Weekly Roundup: The Pope, JD Vance, and Anti-Christian Bias
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Brad and Dan talk about the controversial legacy of Pope Francis following his recent death, discussing his mixed reception among both conservatives and progressives. They highlight recent initiatives, including President Trump's anti-Christian bias task force led by figures such as Pam Bondi and Pete Hegseth.
The discussion touches on the differences between genuine religious freedom and Christian supremacy, as well as the potential uses of the task force for political propaganda.
Brad and Dan also cover recent legal losses for Trump, including issues with China trade tariffs, university disputes, and challenges in Ukraine. They conclude with updates on ongoing protests and legal actions, emphasizing growing pushback against the administration.
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Before we get going today, I need to tell you about two things.
One is May 1st.
If you're a subscriber, we're going to have Leah Payne in our Discord to talk about the first 100 days of the Trump administration and how charismatic Christians are reacting to that and have time for Q&A.
So check that out.
I sent out an announcement yesterday.
For subscribers, and if you're not a subscriber, it's a great reason to subscribe.
Secondly, Sunday, May 4th, 6.30 to 8 p.m., there's an evening with our friend, Catherine Stewart, to talk about her new book, and that's at the United Church of Christ in Simi Valley.
You can check this out, and we'll try to put a link in the show notes, but an evening with Catherine Stewart in Simi Valley, just outside of Los Angeles, on May 4th from 6.30 to 8 p.m.
Check that out, too.
I was at the meeting yesterday with A.G. Bondi, with about 15 cabinet secretaries.
That just shows you the importance, and sadly, that there is anti-Christian bias in the government.
And so you had Secretary Rubio, Secretary Hegseth, you just had Robert Kennedy, who were all reporting on all the anti-Christian bias they have found thus far.
Already.
So Rubio went and asked for, you know, tell us what anti-Christian bias you find.
In just seven days, they found 150 plus instances.
*music*
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
Great to be with you on this Friday.
Joined, rejoined after a week of absence.
By Dan Miller.
How are you, Dan?
Good, Brad.
I want you to know, because you can't see, that for the first time in 2025, I am, at this moment, wearing cargo shorts.
So, all the people who are like, we don't know if Dan's really doing it, I'm doing it.
They're on.
It is the season.
April 25th.
This is the time in the Northeast.
The weather gets good, and you all in the Northeast can start to hope that...
It's over.
It's the thing where it hits.
I live in this college town.
It hits like 65 degrees, and all of a sudden, no men are wearing shirts, like people are laying out, sunbathing.
In the fall, when it hits 65, everybody puts on sweaters, but in the spring, everybody suddenly acts like it's 85. I can tell you right now that it's probably the same temperature in California.
And for us, this is a reversion.
It's been in the 70s.
And, like, everybody's, like, bundled up and got, like, I went for a walk.
It's like 72 degrees.
Oh, dude.
Puffer jackets, hats.
I went for a very short walk this morning at, like, 645, and, yeah, there was a woman with gloves and a puffer jacket and a snow hat on.
So, all right.
Let's jump into it.
You were away last week, and there's a lot to catch up on.
If we get to it, we'll come back to the midlife renaissance you continue to undergo.
You've got new tattoos.
You've got fabulous nails, getting ready for a punk show.
It's really something.
I got new glasses, which I was proud of, but now my eyes hurt, so I don't know.
It's not even worth trying anymore at this point.
Where you got me, Brad, and you really got me, is that you actually have hair.
And so each passing year, I kind of resent you more.
So maybe a couple more years, we won't be friends anymore, I don't know.
But you've got that going for you no matter what.
So congratulations.
I do have hair.
I have a lot of hair, but...
All right.
Everyone is so bored right now.
They're like, guys, this is not a dad show.
Stop it.
Stop being middle-aged men and start being religious scholars who are breaking down the news.
We will do that, people.
We apologize.
No more living, laughing, and loving.
It's over.
Okay.
Got to talk about the Pope.
The Pope died this week.
Pope Francis is no longer with us.
Get to who he was, what happens now, and some of the...
Politics ahead of us when it comes to the decision about the next pope.
And, of course, J.D. Vance being one of the last people somehow in his 88 years.
Maybe the fifth or ninth last person Pope Francis saw in his 88 years.
There's so much there.
In case we want to know exactly the effect.
J.D. Vance has on people.
People can draw their own conclusions.
The Pope talks with him.
He's dead within 24 hours.
Yeah.
The internet is alive with that whole trope.
But we will connect.
I do want to get into the sort of J.D. Vance versus the Vatican stuff, so we will do that.
And then we'll get into some of Trump's losses when it comes to courts and education and some hope and kind of rollbacks of some of the things he's tried to enact.
Excuse me, just today I saw that a bunch of student visas have been reinstated.
So things like this are happening and they're not getting as much news as the first announcements of them.
So we'll jump into that and the ways Trump is losing all over the country and what that means.
So let's start with the Pope.
Dan, give us some context about what happens now.
I think a lot of people have watched Conclave, so there's a...
There's a lot of people on Instagram right now who are experts on this.
I don't know why you laugh, because Conclave was a documentary, Brad.
No, no, no.
Look, man, I didn't watch it, and I don't know if it's good or not.
I'm just saying it's one of those moments where, like, you know, previously the only information most people had about what happens when the Pope dies was, like...
Godfather 3. And now everyone's watched Conclave and is a liturgist who is versed in Vatican rites.
It's a little like the Olympics when you're super into some sport that you watch every four years.
But for two weeks, you're like, I'm into curling.
It's all curling.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
So yeah, the Pope passes.
What happens?
A few things.
You can jump in at any time.
I just want to start with some background stuff on what happens.
A little bit about who Francis was.
I think he was a really complicated figure as Pope and some of the controversies about that.
I want to get into the J.D. Vance stuff.
We've talked a lot about the kind of radical, traditionalist, Catholic discourse within contemporary Christian nationalism, and Francis fit into that and really...
So when a pope dies, what's called the College of Cardinals meet in this meeting called a conclave.
And the cardinals, they're the people in the Vatican or the Catholic Church who wear the red gowns and red caps.
That's why they're named cardinals.
It's the color, that red color.
For those who don't know, that's like the sort of the second highest rank below pope.
So you have, you know, priests, and then you have bishops, and you have archbishops, and then you have cardinals who oversee a group of archbishops.
And you can think of this if you want.
Think of, like, I don't know, a restaurant with franchises or something and regional managers.
