Weekly Roundup: Taco Trump Loses on Immigration and Tariffs + the History of Family Values Propaganda
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Brad and Dan discuss recent Trump administration actions on immigration, international student visas, and Republican strategies to undermine universities like Harvard. The discussion extends to a growing resistance in Oklahoma where parents utilize GOP-pioneered parental rights laws to opt their children out of biased educational content.
The episode also highlights broader historical and ideological themes around 'family values,' a strategic point of alignment among conservative Christian groups since the 1970s. To wrap up, the guys examine the legal challenges and setbacks faced by Trump's tariffs and broader MAGA policies, including a humorous note on the coined term 'TACO trade.'
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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.
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If you are looking for a new way, To dig in critically to these issues, this is the perfect opportunity.
Check it out now.
This week, the Trump administration announced new actions against immigrants and those here on student visas.
They also tried to stop Harvard from enrolling international students altogether.
This fits into the larger picture of Trump's tariffs and his war on immigrants who are here legally or not.
We unpack all of that and discuss how it fits a larger picture of Trump losing in court and having no real plan for the long term.
We then go to Oklahoma, where parents who do not want their kids taught the big lie in social studies courses are turning the tables on conservatives by claiming that they have parental rights to pull their kids out of those classes because they don't want them exposed to conspiracy theories and misinformation.
This leads to a larger discussion about where this came from, the idea of the pro-family, family values propaganda that we've been exposed to in this country for more than half a century.
Unpacking that history explains why it is so hard to counter in our public square, whether in schools, whether in protests, whether in issues surrounding reproduction, gender, and sexuality.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is The Straight White American Jesus Weekly Roundup.
The Straight White American Jesus Weekly Roundup Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, and it is great to be with you on this Friday.
Joined today by my co-host, Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
And it's good to see you, Brad.
I saw you came in looking kind of windswept.
I'm like, man, he's probably been doing something cool.
Outside in California.
And it's like, nope, just kids.
Kids.
Overwhelming kids.
Yeah.
So, you know, you're in it.
Kids spilling stuff on you.
Kids sneezing on you.
Because you're still kind of in that phase where you're basically just perpetually sticky.
Yeah.
Like you're just never not sticky somewhere.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's always a Cheerio on my foot.
There's always snot on my shirt.
There is always oatmeal somewhere on my arm, so it's...
Yeah.
You're maybe not quite to the place of always like stepping on Lego pieces though yet.
So like you've still got, you know, it's basically like walking across glass anytime you're like trying to cross like a kid's room or something.
We're getting there.
All right.
We're done.
It's over.
Some of you are like, please stop.
Today, we're going to get into what's going on with sort of the Trump administration having its eye on China, revoking visas.
Talking about Harvard and the trying to bar Harvard from enrolling international students.
The larger picture there.
Then want to open up a kind of can of worms by zooming in once again on Oklahoma, where there are parents who are using the language of parental rights to try to make sure their students are not exposed in the social studies curriculum to the big lie, which is now part of the official teaching of Oklahoma's public schools.
We'll talk about how and why they're trying to do that via parental rights.
But for me, that's going to open up this whole historical can of worms that can lead us down from the religious right to Paul Weyrich.
And hopefully, Dan, provide a decoder ring for understanding this whole family nexus of issues that is so hard to counter on the part of anybody who doesn't buy into them.
And I'll explain that later on.
So for now, let's jump into this week's kind of set of happenings as it relates to immigration, China, visas.
Where I want to live for a few minutes here is another string of legal setbacks for the Trump administration this week.
And I want to sort of, you know, we'll summarize those.
People have probably kept up with them, but things come fast and furious, you know, and sort of take a look at that.
And I'm not trying to take us into, I don't know, policy areas where you and I are not experts.
I'm not going to delve into deep...
But I do want to try to look at what I think this reveals about the Trump administration, the MAGA agenda, how it works.
I think the way it illustrates things that we've been saying about the Trump administration for a really, really long time now.
And I think it's going to set the stage for the places you're going to take us as well.
So I'm going to start with the first of these, as I say, a sort of string of court cases.
And they're related to some of Trump's big signature topics.
So immigration.
As well as this effort to bring higher ed to heel, higher ed viewed as this kind of, I don't know, safe space for liberal anti-American wokeness and whatever.
And so the ongoing battle with that typified, I think, most prominently in Harvard, as well as a significant loss on tariffs.
And I think these things tie together in some ways.
But let's talk about the Harvard case first.
Last week, as you mentioned, the Trump administration banned Harvard from enrolling international students.
Which is something like 27% of the Harvard enrollment.
So, on one hand.
On the other hand, if somebody's like, oh, poor Harvard, Harvard is like, what, a 5% maybe acceptance rate, so it's not as if they couldn't admit other students.
But 27% of the student body.
And it said that current students would have to transfer.
Basically, they were going to revoke Harvard's ability to have international students, period.
Harvard sued, saying the move was a retaliation for their refusal to comply with the administration's extra-legal ideological demands.
The administration had come and demanded a bunch of information.
Harvard had said that they complied with, like, sort of all federal guidelines and policies and so forth, and they didn't have to do this, and so forth.
So the administration sued.
