Weekly Roundup: The LA Fires, DEI, and the Right's New Slur
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In this weekly roundup, Brad and Dan discuss the politicized reactions to recent California wildfires, and critique the rhetoric blaming DEI initiatives and ignoring climate change. They analyze Trump's comments on annexing territories like Greenland, Panama, and Canada, relating his rhetoric to broader themes of fascism and expansionism and emphasize the importance of challenging such rhetoric and examine the implications of these conspiracies for future political landscapes. Additionally, listeners hear about their personal experiences and reasons for hope in troublesome times.
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Here, as always, with my co-host, I'm Brad Onishi.
Who are you?
I am Dan Miller, Brad Onishi, and I am Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
I think we're both feeling some sort of New Year's thing where it's like you're equal parts, like, I don't know, excited about something new, but also still fighting off the entire hangover from 2024, just in time for all the serious stuff in 2025. So it's nice to be here, take a break from some other stuff, and hang out for a few minutes.
Yeah, that was an awkward, that was definitely an awkward opening.
We've done this like 800 times now and I don't know why I did that.
I feel like that was one of these moments where we were like at a work conference and we were going to try to go like talk to someone important and I walked up and I was like, hello, this is Dan.
What are you doing?
Why are you being weird?
You know, it's like when I do the intros to it's in the code and like the part that I have to redo over and over and over is usually like the first 30 seconds.
And if people could hear all the outtakes of me swearing into the microphone when I realized that I, like, I don't know, forgot to say my name or mispronounced a word or something like that.
So, yeah, it takes me like five tries.
That's the part I have trouble with.
Once I'm into the stuff, I'm fine.
So, yeah.
Well, I do want to say something.
I have a serious point to make and then another point, which is the recent It's in the Code episodes have been fantastic.
And if you're not listening to those, you're missing out.
Dan's been doing great work surrounding, like, Evangelical conceptions of sex and gender, and we have to talk about the sex thing, and it's just really good.
And if you're in our Discord, you know people have really been loving it, really been digging it.
So I'll just say, if you're not an It's in the Code listener, the last six weeks have just been really, really awesome.
I was listening to Wednesday's episode, and I was driving, and that episode, Dan, just showed the ways that you are a scholar, a gentleman.
A high-minded, intellectual man of the world.
Because you were talking in a very serious way, and none of this was crude or raunchy.
It was all very, I'm trying to make a really good, important point.
And you were.
You really were.
And you were talking about the ways that evangelicals are like, get rid of all porn.
And there used to be these times where like...
Porn was, like, a physical object.
Like, you had to go somewhere to buy, like, an explicit magazine, or you had to go, you know, and somebody, there had to be another human being, and you're just like, hello, I'll take this.
I think I referenced the back room in the video stores, for those of us who can remember that, when there was, like, the adult-only room.
Yeah.
Yeah, I remember when I was, like, 13, and I, like, I saw someone come out of that, and I, like, peeked in, and I was like, oh, my God, there's, like, a hidden door.
What is going on back there?
And, yeah.
Before the blockbuster employee ushers you away or something.
Why is Mr. Robinson, my friend's dad from school, coming out of there?
All right.
Hey, my Mr. Robinson.
Yeah, hey, Mr. Robinson.
Good to see you.
Okay, yeah.
I just now was here to...
People walking around the video store with the video awkwardly tucked under their arms, right?
So nobody could see it?
I'll take Robin Hood, Men in Tights, The Matrix, and this one.
Yeah, this one.
But the way you described it was like, you know, these days there is, there's like, it's not just pornography for straight men.
There's pornography made like for women and queer folks.
And then you said, this is the point where you were making a really good point, but I was in my car and I was just maniacally laughing because you said, and there are folks who make amateur porn.
And you know, Dan, it was just that moment where I knew you were a highly skilled public scholar because For some reason, when you said amateur, with a little bit of French inflection, it was like, yeah, that's, it's art.
These might be, it might be someone at home.
If you would have said amateur with like a hard American A, then you would have really degraded and you really would have, you know, denigrated the people who are just doing things that are indie or not professional pornography or erotica.
And I just, you know, Dan, it really showed your seasoning as a man in the world.
So well done.
I just wanted to tell you that.
I'm glad I made the standards.
Carrying the standards of straight white American Jesus forward into the new year.
We're going to talk today about California wildfires and the response by Trump, Musk, and a whole other litany of conspiracy theorists and why it is a really good moment for us to decode the fact that when folks decry DEI, They are in fact decrying racial diversity and they are in fact beckoning a racist dog whistle.
We'll then talk about the annexation claims that Trump has made and Dan will lead us through what those mean and why there is something to pay attention to there, even if this is all very far-fetched and perhaps a distraction from his cabinet picks and everything else.
And if we have time, we're going to look at some alarming language in...
Coming out of Congress regarding women's health that was flagged in our Discord and is actually really important.
So we'll see if we can get there.
All right, Dan.
As we established last week, you're the show's resident Baptist, but I am the show's resident Californian.
Or ex-Baptist.
If you're new, Dan's an ex-Baptist.
But I'm our resident Californian.
And so many of you know that I grew up in Southern California, and I have a lot of family in Los Angeles.
And what's happening right now...
In that city is heartbreaking for me personally, and I think it's just heartbreaking if you're just a human being.
I've had friends and family members who've evacuated, have heard about folks losing their homes.
So it's really just a nightmare scenario, and there's really no way to convey that in a short way and how much it means.