That's kind of how these work.
And then when a pope dies, the cardinals...
Did you just call the cardinals, Michael Scott?
Because if you did, Dan, we're going to get a lot of emails.
Okay?
So just get...
You know what?
People, email Dan.
Okay?
DanMillerSwag at gmail.
Do not email me.
Thank you very much.
Okay, go ahead.
Pass it off to me.
They meet in the Sistine Chapel, which is kind of cool, to choose a new pope.
They have to be under 80 years of age to cast a vote, although if you're a cardinal who's over 80, you can participate in debates and things like that.
Essentially, people debate, and they vote on who's going to be the new cardinal.
In principle, any baptized Catholic can be chosen as pope.
It's almost always a cardinal, somebody from that next level of ranks.
And there is, and I think maybe you'll walk us through some of this, or people can look this up.
There's a lot of jockeying that goes on when a pope dies among cardinals who want to be the next pope, and there's a lot of politicking that goes on there.
There are currently 252 cardinals in the Catholic Church.
Only 135 are under 80, which I find sort of interesting.
So it's a pretty aging class of cardinals.
And the conclave follows around a two-week mourning period, so sometime in the beginning of May, kind of beginning to middle of May is when the conclave will start.
The conclave continues until a new pope is chosen.
Sort of like a baseball game, it goes on until it's over.
And in 1903, I had to look this up.
This was not information that I had, you know, right at my fingertips.
1903 was the longest conclave in the 20th century.
It was five days.
Pope Francis, it took two days of voting to vote for him.
The longest conclave, Brad, you probably know this with your medieval Christianity background.
Was in the 13th century.
They elected Pope Gregory.
It went on for two years and nine months.
So I'm predicting somewhere the under is two days.
The over is two years, nine months.
So, you know, wherever you're at in there are kind of your betting options.
A little bit about who Francis was, why he was significant.
He was a Jesuit.
He was born in Argentina.
So he's from South America.
Jorge Mario Julio, I think, was his given name.
For those who don't know this about Pope, some people don't.
Their Pope name, papal title, is kind of like kings who would take a name like that.
So Pope Francis.
Francis is the name he chose when he was elected Pope.
This is his birth name.
He was the first Jesuit Pope.
He was also the first Pope from the Americas.
And he was the first non-European in more than a thousand years to be elected as Pope.
So he was historically significant in a number of ways.
Symbolic in a number of ways, he chose the name Francis.
This signaled a concern for sort of the poor, the marginalized, the downtrodden, and this is sort of what he was sort of known for.
His legacy is mixed, in my view.
He was often described as a progressive.
He was opposed by many conservatives and traditionalists within the church, including a lot of people within the American Conference of Bishops.
They didn't like him.
The J.D. Vances of the world, and that...
The school of Catholicism was not big on Pope Francis.
But despite that title, he disappointed many of the most progressive people in the Church.
And I'm not Catholic, I'm not part of the Catholic Church, but I think this is where I would land on somebody like Francis.
I'm reading now from a CNN article that was quoting some other people within the Catholic Church talking about Francis.
This is one of the ways that it said this.
It said, The pontiff periodically disappointed some of his most progressive church supporters.
One critic said this of Francis, said he was, quote, at heart a conservative who had a habit of floating progressive idea and then angering the left by retreating as soon as that idea was met by a pushback from the right.
And I don't think that that's an untrue statement about Francis.
He did bring about some changes.
He placed climate change front and center as a kind of moral issue.
He denounced unfettered capitalism.
This is part of what got him on the wrong side of American conservatives.
He opened high-level Vatican offices to women, though again, he would not revisit the issue of ordaining women within the Catholic Church.
He declared that heaven was open to atheists.
Early in his pontificate, he was asked about LGBTQ people and their sort of spiritual status, and he said, who am I to judge?
And this, to many people, signaled a kind of openness.
But he was slow to respond to the sex abuse scandal when he came into the pontificate.
He later, several years after becoming pope, I believe like five years it took him, he did form a commission, and then he did a lot to try to reform the church and root that out.
But again, it took half a decade to do that, so a lot of critics of the Catholic Church obviously are critical of that.
A lot of people were disappointed in his stances on LGBTQ plus rights.
I would put myself there.
He had what I would call...
I love the sinner, hate the sin kind of attitude, like he would talk about openness and he said things that, you know, they were more welcome.
He said that priests could bless same-sex unions, but not perform marriages.
It's that kind of classic, oh, we can tell you that you're okay and God loves you and Jesus loves you, but we're not going to actually recognize you or push for inclusion or anything like this.
He also, I didn't know this, I read this this week, he met weekly with a community of trans women.
And gave them sort of VIP seats, like in these meetings.
But he also, in other statements, denounced, quote, gender theory for denying the order of creation.
And he likened to those who question binary gender as, you know, or questioning of binary gender as equivalent to nuclear war or genetic manipulation.
So disappointed a lot of people.
In 2023, there was a synod, a meeting of the church.
And again, I'm reading from ABC News this time that summarized it well.
It said the Pope's mixed legacy was epitomized by the Vatican's 2023 Synod, bringing together hundreds of bishops and lay people to discuss the Church's future.
The advance agenda mentioned LGBTQ plus issues.
One of Francis's hand-picked delegates was the Reverend James Martin, a U.S.-based Jesuit and prominent advocate of greater LGBTQ plus inclusion within the Church.
Yet in the final summary of the three-week Senate, there was no mention of queer people.
Like, they just disappeared from any mention.
And during the Senate, the Pope met with a small delegation from the Maryland-based New Ways Ministry, again, another Christian ministry advocating for queer inclusion, queer-inclusive Catholicism in the U.S. And according to the group's director, the Pope urged them never to lose hope, but then didn't do anything.
And so it was just this kind of, you know, hey, we'll see you around next time.
A mixed bag for a lot of people.
Again, a lot of conservatives didn't like him.
They felt that he was too progressive.
A lot of progressive Catholics felt that he would make statements and then kind of walk them back.
Or maybe not unlike, you know, figures like Trump or somebody just sort of making a statement, but then not really putting it in practice and not doing anything to bring it about and making waves.
And so a controversial figure for a number of reasons, not least of which was his engagements with the Trump administration and very recently.
With J.D. Vance, I've got more on that.
I know you have more on that.
You might have more historical stuff and other things.
So I'll throw it to you for your reflections on Francis and legacy and who he was and all of those things.