There was a sort of immediate, sort of short-term injunction put in place to stop this and pause it until they could appear in court this week.
The Trump administration, I think, was nervous about this because they actually backpedaled some.
And we're going to come back to this notion of Trump backpedaling when we get to my reasons for hope.
They backpedaled some and said that they'd give Harvard 30 days to respond to the demands.
So, like, Harvard sues and the administration suddenly gets a little, like, nervous about how this is going to go.
And they're like, oh, hold up, we'll give you 30 days, like, you know, to try to, I think, avoid an injunction.
The judge ruled, the judges, Judge Allison Burroughs, the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts, Judge Trump accused them of judge shopping.
It's like six miles from Harvard.
It's the court that you would go to.
She ruled that that was insufficient.
She's the one who temporarily halted the order, but she extended that order indefinitely and said she wants to maintain the status quo.
In other words, she pretty politely said that she didn't trust the Trump administration not to go back on this 30-day promise and so forth.
She ordered the Harvard lawyers and the Justice Department to come up with a framework whereby Harvard could continue enrolling students.
And she said this.
She said, quote, it doesn't need to be draconian, but I want to make sure it's worded in such a way that nothing changes, end quote.
So that's where we are with that.
Trump administration tries to stop foreign students from coming to Harvard.
Right now that's on hold.
I want to enter one other figure here, not directly related to the court case, but Secretary of State Marco Rubio also announces this week that the U.S. would be, quote, aggressively revoking, end quote, the visas of Chinese students.
Especially, he said, those with connections to the Communist Party or studying in quote-unquote critical fields.
So a whole bunch of stuff related to student visas and students.
I read right before we came on that the State Department has now issued new guidelines for vetting student visas and things like that.
That would be related to this.
Here's some takeaways.
I want to throw these out.
I want to hear what you think.
I want to come to tariffs in a bit.
But the first thing is, I think what we're seeing, and we've seen this forever with the Trump administration, is their public ideological statements undermine their positions in court.
Trump can't not say the quiet parts out loud.
It's all he does.
It's all he does is boast about bringing people into line and so forth.
Everybody knows that they are targeting Harvard, I think because of what Harvard sort of symbolizes, but also because Harvard refused to go along with these things.
And it's undermining their positions in court.
It's difficult for them.
I'm not an attorney, but it's pretty obvious.
It's difficult to argue that you're putting forward a policy of, like, national security and stuff when you're targeting one university.
National security, but only for Harvard.
And I think that that's a thing that's coming out, and that's going to relate to some other points I want to make later.
But they can't publicly be targeting folks and then have their attorneys go into court and say, oh, no, no, no, it's not targeting, it's not retaliation, it's not these sorts of things.
The bigger issue, and we've talked about this, it's not about illegal immigration.
We've talked about this.
We're not the only ones who've talked about this.
For years, people have said, look, you can talk a good game about wanting to take the most dangerous immigrants out and criminals and so forth, but this is about whiteness.
This is about making sure that America stays a white country.
This is about making sure, again, to use the quote from Trump's first administration when he said that we had too many people coming from shithole countries.
And he wondered why more people from white European countries weren't immigrating to the U.S. He was talking about Scandinavia in particular.
That's what this is.
And so it's targeting specifically Chinese students.
China, rather, provides one of the largest cohorts of international students to the United States.
And for me, we can see this in the stipulations that Rubio makes.
Chinese is a single-party communist country.
So they want to say, we're not going to let anybody in who has connections to the Communist Party.
We've seen how the Trump administration likes to interpret very broadly on these things.
That could potentially be anybody from China, because you don't have a choice.
It's not as if you can be like, oh no, I'm part of the, I don't know, Chinese Democratic Opposition Party or something like that, as well as the definition of quote-unquote critical fields.
What is a critical field?
what is going to be defined as a critical field.
We're going to come back to that as well.
But I think that this is very clearly in line with his broader immigration policies as well as trying to get rid of wokeness.
It's all about keeping America white.
The anti-DEI initiatives, this effort to silence sort of Palestinian dissent or pro-Palestinian voices of dissent on college campuses.
To bring college campuses to heal, to stop Chinese immigrants, all of this for me is part of this broader MAGA vision of a white America.
Your thoughts on Trump or China or Harvard or any of that?
Yeah, a couple thoughts.
One is there's something floating around that's at least just worth mentioning.
I'm not going to pontificate on it for a long time, but Michael Wolff, the Trump...
And this is a revenge tour.
Now, I'm not going to spend a ton of time on that, but it tracks, if you know Trump and his understanding of resentment and revenge and retribution.
It's worth bringing up that Bobby Kennedy, the leader of Health and Human Services, who put Like, they literally had a report that I think they generated with AI of sources that don't exist.
So Bobby Kennedy, the Harvard man, did that.
But Bobby Kennedy did get into Harvard, and if you look up Bobby Kennedy's admissions packet to Harvard, it is like a one-paragraph statement about how he would like to be a Harvard man.
I mean, he literally says, I would like to be a Harvard man.
There's, like, great gravitas and tradition there.
You know, Bobby Kennedy gets in based on that.
Trump doesn't.
Whatever.
Okay, let's leave it.
