Weekly Roundup: Trump's Cabinet Picks Are Designed to Destroy America
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Brad and Dan critically analyze the backgrounds and motives of various Trump appointees, arguing that their nominations are part of a broader agenda to dismantle the progress of the 20th century and consolidate power. They also explore how hyperbolic threats and trans panic are used to manipulate public opinion and political outcomes, comparing this to historical geopolitical strategies.
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I'm Brad Onishi, and great to be with you today alongside my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Always nice to be here with my co-host, Brad.
And we're recording early, which means we get some of the gravelly voice, Brad, that we like so much, you know, early morning recordings.
Yeah, it's a 5 a.m.
day for me.
Get up at 5 and start recording.
So it's all good.
There's not many things that I like getting up at 5 a.m.
for, but getting to talk to Dan Miller.
About the week's most important things is one of them.
Today's Friday.
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And today we want to talk about a bunch of stuff.
The confirmation hearings are a big one.
And I think I've probably dominated a lot of your minds this week in terms of what you've seen on cable news.
I want to talk about a bill in the House that has effects, I shall say, for trans people in this country.
And Dan will take us through that.
And of course, we are kind of anticipating that by this time next week, Trump will have been inaugurated as president in his second Trump term.
Dan, you just told me offline about...
Trump's official portrait.
I think we're going to try to keep this professional now that we're recording here, but the portrait is certainly of a certain genre, I'll just say.
If people haven't looked at it, just go look at it.
Vance is your typical headshot portrait thing.
Trump, I think, yeah.
Just people can go look at it.
There's a lot to say about it.
Yeah, Vance, I have so many thoughts.
I'm going to try to keep it professional.
We'll just leave it.
We're just going to leave her.
So, let's talk about the hearings this week.
And there was a bunch.
Pete Hegseth, at the beginning of the week, we had folks like Pam Bondi for Attorney General, the Matt Gate backup.
We had Scott Besant, who is up for Treasury and is a kind of hedge fund billionaire.
And I have to say, Dan, in person is the sort of caricature of a billionaire whose life is about money.
And money?
And also money, markets, money, investments, also money.
Not somebody who really seems to...
I mean, I'm not saying this to be snarky.
I'm saying this because this is what came across in his testimony.
There was just no sense of an investment in human communities in any way.
Anything that falls outside of the market, Dad?
You said on our bonus episodes coming out soon that one of your first philosophical...
Love's was the work of Jacques Derrida.
I've spent not as much time as you with Derrida, but a significant amount.
And there's always these debates in Derrida and Bataille about, like, does anything fall outside of the economy of exchange?
And for Scott Bessent, the answer is no.
He does not need to read Derrida.
The only thing that matters is money.
I'll get to him.
We had Russ Vogt, who might be one of the more dangerous folks, part of this cabinet, and so on and so forth.
We're going to go through some of those and just kind of try to break down what happened with them and what is at stake.
Let me give you a thesis, Dan, and let me give you some kind of framing and want to see what you think about this.
What I've been saying on Mondays is that one of the goals of those who are surrounding Trump, whether they are the tech magnates, Mark Andreessen, Elon Musk, To some extent, Peter Thiel.
Peter Thiel and Trump had a falling out, but he was a huge supporter of Trump for a long time.
They want to repeal the 20th century.
And I think that includes...
And people wonder why tech magnates and Christian Reconstructionists or Integralist Catholics, how could they have overlap?
What do they share?
If you are a Doug Wilson type of Christian Reconstructionist, or if you are a...
A reactionary Catholic, like Kevin Roberts at the Heritage Foundation, and like J.D. Vance.
What do you share with the, like, Silicon Valley dudes who have flooded into Mar-a-Lago?
And the thing you share is that you all want to repeal the 20th century.
That when it comes to things like, and I've talked about this on Mondays, the 40-hour work week, social security, when it comes to FDIC protections, child labor laws, protections against, like, harassment in the workplace.
Women being treated equally in the workplace.
When it comes to things like the rule of law, when it comes to things like protecting Americans from corruption, or providing a social safety net that helps people buy a home for the first time, or Medicare and Medicaid, which provide some sense of if you get hurt or sick and you are older or have certain circumstances, you will be taken care of by the richest society in human history.
They want to repeal those things because they see them as impediments to power.
They see them as impediments to the right kind of society.
So if you want to know what they all share, that's what I see.
Like, Pete Hegseth, and I've documented this, I've talked about it, talked about it on television, I've talked about it elsewhere.
Pete Hegseth attends a church that is part of Doug Wilson's denomination.
He is an...
Fred Clarkson wrote a piece about this this week.
He is a tried-and-true Christian Reconstructionist.
He thinks government schools, quote-unquote, meaning public schools, are propaganda machines.
And he thinks that one of the goals of his life should be to act as a knight in the round table of a new Christian society.
Well, what does he share with the likes of Elon Musk?
Well, they both want to repeal the 20th century, that extended rights, representation, protections.
To so many others.
Now, what's the easiest way, Timothy Snyder asked, the great Yale historian, to undo American society if you are one of its enemies?
And the best way to destroy the United States is to, quote, and I'm quoting Snyder now, get Americans to do the work themselves, to somehow induce Americans to undo their own health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence.
From this perspective, Trump's proposed appointments, Kennedy, Gates, Musk, Ramaswamy, Hegseth, Gabbard, are perfect instruments.
They combine narcissism, incompetence, corruption, sexual incontinence, personal vulnerability, dangerous convictions, and a foreign influence as no group before them has done.
I want to get into the testimonies and the specifics of this, Dan, but I just want to get your reaction to this thesis, and that's basically...
You can watch these and just scream endlessly, if you'd like, about, oh, these people are hypocrites.
Or, like, Pete Hegseth is not prepared for the job.