Yeah, and I don't think that either of us think Francis is comparable to Trump as a whole by any means.
There's no sense here that Francis is the kind of...
In any way.
No, I just mean in the sense of making statements that sound bold sometimes, but then you're sort of looking for the follow-through.
People are looking for the parallel.
And I think the mixed bag for me can be broken down this way.
I think Francis, when he was elected Pope, was a true dark horse nobody expected.
If you look at the list of Popes by country, okay?
217 from Italy.
So Italy is the New York Yankees there of Popes, just not going to win more World Series than Italy there.
16 from France, Germany, the Byzantine Empire, Greece.
We can talk about the Holy Land, Croatia, the northern African countries that are really part of the Mediterranean world.
He comes from Argentina.
He's the only one to come from that far away from Rome, the Vatican, and so on.
He's also somebody who placed great emphasis on the poor and the economically disadvantaged, which I think many people were drawn to, that he seemed to have compassion.
And that was quite different from Benedict, who always seemed like a theologian, who was not comfortable around everyday people, especially those who were cast out from society, marginalized.
Pope Francis had an easiness about him when it came to being in public with people from every rung of society.
I think it almost seems like he would rather have met with those trans women, even if he never did the revolution you're talking about, Dan, than J.D. Vance.
It almost seems like he was more likely to enjoy One rather than the other.
Certainly, it's worth noting, gave them a priority he didn't give J.D. Vance.
That's a whole thing you could have about the recent visit.
There was a lot of discussion about whether they would actually get to meet.
Francis is part of that.
Yeah, he was more eager to meet with ordinary people than he was people who viewed themselves as the powerful and significant in the world.
I think that seems to have been a real part of his personality.
Yeah, not somebody who's looking to hang with billionaires or with...
Global elites or others, you know, for whatever reason.
I know some of you listening are Catholic and you're mourning the Pope.
I know some of you listening are completely turned off by the Catholic Church, right?
There's going to be a wide range of reactions here.
I think for me, highlighting the complexity is a way that we can think about who he was.
As you've already highlighted, Dan, not somebody who affected any real...
Transformation along the lines of gender and sexuality in the Catholic Church.
Nonetheless, represented a tradition of Catholic teaching and care for the poor, for the outcast, that I think many people were magnetically drawn to.
I think that can lead us into a couple of things.
The Pope's last words on Easter were really ones directed at The marginalized and the poor.
And he called out for peace in the world and for a sense of a shared humanity.
And I talked about that last week.
It's something that we seem to have lost.
And I think that might lead us into what happened with J.D. Vance.
J.D. Vance went to the Vatican and went to Rome for Easter.
He wanted to meet with the Pope and he was initially kind of stonewalled.
You know, J.D. met with a cardinal and it seems from the reports we have.
They had somewhat of an exchange, we shall say, about immigration and the ways that J.D. Vance and Donald Trump and others in the MAGA orbit have discussed immigration and those coming across national borders.
This goes back to the controversy from February when J.D. Vance got into one of J.D. Vance's online tiffs where he's like being Mr. Tough Guy about...
The idea of loving your neighbor.
And he said, of course, it's natural that we love our children and our family and our neighbors more than we love those far from us.
Which, in some sense, I understand what he's saying.
Like, in some sense, y 'all don't, like, lose your mind right now.
Okay?
I get that when I wake up in the morning, Dan, like, I have limited time and resources, and most of that goes to, like, making sure my kids are okay.
Right?
Doing my work, my partner, and so on.
But, you know, as a leader, you cast a vision for what society could be, and especially as a Christian leader.
And so, in this online hubbub, excuse me, with the UK politician Rory Stewart, you know, Vance just says, Google Ordo Amoris, which is like, okay.
Which, by the way, is what I think Vance probably did.
Like, literally, I can view him now having a, I don't know.
Like, you know, you should hammer on Ordo and Morris.
That's what you should do to sound Catholic and sophisticated and convince people and whatever.
And he Googles it, and there's this surface-level reading of it, and there he is.
Like, that's what he does.
And we highlighted this on the show.
It's on our social media.
It's clipped.
You know, Francis chimed in.
Like, no less than, like, not a cardinal, not a priest.
Not a theologian.
No one but the Pope himself.
And he said that we should meditate on the parable of the Good Samaritan, which is, of course, when you stop to help someone who is a complete stranger.
Not just a stranger, but an enemy.
That's the whole story of the Good Samaritan.
This was the group that was the outcast, sort of the enemy, the opponent.
It wasn't like a neutral, I don't know this person, I'm helping them change their tire or something.
It was like...
The bad guys.
And so that's who your neighbor is.
So, you know, that's the clash.
And you can see there, and I think this is at least something people can appreciate about what Francis is trying to say to people like Vance here, is you are peddling an anti-immigrant set of policies.
I mean, J.D. Vance claimed that the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops was harboring illegal...
These are his words.
Harboring illegals in order to get money.
So here's a Catholic saying to the bishops of the United States that they were doing things and harboring undocumented people to get a payday.
And the Pope jumps in and is like, cut it out.
Stop.
So I think we can at least appreciate the differences in their visions here.
And I think I want to highlight the historical kind of connections of Vance and illiberal Catholicism.
And the clashes with the Vatican.
But before I do that, let me throw it back to you.
What else do you want to say about the Pope, about J.D.?
Just to tie in briefly with that point on J.D., so part of the Pope's response to this, and I think he said this in a letter to U.S. bishops, he didn't mention J.D. Vance by name.
It was kind of that kind of thing where everybody knows who he's talking about.
But he said that we have to meditate, there's a quote from the Pope, meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all without exception.
End quote.
And that notion of an openness to all.
I'm just going to throw this out based on, you know, things we talked about in the supplement, things you've been working on.
It sounds an awful lot like empathy to me.
I just want to throw that out there, too.
This notion that it's open to all without exception.
I don't know, Brad.
I feel like it comes dangerously close to saying that we should have empathy for everybody.
Yeah.
So here's what I want to highlight.
And if you'll just hang with me, friends, I'll do this quickly, I promise.
But you know, Dan, you know how I am.
I love history.
I often go on into story time.
So I'm not going to, Dan, I'm not going to do a famous 28-minute story time, I promise.
Okay?
But give me five, six minutes here.
J.D. Vance, and we've chronicled this on the show at length, is part of what is called a post-liberal set of contemporary Catholicism.
