Weekly Roundup: Trump, Epstein, John MacArthur, Allie Beth Stuckey, and Theology for Psychopaths
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Brad and Dan unpack the legacy of John MacArthur, the influential evangelical preacher whose death reignites conversations around authority, submission, and even slavery in conservative Christianity.
They also examine new developments in the Epstein-Trump story and whether any of it could dent Trump’s support.
The conversation then turns to the troubling fusion of empathy and authoritarianism in evangelical spaces—highlighting figures like Allie Beth Stuckey—and the political whiplash from GOP senators flipping on education funding and Medicaid cuts. What does it all mean for Trump and the future of the MAGA movement?
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad O'Nishi.
Great to be with you on this Friday.
I'm the author of Preparing for War, The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next, the founder of Actus Monday Media, here with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Nice to see you, Brad.
You too, Dan.
And a bunch of things to jump into.
Some of them like totally on everyone in the news cosmos's mind, Epstein, Trump, et cetera.
Some a little more niche to our beat, which is Christian nationalism and the religious right.
John MacArthur died at 86.
He is a monumental figure, for better or for worse, in evangelical life and church preaching and politics over the last 50 years.
So we'll talk about his legacy and link that to Allie Bestucci, who just had a flashy new interview up here at New York Times, and she is still on the Toxic Empathy beat.
So we'll get there too.
We'll wrap up with some comments about just a host of news stories.
Putin, NATO, Josh Hawley, Republican senators worried about Trump's cuts to education, Medicare, Medicaid, and so on.
This is the Straight Right American Jesus Weekly Roundup.
Here we go.
you All right, Dan.
Let's talk about, let's ask a basic question.
You ready?
Let's just ask a question that you and I can answer.
We're not going to probably agree on all of it, but here it is.
Will the Jeffrey Epstein situation have any effect on Trump and his popularity?
Will this sink him?
Will this do anything noticeable?
I will say that it is today, Friday, July 18th, and the Wall Street Journal just published an article that reports about Trump's letter to Epstein on Epstein's 50th birthday as part of a book of letters that friends and whoever's sent Jeffrey Epstein.
That book contains many what the Wall Street Journal calls body images, and including one reportedly from Donald Trump that includes him drawing a naked woman.
We should say that's B-A-W-D-Y.
Body images.
There's a lot of wordplay we could do there with.
Thank you for that.
Good catch, Dan.
Good catch.
That's what I'm here for, Brad.
It's what I'm here for.
The description of the, I'm not going to repeat.
I'm honestly not going to repeat.
It's awful stuff.
It's ridiculous.
I'm not.
I'm not.
You can go read the story if you want.
I don't feel like I want to re-traumatize people or give people images in their head that they don't need, Dan.
So it's not good.
And it's great.
I mean, Dan, I don't know.
You and I are staring down 50.
We're in our 40s.
I cannot, I don't know.
I'm not going to get started on this.
I'm just going to say real quickly, I cannot imagine on someone's 50th birthday, a friend of mine thinking that like the thing that I wanted to send them was like drawing amateur drawings of naked people with like little hints at sexual innuendo that sound like something a 13-year-old Would or would like, I don't know.
It's whatever.
It's beyond me.
All of that is a setup to ask this question: Will the Epstein stuff stick?
Does it have an effect?
Is there something new here?
Or have we seen this story before?
I'll let you jump in first.
What do you think?
I don't think it sinks in, certainly.
I don't know that it has any long-term negative effects.
So like, well, we've heard, you've heard the mainstream media be the cracks in the MAGA, you know, alliance and this and that.
And I mean, there's, there's some reason to look at that and take note when you have the, you know, Laura Loomers of the world and you have the Steve Bannons of the world and you've got, you know, some people who've been big names sort of coming after Trump and things like that.
When you have Trump on social media talking about these weaklings who are demanding more information and so forth, and he's talking about some of his staunchest supporters.
I think it's not insignificant.
I don't think it's going to sink.
And we've already seen, you mentioned this Wall Street Journal thing, then all of a sudden, you know, Steve Bannon flips around and is like, oh, we're all on the same team again.
We've got to rally around Trump, you know, whatever.
But here's what I think is of interest.
And I don't know how significant it is for Trump politically, but I think it's the same thing that we've seen tearing the GOP up for decades and so forth is this is one of the first times that Trump is getting caught in a vice of his own creating.
He's Mr. Conspiracy Guy.
He's Mr. Doesn't usually come out and say it.
Remember the QAnon stuff when people ask me if he supported QAnon.
He's like, I don't know anything about QAnon, but I hear that they don't like pedophiles and that's good.
So, and I think they're good Americans, or whatever it was he said.
A wink and a nod that everybody hears.
And he's done this about Epstein forever, you know, and the wink and the nod, the Democrats know things that they're not telling you and Biden, Biden, Biden, whatever, all of that.
And today he's telling Bondi to release more information.
Like he's essentially caving to those who are saying that we need more quote unquote transparency and so forth.
What is significant about it for me then is you have this conspiracism that has always helped Trump.
It has always fueled Trump.
It has rocketed him to the top.
And it's one of the first times we see it really coming back to potentially bite him.
Now, what does that mean?
I don't think hardcore MAGA people are ever going to vote against Donald Trump.
I don't think that they're ever going to, Like that, that's what would happen.
But I do think that there is this element of showing the real weaknesses of that movement.
And that doesn't necessarily mean that doesn't necessarily bode well for everybody else, but I think that that's significant.
What it does for him politically, I don't know.
The last thing I will say is it does draw a lot of oxygen and a lot of focus of the Trump administration right now away from other things.
They're not effectively going out and selling the big beautiful bill, which is what they need to be doing is something like 60% of Americans are still opposed to it and things like that.
So I think it's a distraction.
And I think a distraction is good in some ways.
I think the notion that MAGA is fracturing and this is going to sink Trump, I think that's overblown.
So I agree mostly with you.
And I think that here's where I think I agree.
And then I want to offer some other thoughts too is let's say we were, let's say there was an election right now of national importance.
Let's say the midterms.
It's July 18th.
Let's say the midterms were this November.
Okay.
Right.
Here's what you would see.
You would see Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon.
You would see Ben Shapiro and all the MAGA talking heads get to a place where A, what they've already done, Charlie Kirk's already done this.
I'm done talking about Epstein and Bannon.
You've already nailed it.
Like they got their marching orders and they were told, if you don't cut it out, you know, look out.
So they have stopped talking about Epstein.
That's already happened.
So if we were going to go vote in two months, what would they do?
Here's how the rationale would go.
Well, you know what, y'all, Trump, yeah, that Epstein thing, that pissed me off, y'all.
I didn't like that.
