I like I like the fact that in a way he's so rich, he's so removed from the potential financial influence of it.
That's Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire talking about Elon Musk, saying that he's so rich, he doesn't have to get into this for the money.
He's simply in it for the larger vision of America.
Sununu's comments come in the week that we lost Jimmy Carter, the former president who put his peanut farm in a blind trust when he entered the White House so he would have no conflict of interest.
Today we discuss the legacy of Jimmy Carter in the context of the ongoing I'm Brad Onishi,
And this is the Straight White American Jesus Weekly Roundup.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
Back for our first roundup of the year today.
It's very exciting.
Everything is new and fresh, and Dan Miller's looking fresh.
It seems like he's got a new shirt on, and he's feeling good.
So, Dan, how are you?
Who are you?
I am Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Glad to be back.
It's sort of a shout-out to your brother, I guess, who's super into H.P. Lovecraft.
It's an H.P. Lovecraft shirt that I'm wearing.
So now, today, if Brad Onishi makes fun of my shirt, I'm going to have backup.
So tread lightly, my friend.
Well, yeah, there's no...
Yeah, my brother will back you up.
I think the entire Discord will back you up.
There's no way I'm going to make fun of that shirt.
There's no chance.
All right.
So, Dan, it's one of these times where we've been off the mic for a bit.
We've had new episodes here or there, but it's been kind of a couple week break and a lot's happened.
And as I was thinking about today, I was like, we could just talk about so much.
But I think we should start with Jimmy Carter and his legacy, Jimmy Carter passing away at the age of 100 here about a week ago.
We're also going to talk about the ongoing Elon Musk and the ways that he's created a rift in the MAGA world that is enduring.
We'll have real consequences down the line, and we'll talk about everything from the visa controversy to Steve Bannon's comments and Laura Loomer's comments.
It's one of those weird days, Dan, where Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer are making good points, and you're like, you know, for 30 seconds, I agreed with you.
I'm a little bit scared, and I need to go take a shower.
But we'll examine that and the ways that he's supporting AFD in Germany, which is really frightening, and the The op-ed that he wrote in Die Welt, kind of one of the German papers of record.
And then we will go to John Roberts and the Supreme Court, something that's not getting enough attention, but John Roberts is all of a sudden very worried about the independence of judiciary, and he's warning people about...
What happens if you defy the Supreme Court?
In other words, we're going to watch, as a man describes, the leopard eating his face that said it would not.
Dan, I want to go to you first.
Jimmy Carter's died, and there's been so many homage and other remembrances of him.
You are the show's I'm a Baptist.
Former Baptist.
You used to be a Southern Baptist.
Therefore, I think by dint of that, myself, the lapsed Quaker, you get to be the one who starts us off on Jimmy Carter.
I want to talk about some things related to Reagan.
To Palestine, to Trump, but you take first crack at it, and what are some things you want to remind us of about Jimmy Carter?
And just so folks know, that's usually how I introduce myself.
I'm like, hey, I'm a host of a podcast.
I'm the Baptist member.
It's, you know...
No, it's...
So, obviously...
You know what?
You know what?
I don't...
Wait.
You know why I don't introduce myself is the Quaker member?
Have anything to do with Wilford Grimbley?
Because I just...
I don't have...
I don't...
No, I just, I don't say anything.
I just shake hands and look at people silently, right?
And then they usually, you know, think I'm creepy and walk off.
When I'm really trying to convey my Quaker-ness, but whatever, I'm misunderstood.
It's a whole nother, you're not my therapist, so we'll talk about it later.
They don't know how to read the code, man.
Yeah, so obviously a lot of stuff about Carter and Carter's legacy, and we've talked about Carter before in a lot of directions we could go.
Just again, a little bit of background.
We've talked about, I think most folks know, but people maybe of a little, not that much younger maybe than us, don't sometimes know this because the American religious and political landscape has looked a certain way for a really long time, basically since...
If you want to put a date on it, just say 1980 and Ronald Reagan.
But the background, you had this guy who was a peanut farmer from Georgia, Southern Baptist, committed Southern Baptist, Sunday school teacher, continued going to the same church and teaching Sunday school up until he was no longer able to, and we know that part of the story.
He was the first evangelical Christian elected president, and that was a really big deal at the time.
But he frustrated popular evangelicalism, sort of rank-and-file, grassroots American evangelicals, because he didn't embrace a Christian nationalist agenda.
Now, they wouldn't have called it Christian nationalism then, but that's what it was.
You had people who wanted what essentially is now the kind of policy project of so many people that we talk about all the time.
And he was sort of ironically drummed out of office in part by American evangelicals who had become part of what's going to emerge as the religious right.
Who identified with Ronald Reagan and helped push him out of office and marked the end of an era for a certain kind of evangelical politics.
And so that's the piece that I want to look at a little bit today before we get into sort of the relation to kind of contemporary politics and some other figures.
Randall Balmer, a friend of the show, a very well-known historian of evangelicalism—we've talked with him on Straight White American Jesus before—wrote a piece in Politico, and one of the things he noted is he said that Carter's death symbolically represented the end of what he called progressive evangelicalism.
And what he meant by that was a kind of evangelicalism that was concerned with what we would now call social justice.
It was concerned with, to put it in biblical parlance, the least of these, or in prophetic language, the poor, the orphan, the widow.
It was a vision that said that part of what it was to be a Christian in the world is to create a more just and equitable society, that that was part of the Christian mission.
Now, the people who don't like Carter, they would say he's woke.
That's what it would be.
Ron DeSantis or somebody like that would say that he's just a woke politician.
That's who he was.
We wanted to contextualize him now.
And just as a reminder that relates to this, and Brad, I know you've talked about this a lot.
We've talked about it.
You write about it and discuss it.
What really caused the break between him and the religious right Was the threat to take away the tax-exempt status of Christian schools that were segregated.
He was forcing desegregation.
That was part of his vision of a more just, equitable social society and so forth.
So we know all of that.