He was asked by Tammy Duckworth about various components of foreign policy and geopolitical configurations.
Asked about the network ASEAN and who is part of that.
It's basically the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
And he talked about Australia and Japan and Duck River was like, none of those countries are in that network.
He seems to be completely not competent for this.
In another clip, Scott Besant, who is up for Treasury, was asked about, will he get rid of Medicaid?
Will he cut it?
And he spent like, he looked like Mr. Magoo.
Like pretending he couldn't hear.
And he was like, did you say Medicare or Medicaid?
And it went back and forth like three times.
Like Medicare or Medicaid?
Medicaid.
Was it Medicaid or Medicare?
And you're just like, bro, you sound like my three-year-old.
Like when I'm like, hey, you know, you need to, in order to finish dinner, you got to eat like three more bites.
And it's like three more big bites or small bites.
Did you say bites or something?
Dad, did you say bites or something?
It's like, all right, thank you very much, three-year-old.
I'm just trying to get you there.
Just lick the chicken nugget, and you can get down from the table at this point.
That's what I want to tell her.
Okay.
So, the point is, like, you can sit here and say, oh, they're incompetent, but what Snyder's saying, what I am saying, what the others have noticed, is that's the point.
They have been nominated for that reason.
It's not that they're not ready for their job.
This is why they were put up for the job.
And then in the case of Besson, I'll just add one more thing, and that is...
We have this desire to repeal the 20th century.
And then if you repeal the 20th century, what do you get if you're Donald Trump and others around him?
Well, you get so many more riches.
You get access to the bounty of American wealth because you're going to take it.
You're going to take it through tax cuts.
You're going to take it through cutting programs such as Social Security, Medicare, etc.
You're going to take it through cutting wherever you can.
From everywhere else, so you can take.
And if you look at what happened in Russia at the end of the Soviet Union, this is how it works.
Putin and a few oligarchs consolidate almost all the wealth in the country, okay?
And they're off and running.
So the idea for me today, Dan, with these hearings is, A, you repeal the 20th century, and B, you try to get as rich as possible.
People might go in and, well, why do you want to repeal the 20th century?
You need to explain that more.
I'll do that in a minute, but Dan.
I think there's a lot to that.
I mean, one of the things, if you talk about like historians or if you look at, you know, history textbooks, right?
I'm getting ready to teach a history class starting next week.
And so I've been kind of thinking about this.
People often have what they refer to as the long 19th century, right?
And so when they talk about the 19th century, they often take that up to World War I, right?
So it goes about like 1917 or something.
And if you think about that, it's the perfect way.
Because what do you have here to just tie together some of the pieces that you have and maybe why this becomes?
A way for understanding this nexus is, on one hand, you have this kind of nostalgia for an imagined sort of pre-1950s America when it comes to race, when it comes to religion, when it comes to white identity, when it comes to gender and sexuality, right?
Obviously, non-hetero people existed before the 1950s and 1960s, but they were comfortably invisible and marginalized to most other Americans.
You know, within dominant heterosexual society and so forth.
So I feel like for many on the culture war side, that's the vision.
And then you could carry that further back.
But I think there's also the capitalist side.
And I think this is what you're picking up on.
The gilded age capitalists, the capitalism before income taxes, the capitalism before a social security net, or social safety net, rather, and things like social security as a part of that.
Kind of, you know, the robber barons of the 19th century and, you know, industrialization and all of those kind of things.
And what do you have then?
Well, if you merge that capitalism and you merge that high control Christian vision of America, as you say, you'll both can find that reset point by, as you say, sort of circumventing the 20th century by being able to go back to that. sort of circumventing the 20th century by being able to So I think it has a lot to commend it.
I think that's why you see both the coalescence here and occasionally the tensions.
We talked about...
You know, Musk and foreign workers and angering some of the culture war MAGA crowd on immigration and things like that.
There are those points of tension as well.
But I think that for both of those components of this movement, there is this vision of a nostalgia for an America from a very different kind where each of those kind of wings, if we want to talk about it that way, could feel very comfortable, could feel affirmed, had the America that they wanted.
And I think that it's a fruitful way to think about it if we understand the, quote-unquote, the 20th century as all those kinds of structural changes, demographic changes, impediments to the exercise of unilateral power and so forth that you're describing.
So Pam Bondi's up for Attorney General, and I think she kind of emblematizes a lot of what we're talking about.
So let's just take Pam Bondi for a minute.
She has incredible conflicts of interest as Attorney General, and these are laid out at the Bulwark by Kim Wella this week.
She's represented 30 corporate and foreign clients, including General Motors, Uber, etc.
The Department of Justice is currently investigating two of her clients, Amazon and the Geo Group, the latter of which is a private prison company.
In her Senate nominee questionnaire, Bondi failed to disclose any of these potential conflicts of interest.
She's yet to account for what is the biggest stand on her credibility as a rule of law prosecutor.
In 2013, Trump's charitable foundation donated $25,000 to Ann Justice for All, a PAC link with Bondi.
This donation came three days after a spokeswoman for the Florida AG's office said that Bondi was revealing allegations against the get-rich quick seminars associated with who?
Trump.
Okay.
So, I can go for all those.
I don't really want to.
I just want to make a point of, like, he has total...
Conflicts of interest is being the Attorney General.
She seems to have an interest to protect certain people and companies in the country and not others.
That's not good if you want to be the Attorney General of the United States, and yet that's the point.
That's the point.
She has certain loyalties, and she has certain kind of demonstrated ties with Trump and others, and that's what matters.
She is a believer in the big lie, okay?
Again, that's by design, okay?
And then the one that I think I want to spend time on is the refusal to disobey legal or unconstitutional directives.
She kind of was ducking and avoiding questions about, would you do things if they were illegal, even if they came as an order of the president?