If you all are interested in those things and you want to go look those up.
There's rumors about Barron Trump getting rejected from Harvard and Columbia, and that's why Trump is after Harvard and Columbia, etc.
Whatever.
We'll leave those.
if you're interested in those things, you can go look them up.
I made a point in my interview with David Graham this week from The Atlantic, and it was in the subscriber segment, so not everybody heard it, but what...
It's all about Project 2025.
Project 2025 outlines two clear enemies of the United States.
One is China and one is woke progressives who are the domestic threat.
And one of the things that he and I talked about is that the American right kind of needs at least one external other in order to...
Christian nationalists, alt-right people, you know, traditionalists, etc.
war hawks, libertarian business interests, those that don't want a dominant China in the global economy, and so on.
I've maintained following Ivan Krashtev and Stephen Holmes that I don't think we are in the era of the China spreading the gospel of communism anymore.
I think there was this Cold War ethos of like, who's going to win?
Who's going to spread their gospel, capitalists, or communists?
I think we're now in a place where China wants to be a dominant global economic entity, but it's not trying to get the rest of the world to be communist.
It's There's a difference, and I hope you all can see that difference.
I think the Trump campaign, though, needs them to actually...
And thus we should be afraid of China and we should reject all Chinese people based on that idea.
And I think that the question of China and American foreign relations is a complex one when it comes to the economy and trade, when it comes to...
And there's like 20 books and 200 hours of podcasting to do on that.
But I think when I hear stuff like this from Rubio and I see what they're doing with Harvard, that's what comes up for me.
I'll bring up one more thing, Dan, before I throw it back to you.
Some folks in our Discord were discussing this last night, and I think it's worth bringing up.
There's a piece at Wired about the Trump administration creating an office of remigration.
And if things couldn't get bad enough, David Gilbert writes at Wired this week about the plan in a 136-page notification document sent by the State Department to six congressional committees for approval by July 1. The Office of Remigration will serve as the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration's hub for immigration issues and repatriation tracking.
Dan, this goes right to what you just said about this being a white ethnostate.
There's a man named, there's been conferences on remigration in Europe.
It's something that Europe has been talking, like the far right, has been talking about for some time.
It's not something you hear about, like, in the colloquial American context, the idea of remigration.
But there was a remigration summit in Milan earlier this year.
There were people there from France and the Netherlands and Germany and so on.
Two Americans attended, and one of them is a TPUSA alum.
So you can kind of see where the American representation is coming from.
But then you have a man named Martin Selner, who's kind of spearheaded this idea of re-migration.
And one of the things that I want to highlight is that in his idea for re-migration, the first phase is you deport, mass deport, all those who are undocumented.
And we're seeing that unfold now.
I'm going to read, though, the second part, and then I'll just throw it to you.
The second phase of Selner's plan, following the initial removal of undocumented immigrants, includes the removal of, quote, migrants who entered the country legally and have a residence work permit or temporary visa, but are an economical, criminal, or cultural burden.
The final phase targets citizens who are seen as non-assimilated.
And it involves passing laws to target parallel societies with economic and cultural pressure.
So here's the figurehead of the re-migration movement outlining the three-stage plan.
The Trump administration just sent to its agencies this remigration outline.
We don't know if it's going to use the three part plan that Selner talked about there, but that is a vision for a.
Thank you.
Visas, etc.
And we've already seen it.
I know that many of you are driving in your car now.
Like, Brad, it's already happening.
I know.
The third part is, get citizens who are economic or cultural or criminal burdens.
Who's that?
Anyone you decide?
People you don't like?
Do you go to Michigan and visit like, you know, large Muslim communities?
Do you go to like...
Who are the cultural burdens?
Well, that is just the echo of the echo of the echo of Chinese exclusion, of Japanese internment.
And also, I was on a meeting with a Black American this week who said, that's grounds to send Black people back to somewhere that Trump imagines they came from.
So, I'll throw all that out there in the mix of everything you said.
Yeah, so just to pick up on that, that language of unassimilated or parallel societies, that's just the anti-multicultural sort of thing.
The opposition to any quote-unquote hyphenated American.
So, all of those, you know, cultural, those populations that identify with a culture of their ancestors or their homeland or whatever, depending on how long.
They've been here and what generation they are, all of that.
But it's rife for targeting.
And the anti-assimilation thing has always been, the language of assimilation in America has always been about white Europeans.
Can you be assimilated, incorporated into white European society?
And, and you know this, Brad.
It's always come hand in hand with the notion that there are certain populations that are unassimilable.
Yeah, exactly.
Because that's how the logic works.
You say, well, everybody's welcome.
Of course, they just have to assimilate.
They just have to assimilate to American values and affirm American values and so forth.
The trick, where it's a rigged game, though, is that you take entire populations that can't assimilate.
People of Asian descent and Asian Americans have obviously experienced this.
Muslims are, I think, one of the preeminent sort of contemporary groups that experiences this.
But I, as you were describing this, of course we should think of the African-American community.
I can hear it now when the right-wingers say, well, you know, they've been here 200 years and they still, like, you know, have their own colleges and their own this and their own that.
And there's a black entertainment network, you know, like whatever, whatever it is.
