Weekly Roundup: Texas Floods and the Vengeful Theology of Kristi Noem + Why the Concentration Camp Had to Be in Florida
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Brad and Dan begin with the devastating floods in Texas and Kristi Noem’s controversial disaster response before turning to a chilling development: a proposed concentration camp in Florida. From there, they examine the deeper forces driving these events—white Christian nationalism, the weakening of church-state separation, and newly proposed changes to the Johnson Amendment.
With insight and urgency, Brad and Dan break down the theological narratives, policy shifts, and cultural consequences shaping today’s America. They also highlight why local elections and grassroots activism remain critical in the face of mounting extremism.
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I'm 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.
I'm Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
And nice to be with you, Brad, who has nothing going on in his life.
Well, you too.
No, good to be with you too, Dan.
And I think, as always, a bunch to talk about today.
We're in that mid-summer moment, I feel like, that week after 4th of July where you realize summer's half over.
And, you know, for some folks, that means vacation and being away, but there is a bunch to talk about today.
And I think for a lot of you, what's on your mind is the Texas floods, but also DHS and the concentration camp in Florida.
So we're going to tie all that together in what I'm going to call the theology of Christy Noom and the politics of Uncle Ron DeSantis.
So those are going to be our two characters for today, them Uncle Ron DeSantis and Christy Noam, theologian of Doom.
We're going to also jump into the IRS saying that the Johnson Amendment will no longer be enforced.
So I know a bunch of you are wondering about that.
We will get there.
So a lot to do.
Here we go.
First things first, Dan, I'm going to jump in here on what's happening in Florida.
And I know some of you are wondering about the flood.
All of this is going to lead to Texas and the response by Christy Dome and FEMA and Governor Abbott and others.
So don't think that we're not going to get there.
We will.
There's a reason to start in Florida.
And we haven't talked about this on the show yet, but I think all of you know by now that there is a concentration camp, and I am calling it a concentration camp that is now being run and is operational in Florida.
We have reports from people who are being held there that the conditions are inhumane.
They are saying that the lights are left on 24 hours a day.
The food has maggots.
One man had his Bible taken away and was reportedly told there is no freedom of religion here.
I want to stay on that point.
So just think about that point.
You do not have the basic freedoms here, any.
You have no rights here.
Okay?
And I want to read for everybody the definition of a concentration camp from the Leo Beck Institute.
And here it is.
Concentration camp is a place where a large number of inmates, often those deemed political enemies or members of ethnic and religious minorities, are confined against their will and under guard, usually without having been charged with a crime.
Punitive conditions of internment usually result in a higher rate of mortality.
Dan, to me, this is a concentration camp.
It's about three times bigger than any other detention center that DHS has.
And it has a very specific purpose.
One of those is to instill terror in everyone.
I mean, we've heard Laura Loomer, we talked about it last week, saying that the alligators are hungry.
We've heard Christy Noam say, you know, you better watch out, otherwise you'll end up here.
Andrew O'Hear at Salon puts it this way.
Terrorized.
Sorry, I lost my place there for a minute, folks.
Here we go.
Terrorizing, incarcerating, and deporting immigrants is an important regime goal in its own terms.
But the real target of terrorism, state terrorism included, is always the broader public.
Liberal outrage, to some significant degree, is the point, as are a mounting sense of powerlessness and increasing anxiety about the rule of law and constitutional order.
In other words, a concentration camp is both functioning in terms of this goal of mass deportation that the Trump administration has, but it is also symbolically functional.
It tells the public, this is what we can do.
And Trump said, we have a lot of people who were born here and maybe we should put them there next.
So this is a message.
We're going to build places like this and we're going to put people who we deem not allowed to be here there.
But it may come to a point where we have to put on, what if we denaturalize your citizenship overnight?
You who are an American citizen and you've been an American citizen for 25 years, we're going to denaturalize you in a matter of a couple of days.
And then we might put you here because, well, you're here illegally.
Like you see the progression and then it goes down to American citizens who are native born and so on.
And we're there.
So I have a lot more to say, Dan, about like this being in Florida and history and Uncle Ron and all of that.
But I want to stop before I get going, throw it to you for some initial thoughts on just the symbolic and operational functions of this place as a concentration camp.
What you think it might mean that you're not allowed to have a Bible there, whatever else you got.
So, I mean, yeah, lots of thoughts.
One, when you talk about the symbolism of it and the function of state terror and all of that, I think all that's true.
And Trump knows that and the mercurial nature of Trump with the off-the-cuff comments about, well, you know, maybe you're next.
Maybe we'll put some other people there.
Maybe we'll put some Americans.
Like that's part of the intent.
There's another piece of this about the, how would I say this, the fluidity of appeals to legality here and the way that that works in the Trump administration.
You're talking about denaturalization and all of this.
Remember, the Trump administration said once upon a time that the target was violent offenders who were here illegally.
And then it's clearly just expanded to anybody who's undocumented, anybody who doesn't have a protected legal status in the U.S. And they'll always appeal to that.
Like that's some sort of like divine law or something.
Well, you know, they're here illegally.
What are we going to do?
We're like, well, you know, we write the laws.
Like they're human conventions.
We could change them or we could, you know, as other administrations have done, we could choose how to enforce them or whether to enforce them or whatever.
But you get this thing all the time on the right when where it suits their purposes, they appeal to laws that human beings made as if their hands are tied.
Ah, shucks, what are we going to do?
They're the party of law and order or whatever.
But then other times they use that conventional nature, the fact that laws are conventions to their benefit.
So they'll be like, oh, you're naturalized.
We can't do stuff to you because you're a citizen.
Oh, we'll just not have you be a citizen anymore.
We'll just, you know, bend naturalization law, possibly break it.
It's another one of these ambiguous, untested kinds of issues.
But that's what stands out to me is just the circularity of the appeals to laws and rights and so forth.
And so the same thing with the appeal to the Bible.
You don't hear anybody talk more about supposed religious freedom and specifically Christian freedom and freedom of religion than people on the right.