At one point, she was asked about the 14th Amendment and birthright citizenship.
And her answer was, I will study birthright citizenship.
And the response was, you want to be Attorney General of the United States and you have to study.
There's Alex Padilla from California.
And you need to study the 14th Amendment?
Like, what kind of answer is that?
You know?
You want to be the Attorney General and you have to study this.
Well, it was an answer by design.
You can say, oh, because she's so stupid.
Oh, she doesn't know anything.
Nope.
That's not it.
It's because this is the design.
The design is to say...
The 14th Amendment birthright citizenship is something that Trump has called into question at every turn, and he seems bent on somehow destroying it.
So she's been brought in for that purpose.
Again, as Timothy Snyder says, if you want to undo what we have in this country that made this country be the richest economy on Earth, well, these are the kinds of things you can undo.
I want to go to one more person, though, and that is Russ Vogt.
Vogt is a...
To be the head of the OMB, and he's someone we've talked about a lot in this show.
One of the reasons is he is one of the architects of Project 2025. Vogt is a tried-and-true Christian nationalist believer.
This is not the tech magnate.
This is like a grinded-out Capitol Hill guy who's been in D.C. for a long time.
And I used to live in D.C. I can picture these kinds of guys kind of sweating through their suits.
Ties are always sort of half-cocked because they've just been in the office for 14 hours.
They seemingly haven't been on vacation or seen sunshine for a while.
And his whole goal is to work.
And what's his goal, though?
His goal is to basically bring us back, not down to the 1950s, but to the 1910s.
And this is what I mean about until the 20th century.
If you ask Russ Vogt, where did it all go wrong?
It is not 1964. It is...
Woodrow Wilson.
It is 1913, 14, 15, where certain amendments were passed, where things were put in place to protect, you know, regular Americans from the Gilded Age robber barons.
It was also the moment where Woodrow Wilson suggested that the proto-United Nations, the League of Nations, be something that is put in place after World War I. So, Thomas Zimmer, who is a great podcaster and writer out of Georgetown, a podcast partner of our friend and our colleague Annika Brockschmidt, wrote this at his Substack this week.
Towards the end of his piece, he's talking about something Vogt wrote this summer.
Vogt implores his audience to fully grasp the severity of the situation.
The hour is late and time is of the essence.
the woke and weaponized leftist regime is now increasingly arrayed against the American people, treating patriotic parents as domestic terrorists and putting political opponents in jail.
But all is not lost yet because Donald Trump, a savior, has arrived, an existential threat to the leftist regime who can break the political cartels.
He wants everyone to recognize, Zimmer says, that, quote, and this is vote now, we are living in a post-constitutional time.
One of the things, Dan, that Vote shares...
With Mark Andreessen or Elon Musk, one of the things that Hegseth and Vogt, very different guys.
Hegseth, the pretty boy, got his shirt off, hair slicked back, Fox News host.
Vogt, the Capitol Hill ant farm worker who never leaves his office and has never taken off his suit in 26 years because he's just been working.
And Mark Andreessen or Elon Musk, these Silicon Valley lost boys, what do they share?
They think...
That the administrative state, that the bureaucrats, that those who implement the rule of law, those who implement the policies that are supposed to protect all Americans and provide an equal playing field, they are the enemy.
This is where we went wrong, they think.
That if we went wrong by implementing things like the rule of law, we went wrong by having intelligence services that are not abused, as Snyder points out in his Substack piece this week.
We went wrong because our armed forces are not supposed to be used internally.
We went wrong by protecting the allies that we have across the world rather than protecting ourselves only.
We went wrong because we allowed the rule of law rather than loyalty or special privilege for one group, like white Christians, to be how we operate here.
That's where we went wrong.
One or two more comments.
I know I'm on a roll.
I'll shut up and it's all yours.
One of the things that I've learned and thought about over the last months is that Donald Trump and everyone we're talking about today, they think of the post-Cold War, 1989, as us being the losers.
And Ivan Krashtov talks about this a lot in his work.
That even though that's when the Soviet Union failed in the early 90s and in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, that is the era, those couple of years, where we became the losers.
Why?
Because we had to take care of the rest of the world.
We had to be the global leader of liberal democratic society instead of taking care of ourselves.
And that meant...
That we started thinking about rights for everyone rather than just a certain group of Americans who fit our vision of what a real American is.
If you think about us as losing the Cold War, then you can think of Donald Trump and everyone I'm talking about today as wanting to finally win the Cold War.
And it's a vertiginous, upside-down way of thinking, but it helps you get a clue as to what they're up to.
All right, I'm done.
I apologize.
It's all yours.
Take it away.
There's a lot of good stuff in what you just said and not a huge amount to add.
One thing that I was thinking about, that question of, you know, they're incompetent, is the question that should always come up when they say they're incompetent because they're there.
They're sitting there in front of the Senate being confirmed.
Maybe Hegseth's going to run...
If Hegseth runs into turbulence, nobody else will.
Like, all of the...
If the powder is kept dry to go after Hegseth...
Right, right.
It doesn't look like he will now.
It did for a while.
The point is, they're there.
So if they're so incompetent, why are they there?
And I think that should make us raise the question of, you know, competent for what?
What do we mean by competence?
And I think this goes to your point, you know, again, I invite folks to listen.
If you're a subscriber, listen.
If you're not, subscribe and take a listen.
When we get into the supplemental episode, we talk about this some.
But of even a lot of the people in, you know, the Democratic senators and others kind of missing this, you're pressing the wrong buttons.
You're asking the wrong questions.
They're competent because they're loyal to Trump.
That's the measure of competence.
The measure of competence is, will they uphold this agenda at all costs?
We've seen, you know, I've known this for a long time.
I've said this for a long time.
I'm not unique in that.
