Weekly Roundup: Mamdani and the Rebirth of Birtherism + Christofascism in the Big Bill
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Brad and Dan begin with a deep dive into the GOP’s controversial new bill targeting Medicaid access and how it ties into white Christian nationalist ideology.
The conversation moves to JD Vance’s pro-natalist rhetoric and his troubling comments on immigration, revealing the racial and religious undertones driving the GOP’s messaging. Brad and Dan also discuss Trump’s escalating feud with Elon Musk and the disturbing implications of Trump’s remarks about Zoran Momani.
Throughout the episode, Brad and Dan connect the dots between these stories—examining how immigration, xenophobia, and Christian nationalism are shaping American politics and threatening democratic norms.
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My name is Brad O'Nishi, author of Preparing for War, The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next here today with my co-host.
Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Good to see you, Brad.
Had a little break, like I was gone.
And then you've had a couple life events taking place in the last couple weeks, I think.
Yeah, a lot going on behind the scenes.
I will share some of that with subscribers at some point, but I am back kind of on the fly, not in my normal setup or anything, but that's okay.
But you're also not like in an airport in Las Vegas or anything.
So, you know, it could be worse.
I think there are two weekly roundups that stand out as hard to do.
One was in the Las Vegas airport.
The other was in my car like at 5 a.m. at a San Diego airport and I had to leave our hotel and I had to go in the car because my kids were sleeping.
All right.
So today is better than that.
All right.
We're going to jump into the bill and we don't know if it's passed yet.
We're recording this July 3rd, Thursday.
And want to not only go through some of the dynamics, I'm sure many of you are familiar with those already, but to the way it just ties directly into white Christian nationalism and immigration.
And we'll look at that by way of J.D. Vance's comments.
We'll then go into the attacks on Zoran Mamdani by Donald Trump and what they say and how this is the rebirth of Bertherism and what that will mean in the next few months.
And we'll then go to talk about Elon Musk and Doge and Donald Trump's threats against him and what those say.
You may say, well, who cares about Musk at this point?
It's old news.
But there's a lot of tell in what Donald Trump has done in his attacks on Elon Musk recently.
Those three will all tie into ICE, immigration, deportation, and white Christian nationalism.
And dare I say, Christo-fascism.
So that's the plan.
Here we go.
you Dan, I think by now a lot of folks have heard about the dynamics, the details of the big beautiful bill, but take us through a couple of those and then we're going to see what Vice President J.D. Vance said about it that I think really does reveal the A, nihilism at the heart of this governing ideology and B, the ways that Christian nationalism envisions the world through people like J.D. Vance and Donald Trump.
Yeah, so as you say, currently they're doing stuff in the House.
The Democratic leader of the House is apparently stalling and speaking and has been talking for like seven hours to just delay.
But they've reported that the GOP has all the votes that they need.
Trump brought everybody in line.
So this is going to go into law.
And it is, of course, the Senate version that like, you know, 48 hours ago, all the hardcore fiscal conservatives in the House were swearing up and down that they wouldn't support.
And now they will.
So talk about a lot of pieces of this we could talk about.
What I want to focus on, I think, is, you know, Trump had a, I don't even know what to call it, a speech, a press conference, whatever, you know, surrounded by kind of regular people, a bunch of blue-collar people in different kinds of professions and things, and just said a bunch of stuff about this bill that was completely false, including that, you know, it cuts $1.7 trillion out and you won't feel a thing.
Regular people won't feel a thing.
And then talked about how Medicaid, it doesn't touch Medicaid and it improves Medicare and Social Security.
And what I'm interested in, I think in this, and we'll get to the JD Vance and the Christian nationalist dimension of this, but what I'm interested in is the dimension of this I think will have probably the biggest impact on lots and lots of just regular American people.
And that is the stuff that has to do with healthcare and Medicaid and the dynamics of that and how that relates to other pieces of this.
So just some numbers and folks that they've followed this, they'll know this, but just some numbers about not just Medicaid, but Obamacare, the child health insurance program or CHIP, all of these things will be affected.
So estimates are, these are estimates by array.
These are not like left-leaning groups.
These are like Congressional Budget Office and groups like this.
Estimate that almost 12 million Americans will lose their health insurance because of this bill.
And the reason, of course, is that they needed that to pay for tax cuts that do what?
That mostly benefit maybe upper and middle income people, but certainly high earners and corporations, including making permanent some of the tax things that were put in place the last time that Trump was in office.
So their plan chips away at programs, like I said, Medicaid, Obamacare, and CHIP over a decade, taking about a trillion dollars out of those programs.
Medicaid and Obamacare together cover over 100 million people.
So, I mean, that's almost a third of the U.S. population is insured through programs that are being targeted by the GOP.
And that's not a surprise.
This is a point I'm going to circle back around to eventually when we get to it.
But this is not a surprise.
The GOP has always been opposed to the government doing anything to have people have health insurance.
All we have to go back to is pre-Obamacare, 20 years ago when the GOP was debating these things, back when Hillary Clinton as first lady was tasked with trying to put together some model of universal health care and so forth.
And so this is old news here.
But Medicaid and CHIP also cover about half of the children in the U.S. So half of the children in the U.S. who are insured are insured through these programs that are being targeted.
I'm just going to throw out, right, this is the same party that says that they're about protecting children that targets trans youth, now supported by the Supreme Court by denying health care, that somehow thinks that it's more important to, I don't know, keep kids from reading a book about two guys who love each other than it is to like make sure that they can go to the doctor or the dentist or the eye doctor or whatever it is.