Post-liberal Catholics basically argue Liberalism as we know it, not in the sense of the Democratic Party, but liberalism in the sense of a tradition that prioritizes individual choice and freedoms, personal liberties.
It is often associated with democracy because democracy is a form of government where everybody has a vote and everybody's treated equally as somebody, as a human, with the same rights and liberties as all other humans.
Post-liberal Catholics call into question that whole system.
And they often...
Argue that in its place we should have a common good conservatism.
And common good conservatism, as I outlined all summer, excuse me, is a form of conservatism that says government is not about individual freedom.
Government is about the common good as it is envisioned in the natural order of things, i.e.
in a divine vision for how human society should be ordered.
The goal of government should be to create a situation where humans live under a state and in a community that is ordered according to how God wants it.
So the government should not try to give you as much freedom as possible or make sure that your basic needs are met because you're a human with rights.
The government should direct you to your own ends.
And post-liberal Catholics, J.D. Vance, Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, R.R. Reno, many others would say, It may feel to you, the individual, like coercion or manipulation at first,
but it's for your own good.
Common good conservatism is parental.
And the best way to get common good government is actually not through this whole separation of powers as it was laid out by James Madison.
The best way to get a common good government is
an unbound executive who has the power to basically make unilateral changes to how the government works.
And that unbound executive is bound by really, when it comes down to it, only one higher authority authority.
I bring that up because when...
The Catholic Church underwent drastic changes in 1962 to 1965, the Vatican Council.
There were so many American Catholics that hated what happened with Vatican II.
They saw Vatican II as modernizing the church.
The liturgy and the mass were—the mass, I should say, was now conducted in Latin.
There was a sense from the church that the church's goal was not to— Be the dominant imperial power of the world, but to recognize that all people have different faiths, that there are other pathways to truth,
that we are going to coexist as the Catholic Church in a pluralistic world.
We're not going to try to dominate or colonize people spiritually or economically or geographically.
We are going to be a good citizen of a pluralistic society.
That was Vatican II.
There's way more to it, friends.
And who were the ones that hated that?
Well, there's a lot of names you will recognize.
Paul Weirich hated that.
Paul Weirich created the Heritage Foundation.
When you think of the Heritage Foundation in 2025 and it publishing Project 2025, you need to think of Kevin Roberts, a radical Catholic who leads that organization now.
And Paul Weirich, a radical Catholic, who started that organization in 1973, who also hated that.
There were some other Catholics who saw the Catholic Church as needing to insert itself to make sure that societal order was achieved.
And it often led them...
Here's the point I really want you to take away from this story time.
It led them to illiberalism.
It led them to saying, I'd almost rather have Hitler...
A lot of mid-century Catholics came down on the side, at least leaders, not everybody.
Don't get me wrong.
Don't misquote me.
You know, FDR is almost as bad as Hitler.
One of those famously was Joseph McCarthy, the senator who's famous for McCarthyism.
He inspired a couple of young Yale graduates named William F. Buckley and Brent Bozell Jr.
To write a whole book about him where they concluded that he was a man of moral courage and people with a stern will could rally around Joseph McCarthy, the man censured by the Senate, who entertained witch hunts against what he called communists.
There were many others in that lineage.
But who does J.D. Vance, and I'm going to end here, Dan, I promise.
Dan's like, come on, Brad.
Who does J.D. Vance quote sometimes?
When it comes to his Catholic inspirations.
Patrick Deneen, the post-liberal philosopher who's at Notre Dame right now.
Kevin Roberts, the leader of the Heritage Foundation today.
I have it in front of me, his essay from the American Conservative, where he quotes Brent Bozell Jr. and says he put to rest arguments about conservatism a long time ago.
J.D. Vance is connected to a long lineage of right-wing American Catholics.
Who were openly illiberal, openly not in favor of a government based on human rights and individual choice and liberty.
But instead, concluding point, Dan, they wanted a government that was a weapon for ordering society according to God's vision and a coercive tool for making sure that people got in line with the divine...
Ordinances as laid out in natural law and in scripture.
So when I see J.D. Vance in that very infamous picture from like four days ago, looking at a very ill Pope Francis, I see two visions of Catholicism as mixed as Francis might have as a legacy.
He's staring down an American illiberal who is a direct line from Vatican II, but...
Francis himself is a direct line from Vatican II.
I don't think we ever get an Argentinian pope without Vatican II and the reforms made there.
So them two staring at each other in that photo, to me, carries enormous historical weight.
And there ends my story.
There is, of course, more.
But please, jump in.
I think, maybe just sort of a concluding reflection, I think it's a great point about the two of them looking at each other and so forth, is on one hand, what I find, you know...
When I teach about religion and people get these ideas of religion, they often view religion as very institutional, very hierarchical, very authoritarian kind of structure.
And the reason is the Catholic Church, right?
So on one hand, maybe with the exception of Latter-day Saints, the Catholic Church is probably the most hierarchical kind of, like, structured religion, certainly Christian denomination.
And has a kind of authority structure that other denominations simply don't have.
And they don't have the scope, the global scope that the Catholic Church does.
And on one hand, that's a thing.
But because of that, I think for lots of people, there's an assumption that the Catholic Church is kind of monolithic in that regard.
Like, what the Pope says goes.
And Catholic doctrine dominates everything and so forth.
And what we find, you get in this, is the real diversity that exists, right?
There were real challenges to Pope Francis.
All of those sort of Catholic conservatives that you're describing and others actively opposed him.
They would decry certain statements that he would make and so forth.
And I think all of this highlights how diverse and contested life within the Catholic Church and by those who claim Catholic identity can actually be.
And that can go in progressive directions as well.
I have had friends who are in same-sex relationships who...
Attend Catholic churches that accept them as they are, and who baptize their children and do things that they are not supposed to do, according to Catholic doctrine.
This goes in all different directions, but I think that this is one of the things that we'll watch going forward as well, is who's the next pope going to be?
All that jockeying that goes on, is it going to be one of those cardinals?
And there's a lot of cardinals that Francis installed, which means that it's likely to be relatively sympathetic to the perspective of a Francis, or to some other faction.
Win the day and, you know, move the papacy in a different direction.
That's kind of what we saw with when Ratzinger became Benedict.
So I think it's just another sort of overarching thing for people to recognize is the real diversity and conflicts that exist within this institution that on the surface is very authoritarian, very hierarchical, very well-ordered, has a near-absolute authority that rests in the person of the Pope.
I mean, the model for the Pope was Caesar.
Like when the Catholic Church...