And we're going to talk about that when we come to the Johnson Amendment.
But not if you're a brown person and not if you're somebody that we have deemed you belong here and then you don't have those rights.
You're not protected by those laws, even though you're still in the United States, even though you are still subject to U.S. law.
So I think those are the things that show just how sort of dystopian this whole thing is.
And then all the stuff you're talking about, the appeal to the alligators and stuff, this is literally like something out of like some sort of dystopian novel where you've got a camp in the middle of the swamp somewhere, you know, surrounded by alligators and like, you know, they don't even have fences.
If you can survive, whatever.
And it's, it's like a dream for the right.
And it's, it's, it's really just sort of insane and chilly.
And I think that brings in some of the pieces of the Florida stuff as well as probably bringing us to our friend, Uncle Ron DeSantis.
Let's talk about Uncle Ron and Florida.
So I think that it is, it is highly symbolic also that this first 21st century Trump concentration camp is built in Florida.
And Dan, I want to say how annoyed I am that the media has just adopted alligator alcatraz.
Like the the the Trump administration invented a word, a name, I should say, that is positive for them, alligator Alcatraz.
And their base loves it.
And the mainstream media, everybody's like, yep, that's what it is.
Like we could call this the DeSantis concentration camp.
We could call this Trump's decal.
We could call this whatever you, like, there's a lot of things to call this, but it's just apparently the new Alcatraz, which is tough and badass and what everybody likes.
Why is it so fitting that it's in Florida?
Dan, if you go back to our archives, we talked about Uncle Ron when he was running for president and flamed out viciously about the ways Florida has been a laboratory for the erasure of history.
Florida has been the place where Uncle Ron DeSantis has attempted to erase history.
How?
By instituting policies and education that mean you're not allowed to learn or study certain things.
You're not allowed to know about LGBTQ people, their history, their existence, their characters in literature, whatever.
Remember that whole fight over African-American studies and whether or not it counts towards AP credit and everything else?
That was like centered in Florida.
Where did Moms for Liberty come from?
Florida, who is one of their biggest fans?
Uncle Ron DeSantis, book banning, making sure certain books are not allowed.
And we're talking about like, you know, foundational books for literature curricula and so on.
You're not allowed there.
Dan, let me put it this way.
If you're not human, you don't get a history.
If we don't consider you human, you don't get a history.
If you're a black person who's under enslavement in this country, you don't have a history according to the enslaver because you're not a human.
Why would we keep the records of who you are?
Why would we be able to trace your life and family back to West Africa?
You don't count.
If you're not a human, you don't have a history.
History is a human phenomenon, and only humans have the privilege of their history being recorded, remembered, recounted.
In a concentration camp, you are treated inhumanely.
Somebody will look you in the eye who's a Christian person and say to the person with the Bible, there is no freedom of religion here.
We're basically telling you, like the enslaved peoples of centuries ago, you're not human enough to be Christian.
Now, that changed and there's a whole nuanced history to that.
And don't email me.
I know that some enslavers wanted to convert enslaved people.
Blah, blah, blah, blah.
I know.
But there was a lot of folks that basically looked at black people and said, you are an animal and not a human.
Why would religion pertain to you?
If somebody's being looked in the eye at this concentration camp and being tolding, you don't get the Bible because you don't get religion, you're not worthy of that.
They're saying you're not human.
The concentration camp is where your history is erased.
It's where you're treated as a human who is not worthy of having a history.
You're being put in the swamps out in Florida that can absorb.
Like your history and your humanity are going to sink into the swamp and absorb your value and your worth and your dignity.
They're going to take your story and your struggle and your beauty and they're going to say, it all sunk into the swamp.
I'm sorry.
Like we don't know if these are going to turn into death camps yet, Dan.
They very much could, okay?
We don't know if what we're beginning, what we're witnessing is like the beginning of some kind of Holocaust.
But we are witnessing the beginning of something that does not, history shows us, does not have good outcomes.
I want to quote Andrea Pitzer at MSNBC when she says, when people think of concentration camps, they think of more than a million people murdered at Auschwitz.
But extermination camps appeared only after nearly a decade of Nazi rule and several evolutions in wartime detention.
What that tells me is that when you think of Auschwitz or Dachau, you're thinking of things that had a 10-year evolution, that they Evolved over time and they started as detention centers.
Okay?
So I'll just make my point and I'll throw it back to you.
Uncle Ron has been trying for a decade to erase people who he doesn't deem worthy history.
The concentration camp is where you literally do that.
So it is so fitting that the first concentration camp of the Trump administration is in Florida and not somewhere else.
Just pick up on that last point about it being in Florida.
Again, this is we've seen DeSantis, you know, he sort of butted heads with Trump for a while, tried to be the new Trump, flamed out.
He has been cozying back up.
And so that's part of what this is, serving the interests of MAGA.
It's his way of bearing fealty to Trump, of sort of being back in the good graces and all of that.
But I want to pick up on this theme of no history because people listening to it's in the code know that we're talking about, you know, this attack on empathy and specifically the author we're looking at, the anti-trans rhetoric and so forth.
But these things all tie together because the argument on the right often is that there literally is no such thing as a trans person.
It's not a real thing.
It's not a real phenomenon.
There's no such thing as a queer person.
There's no such thing as black people.
And if somebody says, how can you possibly say there's no, because if you say that there are black people, you're appealing to race and race isn't real and you're a racist and you need to just affirm that we're all human.
So there is no such thing as somebody who's not white because to say human means white and white privilege and all of that sort of stuff.
And so that's what this is.
And you get that legally as well, where if you can deny somebody legal status, well, now, now institutionally, we get to treat them as if they are the people that don't really exist.
We get to put them in this place.
We'll suspend their rights.
We will deny them basic services and things that we're obligated to give them and all of that.
I think this notion of erasure is really, really important.
I think that people hear that and they think it sounds extreme, but go talk.
Go talk to people about queer folk or black people or undocumented immigrants.
