Weekly Roundup: Good News Friday - Harvard, Abrego Garcia, and the Chinese Mirror
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Brad presents a 'Good News Friday' amidst various hard and difficult topics, focusing on positive developments from the past week. Key highlights include Andrew Seidel and Brian Kaylor's inspiring talks at Capitol Hill about the threats of Christian nationalism and authoritarianism.
Brad also discusses Harvard University's resistance to the Trump administration's demands to eliminate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs, amidst federal attempts to revoke its tax-exempt status. He touches on the ongoing fight for constitutional rights, particularly through the case of Abrego Garcia and the judicial pushback against the Trump administration's aggressive immigration policies.
The episode wraps up with Brad reflecting on the global context, comparing U.S. infrastructure and societal norms with those in China, urging listeners to imagine a more vibrant, inclusive future for America.
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He is traveling with family and unable to join us.
So we won't be getting an update on Dodgeball or his new earrings or anything else.
And most of all, we'll miss his commentary and insight on what's going on this week.
I want to frame today as good news.
I want to talk about good news.
Now, we're going to talk about things that are hard and difficult and in some ways not good news.
But I want to frame today as Good News Friday.
We're celebrating Good Friday.
Some of you aren't.
It doesn't really matter to me.
What matters to me is I think we're in a place where a lot of you need some good news, and I do too.
And I want to focus on things that have happened over the last couple days that are actually positive and do so in a way that trains us not to miss things that are positive when they happen, because I think they are easy to in a time when the onslaught of bad news happens nonstop.
And, you know, just perusing our Discord, listening to folks talk about where they're at right now, the emails, the other things I get, I sense that there's building dread and despair.
And I understand that.
And I have to train myself and discipline myself not to go there either.
We always say on this show, stare not into the abyss.
And that's easier said than done.
And I want to try to exercise some of that today.
So here's what we're going to do.
We're going to...
Start with some inspiring words from Andrew Seidel.
Andrew Seidel, and this is good news, and I'm going to tell you right now, it's good news, and if you don't see it, you don't feel it, if you don't hear it, then I need you to figure out why.
Andrew Seidel and my good friend Brian Kaler, both colleagues, both amazing scholars and journalists and people who just do great work, and in the case of Andrew, an attorney, not a journalist, they went up to Capitol Hill a couple of days ago.
And they spoke to a group of Congress folks, Congress people, elected officials in Congress, about the threats of Christian nationalism and authoritarianism and why the separation of church and state is so important.
The meeting was convened by Jared Huffman, who's been on this show.
He's a congressperson from Northern California, one of the very few humanists in Congress and the only person to profess non-belief in Congress.
And Huffman, somebody I've communicated with quite often over the last year or two, and sees the importance of talking about these things with Congress.
And it's good news that they invited Andrew Seidel and Brian Kaler, who are incredible voices on this stuff.
And on this week's episode of One Nation Indivisible, Andrew Seidel's podcast, he shared the words that he read and gave to those Congress people.
And I'm going to play those for you now because they should inspire you and they should remind you of what we're doing here and why we're doing it.
So here's a few minutes to scatter the cortisol, to take a minute to be inspired, and remember what's at stake.
The wall of separation between church and state is an American original.
It's an American invention.
The idea was born in the Enlightenment, but it was first implemented in the American experiment.
Until then, no other nation in the history of the world had sought to protect the ability of its citizens to think freely by separating religion and government.
We should be proud of that.
And we shouldn't let people undermine it with myths, with historical disinformation about being founded as a Christian nation.
Most of the truly unique and original elements of our Constitution are secular.
Our Constitution was the first to declare that power comes from people, not gods.
The words"we the people" are poetic.
But also so much more.
They are a declaration of power.
Self-government is quite literally impossible if power flows from the divine.
But it's natural when power flows from the people.
Our Constitution was the first governing document not to mention a god or deity.
And it's godless by choice, not by accident.
Some people in the founding generation objected to that choice.
They were pissed off about it.
And there have been movements across our history to rewrite our Constitution, especially the preamble to add Jesus and to minimize the people.
None of those have succeeded, unless you count the Confederate States of America seceding and adding Jesus to their preamble of their Constitution.
Boo! Our Constitution was the first to ban religious tests for public office in Article 6. This was the only mention of religion in the original unamended document.
And this ban has some of the most clear, emphatic language in a document that is often deliberately vague.
No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust.
No. Shall.
Ever. Any.
These are clear commands.