But what I want to do analytically here today is talk about the ways that the responses to this.
Highlight something that I think we need to be aware of going forward as climate change gets worse and as we enter this new Trump administration.
So Philip Bump had a really good summary of some of the main conspiratorial and disinformation-filled responses to the LA fires as we've seen this week.
So here's Philip Bump writing at the Washington Post just a day ago.
As is nearly always the case at this point, President-elect Donald Trump led the charge.
Talking about disinformation and conspiracy theory.
In multiple social media posts, he accused Governor Gavin Newsom, longtime Republican foil, of having failed to prevent or control the fires.
He accused Newsom of declining to sign a, quote, water restoration declaration aimed at diverting water from northern to southern California, which the governor's office says does not exist and this is pure fiction.
He said that there was, quote, no water for fire hydrants, not firefighting planes, presumably meaning ore rather than not.
That line about the hydrants is like many of the attacks that have unfolded over the last 24 hours rooted in something real.
So, Dan, I'll just summarize.
There are some hydrants in Pacific Palisades and other places that are running out of water because they are a system built to produce water to fight house fires, not a fire that is as big as the island of Manhattan.
Or as long-lasting.
I mean, a house fire, you fight it for several hours and you're...
You're done with the house fire.
That's the other piece is the duration of these fires.
James Woods, the actor who has also become a kind of MAGA spokesperson kind of guy, said that liberal idiots like Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass, Karen Bass is the mayor of L.A., says one of them doesn't understand the first thing about fire management and the other can't fill water reservoirs.
So this is another thing that is circulating, that the reservoirs are empty and yet...
Officials have repeatedly said that they are at or above historic levels.
We actually, in California last year, had a really, really rain-filled winter, and so our reservoirs are actually quite full.
There's others.
Let's talk about Elon Musk.
Elon Musk wrote on Wednesday that LA Fire Department had prioritized DEI over saving lives and homes.
He also says DEI means people die.
That is there.
We played for you at the top a clip of Jesse Waters showing everyone a picture on his show of the leadership of the LA Fire Department.
The leadership and the picture he shows are all women.
And he says, I hope they know what they're doing.
I think we all know what he's getting at there.
Megan Kelly, I also played a clip for you at the top featuring Megan.
Santa is white.
Don't talk to me or yell at me, Kelly.
And Megyn Kelly was saying, we don't care about diversity.
We want to know if you can do your job.
Talking about the fire chief, Chief Crowley of the LA Fire Department.
This is somehow not the worst of the conspiracies.
I'll just give you a few more, Dan, and then I'll let you jump in before I have some analysis of all this.
Stu Peters claimed that in some firestruck areas, none of the bushes and trees were disturbed at all and the lawns are still green.
Adding, the government wants to kill you and then they want to steal your land.
This is from Mother Jones in a piece by Anna Merlin.
Our government, who is working hand-in-glove with the WEF and BlackRock, is purposely setting fires using military-grade DEWs in these areas to initiate a massive land grab.
Read another post representative of the theory, made on Expo, calling himself the Patriot Voice.
It's a verified account, and it has been viewed 180,000 times.
Others claimed that DEI initiatives, going back to Musk and Trump, were really the reason that the fires were out of control.
Chaya Rachik of Libs of TikTok just tweeted endlessly about LA Fire Department Chief Kristen Crowley, who is a woman, is lesbian, and so on, and thus that means that she's a DEI hire, and thus that means that she doesn't know what she's doing.
That's what Libs of TikTok has said.
As with a lot of other conspiracy theorists, Merlin writes, the particular line of attack has been repeated by more mainstream sources.
So we had Megyn Kelly, who I just mentioned.
We had Jesse Waters, who I've talked about.
There's blogger Beth Brelja, who objected to the fact that the L.A. Fire Department strategic plan didn't use the word hydrant, but talked about diversity and sustainability.
Infowar, there's others.
Donald Trump Jr., whatever.
One of the things that I just want to highlight today, Dan, and then I'll throw it to you, is that what we're seeing in response to the LA fires is, I think, two modes of reaction that are actually related.
One is conspiracy theory.
The government wants your land, the government's setting the fires, and so on.
The other is to claim that diversity and DEI initiatives are to blame rather than climate change.
That climate change is never the thing that's brought up here.
James Woods said on TV that Governor Newsom should face a tribunal because he doesn't know what he's doing.
Nobody mentioned climate change.
Trump and others are saying it's Newsom's fault.
The right is fixated on the fact that the leader of the LA Fire Department is a lesbian.
And so we have conspiracy theory, we have DEI, and I want to come back to this.
Those things in my mind are related.
When the reactions are those two sort of twin towers, they are related.
I'll just throw one more thing in there, and that is that there are actually some, there's many celebrities who've lost their homes in these fires.
Billy Crystal, Mel Gibson, Paris Hilton, people like that.
There has been some buzz among those folks that the fires were set as a kind of extension of the anti-CEO and elite sentiment that came out of the killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO and the Luigi Mangione case.
So there is some conspiracy on that level, too.
I got more to say.
What do you think?
I think you're right about linking these two, what you're calling sort of the two pillars of this.
I want to highlight, I know I highlight this every time we have these DEI conversations, but when you get somebody who says, like, you know, I hope they know what they're doing, like, that's the only caption, right?
Let's bring Uncle Ron into it.
I feel like we haven't talked about Uncle Ron in a while.