The Roman Catholic Church, the Western Catholic Church was forming.
It got its institutional structures from the Roman Empire, and the Pope was sort of like a religious Caesar.
That was the political model, but it's much more diverse and complicated than that.
And I think when a conclave is in effect like this, this is one of the times where that comes into view, and I think it will as we move forward over the next few days or weeks.
All right.
Just real quick, J.D. Vance, like, come on, man.
You broke the national championship trophy for the football.
That was, like, ultimate, like, lost your bro aura there, homie.
Like, I mean, you went to Greenland and no one would talk to you.
Like, literally, no one would.
This vision of J.D. Vance, like, knocking on doors and people, like, peeking out their windows or, like, turning down the TV.
Make sure that, like, he doesn't know we're home.
He's like Andy from The Office.
Hey-o!
You know, just trying to get, hey.
Nardog here.
The Dizzler.
The Dizzler's at the door.
No?
Okay.
And then he goes and visits the Pope, and, like, the Pope dies.
There's just...
This is epic level of vice-presidencing.
We don't have time to do any more on that, but let's take a break.
Be right back.
All right, Dan.
This week, we had the first meeting of the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias in the Federal Government.
This followed on the...
Sending of a document to the VA, excuse me, to all VA employees asking them to report anti-Christian bias in their ranks, whether or not they saw it under the Biden administration, if there are particular people who were propagating anti-Christian bias,
what it looked like, whether that was related to vaccines or holidays or beliefs or anything else.
So I want to go over some of the details of that and dig in just a bit.
Here is the Office of Public Affairs U.S. Department of Justice website.
So just consider the source as I read this, okay, everybody?
Today, Attorney General Pam Bondi hosted members of the President's Cabinet at the U.S. Department of Justice for the inaugural meeting of the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias in the Federal Government.
It was established by President Trump under Executive Order 14202.
Was joined by peaceful Christian American...
Peaceful, Dan.
So I guess no one showed up with a sword and was like, well, let's, you know...
I guess none of them supported J6, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, that's good to know.
Good to know.
Good to know.
Hegseth left his chainsaw at home.
Christian Americans who were unfairly targeted by the Biden administration for their religious beliefs.
Okay, who was there?
Who was there?
We had Pam Bondi.
Attorney General.
We had Pete Hegseth, Fox News host slash head of DOD.
We had RFK Jr., infamous RFK Jr.
Did not know he was super into this whole Christian thing, but apparently he is.
You had some others.
You had Michael Ferris, founder of Patrick Henry College, an absolutely famous figure in the homeschool movement.
You had Dr. Scott Hicks, who's a provost at Liberty University, Phil Mendez, a Navy SEAL, who was relieved of duty during the Biden administration for not taking the COVID-19 vaccine.
He was one of these Christians who claimed that he had a religious exemption.
Kash Patel was there, champion of Jesus, Kash Patel.
I like that as a title.
That's just a job title.
Champion of Jesus.
Yeah.
Cash money?
No.
Cash?
Jesus.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
RFK, as I said.
Linda McMahon.
So that's good.
Linda was there.
Good to see you, Linda.
A bunch of others.
Todd Blanche.
As I said, Pete Hegseth.
Kelly Loeffler was there, the former senator and billionaire or married to a billionaire.
And of course, Paula White Kane, the senior advisor at the White House faith office.
Now, let me play you a clip of what Pam Bondi said there at the beginning.
it is.
Thank you all for joining us today.
We're excited to be here for the launch of the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias as outlined in the President's Executive Order.
Joining me today are members of the task force and individuals who have been impacted by the anti-Christian bias.
Together, this task force will: Identify any unlawful anti-Christian policies, practices, or conduct across the government.
Seek input from the faith-based organizations and state governments to end anti-Christian bias.
Find and fix deficiencies in existing and regulatory practices that might contribute to the anti-Christian bias.
As President Trump has stated, the Biden administration engaged in an egregious pattern of targeting peaceful Christians while ignoring violent anti-Christian offenses.
The President is right.
Biden's Department of Justice abused and targeted Christians.
Pro-life Christians were arrested and imprisoned for peacefully praying outside abortion clinics.
The FBI spied on traditional Catholics in their parishes.
President Biden declared Easter Sunday to be Transgender Day of Visibility.
No longer.
Vandalism against churches was eight times higher in 2023 than it was in 2018.
And it's at President Trump's directive.
We ended those abuses at the Department of Justice on day one.
We dropped three ongoing cases against pro-lifers and redefined the FACE Act to ensure that abuse would not continue and that American tax dollars were not used to support the weaponization of our legal system to target Christians.
Just a few weeks ago, we convicted a man in Arizona for a plot to bomb Christian churches.
The Department of Justice will protect religious liberty for Christians and for all Americans.
We'll work closely with everyone around this table and take a whole-of-government approach to solving this problem and, ultimately, protect Americans' First Amendment rights.
The First Amendment isn't just a line in the Constitution.
It's the cornerstone of our American liberty.
It guarantees every citizen the right to speak freely, Worship freely and live according to their conscience without government interference.
Protecting Christians from bias is not favoritism.
It's upholding the rule of law and fulfilling the constitutional promise.
Thank you to President Trump.
We have an incredible opportunity, all of us around this table, to protect the rights of all citizens from discrimination based on their religious beliefs.
And thank you all for being here based on this executive order, and I look forward to doing great work together.
And before we even get going, I want to play a clip of Andrew Seidel talking about this way back when this was announced, because it's really something.
And if you're not listening to One Nation Indivisible, I don't know what you're doing with your life.
What kind of choices you're making as an adult?
So I'll just say, here's a clip of Andrew talking about this.
And if you want more of this, go listen to the podcast because it's amazing.
Thank you all for joining us today.
We're excited to be here for the launch of the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias as outlined in the president's executive order.
Joining me today are members of the task force and individuals who have been impacted by the anti-Christian bias.
Together, this task force will identify any unlawful anti-Christian policies the Biden administration engaged in an egregious pattern of targeting peaceful Christians while ignoring violent anti-Christian offenses.
This order is all about propaganda.
And it gives the game away, which I'll get into in a minute.
But really, the twin purposes of this are to create propaganda that feeds the Christian persecution narrative and to create propaganda that feeds the weaponization of religious freedom.
And what I mean by the weaponization of religious freedom, if you've not read American Crusade, how the Supreme Court is weaponizing religious freedom, that is your handbook for this.
