Weekly Roundup: "Starve Away" + New Trump Policy Encourages Christians to Proselytize at Work
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Brad and Dan tackle two urgent developments shaping the intersection of politics and religion in America. They begin with the escalating humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, examining how allegations of genocide—now echoed by Israeli human rights groups—are forcing fractures within the GOP, with figures like Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene offering unexpected critiques.
Brad and Dan explore how Israel’s religious nationalism and the U.S. tendency to cast Islam and Palestine as threats complicate public discourse. Then, they turn to a chilling new Trump-era memo permitting federal employees to evangelize in the workplace, unpacking its implications for religious privilege, secular rights, and the Christian nationalist agenda behind Project 2025. Along the way, they call out congressional hypocrisy, share reasons for hope in the form of abortion shield laws, and spotlight rising global recognition of Palestine and U.S.-based resistance efforts.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad O'Neeshi, author of Preparing for War, the Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism, and What Comes Next, founder of Axis Mundi Media, here with my co-host.
Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Lamar College.
Nice to see you, Brad.
As always, Dan, good to see you.
Much to talk about today, and I think we're going to start and end with a kind of discourse change on Gaza.
There is an ongoing starvation crisis there, and it is having a divisive effect, unfortunately, on the American Republican Party.
We'll talk about what's going on there, what is being, the ways that the discourse has turned, but we'll then get into comments by a Florida congressman who has said, let them starve and that will all be sandwiched around the fact that the Trump administration just released a new memo about how federal employees should be able to proselytize at work meaning they should be able to talk to coworkers about the quote unquote truth of their religious
worldview and to persuade them of that truth on breaks when they have a chance in casual conversation and so on and so on.
I think it's always going to make you popular at work.
Every time somebody's in the break room, you're like, hey, you want to talk?
And people are like, nope, I've got work to do.
Yeah.
Hey, Dave.
Nah, brought my lunch today.
I've got to take it back to the desk.
Okay.
All right, y'all, a lot to get into.
Here we go.
*music*
Okay, Dan, you know, for a long, long, long time there has been a humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
There has been the threat of genocide.
There seems finally a sense of change in the discourse in this country.
We have seen everyone from high-ranking GOP members talk about how there needs to be aid there.
And, of course, this comes on the backs of months and months and months of activists and anyone who is paying attention saying that there is a true humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Talk to us about some of the ways that might have changed a little bit in terms of the way that's being spoken about in this country this week.
And that'll lead us into, surprisingly, the new government memo.
And I promise, friends, it's all going to sync together in ways that will make complete sense and make it happen.
make you realize how interconnected this stuff is.
So Dan, off to you.
Yeah, so I mean, I won't run through all the GOP stuff necessarily but even even Trump this week talks about how there's what you say real starvation there or something like that like sort of contradicting Netanyahu so we have that but the big thing that really stood out so we're talking as you say there's been this this ongoing humanitarian crisis of course but specifically in the wake of the sort of emerging awareness of the specific starvation crisis that's taking place there at this point that's bringing this all up and
what really stood out this week is that two israeli human rights groups have accused the Israeli government of committing genocide.
So that's a really, really big shift for reasons that we'll talk about.
But Beit Shalem, and I hope I'm pronouncing that right, they released a statement Monday that said they reached the quote unequivocal conclusion, end quote, that it was genocide.
They said that they did this after, quote, an examination of Israel's policy in the Gaza Strip and its horrific outcomes, together with statements by senior politicians and military commanders about goals of the attack, end quote.
And they go on to say elsewhere in the report that, you know, commanders and politicians have made statements that, you know, about eradicating the people and so forth.
And then tied in with that, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, PHRI, they announced, that organization announced that it was joining in that assessment that was essentially sort of signing on.
They published a separate legal and medical assessment citing, quote, deliberate and systemic extermination of the health system in Gaza, end quote.
And so basically they were saying that, like, all of these things are going on, but you're also targeting and destroying all the mechanisms in place to actually help people and serve them and so forth.
Israeli officials, of course, dismissed the reports as politically motivated and obscene and baseless.
The Israeli military also denied intentionally starving the populace, though we know...
know that they were blocking aid convoys and so forth.
And then all of a sudden, you know, hey, aid can come back in.
And it has nothing to do with this report or these accusations.
At least that's what they say.
A few takeaways, we can dive more into this first one in a minute, is just as you say, the potentially changing discourse and the fractious nature of this within the GOP.
But I think highlighting this piece and sort of interlocking with it is this takes away one of the leading responses on the part of the Israeli government and the GOP, and that is the accusation of anti-Semitism.
For years at this point, Anybody who criticizes Israel or Israeli policy in the Gaza Strip is accused of being anti-Semitic.
We've seen this on college campuses.
Anybody who is pro-Palestinian or just says, hey, we're opposed to, like, for example, preventing aid convoys from coming in.
We're opposed to, for example, things that are recognized as war crimes being committed.
But if you're arguing that on behalf of the Palestinians, you're anti-Semitic, well, now you have two Israeli groups coming out and making this statement, and it just doesn't fly.
You can't accuse them of being anti-Semitic when I think most of their membership is Jewish.
It also highlights something that I think most, maybe not most, but a lot of Americans don't know because it just doesn't figure much in media coverage, which is that the state of Israel is a complex place with a complex populace.
There are Christians who live there.
There are Muslims who live there.
There are Arabs who live there.
There are Jewish people who live there.
Within all of that, there are multiple political parties.
And there are lots of Jewish people in Israel who do not support the policies of the Israeli government in the Gaza Strip.
And we've talked about that.
But I think if you watch just sort of media accounts, you get this monolithic view of Israel because probably a lot like people have of the U.S. You see Netanyahu.
You see Israeli government leaders.