But I think it's more and more apparent now that we talk about, say, SCOTUS or something.
You have these institutions where people will make the decision first and they will cobble together the rationale after the fact.
That's how Samuel Alito works.
That's how Clarence Thomas works.
That's how Bondi is going to work.
That's how Hegseth is going to work.
They all know exactly where we need to go, and they will manufacture whatever rationale or justification they think they need to get there after the fact, and the measure is loyalty.
Loyalty to Trump as an individual, loyalty to MAGA as this kind of political worldview.
That's the measure of competence.
And I think that's what has to be understood and has to be foregrounded.
And it's trying to come out with questions, you know, to Bondi being pressed on, you know, would you follow unconstitutional orders?
And I think those are the things that needed to be hammered home much more than, you know, somebody like Cain going after Hegsteth for not being moral.
We get it.
Trump and the other people, they're not good moral people.
Nobody cares.
Or, better stated, not enough Americans care for that to matter.
We have got to look at what's really going on.
And I think that's the kind of thing that comes up for me when people hammer on competence, is that as long as we're doing that, I think in important ways we're missing the point.
We're missing why they are there and what, quote-unquote, competence is going to mean to the GOP at this point.
Let's take a break.
Be right back.
Yeah, you know, something strikes me, Dan, as you're talking that way, is that...
In some ways, someone like Russ Vogt, who spends his life in the absolute details of budgets and policy, is strangely as competent as Hegseth to accomplish the goal.
Sometimes wildly different tools can be accomplished to build the same project or destroy the same project.
And so Vogt is somebody who spent his life...
Like, just in the absolute details of these things, what's his goal?
Destroy the administrative state.
Destroy any guardrails of executive power.
Why did he help write Project 2025?
What is Project 2025 about?
It's about an unbound executive who has the power to work outside of policies, cannot have to confer with anyone at the State Department or DOJ or at DOD or the EPA or the FDA about whatever they want to do.
Okay?
Just let them make the decision as the unbound executive.
This week, and this is so weird, Dan, and if you want to jump in, feel free.
Charlie Kirk posts a picture of Donald Trump, and it just says, Dad's home.
And it's like, you know, somebody, I think it was Stuart Benson posted, like, these folks really need, like, an Austrian psychotherapist or psychoanalyst.
And I think they were talking, you know, it was a Freudian reference, but it was just like, it's creepy.
It's just creepy when you start posting pictures of Trump and being like, Dad's home.
Like, what kind of creepy, weird...
Here's the point.
Vought is ultra-competent at the policy and administrative stuff.
His goal is destroying it from inside.
Hexaf is incompetent when it comes to knowledge, when it comes to understanding of strategy.
He did not know about the Southeast Asian network of nations.
He did not...
He didn't know about various treaties.
He did not know about very basic things if he wanted to be Secretary of Defense.
Besant seemed to know nothing about Medicare or Medicaid because Besant only, like, his brain, I'm convinced, if I saw inside of it, would just be a stock market ticker.
There would be no other, like, yeah, go ahead.
And all he needs to know about them is that they're bad.
They need to go away.
Like, that's all you need to know about it.
So, again, to your point, the ignorance is the competence.
Why would I know about Medicare or Medicaid when they're just evil things that need to be removed and dismantled?
Like, why would I bother knowing intricacies of them?
We're just going to cut them out and fix it and make it so that everything's just free markets and so on.
Raphael Warnock, Dan, asked him, basically, at what level would you feel comfortable with there being tax increases?
So, if you make $400,000 a year, if you make a million.
You make it $10 million.
And at every turn, Bessett was like, well, no, probably not.
Just a lot of business owners in there can't do it at that level.
$1 million a year?
Nah, I don't think so.
$10 million?
Nah, probably not.
And it was exactly what you said.
He didn't even need to think about it.
He was just like, tax cut?
Or I'm sorry, tax increase?
Bad.
Tax increase?
Bad.
And that's all I need to do.
That's the answer.
It was incredible.
The point is, to me, is that...
Hegseth and Vogt may seem like wildly different men, and they are, but they're strangely competent in the same way for what these folks want to accomplish.
And I think we have to keep that in mind, that if you think about us as living in a society where policies and the rule of law do their best, and don't get me wrong, I've said it a hundred times on this show, Protect everyone, even though that has never happened in the United States, even though it has never been a fair society and all of that.
But if you think about what these guys are raging against, they're raging against everything that is meant in some way to make sure that loyalty is not competence, to make sure that if you are part of an inner circle or part of the right family, or if you are a billionaire, you get a certain America and everyone else doesn't.
That is what always was supposed to set the United States apart.
From other places.
And that is what they're raging against.
They're raging against that because, and this is where Vogt would say, because it's unconstitutional, and he would talk, Dan, about your favorite thing and say, it's outside of the natural order of God's law.
This is where Hegseth would say, this is why I'm a Christian knight and a crusader, because I want to reset Christian society.
And this is where Marc Andreessen, and I want to just go to something you said earlier, the tech magnate, he would say, yeah.
You know, things got really weird in the 20th century.
I'm paraphrasing Dan, but I'm not being like funny or like diverging from the essence of what he said.
He said there used to be a deal.
Folks like me would make a lot of money, like an inordinate amount of money, more money than they would ever need.
They would hoard money.
And the public would notice and then they would give a bunch of it away.
And it was like a deal.
You were totally allowed to be like an oligarch.
And then as long as you like...
Give some of it away, like a la Stanford, a la Carnegie, a la Ford.
Everybody was good, and now the deal's broken.
And it's like, that's a reflection of our society's broken.
That's how Marc Andreessen thinks about it.
Okay?
And I just want to add to that.
I can't tell you how many times I've heard that same logic in Christian circles.
I've had so many conversations with just ordinary, grassroots, run-of-the-mill evangelical people.