We've talked about that.
What I want to think about here is just how evangelical and traditionally Baptist Carter was.
Because I think it's easy to look at him and say, well, he's a guy who had personal faith but didn't bring it into his politics.
And I think that that's not the right read.
I think that if we understand Carter and contextualize where he was coming from in the 1970s, in Southern Baptist life in the 1970s, he was a very, very committed Southern Baptist president.
And I think it's a thing to know and to see.
His presidency was consistent...
Yeah, sorry, go ahead.
So one comparison point would probably be Tim Walls.
So Tim Walls is Evangelical Lutheran.
And by all accounts, he's a regular churchgoer.
But when you do deep dives on Tim Walls, he's kind of the guy that's like...
Yeah, I'm a Christian, but I don't really talk about it.
And I think what you're saying about Jimmy Carter is he was definitely a Christian.
He definitely talked about it, but just not in the ways that we expect.
Or even Biden, who would talk about, you know, I'm Catholic and I have these views on abortion back when, you know, he was more sort of moderate on abortion.
And he'd say, but I'm going to carry out the laws of the land and the will of the people and so forth.
That wasn't really, I think, how Carter sort of fits into this model.
So the first point I want to bring out is just specifically how Baptist he was.
His politics and his administration clearly embodied and expressed a separation of church and state.
He did not have a vision of simply appointing Christians to government.
He didn't want to govern from the Bible.
He wasn't quoting scripture passages and saying, this is the law of the land or things like that.
They all expressed a form of secularism.
But it was a secularism that had deep roots in his own religious tradition.
And I know I've talked about this in the past, but it sort of continues to surprise people.
But Baptists in the 18th century, Baptists in the 1700s, they were proponents of separation of church and state.
Thomas Jefferson's famous line about a wall of separation between church and state is not in the Constitution.
It was in a letter he wrote to the Danbury Baptist Association, and he wrote it, Because Baptists had supported the formation of the First Amendment.
They supported separation of church and state.
And not just Baptists, there were other non-conforming religious groups like Quakers, who also affirmed separation of religion and state because their own religious traditions had undergone persecution.
So Baptists believed then that it was the responsibility of the church, not the state, to convert people to Christianity.
That if their God was who they said their God was and their gospel was as true as they thought it was, That was their job, and that was God's job to go and convert people, not the state.
And they also felt that the state should be neutral with regard to religion.
And I say this all the time, this was not a view that said all Christians should be created or treated equally.
There were Baptist thinkers in early centuries who said it applied to Jewish people, it applied to Muslim people, it applied to free thinkers or what we would now call atheists or humanists.
They had a broad vision of this.
So in not imposing this vision of Christian America or what now passes as a vision of Christian America, Carter was being a good Baptist.
And I think part of the interesting thing about this is that he also reflected battles going on within the SBC at the time.
So in the 70s, the Southern Baptist Convention, largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., we talk about people like Al Mohler and others who are central figures in this super conservative denomination.
In the 1970s, it was controlled largely by theological moderates.
Their opponents called them liberals.
They were not liberal by any sort of contemporary theological standard.
But Carter's Christianity reflected that strain of Southern Baptist life.
In 1979, conservatives within the denomination took control.
They won the highest post in the denominational hierarchy.
They appointed conservatives, and that began a long process that is still ongoing of moving the whole denomination pretty far to the right.
That's what coincides with the formation of the religious right.
That's what brings about the Southern Baptist Convention we have now.
That's what brings about, I mentioned Al Mohler, somebody who far from now arguing for separation of church and state is a traditional Baptist doctrine, is busy talking about You know, the Augustinian city of God and, you know, having to have a theocratic society and so forth.
So all that, some of the Southern Baptist stuff, I've got a couple things to say about the social vision, but I want to jump in to see if you have, you know, Quaker or other perspectives on Carter and separation of church and state and what that means for a religious person, a person of deep religious commitment to affirm the separation of church and state.
Yeah, there's a lot to say here.
And I want to turn to Amanda Tyler, friend of the show, leader of the Baptist Joint Committee, somebody who's written a book called How to End Christian Nationalism.
I've interviewed Amanda and spoken with Amanda and appreciate Amanda very much.
She wrote in Time this week about Carter as somebody who did exactly what you're saying, Dan, in terms of the separation of church and state.
And she included in her piece some great quotes from President Carter himself.
So let me read a couple of those.
I think that prayer should be a private matter between a person and God.
Then President Carter told a group of news editors in 1979 concerning Supreme Court rulings against mandatory government-sponsored prayers in public schools in 1962 and 1963. Quote, I think the government ought to stay out of the prayer business and let it be between a person and God and not let it be part of a school program.
Under any tangible constraints, either a direct order to a child to pray or an embarrassing situation where the child would feel constrained to pray.
He told the editors that he made these statements because he was a Baptist, exactly as you're saying, Dan.
There's a lot of ways to remember Jimmy Carter.
He was not a perfect person.
There's things we could talk about in terms of Central America and other things.
He was not the most effective president and so on and so forth.
But I think what stands out in this moment as we remember him is the ways that he was able to articulate a Christianity as part of his identity that recognized that Christianity and the kingdom of God were about not forcing or constraining, but about persuasion and acceptance.
This quote really exemplifies that.
I'll give you one more here that speaks to your point, and I'll throw it back to you before I jump in on some other issues later.
2010 Autobiography, A Full Life, Reflections at 90. This is Jimmy Carter.
My religious faith had become a minor issue during the 1976 campaign when I responded yes to a reporter's question, are you a born-again Christian?
Some reporters implied that I was having visions or thought I received daily instructions from heaven.
My traditional Baptist belief was that there should be strict separation between church and state.
I ended the longstanding practice of inviting Billy Graham and other prominent pastors to have services in the White House, and our family assumed the role of normal worshipers in a church of our choice.
Of all the things about Jimmy Carter that I appreciate, this is in the very top.
In a time, Dan, when...