But that means turning that shield, that protection, of religious freedom into a weapon, into a tool, into a way for one person to claim religion and thereby trump another person's rights, harm another person's legal rights.
So we're talking about legal privilege.
It's not about, it is absolutely not about ensuring equal treatment for Christians under the law.
It is about procuring special treatment for the right kind, air quotes, of conservative Christian under the law.
It is about legal privilege, securing that legal
As Andrew says, and I agree with him, the anti-Christian task force is about propaganda.
It's about weaponizing religion.
That is what it's about.
There is a goal here to make Christianity the public religion of the federal government.
And it is to say, if you're with us, show that the...
The in-group symbols of Christianity.
If you're a woman, like Carolyn Leavitt or someone else, wear a big, big gold cross at all times.
But show your Christian bona fides.
And if you're not part of that group, you're probably on the outside.
There's probably something that you have done wrong.
And I want to just dig into some of the people on this task force.
So the leader is Pam Bondi, Dan.
Let's go through Pam Bondi.
She married Garrett Barnes in 1990.
They divorced 22 months later.
In 1996, she married Scott Fitzgerald.
They divorced five years later.
She's had some fiancées since then.
She's had some other significant others.
Good for her.
I don't really care, but she's the one leading this anti-Christian bias task force, so it's worth digging into the way she lives her life.
She has accepted tons of money and Promotion by the Scientologist, which famously, not the, like, favored group among evangelicals, at least when I was growing up, Dan, I don't know, or the Catholic Church, for that matter.
So, that's there.
Okay?
Pam Bondi has nonetheless become kind of a Christian crusader in the last decade.
That's how she sold herself as AG in Florida and now as AG of the United States.
Okay?
She has done a number of things to kind of bolster these bona fides.
One of them in 2015 was to insert an amendment or be a kind of leading, a driving force in an amendment in Florida that would not only prevent bias against Christians, it was like a freedom of religion amendment, which was really unneeded, but it would not allow Florida to discriminate against religious organizations from...
even if they held views that were discriminatory or
We want to be able to, for federal funds, to be diverted to charities, to churches, to other places that are completely and overwhelmingly anti-LGBT,
anti-trans, discriminatory, prejudiced, etc.
And if you don't give us federal funds for what we're doing...
You are attacking Christians.
She also wrote an op-ed at the Daily Caller with Paula White Kane defending Coach Kennedy in the Bremerton case.
Some of you know what I'm talking about.
Some of you don't.
This was a coach who used to pray at the 50-yard line after games.
Dan, we've talked about it on this show.
He was asked to stop doing that because basically after games he would go as the coach and pray.
And there was this sense of, like, if you're on the team, you have to do it with him.
Otherwise, you're not part of the real team.
Parents would join, etc.
This was up near Seattle.
If you're not a Christian, how does that work?
Do you do it?
Do you not do it?
We can go into the details of the case.
But in that op-ed, they wrote about how he was forced to choose between his faith and his livelihood.
That his faith was attacked.
Because he was not allowed to lead a public school football team and parents wearing his public school football team uniform on public school grounds at a public school event in prayer.
The SCOTUS famously sided with him on that, and that is that.
Okay, that's Pam Bondi.
Pete Hegseth was there.
Anti-Christian bias, Pete Hegseth.
Okay, Pete, let's do it.
He famously attends a church that is part of a denomination.
Started by Doug Wilson.
Doug Wilson said this summer, if you are Hindu, if you are Muslim, you should not be able to be a mayor in this country.
So I can go into PDXF all you want, Dan.
I got six hours on that.
I'm going to leave it.
Two universities represented.
Grand Cranion University says they were targeted by the Biden administration, attacked for their Christian faith.
They were fined $37 million for misrepresenting the cost of their doctoral programs.
But they, as soon as this happened, what did they say?
You're attacking us because we're Christian.
Joe Biden, who probably like filled out the paperwork for this thing while in mass, because he used to go like three to eight times an hour, is the anti-Christian guy.
Okay.
Liberty University also present.
Why?
They had to pay $14 million because of violations of the Clery Act.
What's the Clery Act?
Is that like some obscure administrative?
Let me just take a look here.
Clery Act?
Ah, failure to disclose information about crimes on its campus and for the treatment of sexual assault survivors.
Ah, you got us.
You hate Christians who don't make it possible for sexual assault victims on campus to have pathways to, like, justice or reporting about that.
And when you find us, you hate Jesus.
That's clearly what's happening.
RFK Jr. was there.
All right, RFK, champion.
Of the church, Mr. RFK Jr., who once had 42 mistresses in his phone.
He had his second wife, not his first, his second wife, died by suicide.
Many would say that there was a lot of...
I want to be very careful here.
Her suicide was in conjunction with his serial cheating and a lot of...
Suffering as a result of their marriage.
I'll say it that way in order to be something.
He's now married to Cheryl Hines, who's like the famous person from Curb Your Enthusiasm.
But just when he was running for president six months ago, eight months ago, he had an affair with the journalist Olivia Nuzzi, who some of you remember all of this.
OK, so RFK Jr. is there as the champion, I guess, of Jesus.
I don't know, Dan, I could keep going.
What do you want to say?
So a couple things.
One is, I mean, the reason you're highlighting this is that these, I think in principle, if one's busy fighting against anti-Christian bias, one is presuming to be an exemplary Christian.
Like that you are, as we would have said in my evangelical days, that you're walking the walk, that you're the good Christian person.
And on their own basis, or on any kind of conservative Christian basis, these people are not.
And that just shows kind of what the level of personal character is here.
I think another piece of this is, you know, looking at, That this task force is aimed at anti-Christian bias, not anti-religious bias.
Exactly.
But anti-Christian bias.
And it goes under—so I've talked about this, you've talked about this, we've talked about this, right?
Andrew Seidel talks about this all the time.
That what goes under the nomenclature of religious freedom on the right is actually Christian supremacy.
I'm a huge advocate of religious freedom, by which I mean the freedom of people to practice the religion they want to practice and to not have religion forced upon them, to not have the state tell them what they have to believe, the freedom to be left alone by religious people if they want,
the freedom to know that the state will be neutral toward them with regard of their religious views and faiths and so forth.
That's not what any of this is.
It's an anti-Christian bias.
It's not, hey, VA people, tell us if you're Muslim and you weren't It's not that.
When they talk about, you know, I'm looking at a screenshot of the Veterans Affairs, you know, website with a list of things that people were supposed to report on.
