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Brad and Dan critique the Trump administration’s decision to fast-track the resettlement of 49 white South African refugees while ending protections for thousands of Afghanis. They analyze the impacts of these policies through the lens of white Christian nationalism and systemic racism.
They further discuss President Trump's acceptance of a $400 million jet from Qatar, drawing attention to issues of corruption and the national security risks involved.
The episode also highlights Oklahoma's new education standards that mandate teaching the 'Big Lie' about the 2020 election and Virginia’s decision not to count African American history courses towards graduation requirements, framing these developments as part of a broader, dangerous, and misleading historical narrative.
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We are hosting a Straight White American Jesus seminar starting in June.
June 5th, June 12th, June 19th and June 26th.
We'll be hosting Purity, Culture, Race and Embodiment.
This will be led by Dr. Sarah Malziner who is an absolute expert on Purity culture, white supremacy, and the history of white Christian womanhood in the United States.
She'll be talking about the racist origins of evangelical purity culture, white body supremacy, purity culture and racial formation, and the ways this all links up with white Christian nationalism.
You can check out all the details at straightwhiteamericanjesus.com and click the seminars tab.
You won't want to miss this.
We've done this in the past and it has sold out.
If you are looking for a new way.
To dig in critically to these issues, this is the perfect opportunity.
Check it out now.
All of these folks who have just come in today have been carefully vetted pursuant to our refugee standards and whether or not the broader refugee programs for other people around the world will be lifted is still an ongoing consideration.
The South African government has not done what we feel is appropriate to guarantee the rights of these citizens to live in That is U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau talking about the 49 Afrikaners who were welcomed to the United States as refugees and to be resettled in places like Nevada and Idaho,
Minnesota, and New York.
At his press conference, he talked about the reasoning behind welcoming these Today we break down how this case of welcoming
white South Africans to the United States in a fast-tracked...
Refugee Resettlement Project is an emblem of everything about white supremacy and Christianity that forms the white Christian nationalist movement in our country.
We talk about how it is a slight to Afghanis who've been told to leave, the ways that it flies in the face of the humanity of those refugees fleeing actual violence and corruption and threat in their home countries.
And how it links up with a cruel new idea coming straight from Kristi Noem.
We also break down Trump's acceptance of a $400 million jet from Qatar.
How this speaks to the corruption in this administration and links up with stories about the failures at the FAA, the dangers in American air travel, and the fighter jets that keep falling off aircraft carriers into the ocean.
We finish with discussion of what's happening in Oklahoma and the teaching of the big lie.
As part of the school curriculum in that state.
I'm Brad Onishi and this is Straight White American Jesus.
Straight White American Jesus.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
Great to be with you on this Friday, here today with my co-host.
Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Good to see you, Brad.
Nice to be here on a day that feels a little hectic, but, you know, they all do.
So it's always nice to have my little break, get my Brad Onishi time in.
And so, you know, here we are.
So this is the end of finals week for you.
This is a time in the year where, like, students and professors are just like, and, you know, teachers at all levels are just, like, ready for it to be done.
There's always more to do.
It feels like you're like, oh, end of school or end of class.
And then it's like end of finals.
And it's like, oh, I got to grade.
And then I got to go to faculty meetings.
And then I got to go do the thing.
And then I got to do the other thing.
And then, oh, we're finally to summer.
So anyway, you getting across the finish line?
I am.
I do have like 1.3 million things to grade.
And the students, what always happens to me are the students who like turn stuff in late because I have a late work policy.
So it's like, they turn it all in, like, this week.
And then they're like, why isn't it graded yet?
And I'm like, because you just turned in a semester's worth of stuff.
And I'm like, my grades are due in Tuesday, so sometime by, like, noon on Tuesday, that's my actual deadline.
So, yeah, you get students who didn't turn anything in for, like, 14 weeks, and then it's suddenly this imperative that they turn it in because their parents want to know if they're actually going to graduate.
And I'm kind of like, I'm curious about that, too.
I guess we'll find out.
We will all see at the same time.
Yeah.
This week, we want to just spend a bunch of time on the resettlement of several dozen Afrikaners.
A persecuted minority, Brad.
The resettlement of a persecuted minority.
White South Africans who arrived early this week.
And just all the implications of that that spread out into things we talk about on this show all the time, whether it's Christian nationalism, whether it's white supremacy, whether it is immigration, whether it's immigration.
This example really is to me putting all the cards on the table and we will unpack that.
We're going to go to the story that I'm sure most of you have heard about, probably read about, and may feel like you're not sure what else there is to say.
But we will spend some time on Trump accepting a $400 million plane from Qatar and what that means, why it's important, and how it branches out into other things from the FAA to Newark Airport to Elon Musk.
Finally, we'll end up in Oklahoma in a story that is probably not one you've heard much about on mainstream media or wherever you get your news.
And that is standards in Oklahoma that will now require that students learn in public schools about the, quote, discrepancies in the 2020 election results, meaning the Oklahoma public schools will now teach the big lie.
So we'll get there at the end tonight.
Dan, let's jump into a story that I think just, if I could pick something that emblematized almost everything.
That this show is supposed to cover and analyze.
It would be the story of these Afrikaners, the Boer, coming to the United States as resettled refugees and the president calling them the victims of a genocide, which were his words.
So, take it away.
So, you had to end on that.
Like, maybe the most ridiculous thing that one could state about this.
So, this is, you said it's one of those stories that, like, is emblematic of all this stuff.
It's like the kind of thing where...
There are those of us who, you know, we've spent years of our life claiming that certain things are like coded racist language or that there's real animus behind this policy or that.
Or that, for example, Brad, a topic that'll come up here shortly, that the Trump administration, you know, they're only for the dangerous, illegal, you know, immigrants.
They're not really trying to stop immigration or something like that.
And we're like, no, but I really think that they are.
And then they do this.
And you're like, oh, see, like told you, this is the one where all of it just sort of.
All the things that people say, that's a caricature.
You're like, no, it just walked in the door.
Like, it just came into the room.
There it is.
It's a real thing.
So for those who may not know, sort of, here's the background.
Like, a broader background is, and people probably do know this, that the Trump administration has paused almost all currently existing refugee programs into the U.S. So there are no arrivals from places like Iraq, Sub-Saharan Africa.