Anything about Black History Month, anything that affirms African-American identity.
It becomes a sign that they can't or won't assimilate and so should be, quote-unquote, sent back.
And as you say, the chilling thing about that is that it specifically says citizens who won't assimilate or play these kinds of roles, not undocumented people or even permanent residents who won't, but citizens.
So, yeah, so I think I'm with you.
I see everything that's going on with Chinese students and everything else.
It is all part of this larger vision of a white American.
Let's take a break and we'll come back and get into the tariffs and all that.
We'll be right back.
All right.
Fill out the picture.
So what else do we got?
Tariffs and other stuff.
I'm going to bring the tariffs around to some of the immigration connections as well.
But in one of the more potentially noteworthy court decisions, potentially ever, of the Trump administration, this week the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled unanimously, it was a three-judge panel, made a unanimous ruling.
That the Trump administration overstepped its authority with his tariffs and essentially struck them down.
Now, the Trump administration immediately appealed, and the appeals court issued an injunction, and of course the Trump administration declared victory.
Most analysts are like, that was a pretty pro forma exercise.
The appeals court is going to do that until they can hear arguments, which I think is like first or second week in June, I think is when it's scheduled for, so pretty soon, next week or two.
The reason this would be a big deal is if it eventually goes into effect, it would be catastrophic for the Trump administration.
The entire basis of Trump's economic policy, and it also relates to immigration and other things, is built on this mythology of tariffs that he has.
There have also been people, Ancush Cardori in Politico wrote a really good story about why he thinks even the Supreme Court is unlikely to bail Trump out on this.
Partly because the arguments being used against the Trump administration are the same arguments that conservative justices and lawyers and other groups have used against the Biden administration for a long time now.
It's pretty well established.
So it's a big deal, but what I'm interested in is what does it tell us about the Trump administration?
It tells us, and the Harvard case tells us, and the policies on immigration tell us something that you and I have been saying, I think, for a long time, which is that Trump, as a populist nationalist leader, He does not want to govern.
He wants to rule.
And I'll remind people all the discussions you've taken us through of the unified executive theory and all of what is all of that.
All of that is an effort to basically say the president is an autocratic ruler who ought to be able to just claim whatever they want, do whatever they want, and so forth.
And that's what Trump has done.
He's just leveled demands.
That's what we've seen with Harvard and other colleges.
The executive orders.
There's been no buy-in from Congress, nor have there been concerted efforts from the White House to get Congress on board with these kinds of things.
Trump is not actually a negotiator.
We know this.
He wants to be able to dictate terms and have them accepted.
He doesn't actually want to negotiate or come to any kind of settlement.
And when forced to articulate cogent policy rationales, they can't do it.
And we saw this in the Harvard case.
We're seeing that in the Harvard case.
We've seen this in the tariff case.
It doesn't also look to me like Trump is geared really to play the long game very well.
We've talked about this before.
The shock and awe of those first 90 days or 100 days, the flood of executive orders.
There's still that stuff going on, but the energy isn't there the way that it was in that early onslaught.
And this is not an administration that is built to plow things through Congress, to put legislation in place, to get these executive orders to actually be law and so forth.
And Trump views himself as the supreme leader.
That's what he is.
And supreme leaders don't have to do that.
And I think it highlights that.
I think it highlights the shortcomings of that.
I think all of these different policies, these ideas of making a white America are something that Trump wants to do.
But he wants to do it as a ruler who can simply speak it into existence, not as somebody who has to figure out how to make it actually happen.
I think that we see this happening on all of these levels.
And we're beginning to see people playing catch up with the administration.
I don't want to spend a lot of time on Elon Musk today, but I will say if you remember those weeks, late January, February, Elon Musk in his, you know, I don't know what kind of rage.
Yeah, well, I was going to try to describe his exuberance in a way that might be related to chemicals, but I don't know.
You know, the Elon Musk sort of like surge of manic destruction seemed as if it would never stop.
And don't get me wrong, I don't want to paint that as having no effect.
It has grand, traumatic, in many ways irrevocable effects on our country, period.
And one way to look at Elon Musk is he went into government for three months.
He made sure he got the contracts he wanted, even though his rockets blow up.
He made sure that he...
And then he walked away.
And it was worth the $250 million that he spent doing it and the three months of hanging out with his team of 19-year-old big balls and whoever else he recruited to do it.
Okay?
He also looks pretty sullen.
Like, Elon Musk looks like a defeated guy.
Now, whether that's just something wore off or whatever.
But I'm just bringing that up to comment on the energy.
Yeah.
There is a sense of, like, the big push, the blitz is slowing down.
And on that front, it's worth playing a clip of Steve Doocy asking, or Peter Doocy, oh, I'm going to get him confused, Peter and his dad.
The young Deuce, the double Deuce, asking.
That's Friday.
Let's keep it together.
Everyone just grow up.
Grow up, everybody.
God.
All I'm thinking of is Sam Elliott and Roadhouse now because I'm old.
Just quit.
Screw it around.
All right.
This is what I always tell my class when I'm the one telling the jokes and having a hard time.
So Doocy asks in the White House press briefing, why doesn't he just pass a law if this stuff keeps getting shot down?