So that's what's being targeted.
How a number of new provisions.
One is just basically increasing bureaucratic paperwork and making that harder.
Eligibility will have to be checked every six months.
And, you know, if you're somebody who has a stable life, you have a job, you have a house, you have a fixed, you know, a stable income and all that, that may not sound like a big deal.
But if you don't have internet access, if you're unhoused or underhoused or transient and they have to do things like verifying address every six months and things like that, you're going to lose out on this.
If you're not tech savvy, if you're not well enough educated to be able to kind of understand these complex forms, those of us who file our own taxes, like we know what this is like, trying to make sense of these kind of things, it's a way of just essentially sort of losing people.
It also, for a party that says that they oppose bureaucratic bloat and so forth, just increases that and increases the likelihood of people just getting lost in the shuffle.
We all know what happens when that email that you got from something goes to spam and you needed to click on something to confirm whatever and you never even knew you received it, all that kind of stuff.
They also allow, back to the issue on chip, it allows for kids, children's enrollment in the program to be delayed.
So if parents are delinquent or behind on paying their premiums, they can prevent children from going onto the program.
So they're, again, they're going to target the kids because of what the adults do.
Obviously, this will tie in with other things, a crackdown on immigrant enrollment in these programs.
Access for asylum seekers and refugees is narrow.
These are not illegal, quote unquote, illegal immigrants.
These are not undocumented workers.
These are not violent felons.
These are none of this.
These are people who are here legally and subject to U.S. law and all of that sort of stuff.
It makes it harder.
Let alone states that do allow undocumented immigrants to have access will now have funding pulled, which is obviously intended to coerce them into not allowing that anymore.
Increased work requirements to qualify for benefits.
It'll be harder for individuals to qualify for both Medicare and Medicaid.
So people who qualify for both of those, which usually are people with disabilities of different kinds, people who are disabled, that will now be harder to do.
So just paring it down sort of at every level that they can.
And one of the big things that people have pointed out about this is that the cutting funds to states is also going to lead, in particular, to a hard hit on rural communities, communities that have really underfunded kind of small clinics that serve big geographical areas and so forth.
Those are going to be first on the cutting floor with this.
It's going to target a lot of rural communities, rural Americans.
And then finally, out-of-pocket payments will increase for Medicaid recipients.
All of us who have copays and things like that, we know what that's like when your insurance decides to jack up your copay by $10 or $20 a visit, especially if you have multiple family members and things like this.
So those are some of the things that it's going to do.
Real quickly, some of my takeaways from this, I want to throw it over to you and see what you think.
But Joan Alker, I believe is how I say her name, somebody I came across online.
She's at Georgetown University Center for Children and Families.
And she summed it up this way.
She said, this is the biggest rollback in health coverage in the history of the U.S. And I think that's worth putting out there.
Now, the GOP is going to say, well, there never should have been the expansions in healthcare that there were.
But for those of us who think that maybe the role of government is to actually help take care of its citizens and provide for their needs and so forth, the fact that this is the biggest rollback of health coverage in the history of the U.S. is significant, especially when you have Donald Trump standing up and saying, Medicaid is not going to get touched by this.
The second thing is that solid majorities of Americans oppose the bill, and they have from the start.
And that needle has not moved in the GOP's favor yet.
And we'll see what that looks like going forward.
But again, we have Trump just saying, you know, your Medicare, Medicare and your Social Security or strength and Medicaid is left alone.
It's the same.
This is simply false.
And it's not going to take, I think, a lot of Americans long to figure that out once this becomes law.
Tied in with that, it's going to hit a lot of MAGA constituencies hard.
The GOP-controlled states that expanded Medicaid access are being targeted in this.
I think that was 19 states that expanded Medicaid access that are now being targeted.
And some good, I think it was NPR that I was reading did a really good analysis, which is sort of point out the fact that the GOP governors are completely silent on this.
In 2017, they were very, very vocal and helped to prevent the kind of cuts that have gone through this time.
They're just completely on the sidelines.
The NPR article I read, so they reached out to all 19 and something like four or six responded.
And all they would say is, we support the work requirements.
That's it.
You know, so like way to advocate for your folks.
Before today or yesterday, when the GOP whips managed to get everybody there, back when the people on the GOP, the so-called fiscal hawks and the moderates in the House were swearing up and down that they weren't going to stand for this.
It went to the Senate.
As people know, the Senate sort of cut more deeply into Medicaid than the House had done and the House had sworn that they weren't going to go for this and so forth.
They were busy telling us how bad this was going to be for Trump constituencies.
Even if you're in blue states, but you follow this, you know that rural areas are more conservative.
In a lot of those so-called blue states that go for Democratic candidates, you look at those rural communities.
They tend to vote Republicans.
So these are what many would consider the heart and soul of a lot of Trump country.
So we'll see what that does.
And it also is giving the Democrats good talking points.
You know, you're going to talk about Vance, but they're seeking to make Vance the face of this.
He had to break the tie in the Senate to have this pass.
So he's tied to this.
You've got, you know, a few GOP folks who are talking about maybe now just not running because they know this is going to be so unpopular.
You've had people getting yelled at at town halls and so forth, yet they all still voted for this.
We know that the Democrats can pull, you know, defeat from the jaws of victory on almost any issue, but we'll see how this goes when it comes to the midterms and so forth.
Another thing that is just not surprising but worth noting, everybody in the GOP fell in line.
No surprise.
We know the GOP is not going to save us from Trump.
