Weekly Roundup: Trump Tarriffs. Booker Filibusters. Wisconsin Runs Out Elon.
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Brad and Dan dive into Cory Booker's historic filibuster, analyzed in the context of the Democrats' struggles to regroup, the election of a liberal judge in Wisconsin despite significant funding from Elon Musk, and the broader political landscape. Additionally, personal anecdotes and light-hearted conversations interweave with the heavier topics, offering listeners a mix of economic policies, political strategies, and cultural reflections.
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The global economy is fundamentally different today than it was yesterday.
The system of global trade anchored on the United States that Canada has relied on since the end of the Second World War, a system that, while not perfect, has helped to deliver prosperity for our country for decades, Is over.
Our old relationship of steadily deepening integration with the United States is over.
The 80-year period when the United States embraced the mantle of global economic leadership, when it forged alliances rooted in trust and mutual respect, and championed the free and open exchange of goods and services is over.
While this is a tragedy, it is also the new reality.
That's Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney talking about the relationship with the United States, describing the fallout from Donald Trump's tariffs.
It's clear from Carney that things are not normal and they never will go back to normal.
Canadians are donning the slogan, Elbows Up, in order to explain the tact they're taking against United States aggression.
Colin Robertson, a former diplomat and somebody who's specialized in US-Canada relations, Today we talk about the fallout from the tariffs,
the ways they were calculated, the ways that they are meant to repeal the 20th century in order to take us back to the 19th.
We also discuss Cory Booker's historic filibuster, What it means for the Democrats as they try to regroup and fight back, and the victory of a liberal judge in Wisconsin in the face of Elon Musk's onslaught of funding and cash in the state.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is the Straight White American Jesus Weekly Roundup.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is the Straight White American Jesus Weekly Roundup.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
Great to be here with you on this spring Friday.
As always, here with my co-host.
Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College and here in like balmy, balmy New England, where it's like 65 degrees today.
So, you know, in what we also call mud season up here, because now everything's just muddy, but it's warm at least.
So that's good.
So I want to say today that I know you are in this Midlife renaissance.
You've really discovered your midlife self in the best way.
You're a light to the world.
You're a beacon to all middle-aged people, especially middle-aged men.
And I'm doing my best, Dan.
My kids are tiny.
So on the way home today, I dropped my kids off at daycare, got in my minivan, and in a way that's probably somewhat pathetic, I did turn on the new Kendrick Lamar album, which I do enjoy.
And it makes me worry for Kendrick Lamar, because if I like it, it might mean that he's not going to be popular very much longer.
Or cool.
And I did listen to Squabble Up and I got a little pumped, but the car stopped me from turning it up too loud because there's some sort of like safe driver function on the minivan that means I'm not even allowed to bump the music as loud as I'd like on the way home from preschool.
So I'm still searching for my glow up, but I will find it, Dan.
I will find it at some point.
There's future hope because my kids are old enough now that the metal, I just don't worry about the words anymore.
So yeah, the 11 year old with like all the profanity and the songs, I've just given up.
So I don't know if that's a middle-aged Renaissance thing or bad parenting, but either way, I'm with it.
Just rolling with it.
Your 11 year old's teaching you new cuss words you've never heard of.
You're like, oh, that's a good one.
Wow. Nice.
You could educate at this point, so it's fine.
Yeah.
I will find it at some point.
All right, people.
The light, the levity, the living, the laughing, and the loving is over, okay?
Let's do it.
Let's talk about the week.
It's actually, Dan, a week of glimmers of light and hope in the wider political landscape.
We're going to talk first, however, about tariffs and the ridiculousness and tragedy of those tariffs and what they might bring in the near and long future.
We're going to talk about, then, Cory Booker's historic filibuster and the ways he inherited certain historical voices, stomped on others, and if it means anything going forward.
And finally, we'll get to Wisconsin and a victory for a liberal judge there in the face of Elon Musk offering people $1 million if they vote and pumping about $20 million into the state for that election.
That It is part of a larger picture related to Florida and some other places that we'll get to.
So let's jump in and talk about these tariffs which are There's sometimes words escape you, Dan.
Nonsensical, ridiculous, but I'll let you explain some of the facts so we understand.
Go ahead.
Yeah, so hopefully we'll do all right here.
Tariffs, math, economics, it's all the stuff that the humanities people are all about.
Clearly, clearly in our wheelhouse.
Yeah, so, so Trump has been, you know, he ran on tariffs.
He's got this, I'm sure we'll get into this, there's just this weird Like tariffs will fix everything kind of mindset.
It's going to fix trade.
It's going to fix the economy.
It's going to fix like unemployed everything trade, you know, tariffs will just magically do this.
It's impossible to know with Trump how much he believes that or how much he doesn't or like what's ignorance and what's obfuscation and you know, whatever but this week, you know, they promised, you know, this big unveiling of the tariffs.
I remember, you know, I just kind of waiting all day like kind of wondering like when are they going to actually come out and he did.
The long and short of it is, right, his tariff policy was unveiled.
It's bigger and more aggressive than even most pretty pessimistic estimates thought that it might be.
Excuse me.
It's about a 10% minimum tariff on virtually everything entering the country.
And of course, I think everybody knows a tariff is just like a tax on imported goods.
So, like, boost the price by 10%.
And they've been pitched as reciprocal tariffs.
So, like, 10% on everything and then other countries get a quote-unquote reciprocal tariff.
Which implies that they're putting tariffs on American goods, so we're retaliating.
That's the implication there.
And some of those are much, much higher.
I think China at this point is somewhere in the neighborhood of 50-something percent tariffs on some items.
Lots and lots and lots of issues with this.
The first is the really arbitrary calculation that has come out.
As soon as this came out, people were like, where did they get these numbers from?
How did they develop this?
And Somebody, the name is escaping me, there's a journalist who kind of like put it together.
It was like, I think this is what they're doing and that's been confirmed from the Trump administration.
So it turns out, first of all, that the reciprocal tariffs are not actually reciprocal.
There was no, no tariffs were actually used in calculating the rate.
So in other words, they did not look at what other countries do to U.S. exports in terms of tariffs and then calculate a rate.
They didn't even look at tariffs.
They had this weird, people will have seen this, this weird math thing where basically what they did is they took the trade deficit we have with a given country, they divided that by the number of exports that it has to the US, and then cut that number in half, and that's the tariff amount.