Billy Graham was a regular at the White House, whether you were Richard Nixon or any other president.
At a time when Jerry Falwell was touring the country holding I Love America rallies, where at the end of those rallies he had an altar call, but it was for America.
At a time when what would become the moral majority was ascendant and there was basically a civil war and a takeover happening in the Republican Party, Jimmy Carter is the kind of guy that doesn't soft play it.
He's like, hey, Billy.
Guess what?
Not invited anymore.
You can stay home.
Once you go see your wife or hold a rally, you don't need to come over to the White House anymore.
That takes guts, man, because there are so many lobbyists and power players in Washington.
Billy Graham at the time was one of them.
To say no to Billy Graham was to say no to a whole lot of people that would have glad-handed Carter, helped him get a better image among the evangelical right, and so on and so forth.
And Carter was just like, nah, I'm good, bro.
I actually need to catch up on some things tonight, so don't come over, Billy.
That's a thing, and I appreciate it.
I don't know if I can convey here briefly and succinctly what it took to say no to the evangelical power complex in that way.
And he did it, and it's something I remember.
So, I got more, but back to you.
Yeah, just turning a corner from that to what I call the social justice dimension, just a couple points about this.
Again, now, and I say this for people who, you know, 1980 was a long time ago.
I teach about this stuff, and sometimes it's baffling for students to think about an America before there was a religious right, you know?
And before that was just like a standard part of American identity and so forth.
And so the idea that you could have somebody as a matter of Christian conviction, conservative Christian conviction, theologically traditional Christian conviction who would have this vision of a particular social agenda to help the poor, the marginalized, and so forth, That seems very strange to people, but that was part of it.
It was also very much a part of what was called evangelicalism at the time, coming out of the 19th century.
I think when we use the term evangelical now, we have to be careful because it is a very, very different movement than the movement that that name is applied to before, say, the 1920s.
But it was very much a standard part of that.
And part of what I think this shows us is that the Christian vision of somebody like Carter, it was about more than just personal spiritual salvation.
And we've talked about this a lot, a form of popular American Christianity that insofar as it talks about salvation, tends to do so in very disembodied, Individualistic, immaterial terms.
You become a Christian and it means that when you die, your immaterial soul will go to heaven and everything will be great.
But in the meantime, everything can just suck and be kind of shitty and that's just how it is because everything about Christianity is about the afterlife.
Or we're going to create a so-called social order.
We're going to call it Christian, but we're just going to force you, whoever you are, to get on board with our agenda and our vision of society and what that is.
We're going to call that Christian.
If it doesn't help you, too bad.
If it violates your rights, too bad.
If it doesn't do anything to help you materially or economically, too bad.
We're going to call it Christian, put the biblical stamp of approval on it, move on.
His vision, as I said earlier, was a vision that said that part of the Christian calling was to make this world better.
Not to make it just more Christian.
I want people to hear me on that.
This was not about convincing people that you're right and they need to have the same religion as you.
This is about trying to make the world a better place for everyone, which means an emphasis on those for whom it's not a good place.
As you say, they weren't all effective.
He was not a super effective president, but the vision It was for greater social equality, greater racial equality, greater economic equality, all of those kinds of things.
And that was very much a part.
It was part and parcel of what had been evangelicalism coming out of the 19th century.
And it's a kind of evangelicalism that is now largely gone.
And I will get the emails from a few people who will tell me how it's not.
I've got a couple friends in my world who will point to some church somewhere that's doing great stuff.
And my response is always going to be the same, which is that's cool and it's awesome and I'm glad that that conservative evangelical church is doing those things.
I can point to like a thousand that aren't, right?
It's very much the exception to the rule.
This was a much more common understanding of what it meant to be a theologically orthodox, theologically conservative Christian at this time.
And so again, I think his presidency can be seen as an expression of a kind of Christianity that was just very different than what we see with contemporary American Christian nationalism.
Or as you're saying that the more kind of mainline Before we go to break, I'll just read something from Kasim Rashid's Substack.
Let's address this with Kasim Rashid.
And he wrote this this past week, noting that in his book, Jimmy Carter's book, Palestine, Peace, Not Apartheid, President Carter cogently argues that the main obstacle to peace in Israel and Palestine is in fact the hundreds of thousands of illegal settlements that Israel continues to build, all with US backing and support.
Carter also talks about powerful forces that lobby for Israel in the United States and will not allow for any discussion of any kind of actual peace settlement or two-state solution.
And he says that these, quote, powerful forces have only grown as time has gone on.
Once again, a truth teller, I think somebody not willing to be unpopular and to do and say things that often put him outside of kind of polite company.
You're never going to hear Bill Clinton talk like this because Bill Clinton wants people to like him way more than Jimmy Carter ever cared about that.
And if he talked like this, he wouldn't get invited and get to be in front of folks who continue to lavish him with praise, especially those in the upper echelons of society.
Jimmy Carter was the kind of guy that would say what he thought about anyone, and it often made him a lot less popular with the upper crust and the funders of the American society and so on.
Let's take a break and come back and discuss more of Carter's legacy in order to launch us into the present.
Be right back.
All right, Dan.
In my book, I do discuss Carter quite a bit.
And one of the dates that you threw out there was 1980. It's a sore point for me, Dan, and I just want to address it so that we don't have any issues later.
You said it was a long time ago.
It happens to be the year I was born.
So you're right, it's like 25 years ago.
Is that right?
I'm just doing the math.
Yeah.
I just had my birthday, and I'm feeling a little older, but that's fine.
1980 is also the year Ronald Reagan wins the White House and Jimmy Carter becomes a one-term president.
Most of you listening know the story.
The Religious Right sided with Ronald Reagan.
And I want to just read a bit of what I wrote about all of this that did not make it into the book.
This is stuff that was on the cutting room floor.
So here we go.
In retrospect, the evangelical breakup with Jimmy Carter was the result of a number of complex issues, but all the details lead back to a central theme.
Though Carter was one of them, his policies didn't fit their agenda.