But you really going to vote for some Democrats over here that if they control Congress, are going to stop President Trump from outlawing abortion and from doing X, Y, and Z on immigration and on deport, you know, deportations and on so on and so on and so on.
Think about how folks have gotten to a place where they voted for someone like Herschel Walker, someone like Matt Gates.
Like, remember, Herschel Walker is the guy that stuck out in my mind this week as I was thinking about Epstein is Herschel Walker ran for Senate in Georgia.
Herschel Walker is a former NFL running back, like a really famous one.
And, you know, Herschel Walker, during the campaign, we found out so many things about Herschel Walker in terms of him paying for abortions.
And the way that Herschel Walker kind of, his character started to look was really bad.
And I was asked by journalists going into that whole election, like, are they going to vote for him?
And I was like, look, here's what you're going to hear in church.
Yeah, you know what?
Herschel's made some mistakes.
Herschel's not perfect, but I'd rather vote for him than some Democrat who wants to murder babies.
And if you all remember, Herschel Walker lost to Raphael Warnock by like 0.9%.
Okay.
So if we were voting right now, there is no sense to me that there would be like a mass exodus that would completely sink the Trump coalition because of this.
However, and this is where I will give my however, is over the last couple of weeks, we have seen things that have led to open division in MAGA world in ways that we have not yet, we have not seen for a long time.
And one of those was Iran.
You had Tucker Carlson totally take Ted Cruz to the woodshed, like destroyed him.
And Marjorie Taylor Greene joined him there and Bannon joined him there.
There was the nationalist, non-interventionist wing of MAGA when it came to Israel, Iran, etc.
And of course, Trump did it anyway.
You have the Elon Musk situation.
And Musk is, again, I think doesn't have as much influence in MA as he thinks he does.
But that happened.
And everybody talked about, you know, the first time they broke up and then the kind of rehashing of old wounds.
This is kind of the third thing in Three months of, and I wonder if what we should be noticing here, Dan, is not whether or not this is going to lead to widespread abandonment of Trump.
I just wonder if there isn't two things at play.
One, this is one of those unavoidable times, the first unavoidable time, as you pointed out, that Trump looks like the deep state rather than the guy conspirating against the deep state.
He looks like he is the deep state.
Trump's made his political career raging against the deep state.
You know what?
Barack Obama is not really an American and they're covering it up.
You know what?
Big lie.
They stole it from me.
There's a deep state.
There's a deep state.
And they're just ruining your life.
I'm sorry, but that's right.
QAnon, there's a secret cabal of elites who eat babies.
And it kind of looks now like, wait, and there's a lot of people I think for the first time.
This is where I will say this is worth noticing and where I will say that the last week has been something that I think is interesting is there have been people who ratioed the hell out of Trump on true social.
Like Trump said, stop talking about Epstein.
And there was like 40,000 replies and he was getting destroyed in those replies by MAGA people.
I've never seen that.
So I think we at least have to acknowledge that we are not used to seeing that.
The second thing is, I just wonder if we're not starting to sense like a little who's going to take the throne bloodlust setting in.
Like it's creeping, it's creeping, it's creeping.
The nationalists, the Bannons, the Carlsons, the Marjorie Taylor Greens starting to kind of form a little, a little like intra-MAGA alliance against others.
Is there a sense of like, he's old, he's not supposed to run again in 2028.
And it's not time to get rid of MAGA, but it's time to position someone and something to be the next one on the throne.
And I just wonder if that's part of why we're getting some of these things now that we did never get in 2017, 18, 19.
We didn't get this stuff.
As soon as everyone got on board in 2016 with Trump, they were on board.
And it continued in 2020.
I mean, DeSantis tried it.
He looked like an idiot.
Nikki Haley was one of them.
And she barely made a dent in anything.
Anyone who's approached Trump has been like swatted away and squashed immediately.
Now he's getting ratio untrue social.
That's at least different.
And I'm not out here saying it's over.
MAGA's dead.
The coalition's collapsed.
Nope, not at all.
But go ahead.
Well, I was going to say, you highlight a point that I think is maybe the qualifying point for me.
You say, you know, in three months, we've had these kind of three things.
Can this turn into a steady trickle?
If this is it and Trump writes the ship and gets everybody back on board and these things get far enough in the rearview mirror, then I think by 2026, everybody says, oh, that's ancient history or whatever.
But like, are there more intervention things that are going to happen?
Will there be more if he, I don't know, backs off his tariff deadline again?
Like, you know, they backed it up to was it August 1st or whatever and said that they didn't change anything.
You're like, you kind of did.
You've done it a bunch.
Or if he goes off on the taco thing or who knows what other international thing there is, can it turn into a steady drip of these kinds of things?
So I guess if I want to, I don't know why I'm going with this metaphor, but I am.
This is not like a powerful like fire hose that's going to knock him down.
But if you put, like you say, Iran in there, if you put this in there, if you put some other things like that, will there be others?
Will it turn into a kind of trickle that becomes and just sort of erodes the foundation over time?
I think that that's a possibility.
So I think that the maybe the significance of this is not just this, because you're right, everything you say is right about these things that are different.
But we live in this world with the 24-hour news cycle and everything else.
And so that in two months, things are like, you know, I mean, remember Signalgate?
Like, where did that go?
Like, that's the world we live in too.
So I think that's the question.
And if I was going to tie all these things together, then you start wondering and say, okay, are there people in MAGA world that will perpetuate that?
Because it's now in their interest to be positioning themselves to like displace a weakened Trump.
Like, you know, so people who might have just kept quiet now maybe won't.
Maybe they'll come out and they'll put those things forward.
I think you're also seeing a pattern that happens in a lot of purity movements.
And by purity movements, I mean ideological purity, religious purity.
People can study the history of communist China or the Soviet Union or American religious fundamentalism in the Southern Baptist Convention or something.
What you find is when you have these movements that are based on sort of ideological purity, they start eating themselves.
It's like an autoimmune response where the body just starts sort of attacking itself.
And I think that that's another thing that we're seeing here is because you say Trump wanted to drain the swamp.
He's been in the swamp for a long time now.
He's enough of a figure in the state that like, you know, can he always point to the deep state or others, even for some of his own followers?
Not anymore.
And not if they have an interest in displacing him.
So again, I think maybe I guess what I'm, what I think is I think its significance is really undecided.
It's yet to be determined because is it the start of something?
Are we seeing a pattern?
Or are we seeing some isolated things that can disappear, you know, six months from now, everybody will be like, oh, remember when they thought that was a big deal?
So I think, I don't know that I disagree with you.
Well, let me figure out where it goes.
Yeah.
Let me put it this way, and then we can wrap this and move on to MacArthur and Stuckey.