And everything I have read from every economist, from every, you know, economics journalist, from everybody is like, this means nothing.
It's literally just like numbers on a page for, you know, There's no economic basis for this.
There's no reason why this would be the calculation.
I think it's very much a move of the Trump administration to try to look like there was sophistication and deliberation in a policy or when there wasn't.
Among other things, one of the things that this means is that companies that rely on foreign supply chains are likely to be hit really, really hard by this.
And that's going to bring on all the knock-on effects that people are worried about economically.
But the second piece of all of this is I don't think anybody's clear on what exactly Trump's policy goals are.
As I said, He just invokes tariffs like a magic wand, you know, that's going to fix everything.
He says it's going to bring manufacturing back to the U.S., but companies are not relocating to the U.S. or, you know, dumping billions of dollars into building new factories and things like that because Trump is so mercurial and nobody has any idea if these are going to stay.
Are they going to make it past midterms?
Are they going to stay past an additional president?
What is actually going to happen?
I should give a shout out.
I had a coaching client I was talking with the other day.
Who tangentially is related to this.
He made the point.
He was talking to a CEO of a company recently that has manufacturing plants in Mexico.
And that CEO said, if we build another plant, we now have two plants.
Like we have a plant in Mexico and have a plant in the US.
What are we going to do?
Why would we do that?
It's cheaper to pay the tariffs or even take a loss than it is to relocate the plant.
So anyway, there's that piece of it.
Peter Navarro, top trade advisor, the Trump administration insists the tariffs are not a negotiating tactic.
Commerce Secretary Letnik said that the president is not going to back off.
But Trump himself describes the tariffs as giving us a great power to negotiate.
So it's nobody, including other countries, is clear.
Are these here to stay?
Are these real?
Are they posturing?
Are they things that are going to be rolled back?
Is it a negotiating tactic?
Nobody knows what the goals are, including figures in Congress who are starting to get really nervous about this.
And then the third point, of course, is the immediate negative impacts.
Stocks had their worst day in five years, and that's usually something the Trump administration is very into, watching the stocks.
They had touted, you know, the markets taking off when he was elected, and of course all of those gains are gone.
People fear, you know, longer term than price hikes, inflation, a possible recession.
Countries like Canada and Mexico, excuse me, Canada and China, Have already announced other retaliatory tariffs to this.
And so we just don't know where this goes.
So all of this means on top of it, layer on top of all of this is that lots of observers, again, including members in the GOP, they don't know whether the Trump administration has the competency to manage this.
It's turned into a crisis.
They don't know if they understand really what they're doing or what the significance of this is.
I think you're going to walk us through some historical dimensions, like Trump likes to tout You know, policies from like a hundred years ago on tariffs and this and that and most historically minded folks that I have read have said, you can't, you can't compare, you know, America, the American economy and the international global economy now to like what the world was like a hundred years ago and a million reasons why this doesn't just magically work.
And guess what?
A hundred years ago, it wasn't a panacea either.
On and on and on.
So that just sort of brings us up to what some of the developments were this week.
I'm sure if I clicked, I've been teaching this morning, if I clicked on the news that I haven't read today, there's probably new updates and new retaliatory tariffs and things like that.
But I'll throw it over to you for like your impressions, thoughts, other things that you felt are relevant about this or most pressing.
Oh, there's so much to say.
And I do want to reiterate what you said.
We're not economists.
This is not a show about, you know, this is not two economists sharing their There are public views on things.
So we're not going to get out beyond our skis.
We're not going to pretend that, oh yeah, of course we're experts on this.
And we've spent years in graduate school studying the economics of this.
I want to provide some historical perspective, but I also just want to provide perspective from actual economists.
So I will say that I think the leading kind of public economic voice on this has become Douglas Irwin, who is a professor of economics at Dartmouth University or Dartmouth College, I should say.
Erwin says this about some, he wrote this in recently, he says, reciprocal tariffs make no sense.
And this is in the communist liberal rag called the Wall Street Journal.
He says a reciprocal policy would enormously complicate the US tariff system.
The harmonized tariff schedule of the US, which details individual rates on particular commodities, has about 13,000 line items.
The US trades with 200 countries.
Is Washington ready to impose and manage 2.6 million individual tariff rates?
This goes to what you just said.
Is the Trump administration ready to do that?
Is the Trump administration that seems to rely on the common sense of like eight people, and I put common sense in quotes there, the common sense of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Howard Lutnick, who looks like a used car salesman on TV trying to explain to you why, you know, something being broken and costing more is good for you.
Scott Besant, who looks like he wants to cry every time he's on the television these days.
Caroline Leavitt, who is just ready for her primetime slot on Saturday Night Live in terms of an impersonation.
Is the common sense of like the nine people left in the Trump government going to manage 2.6 million individual tariff rates?
I think that goes to your point, okay?
Moreover, this leads to nonsensical policies, says Erwin.
China exports rare earth minerals that are essential for the production of many high-technology goods.
The US doesn't export those things.
If China were nonetheless to impose high tariffs on them, would the US be required to impose real prohibitive duties on mineral imports from China?
So China's like, hey, we're putting tariffs on the minerals we export and The U.S. is like, well, we're going to do that too, except for we don't have any of those and you don't want anything from us in that domain.
So this makes no sense, as Erwin says.
It also isn't clear if reciprocal really means reciprocal.
So there's a lot of questions about whether or not the U.S. will match tariff rates on products from countries with lower tariffs on U.S. goods.
If New Zealand doesn't impose any import duties on dairy products, Will the U.S. allow all New Zealand dairy into the U.S. duty-free?
I'm not going to go further into the economic weeds.
I'm just saying Douglas Irwin has been waiting for this his whole life because he's one of those economics professors and historians who's been studying the Smoot-Hawley Act, the McKinley presidency, and the impact of tariffs on trade for decades, and now he is everywhere.
The Wall Street Journal, CNN,
etc. To get away from the kind of economics into the history, one of the things that I think some people listening will already be aware of, but it's worth just mentioning is Trump, you know, used to be somebody who mentioned Andrew Jackson as his kind of presidential forerunner and a person he looked up to.
He's often now talked about William McKinley, who again, kind of a forgotten president that nobody really talks about, not in that dinner conversation of Who's your favorite president?
Abraham Lincoln, FDR, I'm a Terry Roosevelt guy.
Nobody says McKinley, okay?
And you can tell I don't enjoy those kinds of dinner parties.