It's not, you know, oh, if you're Hindu and, like, you know, you were not given days off for your religious observance, like, let us know.
Nope.
It's Christian holidays.
It's Christian practices.
It gets kind of Orwellian.
It's sort of like, you know, if you...
If you kind of feel like maybe somebody was mean to you and it's because maybe they don't like that you believe Christian things, tell us that too.
And it's ridiculous and it's about Christian supremacy.
It is not about religious freedom.
It's about Christian supremacy, which is why people like Andrew are saying this is propaganda.
This is about making...
A form of conservative Christianity into the sort of de facto American civil religion and so forth.
And just to invite people, just look at the things that asked them to report.
Like, this isn't us being, you know, radical.
This isn't us being crazy leftists.
It's really absurd.
And again, the kinds of things they're supposed to report on, and I'm looking at it and it says, you know, submissions should include sufficient identifiers such as names, dates, and locations.
I want to see the write-up.
Of the dude who, I don't know, was in a bad mood in the coffee room and told you that they don't have time to talk, and you're like, they hate me because I'm Christian.
I'm going to write that up.
It's absolutely absurd, and it's absurd by design.
I want to stay on that point before we take a break, and that's...
Dan, you and I covered this.
I want you all to think about what they did with anti-Semitism as it related to Gaza.
Anti-Semitism is real.
It is ascending.
It is scary.
Josh Shapiro, the governor in Pennsylvania, has his mansion bombed, so on and so forth, okay?
We never deny that on this show.
But anti-Semitism has turned into a way for the Trump administration via Project Esther and the Heritage Foundation to say, if you support Palestine, if you come out publicly for Palestinian rights, you are anti-Semitic.
They're coding anti-Semitism as support for Palestine.
So when they say anti-Christian, the next question we need to ask is, well, what are they coding that as?
And I know you're the great decoder, Dan.
So I take it to be what you're saying.
Hey, if somebody's wearing a sticker on their, has a sticker at their desk, if they're wearing a shirt that talks about trans lives matter, if they are...
And a bumper sticker on their car in the parking lot.
Yeah.
If, you know, if somebody says to you, Happy Holidays after you say Merry Christmas.
What they're going to do is code anti-Christian as support for things that don't go with the MAGA agenda.
If Christianity under MAGAism is anti-LGBT, anti-abortion, anti-immigrant, anti-pluralism, anti-religious minority...
If that is what Christian, if those are the stalwart doctrines of the Christian MAGA church, then anti-Christianity under that frame is anything that is pro-LGBT, pro-immigrant,
pro-Palestine, so on and so forth.
And so you can start to see that it may not just be, as you say, Dan, oh, somebody was mean to me in the break room.
They hate Christians.
But it could be along the lines of, right, so-and-so was talking about their new boyfriend or so-and-so was talking about, right, this and that at a work function related to their trans child and this.
And you can start to see how a culture of fear develops.
If you work at the VA, maybe you just never share the fact that you have a trans child.
You would never tell a coworker that.
You would never mention it out loud.
Maybe you never mention.
That you're married to a man, if you're a man.
Maybe you've never mentioned that you're married to somebody who emigrated from.
Fill in the blank place.
Whatever it is, the culture, this is religion as a weapon.
It's a way of power.
It's religion as power.
Group, power.
Majority, power.
Dominant power of the group that feels as if they have the authority and all of the ammunition.
And so when I see those people up there, The reason I went through the biographies is that they don't seem to be concerned about anti-Christian bias except for as revenge and resentment and attack rather than the kind of care for the poor and the outcasts we just talked about with Francis.
Any other thoughts before we take a break?
Just briefly.
So I'm looking at the list right now of things to report.
And this is, I think, what we have in mind.
Number eight on the list that they're supposed to report is any informal policies, procedures, or unofficial understandings hostile to Christian views.
What is an informal, unofficial understanding that is hostile to Christianity?
Like, that's a reportable offense now.
Like, an understanding?
You have an unofficial understanding that I find offensive.
Like, that goes to everything you're talking about.
Hey, my daughter just moved in with her boyfriend and I think that's great.
Are they married?
Nope, that's really offensive to me.
Or all the examples you gave.
We had a great time at the Pride Parade this weekend.
Yeah, this is the Orwellian kind of dimension to this, that this is about playing thought police.
It's not about religious liberty.
It's not about protecting people's rights.
It's about infringing on people's rights of any kind of expression.
The Maga world themselves would not appreciate or would not want or would abuse that they don't share.
If you consider Hindu people like Joel Webin does and many in the Pete Hexeth Church as, like, demonically possessed, and somebody has some kind of indication of their Hinduism, whether it's a symbol, whether it's anything at work,
do you report them as, like, anti-Christian because they're bringing demons into work?
I mean, that's kind of where we're at.
Let's take a break.
All right, Dan, got a couple of minutes left here.
Tell us about some Harvard and some Harvard losses and other losses by Trump that may have gone under the radar.
Yeah, so basically, I'll try to make this quick.
We could dive into every aspect of this in much greater detail, and I'm sure moving forward we'll have reason to do that.
But one of the things that has struck me this week, Trump is coming up on his 100 days, and there's always been, for a long time, this kind of symbolic, you know, what does the president do in their first 100 days?
And people have been assessing this.
And we are starting to see real headwinds run into Trump encounters.
So just a few things.
He has these 145% tariffs on China.
China retaliates.
He blinked in a big way.
Treasury Secretary Scott Besson said that the trade war with China was unsustainable.
Defined it that way.
And then Trump says that the tariffs on China will come down substantially.
It won't be zero, but it won't be anywhere near 145%.
They already had to exempt smartphones, computers, semiconductors, and so forth from high tariffs because of the effects of this.
So he blinked.
He hasn't won no concessions from China.
They are not engaged in talks, and he's having to back down from this.
He was rebuffed by Harvard.
We know what he's done to big universities.
Columbia in particular got a lot of news for giving in to appeasing all of his demands.
Harvard refused to.
They threaten Harvard with additional punitive action.
Harvard has now filed a lawsuit against them, as one would expect.
And there's reporting out this week that the Trump administration is now trying to get Harvard to come back and talk with them.
We want to negotiate when we're going to set up.
And Harvard's refusing to do it.
Now, I don't know where that goes, but that's a Trump administration that overplayed their hand with a university that, let's face it, can afford the kinds of things that are being levied by the Trump administration.