Afghanistan, any number of other countries, often really violent places, war-torn places, and so forth, those are all basically on hold.
We're no longer, like, taking that.
But the Trump administration has fast-tracked the application of, I believe it's 49 South Africans.
I've seen the number 49, I've seen 50. I've seen people just say dozens, but about half a hundred or so.
They left South Africa for the U.S. over the weekend.
This is a process, as people know, that usually takes years, right, to the full sort of processing of somebody seeking asylum and refugee status.
But this now they've placed them ahead of about 12,000 already approved refugees in that process while they're pausing refugee resettlement from basically everywhere else in the world.
And the obvious difference, Brad, if somebody says, well, why are these people so different?
What's so special?
What's so unique?
The obvious answer to just They're white Africaners.
February 7th.
Trump issued an executive order that accused the Black-led South African government of racial discrimination against this group of people and announced a program offering relocation to the U.S. So this is a process that started in February.
This is now the fulfillment of bringing that forward.
What is the rationale for this?
It's the same fixations of MAGA in the U.S. that they're now exporting sort of internationally.
And they accused the South African government of anti-white racism and laws, of doing things like what we would call affirmative action.
And there was a law passed allowing the seizure of private land without compensation and redistribution of that in South Africa.
That law was controversial.
It's been challenged in court.
It is currently sort of paused.
But that's the sort of rationale that's given for this.
And the Trump administration, again, says it's anti-white and racist.
A little bit more background here, and then we can get into some of what I think the takeaways are, what you think the takeaways are.
But this is around 30 years after the end of apartheid.
Blacks still only own a tiny portion of the farmland in South Africa, and so this is an effort to deal with that.
The majority is owned by this numerical minority of Afrikaners, descendants of Dutch settlers.
The land was widely expropriated from black South Africans during colonialism and apartheid when all power was in the hands of that white minority.
And basically, the land allocation hasn't substantively changed since the end of that.
That's the background for this.
That's what this law aims to do and so forth.
I've got thoughts about this.
I've got thoughts about why, you know, the logic of saying that this is anti-white, that this is racist, and so forth.
I've also got, you know...
Some analogs that people might want to think about if they talk to Uncle Ron, who's, well, you're taking account of race, you're giving people land just because they're black, or taking land just because they're white, or something like that, how we might respond to that.
But I'm interested in your thoughts first, initial impressions, anything else that you have as you've followed this and heard about this?
So this is from...
CBS News, May 13th.
Joe Walsh.
It's been reported everywhere, but we'll just use this source.
The Trump administration is ending a program that offered deportation protections for thousands of people from Afghanistan.
The Department of Homeland Security said Monday will wind down temporary protected status, TPS, for Afghans on July 12th.
TPS programs, Dan, are some of those that have provided temporary protections for people from Haiti, from Afghanistan, from Venezuela, from other places.
Over 8,000 Afghans were approved for TPS, according to federal statistics.
TPS was last extended for Afghanistan in 2023, and it was set to expire in May, unless the Trump administration chose to grant another extension.
There are so many Afghanis, Dan.
Everyone is...
I want to say a couple things.
Everybody is...
It doesn't matter who you are.
I think it's a human right for you to have some semblance of security and shelter.
The reason that you and I and so many others are upset about what's happening with the white Afrikaners is the evidence does not show us a systemic threat to white people in South Africa.
And I think you've outlined that and many other people have as well.
So there is violence and unrest in Afghanistan, but there's also, and this just goes to the, I think, adding insult to injury.
So many Afghanis who helped the United States as translators, as interpreters, as others in the decades of this century.
And so to say to them, 8,000 Afghanis, you need to leave, while welcoming people from Africa, the only white people from Africa, in essence, and saying, oh, we fast-tracked you so it took a weekend for you to get approved.
It's hard to put into words.
The insult to injury you are sending to people who, in many cases in Afghanistan, were so helpful to the United States military in its misguided doings in Afghanistan over the course of this century.
That's the first thing I'd like to say.
The second thing I'd like to say is I thought of you immediately when I saw this story break, and it's because of something that I think you're going to talk about, and that is...
Uncle Ron is so often your conservative uncle, your MAGA cousin is like, look, bro, I'm all for immigration, bro.
Just got to do it legally, dude.
Just got to get in here legal, bro.
I don't know why he talks like that, but he does.
And so, that's how he talks.
I don't know why.
And what you've said for years, and I won't steal your thunder, I'll let you rehearse this, is just...
When folks come legally, when they apply for asylum, which is a legal protection, when they are claiming refugee status, you still say, get them out of here.
What we've seen over the last months with Kilmara Abrego Garcia, with so many others, with people who are on student visas being disappeared off the street, is you don't care if it's legal.
You care if they are a certain category of person.
Are they white Christians?
Are they white?
If not...
They may be under threat.
They may be vulnerable.
So the idea that anybody would tell you at a barbecue this 4th of July that they are all for legal immigration to me is completely done.
I will never even entertain that conversation when with the flip of a wrist, the demented president can sign a thing that welcomes 49 people from South Africa to arrive in the course of a weekend.
When there are people who are fleeing violence, fleeing threat, fleeing cartels, fleeing rape and the attempted murder and plots by dictators to come to this country, the land of the free.
The idea that it's just about legal immigration is done.
This example is about racism.
It's about white replacement theory.
And I'll just say one more thing before I throw it back to you on this.
And that is, we said last week...
In the PRRI data, 33% of Americans are worried about immigrants invading the United States.
Immigrants taking away our way of life.
We talked about how that was 80 million Americans.
And this story, to me, is about white replacement theory.
It is about paranoia about population and white babies.
And it is a clear...
And present sign of the segregationist goals of this administration.
And I know that it's hard with the onslaught that we are enduring every day, but that is the system they are putting in place.
If you are white, you are not a DEI hire.
If you are white, you can be the head of FAA, Sean Duffy, and say you have no idea what you're doing and still do fine.
You can be Pete Hegseth.
You can be Christy Noem, who's really into cosplay and who I'm going to get to in a minute.
No one will call you DEI.
If you are white, no one will call you a DEI immigrant, which the South Africans who arrived here, okay?
No one will say that.
But if you are brown, if you are Muslim, if you are not Christian, if you are Asian, if you are black, then you are probably being pushed to the top because of some unjust system and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So those are some initial thoughts.