Do not invite me if that's what you're going to ask, okay?
So let's just leave that.
So who's William McKinley?
McKinley is somebody who's from Ohio, plays many roles in government, Congress and Senate and Governor, and then becomes president.
He was famous for being the kind of tariff king, the guy that said tariffs are really important.
They will help us.
And Trump seems to think that McKinley represents this age in American economic and expansionist and political history that he wants to emulate.
He thinks that we as a country were rich and prestigious and full of cash during McKinley's time.
And when he thinks of McKinley, he thinks of somebody who raised tariffs, who wanted to participate in that kind of isolationist or protectionist politics, and who, as a result, was able to, you know, bring the U.S. into what he thinks of as kind of its world power status.
Here is a CNN article that that draws on the work of Douglas Irwin, who I've been talking about today, the economist from Dartmouth.
Trump misses several points in the historical record about McKinley, including his contention that tariffs created wealth and made America rich in the late 19th century.
This whole late 19th century was a period of expansion.
Tariffs themselves probably didn't make a huge amount of difference one way or another.
There was immigrants coming from Central and Eastern Europe that acted as cheap labor.
Now, I'm not going to overlook that labor history because this is also the time of Chinese exclusion and all of that.
There was a deep hostility to Asian people.
Nonetheless, there were immigrants from the Ellis Island, if not the Angel Island side of American migration, and that included so many newcomers from Ireland and other places who were willing to take up some of the jobs that those new industries were creating.
In other words, it was a time of immigration to the country rather than mass deportation from the country.
It was also a time when the federal government was much smaller.
And I have mentioned this on this show so many times, but I'll mention it again.
It was a time of deep Overwhelming income inequality, the time of Stanford, the time of the robber barons, the time when so little of the country's wealth was concentrated in the hands of the 99%.
It was also a time, Dan, before things like Social Security, the 40 hour work week, child labor laws, Protections against like workers getting injured on the job, i.e.
workers compensation.
This was a time when the people at the top had everything and everyone else had very little.
That is what Trump wants.
That is what Trump is interested in.
And if you don't believe me, I'll just point you to, and I know you said you've been teaching all morning, I'll point you what he posted on Truth Social this morning.
This is Trump posting it.
It is a video that a TikToker made at WNNSA11 who said that Trump is deliberate.
This is what the TikTok video says.
Trump is deliberately crashing the stock market.
He is deliberately devaluing the dollar.
He is deliberately causing economic pain at home so that he can slash interest rates.
He can get a better refinance on our national debt and In essence, help people get a better mortgage rate because when things go like this, the mortgage rates go down.
This is a guy who is saying the Trump plan is to destroy the economy.
Now, in addition to that, I'll just say, and then I'll shut up.
I know I'm getting on a roll here.
I'll be quiet.
This is from Blue Sky.
It's from Carl.
I don't know Carl's last name.
Sorry, Carl.
But Carl's pretty awesome.
And you're like, well, who's Carl?
It's just this random guy.
He's a writer.
He's an academic.
He's a, he's somebody who publishes on these things and is, is, is, is pretty knowledgeable about foreign policy or the whole thing.
Here's, here's what he says.
There's a lot of folks who are pessimistic about the idea that Republicans and Trump and the techno fascists around him, Teal, Musk, Yarvin, Vance, want to purposely crash the market so their friends and venture capital can pick the bones of, of American government.
But Trump just posted the video I mentioned, Dan.
He didn't like, you know, he didn't like it.
He didn't mention it.
He reposted it as like, yep, that's what I'm doing.
The stated goal for many within the pan-right movement that makes up the Republican Party now, as well as the techno-fascist movement that has a huge influence on the trajectory of Trump's presidency, is to destroy the markets, to buy America out, and control the economy forever.
I want to say one more thing, but to me, The worship of McKinley is not the worship of a president who made the country better.
It's the worship of a president who he thinks had it right.
And for Trump, that means the guy at the top gets the most, like a mafia boss.
Everybody who's close to him and helps him gets a gets a cut of the pie and the masses can suck it.
They don't matter.
They are extraneous.
And as long as you have their public opinion support by way of culture war issues, you will do fine.
I want to add in something about the Great Depression and tariffs from the 1930s, but off to you.
Just a couple points, and I think all those analyses are good, and I think that they're right, and I think that they get it at really important points here.
First, I just want to point out the, I don't know, irony, it's not irony, the fittingness of saying Trump misses several points of the historical analysis.
Like, excuse me, that's just one piece of this, whether it was Andrew Jackson Or in this case McKinley or whomever Trump ever points to he's like He's like the kid who like here's a name and like there's a president and tariffs in the same sentence and all of a sudden It's like he's off and running or and as you say, yeah, all these kind of historical analyses are there To your point about you know, he thinks McKinley had it, right?
They're not just McKinley but like did the model of what America was at that time is We talk about this.
I mean, that's fine, right?
Make America great again.
It is always worth, when somebody has this kind of nostalgic, backward-looking, you know, sort of, America used to be a utopia and has fallen away from it.
We have to get back to this golden age.
It's always worth asking and saying, well, what was that golden age like, right?
And we've talked about that with race.
And we've talked about that with ethnicity.
We've talked about that with a lot of things.
But here we have it with economics.
As you say, it's the robber barons.
It's the Elon Musks of the 19th century.
That's what this was.
It's a time of, as you say, radical income inequality.
We live in a time with greater income inequality now than we had during the supposed Gilded Age.
And that is exactly what the technocrats and the technofascists and all the people you're listing are looking at.
And I think you're right that Trump ran on culture war issues and on promises about the economy that couldn't be kept and Now we're seeing this as as they call for what they call for like regular people that well, you know, yeah Yeah, there probably will be a recession,
but you know That's kind of tough or yeah, there's gonna be some pain for a while But you know, I think I think it's okay My grandma wouldn't mind if she misses her Social Security check or you know all the lines that have come out About what Doge is doing about what this is doing It's basically telegraphing exactly that point.
The super wealthy people are not going to be hurt by these tariffs.
Yeah, their stock portfolio will take a hit, it'll rebound eventually, or they'll diversify into other things, or as you say, they will come in and sweep up.
Or they shorted the stocks already because they knew what was coming and yeah.
Yeah, you know, stocks were way down.
I mean, anybody who's like super into stock trading knew what the markets would do with this news and so forth.
Sacrifices for the little people.
Sacrifices for the people who don't matter.