And you'll hear this language over and over and over about how they aren't really what they seem.
They're not, they really don't have a status.
They're not really safe.
They're not, there really aren't black people.
There really aren't like, there are just people.
And if you insist on these differences, that's a problem.
And queer and trans folks aren't real.
So for me, all of these things tie together because as we've seen, the question that arises when you see something like this is like, who do they go for next?
As you say, Trump's already said, well, maybe there's some Americans who should be in there.
Some U.S. citizens, which ones are they going to be?
Which group are they going to decide doesn't have enough reality to possess rights, to possess protections, to present, excuse me, to deserve due process and legal protection and so forth.
When you are unassimilable, where do we put you?
We either put you out or we put you in a camp.
Like that's, right?
That's what happened with that.
That's what happened with Japanese incarceration.
And this is the new Guantanamo Bay.
This is the new Guantanamo Bay on U.S. soil.
This is the new Japanese American internment camp.
It's just, you know, it's there in Florida now.
We've done this before.
It's just moving closer to home for many people.
Yeah.
A lot to say here.
I mean, let me just finish this up.
We'll take a break.
I'll just say on the idea of reality, who's real, you know, it becomes this thing where either we're colorblind and we don't see race and I don't know why you're always making it about identity or your identity is so persistent and so unassimilable that we just can't have you here.
Like it's either it's it's one or the other.
It's either why are you making this about identity politics?
I don't understand why you like are so into identity all the time.
And then the flip side of that is, well, your identity is just not assimilable here.
So you either need to get out or we need to put you in a camp so that we can just make sure you don't infect the rest of us.
And that's the choices you end with.
I want to come back in a minute and basically tie this together to Christy Gnome and the theology of Christina and how that's worked with DHS and also the response to the Texas floods.
Be right back.
Okay, Dan, the latest in Texas is that there's about 120 who are confirmed to have died in the floods.
There are many more who are missing.
There's been some really insightful comments in our Discord this week about the fact that Camp Mystic has gained a lot of attention, and I understand why.
And there are young girls there who are missing and some have lost their lives.
There's also folks who are really not being talked about who were underprivileged, living in RVs and other things by the river and who were swept away and presumably many did not make it.
I want to talk about the responses to this from Christy Noam and from Governor Abbott.
And I want to do so by talking about Christy Noam's ethos and ideology at DHS as Secretary of Homeland Security.
So here's the first point I want to make, Dan, and jump in on this before I'd rather you jump in sooner than later.
It took Christy Noam three days to sign off on paperwork to allow funding for FEMA as it was needed.
That's because there's a new rule that she put in place that said any expenditures over $100,000 had to be approved by her personally.
It took her three days to do that.
Okay.
So think about that.
And CNN is reporting that.
That is being reported.
So just to jump in, sorry, on that point.
So a few things that have happened in the wake of this.
So you had the Trump administration talking about just doing away with FEMA.
You had Trump saying, you know, last month that maybe we should just shut down FEMA.
And then they had to walk that back this week.
And Carolyn Levitt said, you know, quote, the president wants to ensure American citizens always have what they need during times of need, whether that's assistant, whether that assistance comes from states or the federal government.
That is a policy discussion that will continue.
So they're trying to be like, oh, okay, we've talked about it, but no big thing or whatever.
But somebody else who hasn't been present is the head of FEMA.
David Richardson Has like been invisible in this.
He hasn't gone on site.
He has not appeared.
He hasn't done like interviews and things.
And like normally, when you get the big event of some sort, like a hurricane hits, tornadoes wipe someplace out, whatever, like intentionally, the head of FEMA is there invisible.
And people have noted this.
And observers have said it raises concern that what?
It raises concern that Christy Noam is the one who is essentially managing FEMA.
Goes right to what you're saying.
She puts this policy in place that everything has to go through her.
Took three days to do it and so forth.
But here's the thing.
Christy Noam is the Secretary of Homeland Security.
She oversees 22 different agencies.
FEMA is one.
That's how unimportant this is, that you're not going to have the head of FEMA focus on it.
If you're that much of a micromanager that you're like, yeah, everything that's going to happen in all these different agencies has to go through me.
You are guaranteeing that you cannot respond in a timely fashion to give people the help that they need.
So I have more to say about that.
And we'll come back to it, I think, as we get into, as you're saying, the theology of NOAA as well.
But like, none of this is surprising when you've had an administration that has been talking about doing away with FEMA and how useless it is.
And that was fun for them to talk about when it's California wildfires and it's a blue state and it's people they want to punish.
When it's red Texas, all of a sudden they have to sit up and say, oh, yeah, we weren't actually going to get rid of FEMA.
We're going to declare an emergency, all that sort of stuff.
Agree.
And so let's take what you said.
We have no FEMA boss who's anywhere in sight.
Christine Noam seems to be the one who, as you say, oversees 22 agencies.
FEMA is one of those, but she seems to be the one who's out in front.
And a couple of things.
I mean, when you run the government, the federal government, like a mob family, you only trust so many people.
And so you keep those people close.
And the federal government is too big and sprawling of an entity to do that.
And this is what you get.
So let's just, if some of you don't want to get lost here, you want to take something away, you want to remember something from this episode and walk away with it, let me just give you this.
It took eight days to build the Florida concentration camp.
Eight days.
They transformed an existing facility in eight days.
It is cheap.
It is shoddy, but it took them eight days to go from this to that and make it operational.
Dan, it took three days for her to sign the papers to get the.
I just want everyone to think about that.
Eight days to build a 5,000-person concentration camp with beds and fencing and everything else.
Eight days.
When they want to do something, they can do it.
Eight days, like a week.
It took a week to build a 5,000-person concentration camp.
And it took three days for her to sign papers so that people, FEMA could get to Texas and start helping.
There were Mexican crews there.
There were crews from Mexico before most of the FEMA resources got there.
Think about that.
You all know how I say all the time, they want to rule they don't want to govern?
Well, let me get into that right now.
