Weekly Roundup: Oklahoma's Catholic Charter School and Hegseth's Prayer Service
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Dan discusses recent developments on the separation of church and state, focusing on the Oklahoma Catholic Charter School case and its split decision in the Supreme Court. He also analyzes the implications of Pete Hegseth’s Christian prayer service at the Pentagon, highlighting concerns about religious liberty and the mixing of church and state.
Additionally, the episode examines JD Vance's criticisms of Supreme Court chief Justice John Roberts and addresses ongoing tensions between the Trump administration and the judiciary. The script also touches on Trump's claims of white genocide in South Africa and the alleged evidence presented during a meeting with South African President Cyril Rama.
The episode concludes with reflections on populist rhetoric and the role of evidence in shaping perceived truths.
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Axis Mundi Hello and welcome to the weekly roundup of Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought.
And today I am your only host.
Our beloved friend and co-host Bradley Onishi is under the weather and made, I think, the wise decision to sit out this week.
And so everybody will get to hear from just me for the next, you know, hour or so.
See how that goes.
I've had a couple friends who have told me that they're confident in my ability to talk by myself for an hour.
I think that's a compliment.
I'm not sure, but we'll see how it goes.
I want to thank everybody for listening, everybody tuning in.
I thank all of our subscribers, everybody who supports all the different things that we do.
As we always do, encourage you, if you would, if you're not a subscriber and that's something that you're in a position to do, you value what we do.
To consider doing that, we work really, really hard to bring a lot of content to you in this really unsettled time and to address a lot of issues.
You're what makes that possible, and we want to keep doing that.
So I'll just throw that out there.
And again, on my own today, so we're just going to dive in and we're going to see what, you know, what the world has given us to talk about this week.
I want to start with a couple topics that relate to issues having to do with separation of church and state.
Issues having to do with the attempt to really enshrine America as the Christian nation that the Christian nationalists and MAGA faithful believe that it ought to be.
And I want to start by picking up on a story that we've talked about before on this podcast, and that is the Oklahoma Charter School, Catholic Charter School, first charter school to try to get public funding.
As we've discussed before, this was struck down by the Oklahoma Supreme Court.
Appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court and they made their decision, issued their decision this week.
And it was an interesting decision for a number of reasons.
We noted before, when we talked about this, that the conservative SCOTUS majority, the majority of conservative scholars, have assembled quite a number of decisions at this point that have, from our perspective, from my perspective, radically weakened the separation of church and state.
That have undermined a lot of, I think, prior court precedents and so forth that have really given voice to or sought to enact the notion that America really is fundamentally a Christian nation and that specifically, whatever it can mean to say that there's a separation of church and state, it can't mean that the government somehow doesn't sort of privilege Christianity.
And I think there's really no other way to look at the kinds of decisions that have been made.
And reach that decision.
And of course, that's why those on the right, they would agree with that assessment and think it's correct.
Those of us who are not on the right would look at that assessment and decry it, as we have been.
So that's some of the background.
So this was an eagerly watched case.
We've discussed how a number of the precedents recently set in the court seem to set the stage for a further erosion of the separation of church and state.
But one of the kind of wild card issues in this case, as it came before SCOTUS, Now, she hasn't given a reason for this, nor is she required to, but a number of outlets and observers have noted this.
She was a former University of Notre Dame law professor and had a lot of ties with the attorneys representing the Oklahoma School, St. Isidore of Sevilla School.
And so the idea is that this is probably why she recused herself.
That was sort of a conflict of interest and so forth.
And so I just want to set on the side, good for her for doing that.
We have had plenty of stories about the Samuel Alitos and the Clarence Thomases of the world who refuse to recuse themselves under any circumstances and certainly, in my view, should have.
So Amy Coney Barrett recuses herself from this case.
And so it sort of set it up in an interesting way.
And it turned out to be significant that she did because the court deadlocked four to four, meaning that four justices said that this Oklahoma school should receive public funding and four justices said that it should not.
What that means is that the lower court ruling, in this case the Oklahoma Supreme Court, the lower court ruling against the school, so the ruling that said the school cannot receive federal funding, will stand.
However, a split decision, in this case a 4-4 decision, Does not set precedent.
So in other words, this doesn't count as the Supreme Court reaching the decision that the school shouldn't receive public funding.
It sort of defaults back to that lower court judgment, but it means that it is still not settled case law.
So the issue will almost certainly be back before the court.
Some Christian charter school somewhere is going to make sure this gets back before the court.
Hopefully, they will think in a form that doesn't lead Amy Coney Barrett to recuse herself, the hope then being that the majority of conservative scholars We'll allow them to receive public funding.
But on that note, another interesting part of this decision was that it was unsigned.
So it was a 4-4 decision.
It was unsigned.
So we don't know how individual justices voted.
And one of the interesting points about this, in case you're like, well, you know, some of it's pretty predictable.
I'm pretty confident how Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas and Kavanaugh voted.
And I'm pretty sure I know how Jackson and Sotomayor voted.
But somebody in that conservative wing of the court essentially defected.
To get a split decision, one of the conservative justices had to side with the liberals, and we don't know who that is.
And so that's a really interesting point about this.
It's been a lot of speculation.
It's just speculation.
That's all it is.
That it was Justice Roberts, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, because he asked really sharp questions of both sides during oral arguments.
But there's an element of reading tea leaves to this.
We just, we don't know for sure, and it's not clear that that's what happened.
And sometimes oral arguments are not a good, predictable indicator of how the court is going to decide.
So the long and short of it is, for now, those of us who would advocate a separation of church and state for any number of reasons are feeling good about this decision, recognizing it's going to come back before the court.
Those who oppose any kind of notion of separation of church and state, the MAGA people of the world, the Christian nationalists, and so forth, no doubt are already plotting some other case, some other school, some other precedent to try to bring before the court and revisit this.