Barack Obama released his birth certificate.
And Donald Trump immediately was like, not real.
And a lot of people behind him were like, yeah, not real.
Which is going to happen with Epstein stuff, by the way.
We know.
Okay, that's my question.
So that's where I'm going.
So here's my question, Dan, is like this.
Let's say tomorrow somebody releases the entire Epstein files.
I mean, everything.
Like some hacker, someone who's got them is just like, here it is.
Epstein Snowden comes along and dumps it.
Yep.
Yeah.
Here's my question: Is normally what we have learned about MAGA is that you provide evidence and you provide stuff that you know, the birth certificate is real.
The 2020 election was not stolen.
Here is all the evidence.
Here's all the data.
And MAGA's like, nah.
Nope.
No, I don't think so.
You're in on it too.
I think there's a chance.
And this is where I think it is a little different.
I think there's a chance that if that happened this time, there would be people that are like, whoa.
Like Alex Jones and a couple of rogue MAGA talking heads would be like, he's in the Epstein files, guys.
He's there.
There it is.
Here's what it says.
Here's the pictures of the docs.
And a couple of people like Alex Jones would go rogue and Elon Musk and those tech bros might pie along.
And I do, I'm going to go out on a limb.
I do think some people would go would would maybe look up for a minute.
That's not good news.
They should have looked up a thousand times over the last 10 years.
I'm not like rejoicing over that.
It's like, oh, finally, they've come to Jesus.
Like they should, there's a million things you should have, like, I don't know.
You know, child separation, mass deportation, inhumane conditions, sending people to South Sudan.
Yeah, all of that, not to mention everything that's happened in the past.
I just, that's my hypothesis.
I actually think that if the Epstein files were released now, little bit of traction.
Any thoughts on that?
We'll break.
I don't think I disagree.
And I think a little bit of traction is potentially significant because there has been no traction.
Reagan, they used to call the Teflon, you know, president.
I mean, and that's, that's like an understatement compared to Trump.
So we'll see.
But I think it just really, I agree.
It's, I guess, traction for what?
Will it feed more?
Will it feed those people?
Will it enable Democrats who are trying to jump on this?
Or will it just kind of spin around in the mud for a while and go?
I think it has the potential.
I'm just not.
Yeah, I'm not positive, but I think it has potential.
Yeah.
All right, y'all.
We'll be right back to talk about John MacArthur, Ali Beth Stuckey, empathy, and psychopaths.
Be right back.
All right, y'all.
So for some of you, this is going to be like something you're intimately familiar with.
And for some of you, this will be something that is straight out of evangelical world that is not your thing.
And you're not going to, you're going to need an initiation.
It's a bizarre world.
You're just like, wait, what?
This can't be a thing.
Yeah.
Let me do my best.
So John MacArthur died.
John MacArthur was 86.
John MacArthur was a kind of luminary in Reformed circles.
He was in Calvinist circles, if you don't know what Reformed is.
And he started preaching when he was 29 and stayed at the same church in Southern California about an hour and a half where I grew up until he died, essentially.
He had about 8,000 people at its peak at the church, but there was a time when 100,000 people or so a week would hear his sermons.
And this was before streaming and Twitch and YouTube.
And, you know, some of you are like, 100,000 followers.
All right, mid.
And it's like, no, well.
This is an old school radio, radio broadcast ministry.
Yeah.
Like 1994.
TV, I guess.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But what MacArthur was, and I'm glad you mentioned TV, was he was always going to be less flashy and less culturally accommodating than even the televangelist preachers, the TV preachers, even Jerry Falwell, even some of those types, because he was so rigid in his biblical interpretation that he was never going to find the ways to kind of relate or accommodate culture in order to reach new people.
And that is part of why people liked him.
If you think about the megachurch movement, the seeker-sensitive movement that took over in the 90s and early aughts, John MacArthur was never the kind of guy that was like, you know what we should do?
We should adjust our way of doing things so we can like be relatable, right, to people.
You know what I mean?
He was never going to preach the sermon series that was like, you know, five Bible verses to help your family have a better life or, you know, five Bible verses to have a successful career.
Like the sort of self-help, therapeutic, suburban feel-good stuff tied in with the Bible.
He was, he was very into what in the field is called expository preaching.
So just verse by verse by verse, line by line, a view that that's how, and so that that's what he was going to do.
And like, yeah, so the application, as the preachers would say, was always very secondary to what he understood as just going through verse by verse and extrapolating what he took to be the inerrant infallible truth of the Bible.
Well, and I think that what that means is if you were somebody who thought that that therapeutic approach, like I remember sermons down in church that were like, I remember leaving church so mad one time in like 2003 because the sermon at church was how to be a good friend.
And I walked out of there as like a 22-year-old or whatever I was.
And I was just like, this is a watered down, lame gospel.
This is what kind of suburban Fisher-Price BS are we doing at this church?
That's how I, that's how I felt.
I like Fisher-Price gospel.
That's the new, like, yeah, the kind of, yeah, I know exactly what you're describing.
Yep.
And it was, you know, I was at a mega church, 2,000 people, and it was suburban.
And one of the biggest concerns in the staff was we don't have enough parking.
It was not how do we help people eat or how do we help people get clothing or shelter or, right?
It was, we have enough parking.
Do we have enough Hawaiian shirts for the pastors to wear?
Yeah.
And yeah.
I was just going to say a focus was relevance.
Like maybe this is a word.
So with that, what you're describing is that seeker-sensitive movement.
I've described it as Cool Kid Church once upon a time and it's in the code stuff that I do.
And you, I would say, like broadly oversimplifying, there were different visions of like, you know, how to make the gospel, quote unquote, relevant.
And you had those who said, we have to make it relevant.
We have to show people that it applies to their lives.
We have to show people that it's not just this 2,000-year-old book and dry and stodgy and whatever.
And then you had People like him who were more like, it's relevant because it's the truth.
And so, like, relevance is about preaching the truth, and God will move people and whatever.
And you even had this kind of backlash sometimes that you know, post-dates him, but I think he was part of that of what would be called like the seeker-insensitive church.
They would be like, We're going to preach it, and we're going to preach it because it's the Bible and who cares if it's relevant.
And that became its own, like, look how countercultural we are kind of thing.
But yeah, it was like this mirror play, but that was where he lived, I feel like, in that space.
We are copywriting that right now, the seeker-insensitive church.
So our lawyers will be in touch with you if you use that.
So that's a good one.
Dan, please.
That was great.
Bishop Price Gospel and Seeker Insensitive.
Yeah, write it down.
All right.
What's happened, though, and you might be thinking, all right, thanks for all this inside baseball, guys.
What's the point?