And if you remember back to your high school civics or government classes, you remember that the Constitution was an outline and later generations were going to come along and define things more clearly.
But not this.
Not the ban on religious tests.
Not the declaration of power from the people.
Not the fact that God is not mentioned in the Constitution.
And certainly not that ban, no shall ever any.
But all of that, all of that was still...
Not enough.
That's all in the original, unamended Constitution.
The separation of church and state is woven into the fabric of our Constitution.
All of those are really important parts of our Constitution.
But still, that wasn't enough.
They wanted more.
And so we got the First Amendment.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Those six rights, a secular government, religious freedom, speech, press, assembly, petition, all of those bolster our right to think freely.
To believe freely.
So, the separation of church and state predates the First Amendment, and it's not simply in one half of one clause of the First Amendment.
It's everywhere.
It's omnipresent.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gary Wills put it nicely, quote, We invented nothing except disestablishment.
No other government in history had launched itself without help of officially recognized gods and their state-connected ministers.
years.
The separation of church and state is an American invention, and that, my friends, is the true legacy of America.
That's what guarantees every one of us in this country the freedom to live as ourselves and believe as we choose so long as we don't harm others.
That separation is our only guarantee for true religious liberty, and it's one of the best guarantees for freedom of thought.
And as a constitutional attorney, I will be the first to tell you that there is a lot that is wrong with our Constitution.
A whole lot.
There are many aspirational values written into it that we have yet to live up to.
But those secular foundations are what made it unique.
And they are genuine contributions, not only to political science and thought, but to all humanity.
And those contributions are threatened, undermined, and under attack by white Christian nationalism and the lies, myths, and disinformation.
Andrew's comments bring me to something that I know a lot of you are aware of, and that's some of the actions surrounding Harvard University this week.
The Trump administration demanded that Harvard stop with its DEI programs.
And this, of course, follows on.
I'm going to read from a piece from April 14th by Jonaki Mehta at NPR.
The Trump administration has been targeting major universities for alleged violations of civil rights laws in an effort to eliminate DEI programs across the country.
Following a year of pro-Palestinian protests on Columbia University's campus, the administration cut $400 million in federal money for the institution.
It also froze about a billion in funding for Cornell and $790 for Northwestern.
In March, the federal government said the multi-agency task force that it had assembled was conducting a comprehensive review of $9 billion in federal contracts and multi-year grant commitments to Harvard.
Harvard's failure to protect students on campus from anti-Semitic discrimination, all while promoting divisive ideologies over free inquiry, has put its reputation in serious jeopardy, wrote U.S. Secretary of Education.
Linda McMahon.
Harvard can right these wrongs and restore itself to a campus dedicated to academic excellence and tree-seeking, where all students feel safe on its campus.
Thanks.
So, the premise here is anti-Semitism.
The premise here is something we've discussed on the show quite often.
Using anti-Semitism as a guise for attacking DEI, multiculturalism, people of color.
And trying, as the government, to force institutions like Harvard to teach a curriculum that eliminates those kinds of programs and those kinds of teachings.
Now, as we always say when it comes to anti-Semitism, we are not denying that that's real.
It is a threat.
It is a major problem, as the bombing at the home and the governor's mansion of Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania displays quite clearly.
This is not us saying anti-Semitism isn't real.
It's us saying, as we have for a long time and many others have argued as well, that the Trump administration is using anti-Semitism as a way to criticize things all over the place, to destroy institutional freedom,
and to basically say that there are civil rights violations happening by way of programs related to DEI, In essence, the freedom to teach history, ethnic studies,
religion, philosophy as these universities see fit according to the training of the experts they have hired.
Now, this all led to something that I think should give us hope in some sense, and that's that Harvard's president, Alan Garber, said in a letter to faculty and students that the university would not submit to a list of demands made by the Trump administration last week.
Some of those demands were to eliminate DEI programs, screen international students who are supportive, quote, of terrorism or anti-Semitism, and ensure viewpoint diversity in its hiring.
At stake, the government said, was some $9 billion in federal funding.
Now, as we've seen, and we'll get to in a minute, supportive of terrorism in this Trump administration simply means any kind of support for...
The people of Palestine, for Palestinian independence, for an end to the war that Israel is waging and that Palestine and Israel are involved in.
To screen international students, well, we've seen the revocation of student visas without notice, and we've also seen international students arrested and taken off the street by ICE for writing op-eds.
So you can see through the smokescreen here.
I don't think I need to explain that.
If you're listening to this show, you know that those things are a smokescreen.