So that's sort of an update on that, obviously related to religion and politics and so forth.
But there are a couple other interesting points that I want to highlight here.
One is...
If you're looking for those ruby-red states, Oklahoma is high up on that list.
Their Attorney General, Bettner Drummond, he sued prior to all of this, he had sued to block the school's creation.
So at the very outset, when they were starting this charter school, because a charter school is a public school, Which means it brings up all these issues of public funding and so forth.
So he had sued to prevent the formation of the school, obviously lost.
The school was formed and so forth.
But he responded to the Supreme Court decision and he said this.
He said the Supreme Court proved to have fought against this, excuse me, proved to have fought against this potential cancer in our state.
And that he would continue, quote, protecting our Christian values and defending religious liberty.
Sorry, I'm having a hard time speaking today.
In other words, as you know, if you pay attention to American politics, as you know if you listen to the podcast, the language of religious freedom and religious liberty has largely been co-opted by Christian activists who use that language to argue for the privileging of Christianity.
We're going to come back to that.
So here you had a Republican attorney general, so conservative, in one of the reddest states in the country, who said that this decision helped fight against the potential cancer in their state, that he was proud to have done this, that he would continue protecting Christian values and defending religious liberty.
And I've talked about this before, but it comes up every now and then, and I think it's important to recognize his definition of Christian liberty, of religious liberty there.
It is far different from what is now typical on the American right of what is typical of many conservative Christians in the country, but it is the actual sort of more historically robust sense of religious liberty.
And I've talked about this in the past.
Religious liberty, as formulated in the colonial period and the early American period by its staunchest advocates, was not the notion that...
It was the notion that the government should just stay out of religion.
The government had no business telling religious people what to believe or how to practice, but also that, on the flip side of that, religious people had no claim to special government treatment.
And the most robust defenders of religious liberty were not just talking about Christians.
They would specifically cite Christians.
in particular Jewish and Muslim people, sometimes Hindu people, some of these other religious traditions that they knew about as being recipients of those same protections.
So freedom of religion in this country has meant, yes, the freedom to practice one's religion unless and until you violate the rights of somebody else in doing so, but also protecting freedom from religion, that if people are irreligious,
And of course, that bleeds out into the notions that if you're using public taxpayer funds, you're not going to use those funds to privilege a particular religious tradition.
So here you have the Oklahoma Attorney General viewing this as a win for religious liberty, as do I. On the grounds that it kept federal funding or public funding, I should say, from a Christian charter school.
So it's worth noting, and it's worth noting, I think, the interesting point that that is coming from one of these high-level officials in the state of Oklahoma.
I don't have a nice inside line into Oklahoma politics.
I'm interested to see how that sort of plays out over time as this continues to sort of unfold in that state.
But it's worth noting.
Significant Supreme Court decision unsettled.
It doesn't carry the weight of precedent.
It will almost certainly come back before the court.
Be curious to see how it goes.
We have seen also that Amy Coney Barrett has been willing to kind of go against that conservative majority.
We've talked about that.
So we'll see what happens for now.
Good news for those of us who affirm true religious liberty, including the freedom from religion.
Including the freedom for Catholic schools to, for example, not have to worry about government interference that comes with federal funds and so forth.
So, it's the first issue related to church and state I want to talk about.
Got another one coming up here in just a moment.
Let's continue on this theme of separation of church and state, the notion of America as a Christian nation.
This week, same week that SCOTUS issues its split decision, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth led a Christian prayer service at the Pentagon.
During work hours.
Now, we know Hegseth.
You know Hegseth.
You've heard a lot about Hegseth.
He has not masked his intent in configuring the U.S. military as a Christian army.
This is the language he uses.
There have been lots of articles about this.
If you're interested in that, just go Google around.
Take a look.
You'll find some of those.
But he led a Christian prayer service.
And this was the title.
This was the name of the Christian prayer service.
It was called the Secretary of Defense Christian Prayer and Worship Service.
That's what it was entitled.
And I want to pause on this, okay?
Because sometimes I talk to people, maybe it's people of a little bit older generation, a generation when it was just taken for granted that you were going to have prayers at football games or to start the school day or whatever.
Maybe it's from parts of the country where this wasn't as contentious as it is now.
Maybe it's people who remember a time when they probably didn't know anybody who didn't identify as Christian because it was just such a pervasive part of the culture they're part of or whatever.
And these are the people who will often say, Okay, but what's wrong with that?
It's Christian.
I mean, it's not a bad thing.
Christian has good teachings, good morals, etc., etc., etc.
What's wrong with that?
And this kind of notion that it's not excluding anybody.
It doesn't harm anybody.
It doesn't violate anybody's rights.
And I want to push back on that.
I want to look at why it is that this matters.
Why it is that even many Christians, I don't know, Maybe the Oklahoma Attorney General would object to this.
I have no idea what his view on this is.
I object to this.
Let's look at this.
The first thing is, it's specifically defined as a Christian prayer service.
The way that this often tries to sort of squeak through in public venues or state-sponsored events, whether that's an individual state, like a public school or something, or in this case, the United States, the national federal government.
Is to argue that there's somehow some sort of civic or non-sectarian dimension to the religious components.
It makes sense that they're not distinctively Christian.
We're not distinctively or specifically privileging one tradition over another.
Well, not here.
Not for Pete Hegseth, because this is a Christian prayer service.
So no doubt about what the aim here is.
And it's not just that.
It's a Christian prayer and worship service.
I can't tell you how many times I've had conversations with people who say, look, I don't know why people get so worked up and upset about, I don't know, the prayer and the PA system before the high school football game.
It's just asking for everybody to be safe, have a good game.
It's sentiments that we can all agree with.