Well, the point is a couple of things.
One is seeker insensitive gospels are the like all the rage now, right?
We are in a time of like, well, if this offends you, F your feelings.
Oh, if you don't like the sovereignty of God and what the Bible teaches, well, then you must be a soft woke liberal.
I don't know.
Go away.
And so MacArthur at one point might have seemed like he was to the right of the religious right, but he, you know, and his authoritarian ways are now in vogue.
And so let me give you a little bit about MacArthur.
And we're going to then relate this to Ali Bestuckey, who did a whole hour, Dan, this week on her show memorializing John MacArthur.
And she also had time to stop by the New York Times to talk to Ross Douthat about toxic empathy and all of that.
So we're going to link these two things.
If you're not familiar with Ali Bestuckey, Dan's been talking about her on It's in the Code.
I talked about her on my Monday episodes a couple months ago.
She is the person who's written about toxic empathy is a sin.
So that is who Allie Bestucci is.
If you just want the shorthand, empathy is a sin.
Who knew?
She's the one that wants to convince you of that.
Here's friend of the show Rick Pitcock writing at Baptist News Global, talking about MacArthur's spiritual abuses from his pulpit.
Authority and submission pervade the whole universe, MacArthur claimed.
Okay, so Dan, you know, if you're taking notes at home and you want to be ready for the quiz later, y'all, authority and submission pervade the whole universe.
Lock it in your brain.
In the relationship between man and man, there is authority and submission.
Okay, that's a nice way to think about human relationships.
There's always authority and submission.
I mean, I don't know.
I guess he could be talking about kids, but even now, Dan, I have kids.
I don't totally think about it as like authority and submission.
I think about it as like something else, but I don't know.
I don't call you and think about, you know, you're my friend, authority and submission.
Our friendship isn't like that.
So anyway.
In the relationship with man and God, there is authority and submission.
Okay.
I was ready for that one.
That wasn't as ready.
In the relationship between God and God, there is authority and submission.
Now we're getting super Trinitarian.
And wow.
I mean, my nerdy theological brain wants to go all kinds of places because Jürgen Moltmann would disagree.
Nonetheless, the entire universe is pervaded by this concept of authority and submission.
Everyone hold on to that.
Okay.
Now, what Rick notices in his article at Baptist News Global is that MacArthur does not interpret the universe through the lens of love or compassion or presence or wholeness or flourishing or expansion or nope.
Authority and submission.
This came clearest in the last couple of years, and this is like very recent in the 2020s, when a woman at his church attempted to divorce her husband, who was convicted of child molestation and abuse.
And MacArthur church discipline if she divorced that man.
One of the elders resigned over all of this.
And then they released a statement saying, Grace Church's elders do not publicly discuss details arising from counseling and disciplined cases, especially on social media.
There's your seeker insensitive, you know, FU.
Like, we're not trying to be transparent.
We're saying we're the authority.
And if you don't like it, that's how it goes.
MacArthur himself said this.
When someone comes to bring a formal public accusation against an elder or a pastor, we are not to listen to that.
We are not to entertain that.
We are not to investigate that.
So if you go to your pastor and say, one of the elders did this to me and it was really, really, really, really, really, really not okay.
To quote John MacArthur, we are not to investigate that.
Now, MacArthur also said things, this whole idea of authority and submission, it led to his understanding of race.
So he was very into the curse of ham.
Okay.
And if you don't know what the curse of ham is, you can Google that later.
But it is basically the idea that Noah, you know, Noah with the ark, the guy with the boat.
Well, he had three sons.
After he got off the boat, he got really drunk.
You know, Dan, the more I read the Noah's story, I don't blame him.
You go through a flood like that or you get off a boat, you've been with your family for 40 days, you might get dead drunk one day.
Anybody who's ever spent like eight hours in the car with screaming kids, you're already there, let alone 40 days on a boat, you know?
You know what, Noah?
I'm not blaming you for that part of the story.
But then he wakes up dead naked.
I mean, he's but naked and in the tent.
All right.
Yeah, you had a hard night.
You woke up.
You don't know where you are.
You're naked.
This is getting worse, Ham.
You're a dad.
All right.
Noah.
You're a dad.
Like, you got to keep it together here, Bell.
And his youngest son sees him and Noah curses him.
And he says, whoever is a descendant of Ham, this son, is going to be cursed.
Well, that has been interpreted in racist terms across the millennia to be Africa, people of African descent.
Ham corresponds to Africa.
So if you are African, you are cursed.
And therefore, that justifies all kinds of things about the African continent, people of African descent, etc.
Okay.
So what does MacArthur say?
Let me quote, Ham settles the South, Africa, and to Asia.
It seems that Ham became a more servile people and may have moved south and wound up in Africa.
Europeans, on the other hand, developed a peaceful partnership with Israel, and therefore they have been blessed And their countries have developed and been flourishing.
The curse falls on Canaan, he declared.
And the curse is that he would be a servant of servants.
He would wind up enslaved under the dominant rules of others.
And here we find, in God's purposes, children of Ham through Canaan would be servants of the descendants of Noah's other sons.
This is, of course, a justification of you guessed it.
Slavery.
It gets worse.
You ready for it to get worse?
To throw out slavery as a concept, John MacArthur says, simply because there have been abuses, I think is to miss the point.
Okay, so Dan, I'm going to throw it to you after this because this is one of those moments where I'm going to lose my mind.
Let me give you one more quote, and then Dan, the microphone is yours.
It is a little strange that we have such an aversion to slavery because historically there have been abuses.
There have been abuses in marriage.
We don't have an aversion to marriage.
There are parents who abuse their children.
We don't have an aversion to having children.
To throw out slavery as a concept, simply because there have been abuses, I think, is to miss the point.
Dan Miller, I'm hitting mute.
It's all yours, bud.
It's...
Sorry, it's...
It's this bizarre, except it's not bizarre.
And I'll explain in a minute why I think it's not bizarre.
And I think that's why it's most problematic.
But it's this weird mix of like 19, you know, 18th, 19th century legitimation of slavery mixed together with this kind of like post-1950s American theology about Israel that sort of comes together and like in this weird mashup and so forth.
And, you know, here's the thing.
When people say things like the Bible is the source of our morality.
The Bible is the source of our social norms.
The Bible, right?
And I talk about inerrancy a lot on it's in the code.
And, you know, that's just basically the view that the Bible has no errors.
And kind of lodged in that is also that it's our ultimate source of authority and everything we do should be based on the Bible and so forth.
A critique of that is to say the Bible advocates or at least doesn't condemn all kinds of abhorrent things.
It says that if children disobey their parents, they should be executed.
It says a whole bunch of other things, including lots of stuff about slavery.