They're a way to gaslight.
They're excuses.
That supportive of terrorism and anti-Semitism in this context are being morphed.
That the words are being shaped to the lies that the Trump administration wants to tell.
Now, one of the things that has happened this week is that the IRS is now making plans to rescind the tax-exempt status of Harvard.
The tax-exempt status of universities, colleges, educational institutions is really important, just as it is to the viability of many, many, many, many, many houses of worship in this country, churches.
Now, I don't want to get carried away on this topic, and I want to get to a bunch of other things today, so I'm going to cut right to the point.
There's a deep irony here in the Trump administration saying that Harvard is violating civil rights issues and that their tax-exempt status might be revoked because they are supporting DEI,
diversity and equity, because they are including foreign-born students in their community, because they're allowing for students to express.
Their freedom of speech and their freedom of ideas.
There's a deep irony in the sense that Harvard is being too open in its curriculum.
It's allowing too many ideas to flow, allowing too many people in.
Well, what's the irony?
The irony is that way back in the late 1960s, that the threat of revoking tax income status for many...
If you've read my book, if you've listened to this show, if you've read people like Randall Balmer, Anthea Butler, others, you know that what a lot of us have maintained for years is that the religious right was not created by the issue of abortion.
That the issue of abortion in the late 1960s and 70s was really something that Catholics fought for tooth and nail, but their Protestant counterparts, including evangelicals, were often not interested in going to bat for politically.
It is chronicled on the record that Paul Weyrich, the creator or co-creator or co-conspirator or co-belligerent of the religious right, who helped Jerry Falwell become the political star that he was, Paul Weyrich, the man who co-founded the Heritage Foundation,
Alec. The Society for a Free Congress.
Paul Weyrich, the man who may be one of the most important political actors in 20th century American history, despite not holding office, Paul Weyrich himself said that he tried and tried and tried to get the evangelicals to vote based on abortion and he couldn't.
But how did he get them to vote?
How did the religious right come to be?
How did evangelicals come to dominate the Republican Party?
How did you get...
A challenge to Jimmy Carter, the evangelical Southern Baptist president, by Ronald Reagan, backed by Catholics and Protestants.
He did that because Weyrich and others, including Falwell and Tim LaHaye, many of their Protestant counterparts, evangelical pastors, were able to galvanize their people based on this.
The IRS is going to revoke your tax-exempt status.
Why? Because you are running schools at your churches that have a segregationist policy.
Segregation academies all over the South were so popular that in some cases, public school districts closed because there were no white students to attend them.
In essence, they created a paraeducational system where white kids could attend private schools, black kids and others were not allowed.
And this, A, helped to crater some of the public school systems in those regions, but B, it of course created a segregationist system.
So, eventually, the IRS said we might revoke your tax-exempt status because we can't give tax-exempt status to institutions that are openly segregationist.
Now, this was all started under Nixon, but it was really targeted and made an issue under...
Jimmy Carter.
Jimmy Carter became the bad guy in this whole story.
And if you want more on this, you can read my book.
You can read Randall Ballmer's very famous essay in Politico, The Real Origins of the Religious Right.
There are many others.
Here's the point for today.
We now have, five decades later, six decades later, a president who has come to power twice.
on the backs of very conservative religious people in the United States, including an overwhelming majority of white evangelicals, a growing number of Latino Pentecostals,
We have a president who made his first appearance in the White House based on his acceptance and his full-throated support from the religious right,
who is now Threatening to rescind the tax-exempt status and essentially crater the financial viability of Harvard University because they are segregationist?
Nah. Because they're too open to teaching about diversity and equality and equity.
They're too open to inclusion.
They're inviting too many foreign-born students to be part of their world-class educational community.
They're not censoring free speech.
They're not telling students or faculty, they're not telling those on student visas from other countries that they're not allowed to speak about politics or their beliefs.
They're allowing a flow of ideas throughout their campus.
You all see the irony here?
It's almost a mirror reverse.
The religious right starts on the basis of segregation.
The religious right argues that segregation is a religious right.
This is a religious liberty issue.
We are free as religious people to segregate our churches.
Okay, you know what?
You are.
You are.
As an American, I'm not objecting to that.
You are.
You shouldn't have tax-exempt status, though.
I just...
That's what was decided.
That's what the civil rights movement was about.
That's what the developments in the 60s and the 70s were about.
That we're not going to live in a society where if you are going to actively segregate, then you get the benefit of not paying taxes.
We're not going to give you that privilege and that benefit.