Let me play the clip.
Here it is.
So the courts are basically telling you guys they think that the White House's policies, the president's policies are in some way against the law.
So why can't President Trump ask the Republicans that control the House and the Republicans that control the Senate just to make a new law?
Well, these laws have already been granted to the president by the Constitution and by laws that have been previously passed.
So if these judges want to be the Secretary of State or they want to be the president, they can run for office themselves.
It should be the other way around.
But all of the actions the president has taken rely on legal authorities that have already been granted to him by our nation's existing laws.
Half-ass backwards backs into a really good question of like, hey guys, I was like thinking about it.
Like this stuff keeps getting shot down in those courts.
Would it be a good strategy to make it law?
And therefore the courts couldn't do this stuff that you keep saying these rogue judges who the Federalist Society chose are doing to you.
Maybe it would be good to pass the law and then they couldn't even do this.
Deucey's like, I had a really good idea the other day when I was deucing as the deuce.
On my daily deuce, it really struck me.
We should pass a law.
And this is everything you've said, Dan, is you can't get this stuff through Congress, so you do executive orders.
Executive orders are not laws.
Executive orders are not a grand fiat.
And in effect, executive orders can be challenged.
They can be, in some ways, ignored.
They can be stopped by judges.
And this is how the separation of powers works.
This is why you have three branches of government.
We do not have a dictator who was elected And thus can do anything.
And so I think that's a really important thing to remember here, too.
So I think that's on my mind as well.
I've said it for months.
They want to rule.
They don't want to govern.
Governing requires the hard work of getting it through Congress.
It requires the hard work of getting a majority of people on board.
And there's already 2026 looming, right?
You already have the horizon of the 2026 campaign coming.
It seems fraught to try to push some of these things through by way of law, and so they're just trying to do it by fiat, which continues to run into trouble.
Any final thoughts on the judges, the tariffs, the other—I mean, go ahead.
I was just going to say just one more piece of this is I think, you know, it's always risky to psychoanalyze somebody too much, like on the outside, but you can see the frustration in Trump.
With the evasiveness that he has as he runs into these challenges, he mentioned the Federalist Society, and this part is almost just, you know, comical.
The three-judge panel that struck down the tariffs, so it's a three-judge panel, but one is an Obama appointee, okay, but one's a Reagan appointee, and one is a Trump appointee from Trump's first term.
So what does Trump do when he's, like, realizing this?
Of course, he goes on social media, and the first thing he asks is, where do these three judges come from?
And you can just hear somebody being like, sir, I'm like, you appointed one.
So what does he do?
He blames the Federalist Society.
He blames them for the appointment.
And this is what he says.
Just the whining, the evasion.
This is what he says.
He says, I was new to Washington.
And it was suggested, I love that, like the passive voice, it was suggested that I. It's like Adam hiding behind Eve.
Genesis 3, Adam's like in the background, like just eating his out, just eating his fruit.
What did I know?
Just Eve's out here doing stuff.
She just gave me fruit.
I just got here.
I don't even know where the bathroom is.
I don't even, I didn't even know what, Washington, D.C., never been there before.
Who says in his inaugural and everything that I alone.
You know, can save the country and all this other stuff.
He's like, I was new to Washington and I didn't really know what to do.
They took advantage of me.
Somebody told me I should talk to the Federalist Society and I did.
And then he starts crying about, you know, Leonard Leo being a bad person and giving him bad advice.
So, Mr. Autocratic Dictator who should have all the authority and all the power and can fix everything and will end the Ukraine war in 24 hours and all of that sort of stuff.
Basically says, I picked a name off a list that somebody else gave me, and now I'm upset that that judge I appointed ruled against me.
This is the guy who, I think, to have the lasting impact the Trump administration wants to have, they've got to be able to get stuff through Congress.
They've got to be able to mount legal cases that do take, like, they don't move fast.
These things are moving at the speed of light, and for the rest of us in, like, the regular world, they're slow moving.
I just think it's telling and it shows us everything about how the Trump administration actually works, how they actually understand power.
But I think, I hope, I'm trying to be hopeful, we're seeing the limits of this model and this ability.
And I frankly think the limits of the person who was in the White House.
I simply don't think that in terms of constitution and character, he's built for anything sustained and difficult and complex.
We can bring up real questions about, I just think there's a lot to see this week in that, and we'll be watching it as we go forward.
All right.
I mean, I agree, and there's a lot to say there about who's behind the Trump presidency.
I have thoughts, and there'll be more content on that from us ahead.
But I want to take a break.
I want to come back.
And I want to go to Oklahoma and then let Oklahoma take us much farther afield across history and the country.
Be right back.
Okay, Dan, we've talked about Oklahoma a lot, but I think it's been warranted.
Oklahoma, you've earned it.
At least Ryan Walters has earned it.
We love you, Oklahoma.
I have so many great colleagues and friends in Oklahoma, friends who are Oklahomans and so on, Sooners.
You are a Sooner in some way, Dan?
Is that fair?
I went to college in Oklahoma, yeah.
Off spot for some stuff in Oklahoma, yeah.
But what's going on there, and that'll lead us into some bigger things.
