Weekly Roundup: Musk's Coup and Trump's Christian Zionist Gaza Takeover
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Brad and Dan discuss Elon Musk's increasing control over U.S. government operations. Senator Chris Murphy warns of Musk's access to sensitive systems and data, while Democrats are urged to act more decisively. The recent executive order banning gender-affirming care and the establishment of an anti-Christian bias task force signify an alarming trend towards authoritarianism. They also discuss the implications of Trump's comments on Gaza and potential legal responses.
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We are the minority in the House and in the Senate.
But we need to act like a real opposition party in the middle of a constitutional and democracy crisis.
That means we should not be moving forward nominees or legislation in the United States Senate.
Democrats should not be giving votes to nominees or to legislation in the United States Senate until Republicans get serious about this crisis.
Democrats should not help Republicans raise the debt ceiling in order to pass their massive tax cut for billionaires and millionaires.
Democrats should be leading public gatherings all weekend, all across the country to bring Americans out to show Republicans that they will pay a price.
And then Democrats need to speak in really stark terms about what is going on here.
Yes, we are obsessed with subtleties, but I don't think it's a mystery as to what is happening here.
I think this is a billionaire power grab.
I think Elon Musk is trying to steal That's Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut talking in plain terms about what has happened in the United States over the last week.
Elon Musk has gained access to the Treasury Department.
He has intimidated workers at the GSA and other government agencies.
This is a slow-moving coup, one that makes us vulnerable.
To data hacking, to theft, and to a world in which the executive branch and its henchmen in the form of Elon Musk and Doge can shut on and off the U.S. payment system.
Today we talk about all of that and then move on to talk about Donald Trump's executive order, creating a new committee on anti-Christian bias, and how this fits in to his comments about colonizing Gaza and developing it as a beach resort with...
American ownership.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is the Straight White American Jesus Weekly Roundup.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus on this fine Friday.
Back together with my co-host after two weeks of us being apart, which is hard for us, Dan, so long-distance relationships are hard.
How are you doing?
I'm good.
Getting over something, but it's nice to see you.
It's like, you know, Brad and I, as you say, we got this, like, you know, the long-distance thing, so two weeks, it's, you know, you're not here, so I can't give you a hug, but, you know, it's kind of the same, so it's good to be back.
Disappointed that we always have stuff to talk about.
It'd be nice if we didn't, but yeah, I don't know.
Always enjoy doing this with you, and we'll see what we do today.
Well, there's way more to talk about than is possible.
I think everyone listening knows that.
I think that's by design.
We'll get to that.
Before then, though, I'm sure people are just...
There's a lot of suspense and a lot of just confusion because we haven't had updates on your dodgeball.
Enterprises.
So how's that going?
Have you found a team?
Are you still a free agent?
I mean, have you been thrown out of the league for, you know, what's going on?
So a couple things.
One, I had to buy better shoes.
So that's a thing.
Because it turns out I wrecked my shoes.
So I now have designated dodgeball shoes, I guess.
Okay, so are they actually dodgeball shoes?
Are these like running shoes?
No, they're not.
They're like court shoes.
So it's something that you could use for, I don't know, pickleball, basketball, stuff like that.
Running shoes don't actually work very well because the fronts get too worn down.
That's what happened to mine.
So they did a draft and picked teams.
I wasn't excited about that, but I was not the very last person picked, and so I consider that a bonus.
I think on Facebook I said, hashtag not quite the worst, and I'll take it.
But then this week I was sick, so I didn't go last night, so I've gone.
I don't think our team has a name.
It's just a team.
I'm plugging along.
I'm doing it.
I'm pretty sure that I'm not going to get any sponsorships or anything.
Well, you have one.
I'm sending $10,000 of straight white American Jesus money for you guys to be called the straight white American Jesus.
That's false.
We actually don't, I think, have that much money, period.
Extra money laying around?
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't think we actually have any money.
And also, that would be a terrible name.
All right.
We'll come back to Dodgeball in a second.
Not in a second, at the end.
All the subscribers are like, we're done.
You've got $10,000 laying around.
We're done.
Yeah, we, yeah.
I'm going to have to call my wife, see if we can sell our car.
Okay, we're going to talk about Elon Musk and the whole soft coup that's been going on.
I've been talking about it this week.
I've been on social media.
I've been sending out emergency PSAs.
We'll then jump into something that I know a lot of you are concerned about, which is the executive order on Christian anti-bias linked to Trump's comments on Gaza.
And the idea that the United States would take a long-term ownership stake in the region.
So we'll get there.
Also talk about the ban on transgender care and the ramifications for that as they ripple through the country.
All right, Dan, I'm not going to lie.
I had a moment this weekend where I felt sick to my stomach because I was sort of following news like starting Thursday, Friday of what was happening at Treasury.
And by Saturday, I get to a three-year-old's birthday party.
It's like my daughter's friend from preschool is having a party.
And here I am trying to make small talk with other preschool parents.
I'm not that great at it anyway.
We all know I'm Brad.
That's all I have to say.
I'm Brad.
And so I'm looking around this party, and I'm just wondering, do people realize that Elon Musk has control of the U.S. Treasury?
Trillions of dollars.
That run through there, that he has social security numbers and sensitive data that he can, you know, manipulate and do all kinds of things with the personal data of government workers, that he could potentially just turn off money to people he doesn't like and so on.
So eventually, I think most people started to realize what was coming and what had happened, like kind of Monday and Tuesday.
But I had a moment of...
Cognitive dissonance where I almost felt like I was going to throw up because I was like, we are enduring a coup and no one really even knows at all.
And this is not January 6th where they can watch it on their phone.
This is something different.
I got a bunch to say about this, but how did this come to you in that whole light?
Yeah, I think, I'll tell you, I mean, similar kind of feeling about it.
And, you know, specifically with Musk and this.