Now, six decades later, we're in a place where if you are too willing to allow diversity and pluralism, To discuss difficult histories, to invite those from across the world to contribute to your community,
you might lose your tax-exempt status.
This, to me, is one of the clearest examples of how you can see what's happened under Trump, of how you can see the religious right working for 50 and 60 and 70 years to reverse what they took to be the taking of their country from them.
You won't let us segregate our churches and schools?
You won't let us tell black people they're not allowed here in our school?
Fine. We're going to work for 70 years, and we will elect a narcissistic monster that will finally tell schools like Harvard, you're being too diverse.
If you don't stop with your anti-segregation, we'll take away your tax-exempt status.
It's almost too perfect.
It's almost too much.
But here we are.
Let's take a break.
Be right back.
All right.
I'm going to talk about some other good news.
And I know that all of this is not good news.
But hang with me today, y'all.
Come on.
Let's do this in a way that focuses on the positive.
Senator Van Hollen, Maryland, went down to El Salvador and met with Abrego Garcia.
Abrego Garcia is alive.
He was able to meet with the senator.
He looked in good health.
That's good news.
It was good news that the senator went down there.
It was good news that somebody did something.
That somebody took the initiative and said, we're not going to just sit by and let him stay there in this prison without trying to do something.
There is a sense that any time any politician is willing to step up, That they instantly become someone that those of us who feel as if we are in dire threat can rally around even in some kind of minor way.
There's a sense that this is really, at least for me, a sense of relief that Abrego Garcia is alive, that has not been harmed in any way, has not been killed.
This is good news.
And I think...
The more we talk about this case, the more Americans hear about it, the more they might understand that we are all, in some way, Abrego Garcia.
The 14th Amendment promises that every person in the United States is entitled to due process.
It says...
No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privilege or immunities of citizens of the United States, nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.
I just want you to hear me on this because you're going to hear from Uncle Ron and others in your life about how only American citizens are promised due process.
The 14th Amendment.
No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.
Nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property.
What does it say?
Any person.
Any person.
No person shall be deprived of life or liberty.
Abrego Garcia was mistakenly put out of the country.
It was an administrative error.
And I want you to just focus on something.
Nothing matters in terms of the criminal history, even of any affiliations that he might have.
And for the record, there's proof of none.
There's proof of no affiliations to gangs or anything else.
But we have to get something straight from the start.
You are entitled to due process.
You are entitled due process.
Citizen or not citizen.
Visitor or foreigner.
Even if you're an undocumented immigrant, you deserve due process.
There's so many reasons why.
You're entitled due process because without it, somebody can just say, that person's a terrorist.
That person's a gang member.
That person did this.
And if there is no due process, if there is no trial or hearing, there is no judge, then you can be disappeared, as we are seeing with people to El Salvador.
Aaron Reichland-Melnick put this on Blue Sky yesterday.
This is why we have due process, because random people speculating about things is a terrible way to run a government.
Without due process, we're all just vigilantes.
At its core, that's what this is about.
Due process and the rule of law.
Everything else is just window dressing.
And he wrote that in response to Representative Dan Muser, who is a Republican, saying, maybe he's not a terrorist, but he's a potential terrorist.
He's a terrorist watchlist person.
And friends, that's it right there.
They want to create a society where you're a potential criminal.
You're a potential terrorist.
You're a potential pervert.
You're a potential something.
And the potential for that is enough.
For them to say, we took you to El Salvador and we can't bring you back.
We disappeared you.
Now, a lot of people have been pointing this out this week, and I'm sure that if you're scrolling TikTok or scrolling Instagram, you've seen it, but it is worth mentioning.
Auschwitz concentration camp is in Poland, and I visited there.
I'm sure some of you have too.
It's one of those experiences when you visit there that leaves you speechless.
I visited there with friends when I was a graduate student, and we kind of didn't talk for three or four hours afterward because there was just nothing to say.
Auschwitz is in Poland.
It's outside of Germany.
And the reason people are bringing up that this week is that because the argument being made by the Trump administration is simply, and you saw this if you watched the press conference with the president of El Salvador, that he's in...
He's in El Salvador now.
We can't bring him back.
He's somewhere else.
He was taken there by accident, but now that he's there, we can't do anything.
We don't have laws for El Salvador when it comes to America.
We don't have jurisdiction.
We don't have power.
So sorry.
And then they paraded the El Salvadoran president through the Oval Office for him to say, what do you want me to do?
Like, bring him back?