It's usually about, you know...
Say, universal healthcare or something like that.
And they will say something like, well, that should be the role of the church.
That should be the role of people giving benevolently and giving sacrificially or whatever.
Basically, it should be an act of benevolence.
And my question is always, I've asked them this, and I said, well, that's cool.
How many people in your church is your church funding for health insurance?
What part of your church budget is going for that?
that, if this is something you believe in, of course they don't.
But this notion that critiquing the accumulation of wealth, critiquing, you know, sort of unbridled capitalism, that's just so far like beyond the pale that it's literally taken as unnatural as if there is, as you're some sort of weird, aberrant person, if you would suggest that, I don't know, as you're some sort of weird, aberrant person, if you would suggest that, I don't know, maybe people don't need to have tens of billions of dollars when you've got other people It's the same logic.
It's the same logic within those Christian circles.
That say the government shouldn't do anything.
The church should be doing it.
People should be giving, you know, even though they don't actually do that, or even though, as you know, you brought this up with, you know, Musk recently, right?
This giant contribution that he made to the Trump campaign.
What percentage of his income was that?
You know, it comes out to be virtually nothing.
It's the same thing with most of these other big philanthropists.
But that logic cuts through both, you know, we talked about these two wings, the kind of Christian conservative wing and the pro-capitalist wing.
That element, that acceptance of disproportionate wealth and this weird notion that philanthropy is enough cuts through both wings of that.
I think you see that in just the kind of thing you're describing.
And so, yeah, as you say, people are like, I just don't get it.
Why do we live in a world where, you know, people would suggest that there should be a basic standard of living or healthcare or whatever else?
Just have rich people, you know, dole out some donations every now and then, and that'll be fine.
All right.
I want to just dig in.
Sorry, I'm just feeling a little philosophical today.
And this idea, I can't get out of my head.
I want to ask you about it, Dan, because it's something that has really revolutionized how I've thought about Trumpism in this country.
And that is that a couple of things happened after the Cold War.
And I think for me, there's a bunch of landmark...
Moments in American history that have stood out over the last couple of years.
We've just talked about today the kind of end of the Gilded Age, the kind of Teddy Roosevelt era into the Woodrow Wilson era, end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century.
That's one.
There's obviously the FDR period, the New Deal, and World War II. I've written a lot about the 1960s and the ways that that was a moment where you have such changes in this country that are, for me, unilaterally good.
Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, immigration reform, on down the line in terms of protections for women, protections for queer folks in the workplace and in society and so on.
Something I had not been thinking about as much is 1989 and the end of the Cold War.
So, 1989, the Berlin Wall falls.
And all of a sudden, this sort of divide between the two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States, has fallen.
And all of Berlin is now West Berlin.
All of Berlin is now a liberal democratic society, an idea at least.
And Iman Kravtsev writes, and Stephen Holm is right in the light that failed.
It's this weird thing where if you're in Berlin, you're an East Berliner at that moment.
And the wall falls.
All of a sudden, you didn't go anywhere.
You have the same house.
You have the same neighborhood.
You have the same life, except for you're part of a liberal democracy rather than, you know, an ostensibly communist regime or whatever.
Okay.
And this is the moment, Dan, where, like, it seems as if, and, you know, you're in your 40s like I am, and I think we grew up under this ethos, where the United States was the unilateral winner.
Does that make sense to you, Dan?
By the time we got to high school age, we didn't grow up doing nuclear bomb drills.
Like, hey, get under the desk because that'll help you with a nuclear bomb.
We didn't do that.
We grew up thinking we won.
We won.
There is no great Soviet Union anymore.
And the point of that, Dan, is that there was a sense there of we won and the rest of the world...
Now we'll become like us.
That the Europe that we envision, the Europe that is our closest ally, Germany will now transform fully into a liberal democracy, recovering from its horrific past in World War II. And all of those former Soviet states, the Central European countries that are emerging in this new world will be like us.
Poland and And the Czech Republic and Slovakia and Hungary.
And I could go on.
And there was a sense of inevitability.
And I know you know this book, Dan.
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History.
And Fukuyama basically says, there's no other alternative except for liberal democracy and capitalism.
There's nothing else.
Sorry.
And what do you know about human nature, Dan?
Anytime somebody's like, there's only one option.
What does someone in the crowd do?
Like, well, I bet there's not.
They're going to be like, hold my beer and map out that other option.
And my point is, is that all the people I talk about all the time, who in the 1960s thought the country got stolen from them because of the civil rights movement, because of women's liberation, because of queer representation.
If you add in the idea that there's no other alternative except for liberal democracy, which includes progress towards those things as time goes on so that eventually gay people can get married.
Eventually, we will have a black president.
They start to see that kind of thinking as totalitarian thinking.
They start to see that kind of thinking as like, well, you're telling me there's no other alternative except for a liberal democratic way of life that means rights for all these folks and representation and a way of life that is not based on like, I don't know.
Ethnicity.
You don't have to be white to get all this.
You don't have to be Christian to get all this.
You can be a mixed race, black, brown.
You can be Asian.
You can have no religion.
You can be Hindu.
You can be Sikh.
You can be Buddhist.
Really?
You can be an atheist and have all this?
Huh.
They start to see the end of history as the final idea that there is no other alternative and that their quote-unquote way of life has ended.
And if you view it that way...
The backlash starts, and you arrive at a place where the nominees sitting for the cabinet positions in the United States are nominated to break the thing that was built over the last 120 years, rather than to make it better.
That's where I'm at today.
I'm going to get your thoughts.
We'll take a break, and we'll go to a different topic here.
I have not been able to get that idea out of my mind for the last however long.
It really helps you think as to why a Russ vote would call the Obama era a totalitarian regime.
Like for me, I'm just like, what are you talking about?