And as you say, and I think that this has been a part of the MAGA playbook, I think it's been a part of the Republican playbook for a really long time before the distinctions of the MAGA movement, is to get people to focus on hating people who are different from them, to get them to shift blame to,
say, you know, brown people across the border and whatever, and not to look at what We're good to
go. People know.
I don't think Trump is playing 3D chess, but I think that a lot of the people advising him are knowing exactly what this is going to do.
And again, all these things are not bugs.
Hurting regular people, trampling over regular people, calling for people who cannot afford to make sacrifice to make sacrifice.
That's not a bug.
That's a feature of the system for the Trump administration.
So historically what happened is McKinley in 1901 eventually realized that tariffs and economic isolation was hurting the United States and he went on this path of wanting to open up trade and make it such that the United States could export more easily and import more easily, etc. And he was assassinated soon thereafter by an anarchist.
His historical journey did change, and I'm sure Trump doesn't know or doesn't care about that either.
Let's fast forward 30 years to the Great Depression and the crash of the stock market.
Many are saying that the tariffs that Trump just put on, and these are economists, these are political scientists, are extreme to the point of being ridiculous.
I mean, they put a tariff on an island that has a military base.
I mean, there's the memes of, like, A penguin who's like the inhabitant of that island are going around like there's memes of the penguin in the Oval Office instead of Zelensky and both Vance and Trump saying, you know, did you even say thank you?
Why would you put a tariff on an island that has only a military base and its only inhabitants are essentially penguins and other animals?
Because you're an idiot and there's no reason to do that.
I mean, it really just shows incompetence.
These are larger than the last time we did tariffs in a sort of major Significant way, and that was in the run-up to the Great Depression in the Smoot-Hawley Act, okay?
So before we go into the Smoot-Hawley Act for like two minutes, and then we'll take a break, I have this sad brain that really goes weird places at times, Dan, and my brain that last night was like, we're gonna get a video someday where like,
you know, at like really bro-y Poker nights with the worst people Josh Hawley and JD Vance are like some kind of really terrible like rap core duo that performs and you know They go by smoot and Hawley.
It's like JD Vance is a little smoot and Josh Hawley is is his sidekick and that just it's just some weird limp-biscuit sad Christian nationalist BS, you know, I'm saying smoot dog Like, in the group text, you know, you know, the Dizzler, JD the Dizzler, is calling himself Smoot Dogg.
You know he is.
With a W. Oh my God.
T-shirts create themselves, folks.
Like, we don't even have to try.
Oh my God.
All right.
What happens when Smoot Hawley is passed?
Well, Douglas Irwin, the economist I've been talking about, wrote a whole book about it, so you can go check that out if you'd like.
But, Smoot Hawley is passed.
is enacted in the late 1920s.
Other countries responded by putting tariffs on international trade.
It made it harder for the US to trade with other countries, of course, and that made it harder to pull out of the Great Depression.
Imports became largely unaffordable.
People who had lost their jobs could only afford to buy domestic products, which were more expensive.
Global trade tanked by 65%.
It prolonged the depression.
It may not have caused it, but it prolonged it and it made it worse.
So Dan, I want to take a break, but I just want to say one more thing when we come back about where there is an opening here for the American left, and I'm not going to say the Democratic Party, for the American left and a somewhat historical precedent, but one that we have to take with a kind of grain of salt.
So let's take a break and be right back.
Okay, real quick, Dan, I know we got a lot to get to.
I think that we are headed to a place where, at some point, Americans, average Americans, are going to look up and realize what's happened.
And I don't know when it's going to be.
They're going to realize that the government has been stripped down to its parts.
They're going to realize that there's tariffs on things, that they cannot buy a Nintendo Switch or a new TV, a new house, that their eggs cost $18, that a hamburger and fries and a soda cost $24.
Things are going that direction.
The services are going to impact people.
That could be the VA, that could be Social Security, that could be Medicaid, that could be the fact that the university hospital in your mid-sized city in Pennsylvania or in Ohio or in Nebraska shut down because the NIH has no more money.
Whatever it is, people are going to see it and they're going to wake up.
And what happens, Dan, after the Great Depression is perhaps the only time, at least in modern American history, Where the federal government is seen as a help and a good thing that there is a like understanding not by everyone.
I'm not I'm not I'm not like leveling the history, but we get a place where the New Deal set the table for the the United States.
We now know in ways that many on the American right hate and want to repeal and many of us recognize is like, oh, yeah things like Social Security 40-hour workweek.
Things like the protections and the regulations that make it so you might get a fair chance in this country were set then.
Dan, I think we're headed to a place where the people like AOC...
Bernie, I'm sorry, it's not going to happen.
2016 and we're not going to relitigate it.
That was the moment.
The next generation of progressives in this country have a chance to step in.
And I'm going to read you something.
Okay.
FDR developed an idea of a second Bill of Rights by the like early 1940s.
I'm Japanese.
If you mention FDR, you have to say screw Executive Order 9066 and putting people in camp, FDR.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Just wanted to tell you that before we proceed.
He talked about a second Bill of Rights, a decent standard of living for all individual men, women, and children, freedom from fear, A realistic tax law, which will tax all unreasonable profits, both individual and corporate.
The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms of your nation.
To earn enough to provide adequate food for your family.
The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return that is a decent living.
The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition.
To have every family to have a decent home.
That sounds like housing as a human right to me.
The right to adequate medical care.
Holy moly.
The right to adequate protection from economic fears of old age.
Sounds like social security.
Sickness. Sounds like national health care.
Accident. Unemployment.
The right to a good education.
I'm Japanese.
I'm never going to sit here and say, FDR, that you're the best.
The second Bill of Rights is something you could get onto if you're AOC, if you're Bernie, because this is going to happen.
People are going to hurt over the next couple of months.
I'm reading from Eric Alterman's The Cause about American liberalism, page 13, and then I'll shut up.
The whole point of the New Deal lay in its faith in the exercise of democracy, its belief in gradualness, its rejection of catastrophism, its denial of either or, its indifference to ideology, It's conviction that a managed and modified capitalist order achieved by piecemeal experiment could best combine personal freedom and economic growth.
In essence, Dan, the idea that we could limit government or limit the market in order to help everyone flourish.
And guess what?
Here's Bill Kristol.
Bill Kristol, that communist organizer, he said this back in January of last year.