Yeah, so last week we talked about the new high school social studies standards in Oklahoma.
You mentioned it when we were coming in.
It requires students to learn about the big steal as historical fact.
The big lie about the 2020 election as historical fact.
A lot of sort of chicanery about this.
Ryan Walters kind of like his critics say smuggling this into the standards.
People really didn't pay much attention.
The state school board passes it.
Half of them then requested that it come back for review because they apparently didn't realize these things were there.
And it's whatever.
It's a thing.
Now, some Oklahoma parents say that they plan to put their kids, pull them out of that questionable curriculum.
Such as this material, right, to opt out of them having to learn about this, but also what they say is religious instruction, the thing about requiring a Bible in every class and teaching about the Bible's significance historically and so on and so forth.
And what's interesting for us, I think, about this is that the families and the liberal groups spearheading this are using the parental rights laws, quote-unquote, That were championed and implemented by the GOP to do things like, you know, ending diversity equity stuff, to stop talking about diversity, to stop talking about slavery, to stop talking about LGBTQ history, and all these kinds of things.
And I love this.
I came across this.
I didn't know this.
I think this is fantastic.
Sample opt-out letters are being supplied by a local organization.
So basically, there's the form and the language you need to use to opt out.
So there's an organization that's kind of providing this as a resource.
They are the We're Oklahoma Education or WOKE.
That is their acronym is WOKE.
So WOKE is providing these opt-out letters.
State Superintendent Ryan Walters said it's concerning that parents would opt their kids out of understanding American history, but it's a choice they have a right to make.
So even Ryan Walters recognizes they're sort of painted into a corner now because they've created these opt-outs and carve-outs.
What is significant about it to me, and you're going to take us in some different directions, but one just sort of obvious point here.
I guess my theme for the day is people catching up to MAGA world.
There has been this onslaught, not just in this administration, but over the past several years at every level from the local to the state to federal.
I think what we're starting to see is people who oppose the MAGA agenda.
People who are not opposed to the Christian nationalist agenda beginning to find their footing and figure out how to regain ground in this kind of new America that we live in.
And we see that at a level from the local level, here to the state level.
We're seeing this begin to happen at the national level.
People contesting Christian nationalism, contesting this move by using the weapons.
That Christian nationalists and MAGA world have created and implemented for a number of years now.
So that's just the story out of Oklahoma that continues to develop, but I think it's significant.
It's not the only place we're going to see it.
We've seen these things happening with, like, book banning.
And so somebody will be like, oh, hey, how about the Bible?
Or people will start alternative libraries, and we're going to see other states and other groups and other states begin to use these same kinds of things, parental opt-outs and so forth, to disrupt a Christian right agenda.
I want to bring in one more example of something along these lines of parental rights.
So James Tallarico, who is a state rep in Texas, who many of you know, is a Christian who stands firmly and openly against Christian nationalism.
I've interviewed James on the show.
He's a really well-spoken communicator and very clear in his communications with the public and with everyone else.
Texas passed a Ten Commandments bill.
They're going to put the Ten Commandments in schools.
And in his questions to some of those who were spearheading that effort in the legislature, he asked a couple of questions.
He said, what about parents' rights?
What about the parents of children and families that are atheist, Hindu, etc.?
And the answer was, well, we think, why wouldn't they want their kids to learn about American history?
It was the same thing.
The Ten Commandments is about American history, just as the big lie is, apparently.
And so the parents' rights idea was dismissed as like, well, I don't understand why any parent wouldn't want you to learn about American history, a la the Ten Commandments.
Another question he raised, I thought was so genius, was about adultery, the commandment to not commit adultery.
So let's say I have a second grader.
I have an almost four-year-old now.
And we're getting to that stage, Dan, of, like, question, question, question, question.
Like, when we drive in the car, seven minutes means 70 questions.
Dad, what is this?
What is that?
You know, and it jumps from, like, what street are we on to, like, you know, what is helium?
And it's just like, yeah, let's do it.
You got a second grader, and they walk up to the teacher, and they're like, hey, the Ten Commandments say adultery.
What is adultery?
And all of a sudden, we have a second grade teacher talking about sex.
Which you're not supposed to do.
Can't talk about sex and sexuality.
Isn't that grooming?
Isn't that not save our kids?
And if you watch the videos, there's this whole trope of the woman who responds to Tallarico as well as a former kindergarten teacher.
I'm all for it.
This is what we should be teaching kids.
And what she's saying there, if you decode it, and you're the great decoder, Dan, is you're allowed to talk about sex as long as the sex and the family and the structure are how I want it to be.
But if the sex and the love and the relationship and the marriage and the family structure is not what I want it to be, then it's grooming, then it's perversion.
If you talk about sex as like, well, don't commit adultery means you don't get to have sex with someone other than your wife or husband, and you're telling that to a seven-year-old, it's like, that opens up a whole can of worms.
They're like, what is sex?
What is that?
I don't even know what that means.
Okay, I promise story time today.
Dan, you okayed it before we started recording.
I want to focus on something that I think many of you listening are already well aware of, but it's worth distilling and it's worth boiling down to its component parts so we understand what's going on in Oklahoma.