I want to jump in with one or two more major points on this, but I know you're going to have a lot to say here.
We talked about the people being afraid of it.
You know what immigrants, white MAGA people aren't afraid of?
These immigrants.
I remember, I think at least some of them are being resettled in Idaho.
I want to talk about Idaho.
Go ahead.
Yeah, just one of the whitest states in the country.
If you listen to, and I remember, this was a number of years ago, but I remember an NPR interview, and they were talking to people who were really nervous about, I think it was Syrian refugees being resettled and so forth.
And the people who were the most nervous about it, there were a ton of people, like, rural people in Montana.
And, like, they weren't going to be resettled there.
They were not going to encounter these people.
They weren't going to be around them, but they were just sure of, like, how scary this was and so forth.
I don't hear, like, the fear coming out of, you know, conservative, white, rural Idaho.
I don't hear the narrative about, like, terrorists who are hiding with them and have infiltrated them to come into the country.
What I do hear is Trump decrying, and this goes back to the points you just made about the cookout and the supposed, you know, we favor legal immigration and so forth.
I remember Trump, who as we all know likes to say the quiet parts out loud because he doesn't have a quiet switch, in the first term decrying the people from quote-unquote shithole countries.
Wanted to come to the U.S. And he specifically contrasted it with Scandinavian countries.
He chose the most stereotypically white of European white countries as the image that he wanted.
This maps that out.
These are white people that we've declared to be refugees, and so here they are, and they're in.
I've got other thoughts I could say about this, but I think another...
One more point.
From what I've seen in the Idaho Statesman and other newspapers in the PNW, nine out of the 49 are going to Idaho.
To me, there's no accident here.
So the states I've seen are Nevada, Idaho, Minnesota, New York, and one other, I can't remember right now.
And you might be thinking, all right, what's the pattern there?
New York, that's correct.
What, are they going to put them in Manhattan?
And my guess would be, no.
Friends, I've lived in upstate New York.
If you have ever been to upstate New York, Dan has.
It is one of the whitest parts of the country.
Minnesota, Twin Cities.
Diamond Blue, super diverse.
Outside of that, Minnesota, one of the whitest parts of the country.
Nevada, one of the whitest parts of the country.
And then you get to Idaho.
And Idaho is a place, I'll just be really brief and I'll throw it back to you, is there are a lot of people in Idaho who are white from California who are like, I'm a refugee from California.
I had to leave.
Go to Idaho.
Because Governor Newsom's laws and the gun control and the vaccine mandates.
I'm a refugee.
I had to move to Idaho.
To me, the fact that 20% of these folks are going to Idaho, a place that in terms of population is a tiny state, is pretty telling.
So back to you.
Sorry.
No, I absolutely agree.
I want to come to this.
So like, here's what happens.
It's the same playbook that we see in the U.S. context.
And specifically, it's not even just affirmative action.
It's really about reparations.
Like we wanted to translate what's going on in South Africa with this law into terms that come up in the U.S. It's the issue of reparations.
Does this land that was expropriated from black South Africans, should it defer back to them?
Or should there be some kind of mechanism to redress this past wrong?
And what we see is the same logic that we see when people attack these policies.
I know we talk about this, but I feel like you've got to keep talking about it because you will still have...
The Uncle Rons or the other people in your world who will say, well, this is racist.
If they're doing it because they're white and they're black, it's about race.
You get the official halt of racist laws and policies, like Jim Crow in the United States, apartheid in South Africa and so forth.
But what happens is you have decades or more of social inequalities.
And sort of systemic issues that have built up because of those policies that don't just stop.
You've got the historical sedimentation, let's say, of a social order that's built on racism that doesn't just stop because you end Jim Crow or apartheid.
So what happens then, this is why people say, well, we've got to fix that.
There's the outcome of this.
We have to fix it.
Which means we need to identify people who are wronged by this system.
And try to redress that.
And yes, we need to find people who, maybe not them directly, but relatives, ancestors, people of their social class, people of their race, whatever, benefited from that system.
And we've got to kind of balance the scales here.
And that's when people start saying, no, no, no, you're making decisions based on race.
We're supposed to be colorblind.
We're not supposed to be racist.
And so if you're saying they need this because they're African-American or they're black South Africans, you're being racist.
And that's the logic.
So basically what you do is you sort of freeze frame the situation as it existed because of racist policies, and you make it impossible to redress.
And I was thinking about this.
I was talking with some students the other day, and I said, this is what it's sort of like.
It's like if you found out that somebody was acting fraudulently.
Like, I don't know, maybe somebody had hijacked your cable subscription or the cable bill.
They were sending you bills in the mail and increase it.
You've been mailing them money.
You've been doing it for a couple years, and you're out.
Hundreds or thousands of dollars now.
We find out that it's fraudulent.
You weren't supposed to be paying that money.
They're not the people who are supposed to have it and so forth.
It's almost as if you say, okay, we shut it down.
No more fraud.
You say, yeah, but I'd love to have my money back.
And I say, bud, we can't talk about who had money taken.
I'm sorry.
We can't focus on one person because they had more money than another.
I'm sorry.
There's nothing we can do.
How dare you be so classist and suggest that you should get money back from the people who defrauded you because it was your money?
Like, no, we have to treat everybody the same.
And to treat everybody the same means we need to just kind of start over here.
And you're like, yeah, but I'm out like, you know, a couple grand here.
Like, surely I can know.
Hey, you need to stop being divisive.
You need to stop being classist.
You need to stop this class warfare.
You need to stop playing the class card.
It's ridiculous.
It's ridiculous because we know that that's not how it works.
It's ridiculous because nobody would suggest it should work that way.
That's the logic.
We see it domestically and we're seeing it.
Internationally here, and as you say, I think it lifts the cover up and says, this is what, not just the Trump administration, this is what MAGA world wants.
This is what they view as American values.
You cannot be wronged in this country if you're a person of color, because they believe that white people are under attack, they're being assaulted, everybody who's not white has special benefits and so forth.
And anytime there's a policy to try to address historical wrongs, this is what happens.
We're seeing it sort of exported internationally now.
More to say here.
We got a bombshell about Kristi Noem coming, so don't go anywhere.