I think capitalism far superior to socialism And free markets with a welfare state and some regulation far superior to a government-run economy.
But if capitalists side with authoritarians, better social democracy than corporatist authoritarianism.
Just to round this out, I want to play a clip for you of Rand Paul and Tim Kaine appearing together, talking about how these tariffs are awful.
Here they are.
What's the rationale for getting behind this?
Well, one, we should not live under emergency rule.
The Constitution said taxes are raised by Congress.
Most specifically, taxes originate in the House and come to the Senate, so I'm against emergency rule.
But on the tariffs in particular, on the idea of trade, trade is proportional to wealth.
The last 70 years of international trade has been an exponential curve upwards, and the last 70 years of prosperity has been upwards also.
We are richer because of trade with Canada, and so is Canada.
Whenever you trade with somebody, when an individual buys somebody else's product, it's mutually beneficial or you wouldn't buy it.
If the trade is voluntary, it's always beneficial.
There is no Canada versus the U.S. The consumer wins when the price is the lowest price.
Tariffs raise prices and they're a bad idea for the economy.
Just to sum up, Dan, there's going to be a window here for the Democrats to step in, and this will lead us to Cory Booker.
If they want to, if they want to seize the moment where we not just go back to normal, Neoliberal, Clintonian, Obama-ite stuff.
I'm talking about a new normal that envisions the country differently, where people will see the government as something that will help them flourish, and a government that they are connected to, that they run, that they dictate.
Not something that's far off and removed from them.
There's a chance for that.
We'll see if they take it.
Any thoughts before we go to Cory Booker?
So, a final one to tie in with this, that what drove the election, we talked about this, lots of people talked about this, exit polls showed it, was not the diehard MAGA folks and not the diehard never-Trumpers.
Those two camps were always going to vote the way that they voted.
It was all of those people and those groups that voted on what?
On the economy, on promises of doing away with inflation, all the promises that Trump made that resonated with so many.
And the Trump administration is systematically now undoing exactly what it was that they said and convinced, I think, many people that they were running on.
And that has the GOP really scared right now.
There are a lot of Congress people who are like, what about farmers?
What about this?
What about that?
It ties in with Doge as well.
It's fine.
You said you were going to get rid of federal workers, but yeah, we didn't think you meant like at the national, you know, the Forest Service office that, you know, Employees a bunch of people in this little town in Colorado or you know, wherever it is.
I think that that speaks to that point because that's the group of people that got this guy in office again.
They're the group of people who are not beholden to him and and I think that is that point of leverage that you're talking about that that leverage point in the electorate where there is real room and and potentially moving forward really significant space to come in and to be able to actually articulate the positive vision that you're putting forward.
So Cory Booker did some of that this week in his record-breaking filibuster, and I want to talk about that here and what it means.
He had some great quotes.
Cory Booker's, to me, a vexing figure.
He can be so inspiring and so, like someone who gets it, he also takes money from big tech and has some corporate interests.
And just disappears.
He's like the player.
It's a sports analogy that they'll have a player and they're like, Really phenomenal natural talent whatever but like can disappear in big moments and I feel like that's Cory Booker he has these moments where he flashes and had a huge one like a historic one and you're kind of like cool and and now what Cory Booker but yeah.
Yeah a great a great like March Madness run and then you know.
After that not not great.
So here's some quotes from the other day I rise with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able and He did that for 25 hours.
He fasted before this He didn't drink water or liquid so he could like not have to go to the bathroom He of course had to stay on the floor.
He could not take a bathroom break He did not do what Raphael Ted Cruz did a couple years ago when he did his 21-hour thing, which is read from dr. Seuss and Strom Thurman, whose record he broke, was allowed to take bathroom breaks?
Another quote from Booker, the most powerful man in the world and the richest man in the world have taken a battle axe to the Veterans Association Department of Ed.
What will we do in this body?
Right now the answer is nothing.
This is not right or left.
This is right or wrong.
Let's get in good trouble, echoing John Lewis.
Staying on John Lewis, John Lewis wouldn't treat this moral moment like it was normal.
Where does the constitution live on paper or in our hearts?
So, you know, that's a, that's a strong quote that I, that resonated with a lot of people.
Where does the constitution live and what does it mean to us?
He talked about Trump making fun of disabled people, breaking promises and.
Musk and him saying that we should cut healthcare from the sick and needy so that they can have tax cuts for everyone else.
Some quotes that I think.
Really resonated with folks beyond those policy things and those those Trump Ian things if America hasn't broken your heart, then you don't love her enough He said this before but I think that that's something that that resonates that if you love someone and if you love anything they often That involves hurt it involves vulnerability.
It involves disappointment and it involves loving them in the face of that he talks about How American history is nothing else but a perpetual testimony to the achievement of impossible things against impossible odds.
So I think, you know, Booker, if you follow this on social media, there was like 350 million views on TikTok.
People on Blue Sky were all about it.
There was a sense of inspiration and urgency.
What it means and what it will, the effect will have, I think, is more of an open question.
But what it showed is that people are Truly hungry for a leader to step into the gap, recognize the moment, disrupt the normal, and fight back without fear.
And Schumer is clearly not the one people see as that guy, I think myself included.
We have AOC and Bernie on this tour, and to me, AOC has been doing this.
She's one of the few that has been consistent and does not seem to disappear.
Jamie Raskin is calling people out as much as he can.
Thoughts on this, Dan?
I want to mention what happened right after this.
I will say that Adam Schiff has placed a hold on Ed Martin in terms of his nomination to be the attorney in Washington for the government.
And Ruben Gallego has put a hold on VA nominees in order to protest Trump's cuts to the VA's workforce.
There's a proposal to cut the VA's workforce by 15%.
So others have stepped in and I will so someone like Gallego and Booker have both they have both voted for Trump nominees and they seem to be trying to show that they they're taking a different tack and so I have a bunch of more thoughts but jump in here.
I think just the the I guess if there's a theme if we want to relate this back to what we just said about tariffs It's that it feels like this has been going on for a long time, but it hasn't.
Like Trump has been president for, you know, what, like three months, you know, two, three months, like not very long.
It feels like forever.
There are already significant fissures opening up in the Trump presidency.
There are significant signs of weakness.
There are, you know, all the executive orders, but what legislation have they managed to get passed?
That hasn't happened.
You have the American public clearly souring on Musk, so much so that we've got these reports that he's going to be sort of shown the door, essentially, by the Trump administration.