His faith was unquestionable.
He was born and raised a Southern Baptist, served as a missionary, supported his church at every turn, and married as one and only love.
Carter's politics, on the other hand, were not aligned with the vision that Paul Wyrick and Jerry Falwell and others had for the United States.
They felt he didn't represent the power of the nation.
I just want to stop and say one of the things that dogged Carter as president is that people like Jerry Falwell and other warmongers labeled him as not manly enough.
He was a man who listened, a man who wanted diplomacy, a man who wasn't always talking about control and violence and nuclear weapons.
It's in the same ways that Obama was labeled this guy who wears mom jeans and that whole thing.
It's very similar.
In essence, Carter was Christian enough, but not nationalist or patriarchal or warmongering enough to satisfy other Christians.
The man who embodied family values was characterized as hating the traditional family.
The man who was an officer in the Navy was castigated as unpatriotic when it came to foreign policy.
He brought the cross into the White House, but according to his critics, he left the flag outside of the sanctuary.
So in 1980...
Christian conservatives supported a divorced Hollywood actor with a mixed record on issues surrounding, quote, family values and a history of supporting abortion over the Southern Baptist Sunday School teacher, who married his high school sweetheart, served with distinction in the armed forces, and often brought his Bible with him when leaving the house.
It was the election that made clear that the cross wasn't enough.
For Christian nationalists, the cross must always be accompanied by the flag.
This leads to one final lesson to be learned from the Carter Reagan election.
When it came to voting for Donald Trump, Christian nationalists had precedent for prioritizing politics over morals and policies over identity.
Jimmy Carter was born to a poor family in a tiny town in rural Georgia.
Donald Trump was born to a rich real estate magnate in New York City.
Jimmy Carter was a dyed-in-the-wool evangelical from the time he left the womb.
He was baptized as a teenager and committed himself to Jesus Christ wholeheartedly.
Throughout his life, Donald Trump has rarely attended church, and to this day, he is religiously illiterate.
Jimmy Carter joined the Navy and became an officer.
Donald Trump avoided the draft in Vietnam because he claimed he had bone spurs.
Jimmy Carter's father, Mr. Earl, as they called him, was a pillar of his community who helped out his neighbors in ways that would only go noticed after his death.
Donald Trump's father, Fred Trump, was arrested after a KKK rally in the late 1920s.
In 1963, Jimmy Carter ran to be part of the Georgia state legislature, in part to prevent segregationists from shutting down Georgia schools after the 1954 Brown v.
Board Supreme Court decision.
In 1989, Donald Trump took out a full-page ad in the New York press decrying the Central Park Five and calling for the death penalty.
They were later exonerated, of course.
Jimmy Carter built his presidential campaign out of the conceptions of justice inspired by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and his friend Bob Dylan.
Donald Trump modeled himself after Andrew Jackson.
Dan thinks that's so funny.
I wasn't expecting that.
Sorry, I didn't mean to break in there.
Jimmy Carter appointed more people of color and women to the federal judiciary than any other president before him.
Trump employed open white nationalists in his cabinet, including Stephen Bannon and Stephen Miller.
When Jimmy Carter became president, he put his peanut farm in a blind trust, giving up control of his financial portfolio.
As President Trump used his power to promote and grow his various businesses across the world.
When Carter left the White House, he was badly in debt because those who had managed his blind trust had done so poorly.
By the time Donald Trump left the White House, his children earned nearly a billion dollars of private income while he was in office, not to mention Jared Kushner's deal for multi-billions after Trump left office.
After leaving office, Jimmy Carter helped to build 4,000 houses for those in need through programs related to Habitat for Humanity.
Since the end of his presidency, Trump has lived at the private golf resort he owns in Florida.
One of the things I'll just say, and I want to really launch us into Musk and Trump and all that, is Jimmy Carter was also, Dan, in some ways...
The last middle-class president.
So we might get an email here or two about Obama, and that's fair.
But the Bush family, the Reagan family, no, not even close.
Okay?
The Trump family, no, he's a fake billionaire, but still he's lived a life of upper-class luxury for his entire existence.
The Obamas, when they entered the White House, yes, I think we're middle class.
And I think you could probably say that Obama and Carter came from the same kind of class background in some ways.
But what I'll add to that, though, and of course, the Obamas being black...
I'm not going to overlook what the economic challenges that this country has posed to black Americans at every turn, whether it's enslavement, Jim Crow, redlining, and so on.
So not overlooking any of that when it comes to the Obamas.
Jimmy Carter was born on a farm.
I mean, he was the first president born in a hospital, but he's a farmer, Dan.
Tim Walls, I think, was notable for a lot of us because he came off as this regular guy, a teacher, a military guy, a dad, go out and fix your car, go out and go hunting for turkey.
I think a lot of people found Tim Walls endearing because he felt like somebody they might know.
Jimmy Carter was one of those people.
And you cannot even imagine that.
Now, I mean, the Clintons, come on, by the time Hillary Clinton ran, they were millionaires a hundred times over.
So I think that's there.
Anything else on Carter before we go to some contemporary stuff here with Musk and Trump and everybody else?
I think to echo your point about nothing but respect for the achievements of the Obamas, but you also have like, you know, University of Chicago educated Barack Obama, I think is another contrast even between somebody like Carter.
Well, Ivy League law education.
Just to make that point, I think to reinforce that, if you wanted middle class credentials now, I think you'd be really hard pressed to find anybody who could have fit that better than somebody like Carter.
Well, and this whole idea of class and money and corruption and, you know, the guy put his family's peanut farm in a trust and the whole time he's president, he's like, don't tell me about it.
I legally don't want to know about it.
And when he gets out, it's like he's in debt.
So I've said this before in the show, Dan, can you imagine being president and you lose and you're like, well, got to leave the White House and take my solar panels with me.
Right?
He brought solar panels.
I mean, we haven't talked about it, but he brought solar panels to the White House.
And then you're like, well, let me see.