For most of the people listening, it's like, what are you talking about?
But if you view it that way, you get a window into his mind.
Does that mean I agree?
Not at all.
But you get a window into why he would say that.
Anyway, what are your thoughts?
Yeah, so I mean, I think your language of finding a window into how somebody thinks is really important, as long as we're being philosophical.
I swim around in like lots of social science discourses, philosophical discourses in a field called phenomenology and whatever.
What does all that mean?
What it means is you're often trying to think about like, how is it that people are shaped as the people that they are?
How is it that the beliefs that they hold feel like the right beliefs to them?
How is it that something that can seem so foreign and strange and absurd to somebody who's not them, Can feel just so transparently obvious to somebody who is, and I think that that's part of what you're highlighting.
I think it's worth noting the shift, because, yeah, I remember all that stuff, you know, the fall of the Berlin Wall, whatever, the triumphalism.
Reagan did it.
It was all Reagan.
It was all, you know, this was not the Democrats who were running around saying this, right?
This was GOP orthodoxy.
I think the other thing that's worth noting...
That it also carried forward and expanded.
I don't know if you remember this.
Remember when there's the language that are no longer superpowers?
There's only one global hyperpower.
The U.S. is now the only hyperpower in the world.
And this is before China, you know, kind of started occupying the space it now does and so forth.
But the point is that it also carried for a continuous policy of the U.S. since at least World War II. What happens after World War II? The U.S. emerges with the strongest economy.
The strongest military.
And what does it do?
It makes sure to extend that everywhere.
And that's part of what NATO was.
It's part of why the U.S. was willing to fund the bill and all that sort of stuff.
Post-Cold War, it's the same thing.
And part of the shift is in the economics of the GOP, where they decide that that's not a transaction that's worth making anymore, right?
That investment doesn't pay off somehow.
We need to pull all those funds back.
And so that's like one piece of it.
The other piece that you're highlighting is really interesting, The End of History.
And I remember Fukuyama wrote The End of History.
There's another book by somebody whose name I'm not recalling at present.
It was called The End of Ideology, which had sort of a similar kind of thing, as if liberal democracy was not an ideology.
It was just there were no other ideologies.
It's interesting that Fukuyama later had to come along and write another book about neoliberalism, basically acknowledging that, oh yeah, neoliberalism came along and it turns out that liberal democracy was not the end of history.
And so forth.
But it is.
I think you're right.
It's a real shift, a kind of paradigm shift, almost a Copernican revolution sort of thing of just radically shifting perspective on the same set of phenomena to say that somehow or another it was a bad thing that the U.S. was extending all that power, extending that force, spending that money to sort of direct the rest of the world and so forth.
I'm not advancing all of those things.
I'm just saying that was especially I think right-wing political ideology, when I was an evangelical, when I was in the church, when I was in high school, when I was coming out of middle school, all those times, that was what was taken for granted.
And I think you're right that it's a radical sort of paradigm shift of viewing that same period, those same things in a completely different way.
And I think you're right that, again, back to the point of the confirmations, we have to ask that question of like, Through what view or what prism are these people seen as competent, as qualified, and so forth?
If that's the perspective, a phenomenological term, if that's the life world, the thought world, if you want to say worldview in which those people exist, this all makes sense.
And for those of us who don't exist in that same life world, we have to try to translate that and understand it and be able to comprehend it to be able to combat it.
Let's take a break.
Come back and talk about something else.
I promise.
I promise, Dan.
Talk about something else.
Here we go.
Let's take a break.
All right, Dan.
Take us through what happened in the House this week.
The House passed an anti-trans bill.
One of the most visible and concrete steps of trying to move forward with the promises of MAGA and the Trump campaign to actively target transgender individuals, particularly trans women.
And so it is the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act.
I want to highlight that word protection.
We're going to come back around to that.
But the law, the bill, rather, it's not a law.
It'd have to go to the Senate and all that stuff.
But right now, it has made it through the House.
It would amend Title IX, which is the law that bans sex discrimination in schools.
To recognize sex, quote unquote, as, quote, based solely on a person's reproductive biology and genetics at birth, end quote.
In other words, your gender assigned at birth is your legal gender, full stop, and Title IX has to recognize that birth assigned gender.
Schools allowing, quote, a person whose sex is male, which means, in this case, A trans woman.
So somebody who was born male, identifies as female, lives as female.
That person is still considered male under this new law.
Any school that allows them to participate in sports for women or girls would lose federal funding.
218 to 206 votes.
Two Democrats voted in support of it, and one Democrat voted present so as not to have to be on record as either supporting or opposing this.
So, none of that's surprising.
The GOP has been fixated on trans folk and especially trans women for some time.
I talk about this a lot.
I've written on it and interviewed about it and those things, and people have heard all of that.
Part of what stands out to me is the scale of this response that's out of all proportion to anything that's real.
And I think that this also helps us think about the same things we've been talking about in the confirmation hearings, right?
Of understanding...
What's really going on if the facts just don't support this?
So here are some facts.
According to the CDC, about 3% of high school students identify as trans.
Now, that's high school students who identify as trans, not high school students who identify as trans women.
So the percentage of high school students who identify as trans women is going to be lower than that.
Not all of those high school students who identify as trans women will be athletes.
We all remember high school.
Not all of us are athletes.
So what does that mean?
It means that you're talking about a really super small, negligible number of people who are trans women in high school or, I suppose, middle school athletics.
It's a very, very small number.
And yet you have Congress passing the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act.
The response to this is out of all proportion to the reality behind it.
The facts don't support it.
The science is still ambiguous in lots of ways about whether or not somebody who is identified as male at birth and transitions.
What benefits they have, what competitive advantage they have, all kinds of ambiguities there.
Things like, have they gone all the way through puberty before they transition?