You have a lot of concerns, and we'll come back to this in some places, but concerns among Republicans about, you know, underperforming in other places.
Like, real signs of weakness and stress.
That creates that opening that we were talking about with tariffs.
I think the Cory Booker filibuster is like a sign of that.
These moments, these flashes, these possibilities.
The question is, can, you know, as you said, the Democrats are not the left.
But they're the political party we have.
They're in this two-party system.
They're the people that are in Congress.
There's not a bunch of third-party people.
We don't have a social democratic party that's there doing a thing, right?
That's what we have.
And I think it remains an open question.
Can the Democrats figure out how to harness that?
How to, you know, sort of put a pry bar into some of those cracks and really pry it loose?
and show what it can be and unleash people like AOC and others who could be a force in this versus constantly trying to reign them in in the name of some middle-of-the-road kind of thing that they think is going to appeal to people I think it's just not so I think for me that's it's it's equal parts hopeful and energizing but also really frustrating because I you know as you say for every Cory Booker thing that there is there's something that Chuck Schumer Schumer is gonna do and it's just gonna be a bunch of nothing And
it's going to be a bunch of spinning wheels.
It's going to be a bunch of, like, going to town halls and worrying about people are mad at us and we don't know what to do.
We don't know what our identity is, whatever.
And I'm like, it's right in front of you.
You can see what your identity needs to be.
Just go do it and stop with the navel-gazing.
I think it's those two tendencies, and I don't know which direction it's going to go.
And I think that that's what occupies a lot of my thought at present as we think about things like Booker, the fallout from the tariffs, you know, and sort of what unifies those things.
Well, a lot of people are getting ready to protest this Saturday, April 5th, with indivisible gatherings all over the country.
And I think here's a clip of Booker saying that, you know, he needed to do better and listen to his constituents in some sense.
Where were you when we turned our back on Ukraine?
Where were you when we turned our back on our alliances?
Where were you when they took the economy down with tariffs?
When they took the economy down by threatening it so consumer confidence drops, where were you?
How many things are going on before we answer the question as it says in Hebrew, he, nay, me.
He, nay, me.
Behold, Lord, here I am.
And so I confess that I have been imperfect.
I confess that I've been inadequate to the moment.
I confess that the Democratic Party has made terrible mistakes that have given lane to this demagogue.
I confess we all must look in the mirror and say, we will do better.
And it's not just defining ourselves, what we're against.
The next generation, as the baby boomers are leaving the stage, the last baby boomer president, we have to say that we're going to redeem the dream.
We're going to dream America anew.
We're going to start talking about bold things that don't divide people, that unite people.
Bold things that excite the moral imagination of a country, to do better, to go higher, that call us together.
This is the time where new leaders in our country must emerge.
I'm not talking about senators.
I'm talking about citizens.
This time of despair and darkness doesn't demand more darkness.
We don't need to demean and degrade people who disagree with us.
This is a time for us to do something bigger than that.
Do you think Martin Luther King and Birmingham hated Bull Connor?
Or said, I'm going to defeat this guy by bringing bigger dogs and bigger fire hoses?
No! But he did say we're going to be so creative.
We're going to inspire the moral imagination of the nation.
We're going to call to the conscience of the country.
We're going to excite them about who we could be.
When he went to the March on Washington, he didn't stand there and complain about the demagogues.
Listen to his speech.
He didn't stand there and demean and degrade the governor of Alabama.
He didn't stand there and talk down to Bull Connor.
No, he stood there.
before the American people and said, it's not what you're against, it's what you're for.
I have a dream.
And now it's our generation.
We have to redeem the dream.
We have to excite people again.
He, in the highest office of our land, wants to divide us against ourselves, wants to make us afraid, wants to make us fear so much that we're willing to violate people's fundamental rights.
We're willing to go after the speech on college campuses.
We're willing to go after law firms, go after the freedom of the press.
Don't let him do that.
Don't become like him.
Be an American that says, I look to the future and I'm excited.
Yes, things are tough right now.
They're hard.
They're scary.
They're hurting.
But we can overcome this.
Our American history, if it's nothing else, American history, if it's nothing else, It is a perpetual testimony to the achievement of impossible things against impossible odds.
We are a nation that is great not because of the people that are trying to whitewash our history, to remove great people, Native Americans, black people, and women from our military websites.
I don't want a Disneyfication of our history.
I don't want a whitewashed history.
I don't want a homogenized history.
Tell me the wretched truth about America, because that speaks to our greatness.
And so what do I want people to do?
It starts with us, man, and you're doing it.
I've seen courage of my colleagues.
We're doing it, but we have to do more, and I'm sorry.
I'm not going to be a politician that's going to say, we are going to do more for you.
I'm going to be a politician, I'm going to be a leader that demands more from America.
So in that clip, I think, you know, we can take something away that says, yes, and I've talked about this with Andrew Seidel, when you call your reps, when you write the postcards, when you continue to be a voice that they hear, they eventually will listen.
In the case of Cory Booker, there's something there that needs to be heated.
I participated in a protest outside of Adam Schiff's office a couple of months ago, and Adam Schiff is now holding up The the nomination of Ed Martin we have to take those wins when we can you can write that off you can poopoo it you can be cynical you can be that that Dan we've all been there with the You know The leftist smoking a cigarette at the grad school lounge saying oh none of this matters anyway And this and that and it's like you can go there if you want you can be that guy in the play or
you can say This is a win what Cory Booker did was a win in some sense now What what what bothers me is as soon as he was done?
Chuck Schumer allowed for unanimous consent in the Senate and Booker said in an interview that he was not against unanimous, like, blocking unanimous consent and shutting down the Senate because he's worried about the procedures in the Senate and everything you kind of move over here has an effect that comes back at you that the sort of dialectic of the two-party system is always going to get you in the end.
I understand that.
I get it.
But as soon as he was done talking, they confirmed Matthew Whitaker.
to be the representative, or I should say, ambassador to NATO for the United States.
Whitaker used to be Jeff Sessions' kind of top attack dog, but he's somebody, Dan, who just claims that he has a biblical view of justice.
He has said that if somebody has a good worldview, they'll be a good judge, but I quote, and if they have a secular worldview, where this is all we have here on earth, then I'm going to be very concerned about how they judged.
He's a Christian nationalist through and through.
I mention him because he's the guy that got confirmed like 20 minutes after Booker got off the floor.