Quasi-weird government agency, whatever we want to call Doge.
But I think tied in, you mentioned it earlier, also just the, and I think by design, I think as you said, the kind of fire hose of stuff coming, the flurry of executive orders, the statements, the outlandish claims, the, you know, at times kind of sleight of hand stuff.
You have like the free, like last week, the freezing of federal funds, like just period, with no explanation and no anything else and all of what that meant.
We'll get into it, but, you know, the trans healthcare, you know, directive, you know, all of these things.
So, yeah, like a moment of kind of panic of sort of like, you know, this feeling of it's all happening.
And I think that, as you say, you know, by this week, some of that, like, you know, it's kind of a lot of backlash to that.
And there's been some pushback and some positive things and whatever.
We'll get into that.
But, yeah, the same.
The same kind of thing, kind of overwhelming.
And I think that this is a point I'm going to come back to later.
This is something that I think more and more as we get into the statements and even the executive orders, I think that's a huge part of what they're intended to do.
Because if you can cut through a lot of the noise, and there are real things, like Musk having all that access, that's a real thing.
I don't want to trivialize that.
But there are a lot of things that aren't.
We're getting into the performative thing where people are responding to them all as if they are, and they are bringing them into reality in a way that Trump can't.
And I think that that's part of it as well, to create this kind of perpetual motion machine that magifies America.
And all Trump has to do is sit at his desk like a wizard signing pieces of paper that have no legal force.
They have no ability to be executed, no ability to be enforced, and everybody just falls in line.
I think that also allows the sleight of hand when the real things happen, the big things like Musk, a lot of people don't notice.
So I think there's a lot of dynamics and a lot of pieces of this.
And I've found myself this week trying to just kind of rein myself in enough and like chill myself out enough to be able to like, okay, can I actually look at this?
Can I actually try to lay these pieces out in front of me and see what looks like it's real and like what's significant and maybe what isn't?
Keeping track of court decisions and things that are starting to come out.
So just a lot of moving pieces, and it's pretty overwhelming.
It is.
And we've been telling people to try to remain calm, to try to remain in some kind of state of equilibrium.
But that was hard this week, and I recognize that too.
I had moments of feeling like panic was a word that is probably accurate.
Let me run through what's happened for folks, and then we'll do some analysis.
Basically, over the weekend, going back about a week now, we learned that Musk and the kind of raving, roving crew of henchmen hackers that he's put together have been able to gain access to government agencies.
And that included the Treasury, the Human Resources Agency.
They've shown up at the GSA. They have really tried to kind of get their way into any...
Department they can, the Department of Labor.
I'll read a little bit here.
Aides to Elon Musk, charged with running the U.S. government, Human Resources Agency, have locked career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees.
So we start to get this information that government employees are locked out, and yet here's Musk, who has not been confirmed by the Senate, who is, we don't know about his security clearance.
Who is running this, as you referenced, Dan, nebulous government agency that is not really officially established, and they are taking authority, usurping federal employees, and now who?
Musk and who have access to millions of federal employees and their personal data?
They also were able to log on to the...
Payment systems of the U.S. Treasury.
I'm going to read a little bit from Wired here, who's just done a great job throughout the last month reporting on this.
U.S. Treasury Department and White House officials have repeatedly denied that technologists associated with Musk's so-called Doge had the ability to rewrite the code of the payment system through which the vast majority of federal spending flows.
Wired reporting shows, however, everybody, listen, if you're driving, if you tuned out, If you're cutting cucumbers for dinner or chopping onions, stop.
Just stop for a minute.
Wired is reporting that a Doge operative did in fact have access, write access, meaning they could write the code of the Treasury.
Not only that, but sources tell Wired that at least one note was added to Treasury records indicating that he no longer had write access before senior IT staff stated it was actually rescinded.
So, we have a situation, and I'm going to get to who's on Musk's team in a minute, Dan, okay?
Yeah.
It's not a dream team.
This is not an all-star cast.
They are able to get into the code of the U.S. Treasury.
Not just to read, Dan.
They don't have just, like, viewer access to the Google Doc.
They have editing access to the Google Doc, okay?
Now, who was the one that had access to this?
It's a man named Marco Ellis, a 25-year-old Doge technologist who was recently installed at the Treasury Department as a special government employee, one of a number of young men identified by Wired who have little to no government experience but are currently associated with Doge.
He previously worked for SpaceX and for X/Twitter.
What happened to this guy, Dan?
Oh, I don't know.
He resigned yesterday.
Because he had a social media account that advocated for racism and eugenics.
Nonetheless, he was granted privileges, including the ability to not just read, but write code on two of the most sensitive systems in the U.S. government, the Payment Automation Manager and Secure Payment System.
This is an agency, they're talking about the Bureau of the Fiscal Services, an agency that, according to Treasury records, paid out $5.45 trillion in 2020. So, Dan, millions of federal employees, trillions of American dollars, a 25-year-old who, again, confirmed by the Senate, security clearance?
Oh, he just quit because he's a eugenicist and an open racist.
Okay?
There are, and I'm going to continue just to go through some information here, friends.
There's a bunch of requirements in federal law about who can control the federal funds.
Who can issue payments on the behalf of the federal government?
Who has access to those things?
Who has access to the sensitive private information?
There's something called the Privacy Act, Dan.
There's all kinds of statutes and regulations designed to protect people.
Designed to protect the American people.
From 25-year-old hackers who are open eugenicists and racists from having their most sensitive information and being able to control who the government pays and who it doesn't.
Now, Musk is saying he's identifying false payments and illegal things, and he's saving the federal government $4 billion a day.
Why does he get to decide that?
Who gave him the power?
Who authorized that?
This is not his job.
Period.
This is not the executive branch's job.
It is not Elon Musk's job.
This is a coup.
And what I mean by that is...