Let's open up the books.
Take a look at the business.
And it's like, we lost this much in the last four years.
I'm now president and I'm in debt.
You want to talk about identifying with real Americans?
Real Americans know what it feels like to have debt, mortgage debt, student loan debt, credit card debt.
So that's a thing.
And it leads me to the clip that I played at the top, which is Governor Sununu of New Hampshire.
And in that clip, he says that he likes that Elon is working as an outsider in Washington.
And I want to break down this clip, Dan, because it really speaks to everything.
If you just think of everything we just said about Jimmy Carter, and then we bring in Elon Musk.
He's like, Elon's an outsider.
And first of all, Dan, Elon has like billions of dollars in government contracts.
He has subsidized so much of his business.
His business in many ways relies on government contracts, whether it's in this country, whether it's in Shanghai, whether it's in other places.
He is somebody who gets a lot from the government.
That's number one.
So you can call him an outsider because what?
He's not somebody who's like, ever run for office or something?
Sure, whatever.
Okay, so there's that.
But then Sununu says, I'd rather have someone successful.
And I like that.
I think I like that he's successful.
Okay.
Dana Bash says, don't you see a conflict of interest?
And Sununu says, everyone has a conflict of interest.
I just want to stop on that point.
We've reached a place in our politics, whether it's with Christian nationalists, presuppositionalist theologies from reformed circles, those who would say there's no such thing as neutrality.
And I just want to point us back to Jimmy Carter.
Jimmy Carter, as a religious person, is like, keep God out of the government.
As a financial actor, he's like, when I get to the White House, I want to have no financial interest.
I want no way for me to gain or lose money that I know about.
When I go to bed at night, when I am president and I have a quiet 10 minutes, I don't want to wonder if I've made money today or think about how I could make money today.
I'm done with that.
And here's Sununu saying, well, everyone has a conflict of interest.
And my point is like, I totally get it, Dan.
You and I have been through the philosophical ringers.
Everybody wants to talk.
Is there such thing as objectivity?
We have said on this show that everybody has feeling and affect and embodiment.
I understand all of that.
It does not mean that as a leader, you can't strive to say, I'm going to do everything possible to serve the people of this country, of this community, of this state.
With the same status and respect and voice.
You can try that.
You can do things to practice that.
You can cultivate that.
I was just going to say, this is such a fallacy, and it's a really common one.
I run into it with students all the time, because I will say, there's no way to not have a perspective on something.
Especially if it's something important, if it's something you care about.
You and I teach, and sometimes we're teaching about stuff that's really, really impactful to us.
It's something that we care about.
I have a perspective, and it's going to color how I teach it.
And people should know, I don't teach in the classroom with the voice that I use in the podcast.
Every now and then, I'm like, people are like, you should be ashamed of yourself.
I'm like, I'm not indoctrinating my students.
I'm not just there throwing out my ideas.
But there's a difference that the fallacy from we all have interests, we all have desires, we all have perspectives, to therefore, I guess anything goes, right?
There's nothing wrong with grinding your own axe or pushing your own agenda.
It's a fallacy.
The reason that you're hinting at is that we can be aware of that.
We can reign that in.
We can put that on the table.
We can put that out front and say, I have this perspective, and I think it probably colors how I look at things.
I'm open to hearing others.
I want to hear other perspectives or just recognizing that.
It's a fallacy that gets inserted, and it really throws people because I think it's a false alternative that you either have some sort of pure neutrality or objectivity, or it's just pure...
Subjectivity, whatever anybody thinks is of equal value or equal worth, it's a false choice, but it's one that gets put out all the time.
It's one that Sununu is putting here.
And what it does in this case is it licenses the worst impulses.
Within a kind of advanced American capitalism, which is part of what Musk is, within this technocratic elitist wing of the MAGA movement, it unleashes and licenses the worst elements of that because it accepts, whether strategically or ignorantly or whatever, it accepts that false alternative.
And I just want to put that out there.
People have to know That that's a false alternative.
The last example I'll give is, you know, you teach philosophy classes sometimes, and there's certain questions people have been arguing about, but like as long as people have been arguing about questions, right, they might feel unresolvable.
And one of the things I tell students is, I'm like, you know, just because we're not sure what the right answer is, doesn't mean we don't know what some wrong answers are.
And I think it's the same kind of thing.
Yes, there may be perspective.
Yes, there may be interests that sneak in.
Yes, we may, in retrospect, realize that we had perspectives that we didn't know were there or biases and so forth.
That doesn't mean we can't identify those biases and seek to mitigate them and have that eye out moving forward for just the knowledge that, you know what, maybe I will bring my perspective in here in a way that I don't want to or that isn't fair to others.
So, Don't mean to hijack that, but it's just such a fallacy, and we find it not just in the classroom or in abstract philosophical discussion, but in the concrete discourse of somebody like Sanudu.
Well, and everything you said is so spot on because what Sununu says is the guy's worth $450 billion.
So I don't think he's doing it for the money.
He's doing it for the bigger project and bigger vision of America.
What else is he doing it for?
I'm sorry, like $450 billion.
Everything you have ever done is for the money.
Like that, ah, sorry.
Dan, Dan, Dan, calm down because you know what I need to tell you?
Is there something that I know about rich people?
Okay?
They're the kind of people that they make a lot.
And then one day they sit up in bed and they're like, I think I've done enough.
I no longer need this much.
That's all the rich people I've ever met have always just been the kinds that are like, once I've hit this amount of power and influence, I will stop.
And so, yeah, of course, that's what's new.
No.
So a couple of things here.
I don't think he's doing it for the money.
He's doing it for the bigger project and the bigger vision of America.
So here's the deal, y'all.
Here's the deal.
Jimmy Carter, rest in peace, 100 years old.
A unique life that will never be, ever be repeated.
The first resident born in a hospital.
Okay?
I mean, Jimmy Carter, Dan, lives from the roaring 20s all the way to the point where we have supercomputers in our pocket.