We'll be right back.
All right, Dan, want to make one point and then get to something about Kristi Noem that a bunch of you, I would be shocked if most of you know about this yet.
So you talked about vetting.
And every time we hear about Syrian refugees, Afghan refugees, Iraqi refugees, anytime we hear about folks with Ebola, I was teaching at Rhodes College, and I remember there was the Ebola outbreak, and there was this huge discussion in the South about whether or not we could take people and what to do if they had Ebola and this and that.
We've got to vet these people.
They haven't been vetted yet.
One of the things that Kristi Noem said, the Secretary...
Secretary Noem said is she made the decision to terminate TPS for individuals from Afghanistan because the country's improved security situation and its stabilizing economy no longer prevent them from returning to their home country.
So that's one.
But the other thing that has been floated is that, you know, the proper vetting and that the Biden administration didn't do proper vetting of people from Afghanistan or from Haiti.
And he did say, who is he?
Christopher Landau, who works for the State Department as a Deputy Secretary of State, Said the Africana refugees had been carefully vetted.
One of the criteria was that refugees did not pose any challenge to our national security.
And they could be, you ready for it?
Assimilated easily into our country.
Talked about that at the top.
So that's the racism on the nose.
That if you are white, you can assimilate easily.
This is rhetoric from the 1960s.
It's rhetoric from the 1860s.
Okay?
And yet, Dan, I'm reading here from The Guardian, and it says that one of the Afrikaners brought here, Charles Kleinhaus.
Carl Kleinhaus?
Sorry, Carl.
I don't know if it's Charles or Carl.
I'm sorry about that.
Sometimes foreign names are hard, Dan.
You know, it's just these, I don't know.
But this is Jose Olivares in New York, and he says that Carl, or Charles, C-H-A-R-L, Kleinhaus, posted on X in 2023.
Jews are untrustworthy and a dangerous group.
He also retweeted white nationalists who posted this.
We'll shoot illegal immigrants.
Poland's illegal Islamic immigration solution.
A number of his posts also promote the conspiracy theory that white people in South Africa are being particularly persecuted.
Well, that makes sense if he's going to come here and live in Idaho.
He has made anti-Semitic and racist posts.
Whether he was vetted or not, I don't know.
So either he was vetted, and this was not a problem for the Trump administration that is supposedly so into protecting everybody from anti-Semitism and getting rid of anybody who supports Hamas and all that, or he was not vetted and they have not done their job.
But they led an open anti-Semite as one of the 49 people come.
So what's interesting here to me about Charles Kleinhaus is he's like, we will shoot illegals.
And this, Dan, is there any example you can think of that would put it more on the nose of like, well, who's illegal and who's legal?
And why?
Is it because the country has room?
The country, why?
Why are you legal, Charles, Carl, Kleinhaus?
And why is somebody else not legal?
Simply because somebody said on a piece of paper you are, is it because of merit?
Is it because you've done something?
Is it because you're in particular danger that others are not?
What is the merit?
What is the reasoning of your quote-unquote legality?
You're going to shoot people who are illegal and now you're coming to this country as somebody with legal papers to be here.
And that's just okay.
Why?
Because somebody snapped fingers and signed a paper?
And you're going to be like, well, that's what Biden did with people from Haiti.
That's what Biden did with people from Venezuela.
I'm going to say, yeah.
You know why?
When people seek asylum as refugees, the richest country on earth can say to those people, We are going to give you a hearing and perhaps temporary protected status while we resolve whether or not you can stay forever and as we monitor what happens in your home country.
And what the world is saying about South Africa is that regardless of what lies you're hearing from Elon Musk or anyone else, there is no credible threat there of genocide or systemic violence.
The second part, though, I want to get to, and I don't want to leave before we do this, is Kristi Noem is the one who revoked the status.
The status for...
Afghan refugees to have temporary protected status.
There's a report from the Daily Mail and the Daily Beast that Kristi Noem wants migrants to compete in a new reality show for citizenship.
She wants people to get on TV and she wants them to compete in a reality show where they go across the country in a bus to Wisconsin and Kansas.
And everywhere else.
And make a show where they show, I guess, their knowledge of Wisconsin cheese and shrimp and grits.
And I don't know, like Tombstone, Arizona?
They can play baseball?
They're going to compete for citizenship.
In a reality show, Dan, I don't have words for how grotesque and disgusting this is.
You let 49 white people come in, but ostensibly you're going to get folks from Haiti and Venezuela and Afghanistan and Mexico and everywhere else and make them compete in the most degrading way possible for American citizenship.
This is like, I could write three books about how this is like Kristi Noem as a cosplay politician.
How Donald Trump, the reality star president, has infected our politics so much that we're now throwing around ideas of creating a reality show for citizenship.
And how the oligarchs do not think of the rest of the world and people who are in real peril as having actual needs and rights and vulnerabilities.
That it's a game show.
Like Wheel of Fortune or Jeopardy.
That you would get on TV.
And humiliate yourself so you could be an American citizen.
This is the most disgusting thing I've ever heard, because right on the other side, they're flipping the switch and allowing white Africans to come in because of reasons.
I've got more to say, but what do you think of this?
The first is that, I mean, just to put it into context, this is coming from a sitting cabinet-level official.
This is not just somebody on Fox News.
This is not...
I don't know, some podcaster.
This is not, you know, it's not just somebody saying this.
It's a real person who helps set and execute policy.
And I think grotesque is the word for it.
You know, the other thing about this, though, that's interesting is, you know, and it takes a long time to become a citizen and so forth, but I've challenged this to students.
I challenge it to most Americans.
Listeners can go do it.
Go online and just look up the citizenship test, like the kind of civics test.
That somebody who's naturalizing to be a citizen has to, like, pass.
Like, what they have to know about the United States.
I would submit, Brad, that most Americans can't pass that test.
Just sort of, if you sit down blind.
In other words, most of us don't know as much about American history or government or civics, real American stuff, to actually be able to pass the test that naturalized citizens do pass.
So, my whole point with that is, you want to play this thing about putting it in terms of a game?
Lots of American citizens, in terms of their civic knowledge and their awareness of what this country is and what our history is and how our judicial and executive and legislative branches work together and how many people are in the House of Representatives or whatever kind of thing, most of them would outperform many of the same Americans who think that this game show thing is kind of a great idea, this reality show.