Because if we go back to Christy Gnome, okay?
And Dan, jump in here because I think you've got a lot of good thoughts on this because of it's in the code and what you've been doing.
Christy Gnome's theology is when it comes to things like natural disasters and caring for people, that's out of my hands.
That is not what FEMA does.
We help, but it's after the states do it.
And we're kind of secondary and we're not really the like primary and we just can't get our hands dirty.
If you don't believe me, here's a clip.
Let me play it for you right now.
So that was her at a cabinet meeting saying FEMA is not the primary, it's really the state.
Matters a lot.
I'm extremely grateful for God's hand in that whole situation because hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people were saved.
And this is a time for all of us in this country to remember that we were created to serve each other.
God created us to take care of each other.
And that when we do that, we are happier, we are more fulfilled, and we can walk alongside people on their worst day and help them get through it and come out the other side knowing that we can continue to live a life that God has purposed for us.
So they're grateful for you.
Several times the day after the flooding, you and Melania were on the phone with me, and I want to thank you for that.
That meant the world.
I was able to tell many of those folks that I had been visiting with you and that you had said, whatever they need, Christy, let's deploy it and get it down there and be helpful.
Okay.
As you said, Dan, maybe we should get rid of FEMA.
Maybe we don't need it, et cetera.
But I've been saying this for months.
When it comes to occupying your city with the military, oh, yeah, we can do that.
Oh, yeah.
I'll found the papers right now.
Actually, you don't just here, docu sign it.
Here, I'm Christy Noam.
Here, what do you need?
You mean to docu sign?
Whatever.
Well, just text my name.
What do you need for me to send in whoever you need?
I got you.
I'm good.
Yeah, call Pete.
Hexeth.
Heg Seth, are we good?
You're going to send him in?
All right, great.
It's done.
It's done.
We did it.
Took 30 seconds.
If we need to occupy you militarily, we got that as the federal government.
If we need to show up and help girls trapped at a camp, people swept away by a river, entire communities caught up in floodwaters, 72 hours.
We might need some, it's the weekend.
I don't know.
Jenny's not in the office.
I don't know.
The paperwork went through.
We'll just have to see what's up.
There's a theology behind this.
And Dan, you jump in here with the theological component because there's another one that's coming and it gets worse, friends.
It gets even worse.
But Dan, just go ahead.
What I think it is, and this is something I will, next week's It's in the Code is going to talk about this too.
But so on the right, the really, I know I say this in the episode, I describe everything as Orwellian with his administration, but like they are.
It's like if George Orwell was like here, he'd be like, yep, this is it.
Everything they do is always described about protecting others, protecting Americans.
And so all the anti-immigration stuff, building the concentration camp in Florida, all these things are about protecting others and keeping others safe and targeting trans people is about protecting women and children and targeting Black Lives Matter is about protecting law-abiding Americans, all that, the rhetoric of protection.
But if you dig down, protection for them is always punitive.
It's not really about protecting somebody.
It's about punishing or attacking somebody else.
And you talk about this on the political register.
You have to have an enemy.
There has to be an enemy that we can punish.
So, yeah, we're going to occupy your city-wide because we see enemies that we can punish.
It's not really about protecting somebody else.
It's about targeting people we want to target.
It's about being aggressive.
It's about attacking you.
It's about having an enemy.
It's about exercising force.
Like running a tank through MacArthur Park in L.A. while there's a kid's summer camp going on.
Yeah, showing up with hundreds of soldiers in a park just for a show of force.
Yeah, making sure you've got your ice storm troopers with their faces covered and unidentified and everything else marching around and terrorizing people.
That's protection.
Building camps where you can put people in and you can talk about alligators eating them.
That's protection.
Protecting is not really helping.
It's not caring.
That's too soft.
Maybe that's too feminine.
That's too a lot of things.
But so, and this is not just Christy Noam.
Kerr County had been trying, right, to get warning systems put in place for years and it was defunded.
Why?
This is the GOP for decades.
What does it do?
It defunds everything.
Anything that actually helps people, anything that cares for people, you defund it.
Snap, let's defund it.
Medicaid, let's defund it.
Obamacare, let's defund it.
Let's defund things.
But if we can find an enemy to punish, yeah.
So let's go out and make sure that police have money.
Let's go out and make sure that ICE has money.
Let's build the border wall.
Let's make sure that the military is always getting bigger and bigger and bigger budgets.
There's a theology here of, I think, retribution, a theology of violence, of what a famous theologian named Walter Wink a long time ago, decades ago, called the myth of redemptive violence, that violence can be redemptive, that violence can be the means of peace.
This has been, in my view, at the heart of the GOP for a long time.
And once again, MAGA world doesn't invent it, but they just turn it up.
They're just like, fine, let's take the lid off of this and let's let this out and let's let this breathe and let's let this be everything it could be.
And that's what you see.
And so there is this deep-seated desire to punish, to oppress, to target.
And if we need to do anything to help people that doesn't look like that, that's secondary at best.
Or I honestly think they just like, it just doesn't compute.
Right.
They need like people in boats to like help people in tech.
Like, what are we going to do with, but like, who are we going to shoot?
Do we get to use tear gas anywhere?
Do we get to put anybody in a, in a, in a camp?
If not, I don't get it.
What are we doing?
It doesn't feel good unless I get to hurt someone.
Exactly.
And, and, okay, so some of you are like, all right, Dan is on point here, and that makes sense.
Does Christinom really have a theology?
And so I'm going to play for you an ad that was posted on July 7 to X. And it read, here I am, take me.
And that was posted by the DHS account.
So here's the ad.
I'll let you listen.
And then you can decide if there's a theology here or not.
And we'll break it down.
All right, Dan.
So several people said this to me this week.
Every time I logged into Blue Sky, someone else was tagging me with it because, you know, it is like, I mean, it's just a lot.
Here's Bible verse I think about sometimes.
Many times, it goes, and I heard the voice of the Lord saying, Who shall I send?
And who will go for us?