And let's imagine that you and Uncle Ron are talking and you're like, oh, Uncle Ron's a dog.
What?
What?
I'm just saying I hope that I want the best for everybody.
I hope they can do their jobs.
Like, don't you want that for everybody?
When you go to the doctor, don't you really hope they know what they're doing?
And it's that way of deflecting from what the real issue is.
The logic of this always is, whenever they come up with a DEI, and you highlighted this, this racial diversity, whenever you hear that language of, well, I value competence over diversity, or the ability to do your job over your diversity, or we don't need diversity, we need just hiring the best person.
Notice the opposition that is always presupposed there, that the best person is not a so-called diversity candidate.
That if your fire chief is a lesbian, she must not be the best person or most qualified for the job because she's not a straight person and she's not a man.
So I think that that's the one piece of it that I think does tie it in with the conspiracism, both what I think is the existing discourse to try to reinstate a kind of white supremacist structure within the U.S., but also the conspiracy.
That what people on the left are really about, and nobody can ever explain to me why people on the left would want this.
They're all about weakening America or being mean to white people or whatever.
And I guess the land grab piece maybe is why you want LA to burn so you can swoop in and get the land or whatever.
But I think that that's a piece that's...
There's so much about DEI and anti-diversity now, and it's always couched in these terms of...
You know, marketplace efficiency or qualifications or whatever.
But if you follow the logic of it, it is always that a person of color, a woman, a queer person can't be the best candidate.
And this is where I think it matters because if you follow their logic, it means any of those categories become disqualifying.
It's fundamentally about and calling for discrimination that if you could tick any kind of diversity box, not that you do, Not that you claim it, but if somebody could look at you and say, oh, that person could have ticked the Asian American box, African American, that person is queer, or whatever, it's a disqualifying element of your identity.
It's institutionalized white supremacy.
So that's the piece that always stands out to me.
And I think that that's why the DEI stuff becomes this specter, like no matter what the issue is, where it is.
What we're talking about.
If you'd said a few months ago or a few years ago that they were going to blame the wildfires in California on diversity initiatives, people would be like, what are you talking about?
But that's why.
Because anytime there's any kind of catastrophe, you blame it on this as a way of trying to reinstate the vision of Christian white America that the MAGA world has.
We're on the same wavelength because I'm looking at a piece by Jennifer Saul of the University of Waterloo at The Conversation, and she says a lot of what you just said.
She says, those books you don't like?
Blame DEI initiatives.
Black people getting prestigious jobs?
DEI is at fault.
Annoying young student activists?
Too much DEI. It's hard to find a hot-button issue or social context where DEI can't be hurled as a term of abuse to undermine marginalized people.
And so, if you go back to the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge and Baltimore, Dan, you remember that there was lawmakers who says, this is what happens when you have governors who prioritize diversity over the well-being and security of citizens.
Others called Brandon Scott, the mayor of Baltimore, a DEI mayor.
A lot of us remember when the Boeing issues, the airplane issues were happening, doors falling off, etc.
What did Elon Musk say then?
Do you want to fly in an airplane where they prioritize DEI hiring over your safety?
And Baltimore, you know, Mayor Scott had a response to this.
He says, we know that these folks really want to, what they really want to say when they say DEI mayor.
They really want to say the N-word.
Joy Reid, the MSNBC host, said it this way.
At this point, it's evident what they mean by DEI. It means black people.
It's not fashionable to be openly racist anymore in America, which, yeah, may or may not be true at this point, but.
So referring to a black mayor as a DEI mayor gets the point across.
So I'll just make this point and one more, Dan, and then we can take a break, which is everything you just said is what I've thought about all week, that if you are a black person in a place of an executive position, college president, college professor, if you are a queer woman, if you are an indigenous person, It does not matter.
If you are a non-white male, the DEI hire can just be labeled, can be, you know, lobbed your way.
And what people are saying there is like, you were probably hired because not you're qualified, but because of your identity.
Because somebody wanted to tick a box.
We need to see this for what it is.
This is an openly racist way to criticize anyone who is not a white person who is in a position of leadership.
And it extends to white women at times, as we're seeing with the leader of the LA Fire Department.
There is a study done by a whole group of researchers about DEI programs.
And it was published about 10 months ago.
There's a bunch of scholars.
Adam Eichen, Douglas Rice, Jesse Rhodes, Justin Gross.
And what they found is that those Americans who have negative racial attitudes, so what does that mean, Dan?
It means respondents who hold prejudicial, stereotypical, or racist views of people of color.
So if you're responding to their survey and you have already identified yourself as somebody who has negative views of black people or Jewish people or others, okay?
Then, you think that DEI initiatives are, on the whole, not a good thing.
Support for DEI programs was 73 percentage points lower among individuals with the most negative racial attitudes compared to those with the most positive attitudes.
So, on average, Dan, 7 in 10 Americans support DEI training for medical professionals, teachers, police officers, members of the U.S. Armed Forces, public employees.
65% of Americans support this training for private sector employees.
And yet, if you have answered on a survey in ways that identifies you as somebody who has negative views of racial minorities or other marginalized groups, that's a very good predictor that you think DEI is bad.
My point is this.
The DEI label has become shorthand for, well, you got a black person leading the thing.
Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, is a black woman.
Who's that brown-skinned guy?
Who's the engineer that worked on the Boeing plane?
Was that somebody from Southeast Asia?
This is just pure and simple.
You do what's in the code.
This has to be decoded.
It has to be decoded.