There's lots of stuff about slavery in there.
It's never explicitly condemned in the Bible.
Certainly in the Hebrew Bible, it's not.
Paul is pretty soft on slavery, you know, whatever.
And so lots of people would say, yeah, maybe we better be careful with this whole biblical literalism thing.
Like maybe we need to, you know, but not John MacArthur.
And this is where when people ask me about doctrines like biblical and errors, I said, this is where it's really bad.
When you get to people who really believe in it, it's like, well, yep, you know, you're right.
I guess slavery is not so bad.
I'm going to say this in like the 21st century.
I'm going to say that, you know, we're too quick to dismiss slavery as a concept.
You know, in theory, it's okay.
In practice, there were some bumps.
But, you know, in theory, owning another human being, that's fine.
That's fine.
That's the pernicious side of this.
And, you know, people ask me sometimes like why, you know, they're like, well, if you could have what I call the kinder, gentler, you know, sort of inerrancy or reform theology or whatever.
And I know that there are reform theologies that are not this, okay?
But, but this is all part of it.
And my answer is no, because this is what happens if you really, truly believe that you need to be beholden to everything the Bible says on all these different topics is you wind up telling women that they should stay in domestic abuse situations.
You know, the only reason Jesus gave why you could divorce was infidelity.
So anything else means you need to stay there and wives are called to submit to their husbands.
And, you know.
Literally, if even if your husband might be molesting your own child.
Yep.
It's not a legitimate basis.
Jesus said, you know, infidelity.
And you're, and yeah, your husband came and he confessed to us and there were a lot of tears and he feels really bad and he's repented.
So you need to take him back.
You know, all of that kind of stuff, the authority submission.
All, I mean, when we talk about high control religion, this is all the core of it.
And it's baked in.
It is in the code of this theology.
So if you know that and you hear these things that MacArthur says, the response shouldn't be like, oh my God, I can't believe you said that.
It's like, yeah, he was like, this is what it looks like if you actually believe those things about the Bible, which is why we shouldn't believe those things about the Bible, in my view.
But that's, that's, so it's shocking, but in some ways, it's like perfectly explainable.
And he was, just, you cannot get over how influential a figure he was.
When I, when I was in college, in an evangelical college, as a Bible studies major, as somebody who preached and so forth, the expository preaching of John MacArthur was like kind of the gold standard of what like true Bible preaching should be.
And we might not have agreed with everything that he said, but like that was the model.
This is why it shouldn't be the model in my view.
And so when people ask me, like, why are you so critical of this?
You know, what if there's somebody who's an inerrantist and they believe in social justice?
I'm like, I don't think you can be in contemporary terms because you're stuck with things like slavery or you can only divorce somebody if they've been unfaithful to you or you can't eat shellfish or like whatever else it is in the Bible.
You're stuck with it.
All right.
I'm going to take this further.
And I know there's going to be some folks who get upset about what I'm about to do, but I'm going to do it because I think it applies to everything you just said.
It's an extension of, I think, what you're saying.
You can tell me I'm wrong and disavow yourself.
But we have someone in our Discord who's somebody I converse with often is a great researcher.
I'll leave them anonymous.
But after last week's episode, they posted about how Christy Gnome's theology seems to map onto what the DSM says about psychopathology, like a psychopath.
And it got me thinking.
I have been thinking all week, Dan, about psychopathic theology.
Theology for psychopaths or theology that wants to make you into a psychopath as the image of God.
Like, and I'm going to just throw this out again.
So I want to just, here's my disclaimer.
I am, I'm not talking about anything near, close to, adjacent to, proximal to, whatever word you want to use about something that is close to another thing, Christianity.
It's not what I'm saying.
I'm not even talking about all reformed people, not that either.
I'm talking about some of the what we just heard about John MacArthur.
I'm talking about what I think we're going to get into with Ali Beth Stuckey here in a minute and some of what we talked about with Chris Denome last week.
That's what I'm talking about.
Okay.
So if you want to write me an email saying, why do you hate Christians?
or why do you think all Christians are psychopaths or I can't believe you called God a psychopath, feel free.
I'm not going to answer it and I am not going to own up to that, what I'm doing because it's not.
Okay, here it is.
DSM on psychopathology.
Seven traits and you need to manifest three of them to kind of be considered in the psychopathology, psychopath range.
Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest.
Now, I could point to John MacArthur not closing his church in COVID.
That's, yeah, I'm not going to do that.
That's not fair.
I will say, though, that, I don't know, advocating for slavery in the 21st century by way of a theology that prioritizes over everything else authority and submission, that's not conforming to social norms.
So that's a thing.
I don't know.
Deceitfulness as indicated by repeated lying, not going to go there.
Impulsivity or failure to plan ahead?
I don't think so.
Irritability and aggressiveness as indicated by repeated physical fights or assaults.
I will say that I just read a quote about John MacArthur saying, if you bring any kind of charge against the pastor or an elder, we are not even going to entertain it or listen to it.
Authority and submission means we have the authority, we have the power, do not question it, or you're wrong, not me.
End of story period.
That's aggressive.
That's very irritable to me.
If you ever meet somebody who's like, hey, you did something wrong to me.
And that person says, what do I care?
Submit to my authority and the status of who I am.
That is not a person you'd have any kind of friendship, relationship, anything with.
And yet that's what he's arguing for.
Reckless disregard for the safety of self or others.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Stay married to the guy who's molesting your own child.
Consistent irresponsibility, indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or financial obligations.
Probably not.
But number seven stands out.
Lack of remorse as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another.
So if you're teaching people that empathy is a sin, if you're teaching people that we shouldn't really have this distaste for slavery, even though there's estimates that many more millions of people died in the Middle Passage and chattel slavery in this country than did in the Holocaust in Germany.
If you think slavery shouldn't have such a bad name just because of, I don't know, like tens of millions of people dying and the inhumanity and degradation of that whole institution.
If you think that somebody should stay with a marriage, in a marriage with a spouse that is molesting a child and there's no grounds for divorce there, even if you yourself are being abused physically, if you have a lack of remorse about that kind of hurt and pain of others and you're teaching people to develop that as a virtue, I think we're gesturing towards the outlines of a theology for psychopaths or a theology that makes you a psychopath.
Now, I'm not saying everybody who's ever listened to John MacArthur, everyone who's ever, I'm not doing that, I'm not doing that.
I'm not doing that.
Please try to hear what I'm saying.
I know some people are going to be upset.
I'm trying to say that if your theology is based on authority and submission, not love, not presence, not flourishing, not community, authority and submission.
If your theology is based on authoritarian that says you never question me, if your theology is based on, I have no remorse about who's been hurt because that is the sovereignty of God and you deserve it as an utmost disgusting sinner.