This is the executive branch taking powers it is not given in the Constitution and taking them from the legislative branch.
Presidents can send recommendations to Congress.
There's the Impoundment Control Act.
But guess what?
The president, much less Elon Musk, does not have unilateral control over the purse of the U.S. Treasury.
Let me quote Elizabeth Pop Berman writing at Liberal Currents.
And you know this is good, Dan.
You know why I know this is good?
Because A, not only is Elizabeth Pop Berman a great commentator at the University of Michigan, but the New York Times asked her to write this, and then she wrote it, and they were like, oh, actually, too radical.
So you know it's good, right?
You know it's good.
Trump has already demonstrated his intent to gut parts of the government that threaten him or depart from his political allies, interests, or ideology.
So all the things, Dan, that we're not going to have time to talk about today at length.
Purging the FBI. Prohibit funding for whole fields of study.
And as you mentioned, halting spending and including on clean energy.
The effort is unprecedented, but so far it has been met with mixed success.
So there's a lot of bureaucratic obstacles here.
However, with Musk in control of the federal spigot, the messy and slow problem would be solved.
Places like the National Science Foundation, the president does have considerable authority to direct spending.
If the president wants to create ideological litmus tests, he probably can.
But even so, it takes time to make unenthusiastic employees review each grant for mentions of gender and equity and all this kind of stuff.
But if Elon Musk, Dan, just has control of the money spout, well, they can centralize power and speed things up.
And that's the goal.
If you control the purse, you control the government.
If you control the purse, nobody can get in your way.
If you control the purse, you can do things like you did last week with no warning, no guidance.
Turn off the money so that people who get Meals on Wheels, the elderly, school children who rely on Head Start programs, the young, people who are on Medicaid, the sick, they are cut off from help with no warning.
Having a president, Elizabeth Popperman says, even more so an unelected billionaire, hold direct, granular control of nearly $7 trillion is power beyond the founders' wildest dreams.
And we have seen elsewhere, notably in Hungary, that finding the ways to use government to defund the opposition has been an effective opening salvo in the expansion of authoritarian rule.
I got more to say.
Throw it to you.
Some reactions.
And there's not a lot to add to that, except...
There was all that discussion, as we remember, all the unified executive theory stuff.
There was the presidential immunity stuff.
I think all of that's harboring in here.
What people seem to forget is that only extended to the president.
It doesn't extend to these other people.
And to have somebody who, as you say, is not confirmed, Musk hasn't had to turn in paperwork that other people have to turn in to get confirmed.
As you say, I'm sure with SpaceX, he's got some level of security clearances or whatever.
But we don't know any of that.
There's no transparency.
And again, just that it's all by design, as is, I think, at least the threat of having his hand on those levers.
I think that that, again, is as important as the facts of what actually happened.
I think a lot of this is about chaos.
It's about fear.
It's about fear of reprisals of different kinds, including financial reprisals, right?
That if you're an agency and you don't...
You don't scrub your website of DEI stuff the way that we said that you should, right?
Or something else.
Or, I don't know, one of the things we could talk about, right?
The buyouts for federal employees and, you know, the entire Department of Education gets buyout offers and it's coming out now that the language in the contract says that, you know, if they choose to quit, Trump and or the government could just renege on the buyout offers and they would have no recourse.
So they could be told, you're going to get a 10-month buyout and they could get nothing.
So what happens if they figure out which people told the news media that?
Or which people, like, you know, released the contract?
You know, whatever.
Like, you've got the money.
And I mean, I just want folks to think about this.
Like, you know, how nervous do you get when your credit card disappears?
And you've got to go get a new credit card or your debit card.
Or once upon a time, when I lived in the UK, my debit card was cloned and somebody emptied my bank account.
And it was one of the most powerless feelings I've had ever.
That was able to be resolved, and it took a few weeks.
But imagine that on a societal level, and that's the kind of thing we're talking about.
And again, it's by design.
We've talked about this.
I've said this, I don't know how many times, but democracy, a real democracy, is inefficient by design.
Checks and balances and counter forces and deliberation and collaboration and coalitions and all that sort of stuff.
And I've said over and over and over and over, the people who think the government should be run like a company, they want efficiency.
Efficiency is the enemy of democracy.
And this is what we're seeing.
What is more efficient than giving an oligarch billionaire the levers to all the finances in the U.S. and saying, well, hey, you just do it.
We'll just give it to one dude.
You do it.
You make the call.
Nice and efficient.
Wash our hands of it and move on.
It's fundamentally anti-democratic.
It is the move toward authoritarianism as you're describing it.
This is a point I want to keep going on about what you're saying about efficiency.
So I want to flesh out some incoherencies in some of the things you're going to hear from Uncle Ron, from Elon Musk, from anybody.
So Elon Musk is treating the U.S. government like a startup.
He's treating it like when he took over Twitter.
And here's a piece at Wired, a different piece, that reads like this.
While this takeover is unprecedented for the government, it's standard operating procedure for Musk.
It maps almost too neatly to his acquisition of Twitter in 2022. Get rid of most of the workforce, install loyalists, rip up safeguards, remake in your own image.
This is the world that Musk's lieutenants come from, and the only and the one they are imposing on the Office of Personal Management, the GSA, and on down the line.
But Dan, as you're saying, the U.S. government is not a startup.
And this is where you and I have always tried to make a point about this whole do the government like a business.
The point of business is to make money.
The point of government is to help people's lives get better, to care for people, to help people thrive, to create systems that allow for people to make decisions, right?
Not for them and not so that they're just like passive agents.
But to create systems where people have good choices about food, shelter, care, about infrastructure, about education.
Do you think that Musk and the people working for him, and I can go down the roster if you all want, the 19-year-old freshman at Northeastern University, the 25-year-old eugenicist, the 23-year-old who just graduated and had his first job at Meta?