The people who pride themselves on knowing what the Constitution says, but they've never actually read it.
And they don't understand what it is.
And so I think there's also just this sick dimension of this that makes a mockery of that.
It makes a mockery of what people actually have to do to become citizens of the United States.
And makes it sound as if that's something that's just sort of handed out, you know, for nothing.
When people have sacrificed a tremendous amount to come here to go through that process, to demonstrate that they belong, to demonstrate that they want to be American citizens, and to dismiss all of that.
And then to create this caricature of some vision of national belonging that people have to come into to be able to then be sort of accepted within, you know, basically white Christian American society.
But Dan, this is white Christian nationalism to a T. White Christian nationalism is, if you're a white Christian, you have rights, you have dignity, you have worth, and you are a real American.
Full stop.
Afrikaners, come on in.
You're good.
You can assimilate.
Get on up there to Idaho.
Get on out there to rural Minnesota.
Yeah.
You're one of us.
You're good.
Everyone else, I want you to humiliate yourself on TV and show us you're worth it.
Show us you have dignity.
Show us you're a human.
Show us you're one of us.
And also to show us, though, and I think this is the key, to show us that you're not really one of us.
Like...
Whoever those people are, they will always be marked by the difference of having had to prove themselves in that way.
And the aim, what that does is maintain.
You said Christian nationalism to a T. It maintains that distinction.
Like, yeah, maybe you get citizenship, but you will always be the person who had to do that to be able to become a citizen.
We know you're not really one of us.
You know you're not really one of us.
You know that you only got here...
And got our nod of approval because you know your place, which is to do what?
To entertain us, to grovel before us, to show your thanks to us.
All the things that Trump said to Zelensky, basically, but we're saying it to everybody else in the world.
There's that dimension, too, so that even if you clear that hurdle and you're quote-unquote one of us, we know you're not really one of us.
And it marks those people.
It would guarantee...
To mark them as never being fully assimilable, as never being part of the real or authentic America.
And that, again, is the thing we talk about all the time, about national identity.
Who are the real and authentic Americans?
Who can fit into that?
Who doesn't have to try?
They just are viewed as stepping right into it, the Afrikaners.
But if you go through this process, yeah, you might get citizenship.
You might get legal status.
But you will always have been the person who had to humiliate yourself.
in order to be recognized.
People of color know this story through the military.
So I have told this, I have talked about this on this show so many times, but when people celebrate the all-black regiments, when people celebrate the regiments that fought, even though they were being marginalized at home, you know, when I think of the Japanese-American outfit, the 442nd, 100th Battalion that fought in World War II, and friends, some of you know the story, some of you don't, but the...
The 442nd is the most decorated outfit in American history.
American military history, the 442nd, 100th, is the most decorated.
They fought in a way in World War II that is the most courageous and brave you will ever, ever, ever discover in American military history.
Okay, I have to hold back tears when I talk about them.
I have to hold back tears when I meet, like, you know, people in my community, most of them have passed now, who fought in the 442nd.
But there's great reservation in the Japanese American community to celebrate the 442nd 100th because what you're saying is, hey, while the rest of the Japanese were put in camp at home, these guys fought in the military and they proved that we are real Americans.
And in the same breath, I can say it's hard to be more choked up and proud of the 442nd as a Japanese American.
And more angry that you have to prove yourself an American by dying on hills in France in the middle of nowhere so that they will count you as a citizen.
And that's exactly what you're saying, Dan.
And until you come back.
I mean, you come back, you leave that battlefield, you come back, and you are, you'll understand what I'm saying, you're still just a Japanese American.
You are still marked as different from the real or authentic Americans, and it's exactly that.
It's a reenactment of that.
I think it's not accidental that it reenacts and reencodes this well-wrought history that you're highlighting with, as you say, we could look at all different kinds of minority communities and groups and special battalions and so forth.
The fact that they were in special battalions, like, that's the point that you're making, and I think it's spot on.
Just to close this out.
So here's Christy Noem, who the Daily Mail and the Daily Beast report.
Here's Christy Noem, who suspended TPS for 9,000 Afghan folks in the United States.
She was before Congress this week.
So, here's what happened.
I'm reading from Yahoo.
A gay man who sought safety in the United States was instead disappeared into one of the most notorious prisons in the world.
On Wednesday, a sitting member of Congress demanded to know why.
Robert Garcia, who is the first out-gay immigrant elected to Congress, confronted Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem during a hearing in front of committee.
He asked about Andre Jose Hernandez Romero, a Venezuelan asylum seeker who hasn't been seen or heard from in more than a month.
He entered the U.S. legally, passed a credible fear interview, and awaited a court hearing.
Dan, he was a refugee in the ways they claim the South African folks are refugees.
He was fleeing violence.
He entered legally.
He was trying to get a hearing.
Can I stay here as a protected person?
Can I be here so that I can not be killed in my home country?
Instead, ICE agents transferred him to El Salvador's notorious Sekat prison.
When Noam was asked about this, she would not...
She wouldn't do any of that.
She was asked repeatedly if she could just do a wellness check.
She wouldn't do that.
Our asylum applications are different than the granting of asylum, and I don't know the specifics of this individual case.
This individual is in El Salvador, and the appeal will be best made to the president and to the government of El Salvador.
This is not Ice Barbie, man.
This is a cosplay Nazi.
This is the most psychopathic thing I've heard in a long time.
That you're going to sit here and allow 49 white people into the country, you're going to tell 9,000 Afghans to get out, and you're going to say about this man who is in this country, according to a legal process, I don't know where he is and I don't care.
Go ask the president of another country.
This is...
You all might wonder what it was like when the Nazis had no empathy and no concern for human life.
This is it.
This is it, period.
Like, I don't know how else to say it.
And I don't know what's going to happen on our airwaves anymore.
You know, like, I don't know when the day's going to come where when I say things like this, I'm going to have to be afraid for my own safety and my own whatever.
but I'll say it now.
Kristi Noem wins this week, Dan.
There's a lot of contestants, but she wins this week for...
The least empathy, the most psychopathy, and the most disgusting display I can think of, of inhumanity.
You want to have a reality show, you want to tell the Afghans to get out, and you want to say, I don't care about this man who might be dead.