It's not, you know, it's just your prayer against players being injured or hopefully there'll be good sports or, you know, all of this sort of stuff.
What could be wrong with that?
And I get that at a certain level.
I do.
Okay?
But this isn't just a prayer service, a prayer and worship service.
If you attend this, you will be participating in a Christian act of worship.
You will be participating in a Christian service.
So again, it's not non-sectarian, and it's not taking place in some private venue or context.
This is at the Pentagon during work hours, okay?
This service was also televised on the Pentagon's internal TV network.
It was posted online.
You can go find it.
You can go watch the service if you want.
And here's what Pete Hegseth had to say about this.
Pete Hegseth said a few things that I want to highlight.
This is the first one.
He said, and I quote Pete Hegseth, Defenders of this are going to say, hey, you said it was voluntary.
Right there, said it's on a voluntary basis.
I don't know what you're so worked up about.
Okay, sure, says that.
We've all probably had the experience of being in some workspace when your boss or your boss's boss, or I guess if you're Pete Heggseth, it might be your boss four levels removed or something, says, well, no, no, no, this is voluntary.
But you know that if you're not there, They're taking note of that.
You know that if you aren't there, you're going to miss out on opportunities later.
They know that if you're not there, you might be singled out for, you know, a lack of enthusiasm or not supporting the workplace or bad morale or any number of different things.
You get the same thing all the way down to, like, grade school level when, like, you know, you can't require students to say the Pledge of Allegiance.
So a student can opt not to or they can leave the room or they sit down.
They're marked and targeted at that point as like the weird student who for whatever reason won't do that or the kid who doesn't love America or something like that.
So there's real pressure here if you are in this workspace to participate in this.
And he says that at the same time, I hope you'll let those you work with know about it.
I hope you'll pass the word and I hope that we'll get more people here in the Pentagon during work hours, during their work day to come and participate in this Christian worship service.
And unless we think those fears are overblown, let's remember that this is the same Trump administration that is on this crusade, and I'm going to use that word, a crusade, to seek out, quote-unquote, anti-Christian bias across federal agencies.
And we've talked about this in prior episodes.
The descriptions of that anti-Christian bias are often sort of like a perceived animus toward Christians or Christianity.
So if your coworker goes to this...
They tell me about it.
They invite me to say, hey, I'm going to go head over to the worship service.
You come, and I'm like, no, I've got some things I've got to work on, or I'm trying to get some stuff done ahead of the weekend, or whatever, whatever your reason is.
Are they perceiving you as anti-Christian now?
Are they going to argue that you're suggesting they're not doing their job right because they're Christians?
Or whatever.
And who's that going to go to?
What are the consequences going to be?
So this is not, in my view, It's innocuous or voluntary.
To say this is voluntary doesn't sort of make sense, okay?
Let's look at some more that Hegseth says.
In case somebody wants to make that argument, like, what's the harm here?
What's the difference?
This is just good moral principles and so forth, and just asking God to watch out for America or whatever.
Hegseth also said this, and he said this while standing behind a podium with the Defense Department logo.
So he is standing behind a logo.
That has the U.S. Department of Defense logo on it.
A position that marks him as the Secretary of Defense speaking in his capacity as the head of the Department of Defense.
He said, quote, this is precisely where I need to be.
Exactly where we need to be as a nation at this moment in prayer on bended knee recognizing the providence of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
End quote.
He doesn't speak just for himself.
Now, somebody else could say this.
I can hear the person, well, are you going to say Pete Hegseth doesn't have freedom of religion?
He's not allowed to practice his faith?
You're going to tell him he's got to leave his faith at home?
He's got to keep it out of the workplace?
No, not saying that.
But here he's not speaking for himself.
He says, this is exactly where we need to be as a nation.
Folks, I'm going to suggest, if you are standing up, you are the Secretary of Defense, you are in the Pentagon, you are during work hours, you are standing behind a podium, With the Department of Defense logo, you are speaking in that capacity, and when you say, this is where we need to be as a nation, you are making a normative policy claim.
And if somebody wants to say, no, no, no, no, he's speaking as a private individual, I'm sorry, you're not.
Not when you have that role, and you're in that space, and you're in that location, speaking in that capacity, I'm sorry, you're not just speaking as Pete Hegseth, private individual.
You want to go on a speaking tour and speak at churches on Sunday mornings and give a speech and talk about this is who we as a nation need to be?
Fine.
More power to you.
I'm still going to disagree with that.
I'm frankly still going to have problems with that when somebody who's that high profile of a federal official says something like that.
But I think you would probably be within your rights to do it.
Here, you are representing the U.S. government.
So when he says this is where we need to be as a nation, that's what he's claiming.
And again, the sectarian nature of this is right out front.
On bended knee, he wasn't actually on bended knee, he says on bended knee, recognizing the providence of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
It's not even the generic God's providence.
It's not the kind of the deism of the American founders who will talk about the providence of our maker or something vague like that.
Nope.
This is the providence of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
There's nothing non-sectarian about this.
This is not quote-unquote civil religion as it has come to be formulated.
This kind of, again, non-sectarian, non-specific sort of civic appeal to religion.
This is Christian.
Period.
This is Pete Hegseth, the Christian, saying, I as Secretary of Defense am standing here in the Pentagon saying that this is the Christian direction we as a nation need to be on.
And so that's what he said.
Okay?
Now, Again, let's imagine somebody's, well, all right, fine, you're just being too hard on Pete Hegseth.
He's a man of faith and blah, blah, blah, trying to provide an opportunity for Christians in the workplace to celebrate their faith and so forth.
Well, the majority of the service wasn't actually offered by Hegseth.
He spoke, he sort of introduced it.
The majority of it was run by his personal pastor, his pastor, who is the pastor of a Tennessee church with a documented history of leaders who argue for society's need to be led by Christian men.