Do you think that they're concerned with the fact that the trillions of dollars they now have in front of them in a code and where they're just like slamming Red Bulls all night and hamming it up affects people's real lives?
That non-profits are shutting down because OMB cut off the money?
They don't.
This is not a startup.
It is the most powerful government in the world.
It's one that oversees 350 million people.
Dan, I live near Silicon Valley.
Startups come and go.
One out of 100 make it.
Most of them expend a significant amount of energy and resources, and then they die, and then you just start another one.
That is how the kinds of young men that Musk is dragging around think.
It's also a huge cybersecurity threat.
There's a piece of the conversation by Richard Forno, who's a professor at University of Maryland.
And what he talks about is, when you have this kind of fiddling with the code of the U.S. Treasury, when you have people who are taking this data and putting it on private servers, do you remember Hillary Clinton's emails, Dan?
The private server?
Do you remember that?
That's what they're doing with the data.
Oh, not of, I don't know, some emails that she sent, which, not great, Hillary, okay.
Whatever.
Oh, I don't know, Dan happens to be...
Perhaps every American and their financial records, their millions of federal employees, just on someone's server who's like 23 years old and walking around like a hacker on the metro with his backpack, looking like Mr. Robot.
Okay?
That's a problem.
And it flies right in the face of what we talked about over the last couple of weeks.
Donald Trump.
Well, I know this was DEI with the plane crash because I have common sense.
J.D. Vance, if you just use common sense like real people, not bureaucrats, not technocrats, not those administrative state liberal career hacks, then you'll have a good government.
Okay, cool.
So who did you guys put in charge of the entire treasury and who are you allowing to hack our entire government?
Oh, you mean people with specialized knowledge who are 23 years old and led by a madman, the richest man in the world?
That guy who just did the Nazi salute twice?
You want to tell me that's common sense?
You want to tell me that now you're just like a man of the people, one of the plebeians who lives in the life world of the peasants and is thinking through everything with common sense, like you would down at Ace Hardware?
You put in charge children with technical knowledge, you allow them to download the entire code and data of the nation, and then you're going to turn to us and tell us you have common sense about non-white people?
And women?
This is an authoritarian takeover.
It's an attempted coup.
And we should treat it as such.
And I'll just, I'll close this out, Dan.
I'll throw it to you and we can take a break.
Go something else.
The Senate Dems need to figure it out.
And I don't usually go for the Democratic Party, like, by the throat on this show.
Not that often.
But Chuck Schumer, you're not the man for the job, bud.
It's time to go.
You're out here introducing legislation to do stuff and Hakeem Jeffries is tweeting that Jesus is in control.
That's not going to cut it.
You cannot do business in the Senate when the social contract has been broken.
They're trying to take your job, Chuck.
They're saying they get the purse and they're going to spend the money.
And you're out here saying this has to be stopped.
Why are you using the passive voice, Chuck?
Go get arrested.
Go demand.
I want to know which Democratic senator is going to get thrown to the ground and arrested at the Treasury building, trying to get in and see what the hell's going on in there.
That's what I want.
Show me that guy.
Show me that gal.
Show me that person.
And guess what?
They got my vote, 2028. Because right now I see a lot of hand-wringing, soft-handed BS from some of the only people who have a chance to do anything right now.
And this is not a way to win and back voters and do whatever you've been doing since Kamala Harris lost.
This is a way to make people think you're a bunch of old folks who are not built for the fight.
Okay, Dan, I'm upset.
You're going to have to take the wheel here because it's going to get worse because I got a lot.
It's been a week.
I haven't seen it in three weeks.
You know, if they would have let me do this, if they would have let me do this by myself today, I probably would have broke the computer screen.
I'd have no microphone left.
Popped a blood vessel.
I'd be at the hospital right now, so you better take over before it gets real ugly.
Yeah, because I'm sure I'm going to calm you down.
I'm sure that's exactly what's going to happen.
But, I mean, so if I had a theme for today and some things that we'll get into, things we won't have time to get into, it's what I call the kind of soft advocacy.
It's the people who are like, oh, we oppose Trump, but they're not doing anything to oppose Trump.
It's the same thing with the executive orders.
It's the same thing with agency after agency.
It's the same thing.
With lots of just regular Americans who want to talk about, oh, I didn't support this and this and that, but they're not going to do actually anything, anything, to try to slow the process down or to try to actually bring it into view.
And as you say, when the people who actually have the authority to try to do that and the visibility to do that, I think this is another part of it.
politics is in part spectacle and there is nothing less spectacular, less worth watching, less that's going to get your attention than the Senate Democrats right now who are just this complete non-entity.
As you say, hand-wringing and whining about Kamala Harris and still like whose strategists were right about the election and who was wrong and whatever.
It's unconscionable.
It's immoral in my view.
And I think that's my theme that would carry through a lot of the things we're talking about today are people who want to claim that they're advocates for whatever, for whatever marginalized group, for whatever political But when push comes to shove right now, they're just going to lay down and they're going to let...
Trump and his cronies walk right over them and just pave the way to where he needs to go with our own bodies.
And I think the Democrats are doing that, and I think it's unconscionable.
Let's take a break.
Otherwise, I'm going to tell you what I really think of Chuck Schumer, even though you might have already did.
Be right back.
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All right, Dan, take us into something that dropped yesterday for the most part.
And the day before.
So it's the connections between Trump's creating an anti-Christian bias task force led by Paula White, his longtime spiritual advisor, figure from the New Apostolic Reformation, and the comments about Gaza and basically an ethnic cleansing there where the United States would be a colonial power that takes over the territory and has a longtime ownership stake.
Yeah, so to start with that latter point, so in the context of the National Prayer Breakfast and events going on around the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump said, you know, one of the quotes he started with is he said, people, quote, can't be happy without religion, without that belief.
Let's bring religion back.
Let's bring God back into our lives.