You hear interviews with the military towing the party line.
So I think it also brings into view the complexity that is there.
A complexity I think a lot of Americans who support Israel at all costs, they have a high interest in sort of masking that complexity and always presenting this.
Because, of course, you can't really argue that Jewish people who oppose this are being anti-Semitic.
It doesn't work.
And so I think that that's a significant piece of this.
And I think that's part of what lends some emphasis to this is it got a lot of news coverage.
You have increasing awareness of this.
That's feeding, as you say.
some of the kinds of disagreements that are going on in the GOP and on the American scene now.
So that's what sort of was, I think, the sort of tipping point piece this week with these two Israeli groups.
So your thoughts on that or more on the sort of how.
this is rolling the GOP.
Well, I think you're exactly right that this is one of those moments where some of the facade is crumbling.
There is just a threat here of genocide.
We've talked about this on the show.
There are so many folks who have been trying to get anyone who will listen to understand the gravity of this.
The difficulty in this country, difficulty may be the wrong word, is always that if you talk about Palestine, We have laid this out on the show where Palestine is set up as an enemy of the United States because it is Hamas, that everyone who's in Palestine is Hamas.
And Hamas is.
with Iran and Iran is the big bad other and they're all Muslim.
The Trump administration, the first one, is the administration that tried in the very first few weeks of the term to institute a Muslim ban.
This is the man who said, I'm not going to let any Muslims into the country until we figure out what the hell is going on.
So that has been cultivated for 10 years and even longer than that.
We know that.
Going back to 9-11.
The Islamophobia, we've talked about it.
So what happens in this country is you set up Islam as the bad guy.
That is, right, if you want to label somebody a political enemy, you can either call them a communist or you can call them an Islamic terrorist.
Those are go to.
And we're going to see evidence of that here in a couple of minutes.
When Israeli groups say there is incontrovertible evidence of starvation and the possibility of genocide, you start to get to a place where, as you say, that defense is will will will will start to chip a little bit now.
This has been happening for a long time.
I mean, there have been so many Jewish voices in this country who have said, what is happening is not okay.
There have been so many Jewish voices who have said, I'm Jewish and I do not support what is happening in Gaza.
And yet, you never know what it's going to take.
But I'll just add, you didn't go through any of the GOP stuff, and I don't want to go through all the details.
But as you say, Trump himself says this.
Who knows what that means?
Who knows what Trump, who knows day to day what he's saying?
We have new tariffs today.
We're not going to talk about that, but that that's going to be big news, and that's going to roll the markets, and it's going to be a whole new cycle.
But Marjorie Taylor Greene jumped in and has talked about this.
You know, this goes back to Dan, I think.
This goes back about a month and a half to what happened with Iran and the possible possibility of war with Iran.
Iran, Iran, I should say.
And if you remember, Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene were sort of lined up as those who are more isolationists saying, we need to kind of not just be completely all-in on whatever Netanyahu says that we should do.
And of course, Tucker Carlson gave it to Ted Cruz, and Ted Cruz was the guy saying, well, the Bible says to support Israel.
So whatever that means, I'll do it any day, all day, without question and without qualification.
Those two camps are still sort of fighting it out.
I think in Trump world and in the GOP, that doesn't mean anything good.
That doesn't mean I'm hoping one of them wins because I'm on one of of their sides.
It doesn't mean that I think there's actually like merit to either of their their their their arguments.
Now, maybe less I know you're secretly a Tucker Carlson fan.
I know that that's clearly where you're going.
That's how I fall asleep at night.
It's hard, Dan.
It's hard that, you know, you know, I don't drink anymore.
I don't, I don't party.
I'm, I'm, I'm, I've got little kids.
And, you know, at night, in order to just ice my brain down, I got to get my Tucker going.
It's bad sides.
It's bad people on every side of this.
You know, when we talk about that.
And there may be like less harmful.
Like I might say that in some instance, what Marjorie Taylor Greene is proposing would be less harmful, like in one instance, than what, you know, Ted Cruz or someone else is proposing.
Here's the point.
Here's, here's, like, the overall point is there is disagreement.
The takeaway for me today is there seems to be at least some room in the mainstream American discourse across the aisle for recognition that there are human beings in Gaza.
Think about what I just said.
Like, it takes Israeli groups finding incontrovertible evidence of genocide for the American right and many in the mainstream window of this country to like recognize there are human beings starving.
There may be conflict.
There's no doubt that hostages need to be freed.
There's no doubt there are so many things, so many components to all of this.
What it has taken, though, to recognize the humanity is mind-blowing.
And it does not speak to us being in a good place as a country.
I don't need to tell anyone who's listening that.
I think you all know that already.
Those are some thoughts that this is going to lead into, I think, some other things we're going to get to today.
They're all going to sync up, but what else do you want to get to here?
It's one point that I've raised before, and I think this, you know, we could sync this up with where we're going next as well if we wanted, but that is the, I've talked about this a lot, the conflation of Israel as a political state with the Jewish people.
And that's how that discourse of anti-Semitism works with this.
When if you're critical of their policies, you're critical of, say, Israeli foreign policy, or you're critical of their policy in Gaza, or their military policy, you are not saying there's no place in the world for Jewish people, or we want to destroy the Jewish state, or these kind of ridiculous things.
In other words, it's a question about what a geopolitical state is doing, what a government is doing.
It's not a statement about an ethnicity or religious group or people with a shared history or any of those kind of things.
And that is the other conflation that consistently takes place here.
And what it does is it trades on, I think, this sort of overarching term, quote unquote, Israel, that operates in the Bible in one way, or that operates with a religious tonality in one way, but is something different if you are talking about geopolitical states.
And I think it is that conflation, intentional on the right, of basically religion and state, a breaking down of any distinction between those two entities so that if you are critical of the state of Israel, you're being critical of the religion of Judaism or of all Jewish people.