He'll be like, what, you want me to smuggle him?
More gaslighting.
This is just the same stuff as...
We talked about with Harvard and civil rights issues and anti-Semitism and supporting terrorism.
It's gaslighting.
But the point to me is that El Salvador represents this place outside of American law, this place outside of American jurisdiction, as the Trump administration would like you to believe.
So whatever happens there, we don't have control of and the Constitution doesn't apply.
Our laws don't apply.
Our judges don't apply.
What can we do?
Sorry. The problem with that is that if El Salvador, the El Salvadoran prisons, I should say, become places where people are held for life,
where they're tortured, where they're killed, the American government is basically arguing, A, we can take you there if we'd like.
Once we take you there, you're outside of the law.
Whatever happens to you does not pertain to us, and you're out of luck.
So we can take you to a lawless zone, a zone of exception, a zone that is outside or beyond the Constitution in America.
And once you're there, whatever happens to you happens to you.
And what did Trump say at the beginning of that press conference when he was on a hot mic?
You're going to have to build five more because we want to send homegrowns there next.
We are all Abrego Garcia because we are all promised due process and we're not given it.
We are all under threat of a government that will say to you, because you're a potential terrorist or because we heard rumors about you being a potential terrorist, we need to remove you from America, take you to a lawless zone of exception outside of our borders,
and whatever happens to you there happens to you there.
That is straight out of Soviet Russia.
It's straight out of what you hear about what might have happened under Mao's regime.
It's straight out of communist lore and history.
People spying on each other, people telling secret police that they are living next to someone who has some kind of unloyal beliefs or activities.
And based on those rumors or Based on those files, without a hearing, without a judge, without a jury of your peers, you are stuck being disappeared and they can't bring you back.
Senator went down there.
He met with him.
The more we talk about this, the better.
And just yesterday, we had a judge who was appointed by Reagan basically come out absolutely swinging against Here is Alison Gill writing at Mueller,
She wrote after judge Zinas issued her amended order for the government to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia as instructed by a nine zero Supreme Court ruling.
Trump ran to the appellate court asking them to vacate her order.
Sure.
Judge Wilkinson, a Reagan appointee of the Fourth Circuit, wrote this.
Upon review of the government's motion, the court denies the motion for an emergency stay pending appeal and for a writ of mandamus.
The relief the government is requesting is both extraordinary and premature.
While we fully respect the executive's robust assertion of its Article II powers, we shall not micromanage the efforts of a fine district judge attempting to implement the Supreme Court's recent decision.
I hope the word premature reverberates in Trump's empty head for a while, Gill wrote.
Basically, Judge Wilkinson, again, a Reagan appointee, somebody considered conservative, told the Trump administration that what they were asking for is extraordinary and premature, that there was no basis for it.
My point with this is that we need to recognize the good news.
That Trump, excuse me, that Senator Von Holland from Maryland, Was able to meet with Abrego Garcia.
My hope is that that will inspire other Democrats to make the trip.
That they will go see for themselves.
That they will take the moment to understand what's happening to people who are being disappeared from this country.
That they will continue to force the spotlight on this.
And that the courts have now told the Trump administration clearly to
these folks back to facilitate Abrego Garcia's return.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Now, there's not the good news that he's been brought back.
There's not the good news that the Trump administration is listening.
But there are mechanisms of government forcing a confrontation.
People willing to stand up and say, this is not how the Constitution works.
Now, where will that go?
I don't know.
I'm with you.
I'm scared.
I'm with you.
I've been talking about constitutional crisis for months now.
I'm with you in the sense that I feel a deep fear for what is happening in our country.
I'm not trying to sugarcoat anything today.
But I am trying to tell you, Obrego Garcia is alive.
That he was able to come out and have a really seemingly nice time with the senator.
For somebody who's claimed to be a terrorist and a really dangerous gang member, they let him out and he was...
Wearing plain clothes, looking healthy, and drinking a drink with the senator.
He's alive.
The judges continue to slap down the Trump administration's actions.
And I'll play you the clip here just to close this out.
Old white people at Senator Chuck Grassley's town hall this week absolutely berated him, asking if they were going to bring back Abrego Garcia.
What was he going to do about it?
And Grassley, Sort of said, nothing I can do.
It's not about Congress.
And they were not having it.
More signs that people, people you would not expect.
Chuck Grassley voters.
There's even folks in this video wearing MAGA hats, wondering where Abrego Garcia is.
We don't need, at least I'm not going to, shun people who are trying in this moment to uphold what we have left of a constitution and the separation of powers.