And we just talked about the ways that he was not doing it for the money as president.
He lost money as the president of the United States, as a farmer.
A farmer was president and he lost money serving the American people.
Was he the perfect president?
No, but just A, that's A. B, he was a thoroughly committed Christian who said God should not be part of the government.
So Elon Musk, if you're doing this for...
The country, for the bigger vision of America, step down right now.
Step down.
Step down as leader of every company you have.
Cash out.
Let somebody hold all of the power when it comes to the government contracts, the corporate interests, Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, Get yourself out, and then continue to live at Mar-a-Lago, and then continue to do what you're doing.
I'll just say, Dan, that we don't have time to go through it today, but Musk wrote an op-ed for Die Welt on AFD, which is the neo-Nazi party in Germany, and he made so many falsehoods, he overlooked so many things, and the editor of that newspaper stepped down because they published it, okay?
But one of the things he says in there, I am not German and I do not live in Germany, but I think I have the right to appear in Germany's paper of record as an op-ed writer because I have invested so much in the country.
Do you know what he's saying there?
I am so rich, I deserve a voice.
I am so rich, you get to listen to me now.
That's why I get to pop up into your feed if you're a German, because I don't live here.
I've never lived here.
I'm not a citizen, and I'm not really somebody who's ever planning to have anything but a financial interest in your country, but you still have to listen to me.
Does that sound like a guy who's doing it for the bigger project and bigger vision of Germany?
Then why would I ever think he's doing it for the bigger project of America?
That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard, Sununu, okay?
And I have to say it for the second time in this podcast.
Sununu, Sununu, okay?
That's what I'm saying.
Sorry, Dan.
It's a new year.
It's a new year.
I'm feeling as spry as I can feel right now and all of that.
This leads to what Laura Loomer said.
And I want to play a clip from Laura Loomer.
And this is really the epitome of the civil war that's happening between Laura Loomer and Steve Bannon versus Elon Musk, Ramaswamy and the tech magnates.
So here's Laura Loomer speaking last week.
And what we need to have a conversation about is what is it going to mean for the future of our country, our national security, and the incoming Trump administration if we have a bunch of technocrats who are also essentially welfare queens because their companies are receiving government subsidies and they want to take over our defense industry.
If you have a bunch of tech bros with billions of dollars and direct unfettered access to the Vice President and the President of the United States, and then they are also very cordial with our adversaries as in China and Iran.
We see that Elon Musk is having these meetings off the books with Iranian officials, with Chinese officials.
What does that mean for us and the future of our constitutional republic?
Aaron Rupar said, the journalist said on Twitter, the worst person you know is saying some things that are actually right.
And I agree.
Laura Loomer is one of the worst people in terms of her white nationalism, her racism, and her xenophobia.
But she says these are tech bros who have so much tied up in government contracts, and they have unfettered access to the president.
And they're having off-the-book meetings with Iran and China.
Now, notice she doesn't mention Russia because people like Laura Loomer and Steve Bannon think Russia is basically an ally and a force of good in the world.
She mentions Iran and China, no Russia.
I will mention Russia.
And say, that's right.
Elon Musk has meetings off the books with Iran, China, and I'll mention Russia, has unfettered access to the President of the United States.
And what does that mean for the future of our constitutional republic?
Donald Trump was asked about the H-1B visas that basically allow, quote unquote, high skilled workers to come into the country.
And if you look back a couple, when he was president, he said, we have to totally change this visa program because too many people are coming into the country and it's a disaster for Americans.
Here's what he said the other night at his party at Mar-a-Lago.
So, A, he lies.
I didn't change my mind.
Yes, you did.
We have the receipts.
But B, look at this quote, Dan.
We need a lot of people coming in.
Donald Trump, build a wall, says we need a lot of people coming in.
And you can see where Loomer and Bannon and others are like, this is not what we wanted.
Now, I am not here to take sides.
I am not with Bannon or Loomer, and I am not with Ramaswamy, Trump, Musk, whatever.
What I'm saying is, is there is this realization right now among some of Trump's MAGA faithful, the non-tech people, the non-billionaire, the non-1%, that this is a con.
The guy that said he was going to do all this, put America first and all that, is saying, quote, we need a lot of people coming in.
There's so much to this story.
I have more to say, but what are some reactions from you?
I've said for I don't know how many years now that the populism of MAGA That populism is always defined as being anti-elitist and so forth, and that the rhetoric is that, but it's often not, right?
That Trump is an elitist, he's supported by elitists, that MAGA has always had this kind of elitist dimension to it, and we're seeing that.
Sort of in real time, seeing the fracture points open up in this as these Died-in-the-wool populace suddenly figure out somehow that, oh, wow, we've got a bunch of billionaires calling the shots.
It turns out that they're not the voice of all of these blue-collar Americans who think that immigration is the issue and whatever.
It's just one of those...
For me, if I want to be like, try to take the emotions out of it and just sort of analyze it, be analytic about it, it's this really telling moment We're something that people who theorize or try to understand populism and nationalist movements and how they actually operate and the role that elitism or a figure like Trump plays within them.
And we suddenly see it like coming into view.
It's the kind of thing that nerds like me who are like, no, it's elitist.
There's always been elites.
Suddenly there it is.
And I think it's really, really worth watching because we're seeing the counterbalancing.
We saw Trump come out Basically, along with Musk and Ramaswamy, after Musk says nasty things about some of the MAGA faithful, but we've also seen Musk have to roll that back a little bit and talk about how the system is broken and we've got to fix the system and so forth.
So I think it bears watching to see how this goes.
It bears watching over time to see if this has any effect on...
You know, the MAGA faithful who took hook, line, and sinker this notion that all the problems in America come down to, like, non-whites coming in and having jobs, non-Americans, and we're going to build our entire platform around this.
I don't know how many times we heard people in the Republican Party say that immigration is the issue, and lots of people who said, we're not just talking about illegal immigration, we're talking about visa programs and others, and now all of a sudden, Trump's been elected and he's lifting up the cups on the table and it turns out it was a big shell game and he was never going to do the things that he said.