Have they not?
And so forth.
Most of which is more relevant for college and professional sports than it is high school and certainly middle school sports when these things are still going on.
I might save this for a supplemental episode to take a deeper dive in this, but you also get questions about how tall they are and hand size, and it opens up all kinds of weird questions about, cool, are we going to ban women from basketball if their hands are too big now or whatever?
Anyway, the point is, it's this kind of solution in search of a problem.
Why?
Well, one, the GOP can lean on public support for this.
One of the things that I've talked about for a long time is that trans rights are kind of the new gay rights when it comes to the right wing.
Broad cultural acceptance of people who are gay, of same-sex marriage, different things like this.
We've talked about this.
The numbers have flipped.
Vast majority of Americans support that.
Most Americans still They still oppose athletes, and the GOP has helped feed that.
The opposition to trans athletes has actually risen in recent years to 69% of Americans, as opposed to 62%.
A majority of Americans say that changing one's gender is immoral, which, by the way, it's already loaded language, changing them.
Nobody changes their gender.
They live in a way that is in accordance with their experience of gender.
That's a different thing, but we capture the ideology there.
What does all of it show?
For me, it shows that the GOP is really invested in creating a trans panic.
And it's the same dynamic that we've been talking about.
We talk about it in other things.
They actively target a vulnerable minority group for social and political gain.
And then they use that group to justify the targeting that they're doing.
They create this sense of panic.
And that's the disproportion.
We're talking about, what, maybe 1.5%?
Of like athletes or something in high school, I think that would be probably a generous percentage there.
One and a half percent are somehow threatening everything.
I did an episode, Brad, time ago on It's in the Code, invite people to, excuse me, go back and listen, called Christian Health and Safety.
And it was about how these conservative Christians will pick up and conservative politicians.
The language of health, the language of protection, the language of safety, and it's positively Orwellian because they will target the most vulnerable portions of the population and do so claiming to protect precisely some other vulnerable part of the population.
You get this with trans women, and we're going to target trans women, quote unquote men, who are what?
Threatening women and girls.
And the last point I want to focus on this is the why.
It's about control.
High control religion and the politics that is part of it.
American conservative religion, the nexus of conservative politics, a core feature of this.
And this is on my mind.
Those who listen to It's in the Code know I've been talking about this for a while in this recent series on gender and sexuality.
It is focused on policing women's bodies.
It is focused on policing women's sexuality and their gender expression.
It is also focused on policing their very identity.
That is a core component of this ideology as patriarchal, as misogynistic.
And that's what I think is at the core of this.
And the last point I'll raise, I'll let you jump in here, is, excuse me, I came across a recent study in the journal Sociology of Sports.
Which made me want to go read more about sociology of sport because I don't know much about that.
But this is what it found.
It found that opposition to trans athletes' rights, so in other words, those who do exactly what this bill says, that trans women, and the focus is almost always trans women, which I think is a telling point, that trans women should not be able to participate in women's sports, that view is associated with beliefs about women's physical appearance.
They're not feminine enough.
Not only are they not feminine enough, Brad, these are the people who mock the WNBA because it has too many lesbians.
These are the people who, you know, every time the Olympics is on, you get those weird comments about somebody who's kind of like got a butch appearance and they'll make comments about that or somebody who doesn't have a full enough figure or weird, super creepy comments about like the bus size of women gymnasts or whatever.
All that weird stuff, that super creepy stuff, this is part of it.
Cisgender women who aren't feminine enough are already a source of discomfort.
Trans women threaten that ideology of gender.
So it's associated with that.
It is associated toward negative attitudes toward female athletes generally.
And, surprise, surprise, it's strongly associated with people who hold homophobic views.
All of which is to say, when we hear this, I mean, you see Congress passing is you would think that there's, I don't know, some epidemic of, you know, guys just showing up and I don't know, skirts wanting to play field hockey or whatever.
And you're talking about a super small minority of people who've sacrificed a tremendous amount to live their lives in accordance to their gender identity who are targeted.
And I think for me, that's what shows the real dynamics there.
The fact that it has this response that's out of all proportion to anything grounded in reality.
I want to relate this to what we talked about in the first part of the episode by saying that you've basically laid out here the fact that this is a solution in search of a problem.
That if you ask people on the street, especially those who lean conservative, how many folks do you think identify as trans in the country?
They're going to tell you, I think it's like 25 or 30%.
And as you're laying out, it's a minuscule percentage of the population.
It's an even smaller percentage who are playing high school sports.
Okay.
So why?
And I think you've laid it out.
It's in the code.
The stuff you've been doing the last two months has just been genius.
And I think people in the Discord have just been so exuberant about the insight you've provided.
It's about control.
It's about identity.
And I'll just trace it back historically.
You always do the social theory.
And I'll just say historically, if you think about what I've tried to outline today.
You think about the progression of rights and representation in the United States.
So you rest votes like 1913 is when we weren't wrong.
So 1913 is like less than a generation from Reconstruction, Black men getting the vote.
1913 is seven years from women getting the vote.
And then you progress through the century.
And I'll just skip a whole bunch of really important stuff, but it overfell.
Now gay people can get married.
Okay.
And if you just want to...
And then you get to trans folks.
And basically what happens to the Russ Votes, the Pete Heggsess, the Christian Reconstructions, the Christian Nationalists, all the people we talk about in the show all the time.
By the time you get to trans representation and the acceptance of trans people into American society, you get to this place where they're like...
All right, we're going to just reverse this and we're going to start with them.
We're going to start with the people who are most vulnerable and who are still least accepted.
And we're going to say, you do not deserve rights.
You do not deserve to exist.
And then we're going to go backward.
Then we will go for Oberfell.
Then we will go and say that every LGBTQ person is a groomer and a pervert.