Suddenly, you know, Mr. Pious Trump, who doesn't know anything about any of that, but of course the religious conservatives love him as we know.
And so speaking at events, he elaborated on how to bring this aim, and he announced a task force to be run by, among other people, like Paula White would play a role in this.
The new Attorney General, Bondi, would play a role in this.
So it's a task force to be run that is aimed at numerous things, but one is rooting out what he calls anti-Christian bias specifically in the government, one big area.
So he said it was aimed at halting what he called the absolutely terrible form of anti-Christian targeting and discrimination within the federal government, including...
At the Department of Justice, at the IRS, at the FBI, and at other agencies.
He also vowed to protect Christians, quote, in our schools, in our military, in our government, in our workplaces, hospitals, and in our public squares, end quote.
And he said, and this is the key, so we talk about religious freedom and the language of religious freedom, and if somebody...
Didn't know any better and said, well, of course, we don't want anti-Christian bias.
We don't want anti-religion bias.
Isn't bias bad?
Sure, it is, if it exists.
But this is what he went on to say.
He said that we will, quote, bring our country back together as one nation under God, end quote.
This isn't about ending anti-Christian bias.
This is about reestablishing or maintaining Christian hegemony within all of those places.
This is about...
The privilege of Christians within the Department of Justice, the IRS, the FBI, and other agencies.
This is about the privileging of Christians in our schools, in our military, in our government, in our workplaces, in hospitals, in our public squares, all those places that he listed.
You've talked about, you know, Hegseth and the white nationalist slogans that are marked on his body.
We have talked about radical traditional Catholicism and white evangelicalism and all of these movements.
We have talked about all the moves that say that, you know, America's a Christian nation and should be based on theocratic principles and so forth.
That's what this is aimed at, and that's what gives away the game to me.
When he says, this isn't about religious freedom.
This is not about state neutrality toward religion.
This is not about the classical notion of the freedom to worship whatever God you want or none at all or however else we want to talk about religious freedom.
It's about making us together into one nation under God.
Meaning, what?
The straight white Jesus.
The straight white Christian nationalist God.
That is the God of the nation.
That's what we're going to privilege.
And it's going to result in the targeting of religious diversity.
It ties into DEI stuff in that regard.
All things diversity are bad, including religious diversity.
And it's going to do it on the grounds that it represents persecution of Christians.
I don't know, the next time Muslim workers somewhere say that they should have a reasonable accommodation to pray during the day or something, it's going to be talking about how this infringes on my right as a Christian business leader to do whatever.
All the way up to every level, as you say.
Tie this in with things like Musk and the funding and whatever, and you get powerful levels for this.
I think it's also obviously, and this is key, it's going to curtail efforts to curb Christian nationalism.
People can remember in 2023, there was an FBI memo that detailed the overlap between Christian nationalism and radical traditional Catholicism.
And I think, Brad, there are a few people who have been talking about this for a long time, pointing that out.
And the FBI said, here's this analysis, and there's a lot of overlap here.
They did not say all Catholics are Christian nationalists.
They did not say everybody who's a traditionalist Catholic is a Christian nationalist.
What they said is, you plot those two diagrams, there's a lot of overlap.
And I'll just give you J.D. Vance as a great example of that overlap.
And what happened?
There was GOP outrage and the FBI director withdrew the memo.
That is now, for Trump and this task force, anti-Christian bias.
It's not about bias.
It's about determining before any investigation takes place what outcomes can even be found and ensuring that Christians can never be held accountable.
That Christians can never be found to violate other people's rights and things like this.
That's the aim of this anti-Christian bias task force, is the preservation of Christian privilege and the further instantiation of Christian nationalism as the sort of official religious ideology of MAGA Nation.
There's another example he uses.
is I'm glad you brought up the FBI memo on Catholics who, a small number of Catholics, who might be something like domestic terrorist threats.
One of the other examples that came out yesterday was those who've been arrested and charged for blockading abortion clinics.
And, you know, if you all know your history, you know the history of...
of of pro natalism and abortion extremism in the Christian right.
You also know there's been violence there.
There have been doctors who have been killed by anti-abortion extremists.
So here we have people who are like showing up to abortion clinics, causing trouble, causing violence, making things such that people are threatened.
They're arrested.
And Trump saying that's anti-Christian bias.
You know, Dan, and there's no surprise here.
There's nothing here that we're like, oh my God, didn't see that coming.
Luka Doncic got traded to the Lakers.
That was one, Dan.
Yeah, did not see that coming.
This I did see coming, but this is the man who pardoned.
January 6th writers, the violent ones.
So that is part of anti-Christian bias because, I don't know, people like you and I have spent hours and hours and hours of our lives on podcasts, this one, and writing books and everything else, along with all of our colleagues from Andrew Seidel to Matthew Taylor to Catherine Stewart to Sarah Posner to Ann Nelson, talking about how January 6th was a Christian nationalist crusade.
And so...
This fits in not only to the patterns that we're talking about, it is directly tied to January 6th.
And it is absolutely frightening.
Yeah.
So let's tie this in with another piece.
Let's go to Gaza now, because people will say, what's the Gaza piece here?
We've been talking about, I don't know if people, subscribers can go and look at some of our earliest, earliest, earliest episodes.
And we talked about...
White evangelical support for the nation of Israel, the state of Israel, and what that is, and Christian Zionism, and all of this, and it's something we've been talking about for the better part of a decade at this point.
And that also...
I think it was episode four.
Episode four of now 800 episodes.
Episode four was on that.
Yeah, so pretty early on.
Pretty early on in the tenure of straight white American Jesus.
And this week, this was also an enactment of that, of the dreams and visions of Christian Zionists and developmental capitalists, and there's a lot of overlap between those in America, when Trump, in a joint press conference with Benjamin Netanyahu, as you said, and most people have seen this, floated the plan for Gaza this week and basically suggested that 2 million, give or take, Palestinians should be relocated to other regional countries.