So I think it's really, really, just analytically speaking, fascinating to watch.
I think it's also potentially a hopeful sign for those who are opposed to MAGA and the MAGA movement as we see these fracture points open up.
Yeah.
And I want to make a point before we have to go to break.
So there's a bunch I want to say there about Trump really does seem like he's under the sway of Musk at this point.
Timothy Snyder, the great scholar of fascism, said this week that he thinks that Trump will continue to be in Musk's something under his sway because Musk is giving him so much money.
That's the way we need.
He is enthralled by Musk.
That's Enthralled by Musk.
I'm just picturing a cologne act.
Exactly what I was thinking.
Enthralled.
Enthralled.
a new musk by Dan Miller um it's a whole new year Brad uh Cargo.
A new fragrance.
We laugh, we laugh, we laugh.
Okay.
So, all of that's there.
And what is not a laughing matter by any stretch is we had two disgusting acts of terrorism in the country over the new year.
The one that really is most deadly is that in New Orleans.
And we were thinking of all those affected, those who died and their family members.
And when I think about that, I think about Trump automatically getting on social media and saying that was a matter of immigration.
Mike Johnson got on the TV and said this is about Biden's open border.
What we know about the person who perpetrated these attacks, the people, I should say, is that there's no evidence that they're immigrants, no evidence that they are anti-Trump.
In fact, they seem to be people who were pro-Trump.
There's no evidence of anything that they're saying.
And yet, Dan, and this is where I just want to get the symbol for one minute and then we'll take a break and we'll go to John Roberts.
There's symbols of evil now.
Reality doesn't matter.
There's the bad immigrant.
The bad immigrant is the one who hurts you.
The bad immigrant is the one who's the threat.
If we can solve the bad immigrant, if we can jettison, excise the bad immigrant, The brown immigrant who's a rapist and a drug addict and is crazy and is a murderer.
If we can get rid of the Haitians who live in Ohio, because even though they're here illegally, I consider them illegal.
That's what J.D. Vance said.
We'll have a better society.
But Musk and Ramaswamy and even Trump are like, yeah, but the quote unquote good immigrants who do the work we need to control the world and dominate global industry and tech, they need to come in.
Why?
Ask Ramaswamy and he says because Americans are too mediocre.
They can't do the job.
So you can see the fracture.
And I just want to read a post by Ron Filipkowski who says, so basically the Trump admin's immigration policy is to increase the number of people from other countries who come in and take high skilled, high paying American jobs while deporting everyone else doing physically grueling jobs for shit wages.
So, I'm not in the camp of like, I'm not going to sit here and say, oh, all these people coming in taking the high-skilled labor.
I am somebody who has a view of immigration as it makes our country what it is.
It helps the economy.
It diversifies our economy in ways that if you just look at the pure economics The economy is helped by people who are immigrants, period.
Whatever.
We don't have time.
But he's making a fairly good point that the Trump administration is like, if you fit into a tech role or you have some other high-paying, high-skilled job, you can come in.
But everyone else who does physical grueling jobs and we consider below us and who we want to blame for violence and pain every time it happens, even though there's no evidence, even though there's no one eating cats, In Ohio, even though what happened in New Orleans and what happened at Trump Tower in Vegas has nothing to do with immigration or open borders, we will blame them.
Because symbolically, they're the thing that has to be fixed if we want to feel better.
That's a really dangerous place to be.
But we see the full contradiction of it on display.
One minute, Trump's like, we will have a lot of people coming in.
The next minute, there's violence and he's like, had to be somebody who came in.
It's just a matter of which one's good and which one's bad.
And historically, we know, even if you think you're a good immigrant, White supremacy will decide you're a bad immigrant whenever it needs to and whenever it wants to.
And I know that history because of Japanese incarceration, 1882 Exclusion Act, and so on and so forth.
Quick thoughts, Dan, and then we'll go to a break.
Just, excuse me, I think just as you're saying that we get more false alternatives when it comes to this immigration.
I'm with you.
I think that immigration...
Is a positive thing, like just sort of full stop.
Are there bad people who come in?
Of course there are.
There are bad people who live here.
There are bad people who were born here.
There are bad people who come here.
There are probably bad people who leave here.
But as like a sort of a net...
I guess it's a net gain for the country to me.
And I think, I guess that's my theme today, is rejecting those false alternatives, that it's either you keep low-wage workers and make it too hard for high-wage workers to come in, or the other way around.
And I think that that's the other piece of this, where this is taking shape, is that both sides, I think both the Musk-Ramaswamy side and the other side of the MAGA thing, are still trying to pitch it as keeping the right But that's where the war is, because Loomer and Bannon are basically like, there's no good immigrants.
There's no good immigrants.
That's what they're saying.
And they thought Trump agreed with them.
And that's what a lot of the MAGA people think too.
And so anyway, let's take a break.
Come right back.
Okay, Dan, a couple minutes here.
Tell us about an underreported, underpaid attention to story out of the Supreme Court.
Yeah, just so very briefly.
Each year, the Chief Justice of SCOTUS issues this kind of annual report sort of thing, and Chief Justice Roberts issued his.
And in it, he decried the dangerous, quote unquote, dangerous talk by elected officials, quote, across the political spectrum.
Suggesting ignoring federal court rulings.
And there have been politicians on all sides who have suggested doing this and so forth.
He specifically highlighted as illustrations of what this might look like past instances related to court mandated desegregation and governors and states and others that sort of ignored court orders and so forth.
And he emphasized, Brad, with this, The importance of an independent judiciary.
I support an independent judiciary.
I know you do, too.
Apparently, John Roberts does.
And he didn't name any names, but everybody noted that this happened right before Trump's inauguration.
He did note that, quote, every administration suffers defeat in the court system, end quote, as if he's kind of throwing out a flag to Trump, like, don't expect a green light to everything and so forth.