We understand what happened in Texas, the Den Commandments debate I just talked about.
We understand what happens when people show up to the gayest neighborhood in Seattle like they did on Memorial Day and they Hold a MAGA Christian rally that basically says to be gay and trans and non-binary is a perversion from God.
What is happening when the moms and the young kids and the militias show up in Seattle on Memorial Day and proclaim in the gayest neighborhood in Seattle that they're against groomers and perverts?
What's happening is something that most of you listening already know about.
Family values.
Pro-family.
We've heard about this since the 1970s.
But I want to just do a very short history so that you can see it clearly.
Dan, before 1975, we've covered this on the show, abortion was not a main issue for conservative Protestant Christians in this country.
Most Baptists, most evangelicals had varied opinions on abortion.
Now, don't get me wrong, there were some that were staunchly against it.
There were many who were not.
There were many who were like, rape, incest.
Abortion at 18 weeks, all totally fine with God.
Okay.
The same really goes with a lot of the women's rights and kind of women in the workplace stuff that eventually culminated in the fight against the ERA.
The point is, is that the idea of the nuclear family was not a core Protestant idea until the 70s.
When, what happened?
What happened is Paul Weyrich And Connie Marshner and Richard Vigery and a bunch of other Catholic activists had this idea that went like this.
If you can make the nuclear family into the traditional family, into just the family, if you can take the nuclear family, which means heterosexual, patriarchal and reproductive, a man and a woman with the man in charge of the house and a woman.
That is the, quote, nuclear family.
Well, then you call it the traditional family.
And then you just call it the family.
That's just the family.
What happens is you can take that idea, and the best book on this is Chelsea Eben's The Radical Mind.
I've interviewed Dr. Eben.
Two episodes I did with her.
You can look it up.
If you can convince Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye, Pat Robertson, and all those evangelicals that the family is the litmus test of American religious orthodoxy, you can create an alliance that is pretty much unprecedented in American history.
You can get Catholics, you can get fundamentalists, you can get evangelicals, you can get Mormons, you can even get some Jews.
And you can create a situation where the doctrinal orthodoxy is the nuclear family such that it's a divine institution, as Sophie Bjork-James calls it in her book.
The family, a la the nuclear family, the traditional family, the patriarchal heterosexual family, that is the divine institution.
Not the church, not the doctrine of the Trinity, not the doctrine of the resurrection.
If you can code and codify the nuclear family, As a divine grouping, then if you diverge from that, if you have a single mother, if you have two moms, if you have a mixed family,
if you have any hint of polyamory, if you have a willingness to say I am pro-choice, that abortion is not murder at conception, but there are so many different ways one can approach reproductive rights and health.
If you are willing to say that Gender goes beyond assigned sex male at birth, assigned sex female at birth.
Dan, any deviation from the order of the divine institution is a sin and is a threat to the nation.
Everyone just hear me.
I know many of you out there are like, Brad, I took this class from you already.
Let's take it again.
Let's take it again.
If you deviate from any relationship, order, or gender, Correspondence.
In the divine institution of the nuclear family, you have committed a grave sin you cannot come back from.
I'll give you an example, Dan.
I'll shut up here really quickly.
I know.
Story time.
I had a student at Skidmore, and I've said this on the show before, who asked me very naively, totally secular student, had never grown up with a religion.
Hey, Josh Duggar, that guy from, like, that fundamentalist family on TV, the, like, what is it, 18 and counting, or whatever that show was?
He molested his sister, but he's been forgiven and welcomed back.
How come he can be forgiven within a matter of months and welcomed back to the church and to the family, but if you're gay, that's never available to you?
And the response is, because if you sin against the institution in terms of order, gender, sex, abortion, you cannot be welcomed back in until that is changed.
If you sin, Because of temptation.
You're a man who has sex before marriage or you molested your sister.
As long as you ask for forgiveness, you're back in because you didn't sin against nature.
Okay?
You're like Brad.
You gave in to what was most natural to you.
That's what you're saying.
So it's like you sin according to your nature.
You don't violate your nature, which is exactly what you're highlighting.
The reason I bring this up is because in the 1970s, Book bans, revolts against sex ed, calling anyone who was queer a groomer and a pervert, claiming that women in the workplace was a degradation of femininity and of women, that we had to protect our kids, protect our women, and that would protect our nation.
Parental rights.
something different, or something progressive.
Some of you are screaming at me through your radio right now.
You're like, That's never been the family.
The family has always been so much different and varied than that, and you are exactly right.
The point, though, is on the ground today, when you enter the school board meeting, when you enter the protest in the gayest neighborhood in Seattle, when you try to advocate for trans kids, the case that's always going to be made against you is that you're standing against God-believing Americans who stand for the traditional family.
And simply want order and protection for how things should be.
And if you have some radical, woke, new ideas that are not grounded in civilization as it's been practiced by humans for thousands and thousands of years, you're the one that has to prove yourself, not them.
The example of Oklahoma is a small example of people saying, we have parental rights too, so we're opting out of your social studies curriculum because we have the choice to do that.
Based on the premises that have been laid down by the pro-family people.
I can keep going, Dan.
I just want to highlight for people, if you don't hold the orthodoxy of the patriarchal heterosexual nuclear family, you're out.