And I don't mean Christian people, I mean Christian men.
And we know, you know, you've listened to this podcast enough, you've listened to other podcasts, you've gone, you've done your homework, you've read the stuff, you know who Pete Hegseth is.
He believes, in his vision of Christian America, that a Christian America is an America under essentially male headship, that the same thing they're supposed to hold in the family, male headship and so forth, ought to hold at every level of society.
So this is the person who's leading the service.
Again, just another indicator of where Hegseth is in all of this and the significance of it and why this is really concerning to so many people, including, I would presume, lots of people within the Pentagon.
So this happened this week.
Why do I call it a separation of church and state issue?
Why do I think...
This is not somebody who's fighting against Christian discrimination in the Pentagon or the workplace.
This is somebody who is effectively making Christianity, and not just Christianity in some generic form, but their vision of Christianity into.
The de facto religious position of the Department of Defense.
That's Hegs' privilege as Secretary of Defense is to speak for that department.
That's his job.
His job is to represent that.
His job is to be such that when he speaks, he is the voice of the Department of Defense and, by extension, the voice of the Trump administration.
So when he stands in his official capacity as Secretary of Defense, again, folks, it's during work hours.
It's at the workplace.
It is behind a podium that bears the logo of the Department of Defense.
When he speaks in that way, when he invites this person to come and lead a Christian prayer and worship service with this model of Christianity, what he is declaring is, this is what America is.
This is what the American armed forces.
Will be.
This is the issue.
Now, a final thought here.
For those who might, I don't know, maybe you'll talk to Uncle Ron.
Maybe you'll talk to somebody else.
And they'll say, no, no, no, no.
I still think this is just about individual rights.
This is about letting Christians practice and so forth.
I want everybody to think about those workplaces where you're at, where you're not allowed to take personal calls.
It's something pretty simple, pretty basic.
You get caught during work hours taking personal calls.
Somebody's going to take note of that.
You might get written up for it.
Maybe if you're on like an hourly, if you're paid hourly, you'll be docked some of that.
You'll have to work an extra period of time or something.
You can't take personal calls.
You can't be texting and so forth.
When you're at work, your phone is off, it's in the drawer or whatever.
You want to go on your lunch hour, your non-work time, and take personal calls?
Great.
Obviously, weekends.
Outside of work hours, holidays, whatever.
Of course, you can take personal calls.
But when you're at work, being paid to work, that's what you're supposed to be doing.
You're supposed to be working.
That's the logic of that.
And even if, let's say you've got, I don't know, let's say you get a 15-minute break in the afternoon and you want to check those texts or you want to go make that call that you've been waiting to make or check your voicemail, whatever it is, typically you're also not really expected to do that at your desk.
Maybe there's an employee lounge.
Maybe you step outside.
Maybe go into the restroom.
I don't know.
The point is you're not sitting at your cubicle or your desk where everybody else is going to hear it and you're going to impact everybody else's workday.
What does that mean?
It means that what is yours, your personal time, is also privatized.
There is a sense in which when you enter the workspace, you are setting aside your rights and privileges as a private individual.
And expected to conduct yourself in a particular way and serve the interests of that business.
And on your time, you can do what you want, but also in a different space.
The location piece of this is really significant.
Now, take all of that and transpose it to what happened here at this event in the Department of Defense at the Pentagon, in the workplace, during work hours.
Led by essentially the CEO of the Pentagon.
It violates all of those kinds of standards, and it does so around something where individuals are explicitly protected from a government imposition of religion by the Constitution.
That's how the First Amendment has very consistently been interpreted.
The federal government cannot mandate that you participate in a religion.
This is what Hegseth is essentially doing.
And yes, again, people say, well, he said it was voluntary.
I've already talked about that.
The pressures are real.
The workplace pressures to participate are real.
And we've already seen this again with the Trump administration pushing their hunt for so-called anti-Christian bias.
So, really disturbing story.
We'll see.
We'll see.
Does it turn into a monthly event?
Is there pushback?
What happens with this?
We don't know.
But another issue related to church and state that sort of stood out this week.
All right, let's move on from separation of church and state to some other things.
We're going to talk about J.D. Vance for a minute, because what would a Weekly Roundup episode be if we didn't get to talk about J.D. Vance?
This is also, though, related to the Supreme Court.
A lot of Supreme Court stuff this week.
To set this up, a couple of weeks ago, Chief Justice John Roberts, same Chief Justice we mentioned a few minutes ago, speculation that perhaps he was the sort of conservative defector, as it were, when it came to the Oklahoma Charter School.
A couple of weeks ago, he made comments that were public, and he doesn't speak a lot publicly.
It's not a super common thing, and so this was sort of newsworthy.
He was doing an interview.
And he defended, in those comments, he defended the independence of the judiciary.
And it was in the context of being critical of GOP efforts, in particular, to impeach judges whose decisions they disagreed with.
So we've seen a lot of this.
In Trump's second term here, he's run into major roadblocks with different courts, especially federal courts, blocking some of his initiatives.
And so they go after the judges, they threaten to impeach them, and so forth.
Okay?
He did not mention the Trump administration specifically, but he went on to make comments I think everybody recognizes, everybody across the political spectrum that he recognizes as a shot against the Trump administration, against the rhetoric on the right, against the practices of the right, seeking to impeach judges, even imprisoning a judge for, they argue, illegally impeding Trump's efforts at anti-immigration and so forth.
This is what he said when he was asked to expand on his view of judicial independence.
So he says, you know, you have to have an independent judiciary.
And he said, can you say more about that?
So he did.
He said this.
He said, it's central.
The job of the judiciary is to obviously decide cases.
But in the course of that, to check the excesses of Congress or the executive.
And that does require a degree of independence.
End quote.
So again, when he said...
What's the point?
Why is it important?
Why does it matter?