And then we'll keep going.
And we'll say DEI. Then there's segregation.
If you have a job.
As a person of color or a queer person, must be DEI. And do you all see what we're doing here?
We're reverse engineering the 20th century, and we're just using different language.
So attack the trans athlete, then attack the LGBTQ person of any kind, lesbian, gay, bi, as a groomer, as a pervert, person of color, end word, meh.
Other slurs, meh, DEI. And we're just going right in reverse to reverse it all.
And I think that's what I see at play here is why would you have this solution in search of a problem?
It's because of everything we've said today and trying to repeal any society that extends rights to more people, that actually tries to be a democracy that recognizes that you can be a trans person and, I don't know, be a member of Congress.
You can be.
Yeah, go ahead.
Sorry, I was just going to say there's one more connection here to make between, I think, the historical geopolitics we're talking about and this, and that is the need to create a threat, especially if you are the one who has won, but you have won.
Always on the notion that you're under threat, you have to create a threat.
We've seen that with high-control religion, Christian nationalists.
They hold all the levers of power now.
They have to create a threat.
They can't say we won.
They can't say we beat everybody.
They have to always be able to promise that they will defeat those enemies.
So you have to create the threat.
You had the same thing after the Cold War.
This is something I did in my PhD dissertation work and my comp exams is with the fall of the Cold War and the rise of what were known as the neoconservatives, there was a lot of concern because they were like, who's the enemy now?
Everything about American global policy for decades has been built on the communist threat.
What do we do now?
You had a think tank called the Project for a New American Century that before 9-11, because 9-11 becomes really important, was saying we have to identify a new global threat to maintain American hegemony.
We have to be able to find a threat.
We won, and winning is bad news.
We've been defeated by victory, and now we've got to find a threat.
And they look to, quote-unquote, the Islamic world.
9-11 happens.
We know how all of that played out.
It's the same cultural dynamic of having to create a threat because your entire basis of existence is about threat suppression.
It's about keeping people on edge all the time in threat.
Why do people vote for Trump?
Because they're scared.
There's a threat.
There's a world of threats out there.
And Trump said, only I can protect you.
Only I can do that.
You have to create the threat.
And we see that in everything from sort of the cultural level and the micro level of, you know, clutching pearls about, I don't know, a book about two high school boys who fall in love in the local library, all the way up to bills in Congress, all the way up to confirmation hearings and an entire model of a global social order.
I, yeah, you read my, I was going to make a dad joke, but I'm not going to.
I'm just going to say that, like, 6 a.m.
What I was going to say is like, you going back to the end of the Cold War, the 90s, there's a thesis there of like, A, we have to find another enemy because we need another threat.
But this is also the decade where like the Cold War is over.
So who rises to prominence in the GOP? Newt Gingrich.
Newt Gingrich is the guy that's like, go to war with the Democrats.
They're not your colleagues.
They're your enemy.
Pat Buchanan is hanging around, thinking about, you know, he needs to be in power.
There's a book called The Partisans that outlines all of this.
The point is, you need a threat, and you can trace the winning of the Cold War to becoming the victim.
And a victim in need of an oppressor, and that oppressor becomes liberal democracy, and all of a sudden it's like, trans people need to be erased.
DEI is the new segregation, and...
All LGBTQ people are perverts.
It's a 25-year process that starts there.
It started before that, but nonetheless.
All right.
As always, we could keep talking about this.
We'll cover this on future episodes.
We're going to be on this for a while.
Nonetheless, Dan, any final thoughts on this issue, or do you want to go to your reason for hope?
I'll go to my reason for hope, or I'll just keep talking and talking and talking.
It's not perfect, and it's too late, and there are lots of problems with it, but I take hope that it appears that a ceasefire deal might finally be coming to Gaza.
As I say, lots of things to be critical of, but anything that will help stop the loss of life there, I think, is a cause of hope.
We'll see.
Israel keeps kind of...
You know, backing away from that and finding reasons to not accept yes as an answer.
I think a lot of strategic interest there.
But yeah, I'm hopeful that maybe things can be better than they have been.
I have a couple.
The State Department here in the last days of the Biden administration has applied the specially designated global terrorist category to the Terrorgram Collective, which is a groundbreaking move because it's a sanction.
Counting a white supremacist group that is basically based in the United States as a significant base here.
So what that means is you have a global terrorist group who is a white Christian group in the United States.
And surprise, surprise, the State Department actually recognized it and was like, yeah, those people exist.
You can be a white Christian and be a domestic terrorist.
It is possible.
So that seems like good news to me.
The British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, and Vladimir Zelensky signed a 100-year partnership agreement in Kyiv.
I think Karma, on the eve of Trump taking office, is trying to show the UK's commitment to Ukraine and to global democracy and to NATO and so on and so forth.
So I think that's good news.
There's also a great clip of an ex-Army sniper who basically takes down the Hegseth and talks about how he's totally not...
Ready for the job.
But he makes this great point about Russia being the most macho army in the world and how they marched into Ukraine and they're losing five or six Russians to every one Ukrainian and how machismo and toxic masculinity don't actually help you when it comes to battle.
It's just a really good message and I'll try to link it on our socials.
I thought that was good.
All right, y'all.
Thanks to all of you who listened.
Thanks to all of our subscribers.
Bonus episode is coming in a couple of days.
I'm not sure that Dan and I have ever laughed as much as we laughed on that episode.
There are moments of like sirens on the audio file because I was just laughing and unable to iterate any sound other than, you know, yeah.
So we did talk about some pretty serious things.
Don't worry.
But there's a lot of fun in that episode.
Be back next week with a great interview.
We have a big announcement Monday.
If you do not listen on Mondays normally, you're going to want to listen Monday.
Wednesday, Dan will be here with us in the code, and we'll be back Friday.