I have so many words in my head right now I want to say about her that I'm not going to say.
I'll throw it to you and then let's close this out.
Just to circle back around to the theme that I'm talking about on It's in the Code, a theme that you've talked about, that that's the badge of honor now, is to have no empathy or sympathy for others.
And that that is, again, just quiet parts out loud, the kinds of criticisms that religious conservatives and MAGA folks in our worlds have denied for years.
It's just now out in the open where to be heartless, to be cruel is...
It is the badge of honor.
It's what we're seeking.
It shows that, I don't know, that we're tough, that we're real Americans, that I don't even know what it's supposed to show.
But to your point, not having empathy is exactly the goal.
It's the aim.
It is by design.
All right, y 'all.
Let's take a break, and we'll come back and talk about the $400 million plane that the president accepted as a gift this week from Qatar.
Be right back.
Okay, so I think most of you know this story.
This story's been in the headlines a lot this week.
I don't feel like we need to go over the details.
You know, Trump doesn't have time to go around the country.
He doesn't have time to go see Americans.
He doesn't have time to travel domestically.
The only places he really travels domestically are to his golf courses or for his rallies.
But he did have time to go to Doha to meet with folks in Qatar.
And to accept a $400 million palace in the sky.
There has been so much commentary about this as just a stunning display of crossing the emoluments clause, accepting foreign gifts.
And it has recalled, to me at least, Hunter Biden and the laptop.
He's doing this all out in the open.
And I think...
A laptop.
Like, I just want to compare.
It's like a $400 million...
That would be a hell of a laptop if you were going to talk about this.
Air Force Colonel Moe Davis says we couldn't accept a cup of coffee and a donut at a contractor site because of the appearance of impropriety.
There's a lot to say here.
I want to keep this brief.
I want to go to judlegume at popular.info, and he says this.
Qatar is the second largest purchaser of U.S. military equipment just behind Saudi Arabia and has taken a keen interest in ongoing access to high-tech weaponry.
In March, the Trump administration approved the sale of eight MQ-9B Predator drones and a large package of bombs and missiles to Qatar, who, Dan, many have pointed out this week, I'm sure most of you listening have heard this, is in some way an ally of Hamas.
Arming Qatar with advanced unmanned aircraft, a development that may not be welcomed by all of its neighbors, marked a policy shift for the United States.
Included in the deal were 200 joint direct attack munitions and all kinds of other stuff I'm not going to read.
This is controversial due to Cutter's ties to radical groups, including, as I just mentioned, Hamas.
There's something, though, that I want to just say that I think gives us insight into Trump's mind about this and why he cannot fathom how the rest of us think this is a bad thing.
So this is Larry Glickman on Blue Sky, and he said something, Dan, that I think is really insightful, and I'll throw it to you after this.
Trump believes that spending money is a sign of weakness.
This is the same logic as his claim that last week, the precipitous decline in shipping volumes at the country's ports is a good thing, not a bad thing, because we lose less money.
So Trump keeps claiming that, like, we're not paying money to China, and therefore we're winning, but we're also not getting all the stuff we used to get from China or from Canada or from Mexico or other places as the tariff set in.
Back to Larry Glickman.
Rather than exchanging money for goods, which is always a loss, he thinks it is better to get them through intimidation, coercion, corruption, extortion, and bribery.
This explains his obsession with deals.
A magic process far superior to market transactions.
So he's against spending, not as an advocate of thrift, but because he wants a zero-sum concession.
This is why the pencil limit he suggested last week is telling.
Remember, he's like...
Your kids will have fewer pencils and they might have fewer dolls and we've heard all this discourse.
The pencil was Leonard Reed's and then Milton Friedman's example of mutually beneficial market-based exchange.
Trump can't imagine exchange in which one party isn't harmed.
That's the key to me, Dan.
Trump thinks every exchange is either win or lose.
Dan, have you ever had a time in your life?
We've all had this.
I don't even know why I'm asking you.
We've all had times in our life where we felt like we got cheated.
Like, for Mother's Day the other day, my mom, my mother-in-law, my wife, and my kids, and I went somewhere, and it was a touristy place.
And we did the thing where you pay for parking.
This is like the most middle-aged dad thing ever, and I'm not going to get into it.
I'm not going to tell you how much I paid for parking last Sunday, and I'm not going to, like, worry about it.
But I left that parking lot feeling like, wow.
And I know that if I had spent half an hour looking for a free parking spot, my kids would have been like, Off the walls by then, my wife would have been like, you know, Brad just parked the car, which I'm not mad at her about.
She's probably right.
And everything would have been ruined.
So, but single me in the car by myself, Dan, I would have spent, I don't know, how long looking for a free parking spot.
There's other times you do stuff and you feel like you got a great deal because whatever you paid for was like no money.
I remember sitting in a pub in Slovakia with my friend and we ordered beers and they were like 50 cents.
And I was like, wow, that's awesome.
Then there's times, Dan, where you feel like, you know what?
I paid this much.
That felt like a fair trade.
I gave you $10.
You gave me that thing in exchange.
I feel pretty good about it.
The point Larry Glickman is making is Trump cannot fathom that kind of exchange.
Hey, Dan, you gave me this.
I gave you that.
I feel good about it.
You got what you wanted.
I got what you wanted.
Let's shake hands.
Hey, thanks, man.
Appreciate it.
I'll see you later.
For Trump, it's either humiliate or be humiliated.
That's why he thinks gifts are like a no-brainer.
I think he honestly cannot fathom why we think this is corruption.
And everyone else, there's so many people in Trump world.
Ben Shapiro, if this were Hunter Biden, we'd be singing a different song.
Laura Loomer was like, I don't like this, okay?
Yeah, if Trump can alienate Laura Loomer on an issue, like, I mean, where are we?
I don't even know what world we're in.
What do you think?
I've been talking a long time.
Go ahead.
Sorry.
Well...
I think I paid too much for parking at a concert the other night, and I had to just get myself to be like, just park, and don't drive around for 20 minutes and miss the first act and all that.
So, yep, I get it.
I think it's a great point.
What I wrote in my notes is just, to anybody that looks like a quid quo pro, it's like, oh, you want all this hardware, you're going to give me a $440 million jet.
Okay, that sure looks improper.