And as you say, the linkages that you can then make between Arabs and Palestine and Islam and Iran and so forth, so that anytime I say, hey, you know, maybe we should like let aid come in, oh, you're saying Israel shouldn't exist.
You're saying the Jewish people should be destroyed.
No, I didn't say any of that.
I just said maybe.
What about October 7th?
What about the Hamas?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Maybe cool.
All the people starving in Gaza didn't do that because they're not all Hamas and whatever.
It's just that point, but I think it's this conflating of state and religion that ties right in with where we're going next.
And that's bread and butter for the GOP is to define state.
fine states in terms of religious identity.
But this, you know, you're going to eat, people can email me and say, Brad always finds a way to relate this to Christian nationalism.
But what, but what happens in this country?
What happens in this country?
It's the connection, yep.
Right?
You have an American flag.
America's a Christian nation.
The flag's a religious symbol for millions and millions of Americans.
A Christian symbol for millions and millions of Americans.
And if you don't, if you don't fly the flag, if you're not a Christian, you're defined out of being a real American.
How many times on the thousand episodes of this show have we explained that and talked about it?
That no shoes, no shirt, no service.
If you're an American flag flying white Christian, you're good.
If not, we may not let you in the store.
And so if you define this country that way, well, we're a Christian country.
We love God.
It's a European heritage country.
You start down that road, then you start applying that to Israel.
Say, well, Israel is this.
As you say, there's no nuance.
There's no levels, no dimensions, no variants.
None of that.
And then you do that to Palestine, Iran, et cetera.
And you can see how the same logic starts to apply.
And it starts to help you make sense of how many people view what's happening in Israel, in Gaza, and so on we're just we're going to come back go ahead just real quick as a quick illustration of this just try explaining to a lot of americans it's not a conversation that comes up all the time but it comes up in classrooms the concept of a secular jewish person and like it just doesn't compute if you're like yes this person is jewish they identify as jewish they don't observe torah they don't maybe they don't go to synagogue they eat they don't observe diet they don't believe in god bernie sanders
yeah they're they're they're atheists whatever and so many young americans of the popular conception well they can't really be religious they can't be really be jewish because you're like no but like they are because religion is not always or ethnic identity is not always what you think it is.
But that's what sort of brings into view the way that this operates and the way that they become so centrally entwined.
I think to your point of, well, we always bring it back to Christian nationalism, because that Christian nationalism becomes the lens through which the world is viewed and understood.
And that's what we see with the contemporary issues related to Israel.
One way to spin that is just to say that a Christian nationalist worldview leads you to view Israel in this flattened way.
It leads you to conflate the state of Israel with the Jewish people.
And it leads you to say that all people in Palestine are Hamas.
And so right on down the line.
That's what that leads to.
I mean, that's a way you can, you can, you can, in the logic of all this in those terms.
All right, we'll be right back.
We're going to get to a new memo that is, that is really, well, we'll get to it.
You don't miss it.
You're going to want to miss it.
But don't miss it.
Come back.
We'll see you in a minute.
All right, people.
Many of you've seen this already, but let me just tell you about a new memo from the Trump administration's Office of Personnel Management.
Federal employees are now allowed to engage in conversations regarding religious topics with fellow employees, including attempting to persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views.
They can also encourage their coworkers to participate in religious expressions of faith such as prayer.
Now, that is concerning, Dan.
Let me read a little bit more.
Sorry, I'm trying to get my act together because there's a lot of people.
We're with understatement, Brad, today.
Brad's like, I'm concerned about this.
It's like, you know.
Understatement, Brad.
I can see Brad's like his head shaking and there's like a there's a vein in your forehead.
It's like, I'm concerned.
Like, you know.
Yeah.
I'm, this is me being professional.
I like to think of this as professional, Brad, Dan.
PBS Brad.
It's like Yeah, this is Yeah.
This is not ranting after three Coke Zeros and, you know, my kids spilling lemonade everywhere, Brad.
I don't think so, Dan.
All right.
Here's a part of the appendix to the memo.
During a break, an employee may engage another in a polite discussion of why his faith is correct and why the non-adherent should rethink his religious beliefs.
However, if the non-adherent requests such attempts to stop, The employee should honor the request.
Okay.
There's so many dimensions to this, Dan.
A friend of the show, Amanda Marcott at Salon, wrote a short piece about this and points out a couple of possibilities.
This allows Christian conservatives, she says, to deprive their colleagues of religious freedom by pressuring them to participate in religious rituals.
Now, we've already seen this happen at the Pentagon.
In May, Pete Hexeth hosted the first voluntary monthly worship and prayer service in the auditorium at the Pentagon.
And he said, when he spoke from the podium there, invite your friends, tell your co-workers.
This is the head of DOD.
We've talked about it before.
You want to be on the good side of your boss.
You want to be seen as a good employee, a team player.
You want to be up for promotion.
You want to be in the inner circle that gets invited to happy hour and you want to like be on the right track for your career being a Christian might help that that might be a good thing wearing hijab being a prac you know being someone who's Muslim talking about how you're an atheist I don't know if that's going to help you in in this in this situation I just want to throw in there this is the new but this is not new to the GOP these practices and one of the things that the folks might remember is the investigations into,
say, like the U.S. Air Force Academy, which was the one that really stood out in the service academies of being essentially a kind of Christian proselytizing playground.
And, you know, all kinds of things were quote unquote voluntary, but they embody all the dynamics you're talking about.
What happens when your superior officer tells you that this thing is going on and that kind of wink, wink, nod, nod.
Well, of course you could do something else.
I mean, I don't know why you would because you're worshiping God, but like if you have something more important to do than worshiping God, I guess you can do that.