Not going to say, sorry, you're not on my team because this and this.
Don't get me wrong.
There's so many times for that.
And there's so many reasons to talk about those kinds of guardrails.
Right now, anybody who is willing to stand up to the constitutional crisis that Trump puts our country in daily, to me, is good news.
Here's that clip.
The Supreme Court said to bring him back.
Trump don't care.
If I get an order, pay a ticket for $1,200, and I just say no, does that stand up?
Because he's got an order from the Supreme Court, and he's just said no.
Yeah. Screw it.
You ignored my letter.
El Salvador is an independent country.
Can you speak up, please?
We can't hear you.
The president of that country is not subject to our U.S. Supreme Court.
And cut one of the Brady Bags!
Cut one of the Brady Bags!
I'm pissed!
We're paying him to keep him down here.
We don't have to pay him.
All right, y'all.
Let's take another break.
Be right back.
All right, y'all.
I want to talk about one more thing today, and that is some of the things that are happening with China and TikTok.
And this started, in some sense, with Trump's tariffs, but it also traces back to one of our most infamous people on this podcast, and that is J.D. Vance.
About a week ago, J.D. Vance did what J.D. Vance does.
He said things in the exact wrong way, insulted everybody, And won no fans.
So, here's what J.D. Vance said about what he called Chinese peasants a while back.
Let me play the clip for you.
We borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture.
That is not a recipe for economic prosperity.
You will know the comments from the Vice President J.D. Vance calling the Chinese peasants.
How does, where does that leave US-China relations and any sort of talks between the two presidents, do you think?
I need to be very brief.
J.D. Vance and I went to the same law school, your law school.
I was 20 years ahead of him and I'm ashamed for the ignorance and the bigotry he demonstrated because he called China.
The peasants, the peasants financed them, the peasants sold them goods.
Let me just make one simple point.
The middle class in China is larger than the total population in the United States.
The urban population in China is about three times as big as the total population of the United States.
So, my advice to my alumni at Yale Law School, JD Vance, is wake up or you go back to school to study more diligently to avoid making yourself a fool in front of the world.
All right.
Now, this is JD being JD.
He always seems to try to be showing off for someone and fronting for, like, all the most bro-y dudes in the room or something.
I'm not sure.
But, yeah, China was not happy with this.
A top Chinese official said on Fox News, let those peasants in the U.S. wail before the 5,000 years of Chinese civilization.
This is kind of what came out of China all week, which was top officials saying things like, look, these tariffs will hurt our economy, sure.
But we're a 5,000-year-old society, and we will endure.
And we have been here before, and we will get through this.
It was a way to explain to the U.S. and to the world that the U.S. is not the determining or the only factor.
In the global economy and certainly when it comes to China's export business.
Some folks called him ignorant and impolite.
Some foreign ministry spokesperson from China said that the remarks were surprising and sad.
But nonetheless, one of the things that took root on TikTok, and yes, I know you're like, Brad, you're on TikTok, is...
And we are on TikTok.
You should go follow StraightWhiteJC on TikTok.
If you're a TikTok person, we could use your support.
We just started our channel and posting there regularly about a month ago.
So go follow us on TikTok, young people, young, cool, hip people who are doing that.
One of the things that happened is not only suppliers in China showing some of the...
Places where goods are manufactured.
And there's been claims about luxury goods, Lululemon and others being manufactured in China.
This has created a whole discourse going back and forth from Chinese TikTokers and, you know, luxury brands saying we're not made in China and this and that.
One of the other genres, however, of TikTok, Chinese TikTok, that emerged this week were basically people showing the way of life in China.
And I want to be very clear as I go into what I'm about to say.
This is not me idealizing China.
It's not me idealizing the Chinese government.
This is not me saying that they have figured out in ways that nobody else does.
There are so many things to talk about when it comes to Chinese policies, about censorship and human rights, about...
Like hundreds of hours of things to say, okay?
But for today, here's what I'm interested in.
What I'm always interested in is China holding up a mirror to the United States.
One of the things that Stephen Holmes and Yvonne Kroshtev say in their book, The Light That Failed, a book I've referenced on this show numerous times, is that China has stood out in the post-1989 world.
Because China has developed an economy that interacts with the United States and the Western world, but it has not tried to, A, imitate the United States.
So China is obviously not a liberal democracy.
We have not seen China turn into something like liberal capitalist democracy, a la the United States, the ways post-1989 that Germany...
or other Central European or Eastern European, former Soviet outlets might have been.