And you could be a Christian.
James Tallarico.
You could be a UCC progressive Christian.
You could be a Christian who is a minister, and yet you are totally welcoming and affirming.
To gay, lesbian, trans, bisexual, and other queer folks in your congregation.
You could be somebody who is an evangelical but pro-choice.
You could be somebody who is, you know, totally a quote-unquote Bible believer.
But you're not sure that there's just two genders.
You are out.
You are not part of the real Americans or the real church in this country.
That is how they view it.
That is what they've done to family values.
And there's a complete...
The nuclear family has always been a white family.
I'm not going to get into it now.
I've been talking too long.
Thoughts, Dan, before we have to sign off?
So just to plug it, because these are some of the themes that are coming up on It's in the Code next week, these same themes.
And I've been looking at Allie Beth Stuckey's book, and I've said several times the reason why is she is indicative of these broader movements.
But one of the things I talk about, and I want to pick up that theme that you had, and people are right when they say there have always been other kinds of families.
Yes.
But this is why rhetoric and language matters.
So I'll be a real dork, and I'll talk about something called semiotics.
Semiotics is the theory of signs and codes and so forth.
But semioticians will talk about marked and unmarked terms.
And so basically what you're fighting over, the ideological battle, is the word family.
Because if you can take that word without any descriptor, you don't have to call it the nuclear family or the traditional family.
It's just the family, but you can smuggle in a fixed meaning.
Then anybody else with any other kind of family, they've got to be descriptive.
Oh, we're a gay family.
We're a poly family.
We are, God, maybe we're just a multi-generational family.
But see, when you have to stick that adjective in front of it, it is now marked linguistically as a departure from the norm.
You're hyphenated.
You're a Japanese-American, an African-American.
Yeah, now you're a hyphenated family.
So you are a departure from just family full stop.
So the battle for how that word is defined and what it feels like in the world.
When people hear the word family, they think mom and dad and their kids.
Straight parents, their kids, and they probably, as you're saying, it's probably coded as white.
That's what that does.
So what it does is it masks the legitimacy, the existence even, of all of those other families.
And then just the last piece of this is, you know.
I'm going to talk about the abortion myth, and it's in the code briefly this week because we're on Ali Beth Stuckey's chapter on abortion.
But again, a lot of these ideas are like 50 years old.
Like 50 years, half a century.
But there's a very concerted effort to mask the contingency of those views, the historicity of those views within.
Those conservative Christian circles?
So, honest to God, when you've got pastors who have never learned this, they really think that the Christian church has, for all time and always and forever, affirmed the nuclear family as the family, or been opposed to abortion, or whatever.
And that's a very, very strategic forgetfulness of historical contingency that allows all this to operate.
So, the language matters.
The cultural codes matter.
In really, really concrete ways that we're seeing play out in a lot of different directions.
I'm not sure.
And, you know, we're going to run out of time.
I'm not sure that a lot of folks who buy into everything we're talking about today who are part of white Christian MAGA America.
I don't think and they wouldn't say this out loud.
I don't know how the conversation would go.
I don't know how they would.
I'm not sure they think like Charlie.
I'm not sure they think a black family.
I don't think that they can.
Do you see what I'm saying?
I think in their mind, they're just not capable of having two kids, wife, husband, like we do.
It goes back to assimilation, right?
It's that they are unassimilable.
No matter what, their families will be different.
They'll feel different.
Even if they look the same, even if it's the same biological connections, marital connections, whatever, I think you're exactly right.
And what that highlights is, I think, The deeply sort of affective emotional level of this, that it's not just about legal definitions.
It's about what feels like the way things should be.
And I think you're absolutely right.
Yeah.
There's more to say, but we're going to sign off.
Let's do reasons for hope.
What is your reason for hope this weekend?
I'm not sure this is a reason for hope as much as something that just made me laugh this week.
So maybe it was just like a bright spot.
The Financial Times colonist Robert Armstrong coined the term taco trade at some point recently.
Oh man, you stole— Is that yours?
That's a lot.
So, for those who might not have heard about this, it stands for Trump Always Chickens Out, and the markets are wising up to the fact that Trump announces the big tariffs, and then there's counter-tariffs announced, and he always backs off.
What made me, like, literally laugh out loud was when he was sort of ambushed with this this week in speaking to reporters, and somebody asked him about it.
He hadn't heard the term.
I'm sure his advisors had carefully kept him from hearing this.
And just watching him squirm and be upset and try to talk about how he's a great negotiator and whatever was fantastic.
So it just made me laugh.
And I think nails something I saw today.
Like it's becoming part of mainstream nomenclature now.
CNN was using the phrase taco trade to discuss how – So that made me at least laugh, if not giving me hope.
No, I want to make America great again by building as many taco trucks.
Taco trucks are a gift to this nation everywhere and always.
So choose taco trucks, not Taco Trump.
Okay?
Onishi 26. It's the new t-shirt every week.
Brad Onishi is going to give us a new t-shirt.
So, you know, there it is.
Yeah.
All right, y 'all.
I want to say thanks to all of you for listening and would love your support as a subscriber.
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We are adding something really exciting.
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