And there's no other way to say this except for bluntly.
If you say at every turn that you must be a DEI hire, you are saying there is no way that a black person or a lesbian woman in charge of a fire department or somebody who has brown skin, somebody who is an Asian person, somebody who's non-binary, there's no way for them to demonstrate to you their merit, their skill, their competence, because you will always just go to, well, it's probably DEI. And when Jesse Waters says, I hope they know what they're doing, that's what they're saying.
They're saying, the people who know what they're doing are white people.
My last point on this, because I know we've got to take a break, is that the other conspiracy theories in response to LA fires are ones that avoid reality about climate change.
And these things go together.
I wrote it in my book.
That white grievance politics and the avoidance of reality go together.
There's just this desire to not face the fact.
That our country is nearly majority-minority.
To not face the fact we have more women going to college than men.
That there's just...
Don't want to face the fact that when you send your kids to school in so many places across the country, it is not going to be a place that is homogeneous racially.
That there are going to be a quarter of the folks who might identify as queer in some way and so on and so forth.
But the other thing is the avoidance.
Of climate change as the reaper of this tragedy and this disaster?
James Woods is like, oh, it's Newsom.
What an idiot.
It is such a shortcut.
It is such a nice shortcut to just think, oh, this is Gavin Newsom who's an idiot and he can't fill a fire hydrant.
Rather than we are living in wide-scale climate emergency.
We are facing every Couple of months.
Hurricane Helene.
Hurricane Milton.
California fires.
Lahaina on Maui, a place that means a lot to my family, burned down.
Just two weeks ago, the Santa Cruz Pier, where half an hour from my house, broke off.
It's a shortcut.
And I know I gotta shut up.
When you have people in charge, like Trump and Musk and others, who they give You end up in a place where if you think that enough climate disasters will cause the conspiracy theorists to be like, you know, we were wrong.
It just keeps happening.
The fires, the droughts, the crazy hurricanes, the tornadoes, Asheville, North Carolina.
We just, we were wrong.
It really is the climate.
Things are bad and we should all work together to fix it.
We're heading to a place where like...
That denial is going to get worse, and you're going to be in a place of political outcast when you call it out as the next Trump administration comes.
All right, I'm done.
Give us your last thoughts, and we'll go to a break.
My last thought about that is I can remember a time back in, say, the 90s when the climate denial on the right was, well, show us concrete examples.
Because it all felt very abstract.
There were all these projections.
But in concrete terms that regular people could experience a lot, there wasn't a lot of sort of experiential evidence yet, if I can use that term.
And I think it's interesting how that has completely disappeared.
Because the concrete examples are all around us all the time.
It is no longer difficult at all to be like, hey, look at all these things that are happening that are exactly what you would expect if climate change was real.
And climate change is, in fact, the most logical explanation for all of this.
That line has completely disappeared.
And as you say, it's just deflection now.
It's deflecting by appealing to other things, by talking about everything but climate change.
And I think there's this sense where people will know what this means.
I think people have had this experience where something is hyper-present because of its absence.
It's like the fact that they talk about everything but this.
You're kind of like, you know the one really obvious thing that nobody's mentioning is the most obvious explanation.
And so I think that's another piece of it, that the DEI stuff, the conspiracism, it helps the white America cause.
It also helps the climate denial cause.
It's like a one-two punch and a really useful mechanism when you have these kinds of natural disasters that can deploy it in those contexts.
Let's take a break.
Be right back.
All right, Dan.
Talk to us about the annexation stuff.
I mean, the climate, it's all tied together, but tell us about what you think is behind Trump's annexation claims, Greenland, Panama Canal, Canada, and whether or not this is something we should be paying attention to.
Yeah, so I'm going to circle around to those specific things, you know, Trump's claims about...
As you say, Canada, the Panama Canal in particular, and Greenland.
But I want to situate this within this broader debate.
You and I have talked about this for a long time, but we're not the only ones talking about this, and it's gained steam over time.
And it's the debate about whether or not Trump and MAGA should be properly described as fascist.
And for a long time, there was a lot of rhetoric, especially like maybe the further left you were politically, the more likely you were to call this fascist.
And a lot of people were like, oh, this is...
This is overstatement.
Those people on the left call everything they don't like fascist and so forth.
But in recent years, as the MAGA movement has crystallized, as it has stayed with us, as Trump has remained ascendant, and I think as more and more scholars and journalists and others have looked at this, it's become like a real question and a real debate about whether or not this should be considered fascist.
I think you and I have made clear where we stand on that.
We think the term fascism applies.
But I want to talk a little bit about why.
And situate Trump's claims in that regard, because I think that even if they're just rhetorical, they tell us an awful lot about Trump and the MAGA movement.
So part of the reason this is on my mind, I've been reading some about this debate.
There's a really good book I would recommend to folks, edited by Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, called Did It Happen Here?
Perspectives on Fascism in America.
It's an edited volume with essays from lots of different people kind of debating this issue of fascism in America.
And one of the issues that comes up is the disciplinary perspectives.
The kind of academic or analyst who's looking at this question will often come up with different answers.
This is of interest to me.
I'm an interdisciplinary scholar.
I teach about interdisciplinarity.
I teach interdisciplinary research methods to my students.
And so this is interesting.
The contemporary discussion is driven primarily by historians.
And it's primarily by historians who study European history and they study the history of Italian and German fascism in World War II and the run-up to World War II. And they tend to argue that, yes, there are echoes of this, the rhetoric is similar and so forth, but that those parallels aren't sufficient.