That's not what they're going to do.
But I think anybody who followed just mainstream media sensationalizing of all the hurdles this would have to, you know, it's never going to make it through the Senate.
Of course it made it through the Senate.
Oh, the House is upset.
It's never going to make it back through the House.
Of course it did.
And part of the reason it did, this is my final kind of a final takeaway is that the goalposts moved, including the goalpost coming from Trump.
It left the Senate.
Once upon a time, Trump was saying, don't touch Medicaid.
We know the cost that this will be and so forth.
Of course it did.
He said, okay, sends it over to the Senate.
It gets more.
Trump, so his support for it has evolved.
so that all the GOP support has evolved for it.
I guess my final sort of thought about this is: you know, for me, this really, as I say, harkens back a long ways.
This issue of targeting what I think are some of the most vulnerable people in the country, children, people with disabilities, you know, immigrants, documented or otherwise.
This is part of what moved me out of evangelicalism.
I remember these debates in the context of like the 2000 election.
It feels a really long time ago now.
But I remember that for me, I would get in these discussions with Christian friends.
I would be like, how in the world do we as Christians in the most powerful, richest country in the world think that somehow it's bad to help people who don't have the means to help themselves, like children or people who can't work or people who have other issues, whatever it is.
And I would hear all the things we hear now, you know, waste and fraud and whatever.
They're like, okay, well, yeah, like, so there's going to be some waste, but if that means you're protecting kids, like, yeah, their parents are delinquent on the premiums, but you're insuring children, that feels like a higher good.
We've talked about this before.
The GOP doesn't believe that.
They believe it's better to punish a bunch of children to try to squeeze out a little bit of money from parents and things like that.
So this is, this is, in many ways for me, a lot of continuity here with this bill on this issue.
This is not, there's nothing distinctly MAGA about this dimension of the bill.
And I think that that's important.
I'll come back to that later today.
But those are my reflections, at least on the Medicaid pieces and your thoughts on that, walking us through Vance and the other pieces, especially on immigration and xenophobia, white Christian America, and everything else that's in here.
So I want to make sure that I focus my analysis here on Vance and what this says about what I think is Christian nationalism on steroids.
It's inching towards Christo-fascism.
And that's really the bread and butter of what we do here, straight white American Jesus.
Really quickly, about half of Americans have heard of this bill.
Democrats have already lost because only half of Americans have heard of this.
So they can have talking points.
They can have things that are going to like tee them up for the midterms.
Their messaging on this went nowhere.
There were some folks who did not get in line.
So Tom Tillis from North Carolina in the Senate said he's retiring, so he didn't have to get in line.
Thomas Massey from Kentucky in the House didn't get in line.
Elon Musk is now backing him.
There's a whole thing.
There's a couple of senators, but nonetheless, it passed.
And that whole jockeying of will it pass, you know, blah, blah, blah, as you say, a lot of it was fabricated.
Let's talk about J.D. Vance, though.
As you say, Dan, the tying vote in the Senate, the man who voted in the Senate, he wrote this on June 30th on X Twitter.
The thing that will bankrupt this country more than any other policy is flooding the country with illegal immigration and then giving those migrants generous benefits.
The bill fixes this problem and therefore it must pass.
Everything else, the CBO score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.
Dan, this is the whole game.
And to me, this is something you have to just hone in on.
J.D. Vance, Catholic convert, 2019.
J.D. Vance, and let's hit on the children and the most vulnerable, Dan.
You did a great job highlighting what this does to kids, half of U.S. kids somehow on CHIP or Medicaid.
Dismissed as minutiae.
I mean, to pick up on that, right?
That that's minutiae.
That's a side issue.
It's more important to go after, you know, non-white people coming into the country.
J.D. Vance is a pro-natalist.
J.D. Vance has said in the past he wants to give people with kids more of a vote.
He has called women with no children childless cat ladies.
J.D. Vance is a pro-natalist because, I mean, meaning he thinks that population diminishment is a primary issue and people should be incentivized to have as many children as possible.
He does not want abortion in any form.
This is a man that wants you to have children.
He wants you to think that you must have children.
He wants you to think that you're expected to have children to be a real American.
And now he's like the minutiae of the programs that will cut help to half of the children roughly in this country is minutia.
And what is what is everything?
So let me, I have one more point before I get to what he said about illegal immigration.
He says, the thing that will bankrupt this country more than any other policy is flooding the country with illegal immigration.
There's A and B to this.
A is everybody knows this bill will add $3 trillion to the debt.
Do not ever let anyone tell you when you go to the 4th of July barbecue, well, Zoron Mom Donnie wants free buses?
How are we going to pay for that?
They're giving $3.3 million in debt so they can cut taxes for the richest people in this country.
There is no conversation ever again about how do we pay for it.
That's number one.
Number two, there is data.
And I don't want to frame today's discussion about immigration and deportation in terms of economics, but the economics says that immigrants, even undocumented immigrants, make the economy better.
They pay taxes.
They do jobs other Americans don't want to do.
They're willing to start at the entry level of the system, at the points of entry in the system, most people don't want to do.
This is enter.
This is the same administration.
The Trump, who obviously is calling the shots an immigration policy, has said that they have to stop deporting so many people from what?
From service industries, from farm industries, from like service sector, hotel and restaurant jobs and so forth to exactly that point.
Because I'm with you.
I don't think it's, I think it's about human beings, not economics.
But the GOP is, they're just full of shit on both of these, both of these dimensions, because it helps the economy.