And if your safety doesn't matter as much as God's will, even though you're being abused in your home or your child is being molested, I don't know, Dan, you can tell me I'm wrong and say, what a jerk and this guy hates religion and he's the worst and I can't believe he's just trying to get clicks.
Or you can say, we now live in a seeker-insensitive Christian culture that is following someone like Donald Trump, who seems to be himself a psychopath and trying to form good Christian soldiers in the same vein.
Talk me down.
Tell me I need to calm myself or that I've truly lost it this time.
But any thoughts there before we go to Stucky?
Well, I'm not going to talk you down, but I'm going to take us to Stuckey to make the point.
Because it sounds like...
I'm not a psychologist, but it sounds like you take a lot of those clinical diagnoses of things like psychopathology or borderline personality or all kind of related things.
A hell of a lot of them come down to the inability to express empathy and to experience empathy.
Yep.
Cannot feel what other people feel.
We cannot put ourselves in the perception of like what it would feel like to have this or that or the other happen to us.
You've got kids.
I've got kids.
Everybody of the kids has had this conversation with a child at some point where, I don't know, they had to blow up on the playground or something, or maybe they said something mean to some other kid or something and you say, how would you feel if somebody said that to you?
And they realize that it would suck and that maybe they shouldn't do that and that they should be nicer people.
And like, we're teaching empathy.
All that comes down to it.
So Stucky was like, you know, the problem with the world is that we're too empathetic.
We care too much about other people and so forth.
Her overarching thing, folks can go and like get a deep-ish dive on her and it's in the code and we're going to be with her for a while.
But like that, that submission and authority thing, it's all about, she's like, you know, we don't need empathy.
We need true divine love.
And what does that mean?
It means authority.
It means truth.
It means, you know, all the stuff that that brings.
But in the interview, she was asked about Trump and they were talking about and like really pressing her on, could it be that there are other people, it's not just they're empathetic, but that they think Trump is cruel, that he rejoices in causing pain, that the Christy Noams of the world rejoice in causing pain, that a lot of MAGA has this whole thing built up on sort of taking glee and pleasure in inflicting pain on others.
And he says, Isn't cruel, cruelty toxic?
Isn't that worse?
And she says that it may, it may be fair to say that Trump is cruel and that cruelty is toxic.
But she's like, But that's not the point of my book or argument.
Like, basically, saying, Yeah, yeah, cruelty is bad.
I get it.
But man, empathy.
You want to talk about bad.
Caring so much about people that like you'll, you'll do stuff like, I don't know, except that you should treat them like people.
Now, her targets are queer folk.
Her target, she talks all in this interview in her book about being the brave, white, middle-class, evangelical woman who stood her ground and refused to give in on social justice about George Floyd.
Like, you know, like, oh, look at you, you brave, brave, privileged white woman.
But let's take it to slavery.
Well, you know, cruelty is bad, but God, empathy.
Brad, if you're busy so focused on all the people who died in the middle passage, you need to just stop focusing so much on like other people's feelings and let's go read the Bible where there are slaves.
I mean, that's the logic of it.
So it is.
If empathy is, one might say, an ingredient that's supposed to make a healthy personality and help us not be psychopaths, then yeah, when you're busy trying to make sure to cultivate that out, when you're busy trying to make sure that you define empathy as toxic, when you are busy trying to raise a generation of people that we can be sure will not be empathetic, so that what?
So that they accept structures of authority and submission.
Yeah, I think there's a lot to that.
Let's take a break and I'm going to respond to this because I think there's even more fodder here for developing this idea.
So we'll be right back.
All right, Dan.
So Allie Bestucki did sit down with Ross Dowth.
I can never say his name.
The New York Times this week.
It is pretty astounding that the New York Times thinks that this is what needs to be featured these days, but nonetheless.
And in the interview, as you say, she's outlined some of the positions that are in her book, The Sin of Toxic Empathy, which you've been talking about on its in the code.
So if you want more on this, just tune into Dan's series.
It's in the code for the last month.
But let me give you a quote, Dan, and let's chew on this for the next five minutes and then we'll go on to something else.
This is Ali Bestucci talking about empathy.
It's not against even trying to feel how they feel.
It is allowing feeling how they feel to lead you to justify what they are doing, which happens in abortion and the gender debate and the sexuality debate and the justice debate and the immigration debate.
Because we feel so deeply for this one purported victim, we say, well, maybe deportation is wrong.
Now, one purported victim, Ali, nobody's talking about one purported victim when we're talking about sexuality, deportation, or any of these debates.
We're talking about millions and millions and millions of victims, but nonetheless, we're also talking about victims.
I'll just throw this in, who were abused by Jeffrey Epstein and people around him.
Like all this talk about Epstein and the victims are the ones who are ignored all the time.
And, you know, so victims.
Okay.
Because we feel so deeply for this one purported victim, we say maybe deportation is wrong, or maybe I should affirm this person's stated gender, even though it mismatches their biology, or maybe I should affirm the right to have an abortion because I feel so deeply for this person's plight.
That is when your empathy has led you in a bad direction and has turned toxic.
Now, we've been over this, Dan.
I'll like summarize and then I'll let you throw it back to you because you're about to explode with rage here.
Number one, empathy is not the final stage in a relationship with somebody.
Empathy is a first stage of feeling what they feel and putting yourself in their shoes.
That's number one.
But to continue the psychopath traits, what it seems like to me is that we live in an age where we are trying to be convinced either by the neighborhood white evangelical mom like Ali Bestaki, John MacArthur, Christy Noam, or the president of this.
There is a clear authority and that authority dictates what is right and wrong.
What they say and how they determine good and bad, right or wrong, is what is right or wrong or good or bad.
That is how, right, a lot of folks approach God.
What God says is right or wrong, not because it is right or wrong, but because God said it.
And that is why a lot of folks will say, well, that sounds authoritarian.
And it is.
John MacArthur, authority and submission.
That is the end all and be all of being existent.
Authority and submission.
Who are you supposed to submit to?
Who is your authority?
Dan, if you've ever met a psychopath, that is how they talk about human relationships.
Human relationships are about authority and submission.
Who can prey on who?
Okay.
So Ali Bestucky's like, look, if your empathy leads you in a place where you start to question or you start to expand or nuance your understanding of right and wrong, that is taking you from the objective, authoritative, unquestionable authority of what is right and wrong.
And that's when you go bad.
And among all the other things I could say about this is there is no determined, 100% agreed upon orthodox vision of abortion, of immigration, of sex in the Christian tradition.
And so when people try to convince you of that, and I have been studying this for 20 years and so have you, Dan.
We have done 800 episodes on this.