MAGA isn't really a fascist movement.
And they say that it doesn't parallel the developments in Europe at the time enough to qualify as fascist.
But there's this whole other range of discourses.
And Brad, I would situate what we do, I think, in this other range of discourses that comes at this from the perspective of social theory, that comes at it from the perspective of philosophy.
Lots of social scientists, sociologists, and others, their perspective tends to be that, no, like sort of in lots of structural ways and ways that matter, this is, in fact, an articulation of fascism.
There are also other discourses.
There are lots of folks that are critical of the kind of Eurocentric Yeah, African-Americans and critics of white supremacy have been calling that fascist for decades.
This long predates Trump.
This is not like a new thing.
And maybe Italy and Germany aren't the only model.
Theorists of the two-thirds world will look at this and say, yeah, let's take a look at someplace besides just Italy and Germany.
Maybe those are not the roadmap for everybody's experience.
The reason I highlight that is because what happens is that I think historians can fall into a trap, and I call it the repetition fallacy.
That's not a really fancy name.
I just made it up.
But what that is is this thing where sometimes historians can fall into this trap.
Where they pay so much attention to all the minutia of how a particular social phenomenon came about in a particular time, particular place, particular circumstance, that if a contemporary circumstance doesn't mirror every aspect of that, they say, oh, well, it can't be an example of this or that or the other.
They do this with fascism.
So I've got an example I want to read from this just for a minute.
This is an essay in that same book called Why Trump Isn't a Fascist.
It's written by Richard J. Evans as impeccable.
He's Regis History Professor Emeritus at Cambridge.
For those who don't know the Oxbridge system, the Regis Professorship at each of those institutions is sort of the premier professorship you can have.
So his premier professorship at one of the premier institutions in the world.
He's a specialist on Germany and Nazism.
And this is what he says.
He says, Fascism and Nazism were the creation of the First World War, which militarized society.
And in the minds of their leaders and supporters, discredited liberal democracy by associating it with armed defeat.
He goes on to say, What drove fascism and Nazism was a desire to refight the First World War, but this time to win it.
Preparing for war, arming for war, educating for war, and fighting a war to find fascist theory and praxis.
And he goes on to say that Trump and MAGA are isolationists, so they can't.
The parallels don't hold.
He's not really a fascist.
Here's my critique, and I see you shaking your head.
I'm going to let you jump in in a minute because you're going to say the same things that I'm about to say.
I just keep your finger on that page because I'm going to ask you to read it again.
Yeah, because here's the thing.
The rhetoric of MAGA and everything they say says everything he says that fascism is about.
That the U.S. has been defeated?
That the U.S. is humiliated?
That the U.S. is suffering invasion?
That the U.S. is weak?
That the U.S. has been relegated to secondary status?
Folks, go back a little like post-Weimar Germany and after the Treaty of Versailles and the way that this rhetoric worked and resonated with what?
Millions of ordinary Germans.
We know that millions of Americans buy into this rhetoric and they believe that.
The language around the threat of immigration and white replacement theory, we know all of that echoes in terrifying ways the anti-Semitic rhetoric of, in particular, right, German Nazism.
So I'll pause there, but just to say before we even get into what Trump is saying about the annexation stuff, I already think, and this is what situates me as, I guess, the cultural theorist and not the historian, because I care about the rhetoric.
I don't care that, no, we didn't just have a world war, we didn't just come out of a world war, and it's not militarized in the same way.
We do have the largest military budget of any nation in the world.
We do have a defense budget that is sacrosanct and cannot be questioned.
We do have an unquestioned right to quote-unquote defend ourselves and to project force anywhere in the world, but because we pride ourselves on being a liberal democracy, we don't consider that militarization when arguably we're the most militarized society on earth.
I think the parallels already sort of stand out.
I'll get into the Trump stuff in a minute, but if you want me to reread the passage or you want to jump in, I'm happy to do it.
Reread it.
Reread it.
I just want to say that Regis Professor is not someone who is amateur in any way, so we do need to be careful, but go ahead.
Well, I'm going to read another piece I didn't read because you just said that, because Regis' professor does something sneaky in this thing that he shouldn't do.
We're putting on our textualist hats, right?
He says this.
He says, the temptation to draw parallels between Trump and the fascist leaders of the 20th century is understandable.
Okay.
How better to express the fear, loathing, and contempt that Trump arouses in liberals than by comparing him to the ultimate political evil?
Notice how he immediately dismisses it.
It's understandable.
But it's nonsense.
There couldn't be real reasons for doing this.
It's just that you don't like Trump, so you want to label him a fascist.
But passages that I read were this sentence.
This is on page 80 of the book.
If anybody wants to go look it up.
Fascism and Nazism were the creation of the First World War, which militarized society and, in the minds of their leaders and supporters, discredited liberal democracy by associating it with armed defeat.
And the next sentence that I read...
Go ahead.
Jump in.
All right.
So, militarized society.
So, we have everything you just said.
Military budget, largest military in the world.
Our military budget is the most...
Every time they audit it, they're like, oh, look at that.
We found this many billions just in the couch.
I mean, it is that bloated, okay?
But, I would also argue that when there are protests in this country, what happens?
The police show up.
In tanks and military gear.
They show up in gear that looks like they are dealing with a foreign invasion when it is people protesting.
I've been part of those protests.
I have seen those things.
So, militarized society, we live in that.