It is a net gain to the U.S. economy.
So this notion that nothing will drain it more, it's just xenophobia and racism.
That's all it is.
It's feelings, not facts.
Yep.
Period.
You feel like getting anyone who is brown out of this country will make your life perfect.
You feel like that's the answer to all your problems.
So that's what you want to do, despite the fact that all of the data shows us that immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, make the country richer.
And that can be people who are working in fields, picking fruit.
That could be people who are neurosurgeons and brain surgeons coming from all over the place, whether it's the Middle East, whether it's East Asia, whether it is South Asia, whether it is Latin America or anywhere else.
We are richer because of it.
The data says that.
Their feelings say, my life will be better if all of the immigrants go away.
So that's what we're going to do.
J.D. Vance is operating on feelings here, period.
And he gives the game away.
And here's my second point.
And then I'll throw it to you.
Everything else is immaterial compared to the ICE money.
So just what I, sometimes I love to just compress statements.
Everything else is immaterial compared to the ICE money.
What he's telling you folks is that nothing matters whether it is debt, whether it is children eating or having health care, whether it is the influx of folks coming here who will contribute to our society in ways that are really important, like medical research, cancer research, all kinds of things.
Nothing matters except for giving as much money as we can to the modern day slave catchers who will kidnap people off the street and take them away.
That is all that matters.
Dan, this, when people are like, what is white Christian nationalism?
I talked about it with Ted Cruz a couple of weeks ago.
Here's another example.
You think that getting people deported en masse, putting them in a concentration camp in Florida is the most important thing that a government can do as a Christian because they are brown, because they come from another place, they speak a different language, et cetera.
Rather than feeding the hungry, taking care of the vulnerable, making sure the widow and the sick are taken care of and that the stranger is welcomed.
This is Christian Trumpism in a nutshell is this.
You know what Christian virtue is?
Deportation.
Do you know what Christian governance is?
Giving billions to ICE and taking billions and billions away from Americans who are trying to eat and get health care and just make it through the day.
That's Christian nationalist, Christian Trumpist governance, period.
I'm going to come back to this today.
I want to say one more thing about this before we go to a break, but any other comments before we break?
Well, just to hammer on a couple of these points that you've made.
So we talk a lot about that kind of traditional, Catholic traditionalist strain within Magadland that says that, you know, the goal is to have a good society, that the goal of the state is not to let people live their own lives, but it is to dictate what is the highest good and so forth.
This theological notion.
The highest good for them is to make America wider.
Like that, that's the highest good.
That's the goal.
That becomes the highest Christian virtue.
And I think that should really sink into people.
It's a long list of Christian virtues that we could highlight and that people who identify as Christian could probably argue about and whatever.
Their highest one is to make America wider.
And I just can't get over this, this targeting of the children stuff.
The other piece that we, I know we talk about this a lot, the culture of life language that other people cares about life, they don't.
As long as you can force women to carry a pregnancy to term, as soon as that life is born, you're on your own.
And if you don't have health insurance, that's too bad.
If you don't have a job that can pay for private health insurance or provide that, that's just too bad.
If your kids are going to be malnourished or sick or whatever else because they can't have access to health care or as you say, food and these other things, that's just too bad.
So again, next time you're talking to the family members or the friends or the coworkers or whatever, and they say they oppose abortion because they're about a culture of life, bring real life into this because there's just no way to square that circle.
And as I say, this was part of what moved me out of conservative Christianity two decades ago was exactly this kind of logic that said the poor, the orphan, the widow, all those things that the Bible says way more about than it does queer folk or patriarchy or something like that, that that was completely ignored and dismissed as socialism or whatever else it was.
It's all there front and center.
Look, and I know that Christian nationalism is a complex issue in this country.
You know, if you listen to the show, you know that Matt Taylor's been on the show 100 times and he's talked about the ways that the apostolic reformation is multi-ethnic, multiracial, and he's completely right about that.
It does not mean that every sector of Christian nationalists in this country is multinational, or excuse me, is multi-ethnic, is multiracial.
And so when I think of the J.D. Vances of the world or when I think of others in this camp, white Christian nationalism is how we should frame this because, and I got to give a hat tip to Phil Visher at the Holy Post.
Some of you have completely mixed feelings about Phil Visher, creator of VeggieTales, and I understand that.
Not somebody I usually repost, et cetera, but he made a good point and he's the one that really tipped me off to this.
So I got to give him credit.
10 million Christians in danger of deportation.
Then these are Christian people.
One out of every 18 evangelicals in the country in danger of deportation.
This is not about if you're a Christian.
You have to be a white Christian if you don't want to be In fear of being deported.
And the Christian virtue says, This is where we've arrived at Christian virtue in this country.
Christian virtue is deporting Christians who are not the right correct race or nationality because that is what God would want.
And when some of you are like, well, what is the nationalist part of Christian nationalism?
That's it.
It's convincing yourself that deporting other Christians is what God would want because God wants there to be separate nations where everybody just exists separately, i.e., that's a white ethno-state in the United States and that's other ethno-states elsewhere.
Laura Loomer gave the game away when she posted that the new concentration camp in Florida that Ron DeSantis just unveiled.
She said, oh, well, alligators get hungry, but there are 65 million people who might feed them, meaning not 65 million undocumented people, 65 million Latino people in this country.
That is white nationalism to its core.
Laura Loomer is somebody who has the president's ear at times.
And there you go.
We need to take a final word.
Whiteness is not about skin color.
It's an ideology.