And that the U.S. should then send troops to take control of the Strip and build what he calls the Riviera of the Middle East.
Just redevelop it, build it up.
People can remember Jared Kushner and talking about this valuable Mediterranean oceanfront property and how it should be developed.
Like, here's the vision.
It'd be a violation of international law.
It's an abandonment of longstanding U.S. policy, obviously.
It brought the condemnation of almost everybody in the world, except for guess who?
Israel and Israeli hardliners.
So the U.S. In this statement is now lined up with, you know, the hardest lines of Israel.
Israel has backed the plan.
Netanyahu has ordered the military to prepare to move Palestinians.
In that fallout, you know, Trump spokespeople have tried to soften the edges of this a little bit.
They said that, you know, this was historic, outside-the-box thinking.
This is what the press secretary said in describing the plan.
They said that they wouldn't be permanently resettled, they would just be temporarily resettled and they could come back.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, I still hate saying those words, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, said that the Gazans could leave for an interim period.
Netanyahu said Gazans could leave and then they could come back.
Nobody's buying this.
But the point is, if somebody says, well, but why?
What is really going on?
There are a lot of things going on here.
One...
Trump has no idea how to fix things.
He just wants to hit reset all the time.
That's just one thing.
He has no idea how to fix what's going on in Gaza.
He has no idea how to fix what's going on in Ukraine.
That's why he wants the Ukrainians to just sort of like, okay, let's hit pause.
Russia got what they got.
They'll stop here and let's just start over because we can't actually fix things.
Trump doesn't know how to do that.
He's not interested in doing that, so he's going to try it.
But it's also, this is the Christian Zionist dream of returning the land to Israel, really under the authority of the U.S. Again, that capitalist strain in there that somehow sees, like, building condos on the Mediterranean as some sort of humanitarian work.
And, you know, Trump has his whole, like, you know, I guess Gaza Lago kind of vision here of, like, this is going to be this harmonious place where people will live in peace and so on.
There's a sense in which it seems almost comical.
It's ridiculous.
But if we get past that, there's the humanitarian side of it.
It would be catastrophic for a number of levels.
Getting past that, just understanding how much of an impulse of Christian Zionism and Christian nationalism this is, and when is it going to turn out that if you're critical of this policy of Trump's, is that anti-Christian bias, Brad?
You know, churches have been preaching for a long time about the need of Israel to possess the land.
So if you come along now and you say that this is a terrible idea, like, that's just anti-Christian bias.
You just can't say things like that.
These things fit together.
They weren't articulated together in, you know, a policy package or something like that.
But they were like two days apart.
And I think it's not accidental the way that these things link together.
And as I say, for every Christian Zionist in America, this is like a dream scenario.
Netanyahu knows it and loves it and has fully embraced it.
And it's a terrifying thing that I think brings together some of the really concrete and global repercussions of this vision of Christian national America.
There's a direct tie there to Paula White, too, because the New Apostolic Reformation is just rife with Christian Zionists.
I mean, if you go to a New Apostolic Reformation church, event, revival...
You're going to see people with the Israeli flag.
They're going to be blowing shofars.
There's going to be a lot of Messianic Jews there.
And so, you know, Trump's kind of bread and butter Christian group, independent charismatics and Pentecostals, love this.
And so, so do your more traditional kind of mainstream evangelicals, the ones that come out of...
Southern Baptist circles or the Graham family, the Falwell family, however you want to talk about mainstream evangelicalism, going back to the religious right.
I want to make one more connection here, Dan, before we take a break and go to a final story.
And that is the destruction of U.S. aid.
So I think a lot of you know that Elon Musk has basically said that he just basically stopped U.S. aid.
It's over.
And there's reports of- In his words, sorry, in his words, he said he put it in the wood chipper.
That's how he spent his weekend, putting USAID in the wood chipper.
That includes 10,000 US jobs that are just gone now.
It includes billions of dollars of aid.
And I just, I want to think through what USAID is.
USAID was created in the early 1960s as a way for the US to do diplomatic and humanitarian work across the globe in the midst of what, Dan?
The Cold War.
So at a time when the US and the Soviet Union are these two superpowers trying to get to the moon, trying to nuclear weapons and disarmament, the fear of nuclear fallout, this competition for which ideology is going to win?
Is it capitalism or is it communism?
Is it liberal democracy or is it Soviet authoritarianism a la Stalin and his heirs?
At that time, the US says, why don't we go across the globe from Sierra Leone, To Southeast Asia and everywhere else and invest in humanitarian projects.
Now, am I here to say USAID is perfect?
Am I here to say that I'm not?
I'm here to say that it reflects a worldview where the United States is somehow, because of its prosperity and because of its moral belief in what it has, and don't email me about the moral belief.
I know.
Okay?
Leftist.
I already wrote the email and I know what you're going to tell me.
I'm an old man.
I know.
Okay?
Please don't send me an email about the United States as a moral failure.
I get it, okay?
But it reflects a worldview that says, investing in humanitarian aid, like clean water, or HIV and AIDS solutions and medical answers and interventions.
These are ways to help people, A. They're ways to help the United States because they create goodwill and they show that we want to reach out.
And use our prosperity to help others.
It is a way to wield soft power if you want to think about it diplomatically.
And so you you think about Elon Musk.
And the wood chipper, and then you think about, hey, we're just going to move into Gaza.
And I quote Donald Trump saying, and we'll have a long term ownership stake like it's a piece of property and he's going to put up some casino that looks like where Biff lives.
And back to the future, too.
Because that's kind of what we're living through right now, isn't it?
Biff Tannen is the effing president.
Think about the diplomacy and the worldview and the foreign policy, like, inverse there.
And I just want to reiterate something I said before.
I don't have time to elaborate.
You're going to hear me talk about it in the future.