Somebody could say, well, it's to the U.S., but it's kind of not.
It's talking about going to his library or whatever when he leaves office.
He's not even clear that it's going to actually belong to the U.S. or whatever.
You've got...
All these security people are like, we're going to have to literally disassemble the entire plane to be able to make sure that it's not bugged or sabotaged or something else.
There was also...
The weird pressure this put on Boeing to speed up its delivery of new Air Force One jets, and that was a story this week.
But those are put together, as I understand, basically like the Secret Service looking over everybody's shoulder as they build the plane and stuff and making sure that it's safe and it's got whatever, I don't know what all safety features.
Air Force One has to be an oval office, like a mobile oval office.
That is where George W. Bush went after 9-11.
It's an emergency command center.
That's what it's designed for, among other things, is that, I don't know, if something happens and Washington, D.C. is destroyed or something, the president has a mobile command center.
So the idea being like, yes, it's a luxury jet or whatever, but it's not set up right.
It's a safety concern.
It's a security risk.
All of these kind of things.
Never mind the obvious implication that the reason Cutter's getting what it's getting from the Trump administration is that they gave...
Not the U.S. a gift, not some sort of trade agreement, not something, to go to your point about making deals and actual fair exchanges, not a, for example, I don't know, we're going to lean on Hamas to come to the bargaining table with Israel or something like that in return for some military aid from the United States.
These are all the kinds of diplomacy and international deal-making that one might expect.
No, Trump gets a big, shiny toy.
And he gets his ego stroked, and so he pays with U.S. contracts and U.S. goods.
It's everything that you're talking about, and I think the fact that—two facts.
Number one, again, that MAGA world is so opposed to this.
GOP members in Congress are increasingly coming out opposed to this.
That's something we just haven't seen.
You talk about a self-inflicted error that Trump didn't need.
Number one, but number two, that doesn't even matter to him.
He cannot look past.
This shiny toy.
He made that comment.
He's like, well, we could stupidly turn it down.
He's kind of like, what kind of idiot would turn down a jet?
Even that's not pressure on him because he's just the kid with the big shiny toy who sees it as a win, to your point.
He has fleeced them.
He's gotten something out of them.
It doesn't cost him anything personally to give the military hardware.
So it just feels like a win all the way around.
Again, I guess that's our theme today.
Things that make the obvious things really obvious, the things that everybody says is how it works and bring them into view.
This brings everything about Trump's personality and psyche into full view as President of the United States.
All right.
I'm going to land this plane, so to speak.
Hey, hey, Friday.
Okay.
Here we go.
Now, number one, we could be talking about all the other ways he's grifting.
All of the meme coin, crypto stuff.
And we don't have time.
We're not going to do it.
There's other people who are much more into those worlds that are going to break that down.
So is the plane a distraction from that?
In some sense.
I also think the plane is just a really good example of everything you're talking about.
This is the same week that we have a couple of things.
The FAA is in crisis.
The FAA is an absolute crisis.
Newark Airport is diverting planes and flights from Newark because it does not have enough personnel to make it safe.
There was a 90-second outage in Denver where there was a loss of contact and communications, okay?
So the air traffic controllers could not communicate for 90 seconds.
There are people speaking out saying, yeah, I work for the FAA as an air controller and we're not doing well.
Sean Duffy, okay, has been saying this week that the administration is turning to eBay to buy parts for old equipment.
Okay?
You can't make it up.
You just can't make this stuff up.
He said this on Meet the Press, saying the FAA has turned to eBay because we can't buy parts for new for some of the agency's aging systems.
Okay?
Now, he's been blaming the Biden administration and Pete Buttigieg.
So, if Uncle Ron wants to tell you that, just ask Uncle Ron, like, how come for four years when Biden and Buttigieg were doing this, We didn't have Newark Airport basically shutting down or Denver losing contact with its air traffic.
And what did they do when Trump and Duffy took over?
They flipped a switch and everything's falling apart?
Does that logic hold?
Only if you're the worst kind of conspiracy theorist.
In addition, let's just keep talking about planes if you want to.
In addition, four fighter jets have now fallen off aircraft carriers under Pete Hegseth's watch.
If you want to talk about DEI.
So, plane travel in this country is increasingly unsafe.
Now, I don't have time to unpack this, but I'm going to say, Elon Musk wants the FAA contract.
This, to me, smells like one of those situations where Duffy and Musk and Trump want air safety to go bad so they can justify Musk getting the contract.
And it's just one of those examples of where Musk is polluting the waters so he can get the contract and get the billions of dollars from that.
Last point about Trump and the airplane.
If Trump is a patriot, why didn't he say to Qatar, instead of the plane, give me $400 million?
And I'm going to give that to, I don't know, the FAA.
So we can revamp our flight safety and the parts we need.
I'm going to take $400 million and I'm going to inject it here into the American political system.
Dan, this is the thing that nobody ever talks about.
Like, when Trump was selling Bibles, why?
Just give us the Bibles.
You're Mr. Rich.
Josh Hawley said on TV this week, I can't imagine why Donald Trump would need any more money.
If you're that rich and you're that full of cash, just give people Bibles so they can be saved by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
If you don't need an airplane, why not just say to Cutter, give me $400 million?
And we're going to inject that right into Veterans Affairs.
But nah, that's not what you did.
And I know, everyone listening knows, you don't have to, like, email me.
But, like, you can put these in terms for people if you're the Democrats, Dan.
Couldn't you get on TV and say, Pete Hegseth keeps losing planes and Sean Duffy makes it so your plane when you fly isn't safe.
And Donald Trump's accepting.
A $400 million plane from a foreign nation.
Does that seem right to you?
We're not perfect as Democrats, but here's what we've done when we were in power.
We didn't accept bribes in the form of airplanes, and the airplane you flew on was safe.
Make America great again.
I don't know, Dan.
I don't know.
Maybe someone should call me and I'll write some commercials, but that doesn't seem hard.
You know?
Back to you, because I'm going to lose it.
Tell us about Oklahoma.
It's that segue.
So, we enter further into the dystopian world that we now exist in.
We talk about Oklahoma a lot, and I realize this, and I feel like I still feel a kind of connection to the place.
I went to college there.
I have friends who are from there.
But it also just continues to emerge as another one of these kind of MAGA playgrounds.