So somebody can support whiteness and exist within a structure of whiteness and not be quote unquote white.
Just as people can be identified as white and have light skin and not support the structures of that ideology.
It's the same way that you don't have to be a man to support patriarchy.
You don't have to be a woman to support feminism.
You don't have to be a trans person to support trans feminism.
So I think that that's an important piece as well.
Much bigger discussion to have.
And I know it's a complex issue that a lot of people don't understand at first.
So when we talk about white Christian nationalism, it doesn't mean Christian nationalism only for white people.
It means all those Christian nationalists who support that ideology and who fall in line with that, whether they would be identified as white or not, even when it's going to turn around and it is going to bite them.
And they are the ones who may find them on a plane to some third-party country where they have no ties or anything else that is going on in this administration.
You can be not white and be working to and supporting the creation of a white Christian ethnostate.
Let's look at Clarence Thomas.
Like you want an example of somebody who fully buys into the project of white Christian American nationalism.
It's Clarence Thomas.
It's Samuel Alito, neither of whom, for a lot of white Christian nationalists, would be considered quote unquote white.
They are fully on board with that ideology with every SCOTUS decision that comes out.
Let's take a break.
We'll come back and talk about Zoron Mamdani and the rebirth of birtherism.
It's old news now, Dan, but it's something we haven't had a chance to talk about because I was gone last week.
Zoron Mamdani wins the NYC Democratic primary and is headed towards a general election in a couple of months.
I'm not going to say he's headed towards being mayor because there's going to be a lot of things that happen over the next couple of months.
And those things, quite frankly, startle me.
And I'm going to talk about why here in the next few minutes.
By now, I'm not going to go over Mamdani.
I'm not going to tell you all who you all know.
If you're listening to the show, you know Mamdani is somebody who identifies as democratic socialist, somebody who no one expected to win, somebody who I'm sure Cuomo thought was a nobody that provided no real threat.
In light of his win and all of the opinion pieces about Zoran Momdani coming from Democrats, coming from the Wall Street Journal, coming from whoever.
What I want to get into today is the fact that Donald Trump said this week that a lot of people, quote unquote, are saying that Mom Dani is here legally.
Let's play the clip for you so you can hear it from his mouth.
Your beloved New York City may well be led by a communist soon, Zorhan Mandami, who in his nomination speech said he will defy ICE and will not allow ICE to arrest criminal aliens in New York City.
Your message to communist Zorhan Mandami.
Well, then we'll have to arrest him.
Look, we don't need a communist in this country, but if we have one, I'm going to be watching over him very carefully on behalf of the nation.
We send him money.
We send him all the things that he needs to run a government.
And by the way, they get already, they get about three times what you get, Ron.
If you look at the per capita, Florida gets one-third of what New York gets in terms of the numbers.
Why don't you give us those numbers?
That's what we should send him.
Yeah, sometimes people say Florida gets more because they count Social Security recipients, but that's not money to the state.
Those are seniors that live here.
If they moved to North Carolina, you could count it there.
So it has no interaction with the state government.
They get more on the city and state governments than we get.
Right, substantially.
We're going to be watching that very carefully, and a lot of people are saying he's here illegally.
You know, we're going to look at everything.
And ideally, he's going to turn out to be much less than a communist.
But right now, he's a communist.
That's not a socialist.
Now, he also said that if Momdani doesn't cooperate with ICE and so on, then maybe we should deport him.
And so we've already started on something that I think is incredibly startling and I think incredibly dangerous.
Momdani came to this country at age seven.
And he, as all of you know, is of South Asian descent.
His parents are academics and filmmakers.
And he himself kind of grew up in an activist home.
He was born in Uganda.
And he is Muslim.
Dan, I want to just take everyone back.
Are you ready, y'all?
Here was the claims, the central claims of birtherism in the Obama years.
Barack Obama was not born here.
Barack Obama is a secret Muslim.
Barack Obama hates America.
Barack Obama is a socialist.
Now, Dan, just the specter of those things, despite the fact that they were materially disproved time and time and time again, was enough for the white rage led by Donald Trump to fuel the birtherist movement.
I wrote in my book, Preparing for War, about how the birther-in-chief became the president, the man that basically made his political career on a conspiracy that has no merit.
That Barack Obama was not born here, that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim, etc.
Now, here's the thing about Zoran Lamdani, Dan.
Everything they said about Obama is true of Zoran Lamdani.
He is Muslim.
He was born in Africa.
He was born in Uganda.
He is a socialist.
So we need to get prepared for rebirtherism in like full rage.
And I'll keep this brief, Dan, because I know we got a lot to talk about here over the next 20 minutes.
When Trump said a lot of people are saying he's here illegally, it was one of those moments that sent shivers down my spine.
Now, don't get me wrong, shivers go down my spine a lot these days.
And when I'm on social media and I see folks in Los Angeles and Southern California and places that I know intimately because I grew up in that region being taken off the streets, when I see people in Santa Ana or La Habra or East LA, I'm like, my heart hurts deeply.
And it's just hard to like think and sleep or do anything.
When Trump said this about Mom Donnie, I got the same shivers because of this.
It was a clear and open statement of like, there is a man who is a naturalized American citizen who has been here since he was seven years old.
And they're going to invent a conspiracy that will play on Fox News and Newsmax and Tucker Carlson and everywhere on the people on the right wing get information that says Zoran Mamdani is here illegally.
You're going to go to see your cousin or your uncle or your high school friend and they're going to tell you Zoran Mamdani is here illegally.
Like, I am telling you, give it two months.