Run for a long time.
Run for a long time.
Surely God could.
Surely God could.
I said, here am I. Send me.
Here we go.
To the lady that God put you down.
So, here's my thoughts: okay.
This is an ad that says to young men, you should sign up for DHS so that you can help people land in the concentration camp in Florida.
Like, if you sign up with us, you're going to get to do everything you just said, Dan.
You're going to get to punish and chase and tear gas and do whatever.
And you know what that is?
That is what it means to be a Christian man, to be violent, to kidnap, to disappear.
The heart of the DHS program right now is taking people off the street, from their jobs, from their homes, people who may or may not be American citizens, people who have passports, people who may have green cards, the large majority of whom are not criminals, people who are not violent criminals, as you said earlier today.
What this tells you is that Christian virtue in the age of Trump is about violence and kidnapping.
It's about expelling.
It's about attacking.
Even if those people you're attacking are Christians, which as we talked about last week, many of them are.
There's a spiritual calling, Dan, as you just said, to vengeance and to revenge and to hurt.
But when we think about Texas, like you just said, the floods in Kerr County and other counties, when we think of the hundreds of people who lost their lives, folks at summer camps, folks in RVs, folks who were completely caught off guard by this, it's about spiritual bypassing.
Been a lot of talk in our Discord this week about spiritual bypassing.
And I know you got thoughts on this.
It's about saying, instead of dealing with the harsh, difficult realities of what's here, the like dismantling feelings that come with the tragedy, instead of letting us feel those feelings and letting us realize the depth of loss as a community,
Instead of taking responsibility for our part in that loss as leaders, we are going to not confront the mistakes and we are not going to repent from our sins and we're not going to own what happened here because we're going to bypass it and say, we're going to thank God, as Christy Noam did in the clip I played earlier, that more people didn't die, even though hundreds of people died.
And it didn't have to be that way.
Something could have been done in the 72 hours that it took her in the calls for an emergency system over the years on the part of Kerr County that would have prevented these hundreds of folks or over 100 people from dying.
If you don't believe me on this, if you think I'm overstating it, listen to Governor Greg Abbott talk about how he views what happened with the floods over the last couple of weeks.
Second party question needs to be addressed.
You ask, I'm going to use your words.
Who's to blame?
Know this.
That's the word choice of losers.
Let me explain one thing about Texas.
And that is, Texas, every square inch of our state, cares about football.
You could be in Hunt, Texas, Huntsville, Texas, Houston, Texas, any size community that care about football.
High school, running Atlantes, college, football, or pro.
Know this.
Every football team makes mistakes.
The losing teams are the ones that try to point out who's to blame.
The championship teams are the ones that say, don't worry about it, man, we got this.
We're going to make sure that we go score again that we're going to win this game.
The way winners talk is not to point fingers.
They talk about solutions.
Greg Abbott literally says that to dwell on what happened here is to have a loser mentality.
And he likens it to a football game.
And he's like, you know, you go in at halftime or you lose a game and you don't say, you don't dwell on the loss.
You just say, what are we going to do to win the next one?
You know what the thing that happens, though, Dan, with Governor Abbott and Texas politics at the state level on the part of the GOP is there's never any taking responsibility and changing the game plan.
Every time they lose, they tell you it's not time to talk about why they lost.
And then they never change their tactics because we saw that with Uvalde.
We see it now with the floods.
It's not time to talk about it.
And if you do, you're a loser.
I can't believe you would want me the governor or you would want the authorities in the county or you would want Christy Noam to sit here and take responsibility for this.
If you dwell on the past, you're a loser.
Oh, we just happen to be the party.
And the people who dwell on every past grievance we've ever had, we happen to worship a president who will never let go the fact that he thinks he won 2020 or that a bunch of people didn't vote for him and that he is willing to engage in petty grievance down the line for decades and oh yeah, he's not a loser, but you're a loser.
If you want to talk about what happened to these kids and what could have been done.
No, no, no.
We got to move on.
And so the theology, Dan, is one of if we can punish, we are called.
And if we can't, if we have to take responsibility or repent, we're going to bypass that.
And we're going to say, if you want to dwell there, you are doing something wrong as an American and as a Christian.
Further thoughts here?
More than I can probably straighten out in my head here.
So one thing to pick up, you know, you talk about that, that shifting of blame or the just refusal to assign responsibility.
I mean, and of course, Trump did that this week.
He said, if you look at the water situation, that was really the Biden setup.
I don't even know what the hell that's supposed to mean.
The water situation?
Like the flood, like, you know, so it was just the, don't give me the, it's not time to assign blame when that's what the Trump administration always does is to assign blame and just blame Biden in ways that don't even make sense.
The water setup was the Biden thing.
It's like, oh, okay, I guess, like whatever that is.
But I want to come back like around to this, this theology of vengeance.
But also, I think there's a, for lack of a better way of putting it, there's a sort of a therapeutic or psychological dimension to this too.
I've talked, and some of this is personal experience, you know, people can talk about your responses that we have if we're stressed.
I'm a fight response person.
I get mad.
I lash out.
And I've spent a number of years now trying to learn to not do that.
But in talking to lots of counselors and mental health professionals and psychologists and others, one of the things I'll talk about is that anger is a secondary emotion.
It often is layered over other emotions like fear, maybe feelings like inadequacy.
We feel powerless.
And what I often liken it to is that when I'm busy lashing out, it's like if you're stuck in traffic and you take that alternate route that actually isn't any faster, but you're moving around a lot.
So you feel like you're getting something done.
You feel like you have agency when you don't.
Anger does that.
Anger touches into that.
And so you talk about, I heard you talking a minute ago about like other kinds of responses, compassion, powerlessness, sadness, guilt.
Like maybe we made some bad decisions in Texas and we should have done something different and it came back and this happened.
Those are hard emotions to feel.
Those are hard emotions to deal with.
Those are complex theologies.
Theologians and philosophers, not just Christian, but in every tradition, have had to like ponder and deal with those kind of things for millennia.