We've written books.
We can show you all the places where there's widespread disagreement from the early church to 2025.
So when you say feeling someone else and understanding their position will lead you astray, what you're saying is there's an authoritarian Structure here, and it might lead you to disagree with the authority, and you may no longer be submissive to it.
And that's when you're going to go wrong, and that's why empathy is bad.
So, don't do it.
What do you want to say here before we get?
So, briefly, I'm going to plug next week's episode thumbnail sketch of like why there's no such thing as traditional marriage, or like why the Christian church doesn't have like a one model of marriage, or you know, it's, it's there because of what Stuckey says in her book about, you know, marriage equality.
But I think tying in with this is these appeals to authority.
This is how it works.
God's the ultimate authority.
God has revealed God self in the Bible.
It's inerrant.
It's true.
I think I also discussed this coming up, and I did it in the inerrancy thing.
I think lodged in there is also this notion that the teachings of God are really clear.
Like, that's not often explicit, but this is why everybody's encouraged to read the Bible.
It's there.
You have no excuse for not knowing it.
But I bring this up all the time.
It's always a mediated authority.
It's never just God.
You're never getting to God.
You're getting to John MacArthur.
You're getting to the board of church elders who say, what?
We're not going to investigate.
We are the ones who mediate that authority.
You're getting to the Allie Beth Stuckey.
She has to do all this tiptoeing around in there about the whole, do you believe women shouldn't have authority and speak in church and whatever?
And you have this authoritative podcast thing.
And she's like, well, it's not in a church, you know, whatever.
But it's always mediated.
It is always a mediated authority.
It's always an Ali Beth Stuckey or an Al Moeller or a John MacArthur or a JD Vance or whomever who's telling you what that ultimate authority is.
They're the ones you're answering to.
And that is why it's rife for abuse.
That is why, in their own theological terms, it's like, sorry, John, sorry, Allie.
You're just people and I don't have any obligation to submit to your authority ever for any reason.
And I, if I'm a Christian person or not, I'm not just going to set aside my own privilege or responsibility or right or whatever to have to figure out what I think quote unquote ultimate authority is, what my morals are, what my values are, to whom or what I'm answerable.
I'm just not going to see that authority to you.
And that's the move that for me makes high control religion, high control religion, is that that authority is always mediated.
There's this language of being answerable to God.
There's this language of direct access to God.
There's this language of the freedom of like knowing God and whatever, but you never get to God.
You just get to them.
You just get to the structures of authority.
And this is rife in this interview.
It's rife in MacArthur.
That for me is a defining feature.
And it's, I think, a really central core of American high control religion.
Listen, man, if somebody is trying to convince you that God is an authoritarian psychopath, and I'm serious about this, if you show up and tell me that God is a sovereign who demands complete submission because the universe is based on authority and you are a worthless, worthless sinner, there is a 100% chance the person telling you that is an authoritarian.
Go to their church and they will be an authoritarian that will tell you, if you question my authority, you're wrong.
Like the people selling you an authoritarian God themselves are always like it is a, it is not a Venn diagram.
It is a, it is two circles superimposed on each other.
If you are trying to tell me God's an authoritarian, I am going to visit your church and I am going to have put my life savings right on a bet before I go there that you yourself are an authoritarian and you might be a psychopath.
And it might be a small chance of your psychopathology.
I am not saying that all reformed, Protestant, Christian people, leaders, pastors are psychopaths.
Do not misquote me.
But I am saying that there is a seduction here into something that feels really, really pathological.
I'm going to give you a quote.
Everybody, let's play a fun game and then we'll wrap this.
This is going to be a really fun game.
Dan, I'm going to see who, if you, if you know who said this, I want people at home to play along with me.
Okay, here we go.
Here's the quote.
He shook his head.
You're asking that I make myself vulnerable and that I can never do.
I have only one way to live.
It doesn't allow for special cases.
Most people don't believe that there can be such a person.
You see what a problem that must be for them?
How to prevail over that which you refuse to acknowledge the existence of.
Do you understand?
When I came into your life, it was over.
It had a beginning, a middle, and an end.
This is the end.
You can say things could have turned out differently.
That there could have been some other way, but what does that mean?
They are not some other way.
They are this way.
You're asking that I second say the world?
Do you see?
Yes, she said, sobbing.
I do.
I truly do.
Good, he said.
That's good.
All right.
Who said that?
Was that God speaking to Job?
Could be?
Maybe not.
It's not.
I've read the book of Job many times.
It's not.
That's not what that is.
Is that John MacArthur recreating how God might speak to somebody who says, look, I just, I am, I'm gay.
That's my identity.
And, and, right?
It could be.
Is that Ali Beth Stuckey recreating an idea of like, here's why you shouldn't feel empathy?
Because there is a God who says, when I came into your life, there was a beginning, middle, and end, and I had control over all of it.
And there's only one way to live.
I'm sorry.
You can't second guess things.
There's one way to live.
And you want me to be vulnerable?
That doesn't happen.
That cannot happen.
Who said this?
This is from a book called No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy.
And it was said by the psychopathic killer in that book, Sugar, the guy that was played by...
What's his name?
Bardem.
I was just going to say a very hot Spanish man.
That's what I was going to say.
But Javier Bardem.
Yeah.
So I'm just going to put that out there.
I don't know if you want to comment on that, Dan.
You don't have to.
The only thing I want to say, I love Cormac McCarthy in that book.
Cormac McCarthy sees the darkness in humanity, I think, and captures it well.
And the fact that you could, I think, as you did, map that onto God, A certain vision of God that is in the Bible.
Every vision of God and not every vision of God in the Bible because I'm not an errantist.
I don't think the Bible speaks with one voice.
Okay.
A very narrow conception of God by a certain subset of Protestants.
Okay, thank you.
But a John MacArthur or an Ali Beth Stuckey or a damn Donald Trump.
The fact that it can map onto all of them and it's a dark vision, I think that tells us everything we need to know about it.
All right.
We've got a few minutes.
We got carried away.
I blame myself.
But tell us just briefly about a whole host of things that happened this week, whether it's Republican senators, Medicaid, education, or NATO.
So we're just talking about maybe some potential reversals and things of what are the significance of this.
And we don't know.
Will this hurt Trump or will it not?
Or how does it affect MAGA?
We talked about that with Epstein.
It's not the only place we see it.
We've seen Trump this week come out hard against Putin and try to deny that he was ever not, you know, swinging against Putin.
And it's like, I never said anything.
And, you know, people put all the quotes up, whatever.
He's very critical of Putin.
He's distancing himself from him.
He's demanding that he make, threatening Russia with big tariffs.
And I'm sure Putin is shaking in his boots by sending more weapons to Ukraine through NATO.