It's July 3rd.
Come talk to me September 3rd.
And we're going to have a situation, Dan, where like a sizable majority of the American are like Zoran Mamdani is an illegal, undocumented immigrant.
That is what is going to go.
And the idea of deporting the man who was elected by one of the two parties in this country to lead the largest city in this country, eight and a half million people in New York City, which is more than like 10 or 11 American states, I'd have to, I have to go look that number up.
To say, we're just going to deport him.
Then it sent shivers down my spine as I've gotten many times over the last months because it is a clear indication of how this is going to go.
This is what we are in for for the next couple of years, the next couple of however, the next whatever period is going to be Zoran Mamdani is now Navalny.
Like that is the kind of treatment we're going to start to get.
Like it would not surprise me, Dan, if in September 3rd, Momdani is picked up by ICE and all of the Democratic do-nothings, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer are like trying to get into the facility and they're going to turn around to the camera and say, oh, they would let us in.
I don't, I'm Chuck Schumer.
I'm about to go write a strongly worded letter.
Don't worry.
We'll get to the bottom of this.
Yeah.
That's what we're going to get.
And y'all, I hope I'm wrong.
I hope I'm wrong, y'all.
But that is not out of the realm of what we should expect at this moment.
I got more to say, but what do you think?
So one of the things I think about, people get this too.
If I go through like my phone scroll, you know, kind of scrolling my phone, I get those weird things that are like seven things liars say according to psychology or something.
Here's something Trump says when he's lying all the time is a lot of people say.
A lot of people say.
A lot of people say.
And actually it'll show up in those same scrolling things.
We can't tell you who actually says it.
Well, everybody says it or a lot of people say it.
So when Trump says that, and we know this by now and we could look at it, it means nobody's saying that.
There's no actual evidence for that.
Because if there was, you would cite the damn evidence and not this amorphous, like everybody is saying.
So why you summed up the birtherism stuff very well, but to go back to a point that you raised earlier, it's because it plays on the emotions.
And for lots of emotion and feeling, that's what makes it true.
It cannot be the case.
Many white Americans think it cannot be the case that a Muslim immigrant who's a democratic socialist won an election in New York.
Even New York, even a crazy blue city like New York.
That can't be the case.
It can't be the case that this is how democracy works.
It can't be the case that this can happen in America.
It has to be wrong somehow.
And it's the same feelings that drive election denial.
It's the same feelings that drive, I think, the support for immigration crackdowns and the transforming of everything in the big beautiful bill into minutiae that can be ignored.
It's the same feelings that transform this into an issue of truth for all of those folks is that it feels like it could be true.
It feels like it's how the world should be.
And so we call it truth and we put our stamp of approval on it.
And that's how the right works.
And so I think everything that you're describing, when people say, well, it can't possibly work that way.
It can't possibly be that way.
Because for millions of Americans, it's not about facts.
It's not about information.
It is about those deep-seated feelings of what the country, you know, really is or really ought to be.
And they will believe anything if it comes from on high and taps into those feelings.
And that's exactly what's going on.
And as you say, we've seen it with Birth Risen.
We saw with Trump at the Central Park, you know, the murder years ago, calling for the death penalty of people who have now been exonerated from that crime.
This is an old playbook that Trump has and it's very, very effective.
So if you think that's not how it works, let me just quote some GOP Congress folks.
Andy Ogles from Tennessee.
He called for Mamdani to face denaturalization hearings and to be deported.
And of course, I just lost my place.
He's also been calling him little Muhammad, okay, which is completely Islamophobic.
Okay.
Sorry, y'all.
Lost my place.
Here we go.
Representative Brandon Gill.
This is from The Hill.
Said that Mom Dani is not a real American because there's videos of Mom Dani eating birani with his Hands and he said, civilized Americans eat with forks and knives.
Right?
Think about what they're doing.
Little Muhammad.
Okay.
Dan, once again, let's just white Christian nationalism.
What the white Christian nationalists cannot fathom is a Muslim being in charge of a democratically run government, making decisions for all people, right?
People envision the Muslim, and this is what Charlie Kirk tweeted as soon as Momdani won, was that 25 years, 24 years ago, Muslims attacked the World Trade Center in New York City, and now one of them is going to be mayor.
It's the most Islamic phobic thing you've ever heard.
But there is no scenario for the American right, including the Christians who believe this is a Christian nation, for a Muslim to be in a place of leadership in a way that is somehow effective, democratic, peaceful, full of all of the norms and ideals that go along with representative democracy.
There's no imaginative space for that.
And you're like, well, and Dan, a lot of people listening are going to say, well, I know a lot of people like Zaran Mamdani.
And I think what we're trying to say is a lot of people in this country don't.
They have never met a Muslim person.
They do not know South Asian people.
They do not know folks who are brown and Muslim.
The only representations they have of those folks are in popular media or right-wing media.
And so this plays really well.
You have sitting congresspeople calling him little Muhammad and saying that he eats with his hands like an uncivilized barbarian.
And it plays.
It doesn't hurt them.
It helps them.
Okay.
This is rebirtherism.
And I am so scared of what is going to go on here over the next two months with Zoran Mamdani.
And I'm not saying that because I want him to back down.
I'm not saying that because I don't support him.
I'm not saying that because I'm one of these on the, on the, you know, I'm whatever, an American Democrat who's like, this is bad for the party.
Nope, I am.
Count me not in that camp.
Count me as like, this is a really good thing.