What is it?
He essentially said he asserts that the judiciary is a co-equal branch of government, and he says that its role is to, quote, check the excesses of Congress or the executive.
In other words, he's advocating for the power of judicial review of the other two branches of the government.
And this was well received in the context, a context of mostly judicial.
There was applause from the crowd.
We also know, and we've talked about this, and again, you can Google around and find it, this is in line with public opinion.
The public largely supports the idea that courts are independent and that courts should, in Justice Roberts' words, check the excesses of Congress or the executive.
We've seen this.
We've seen that this is, I think, this is one of the places where public opinion actually weighs on the Trump administration.
Because Trump and others in the administration routinely say that they will abide by court decisions, whether they do or not is a whole other issue.
But they say that they will.
They say that they're not against the courts or against judicial review and different kinds of things like this.
So, popular position.
It was popular in that room.
So enter J.D. Vance.
J.D. Vance, who I think has emerged as something of a kind of wannabe intellectual among the MAGA elite, certainly has emerged as the attack dog, Trump's attack dog for policy positions and administration positions and so forth.
He weighed in on this in a New York Times interview.
He was asked about this, and he described Robert's statement, the statement about checking the excesses of Congress or the executive.
He described that statement as, quote, A profoundly wrong sentiment.
A profoundly wrong sentiment.
Now, he said some other things.
He said that checking the power of the executive was only half of the court's job, so he did kind of, you know, give a nod to that.
But he said, quote, the other half of his job, his, right, Roberts, notice that, not the court, but his, the other half of his job is to check the excesses of his own branch.
So you've got this notion that Robert's job is not really to check the others, but to make sure to bring the judiciary into line with the administration.
And he also made it clear that he was primarily thinking about immigration.
Immigration, again, has been one of the real sticking points here.
The Trump administration has been stymied by the courts on other issues, but immigration, obviously one of Trump's signature topics and issues.
But it's on immigration, where the Supreme Court and other courts have really put up some roadblocks, and it has really frustrated Trump.
So he said this, Vance did.
He said, you cannot have a country where the American people keep on electing immigration enforcement, and the courts tell the American people they're not allowed to have what they voted for.
End quote.
And then, finally, he accused the courts of attempting to, quote, quite literally, This is worth decoding.
That's what I do.
I decode rhetoric.
You listen to It's in the Code, you know this.
A few things about what Vance says here I think are worth noting and worth paying attention to.
One of the overarching things, and this is why I emphasize that phrase when he said, describes Robert's position as a profoundly wrong sentiment.
What's that a sentiment, an opinion, a feeling, an intuition?
Notice that when Vance talks about this, he talks about that.
He talks about overturning the will of the people and so forth.
He doesn't make any reference to the law.
He doesn't in any way say that what Roberts says is unconstitutional, that Roberts is misinterpreting the Constitution.
I understand there are real constitutional debates to have about that.
That's not what Vance does.
There's no language here of when he says, you know, that they need to check the excesses of his own branch.
He doesn't appeal to law and order.
He doesn't say, you know, even the courts need to appeal to law and order and they're legislating from the bench and whatever.
The kind of rhetoric of a bygone era of the GOP and the right.
He just says, yeah, it's the wrong sentiment.
It's the wrong way to feel about it.
He's not even trying.
To make a legal argument.
J.D. Vance, Yale Law School graduate, right, likes to lean on those credentials when it's useful to do so, taking on, rhetorically at least, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, but not on legal grounds, on grounds of a bad sentiment.
So there's no element here that this is wrong, legally speaking, that Roberts is misunderstanding the Constitution, the constitutional limits or anything.
It's just that it's a wrong sentiment.
And I think it's significant that you have in this dispute about one of the most fundamental legal issues currently present in the United States, there's no reference to law here.
There's not even an attempt to try to argue that the law or Constitution are on their side.
And I think that that's telling.
What I think it tells us, what it illustrates, is something we have seen, which is this larger insistence that Trump and MAGA are simply not subject to the rule of law.
Now, we've talked a lot about the theories of the unified executive and how the executive has this kind of almost unlimited power and authority that's given to them by the Constitution and so forth.
But when that argument comes from all the MAGA folks, what they're really talking about is Trump, right?
In the here and now nitty gritty of this, it's about the Trump administration and their policies.
And it's a way of trying to argue that the Trump administration literally is not subject to the rule of law.
And I think this is illustrated in Vance's response here when he doesn't make any reference to law at all.
There's no effort here to show that it's legal.
There's no effort here to show that the administration is abiding by law.
He simply sidesteps the issue.
And I think that that's really telling.
I think it tells us an awful lot about this administration and their position on these topics.
The other aspect that I think is really significant about these statements, he keeps appealing to the will of the people.
This is very much an instantiation of the populist, not democratic.
It's something different.
The populist appeal to, quote unquote, the will of the people.
And I want to remind us what he said again.
So he said, you can't have a country where the American people keep on electing immigration enforcement and the court tells the American people they're not allowed to have what they voted for.
And then he goes on to say that it quite literally overturns the will of the people.
Okay?
The will of the people is lifted up as paramount here.
Well, first of all, let's bring that together, what we just talked about.
It means that the will of the people is not subject to law.
That is a limitation, folks, on the will of the people or a group of people or some subset of the people is, yeah, that's fine.
But there are laws.
And if people don't like the laws, the will of the people, quote unquote, means you need to put people into office who will rewrite the laws and write them into the way that you want.
But we, the people, are in fact subject to laws in this country.
Again, he bypasses all of that.
And that is like populist rhetoric 101.
The will of the people is paramount.
And if it violates the constitutional order, so be it.
It's the will It's the will of the people.
If it violates the rights of others, so be it.
It's the will of the people.
And this is why I argue that this is not a democratic appeal to the will of the people.