Ukraine reporting this week that Trump has said to close allies that ending the conflict in Ukraine is harder than he thought it would be.
Stop it, Vladimir.
Just stop it.
Stop it, Vladimir.
Exactly.
You know, he famously insisted he'd end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours.
Of course, Ukraine is refusing to just give in to his demands.
Trump this week is saying he's angry at both Putin and Zelensky because they just won't play along and so forth.
What does all this mean?
Court losses piling up.
We could go into all of that.
I think it's a lot of things that one of the things that is happening, and people ask me all the time, how are we going to survive the next four years?
What's going to happen?
I don't know, but one of the things I have said is that Trump's talk is not leading to actual results and people are starting to notice, especially on the economy.
We know that the economy is what won him this election.
Only 40% of people polled now say that they approve of what he's doing to the economy.
He's losing the patience of American people.
I also think Trump isn't built for more than 100 days.
That's part of why we get the executive orders.
Trump wants to rule.
He doesn't want to govern.
And I was having a conversation with colleagues the other day saying, we're coming to a point where Congress is going to have to start doing stuff.
Legislation is going to have to be passed.
All these government agencies that they've been gutting, our agencies are going to need to actually put forward their agenda.
I think we're beginning to see that Trump just doesn't have the attention span or, frankly, the stamina for the long haul.
A hundred days in, I mean, it's over three months, and I think we're running into the end of his attention and his patience.
The strong arming isn't working.
Trump has built his entire life being a bully to people who can be bullied, and China can't be bullied on the economy.
Harvard has decided they're not going to be bullied.
We have other universities that are sort of building coalitions to stand together against some of these things and so forth.
We're beginning to see that, and I think that what does all of this portend?
We don't know.
Does it mean that maybe when he signs executive orders?
People stop preemptively going with what they're saying, that he loses that flash.
Will his hardcore believers abandon him?
No.
But others will.
And so I think it's been a notable week.
A number of things have really come into the news, and we see Trump having to retreat from positions.
He won't call it a retreat.
We see him being ineffective, and we're starting to see more and more people, including Republicans who will be up for re-election in the midterms, beginning to fret about this because they're looking at next year and saying, we're not getting anything done.
It's a quick rundown, but I think a lot of really stiff headwinds confronting the Trump administration this week, and I think it's significant.
I agree.
I mean, he's the least popular president after 100 days for a long, long time.
He's underwater for the first time on the immigration issue.
He's well underwater on almost every other measure.
So I agree.
There was a flood.
There was an onslaught.
There was an overwhelm in the first month, the first two months, the first three months.
But you're starting to see what happens when people stand up.
I mean, and you made the points already.
China was just like, give it a shot.
We've been around for 5,000 years.
You think we're like, you know, going to back down?
And the Chinese government doesn't have to worry about polls.
I mean, you know, yeah.
You want to talk about unfettered authority?
That's, yeah.
You know, Harvard, much different story than Columbia.
And I think we're going to see more of that from other universities.
Does that mean we're out of the woods?
No, it doesn't mean any of that.
But it means that when you see the bully get pushed back, it inspires others to say, oh, we don't have to live under fear of that bully or that force because there's nothing we can do.
And I think that the other one you haven't mentioned is Tesla income went down by 71%.
70% or whatever it was.
Okay. Elon Musk said this week he's thinking about leaving politics because of the attacks of the left.
And I just want to say one more time what I said
After what happened in Wisconsin with the Supreme Court there and him putting in, you know, tens of millions of dollars and offering people a $1 million check to vote and losing.
I just want to say one more thing, just based on, like, the fact that I went to grad school for, like, 10 years.
I have five degrees.
I've been studying these things for a long time.
You're a loser.
You're a loser.
And you should go away now and never come back.
All right.
Thank you.
I'm turning that into an essay.
It's still in work, Stan.
I'm still not ready to...
Got to cite the right theorists.
Yeah, I haven't published it yet.
I'm trying to track down this quote from Foucault and stuff, but once I get it figured out, it's going to be really good.
All right.
So those things are on my mind, and you don't have to simply take it.
And we had more protests this weekend.
There are more happening on May Day coming up here.
People continue to give people like Chuck Grassley and others hell.
You're seeing it form, and we just got to keep going and not give up.
Let's go to Reasons for Hope.
My Reasons for Hope, really, it's wrapped up with this.
The courts are catching up, and enough courts that the Trump administration has not really been able to just, like, yeah, have they flouted some court orders?
Yes.
They have not been able sort of en banc to say, like, we're not going to do anything any court says ever because they just, they don't have enough support to do that.
So the courts are catching up, and I think that if I had a metaphor, it's, you know, I'm a football fan, and sometimes you'll see games, you get this in other sports, where, like, one team comes out, and they just are hitting hard, and you're like, if we can just hold on, like, for the first quarter, we just handle this first onslaught, we can kind of come back,
and I think we're starting to see that.
It was the shock and awe doctrine of the Trump administration.
We said this as soon as he was elected.
The courts are going to have to play catch-up.
They're beginning to do that.
The polls are beginning to catch up.
People are beginning to catch up, and I take great hope in that.
Again, it doesn't mean it's—there's a reason we need hope, which is that it's not a good situation, but I take hope in that.
Some of you will remember a while back that at a town hall, Dr. Teresa Bornpol was pulled out of the event by blackshirts.
It seemed—it was a really scary moment of, like, do we now have blackshirts in the United States?
They also assaulted Megan Dardis-Koods, who I interviewed on this show after that event.
You can go look up that episode from about six weeks ago.
Six men have been charged, including for their attacks on Megan and on Teresa, so that is good news.
The NYU faculty, as some folks put in our Discord, are taking classes off campus to protest lack of protections for international students.
And as I mentioned earlier, you're seeing international students having their visas reinstated because of lawsuits.
There were 12 at Berkeley this week.
That is good news, and people continue to fight.
Thanks for listening, y 'all.
We hope that you have a great weekend and you'll be back with us next week.
Be talking with Representative Mickey Dollins about how to fight back, ways to get involved in your local government, bills that are being proposed all over the country, and what you can do to further be part of resistance.
Dan will have it in the code and we'll be here next Friday.
Thanks for listening.
Thanks for being with us.
And Dan is going to go to a concert, take a picture in full punk.
Metal regalia, and it's going to break the internet.
So if you are not on our social medias yet, social medias, yeah, I'm young and cool.
If you're not...
If you're not our friend on MySpace, you should probably do that now so you can see Dan's picture.