You know, this kind of, I mean, that was years ago.
That's not new.
So this is, to me, a continuation and extension and expansion and intensification of a trajectory that the GOP and people on the right have been actively pushing for a really, really long time.
I think that that's important as well, just for people to again recognize this didn't pop up out of nowhere, but this now codifies it, puts it into practice.
It's part of the essentially the HR policy of the U.S. government.
So you're in a team meeting, you know, you have your six-person team, you're, You're and afterwards the leader of the team says, hey, y'all, let's who's heading over to the Bible study?
Who's going to come pray with me?
You know, it's Wednesday.
Wednesday we do lunchtime prayer.
Who's in?
And like four of the team is like, yeah, let's go.
I'm ready, Jeff.
And one person is like, no, actually, I'm not.
And you're totally up to say, well, I don't know, Rachel, like what's more important?
Like you going to eat lunch at your desk and look at YouTube videos of cats or should you come over here and pray to the Creator of the Universe?
All right, your decision, Rachel.
If you're a decision, she's eating a salad.
I guess that's fine.
Like, you know, go ahead.
Yeah, Rach.
No, okay.
All right.
Let's go, everyone.
We're going to go pray.
Rachel's going to get out here and watch some more squirrels on the YouTube.
But all right, good for you.
Okay.
Now, Rachel Lazar, another friend of the show, leader of Americans United of Separation of Church and State, said in a statement that there's something that we should be worried about here, which is there's already, and I know, Dan, you're going to want to jump in here.
There's already a task force on anti-Christian bias in the federal workplace.
So let's just have another scenario.
I'm in the break room, and here comes Jeff, the proselytizer, and he's telling me all about about how he wants to go, wants me to come to Bible study or, hey, I should probably check out, you know, the really cool Fourth of July picnic at the church he goes to or sign, you know, whatever may be.
Okay.
Or starts telling me, I can't believe all these ungodly forces are alive in our country, you know, people who are socialist or Muslim or people who are whatever.
And I'm like, hey, Jeff, let's, you know, thanks for telling me all that.
I don't want to talk about it.
I just, I'm just not really.
into that right now and I don't need that I'm at work and I'd really love to just talk about other things so is Jeff going to turn around and say okay I didn't realize you're anti-Christian I'll just I'll just, I'll remember that.
And we'll see you next time.
And is that going to be, is that anti-Christian bias now?
I mean, I don't know.
So, yeah, so what you're referencing, obviously, is Trump in February issues an executive order seeking to eliminate, rather, quote, the anti-Christian weaponization of government.
And, quote, you get the task force and all that.
We talked about this back then.
People can go back and listen if they want.
This was not anti-Christ, or excuse me, anti-religious.
It was anti-Christian.
So this is all couched.
All of this stuff is couched in broadly religious terms and, you know, based on the constitution and so forth.
Any critic of this, including us, is going to say, this is about Christian privilege.
This is not about religious freedom.
This is about Christian privilege.
And so you have that.
So, yeah, the language is there.
Other things about the memo, supervisors specifically can attempt to win employees to their religion as long as efforts to do so aren't, quote, harassing in nature, end quote.
Or as you say, it's polite discussion.
So here's one thought I have about this.
Is there are...
We've all...
Some of us have been one in the past.
We have all encountered the well-meaning Christian person, the Ned Flanders.
Who?
You were like really working to say it the right way.
And you were just like, I'm going to say this.
It's the Christian person who is always doing this kind of stuff.
And they really are well-meaning.
They're the, like in the South, we'd be like, oh, bless their heart.
And then you go on to say whatever.
Like that person who really does not appreciate that inviting somebody to a Bible study could be uncomfortable.
They cannot comprehend that that would be uncomfortable.
They're concerned about their eternal salvation or the fact that, I don't know, their child is sick with a, you know, genetic illness of some sort and they offer to pray for them or invite them.
And like they really, honest to goodness, cannot comprehend that that would make somebody uncomfortable or that it could be, quote unquote, harassing in nature.
Which is why, in my view, in a sort of neutral sense, you know what, maybe let's just not do that stuff in the workplace.
Maybe let's just not make that part of somebody's work culture.
Maybe let's not do something that could create what is perceived or felt to be a hostile work environment, even if somebody doesn't mean to do that.
alone the Pete Hexess of the world who do mean to do that.
Let alone the supervisors who are Trump appointees and picks who want to be on the good side who are now actively seeking to root out anybody who's not Christian, who are using this to create a hostile work environment.
So, you know, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has said in the past, we'll see how it, like what happens with this, that proselytizing the workplace can amount to unlawful harassment if it's unwelcome and can create a hostile work environment.
And so the typical thing would be if it's unwelcome, I go and report it to a supervisor or HR or whatever.
And maybe we say, look, you know.
Janice did, I don't think she means to be malicious, but it makes me uncomfortable.
If somebody could just kind of pull her aside and tell her to maybe not like just stop inviting me to church or stop, you know, whatever.
Okay, cool.
But now, now.
Now, if that's anti-Christian discrimination, you can't do that.
This is effectively privileging Christianity.
And as I say, I've encountered, I know you've encountered two people, and I talk to people all the time with family members who do this kind of thing, and they're like, they don't get it.
They don't get like why it bothers me when they keep telling me that they're going to pray for me or they invite me to church all the time or whatever.
They just don't get it.
Those people are there.
But what we're now getting, in my view, is the weaponization of Christian identity by putting it in the hands of people who are not Janice, the well-meaning office co-worker that we've known for 12 years.
They're the supervisor.
Of course, it's voluntary.
I'm a sports fan.
Lots of teams in the NFL, they all have voluntary workouts in the offseason.
Guess what's not really voluntary if you're trying to make the team?
The voluntary workouts.