Donald Trump and people like him think that we lost the Cold War.
That after 1989, it wasn't that.
Our worldview was now the predominant one across the globe, and that communism was just out of business.
The Soviet Union, no more.
The Berlin Wall, it's gone.
By the early 1990s, it's just the United States.
Liberalism, capitalism, democracy.
You know what they see?
They're like, we're the losers.
We had to take care of everybody.
We had to, like, help Germany.
And now look at all the manufacturing they do that we don't with their cars.
Japan's, like, doing great.
Didn't we have a war with Japan?
And, you know, they're building cars too and all kinds of other stuff.
And China's over here, you know, just doing everything.
We got saddled with caring for people.
The people who are willing to turn off the funding so that the elderly and the young and the sick don't eat or get care because they want you to align with the president's values are the same one that's like, who cares about anyone else?
Let's go bulldoze Gaza because life is just power.
Life is just about destroying enemies.
Bro, manosphere, masculinity, domination, will to power.
That's it.
And that is what we are now.
Go travel, American.
See how people feel about you when you show up at the pub or the cafe across the world now.
Because that is who we are.
And that is how we're going to be seen.
Final thoughts on this before we take a break and go to one last thing.
I'd say that's a great point about, you know, how we're viewed and how we're seen.
It's, you know, people say this, and I understand it.
I've been critical of it before, you know, when they say, well, this is not who we are as a country.
It is.
Unfortunately, it is.
Because the people in power are making sure that that is who we are, which is why we have to not simply acquiesce to this, to not simply give in to this.
This is why...
When you're sitting at the table with, you know, Uncle Ron or whomever, and they're citing this stuff, you have to say something.
You have to counter that.
You have to not fall into the trap.
And I've been reluctant to bring this up.
I got more flack for an episode I did in It's in the Code once than any episode I have ever done.
And it was the one where I suggested that it was basically when they're like, well, you know, I know that my brother-in-law votes for this and supports this and this and this, but he's a really good guy.
And I was like, you know what?
Maybe he's not.
Maybe you've got to deal with the possibility that your brother-in-law is not a good guy.
Maybe your parents aren't good people.
And people got really mad at me for moralizing or whatever.
And I said, but look, we all make decisions all the time about people that we want to spend time with, people that we feel safe having our families spend time with.
And the question is, are these the policies and is this the world we want to create?
Are we making it safe for anybody, including our own kids, our own families?
And so I think that for people to say...
This isn't who we are as a country.
They have got to move past that as just sort of a slogan and begin really assessing the people in their own lives and their own small ways that we have of trying to push back on that and saying, if this is not who we are, then how do I not be that in a way that's visible, in a way that's vocal, in a way that tries to have an effect in whatever limited way any of us as individuals can?
Let's take a break.
We'll come back and finish up.
All right, Dan, so much going on.
We haven't talked about really the purge of the FBI. We haven't talked about the fact that Russ Vogt has been confirmed.
We have the nominations of Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard coming, the confirmations, I should say, coming imminently.
But let's finish today talking about a ban on transgender care and other issues related to the trans community and what that says about the larger picture of the United States.
Yeah, so I want to talk about that.
There was the ban last week on gender-affirming care just yesterday and the day before, like, bans on trans women in competitive sports and in the Olympics.
And, I mean, two things.
Like, there's the issue, the specific issue of trans identity.
We're going to talk about that.
But I think that the bigger issue is an issue you raised a number of weeks ago talking about one of the pathways to authoritarian power is when people sort of preemptively acquiesce to it.
Before they have to actually give in to the power, they simply go ahead and do it because they see it coming or they fear what's going to happen and they just fall into line without those claiming that power actually doing anything.
And this is what's happening with Trump's executive orders.
And I think that that's the bigger issue to see here because he's issuing all these executive orders and we keep seeing people fall into line to things they don't have to fall into line with.
I know we don't have a lot of time, so let me run through this.
Trump signs an order last week banning federal funding to hospitals and clinics and other medical organizations providing gender-affirming care to anyone under age 19. Basically did, in an executive order, what roughly half of the states in the U.S. have done, banning gender-affirming care.
And the aim, of course, is to ban that care for not just minors.
I don't know why they chose 19. It's sort of interesting.
But for anybody under 19 in the country, it's chilling.
That he would do this, but I think the responses to it are more telling, and here's why.
The order directs relevant federal agencies to impose policy in accordance with it within 60 days.
Executive orders are not self-enacting.
They don't automatically have the force of law.
They don't execute themselves.
You have to have all these agencies that have to put into policy ways of enforcing these things, and this one said, like, 60 days.
What happened?
The day after...
The order came out.
You had healthcare agencies, many of which fancy themselves as, I think, advocates for trans and queer identified people who just shuttered their programs, who just stopped doing it, citing this order.
There was no mechanism for this yet.
There's nothing from, for example, if you receive Medicaid funding, there was no directive from Medicaid contacting doctors and saying, as of now, if you do this kind of stuff, you won't get Medicaid funding anymore and so forth.
Before that happened, there was a Teen Vogue article.
We've mentioned Teen Vogue a lot over the past few years.
Shout out Teen Vogue.
Yeah, just phenomenal stuff on a lot of things related to health care, women's health care, queer issues.
And they had an article on January 29th, and they talked about legal analysts being afraid of places preemptively falling into line with this.
And that's what happened.
Denver Health and Colorado University.
Suspended care.
Virginia Commonwealth University and a lot of the hospitals in Virginia.
National Children's in D.C. all suspended this care.
The issue is that there's no enforcement mechanism for this.
They don't have to do this.
There are lots of reasons to question whether this executive...
It's going to be challenged in court.
That's a thing.
But it also, if people listen to the language in it, it's full of junk science.
It's super ideological.
It talks about...