All of a sudden, NATO is a big fan of NATO.
We've seen that.
Missouri Senator Josh Hawley in another kind of reversal.
Conservative senator introduced legislation this week intended to roll back Medicaid cuts that he voted for in Trump's big giant bill.
Hawley, if people had looked at this, this aims to address concerns that he had.
He was one of those GOP senators who voiced all kinds of concerns about the big bill and voted for it.
Anyway, it's aimed at helping rural hospitals, increasing, you know, not increasing Medicaid spending, I guess, but not diminishing it as much as the bill would, though it doesn't reverse all of those.
That's significant.
Another piece is just that 10 GOP senators this week wrote a letter to the Trump administration saying that they need to reverse course and release $6.8 billion in federal funding for K through 12 schools.
They said, you're violating this principle of handing education back to the states, which is what you said you were going to do.
The Trump administration says the funds are under review and that they might be used to like, you know, help undocumented immigrants learn English and DEI initiatives and so forth.
The GOP senators say no, they support a whole bunch of things that bipartisan people support, like, you know, nutrition at schools and after-school programs and so forth.
It's worth noting as well that a coalition of primarily Democratic-led states have also filed suit about this this week.
So what's my reason for hope?
That's my reason for hope.
Yeah.
What does all of that have to do?
It just shows, again, some shifts.
Will they last?
We've heard Republicans make noise against Trump before and it doesn't go anywhere, but it's interesting to your point, because my reason for hope, as long as we'll transition into those, was related to this and the Epstein thing of just the uncertainty that this injects into what has been a kind of brick wall of GOP support for Trump, MAGA-based support for Trump.
We see signs of stress in that.
And it's interesting this week to see these things.
Now, people can come at it the other way and say, great, cool, Josh Hawley, for doing this now.
Why didn't you just vote against the bill if you really believed in this stuff and so forth?
Completely legitimate.
Hey, 10 GOP senators who are upset about this.
Like, you know, where were you with the clawbacks and the recession bill and all of this?
Why didn't you use this as leverage?
Things you could have done.
You didn't do it.
But I think that it's telling that we're seeing these things all at the same moment.
I see it as hopeful.
I don't see it as certain that it's going anywhere.
I don't know for sure what it means, but I think these things are significant and interesting and worth noting.
Your thoughts on whether it's Putin or Hawley or these GOP things, these kind of reversals that Trump is having to undertake and headwinds that he's running into within his own party.
So here's what we know.
There's no consistent policy or worldview from Donald Trump.
And we've known that forever.
Okay.
The one place of coherency, of vile, disgusting, inhumane coherency is the policy of mass deportation.
That is a place where Stephen Miller can reduce that to you have to leave the country and we will detain you, we will deport you in the most inhumane, disgusting, violent ways.
Okay.
There's like a simple, everyday, understandable, disgusting, vile logic to that.
When it comes to other things, there is a lack of preparation, a lack of coherency, a lack of understanding, and a lack of expertise because they fired all the experts.
So when it comes to NATO and Putin and Trump, when it comes to the ramifications of what they're up to, I'm not sure that there's a sense of coherency.
Now, I can hear someone saying, well, what about all the people behind Trump who have these ideas, Project 2025 or others?
There is, but it doesn't mean the implementation of those and the execution of those are 100% coherent.
And I just bring that up because we're seeing someone like Holly or we're seeing Republican senators be like, you know, actually, if you cut all of that education funding on short notice, it's going to really do this, this, and this.
Now, go ahead.
And you're going to hurt rural and red states.
Like I read a stat, I think I've got the number right that it's something like they receive in general, red states, 1.6 federal dollars out of that money for every $1 the blue states typically receive.
They are more dependent on it.
It is counterproductive politically for Trump to hit these funds.
$83 billion a year from California into the federal budget.
That's how much California gives.
$71 billion is how much Texas takes.
And that's Texas.
That's not Arkansas.
That's not Oklahoma.
And so that's there.
What does that mean?
Does that mean, look, none of this is me, and I don't think you saying, again, oh, we finally got it.
It's the end of the road for Trump.
Like, that's not, that's not what's happening.
But it is worth keeping tabs on these things.
And it is worth saying that we will continue to notice so that we're not in a defeatist mindset that says, well, there's nothing you can do to dislodge the emperor and his popularity and his just complete support and this or that.
So we will keep noticing all of that.
I have one more reason for hope, and that is sent in by Natalie from our Discord about the interfaith imam in Cincinnati, Ayman Soleiman, who is a former chaplain at Cincinnati's Children's Hospital and someone who's done a lot of work to bring about interfaith understanding and partnership in Cincinnati, he was detained, and there have been vigils in Cincinnati to get him released by DHS.
And he now has a bond hearing, and there is hope that he will be released at some point here in the near future.
We will keep an eye on that too.
I want to invite you, if you're a subscriber, to next Tuesday, July 22nd, our live taping of our special episode.
That's at 4.15 Pacific, 7.15 Eastern.
We'll be live.
We'll be talking about a host of issues and we'll be taking questions live throughout the episode.
So if you're a subscriber, look for the link coming today or Saturday.
And if you're not, sign up now because you don't want to miss that.
Swatch Premium is on sale for $40 for the entire year.
So you pay $40 and you get Swatch Premium for 12 months.
And GATT gets you access to our entire archive, ad-free listening.
You get to come hang out in the Discord where we have great discussions.
You get access to bonus content that I do on Mondays and these bonus episodes that we are now recording live so that people can see Dan's awesome earrings, my hats, and Dan's earrings and nails and just the whole package of Dan Miller.
You now get in video rather than just an audio.
So it's pretty exciting.
That'll do it for us.
We'll be back next week.
I appreciate you all.
Thanks for listening.
Have a good day.
Thanks, Brad.
Hey everyone, it's your two favorite horror podcasters, professors, and nerds.
We're so excited to tell you about a new series from Horror Joy called Meet Your Maker.
This is a series dedicated to horror creators, their words, and their worlds.
We'll be sitting down for 30-minute interviews with some of horror's best-known authors and some of the best authors you don't know, like Clay McLeod Chapman, Victoria Dolpey, Kat Silva, John Langen, Sadie Hartman, Mother Horror, Emily Hughes, Thomas Ha, Matthew Trefon, Jake Try, and so many more.
Whatever we do, we can both try to do so many more at the same time.
And so many more.
No, I don't think that's working.
Our goal is always to find joy in horror, and this gives us the opportunity to introduce you to new authors and creators and to discuss new books, stories, and movies with your old favorites.
This also means that we'll be dropping episodes every week.
So, get ready, yins, for more horror, more joy, more horror.