China has stopped converting others to its ideology.
In other words, the Chinese Communist Party does not seem to be in a mode of evangelism.
China is much more nationalist.
It's trying to increase and bolster.
It's national profile, it's national interests, it's economic interests, and it's power.
But it's doing so not so that everyone in its region or its hemisphere will be communist like them.
They're not preaching the gospel of Mao.
On the other hand, the United States has always assumed up until the era of Trump that the way to go about preventing another world war Another rise of authoritarians,
such as Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin, was to spread the gospel of liberal democracy anywhere possible.
That, of course, included Europe as a whole, but it also meant trying to establish democracies in the Middle East or in places across Central or South America.
Many of those resulted in disaster, and I'm not going to go into that today either.
But one of the things that, to get back to Chinese TikTok, I know you're like, Brad, get to the point.
One of the things that emerged for me this week was this.
China showing everyday Americans on TikTok, 20-year-olds and 30-year-olds living from Oregon to Indiana to Georgia, that China is full of like super, super modern cities with super, super modern technology,
with really like elevated...
You know, brands that are not available here when it comes to phones or when it comes to computers or when it comes to cars.
I remember so clearly when I worked at Rhodes College in Memphis.
I was one of the few Asian-American faculty at Rhodes College.
So oftentimes, foreign exchange students from China or Japan or others or even those who are Japanese-American or Indian-American would seek me out just because I was one of the few Asian-American professors.
And I remember going to dinner with a student from China who was like the nicest guy.
And we had a great time and we talked and, you know, he told me about what it was like living in Tennessee as someone from China and all of these things.
And then we started talking about Memphis and Nashville.
And if those of you out there know the geography here, to get to Nashville from Memphis, you literally just drive one road.
You get on a highway and you drive for three hours and you're in Nashville.
You don't have to turn.
You don't have to switch highways.
You don't have to, like, you know, go through a mountain.
You don't have to cross a lake.
You just get on a road.
And three hours later, you're in Nashville.
And my Chinese student, you know, couldn't get over the fact that there's literally no train between Nashville and Memphis.
He's like, you can't take a train.
I was like, yeah, I know you got to take the bus.
He's like, in my country, to go that distance, you could get on a train that would leave every hour.
And you would be there in 45 minutes.
And once again, this is not me sort of saying, oh, you know, China is a place of idyllic ways of life for all people.
I'm not doing that.
Don't get me wrong.
But when you hold up that mirror to the American public, for the first time, I think a lot of Americans saw China not as this dark cavernous place that they've been told about by way of propaganda concerning a Wuhan lab or, you know, other propaganda.
That it was not simply people living in inhumane conditions, but folks like them who go to work every day, but instead of driving on broken down roads, are taking high-tech, high-speed rail and existing in the most futuristic,
technologically advanced cities you could ever imagine.
I remember having a discussion with another friend about five years ago, and they had just met some young professionals from Guangzhou.
And one of the things that my friend took away from their kind of interaction in terms of a work project with these young professionals from Guangzhou is there was no sense that the folks from Guangzhou aspired to anything America had.
When they visited America, when they interacted with America, it was not as people aspiring to anything that we did here that they did not or could not do in China in terms of...
Transportation or goods, food, technology.
There was no sense of jealousy.
And I think that's something that the average American assumes like de facto about most of the world.
Oh, that if you could live here, you would.
If you could be like us, you would.
We are the greatest.
We are the best.
America first.
There's these flags everywhere.
There's this like deep-seated need.
For Americanism to be displayed all over this country.
And when you hold up that mirror from China, two things happen.
I think one, folks might start to look around and say, I'm not sure that we've been told the truth about things like our public infrastructure, about the goods and services available to us, about the ways that our government does not provide things that many other people have,
and that could be health care.
That could just be like really advanced transit that helps you get to work and travel throughout a country.
That could be the price of housing, the price of rent, the price of childcare.
We talk about this often when it comes to Europe, but I think the Chinese example is a jarring one for many everyday Americans.
So I think there's a sense there of A, perhaps some folks...
Waking up to a kind of reality they didn't expect.
But B, and stick with me for a minute, folks.
It's one more thing.
It's one more movement.
It's one more phenomenon that pushes us, who are not on board with the fascist takeover of our country, to imagine a world that is not a return to the status quo.
That we're not going to go back.
We're not going to say, if we could only flip a switch and wake up from this bad dream, and we could go back to what?
2008? 2012?