You know, hormone replacement therapies and hormone blockers is genital mutilation, and it talks about countless youth regretting their decisions and so forth.
One of the problems that's going to happen for it legally, I think, is medical communities are going to say, well, actually, what we do doesn't result in any of those things, so it's not clear that this order actually affects trans healthcare as it exists, because they didn't use any clinical language.
They didn't cite any studies of, like, I don't know, potential long-term effects of hormone blockers or what have you.
Other responses to this, there were some states that actually protect access to this.
In New York, New York University Longone Hospital canceled gender care appointments.
The next day, Attorney General Letitia James sent a letter to health care providers in New York reminding them that New York state law requires them to provide this health care and that they are not at liberty to stop doing it simply because there was an executive order that was signed.
In Massachusetts, the care providers were informed by the state that they were to continue providing that care and that if federal funds are lost, the state will make up those funds.
And so that if the time comes when they can't get Medicare, Medicaid, whatever, the state would make that up.
There was a coalition of 14 attorneys general in different states that had a statement about this.
So I'll just say there's opposition, there's movement.
We don't know where this is going.
I think legally and for technical reasons there's a wide range of reasons to think that this might not go into effect.
The bigger significance is that before any of that gets figured out, before any policies are handed down from agencies, you had hospitals that were willing to just shutter their programs because a president sitting at a desk signed a non-binding piece of paper.
And that's what I talk about when I talk about the soft advocacy of this.
And it didn't end there.
I mentioned that Trump bans trans women from competitive athletics.
And what happens the next day?
NCAA, the president of the NCAA, the former governor of Massachusetts, Charlie Baker, bans trans women from competition.
They can still practice.
It's supposed to be because somehow cisgender women are unsafe, but they can still practice with them.
According to the NCAA, they think it affects, quote, fewer than 10 athletes out of all the thousands of female athletes in the NCAA. But that is now banned.
Again, there's no enforcement mechanism.
There's nothing in place to actually make the NCAA do this.
There's no clear status on the legal standing of this and the 14th Amendment and any number of other things about equal protection that are going to come out, Title IX, what have you.
And I know that the Trump administration is redefining that.
This is my big takeaway with this, is over and over and over, aside from the content of specific executive orders, we see people tripping over themselves to fall into line before there is even any reason to do so, before they can even go into effect or have any concrete effect on people.
So those are my thoughts.
Just quickly to you, if you have thoughts.
I have one more, but it's sort of my reason for hope as well, so I'll hold off on that.
Well, I just think...
I think it makes you wonder why you're willing to abandon people so quickly.
I think that's one.
But I also think it shows you this as a strategy, that the strategy has been for a long time.
Coming from Project 2025, one of the other things we have not talked about today is that Project 2025 is being implemented, period.
And the plan has always been from Project 2025 to overwhelm people with executive orders because people will just obey thinking, oh, I have to.
The king said so.
And as you're saying, Dan, there's going to be challenges.
There's going to be a lot of pushback to these.
And it's not clear.
I mean, do you all remember like when they were up in arms because Joe Biden forgave student loan debt and then all of a sudden he didn't because the court said he couldn't and then he did it like five more times and the courts were like, no, sorry, you can't do it again.
You know, people are obeying in advance and I agree.
So my reason for hope is.
All of the federal lawsuits against Trump and what's happening with Musk and so on, there are dozens.
I'm looking at a list at Court Watch and, you know, everybody from the Quakers to the Asian Pacific American advocates to the Department of Education to organized communities against deportations.
I mean, there's a lot.
The state of Washington, the state of New Jersey.
So the court system right now is working to block things.
Now, what I'm going to watch for next is when Trump and Musk and everyone else are like, Yeah, I don't care what the court said.
We're going to do it anyway.
And then we're just in a full-blown constitutional crisis.
But for now, the courts are actually having an effect.
We'll see what happens.
What's your reason for hope?
Mine is related.
Mine is a Supreme Court decision from the summer that Republicans loved.
It was the Loper-Bright Enterprises versus Raimondo.
And if people don't recognize that, they might have heard it as overturning the Chevron president.
We talked about it briefly.
It was a bit technical.
But what it was is for like 40 years, 60 years, decades in the U.S., government agencies have had broad latitude to develop policies and interpret opaque federal laws and apply them.
And that was overturned.
That Supreme Court precedent was overturned, which basically said agencies now just they can't legislate.
And so it's a lot harder for agencies to come out with policies.
Guess what is going to help states fight these Trump executive orders?
Is when they say, oh, well, hey, guess what?
Department of Education, you don't have the authority to apply the policy that way.
Hey, guess what?
Medicaid distribution authority, I don't know what part of Medicaid that is.
You can't just decide how the money goes because Congress didn't empower you to do that.
So this same court case that the Republicans loved when it was aimed at Joe Biden, I think, and other analysts think this too, is going to become a potent tool.
For those who are opposing these Trump executive orders for precisely the kind of reasons we're highlighting.
So I'm with you right now.
I see a lot of hope in the judicial system.
We'll see where it goes.
All right, y'all.
Don't forget that Andrew Seidel's podcast is coming here in a couple of weeks.
You'll want to get signed up for Swatch Premium because you'll get bonus content from him.
You may say, look, I like you, Brad and Dan, but not enough to sign up.
Well, what if we throw in Andrew Seidel?
Huh?
Come on.
For the same price.
So check that out.
It is $50 for the entire year right now.
And we could totally use your help so that I have $10,000 to send Dan and sponsor his dodgeball team.
That is our number one fiscal day ever.
It is not.
Don't worry.
Other than that, we'll be back next week with a great interview on Monday with It's in the Code on Wednesday and the Weekly Roundup on Friday.
Thanks for being here.
Do your best to take care of yourself.
Drink water.
Take a nap.
Play with your kids.
Play a video game.
Go outside because it's going to be a long stretch, y'all.
Until next time.
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