We talk about prayer in high school football games after where the coach is just, hey, we're just going to gather in the center of the field and pray.
I don't know why people think there's pressure there.
Well, because if I'm the second string linebacker who's hoping that maybe next year I'm the first string linebacker, maybe I need to be there and be seen being there.
to do this.
If I've got my supervisor at work inviting me to the Bible study, what happens when promotion time comes up?
What happens when they have to write their annual review of my performance?
Am I now exhibiting anti-Christian bias.
If I just participate in the conversation, somebody says, I believe the God here.
You're like, yeah, I think evolution kind of explains all of that.
Oh, are you now being anti-Christian?
So all of that stuff layers on here.
And I think it's all, this is where it dovetails and is a continuation of that executive order from February that specifically privileges Christians.
So that, as you're saying, I don't think if you're inviting somebody to come to an event at your mosque, this is going to be received the same way in the break room.
as it is if you're inviting me and my kids to the Easter egg hunt that your church does every year.
Okay.
Three points on this because you really laid it out.
Number one is this is straight from Project 2025.
So if you're asking yourself, what would this do?
Like, why would they do this?
Is this just red meat for the evangelicals?
Whatever.
Sure.
Sure.
You can get pastors telling their flock, look, the Trump administration really cares about Krishna.
Okay, fine.
That's, I actually think that's, that's, that's a side effect.
I think the real goal here is straight out of Project 2025, and it is creating the kind of federal workforce they want.
They want a federal workforce that is Trump loyalist.
They want a federal workforce that is Christian.
And the Office of Personnel Management, if you go back and look at the history of Project 2025 was a place that the first Trump administration realized was a place of could be weaponized and utilized for their purposes so that when Russ Vote and the Heritage Foundation and others started to put together Project 2025,
the Office of Personnel Management, this sort of obscure agency was a place where they thought if we get the right people there, we can start to like churn out policies that will really make a difference in the federal workforce.
Remember, federal workforce, what do they want?
They want loyalists.
They want people who will quit if they're understood to stand in the way of the president.
Russ Vote says, I want federal workers to quote be in trauma.
Russ Vogt has said he's an open Christian nationalist.
So if you just want like why, this is a Project 2025 objective that says this will lead to people quitting.
This will lead to people saying, I don't want to be here.
It will also lead to ways that as that supervisor, Dan, if you have two people and you need to choose one for promotion or if you have two people who are on probation and you're going to choose one to stay on permanently, you're probably going to choose the one that went to the Bible study and who believes in the Jesus you believe in and the God that you believe in and who does not believe that gay people have the right to get married or that abortion should be legal or so on and so forth and go.
And we know that they're a good person because they went to the Bible study.
We're going to invest a bunch of like moral and ethical value onto that.
Yeah, as well.
Of course, they're a really good person.
Might be in some white nationalist groups on Facebook and, you know, be really into Mein Kampf or, you know, who knows, attend some Proud Boy stuff.
They're definitely good because they went to the Bible study.
That leads to the second thing is, Dan, what if I...
So let's say I put over my desk a Bible verse from Leviticus or Deuteronomy that says, you should be stoned if you participate in this kind of sin.
What if I have a Westboro Baptist-style sign that says, right?
And just a trigger warning to everyone that I'm going to use a kind of slogan you might hear from Westboro Baptists if you want to fast forward, okay?
I just put gays will burn in my cubicle.
And someone's like, hey, Jeff, can we take that down?
I don't, that's not cool.
And Jeff's like, well, that's just, that's part of my religion.
I don't know.
Why would I have to take it down?
I mean, are you anti-Christian or what's your deal, man?
I'm just, this is just who I am.
I mean, I worship Jesus.
That's why I have this.
Or by way of contrast, somebody does that.
Somebody else to be, it would be provocative if somebody else puts up the thing that says, you know what?
Satan loves gay people.
Yeah.
Hail Satan.
Yeah.
You know, something like that or whatever.
Muslims, Muslims, Muslims for queery quality.
Muslims for Jews.
What about if I put up something that says Jews for God?
Yeah.
Is it going to be received the same way because we can't we can't accuse you of anti-christian bias if you criticize that yeah all right third point comes from the friendly atheist hemet metta who points out something that's really interesting so at a step stack he says what about promoting atheism it's possible that that's not allowed at all title seven of the civil rights act of 1964 prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of religion However,
Dan, this is amazing stuff, and well done, friendly atheist.
Title seven does not cover all beliefs.
For example, social, political, or economic philosophies and mere personal preferences are not, quote, religious beliefs within the meaning of the statute.
So like, there's a world where you're like, you show up with your atheist propaganda, like data over dogma, Dan McClellan, or you say, you know, science over superstition, or you've got your sticker from the American Atheist Convention, your Freedom from Religion Foundation swag, you're all in.
Somebody's like, hey, you got to get rid of that.
And you're like, what?
What about?
No, man, Jeff's got the, you know, Jeff's got like a cross over there.
And he's got Bible verses about gay people from Leviticus.
I can't be having my thing here.
here?
And it's like, that's a philosophy.
That's not a religion.
That's not included.
Sorry.
Now, you know, that's, we may be down the rabbit hole here of hypotheticals and theoreticals, but still, you know, you can see it.
I don't think that we are.
And here's why.
So first of all, we talk about OPM and you see this a lot of media things.
So you say it's this kind of obscure office that regular Americans didn't know that much about until it comes forward.
So it's always described basically as the HR office for like the federal government.