Those are hard human realities.
And it is a lot easier to make everything about anger and vengeance.
And so I would describe that anger and vengeance not just as a secondary emotion, but as kind of a masking emotion.
It masks those deeper realities and feelings.
And these are things that the contemporary GOP just can't make room for and the model of masculinity within it.
We talk about toxic masculinity, hypermasculinity all the time.
You talk about the DHS sort of recruitment ad and the male voice, southern accent, riding around in the helicopters, citing Bible verses, all of that.
How many times, Brad, have you like walked us through the Christian man camps where they're doing what?
Like jumping out of helicopters or climbing walls or the paramilitary training and all of that.
This is Christian identity and Christian masculine identity for millions of Americans.
And the last point I want to make about this is the Bible verse, they said, it's a very well-known Bible verse.
It's from the prophet Isaiah.
It's chapter six, verses eight and nine.
It's famous kind of iconic passage where God says, Who will I send to talk to my people?
And the prophet Isaiah says, Here I am, send me.
And that's what's quoted by this person.
These are the folks who are the inerrantists, these are the people who say the Bible is literally true and we have to be really serious about it and so forth.
The context of that passage is about like Isaiah trying to tell the Judeans that they shouldn't be making alliances with Assyria and Egypt and then it's going to come back and buy them.
It's like it's geopolitics.
It's not some personal kid, some kid who's like having an existential crisis about what do I do with my life.
But what does that do?
And why doesn't that matter?
The irony of those appeals to the Bible are that because we say it's an errant, because it's God's word, because it needs to apply to me personally, it lets me take it completely out of context.
So we can take anything we want to do and say it's a divine calling.
So if I want to go out of helicopters and I want to use guns and I want to like target people and I've been conditioned my entire life to feel nervous and scared around people of color because they might be quote unquote illegal or they're not speaking English or they're all criminals or whatever.
I can now take all of those emotions that have been carefully cultivated by a right-wing ecosystem I've lived in my entire life.
And I can now say that those are God calling me to do this.
So I have a divine calling to go out and enact that vengeance.
And you can just see how circular and how frankly airtight this system is for millions of Americans.
And that is why it is so hard to displace.
Okay, so you said that this is a theology of anger.
So here's a way to put this, friends, okay?
The only emotion allowed when something happens where there is no one to punish, no guns to fire, is...
The primary emotion for, let me back up, everybody.
Sorry.
We're going to start over.
Sorry.
Classroom.
All right.
Reset.
Dan, thank you for resetting the classroom.
Here we go.
Okay.
Anger is the primary emotion of MAGA Christianity.
And so if there's other emotions that should be present, should be cultivated, they are bypassed.
They're bypassed and to thank God this happened or it's in God's hands, you bypass them.
When anger is available, you dig in and you go full throttle.
And what you said there, Dan, is that anger is a way of masking.
And what I would say is, let's do some wordplay here.
Let's do some entendres, shall we?
The masculinity, the toxic patriarchal masculinity we talk about all the time with MA and right-wing Christian patriarchy and so on, is masking.
As a man, you are putting on a mask of anger that says that is the only emotion I'm allowed to feel and that's the only one I'm going to exude to the world.
And any other emotion that you might see, compassion, sadness, vulnerability, that is the mark of somebody who's not a real man.
And therefore, I will always wear the mask of anger.
If we take it back to theology, that means if anger is not available to me, if it's a flood and there's no immigrant, no other, no queer person to punish and fire guns at, then I'm going to bypass that and say, move on, loser.
I can't believe you're staying here.
Okay.
So I think that's number one.
Number two is here's a good rule of thumb that plays right into that.
If Christy Noam can go somewhere and put on a costume, you are in the realm of MAGA theology, spiritual anger, and masculinity.
And you're like, Christy Noam's a woman, and I know.
But think about all the places she goes and puts on costumes, Dan.
Border Patrol, enforcement.
She dresses up as a Marine.
Every time you see Chrissy Noam dressed up, it is role-playing as one of the crusading, avenging warriors that we've been talking about all day.
What was she going to dress up as for the Florida or for the Texas floods?
There was nothing to dress up as because there was no one to shoot at or round up or put yourself in the role.
Like if you think about Christy Noam as a stand-in for everybody at home who is not one of those people but wants to like think of themselves as a character, as a LARP, okay, then you have a total like decoder ring for understanding how this theology works.
If I can dress up as a character who goes and crusades and avenges and fights and shoots and kidnaps, this is my jam.
If not, I'm going to call you a loser and say, move on.
I can't believe you're working in the past.
We're not going to sit in like repentance and ashes and sadness and vulnerability and morbid like tragedy of people dying in a flood.
Why would we do that?
There's no one to shoot.
There's no costume to put on.
And I'm not saying this, and please don't take this as a misogynist attack.
Oh, like Christy Noam likes to dress up.
I don't care who dresses up.
And part of what I'm trying to get at with Christy Noam is she's playing the role in Christian militant patriarchy by dressing up as all those things.
She's playing the role of that.
She's putting herself under the mask of anger that is the mark of this kind of masculine role playing.
So that was a lot.
I don't know if those words made sense.
Any final thoughts before we take a break with the Johnson Amendment?
They did make sense to me, and I think they will to a lot of people.
But, you know, Abbott, you know, Governor Abbott, if we can talk about, you know, the losers, you want to throw the Bible around?
Christian Wright, go read Lamentations.
Go read the Psalms of Lament.
You mentioned, you know, sitting in ashes.
Go read Job.
Go read the prophets who talk about weeping, like watching fallen Jerusalem and like whatever.
Yeah, just on and on and on and on.
And so I just, I get so tired of the whole, we're being biblical.
We're like, you're not.
You're ignoring entire passages.
And to return to the Noam thing, like one of the points made last week is that you don't have to be a man to buy into patriarchy and masculinist identity.
And that's the thing with Noam.
She's like the cosplaying that she does, she's like the woman that like has to be the cool girlfriend.