I understand Booker saying we got to be careful with the Senate.
I'm also here to say they let a robber baron have our Social Security numbers.
He was at the Treasury doing God knows what with a 19 year old named Big Balls.
He just put tariffs on an island with no humans.
This is not Ronald Reagan.
It's not George W. Bush.
It's certainly not Dwight Eisenhower.
It's not even William McKinley.
This is a moment where the democracy itself is on the brink.
We had a clip of the Prime Minister of Canada saying, it's over, the last 80 years of trade And relationship is over.
The EU and Canada are now gathering together to form an alliance without us.
The EU is trying to find another place to buy its weapons.
I mean, there's anecdotal evidence.
I have people in my social media who are at like large metropolitan airports sending pictures and they are dead zones because no one's coming.
I mentioned last week.
All the Canadians and my parents like retirement community are selling their home like We're gonna start to see it this summer.
This is a different country now.
So I get Cory Booker and I get Schumer and those people decorum and and and playing the chess game.
It just seems like McConnell figured this out way way sooner than you guys and you guys are still so worried to pull the trigger and we're just sort of right on the teetering on the edge of the end of this democracy.
And you're still allowing, after a 25-hour filibuster, them to put through Whitaker as their ambassador to NATO.
It's not going to feel like enough to the electorate, and it's certainly not going to do that much to prevent what's happening now.
Final thoughts on this before we jump into Wisconsin.
Yeah, just to reaffirm that, I think it's interesting that you bring up Some of these points that we do about the return to normal business and so forth, I think that that is...
Yeah, that's the thing, right?
Can this be more than symbolic, I guess, is where it comes to me.
Can it be more than, oh look, Cory Booker did this thing and it's a big deal and it's the longest ever.
What a neat symbol of opposition that then is undone immediately by actual practices.
Can we actualize it?
I think we can.
The question just remains an issue of political will.
And I've said this before, maybe I'll close this, the weird thing about the Democrats for me is they keep talking about what a low point they're at, they're pulling worse than they have.
You have nothing to lose.
You just lost the elections and stuff, so take a damn swing.
What are you worried about?
The worst happened already.
And the benefit, anybody out there who's ever experienced some life event that's really terrible, Yep.
You know, the collapse of a relationship, the loss of a loved one, whatever, something awful.
One of the things that can happen is you have this weird experience where like, oh wait, the really terrible thing already happened.
The thing that I was living in fear of already happened and I am now free to go a different direction.
And the Democrats have that and they just can't seem to figure it out because they're still living 25 years in the past.
Like the dude who incited a coup had classified documents in his toilet Wanted the vice president to not certify an election and then was like, yeah, hang him That guy is the president and he let Elon Musk the richest man in the world Destroy our government.
They destroyed the CDC.
They destroyed it Like I have little tiny children who are gonna grow up in a country with no Department of Ed With huge classrooms and less programs and less, like, anything for anybody who has any kind of different kind of ability or neurodivergence or anything else special need.
We're going to live in a country that our food is, like, not protected.
The safety regulations.
Robert F. Kennedy just destroyed health and human services.
Let go of tens of thousands of people.
Like, I'm sorry.
But there's nothing normal here and there may not be a Senate much longer.
I feel like it's sort of like Brutus and Caesar and those guys are like, let's, you know, let's debate it out in the Senate.
And we, you know, at some point there's no more Senate.
You know, there's not.
There's a Caesar and then there's just a ruler and that's how the empire goes.
All right.
Let's take a break.
I'm going to calm down.
Be right back.
Dan. Tell us about Wisconsin and more.
I'm going to talk about Wisconsin and Florida.
And maybe this gives us a little bit of an uplift right here at the end.
And really, these are sort of, you know, lead right into like, you know, they are essentially my reasons for hope this week.
But for those who followed it, there was a Wisconsin Supreme Court race.
It had become a nationally significant and kind of like sort of a, you know, the proverbial canary in the coal mine kind of election.
It had come to national significance.
It had garnered a lot of attention.
And Judge Susan Crawford, a liberal, won decisively, and it maintains the court's liberal majority.
She won by 10 points, which, you know, in contemporary American politics is a lot.
And it was similar to the margin that flipped the court a couple years ago, as people probably remember.
And the conservative justice, who was the Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel, was the guy everybody knows, you alluded to this, he was endorsed by Trump, he was supported by Musk.
This race, like a Wisconsin Supreme Court race, right?
Involved over $90 million of fundraising, as you mentioned, like $20 million from Musk alone.
Included Elon Musk giving million-dollar checks to voters and so forth.
And Musk touted the significance of this race.
He said it would decide the direction of the country and, quote, Western civilization.
And that it would decide, quote, the future of the world.
So Musk really hung his hat on this.
Put all this money into it, said it was so vital and important, and then they get their ass kicked is basically what happened, despite the money, despite Musk, despite all of that.
Musk tried to pivot after the loss.
He said, quote, I expected to lose, but there's value to losing a piece for a positional gain.
And presumably the gain is that an existing voter ID law in Wisconsin was enshrined in their constitution.
And Trump and Musk have tried to lean on that as like the real takeaway from this.
But this was a big black eye for the GOP.
They thought that they had a chance to stem the tide of what they see as the leftward movement of the Supreme Court in Wisconsin.
And it wasn't the only one.
And lots of analysts have said, hey, we also need to look at Florida.
So what was also going on in Florida, excuse me, is that you had two special House elections in Florida on Tuesday.
Replacing people that Trump has named to different positions and so forth.
And they're in very comfortable Republican districts.
Red, red, red districts.
There was no real possibility that they were not going to hold these.
And the GOP did hold both seats as expected, but the Democratic candidates radically overperformed.
Both candidates performed better than in 2024.
I just want to remind folks, 2024 wasn't that long ago.
Wasn't that long ago that we had an election where these things happened.
And for example, in the four counties that make up Florida's first district, so this was one of the districts, the Democratic candidate, Gabe Alamont, lost by 15 points.
Now, that's a decisive loss, but same Democrat lost by 32 points in the 2024 election.
The Democrats cut those leads by half in that amount of time.
Those four counties I've read that make up that district have more federal workers.
in them.
It's where Top Gun is and things like that.
Pensacola and all those kind of things.
Not Top Gun.
This is where, yeah, the top, wrong, wrong, wrong place.
But you get the idea.
The naval base, military bases, lots of government workers, federal workers, and it appears that Doge and Musk having a huge drag on this.