A 33-year-old who is running on affordability and income inequality and making people's lives better in the biggest city in this country, count me in.
I'm so scared, though, of what they're going to try to do to this man and what they're going to try to do in the wake of a surprising win for what is the actual American left and an actual ray of hope for people who are millennials or Gen Z who are like, yep, I'm on.
I'm on the bus.
Let's do it.
Thoughts on this before we get to some other things?
Circling back around again to the emotional appeal that's lodged in this, you know, that notion of, you know, civilized people eat with their, you eat with knife and fork.
And all I can think about is the double standards that come out there.
It's like we're coming into 4th of July weekend and a bunch of people are eating.
How's your hamburger, Jerry?
Hamburgers and hot dogs.
Like I would love to see, I don't know, I'd love to see all the right-wing MAGA folks eating their hot dogs with, you know, knife and fork in hand.
So you're just real quick, Jerry is out there on his boat on 4th of July at the river eating a hot dog, okay, with his hands, a piece of like meat shoved into a wiener, okay, shape with his hands while wearing American flag bathing suit so that old glory is touching his unmentionables and he's telling this guy he's not a real American and he's not a civilized person.
Great.
Thanks for the comment, Harold.
Good one.
Sorry, Dan.
Go ahead.
No, it's just that.
It's just that, you know, when folks, I run into people all the time that really struggle with this.
They're like, why do people not pick up these obvious contradictions, the obvious double standards?
And just to circle around again, it's because it's not about facts.
People are not opposing Mamboni because of a lack of information.
They're opposing it because people can touch into the deep-seated emotions that they have, the fear that they have, the lack of familiarity.
Decades now of an ecosystem of right-wing media that has conditioned people to respond this way to any kind of person who's not a white Christian American.
That's what we see driving this.
All right.
Let's take one more break, come back and talk about what the ongoing feud with Trump and Musk means for the Trump agenda and just the ways that Christo-fascism continues to encroach on our public square.
We'll be right back.
All right, Dan.
Elon Musk is about to become African and he's no longer going to be white.
And you're like, Brad, what does that mean?
And I'm not using slurs.
I am not being demeaning.
What I'm telling you is you're about to hear a lot of right-wing politicians refer to Elon Musk as an African because he was born in Africa and he's about to not be white in the ways you just discussed 20 minutes ago because they want to make sure, you know, he's not really one of us.
They're about to do that to Musk if he keeps going on this third party thing and the opposition to Trump's bill and so on.
So anyway, go ahead.
So, you know, the disillusion or whatever of the Trump-Musk romance is like back.
You know, we talked about this before and they had seemed to kind of reconcile and then it blew up again because Musk opposes this bill.
He has promised to challenge GOP supporters in primaries.
We've heard that before.
He vowed to start a third party to challenge the GOP.
He said on X that, quote, his America Party will be formed the next day when this passes.
It's going to pass probably today.
And so we'll see what happens with that.
But that's what he said.
This is what he wrote.
And, you know, I don't actually agree with Elon Musk very often.
I don't know if I ever have, but like, this is what he wrote.
And he said this.
He says, every member of Congress who campaigned on reducing government spending and then immediately voted for the biggest debt increase in history should hang their heads in shame.
I actually don't disagree with that.
That's what he said.
Trump then responds in Trumpian fashion.
And he said, Elon may get more subsidies than any human being in history by far.
And without subsidies, Elon would probably have to close up shop and head back home to wear Brad to South Africa.
So he says, well, maybe we'll pull funding.
We'll pull some contracts.
We'll pull some subsidies.
You have Talked a great deal about the subsidies and how subsidized Tesla is and all of this.
He has threatened that the administration will, quote, unquote, take a look at deporting Musk.
He threatened to turn Doge against Musk.
He said, quote, we might have to put Doge on Elon.
And everybody knows that's the organization that Musk was in charge of, saying he could cut trillions out of the U.S. economy and, excuse me, the costs that the U.S. pays, all of this sort of stuff.
Threatens to turn it against him.
He says, you know what Doge is?
Doge is the monster that might have to go back and eat Elon.
What are we seeing?
We're seeing everything that Trump does.
We're seeing the threat of political targeting, targeting him, deporting him, of taking the mechanisms of government regulation over subsidies, contracts, what have you, going after him.
But to your point, go home to where?
To South Africa.
Deport him to where?
To South Africa.
I mentioned that whiteness is an ideology a few minutes ago.
Musk may be pale enough that most people look at him and read him as white.
But if that ideology shifts and he finds himself on the wrong side, as you say, he is now a South African who needs to be removed.
When he becomes enough of a fly in the ointment, enough in the thorn of the side of the GOP, it shows how those colors work.
It shows, once again, I don't know how many times we've talked about this.
It is beyond me at this point why anybody thinks that supporting Trump is ever going to be in their long-term interest.
Lots of levels to this.
But your thoughts on the significance of yet another blowup between Trump and Musk?
So I want to make three points, I think.
The first one is maybe we should turn Doge on Elon.
Yeah.
This gives the whole thing away, friends.
If Doge is about waste, fraud, and abuse, and Elon's contracts with the government are legitimate, if supposedly, if you can sit down and convince me, which it would take a lot to convince me that everything Elon Musk gets from the U.S. government in terms of military contracts, in terms of SpaceX and so on, is that now waste, fraud, and abuse?
Like, I'm not a, Dan, you and I are not military experts.
I am not a guy who knows a lot about our military's artillery, its fighter jets, its aircraft carriers, et cetera.