This is an appeal of populism and nationalism.
I think it also plays on other ways that we've seen this play out in the administration.
Again, When he says, you can't have a country where the American people keep on electing immigration enforcement.
He makes it sound like Trump has won 27 times or something like this.
When I hear that, you know, the American people, they just keep on voting for this.
They keep on voting for immigration enforcement.
They keep voting for it, and you just keep standing in the way.
They keep voting for it.
You're overturning the will of the people.
Folks, that's the logic of the mandate.
And we have heard that rhetoric since Trump was elected.
It's a mandate of the people.
It's a mandate to enact his policies.
Mandate, mandate, mandate, mandate.
From a president who didn't win a majority of the popular vote.
He won a plurality.
He couldn't get half of the people who voted to vote for him.
Now, he got more than Kamala Harris.
I want to be clear on that.
I recognize that.
But he didn't get a majority.
That's not a mandate.
It essentially means that if you sort of average all the Americans who voted, it's a 50-50 split.
It means that as many people voted against your policies and against the things you said you were going to do when you got into office as voted for them.
So stop with the mandate stuff.
And anytime somebody appeals to the quote-unquote will of the people, I think that's a really telling point.
When Vance says here you're violating the will of the people, the people here is less than half.
Of the U.S. population.
Less than half of the people who cast a vote.
And that is why I say this is populist logic.
This is populist rhetoric.
I talk about this all the time.
Some of you may be tired of hearing it.
I don't know.
When populists and nationalists talk about the people, they don't mean everybody.
They don't literally mean all the people.
They mean some subset of the people in a given nation.
When Vance says the will of the people, when the Christian nationalist says the will of the people, when they say Trump has a mandate, the reason they can say that is that for them, what they're talking about are what they consider to be the real Americans, authentic Americans.
And who are the real Americans?
They're the ones who voted for Trump.
Everybody who didn't vote for Trump is suspect.
Everybody who didn't vote for Trump is not really an American.
They are not really part of the people.
This is why Trump, as a populist leader, feels no need or obligation to govern on behalf of all of the American people because all of the people who are nominally American aren't real, authentic Americans.
He only has to serve those who voted for him because those are the real Americans.
And this is what is at work in Vance's logic and argument here.
So when he says it's overturning the will of the people, he doesn't mean everybody, and he specifically doesn't mean that laws would exist to defend a minority of the people.
That the language of rights really comes into play, really comes into its own, when it is protecting a minority against a majority.
That's what the Bill of Rights is for.
The reason we have freedom of speech is so that even if most people don't like what we have to say, if most people would rather that we didn't say it, they can't simply tell us that we can't.
The rights language is there.
It's intended to protect minorities of people.
Obviously, everybody has rights, but they come into play when you're talking about those who are at risk of having their rights taken away by a majority.
Vance, Sidesteps, all of that.
It is populist logic because non-people don't have rights.
So if we're going to divide America into the true Americans and everybody else, we don't have to worry about laws.
We don't have to worry about legal protections.
We don't have to worry about rights.
Those other Americans don't count.
So if somebody points out to him, and this is why, if you're having a discussion, and you say, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on.
Only 49% of people voted for.
What about the other 51% who didn't?
Vote for that.
They're just going to write them off because they're not real Americans.
And then the other piece of this that I think is explicit is right on the surface of what Vance says, and again, this is populist logic 101, is that the will of the people, which is embodied in the Trump administration, if you want to say, well, what is the will of the people?
Look at all the executive orders coming out of the Trump administration.
That's what they are.
Talked about this before, that within populism, The leader, the national leader, in this case Trump, is sort of the embodiment of the people.
So Trump's will is the will of the people.
The will of the people in this model, it's absolute.
If the people want something, then fundamentally this is the law.
And that is the logic that Vance explicitly advocates here.
It doesn't matter what the Constitution says.
It doesn't matter what legal precedent is.
It doesn't matter what laws actually say.
If the will of the people read the will of the MAGA faction wants something different, that has the force of law.
It's the same reason we have a president who doesn't legislate.
He just issues executive orders.
His word is the rule of law.
So it's reflected when Trump, this logic of the will of the people being absolute, it's reflected when Trump evades questions, for example, about the legality of a third term.
And he's been asked this for a long time, and oftentimes, go back and look at his response, he'll say, well, you know, a lot of people, a lot of people want me to run.
I hear from people all the time who tell me I should run.
An awful lot of people want me to run.
That a lot of people argument, it's almost like, well, you know, the will of the people is, the will of the MAGA elite is that I should run again.
So the legality of it doesn't even enter in because the will of the people is the law.
And this wasn't just popular rhetoric.
There were legal arguments or legal thinkers who argued that Trump ought to be able to run for a third term.
And one of the arguments that would come up over and over was essentially that he was just essentially so popular that he should be able to run again.
If it was the will of the people, something as flimsy as the Constitution shouldn't stand in the way of the will of the people.
Folks, the Constitution, and specifically the rights enshrined in the Constitution, are absolutely intended to guard against the will of the people.
By which I mean, they are there to make sure that a simple majority can't be.
Cannot determine everything about what we can and cannot do in this country.
Cannot disenfranchise us.
Cannot silence us.
Cannot force us to practice a religion we don't want to practice.
Cannot prohibit us from practicing a religion that we do want to practice.
Can't prohibit us from speaking our mind, from printing whatever we might print, from assembling together to protest, to doing all of those things.
That is why those rights exist.
And so anytime somebody like J.D. Vance comes along and starts appealing to the will of the people to circumvent and sidestep any appeal to law or to order or to the constitutional order, that's populism 101.
And that is what we heard from Vance this week.
That heightens the rhetoric, this tensive rhetoric that exists currently between the courts, the judicial branch, and the executive branch as they explicitly challenge the authority.
of the third branch of government, the third co-equal branch, to exercise that co-equal authority.