How many guns are on the streets or in the hands of American citizens?
You ever watch, Dan, police procedurals or detective shows or whatever's based in the UK? When Americans watch those and the police break in and all the action goes down and the police don't have nine guns each.
They have a baton that they can hit you with and hand-to-hand combat.
Everyone is just like, what?
I'm an American.
How come that police person doesn't have...
Ten guns strapped to their body they can shoot whenever they want.
So, the militarized part?
I mean, come on.
I don't know what you're looking at in terms of our society that you would think it's not a militarized society.
Number two...
Go ahead.
Yeah, go.
No, no, no, go.
I was just going to say, just to that point, tear gas is banned in international conflict.
It can't be used under Geneva Conventions and things like that in international conflict.
It's used all the time on America's own citizens.
So you have a chemical weapon that cannot be used in military combat that is used militarily against U.S. citizens on a regular basis.
I was just going to throw that out there.
I mean, yeah.
Okay.
We could go on about how many Americans die daily at the hands of police and so on.
Okay.
But questioning liberal democracy, are you serious at this point?
Like, it is fashionable to say that democracy doesn't work.
And I'm writing a book on this, or I'm supposed to be at least, I'm trying to, and I can give you the names of all the people.
And I'm not talking about people on the street.
I'm talking about people who have a direct line to our president.
Elon Musk.
J.D. Vance has praised those who have said monarchy is the best way.
Peter Thiel.
J.D. Vance has...
Patron and somebody who supported Trump going all the way back to 2016 and has been invited to the White House by Trump has said democracy and freedom are not compatible.
I can give you all of the theologians, the pastors, the pundits who want Trump to be a Red Caesar.
We live in an era where Jack Posso Beach can say at a major at CPAC in 2024, welcome to the end of democracy.
A conference where J.D. Vance and so many others, including Trump, spoke and nobody disavowed it.
So, I'm just saying as a scholar myself, the ideas of a militarized society that questions whether or not liberal democracy is the answer, all of that is here.
And it's going to be very hard to change my mind on those points because of all the receipts I have.
So, how does this relate to annexation?
Yeah, so just one more point on that.
I just looked it up real quick.
Yeah, the U.S. counts for 40% of the world's military budget.
Four out of every $10 of the entire world that are spent on the military come from the United States.
So just like, yeah, don't give me the non-militarized.
Here's the idea.
The basic line of that, and this is a basic one, is that MAGA is not expansionist.
It's isolationist.
It's not militarized the way that fascism was.
So let's now, within that context, look at Trump's comments.
Teasing in this long, meandering, I don't know if interview is the right word, diatribe, monologue, whatever, that he had at Mar-a-Lago.
He teased, quote, the dawn of America's golden age, right?
By what?
Increasingly discussing seizing or annexing territory from other countries, and the three that we've mentioned here.
He said that Denmark should give up.
Greenland to the U.S. He says the U.S. should take the Panama Canal back from Panama.
And he said that the U.S. subsidizes Canada and that they don't have a substantial military.
I think it's more than interesting that you note that country is militarily weak compared to us.
Wink, wink.
And so we should just kind of annex it as the 51st state.
Now, he also refused, in the cases of Panama and Greenland, To rule out the use of military force to take either of them.
He was explicitly asked about this, and he said, no, I can't assure you on either of those two, end quote, the military force wouldn't be used.
Now, is it just rhetoric?
Yeah, probably, maybe.
He's been talking about Greenland for a long time, though.
This goes back to his first term.
Especially in the case of Canada, Justin Trudeau noted, and he's probably right, that the Canada comments are ways of Trump trying to...
Deflect from the concerns about the great rising costs of tariffs and trying to basically coerce Canada into doing what they want economically and so forth.
All that stuff can be true, but it is still expansionist rhetoric, right?
And here's the thing.
You said a few weeks ago, you talked about not, I forget exactly how I'm going to say it, not surrendering to authoritarians in anticipation or before they actually tell you to surrender, right?
Like not just handing them what they want.
Rhetoric turns into reality.
When we don't challenge the rhetoric, when we let it stand or we dismiss it or we let it take root as quote-unquote just rhetoric, and the people using the rhetoric long enough start looking around and say, you know what?
We've been saying this shit for a long time, but nobody's really doing anything about it.
Maybe we could actually do it.
Could actually give it a try.
It's there.
The rhetoric is there.
So I think that this is sort of this critique of that analysis that says, nah, this isn't fascism.
It doesn't parallel it enough.
The rhetoric does.
The logic does.
In my mind, the effects that it has on real Americans who buy into that rhetoric has to be similar to the effect that that rhetoric had on millions of Germans who enabled and empowered Hitler ultimately to do what he was going to do.
The question is, Will the same thing happen in the U.S.? Is the same thing already happening in the U.S.? Where we empower that rhetoric and we empower those leaders to do these things.
So I look at these expansionist claims of his, and they're easy to dismiss.
It's easy to say this is never going to happen.
In concrete terms, I don't think it's probably going to happen.
Who knows with Trump, but I don't see him invading Greenland.
But maybe he does.
I don't know.
But if you don't challenge the rhetoric, as I say, eventually somebody's going to come along and say, well, you know what?
We've been talking about this forever.
Nobody seems to mind that we're talking about it.
Let's give it a shot.
And then when we do give it a shot and somebody suddenly comes at us, we'll be like, well, we told you for years we were going to do this and you didn't say anything.