I have read enough that I think I understand that there are actually jets that Musk's outfits make that are actually pretty integral to the U.S. military for better and I would say actually for worse.
Is that just waste, fraud, and abuse?
Like, do you see what's happening?
Waste, fraud, and abuse is anything that the regime doesn't want.
It's not really about is it wasteful?
Is it abusive?
Is it something we don't need?
It's just about the regime doesn't want it.
You're not my friend anymore.
Therefore, you're a waste.
That's doge.
You're not my friend anymore.
It's a friend-enemy distinction.
It's Carl Schmidt in a nutshell.
You're not my friend anymore, therefore you're a waste.
And I am licensed to abuse you.
That's how this works.
Now, to sum up what we've talked about today, Dan, I'm going to make a commercial for the Democratic Party because they don't seem to have any right now.
So you ready for my commercial?
I've been practicing.
I'm ready.
I didn't comb my hair.
I don't have the right suit on, but here it goes.
The Republican Party is not a party of fiscal conservatism.
The Republican Party is a party of gigantic, overreaching, invasive government.
But it's the kind of government that can only be used to punish and hurt and not to help or feed or to care.
You Americans somehow are paying more for a government that does less for you and only has its sights on helping the oligarchs of the regime's inner circle and disappearing people off the street so that they are taken away to concentration camps.
You are left behind.
You don't matter.
And they want you to live in fear so that you will believe that the only thing you need is for those neighbors of yours to be picked up by masked men rather than health care, rather than jobs, rather than a stable economy, rather than a way for your schools to be funded.
The Trump administration just withheld $6 billion of federal funding for schools across the United States, $150 million for California alone.
Who does that money help?
It helps kids who need breakfast in the morning, who need school-provided lunches, after-school programs, the most vulnerable, the most in need.
Are those people waste?
Apparently.
Are those people immaterial?
As J.D. Van said?
Minutia.
Apparently.
Just minutiae.
They're the minutia of the American body.
They're the minutia of the American republic.
And that's how they look at it.
We got to go to Reasons for Hope.
But any final thoughts before we do that?
Just, I mean, I'll bring this into my Reason for Hope because it ties into this.
And I'm looking for hope in wreckage.
I recognize this.
Everything you said about the white Christian nationalism, immigration pieces of the Big Beautiful Bill, I think is accurate.
And it feeds to the MAGA core.
But there's another point.
Charlie Matisian, I think that's how I pronounce his name.
I hope I get that.
Politico had an interesting article this week that caught my eye.
And it said, The limit of Trump's revolution or laid bare in the MAGA bill.
And the subtitle was this.
The legislation does little to showcase or cement Trump's new coalition.
Part of what strikes me about this bill, a reason for hope, is that, yeah, you've got the MAGA faithful always going to vote for Trump.
And we've got the polling data and the people that go and ask them what they think.
And they think this is great.
They believe everything Trump says and so forth.
But this was an election where you had a sizable minority of voters who voted on economic concerns.
And this bill has done nothing to help them.
This, on its economic side, this is a pretty straight up old school GOP Republican bill.
And lots of analysts that begin looking at this saying, you know, this isn't going to do much to help.
This is going to harm most voters of color.
It's going to harm Communities of color, those people who decided to take a swing on Trump because they thought that everything he said about the economy was going to work, this bill is not going to help them.
Rural voters who felt trapped and helpless are going to feel worse when insurance is lost for their kids and things like this.
And so, my reason for hope, again, looking for rays of light in the darkness here, is that I think that's accurate.
I think this actually, there were lots of prognostications about this fundamental seismic shift in the American electorate in the last election.
That's not bearing out, and Trump and the GOP have done nothing with this to actually build on that.
They continue to strengthen their case with the MAGA faithful, but they were never going to lose the MAGA faithful.
Lots of Americans who voted for Trump, that sliver of Americans that put him into office, they didn't all vote because they want masked ICE figures pulling people off the street, as you're describing.
They voted because for them, this stuff's not minutia.
They voted because affordability of health care is important and affordability of housing and food and all of those things.
And this bill, the big signature bill that the GOP has put forward, does nothing to help those people.
It actively harms them.
And I hope, I hope that in the future, that is something that can be used to try to remove Trump and the GOP from power.
My reason for hope is 1849 law in Wisconsin banning abortion struck down by the Supreme Court in that state, meaning that abortion will remain legal there up to 20 weeks.
This is a huge example of why elections at the state level matter.
This is the election that Elon Musk, who we just talked about, put in tens of millions of dollars to try to get a certain judge elected.
That did not work.
We see a 4-3 majority.
And what happens?
Abortion remains legal.
Like it's just A to B to C in this case.
And it is good news.
I want to make an announcement.
This is a fun thing.
And Dan and I have been talking about this for a while.
We're going to start live recording our bonus episodes every month and inviting subscribers to join us there to ask questions in real time and to hang out while we record so that you can see Dan's haircut and my hair.
I had to do it, Dan.
I had to do it.
It's because my one hair gets cut.
I had to do it.
I had to do it.
You can see.
Yeah.
So our recording of that is going to be on July 22nd.
And if you're a subscriber, look for more info coming to you through Supercast and other channels.
But we hope you'll hang out for the live recording, watch us chop it up, and then ask questions and stick around to do that.
We'll be back next week with some great content.
We hope you all have a safe holiday and call out Uncle Ron as he eats his hot dog as best as you can.
If you can become a subscriber, it would help us out a lot.
If you can't do that, please go hit, review us on Apple Podcasts and leave us a comment.