Why is this worth noting?
This is an issue that just smacks of so much hypocrisy and irony that it's laughable for John Roberts to come along and suddenly affirm, you know, an independent judiciary.
Let's remember, this is the same guy that wrote the opinion, basically giving Trump as president carte blanche power to do whatever he wants and saying that he has absolute immunity.
And then says what?
Oh, you need to listen to what the courts say.
Sorry, John Roberts.
You almost single-handedly by writing this, you undermine that.
It doesn't say anything about openly partisan people, especially Samuel Alito to me is the one who really stands out.
People have looked at him like it's up in the high 90 percentile range that his decisions align with what the GOP wants, in particular court cases.
We talk about Clarence Thomas all the time.
We talk about conservative justices who just make no bones about it now that their aim is to overturn court precedent, well-established court precedent that they don't like.
The language of originalism is gone and the pretense that conservatives were ever about originalism or reading the Constitution in its textual form, you know, all that stuff.
That's gone, and John Roberts is part of this, as he just invented this notion of presidential immunity in that decision.
The refusal of a code of ethics, right?
On and on and on, refusing to put in a code of ethics, refusing to make it so the justices have to recuse themselves if they have personal interests or personal stakes in decisions, on and on and on.
It's just the hypocrisy and the irony of suddenly appealing to An independent judiciary at a time when, because of all these other things, we know that the approval rating of SCOTUS by the public is at an all-time low.
The public knows that this is a partisan organ, that it is effectively a tool of the Republican Party at this point.
John Roberts is a key part of doing that.
Yes, Trump put justices on there and so forth, but Roberts has done nothing, in my opinion, to try to counter that as chief justice.
And so he suddenly sees the writing on the wall, sees this guy coming into office.
Remember, this is the same John Roberts who accused liberals on the court of fear mongering when they talked about the kinds of things that a president with absolute immunity might do And here he is trying to fire a warning shot across Trump's bow of like, basically don't act like you have what?
Immunity?
Like you can act autonomously?
Like you can ignore the court?
When he's the one that wrote the opinion that could.
So you and I both agree that this was sort of an underreported thing.
It's out there but didn't get a lot of coverage.
I think it's really significant to hear this super conservative court voicing some concern that potentially the administration coming in is going to undermine their authority.
Checks and balances.
Checks and balances.
A new fragrance by Dan.
Checks and balances are supposed to be part of our democratic system.
And so, Citizens United is the decision that allows basically for unlimited campaign contributions.
And the Roberts Court has overseen the chipping away at the Voting Rights Act and so many things that have protected our elections from bias and gerrymandering and money.
We've been talking about Elon Musk all day.
The guy gave $250 million, which Dan, somebody did an analysis.
It's like if the average American gave $37.
That's how much money he has.
So the richest man in the world gives basically the money he has in his wallet.
Like, oh, I got 40 bucks.
Here you go.
Pushes Donald Trump to the finish line with his $250 million contribution over a couple of months.
He's now co-president, lives at Mar-a-Lago.
And guess what?
John Roberts is like, wait, so you mean the thing that we did that eroded protections over here And means that an autocrat and wannabe dictator like Trump and his entourage of tech bros and white nationalists might defy the courts and simply say to them, where is your army?
We will do what we want.
Now you're worried.
Checks and balances, when you check the power of one branch, it means that you're obviously protecting other branches.
It's the very rudimentary idea of our democratic republic.
And he effed around and now he's finding out.
And this is why it rings so hollow.
It's like that It's like that parent who is like, do what I say and not what I do, because all of us are looking at the Supreme Court.
Right now, I'm sure Clarence Thomas is on a jet somewhere, flying off to be on a yacht, and Sam Alito's just mining the internet for memes to see what flag he wants to fly next over his beach house.
And we're like, are you serious?
You want us to look at you as the last guardians of, you know, fairness?
Look what you've done.
And now you're complaining.
There's no way that this rings as anything but, like, you are so out of touch, it's hard to fathom what's happened to the highest court in the land.
Any other thoughts?
And then give us your reason for hope.
Yeah, I don't.
Just, again, both irony and hypocrisy.
I sometimes wish I could, like, I don't know, understand what's going on in John Roberts' head when he thinks that he's got these high-minded positions that he has, but...
Don't have the technology for that.
Maybe Musk will invent it and we can all figure it out.
My reason for hope is this kind of fragmentation or this debate within MAGA. I think that...
I'm not going to go in the weeds in this, but one of the things that often happens in different kinds of coalitions and political movements and so forth is their unity is not as deep as it appears.
What they perceive as a common enemy, a common threat, and so forth, they come together I think that's a sign of hope.
Or show the constructed nature of the kind of MAGA movement.
Anything that can threaten to pull it apart is something that's positive for those of us who impose that movement.
So I took a lot of hope from watching this infighting and this going back and forth this week.
I have two.
One is Biden is expected, according to the New York Times, to permanently ban oil drilling in some federal waters, and that includes the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
Biden has been far from a progressive on oil and oil production in this country, but that is good news, and I will take it.
The city of Chicago is now running.
400 plus municipal buildings on 100% renewable energy.
So that is, I think, really good news.
I'll give you one more, Dan.
It's a little quirky.
But there's now a train that goes from Berlin to Paris in less than a day's time, and it costs 59 euros.
There's a new train in China that goes 273 miles per hour.
If we wanted to, and that train, Berlin to Paris, 1% of the emissions of a flight.
If we wanted to, we could create a world where the emissions went down and we traveled better.
Question is, do we want that?
All right, y'all.
Thanks for being with us on our first weekly roundup of the year.
It's great to be back.
We know this is going to be a turbulent year, but we will be here with you to go through it all.
If you haven't yet, take advantage of the sale on Swatch Premium.
We extended it until one week from today, so check it out now.
Otherwise, we'll be back next week with our regular programming, Monday, I'll be with you.
It's in the code on Wednesday with Dan and Friday the Weekly Roundup.