So the guys are all like, we're not misogynist.
We really like, yeah, like, yeah, you like the women as long as like, I don't know, they like football and they like doing stuff and they want to hang out with you and rub your shoulders because your team's not doing well or whatever.
They're going to Play the role they should in the patriarchal system.
Yeah, they're going to play the role that they should in the patriarchal system.
And so she's that.
She's not something different.
So it's not about her gender.
It's about the role that she's playing in the system and the way that it reinforces that.
And it's exactly what lets the right point to somebody like a Christy Noam and say, oh, I don't know why you're talking about patriarchy.
I mean, she's a woman and she's a cabinet secretary.
How dare you suggest this?
It's that same kind of logic.
And we just see it on full display all the time with her.
And I think, as you're saying, she exemplifies something that goes far beyond Christy Noam as an individual.
She is herself a symbol of what femininity is supposed to be within a patriarchal MAGA Christian nationalist government model.
Let's take a break right back and come back to the Johnson Amendment being no longer enforced.
All right, Dan, this week had a bunch of people tag me in an email and say, hey, have you seen this?
And I had seen it and was keeping tabs on it.
IRS talks about the Johnson Amendment will no longer be enforced.
What is the Johnson Amendment and what are they no longer going to enforce?
And does this matter?
Yeah, so the Johnson Amendment is basically the long and short of it is a tax provision enforced by the IRS that had long been interpreted as prohibiting religious groups from endorsing political candidates.
When we say an amendment, it's not like a constitutional amendment or something like that.
It has its name because it was introduced by then Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson in 1954.
So before he was president, he was Senate Majority Leader.
And it defines tax-exempt church or other nonprofits as, and this is the language of the amendment, one that, quote, does not participate in or intervene in, including the publishing or distribution of statements, any political campaign on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office.
Bunch of wonky legal language, but this is what had been understood, that churches and church leaders could not endorse political candidates.
Well, two Texas churches and the National Religious Broadcasters Association, which is an evangelical group, sued the IRS in August of 24, challenging the Johnson Amendment as infringing on freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
And on Monday, the IRS reached a settlement with these groups, which said the consent agreement says that the discussion of politics, quote, between the House of Worship and its congregation in connection with religious services, end quote, doesn't constitute participation or intervention in politics.
So in other words, it basically said, I guess if you're sort of in the church talking to the congregation as a religious leader, you can do and say whatever you want, including endorsing candidates.
And we're going to say that that doesn't violate the Johnson Amendment.
On the one hand, some of my takeaways from this, and I'll throw it over to you.
I'm a staunch advocate of separation of church and state.
And I think that this is terrible.
And I was a pastor.
And as a pastor, I was a staunch advocate of separation of church and state.
And I never endorsed candidates and was careful about things I would say from the pulpit and different things like this.
The reality is, though, that the Johnson Amendment has been rarely enforced.
Churches of all sort of ideological stripes, and not just churches, but other religious organizations, but Christian churches are the most prominent.
They do this.
Everybody knows that churches invite presidential candidates to come and speak.
And yes, maybe they don't formally endorse them, but if you're having Donald Trump or Kamala Harris come in and speak to your congregation, you're probably not inviting their opposition and stuff to come in.
It's kind of there.
And the IRS has for a long time been very reluctant to actually like sort of wade into these battles because of accusations of partisanship and so forth.
Donald Trump has been warring against this forever.
It's his IRS now and so forth for different reasons, different part of the IRS code.
Super PACs are tax-exempt organizations and they're explicitly political.
So in concrete terms, I don't know how much this changes things given what MAGA has been, how it has related to the religious right and churches and so forth.
But I think this does formalize something that had been sort of in practice.
And I think it's detrimental and terrible.
I've thought this for years as it's not enforced as an advocate of separation of church and state.
But there's some of my thoughts.
That's the sort of background to this, where the amendment came from, what it is for the IRS not to enforce it and so forth.
So I would just say that if we do the history of the religious right, we've done this on this show hundreds of times.
Many of you listening have read up on this from Randall Ballmer to Catherine Stewart to Ann Nelson, Sarah Posner, Kristen Dumet, everybody.
You know that the IRS and the Christian right have an embattled history.
So one of the ways that the IRS became embroiled with the religious right and really at the genesis of what became the religious right was in trying to enforce the rule that churches and not really churches, but schools after Brownview Board of Education could not be segregationist.
You could not have a rule that said our school is for whites only.
Well, a lot of Christian schools did and operated as segregation academies.
And the IRS started to crack down on this.
The short version of this is the religious right, what became the religious right, lost their mind.
And for many historians, this is the beginning of what we eventually got in the Moral Majority and the Jerry Falwell and Paul Weirick and other coalitions from the 70s to the present day.
Okay.
So when I think of the IRS now not having enforced the Johnson Amendment really for decades, to me, it just speaks of like fear.
If we enforce this, we're going to be castigated as anti-God, anti-Christian, anti-religion, anti-American.
And there's no president, including Barack Obama, who wants anything to do with that.
So they're not going to do it.
They didn't do it and they haven't done it.
So does it matter?
Does it matter we're not going to enforce this now?
Or the IRS is like, go ahead.
We don't care.
It's over.
I think yes and no.
I think on the one hand, no, because as you said, it has not been enforced.
In practice, this has been flouted for a long time.
However, I do think there's a permission structure here now that says, churches, not only can you be political, but I think we will see in those churches, especially those evangelical spaces, a mandate to be political.
Like, even more so, you're going to see people thinking, if my church isn't taking a stand, if my church isn't fully behind President Trump, if we're not openly talking that way, if we're not campaigning and rallying for that, then I think maybe we're not at the right church.
Like, we saw this with COVID.
And I'll just make this my final comment is like in COVID, what you saw was a fork in the road.
And one fork was we're going to abide by what the government says about COVID restrictions, masks, shutting down, no in-person, whatever.
And what we saw, and if you don't believe me, read Tim Alberta's book.