Anybody who has worked in a job anywhere with an HR office knows number one.
one how kind of not glorious that job seems, but how significant it is when it comes to defining all kinds of things about like workplace culture or what you're allowed to do or what you're not allowed to do or I don't know questions you can ask in interviews or things that you can say among your coworkers or whatever it has a lot of influence and significance the other piece of this is that this guidance is put out it's not legally binding it's about the application of policy which means that it's in
the hands of OPM or you know whatever the the sort of lower level vision versions of that are in individual offices so they're the ones who are going to be interpreting this could it get to courts it could but courts have been and this is more complicated now because of prior SCOTUS decisions or whatever, but courts have been reluctant to micromanage agencies that develop their own policies and so forth.
So it's not necessarily if somebody says, well, you know, if you're going to say freedom of religion, that implies those who have no religion, that that's a logical implication of this, and there's court stuff about that and whatever.
But does it just stay in OPM?
Or if a court says, hey, guess what?
This is an HR issue.
Your HR will sort this out.
And so, I mean, the point is that on a day-to-day basis, It's OPM and they're the sort of subordinate organizations.
They're the ones who are going to be applying this.
They're going to be the ones who are put've issued this guidance.
So you look at it just on the face of it, there's no indication of religious freedom or parody here.
This is all about privileging Christians over everybody else.
So I don't think it's very far down the rabbit hole at all to see that playing out.
We're going to prove that in a minute.
I want to give you a get out of jail free card.
If you are a federal employee who is an atheist, freethinker, secular, and this happens to you, all right?
So here it is.
Somebody says, well, atheism's not a religion, bro.
So sorry, you don't get to have the same privileges here of, you know, all the workplace conversations and proselytizing.
And what you should do is say, well, actually, the way I see this is the way that the Reformed Protestant tradition views religion.
And also the German theologian Paul Tillich.
What they would say, both Tillich, the quote unquote liberal theologian, and Rushduny and other reformed types like Abraham Kuiper, would be this.
All people hold religious views because whatever is of ultimate concern to them and is of their highest value is the God they worship.
Now, a lot of people, that's humans, humanistic.
Be afraid of them.
The right people worship god we've been hearing for years dan that everybody has a god decades what do you worship is it money secular humanism is a religion atheism is a religion state you know schools allow religion all the time because they allow secular humanists to have clubs and yeah when we were in youth group it was like what do you worship jesus or mtv you got to choose I thought that was only true when they showed videos, man.
Like it was only true.
Shout out to Kurt Loder.
Kurt Loder, if you're listening.
I love you, man.
All right.
So if you're an atheist and this happens to you in the workplace, just be like, look, according to Christian theology, atheist.
Atheism and secular humanism are religions, and therefore I will continue to proselytize, and please do not try to impede me on that front, unless you like to admit that not all worldviews are religious, and therefore it is not a false binary and a choice between either a transcendent worldview or another, blah, blah, blah, blah.
You can trap people this way.
I'm usually the only one who likes to play these games.
Normal people do not, but nonetheless, there is your free.
trick from today.
That's the grab bag for today to take home.
We're going to take a break and we're going to come back and prove to you that this is about Christian privilege because we've already had an example in the federal government at a little place over on Capitol Hill called the United States Congress.
Be right back.
All right, y'all.
Let's do some history.
You ready?
This is some real recent history.
Representative Ilan Omar has been under fire during her time in Congress for a couple of things, a couple of instances.
Let's go through some of those.
You ready, Dan?
In 2019, Ilan Omar said that there are lawmakers and activists who support Israel and it constitutes an allegiance to a foreign country.
Now that was labeled anti Semitic.
It was a really big deal.
The American right hated this.
I'm not going to go through all of it, but Representative Elliot Engel of New York said that this was a vile anti Semitic slur.
Now I will just point out that if you listen to Tucker Carlson and Ted Cruz from a month ago, this is basically what Tucker Carlson accused Ted Cruz and others in Congress of doing, saying, Why do you have blind allegiance to Israel?
But nonetheless, okay, so that was a thing.
Now more recently, in the last year, Ilan Omar has come under fire for comments she made after going to the encampments at Columbia University.
Here's a quote from her, Dan.
I actually met a lot of Jewish students who are in the encampment.
And I think it is unfortunate that people don't care about the fact that all Jewish kids should be kept safe.
So, Dan, correct me if I'm wrong.
I think what she's saying there is like I met a lot of Jewish people in the encampments and I think.
It's unfortunate that not everyone recognizes that their safety is important.
Does that sound right to you or am I misreading?
It sounds exactly like what she said.
Yeah.
That it's bad that not all Jewish kids are safe.
Yeah.
Okay.
Just, just.
And then she added this.
We should not have to tolerate anti-Semitism.
Okay, so far so good.
Or bigotry for all Jewish students, also so far so good.
This sounds like, I don't, not, not, okay.
Whether they are pro-genocide or anti-genocide.
Now, that's the, that's the part that got people really upset.
They were talking about censuring her in Congress.
Don Bacon from Nebraska says folks can protest Israel, but don't blame Jewish American students for Israel.
That is by definition anti-Semitism.
Other people just quick, it's not by definition anti-Semitism.
I just want to throw that out.
Somebody can go Google like a definition of anti-Semitism or look it up in an old school paper dictionary if you want.
That's not going to be the definition.
So she was called anti-Semitic for saying, in essence, that some students were pro-genocide.
Now, I don't know who she met.
I don't know who she talked to.
I don't know if that's true.
I don't know what happened there.
She did say she wants all Jewish students to be safe and you cannot tolerate anti-Semitism or bigotry.
She said all Jewish students should be kept safe regardless of their political or cultural views on what's going on in Gaza.
That's basically what she said.
Regardless of where they are on that, they should be kept safe.
And she was, there was a motion put forward for her censure.
Okay.
So.
So, she was censored for this.
We should also mention that Rashida Taleb from Michigan was censored for comments that she made about Israel-Palestine and things that were pro-Palestine.
Okay.
Let's look at some other comments from this week.
Are you ready?
Let's see here.