If it bugs you so much, how come you've never said anything before?
Those are my thoughts on Trump's annexation claims.
I think the rhetoric matters.
I appreciate the work of historians, but I think that in this case and this kind of inquiry, it just misses what is going on right in front of us.
By getting too bogged down into a notion that, well, it doesn't map perfectly onto Europe.
And I'm with some of those two-thirds world scholars and others who say, well, maybe Europe was an example of fascism, not the definition of it, right?
That Nazism and Italian fascism fit into that model, but that we're naive if we think that for some reason it just can't happen again because you don't have a global conflict preceding it.
Yeah, and you know, you always say that of the two of us, you know, you're more of the social theorist and I'm more, you know, kind of the historian.
And I would say that one of the traps, I think, of history, of being, of historical approaches to this stuff, is that you can get trapped in a like, well, does this map perfectly on?
And let's have a conference and let's go talk for three years.
And all the while, we have a world in front of us that is enduring something that can be called fascism.
It can be called...
Like fascism, it can be called whatever you want, but it is terrible.
And as academics, I will just say there's a time to back off whether or not this is a 99% match to something that we've seen in the past and actually say, what are the ways we can warn people about how it works, what we might expect, what are some of its strategies, and how to prepare.
With that said, I do think this is far-fetched.
I do think it's a distraction from Pete Hegseth from all the other nominees, whether it's Kash Patel, whether it is RFK. Like, we could be talking today about more senators who are doubtful about Hegseth.
We could be talking today about more folks who think Kash Patel's not ready or something, but we're not.
And, you know, part of me is like, should we even give this any airtime?
And I think what you said is actually right.
The rhetoric matters.
And I'll just give one more perspective on why I think the rhetoric matters.
It matters in terms of Ukraine and Russia.
Russia has basically attacked a free and independent democracy and claimed that Ukraine doesn't exist.
It's just Russian territory that is theirs.
That's basically what Donald Trump is saying about Panama.
Basically what he's saying about Canada in a more kind of indirect way.
And this whole idea of Greenland, I'm going to talk more about this Monday, but the Greenland thing is about NATO. Denmark is a member of NATO, and if one member of NATO is attacked,
then NATO is triggered and all the members of NATO are called to defend it, except for the United States is part of NATO. I'm going to talk more about this Monday, so I don't want to give it all away, but what I will say is, A, Trump's rhetoric about Greenland, Panama,
and Canada are ways to legitimate Putin and, you know, give him cover when it comes to Ukraine and give Donald Trump cover for not supporting Ukraine and so on to basically say, well, you know, the more powerful nation should take what's theirs, etc.
B, and I've said this before, friends, and I know you don't want to hear it, and I know it hurts, and I know it's hard to accept.
In the world now.
Macron, the French president, who's in his own sort of chaotic state at the moment, and France is undergoing some pretty turbulent political waters.
But nonetheless, Macron talks already this week about forming a new alliance that is not NATO, that would include a European army, to defend itself against whom, Dan?
Well, Russia, yes.
But I don't know.
The United States, if it decides it wants to do something like invade Greenland.
Friends, we are going to have to accept that we're not in the post-World War II alliance anymore that was built 75 years ago.
We are in the camp that has worked to break that up.
And our leader, as of January 20th, is somebody who aspires to be and wants to be in the fraternity of Vladimir Putin.
Or other authoritarian leaders across the country, Kim Jong-un or Viktor Orban, rather than working with NATO allies and the United Nations and those who have traditionally been our kind of sister and brother countries, I don't know how you put that, across the world, whether that's the UK, whether that's France, whether that's Germany, and so on.
So I think, to me, this is why this matters.
I'll just say one last thing.
I'll throw it to you for final thoughts on this is Donald Trump has spent his life thinking that if he builds buildings with his name on it, he will finally feel like he's done something.
He's a classic narcissist who wants attention at every turn.
He wants your attention.
So he's going to say things that he knows will make you mad just so that you're paying attention.
Like, I'm going to go invade Greenland or we're going to make Canada the 51st state.
And here we are talking about it.
That's what a narcissist does.
You can't really build a building in the United States, but you know what?
If you're the president that buys Greenland, a la the Louisiana Purchase, if you're a president who takes back the Panama Canal or a big chunk of Canada, in Donald Trump's mind, you've done something that no president has done since when?
Right?
Andrew Jackson, since when?
There's no Obama, there's no Bush, there's no Clinton, there's no Nixon, there's no Carter, there's no anybody.
Lyndon Johnson or even FDR who can claim that they went and annexed and gained more territory for the United States.
That is Donald Trump's Trump Tower.
The Trump territory is his Trump Tower as president.
I think that's how we should think about it.
Final thoughts on this one?
I think just very briefly.
You know, if we want just more evidence that this is a real thing, just look at, you know, just Musk, briefly, the Trump surrogate slash puppet master, as we've talked about.
What does he do this week?
He goes and interviews the leader of the far-right movement in Germany.
So you have MAGA very explicitly, like, reaching out and normalizing relations with like-minded political groups.
I just throw that out there.
We could say more about it.
But just to say...
Again, to the people that want to be like, no, this is not fascism.
Just look at the parallels that are happening right in front of us.
History is what is always happening.
And it's taking shape in front of us, and we can't miss it just because it may not look exactly like things in the past.
All right.
I agree.
And yeah, I agree.
Let's go to Reasons for Hope.
What's your reason for hope this week?