I interviewed Tim Alberta on this show, a two-part interview.
A lot of churches that did that lost half their congregation because there are people who are like, what?
You're going to let the government tell us we can't go to church and we can't do this and we can't do that.
And where did they go?
Well, the other fork in the road was this.
Churches that said, screw you, we're not shutting down.
We're going to do what we want.
Come and worship.
Doesn't matter.
COVID's a hoax, whatever.
Those churches grew exponentially.
Like you might have been a pastor who had a church stand of 80 people.
And a year later, you might have 600 people because you said to the government, we're not shutting down.
And all of a sudden, you're that church relic.
Maybe Charlie Kirk's coming to speech or speak.
And maybe there's like another celebrity who's going to come and talk.
To me, this is another like addition to that fork.
Like if you're not a church who's endorsing candidates, well, why aren't you?
We're allowed to now.
Like, shouldn't you be doing that?
So to me, that's kind of one of the ways that this could lead to further escalation of religious politicking in houses of worship.
Time will tell, but that to me is immediately what comes to mind is like, this is why this might matter on the ground even more.
Like I'm thinking of a pastor I know in Orange County who has explicitly resisted this kind of like MAGA like rallying in his church, even though his theology is thoroughly conservative.
And now I just wonder if he's going to be under pressure to do that because people are going to be like, well, why wouldn't you?
The IRS doesn't care.
This is allowed.
You're not doing God's work if you chicken out on this front.
So anything there?
And then let's go to Reasons for Hope.
Just two thoughts.
One is, I think what you're describing is the social dynamics of how polarization sort of concretizes.
Like there is now this pressure on that.
And people ask all the time, like, why doesn't evangelicalism change?
Why, if you have a church like the one you're describing, why isn't that able to like move this like ship in a different direction?
Well, things like this are why, because as you say, that pressure then mounts.
And so now if you don't take the stand, well, you're not really one of us.
You become defined as part of the out-group and it creates, it solidifies the in-group identity.
It makes it harder to change group identities and so forth.
The other piece of this that I'm interested to watch as we go forward is how the right is going to respond to non-conservative Christian churches politicking, to non-Christian religious organizations explicitly politicking and endorsing and so forth.
What happens now?
And what is the political discourse like when candidates start, I don't know, talking at mosques and when they start looking at other places and so forth.
I promise you, we are not going to hear them talking about how good this is that religious organizations get to be explicitly political and so forth.
No chance.
This is about conservative Christians and their privilege.
That's a great point.
I mean, you know, I'm just thinking when you said that, I just thought about Mom Donnie.
And what happens in those churches and the mosques?
What happens in the goudwars and the temples?
And those become targets now.
Yep.
Right.
So like, if you're the conservative Christian, you're like out front, we've got the power.
And then if you're not and this, you're doing this kind of thing, you're a target.
And it's just, this is how privilege works.
This is how we've, we've talked about this on the show for 867 episodes or whatever.
So.
All right, y'all.
Reasons for hope for me in Wisconsin.
I just want to like continue on the Supreme Court with in Wisconsin.
They're set to ban conversion therapy.
They're also striking down rules that have made it impossible for real change to happen in that state.
It's just a reminder that local elections matter a lot and local politics matter a lot.
And there is room in local politics for organization and change.
And you can see that in what happened in the Wisconsin Supreme Court and an election that Elon Musk put tens of millions of dollars into and lost decisively in an off-cycle year, there is room for change there.
And so the Mamdani win, you know, I know it's New York City, but it's another example of the local is everything.
And I just, some of you listen to the show and you're like, I don't know what to do.
What should I do about all this?
And my response is, what are you doing in your community?
Who are you connected to?
How can you find a way to get involved in school board races, in county supervisor races, in state legislature races?
My friends at Houston Oasis, Will Judy is doing that work.
There's people all over the country I think about who are doing that work.
And that is where I want to say keep digging into that.
So, Dan, what about you?
Just real quick on that point.
We talk about things trickling down.
There's a trickle up force of politics as well.
And I think that that's part of what you're describing there.
My reason for hope is that a Gallup poll that was released Friday, it followed up like a same poll like a year ago.
And it showed that American support for immigration has like shot up exponentially over the last year.
A record, 79% of adults think immigration is good for the country.
And the number who want immigration reduced dropped from 55% last year when a majority of Americans said that to 30% this year.
Disapproval for Trump's immigration policies outweighs his approval or approval for those policies by 27 percentage points.
We don't know that that'll hold.
Trump is not going to wake up tomorrow and decide to like forego his immigration policies because of polling data and so forth.
But public, he's losing the public.
The Trump administration is doing things that they said they weren't going to do.
They're not doing things that they said they were going to do.
You could tie this in with polls that show diminishing support among African Americans, diminishing support among Latino voters.
And I think that I think, I hope it's reasons for hope.
I don't know, but I hope the Trump administration has been overplaying its hand.
And one of the things we have to look to is 2026.
And so this gives me hope for that.
All right, y'all.
I want to invite you to come July 22nd to our first ever live recording of an episode.
Dan, we've done 867 episodes and mainly because you and I record just the two of us or with guests or with special invitees, we've been able to pretend no one listens and thus not get nervous.
I don't know.
But we're inviting people to come hang out.
So if you're a subscriber, July 22nd at 4.30 Pacific, 7.30 Eastern, we will be doing our bonus episode for the month.
And we want you to be there, ask questions, hang out in real time, meet other subscribers and so on.
You can look for more on that soon.
Other than that, we'll just say if you can think about becoming a subscriber, it helps us a lot.
We can't do this three times a week without you.
Could really use your support in any way possible, even if that means going to give an Apple podcast review, hitting subscribe, telling a friend about the show, putting something on social media, telling people how much you like my hat or Dan's chain, you know, whatever it may be.
I also wear cargo shorts at that live event.
So, you know.
I'd also like to announce we're going to be doing a men's retreat for 40 days, and we'll just be reading one chapter of Job each day and sitting with our thoughts.