I'm going to read one.
Okay.
This is from actually about two weeks ago.
I'm sure it is difficult to see us welcome the killer of so many of your fellow Muslim terrorists.
This was in response to Ilan Omar, and it was about Trump's and Netanyahu's meeting.
I'm sure it is difficult to see us welcome the killer of so many of your fellow Muslim terrorists.
So this was somebody calling Ilan Omar a Muslim terrorist.
This comment did not come from a Elon Musk tech bro on X. It came from Representative Randy Fine, who is a first-term congressperson from Florida.
Okay.
Now, what he also has talked about in the past, and I can give you some quotes here.
In World War II, we did not negotiate a surrender with the Nazis.
We did not negotiate a surrender with the Japanese.
We nuked the Japanese twice in order to get unconditional surrender.
That needs to be the same here.
Now, he was then asked, like, do you believe that And he said, no, because why?
Because the after effects would carry over into Israel.
I know you are well aware of Iran's influence on groups, terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah.
In an interview though last month, you said this when asked about how to treat Gaza.
In World War II, we did not negotiate a surrender with the Nazis.
We did not negotiate a surrender with the Japanese.
We defeated the Germans.
We defeated the Japanese using any means that were necessary.
And the same needs to be done in Gaza.
Nuke in Gaza would be a terrible idea.
The fallout would drift into Israel.
It would kill the hostages.
The point that I was making was that you're not worried about it.
For example, women and children in Gaza who, you know, the innocents.
I think war is a messy thing.
And I think that when you defeat evil, you have to do what is necessary to do it.
Israel cannot live next to a country that a huge percentage of the people wish to destroy it all the time.
Congressman Randy Fine, thank you so much.
We can go to this week where, when, as we mentioned at the top, Dan, there are There have been a lot of people, including people that may surprise you, like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Donald Trump who have expressed concern about starvation in Gaza.
This is what Randy Fine said here.
Release the hostages, until then, starve away.
So he's admitting that starvation is happening and he is saying actively to an entire group of people, starve them.
This is a sitting member of Congress.
who has called another member of Congress a terrorist.
This is a sitting member of Congress who is saying that you should starve, like you should actively starve a whole group of people, a whole people group.
That's Dan, I don't know.
We just did a by definition anti-Semitism thing.
I think if we looked up genocide, if you are actively trying to end an entire people group, that is called genocide.
They invented the word just for that reason.
That was the exact reason why the word was invented was to cover exactly that kind of attitude and sort of action plan.
Now here, after the first segment about Gaza and everything that's happening in the American discourse on that, and the second segment today, all about, I don't know, religious proselytizing in the workplace.
Here's the United States Congress.
Rashida Taleb, Ilan Omar, some of the few Muslims in the history of the American Congress, either removed from committees, as in Ilan Omar's case, censored, as in Taleb's case, or having the measure put forth for censure, as in Ilan Omar's case in another instance, because Ilan Omar said things like, There are certain students in the camps.
There are certain students at Columbia who are genocide for genocide or not.
Okay.
And they should be kept safe.
Everybody should be kept safe, but there are certain students.
that could be Jewish, non-Jewish, they are pro-genocide.
Okay.
She also said that some people have an allegiance to a foreign government.
Now, there's a ton of history in this country about allegiance to a foreign government.
There's some, there's a ton of reasons that that is rooted in sentiment about Jewish people.
There's, there's ways that so many racial and ethnic minorities in this country have been called that.
I mean, Japanese Americans during World War II, as somebody who's read thousands of pages on that and spent time with family members, that was a core idea.
You are loyal to the emperor.
Okay, fine.
We can relitigate that, Dan.
We can spend four hours on that.
I am not exonerating Ellen Omar for that comment in total.
So if you think that that's what I'm doing, you can email me and I will just delete the email.
That's not what I'm doing.
Okay?
Here's what I'm saying.
We just got going through ten theoretical about what happened, what might happen in the federal workplace for people who are Christian and not Christian, people who prosthetize about Jesus and people who try to be Muslim or atheists in the workplace.
And you know what I see in the United States Congress?
I already know what's going to happen because they're showing me.
If you come, if you come down on the right side, if you read as the right kind of Jew, the right kind of Christian, you're good.
You can call other people terrorists.
I could get in my break room at work and say, I think you're a terrorist.
I think Omar is a terrorist because Omar is Muslim.
And then I'm going to eat my muffin and walk out of the break room.
And that's fine.
Because it's Christian.
I'm just stating my religious truth.
I can say about a whole people group, starve them.
I'm good.
That's part of my religious worldview.
But if a Muslim, an atheist speaks of, well, they may be censured.
They may be removed committee.
and they may lose their job.
Period.
They will be labeled a certain way.
It might be part of the anti-Christian task force job to go root out whatever they're doing.
Do you all see what the goal is?
Do you all see what the end game here is?
The end game is not just to have a Christian nation where people worship Jesus.
No, the end game is to have a regime that uses the symbols and scriptures and stories and figures of Christianity as a cudgel to enforce certain social mores and policy and political positions.
What do you think, Dan?
I think all that's correct.
I think another way to think about this is not just what happens in these contexts, but what doesn't happen.
I mean, that's just the flip side of what you're describing.
Action was taken against and and Omar fine not so much fine just go say what you want to say you're just no you're just fine sorry that the pun is there it's the same thing in the workplace even if you're not talking about like, you know, something actively bad or punitive happening, it's that I'll just get a free pass.
Those who can couch what they're saying, including their bigotry, including their own anti-Semitism, their own Islamophobia, their transphobia, their homophobia, all that stuff.
They just get the free pass to say and express whatever they want because it's a quote-unquote Christian position.
I obviously know that there are other Christians who wouldn't say those things, but right, for the ones who do, if they can just tap tackle Christianity onto it, they get a free pass.