My reason for hope is that SCOTUS ruled 5-4 to deny Trump's attempt to delay sentencing in his New York hush money case.
Now, it's a bit of a pyrrhic victory.
The judge has already said that there won't actually be a penalty of any kind.
But Trump wanted to go into office not being a felon, and he will now be the only president to ever go into office as a convicted felon.
I do think it's worth noting we talk about SCOTUS, and I think, Brad, we're going to be talking about SCOTUS a lot in the next.
I don't know, several years.
But John Roberts and Barrett were the two conservative justices who sided with the liberals on this.
I think it bears watching to see where that goes.
Again, it doesn't change anything in January.
It doesn't change anything that's coming.
But I do think that, once again, Trump can't simply hide from who and what he is.
And so I was hopeful when I saw that.
Piece of news, both for that reason and again, because it does show some fragmentation on certain issues with those conservative court justices.
It was a bit of a shock that they...
I don't know if you were shocked, but there was definitely people online, Ellie Mistel and others, that were like, they did not expect Roberts and Coney Barrett to go that way.
Trump's been in court today.
We've already had...
Judge Mershon say that it's an unconditional dismissal, so nothing's going to happen.
And that hurt.
When I heard him say it, it hurt.
It was not great to listen to, but yeah, anyway.
I think Jimmy Carter's funeral has brought out some of the things that are worth staying on.
Jimmy Carter lived in a house that he built.
With his hands, and it was $167,000, or I don't know how much the house was, for like the last 43 years of his life.
You know, there's people in his hometown who came out to celebrate with him, or celebrate his life, I should say.
And sorry for that misstatement there.
I was not trying to be funny in any way.
Misstatement.
They celebrated his life.
And, you know, when you think about Jimmy Carter, somebody who lived in the same house after being president for like four decades of his life, and then you think about Mar-a-Lago, you think about the ways that, you know, who's in office now?
When you think about the fact that Donald Trump is a 34-time convicted felon who paid hush money to make sure that pornographic actors or adult actor, you know, who he had sex with weeks after his third wife had his fifth child, Didn't tell anyone so he could be president.
And then you think about Jimmy Carter and the way he lived his life.
A lot of people, the reports out of D.C. were like, to go and view Carter was like three and a half hours because so many people wanted to.
People still want leadership full of integrity, leadership full of authenticity, and leaders who have character.
They do.
They're thirsting for it.
We want that.
And unfortunately, a lot of folks now believe our system is so corrupt that that's impossible.
And I understand that feeling, but I'm trying to resist that in terms of despair and nihilism.
Another reason for hope, Dan, I just want to put this out there, is A, you played dodgeball this week, which you put on social media, so I'm allowed to say it.
And, you know, I've told you for a long time, Dan, if you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.
But also...
I have a couple questions about your dodgeball playing.
Did you wear cargo shorts or not?
I did not.
But here's how lame I am.
I had to go buy athletic shorts because I didn't own any.
I do everything in cargo shorts.
But I was like, it's true.
I was like, I can't show up to play dodgeball in cargo shorts.
So I had to go buy other shorts to wear.
I want you to know a couple things.
A, we're just lost, a bunch of listeners, because there are some people in here who believe in you and your character and integrity because of the car.
You are ride-or-die cargo shorts.
You don't care what people think.
And here you are going out to buy some name-brand athletic wear, Lululemon Dan now, out here playing, you know, dodgeball like some sort of, you know, Matthew McConaughey model.
So you just sold out.
No one's going to listen anymore.
Thanks a lot.
Okay.
So that's one.
Two, what kind of shirts can we expect now that you're a dodgeball guy?
Is there dodgeball paraphernalia?
There are teams and stuff.
I'm pretty sure nobody's going to want me to be on theirs yet.
So I'm in what they call when they have the teams, it's the free agents, which means the people that don't have a team get to just go out and be dodgeball fodder.
But I did, I want folks to know, I did wear a Stranger Things themed t-shirt last night at dodgeball.
So I have not completely, you know, turned against myself and denied my personality and my identity in my new efforts to try to learn how to play semi-competitive, as they describe it, dodgeball.
I had my birthday at the end of 2024 and I went surfing for the first time since my Younger daughter was born.
So it's been like 20 months, maybe 18 months since I've surfed.
And I knew it was going to be a struggle.
And I went and it took everything.
And it was a big day.
It was overhead.
So it was like seven feet.
Steamer Lane, Santa Cruz.
Not a beginner wave by any means.
And my whole goal, Dan, when I paddled out, was like, just get out to where you need to be.
Like, not in the takeoff zone, not in the place where the waves are destroying people.
And if you can get there, then we'll just figure out what's next.
And like I did, it took me like 20 minutes.
I did get there.
I was completely out of breath.
But I will say, I will say, I caught one really good wave.
And I haven't smiled like that in so long.
And then I got back to the car.
I was so proud of myself.
I have a sore all over the place.
Like, you know.
Was so, like, out of breath and tired.
And I'd completely forgotten, like, really key ingredients to going surfing.
So I had no towel.
I had no changing gear.
I had to get, you know, butt naked in the back of my truck while hoping people didn't watch so I could put my clothes on.
It was a really great time to be a 40-something-year-old man who's just like, yeah, went surfing for the first time.
Still got it.
Still got it.
And then it's like, oh.
Going to get an indecent exposure arrest because I have to take off a really wet and cold wetsuit with no gear.
Anyway, it doesn't matter.
All right, y'all.
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