I don't know when it would be.
We, and I think Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders are doing a little bit of this right now.
But we need way more of it.
We need to imagine a world.
And an America that is drastically more vibrant and humane and full and inclusive and caring and sustainable than the one we've ever lived in.
That's the political movement I want to be part of.
I want to overwhelm the Democratic Party in a way that the religious right and...
The white conservatives overwhelmed the Republican Party in the late 20th century.
I don't want to be part of a Democratic Party that is a vehicle for some policy ideas.
I want the Democratic Party to be the vehicle, the thing that is taken over and takes us toward a world that is so different from the one we live in in the United States right now.
And when you see, when you have a mirror held up to you that shows you just how different the standard of living is here, as compared to some folks living in a place like China, some folks living in a place like Japan,
some folks living in a place like Germany, you start to imagine not being them, but saying, what would it mean for us to imagine this place in a much different way?
The other thing that happens in that Chinese mirror is you realize that what has happened, and Krastev and Holmes are really good at this too in their book, is that we are now living in the age of Trump and the age of Xi, leader of China,
where there are two superpowers in this world who are not aiming to convert one to the other, are not aiming to spread the gospel of their respective ideologies across the globe.
We're living in an era of no shared humanity, no shared sense of a globe that is ours together.
We're living in an age of self-interest, of nationalistic protectionism, that this is the time when the ideal of a universal humanity or democracy, meaning democracy in the sense that each person has a right,
A will.
A voice in their government.
An ability to be a self-determining human being that's part of a government that represents them.
Liberal democracy in the sense of human rights for everybody.
That that universal dream with Trump has died.
At least in the post-war sense.
And China...
For its sake is not trying to convert everyone to communism.
It's not a Mao gospel anymore.
It's not a Marx gospel anymore, despite what you might hear on Fox News.
We're simply living in an age of self-protection.
We're living in an age of not recognizing our universal humanity, but our national identities.
It's a very different place.
It's a very different understanding.
of relationships between people across the world.
It seems that despite being connected across TikTok and Facebook and WhatsApp and Signal and email, despite being able to call folks for work on video who are 6 or 8,000
miles away, despite being able to connect with friends over social media who live halfway across the world, that we're somehow less connected.
But we also imagine ourselves as less part of the same community as ever.
That is something that we could take as bad news, and believe me, it scares the hell out of me.
The good news about it is that it's time to reimagine this country.
It's time to reimagine what it means to organize for what's next.
Centrist and even center-right people willing to join in that fight.
I'm going to pull up here David Brooks.
Some quotes from David Brooks at The Atlantic the other day.
And David Brooks is famously a center-right columnist who many liberals and progressives can't stand.
And I would put that in my...
I would put myself in that camp.
Here's what he says.
We've reached a point of traumatic rupture.
A demagogue has come to power and is ripping everything down.
What's likely to happen is that the demagogue will start making mistakes because incompetence is built into the nihilistic project.
Nihilists can only destroy, not build.
When you create an administration in which one man has all the power and everybody else has to flatter his voracious ego, stupidity results.
He goes on, basically, to argue for...
Something like a national strike and radical action to stand up to the Trump administration.
That's unexpected from David Brooks.
And we could shun him and say this and that about him.
There's so many things about him I don't agree with.
But if that's where David Brooks is, imagine where we can all go together.
That's what I'm going to hold on to today.
In some ways, that's my reason for hope.
Is that the Trump administration is waking up the Chuck Grassley voter or the David Brooks to something that I don't think I would have ever expected.
In that same article, Brooks says things that are just, in my view, atrocious.
He talks about wokeness and other things.
Like, don't get me wrong, guys.
Don't email me.
I know David Brooks doesn't get it in the large sense.
But you see these little windows of realization that...
Their myopia has helped lead us here.
So, my hope is that we can all imagine something much bigger and better, and that people like that Grassley voter, or like David Brooks, will become ready for that.
I might sound naive.
I might sound like I'm grasping at straws.
But I'm choosing, and I'm hoping that some of you will do that too, that after listening for this hour...
To not overlook, to not shun the positive when it presents itself.
Because if we do that, we won't make it.
You're going to end up in despair.
You're going to end up under the covers, hiding.
You're going to be emotionally paralyzed.
You're going to give up.
And that's not what we need.
That's the last thing we need.
So don't do that.
Thanks for listening, y'all.
I'm sorry Dan's not here this week, but he'll be back next week.
We'll have a great interview on Monday with Kira Butler from Mother Jones.