Once again, another topic we'll be watching.
This is one we've been talking about since before Trump was elected.
I think it will be with us as long as he is in office, this relationship between the Trump administration and the courts.
All right.
One final issue I want to talk about this week.
We're going to stay with the Trump administration.
Then this ties together with with, you know, these statements by Vance implicit in this notion of basically getting to sort of create reality of creating the truth of things that the legal order just is what the MAGA faithful says.
I want us to hold on to that idea of just sort of creating the truth, of fashioning the truth as we want it to be.
We talked last week about the Trump administration's relocation of 59 white Afrikaner South Africans.
To the U.S. as refugees, their privileged status, they were fast-tracked and so forth, and was based on the discredited claims of a white genocide taking place in South Africa.
And I talked about that last week.
This week, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa visited the White House.
And, you know, it starts out, as you might expect, exchanging some pleasantries outside the Oval Office, talking about golf, this sort of thing.
And then he's escorted into the Oval Office by Trump.
Where he is ambushed, and there have been lots of accounts of this, lots of discussions of this, and ambush is the word for it, okay?
He was essentially sort of ambushed by the Trump administration and confronted with supposed evidence of this white genocide in South Africa.
So it's clearly planned and choreographed by White House staff.
There's been a lot of reporting about this, about like sort of how they were prepping for this and so forth.
And what is the evidence then?
So basically he was forced to sit there and watch, And be confronted with evidence that there was in fact this white genocide taking place.
A genocide that journalists have not been able to see any evidence of.
Human rights organizations say it's not happening.
This completely made up white genocide in South Africa.
What was the evidence?
There was a video.
There was Trump with his lots of people argument when he claimed that he has heard from thousands of people on the issue.
And printed articles.
Trump famously likes hard copies of articles, and he had these printed out articles he's kind of waving around in this interview and so forth.
So what was that evidence?
I mean, this is like, you know, this is like the Stop the Steal campaigns.
This is all of this.
You're like, we hear from the right all the time they got the evidence.
Cool, show it to us.
Awesome Trump administration.
Show us the evidence of this white genocide that nobody else has been able to find.
The video.
Was video of an opposition politician, Julius Malema, calling for violence against white farmers.
The Trump claiming that he's heard from thousands of people, of course, that can't be verified.
That's the, again, that's just the version of his a lot of people say kind of argument.
I hear from people all the time who say this.
You're like, well, what people?
Everybody.
Well, like, when?
Like, when did that happen?
All the time.
Well, give us an example.
That's so many I can't even pick.
It just happens all the time.
That kind of argument.
The article included a screenshot from Reuters of a so-called dead white farmer.
And this was like kind of captured on TV cameras and so forth.
Here are the problems.
Number one, we talk about the lot of people appeals.
You can't verify those.
They're intentionally vague and unverifiable.
The image of the dead white farmer, quote unquote, taken from South Africa, it was from the Congo, from a whole different country.
Rama Fosa responded to the video and tried to stay calm.
I cannot imagine.
A lot of composure, especially by all accounts, did not see this coming.
Did not know this was going to happen.
Rama Fosa was talking about the video and what he said.
He pointed out that South Africa is a multi-party democracy.
The video is shown as an opposition politician.
It is not a government leader.
It's not Pete Hegseth saying America is a Christian country.
They need to be on bended knee before Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.
It's not anybody in the South African administration putting forward policy.
It's an opposition politician claiming for, yes, something that's really, really problematic and violent and so forth.
But he said this is not South African policy.
And he also pointed out that opposition leaders are free to, quote, express themselves.
In other words, he said, yeah, you're finding somebody saying things that I, the president of South Africa, don't agree with.
It's not South African policy.
But we're a pluralistic, multi-party democracy, and people can say things like that.
Okay?
What does it mean?
It means that Trump was using truly fake news to advance his agenda.
All of the so-called evidence was fabricated and ridiculous.
And again, if I'm analyzing this, what I find fascinating is that this is all out in the open.
They circulated the articles that were posted.
They played the video like they really, it seems, do think that this is evidence of this kind of fever dream they have about white people suffering in South Africa, even though.
Even the opposition leader calling for violence against white South African farmers, it's not the same thing as actually committing genocide.
The image, and I'm really going to talk about this image in the article, it's from another country.
The a lot of people say thing, just no, sorry.
In a court of law, it's the kind of thing they would call a hearsay.
We just have no way of verifying it.
So any kind of clear-headed, non-ideological observer would know that there simply isn't evidence to support Trump's claims.
And yet the Trump administration says not only is there evidence, we're going to publicly air it and publicly share it and circulate it as evidence.
And what I think we have to understand, because, you know, I talk about this a lot in, you know, different parts of It's in the Code.
I teach about this.
People reach out to me all the time and they ask, like, how do you try to argue with or persuade these people when, like, they just won't respond to evidence?
And I think that we have to understand how evidence works for them.
Okay?
And I think here's how we normally think about it.
I think most of us, especially if we're thinking about being in a context where we're making a claim and somebody might disagree.
Or we need to show that there's a reason to accept our claims as true and so forth.
We recognize the need for evidence.
The idea is that the truth, what is true or what the facts are, is determined or confirmed by evidence.
In other words, if we want to know what is really the case, that emerges from the evidence.
Let's look at the evidence and draw a conclusion.
And that conclusion that we draw based on the evidence is what we're going to take as fact or truth until we have some other reason to take something else.
But Trump operates.
The Trump administration operates.
The actors who serve Trump operate on a populist and nationalist logic that reverses this order.
For them, evidence is secondary.
What do I mean by that?
It serves a deeper, prior truth that we already know.
If you are part of the MAGA faithful, if you are part of the Trump administration, you know.
You know that white people everywhere are under threat.