Oklahoma just set new academic standards, you know, and we get what those are.
It's the kind of things that your state legislature says that says, you know, high school seniors need to be able to do this and this and this or eighth graders, you know, what have you.
But the social studies standard for high school U.S. history in Oklahoma is now built around the big lie, among other things.
And so this is what it says.
Students must now learn about, quote unquote, as you said, you named this as we opened up, discrepancies, end quote.
In the 2020 election.
And here's what the standard says.
The standard reads that high school seniors must, quote, identify discrepancies in 2020 election results by looking at graphs and other information.
Okay?
But here we go, Brad.
Here we go, like, down the rabbit hole to, like, every conspiracy theory that there was about the 2020 election, including the sudden halting of ballot counting in select cities and in key battleground states, the security risks of mail-in balloting, That's the whole quotation of what the standards require.
It is championed by none other than Ryan Walters, the state superintendent, whom we've talked about a lot, same guy that requires Bibles in classrooms and all that stuff.
And he wants to ensure, quote, The seniors are able to give, quote, an accurate and comprehensive view of historical events, end quote.
So they need to know about the discrepancies and so forth.
These standards were rushed through in February.
There was a meeting of the legislature and the school board and all this other stuff.
New board members have since asked to return the standards to the board and re-examine these because they were rushed through.
The state legislature in April declined to do this after a closed-door meeting with Walters, so determined that they're going to keep these standards.
And then the Oklahoma House speaker said that this is about teaching students to, quote, think critically, end quote.
There's so many things about this.
It's always masked in the language of think critically.
Everybody who, like, is an election denier, a vaccine denier, a climate denier, you have it, always says, always says, we're thinking critically.
Thinking critically is about more than just imagining conspiracies or looking at information that isn't there and so forth.
To your point, there's now going to be a generation or generations of high school students.
These are people who are going to go to college.
They're going to go out into the work world.
They're going to continue voting.
They're going to buy houses.
They're going to do all the things that grown-ups do, believing that the big lie is, in fact, historical fact, that it's built into the real history of the United States.
There's a lot to say about that.
What I want to do is the contrast again.
You know, a minute ago they said if this was the Biden administration, what would they have done?
I want to just note some of the things that this highlights.
It says an unforeseen record number of voters.
A lot of people voted, Brad.
That's weird.
It's weird that lots of people voted.
We've got to look at that.
The unprecedented contradiction of, quote, bellwether county trends.
In other words, counties that kind of are usually predictive of how an election is going to go or they're going to go a certain way.
They didn't.
And so they say, well, these trends, I don't know, they all broke.
It's just wishful thinking.
We've been talking about that stuff in 2024 since the election.
We have talked about minority voters who voted against what?
Bellwether trends.
They did things that they normally don't do.
We talked about how Trump flipped every swing state from the election before.
And you know what's not happening on the left?
Nobody is saying the election was stolen.
They're saying, wow, we must have really screwed some stuff up and the economy was bad and all this other stuff and rational explanations for this.
This is Conspiracism 101 written into the high school standards in the state of Oklahoma, and it's not going to be the only place where this kind of thing happens.
Could just lose my mind.
I'll throw it over to you to have you lose your mind.
Well, I'll just give you something from Virginia.
This week, Virginia Governor Glenn Yunkin vetoed a bill that would have allowed African American history courses to count toward high school graduation requirements.
So this would have allowed students and parents to choose African American history or AP African American studies as substitutes for either World History I or World Geography that satisfy the history and social studies credit that students must complete.
So, a lot to...
There's a lot to say there, but this to me is the flip side.
One is going to teach you that 2020 was stolen.
The other is going to make it such that African-American history doesn't count, and therefore many students won't choose it, and therefore it is present in its absence.
And so it's the flip side of the same coin, and we see this over and over and over again.
And I'll just say, look, what's happening in Oklahoma is the kind of thing you expect out of a regime.
It's what you expect in the Soviet Union.
What you expect somewhere where they are teaching the official history of the party rather than history that corresponds to actual evidence and data and sources.
And that's where we are.
If you can contour reality to your liking and you have power, then this is how history will be taught.
And unfortunately, that's what's going to happen in Oklahoma.
All right, Dan, what is your reason for hope?
My reason for hope?
And I've sort of talked about this before and continue to watch this, is that the Doge cuts are hitting a dead end in Congress.
We talked about this before, but there is no political will in the GOP to actually enshrine into law the work that Elon Musk and Doge have been doing.
No doubt the Trump administration, there are articles about this, the other strategies the Trump administration is trying to undertake to make these have a lasting effect, many of which are probably illegal.
Most legal analysts think that they're illegal.
They'll take a long time to challenge, etc., etc.
But I do take hope in the fact that whether they want to or not, even the GOP is recognizing that these cuts are damaging, that they're negative, not just damaging for their party, but they're hurting people, they're hurting states, they're hurting the government, and they have no will to actually put them into law.
And I continue to...
We see the headwinds increasingly blowing against the Trump administration, and I take hope in that.
Mine comes from yesterday at the Supreme Court.
There is a birthright citizenship case brewing at the Supreme Court.
And yesterday was mainly about procedure.
But Amy Coney Barrett came out swinging against the Trump lawyer and lost its mind.
If you checked X yesterday, they were just calling her.
And then yesterday was like, she's from the devil!
She's demonic.
It's just, yeah, it's just like, geez, Lance, like, okay.
So I don't know what's going to happen in that case, but Coney Barrett is showing some, and she has for some time, some form of kind of not going with the program completely.
Now, that doesn't make her whatever you want to call her in terms of a justice, but it does, at least it's a little glimmer.
There's others out there, but for now we'll say that's it.
Go sign up for Sarah Mosliner's seminar.
That is happening in June.
And if you are a subscriber, look for an email about a discount for that seminar.
It's all about purity culture, race and embodiment.
It hits on so much of what we talked about today in terms of gender and white supremacy and how purity culture is the daughter of those things.
Sarah is a world's expert on this, has written a great book called Virgin Nation about it and has a new book coming out.
This year that looks at purity culture even further.
So you can see that at our website, straightwhiteamericanjesus.com slash seminars.
Other than that, we'll be back next week with the weekly roundup with It's in the Code and some great stuff on Monday.