What does all this mean?
It means that despite all those polls that talk about how How poorly the Democrats are viewed nationally, despite the kind of things we're talking about.
They continue a pattern that we talked about from the 2024 election, where down ballot, they're overperforming Democrats or outperforming Republicans.
I think it does show, and most analysts think it shows, a broad dissatisfaction with Trump policies.
Wisconsin had a high voter turnout, really disproportionately high voter turnout.
And a lot of analysts think that this is, you know, people are nervous about what's going on.
They're nervous about what's going on with the federal judiciary.
They're nervous about what's going on with SCOTUS.
And so when they have a chance to vote for their state Supreme Court justices, it's reflecting that.
I think it shows, and lots of people say this too, that Musk has kind of overplayed his hand in a number of ways and has become a drag on the GOP and the Trump administration.
It shows all of these kinds of things.
And I think, you know, to lead into Reasons of Hope, and if you're in a few minutes, This is one, is that we're not that far from midterms.
As I said a few minutes ago, we're starting to see real fissures and signs of what was already weakness within the Trump administration.
All that the Trump administration apparently ever had was the shock and awe of executive orders, and not a lot else.
And that initial onslaught has happened, and it's real.
The damage is real.
The significance of it is real.
I don't mean to minimize any of that.
I don't want to minimize the significance of the damage of Doge.
But we're beginning to see The limits of some of that and what happens when you need real governance and it's not happening and the population is already souring on your policies.
I think all of these were on display in Wisconsin and Florida.
Again, not alone in that analysis.
Lots of people have made those points.
But I think it was a real, really significant things to look at and something maybe a little bit more optimistic this week than seeing things were going on with tariffs and things like that.
So I'll throw it over to you.
Well, the Wisconsin win means that there's a very good chance Wisconsin gets un-gerrymandered.
Yes. Which means that the Democrats have a much larger chance of sending two to three more representatives to Congress from Wisconsin.
And Wisconsin, a state that is basically 50-50, like it's a super, it's a super mixed state.
And if you look at the numbers, it's, it's right.
50-50 Republican, Democrat, and like presidential elections, et cetera.
But they, they often send One quarter of their representatives are Democratic rather than Republican, meaning the Republicans have gerrymandered the state to the point where they are able to send way more to Congress than they should.
This is what happens.
And Wisconsin has these weird off-cycle, like, March elections for the Supreme Court.
When people show up for that, that's a good sign.
It happened a couple years ago with Judge Janet and, you know, it happened again here.
So my reason for hope is the fact that It now looks like Wisconsin will be un-gerrymandered.
That is what we need.
That is more of what we need.
These things do matter.
I'll also throw in one thing to mention is Ellie Stefanik, my former rep when I lived in upstate New York, was supposed...
I don't know if there's a reason for hope, but it goes to your point.
She was supposed to be the ambassador to the United Nations.
She was called back to be a just run-of-the-mill congressperson because they're worried about their I
just want to say to that.
Talking about how this election is going to be the fate of Western civilization is some true red-pilled horseshit, Elon Musk.
A. What is Western civilization?
Go read a book and stop telling everyone empathy is a problem.
That's number one.
Number two, saying, oh, I expected to lose is some real loser horseshit too.
Okay? Let's just say that publicly.
That is loser shit.
You heard it from me.
I got five degrees.
I'm an academic.
I like to analyze things in a very highbrow way.
And that is my thoughts about that.
Okay? Sore, little, tiny, pathetic loser.
That's how I feel about Elon Musk and his performance in Wisconsin giving people straight out of a Banana Republic idiocracy movie one million dollar checks.
Who happened to be a Republican crony, but we'll leave that for another time.
And acting like we have a functioning democracy when the richest man in the world can take a helicopter and start giving one million dollar checks.
And he's still lost.
And I'll just say, like, if government is about anything, government is not a business.
It's not a corporation.
It is about humans trying to communally thrive and survive.
So when people vote against him, you have a little hope.
And I think we should take that into the weekend as you all go out to protest this Saturday.
What's your reason for hope, Dan?
I think it's just it's just more of that.
And I think it is, you know, looking to the midterms and we've talked about polls and things, but, you know, we've talked about this as well.
Every political analyst knows this, that what drives midterm elections for decades now is dissatisfaction with an incumbent party.
Not so much, you know, how the party is running.
I think the GOP is really worried already about midterms.
I mean, it's weird.
I mean, it's like, you know, a year and a half ish, but the midterms are not very far away.
And I, again, I take hope from some of these trajectories that are there.
It's bad that we've got to, like, take hope from the fact that Trump is going to run the country into the ground.
But if that's, if that's the case, I think it's a good thing.
If that's something we can build on and have people recognize that to try to get the guy out of office or his party out of control in Congress and eventually out of office, then I take hope in that.
I'm already finding rays of that now.
All right, y'all be safe this weekend.
If you are going to protest, try to go with friends and loved ones and people you trust.
Make a plan.
Make sure you drink water.
Make sure you know what you're going into and how to Handle yourself in terms of safety and protocol.
Send us pictures if you're in the discord.
If you're in our point of contact, we'd love to hear from you on email, discord, social media.
Send us your pictures.
Send us your inspiration.
Send us the things that made you feel like there was hope that we're going to get through this and we're not going to let our country fall into a fascist hellscape more than it is already.
We're going to get ready here to do our Bonus episode very soon.
It's gonna be a banger.
I promise we're gonna revisit an old beef Some of you don't know that in 2020 al moeller came for straight white American Jesus and straight white American Jesus Gave it right back to al moeller.
He doesn't want any piece of this and he knows it so we're gonna revisit that beef and You'll hear that soon for now.
We'll say Thanks for being here.
Thanks for all our subscribers who make this possible.
Thanks to all of you.
Listen, have a good day.
Thanks, Brad The term Bible Belt conjures images of all-time religion and conservative Christianities.
But what if I told you that the Bible Belt is more than holy rollers and holy judgment?
What if I told you that like any other belt, the Bible Belt is filled with holes that lead to unexpected places?
Where pastors and deacons and volunteer ministers demand equality and representation for gay couples, single moms, and anyone trying to get to the ballot box.
My name is Dr. Gillian Frank, and my new limited series podcast, Red State Religions, explores the persistence of liberal religious values and progressive politics in so-called red states by telling the stories of faith leaders, lay people, and congregations and how they put faith into action.