And we just know that white South Africans are being slaughtered.
So when we're confronted, when somebody says give us evidence, the evidence we're going to give is evidence in service to the truth.
We're not trying to find the truth by looking at evidence.
No, we already know what the truth is.
And what we offer as evidence, what we take as evidence, what we will accept as evidence, is in service of a truth that we already know, a truth we're already convinced about.
So the truth basically creates the evidence.
Evidence doesn't allow the truth to emerge.
The truth creates evidence.
Which means that it doesn't matter if we use an image from Congo.
If somebody says, well, that's an image from Congo, well, you know, it doesn't matter.
There's lots of other stuff.
This is going on.
An image from the Congo, from an entirely different country, can be used as evidence because we know the truth already.
And that's where you get the claims that we can always find other evidence.
So it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter if it's from the Congo.
It's true.
We know it's true.
You're like, well, how do you know it's true?
You just showed me evidence that it's not happening here.
We know it's true.
And we've all experienced this when we confront somebody with counter-evidence and they say that that kind of response is like, well, I don't know about that, but...
The truth for them is not subject to evidentiary value or validation because it's already true.
They just know that it's true.
So that's the logic that's here.
It's a populist logic.
It's a nationalist logic.
I think it drives the Trump administration.
It is also, in my view, a certain kind of Christian logic.
Because, folks, this notion of I know the truth and then I will, like, manufacture evidence that will count as evidence because it supports the truth.
And I know I talk about the Bible a lot and how it works and how it's used within this kind of Christianity, but it's really relevant here in my view.
Because if you engage the Christians of this kind, they already know what positions are true.
And so then when, you know, when they say, well, here's what the Bible says, yeah, they'll pick some verses out that serve as evidence for that position.
And then when you say, well, yeah, but like, what about this verse over here or this one here or the context of this or this historical question about the text or whatever, it can be dismissed because they're not actually reaching the positions they do because they read the Bible.
They're reading the Bible the way they do because it supports their positions.
So if you want to know, Why it is that the kind of logic that's operative in the Trump administration, where we start with a truth that we just feel to be true, and then we will manufacture evidence to support it after the fact.
If you want to know why so many conservative, biblicist Christians are drawn to that, I think one of the reasons is it is a style of reasoning, a style of rationality.
A kind of logic that they have been socialized into for decades, many times their entire life.
They have seen exactly this form of reasoning and logic and rhetoric play out in pulpits and in youth groups and in Bible studies and from their parents their entire life.
So when you have a presidential administration that comes along and says, here are things that we just know that they're true.
We feel that they're true.
And they'll just cherry-pick evidence that they say supports that.
This is why it resonates on such a level with so many American Christians.
And again, a theme that I highlight a lot for those who want to say that this is fringe, who want to come at me with the, well, yeah, but not all conservative Christians, lying, whatever.
I get it.
They don't all support Trump.
But there's a deep resonance between the style of reasoning of many religious Americans.
And the populist, nationalist rhetoric and logic embodied in the MAGA movement.
And I think, as I always say, I think we have to understand that.
If we understand this movement, if we want to understand its appeal, if we want to try to figure out how to combat it.
All right.
Running out of time here.
Time for a reason for hope.
I laugh.
This week Trump talked a lot about his Golden Dome.
I just, folks, I can't get over, like, Trump's fixation with gold and, like, what he's done to the Oval Office and all this sort of stuff.
But as the Trump administration has fired federal workers, as they threaten to deny vulnerable Americans food and health care with his big, beautiful bill working its way through Congress and so forth, Trump has also been boosting his so-called desire for the so-called Golden Dome defense system.
It's a desire for a $500 billion missile defense system.
There were images this week of him in the Oval Office, like this graphic, this kind of picture of the Golden Dome, like literally this Golden Dome over America, protecting us from missile attack and so forth.
Here's the problem for Trump.
It would require resources and cooperation from Canada, an ally that he has largely alienated.
And this is my reason for hope.
I am legitimately concerned about...
I'm legitimately concerned about the tariffs level on Canada.
I'm legitimately concerned about Canadian attitudes against Americans.
I'm legitimately concerned about rising nationalism in Canada.
You get this kind of pro-Canadian nationalism taking root in opposition to Trump's rhetoric about annexing Canada, making it a 51st state and whatever.
I'm concerned for friends and colleagues who are Canadian, who live and work in the United States.
Lots of concerns here, okay?
So the irony of this, that it would require cooperation from Canada, I think, is really key.
Trump says it would be the U.S. helping Canada, but every analyst is like, look, if you're going to have the so-called Golden Dome, you're going to have to have Canadian radar.
You're going to have help from Canadians in detecting missile attacks.
You would have to be able to use Canadian airspace.
And folks, surprise, surprise, Canada is just not buying in.
So what does this do?
How does it play out?
I think it gives Canada real political leverage to push back on Trump and some of his claims and some of his practices and policies.
I think it also shows the limits of his rhetoric.
He can say that this would all be to Canada's benefit, but the reality is there can't be his so-called Golden Dome without Canadian aid.
So I take hope in that because I think it really does help to create some leverage, some pushback for Canada against Trump and the Trump administration.
I think that's important.
I want to thank you all for listening.
It's a lot of me today, so thanks for sitting through that.
Assume, barring anything, I think Brad will be back with us next week.
Regardless, we'll be back with all of our normal stuff.
Good material from Brad on Monday.
It's in the code on Wednesday.
Another weekly roundup next Friday.
We're getting ready, putting together the supplemental episode for subscribers.
So that'll be coming out probably in the next week or so is the plan.
So working on that, some of you have heard from me as I've gotten back to you about emails and ideas that you've had and so forth.
So please, check all that out.
Again, thank you for all the ways that you support us.
Thank you for listening, and especially to our subscribers.