Everybody else is going to be effectively silenced and not even able to respond to these things because then I'm exercising anti Christian bias.
That's the dynamic.
So it's not just what does happen.
It's the absence of action undertaken for people who express these kinds of ideas or undertake these actions.
Yeah.
I mean, so Randy Fine has gotten some negative criticism.
There's a chance that APAC has dropped his, their promotion of him.
Marjorie Taylor Greene said some things that were actually themselves problematic, but she was criticizing Randy Fine for this.
I have not seen though, Dan, I have not seen Mike Johnson say, hey, you know, we need, I'm going to have a talk with him.
We might need to censure him.
I have not seen anyone saying that that is, you know, castigating every Muslim person a terrorist.
Nobody seems to be that up in arms.
There's just no outrage.
The very selective outrage that comes from the GOP is the telling point.
Yeah.
All right.
We're going to do an extended reason for hope today.
And I think there's aspects of reason for hope that are not going to feel like hopeful.
But there is reason for hope in there, even though it's going to take a while to get to it.
Dan?
Yeah.
So.
Take it away.
With that set up, you're welcome, Dan Dan.
I mean, I teed you up.
Dan, I threw the ball up.
Just dunk it now.
All you got to do is I threw it up.
Okay.
I threw the perfect pass.
Just go catch it in the end zone and take it home.
Come on.
It's not that hard.
I like to change metaphors because my verticals are good.
I recognize that even if I threw the perfect pass, there's no way you were going to dunk anything.
So that's why I had to change.
In eighth grade, I got to where I could jump up and like touch the rim.
Really?
Yeah.
But I never got any higher.
By like 12th grade, I could like, like I could still jump up and touch the rim.
Like it just never got any better.
So yeah, touchdown may be a better option.
So, so what happened?
All right.
So this is going to bring us to Texas and to New York and to Louisiana.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in December sued Margaret Carpenter, who's a doctor in New York.
She, that is Dr. Carpenter, allegedly prescribed and mailed abortion pills through a telemedicine practice to a 20-year-old woman in Texas, and this is a violation of Texas anti-abortion laws.
So We've talked about this for a while and like how this would play out when people from states with abortion bans seek abortion or get access to abortion in other states and so forth.
A Texas judge ordered her to pay $100,000 in penalties as a result.
So the Texas judge puts a civil penalty on Dr. Carpenter in New York for violating this Texas law, but neither Carpenter nor her attorney appeared at a court hearing about the suit.
They just basically ignored it and said that they wouldn't comply.
So the Attorney General's office contacted the Ulster County Clerk's Office, so the County Clerk's Office in New York, and basically said, you need to do the paperwork and stuff to level this penalty against Dr. Carpenter.
Ulster County Clerk Taylor Brooke refused and argued that New York State's shield law protects Dr. Carpenter from any such action.
And after filing, it was said he refiled.
the request and Brooke refused again and put out this statement saying the rejection stands.
Resubmitting the same materials does not alter the outcome.
In the meantime, New York Governor Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James have been clear that Carpenter's protected from extradition to Texas or other legal penalties under the so-called SHIELD law.
And so Paxton's office is now suing the clerk's office to try to force compliance of Texas's legal aims.
This is all in addition to Louisiana, where Carpenter was charged with a felony for prescribing abortion pills to a minor.
And so this happened, but there's no ability for Louisiana to enforce that if she's not in Louisiana.
What's the significance of it?
We've talked about this in the past in the wake of Roe v.
Wade being turned aside, being overturned by the Supreme Court.
And even ahead of that, in the case of Connecticut, you had, I believe it's 18 states and the District of Columbia have passed these so-called shield laws specifically aiming to protect abortion providers in their states from...
Some of those, I believe New York is one of eight that protect providers regardless of the patient location.
So some of them, if a patient travels to the state and has an abortion procedure, they're protected.
They wouldn't be protected if they mailed abortion pills as in this case, but there are something like eight states where that is.
What does all this mean?
Why do I have it sort of laid out as a reason for hope?
Because we've seen and we've known that these cases are going to come when it became clear that SCOTUS was going to overturn Roe v Wade.
Everybody remembers that the opinion was sort of leaked ahead of time.
Connecticut was the first state to pass one of these laws and actually passed it before SCOTUS formally overturned Roe v Wade.
And we've seen this, we've heard about this, we've wondered about this.
This is the first really high-profile test of this.
And my reason for hope is that the states that have passed these laws are standing behind them and they're doing what they were intended to do.
do, which is to provide abortion access and to protect people's access to abortion access.
And so we're seeing this play out.
So it's a messy and kind of wonky legal sort of thing going on, but I do see it as a reason for hope for people in huge swas of the American nation who cannot access abortion where they live.
So I see this as hopeful.
So I think there, yeah, I think there is hope here.
I think if you followed this show, if you know that we've chronicled the ways that a second Trump term was going to lead to an even deeper feeling that we live in two countries, that if you live in Texas, your lived experience of being an American is probably very different than your lived experience of living in Connecticut or in Minnesota or in New York.
And that's been true for a long time, but you've seen that accelerate.
And I think that this is one of those examples.
This also is the kind of stuff that I'll just say like tears at the fabric of a federation of states.
And you're already seeing that in Texas where they're going to meet to redistrict.
mid-decade in a clear, unabashed, not even hidden attempt to gerrymander the state even further for the sake of giving the Republicans an advantage in the 2026 midterms.
Now, Gavin Newsom is, of course, now exploring how to do this in California.
And there's this tip for tat going on.
That is not a, that is not a, the sign of a Republic that is like, you know, looking to stay together.
And so that, you know, that's, yeah, it's like, my analogy is, you know, if you get like, you get all your blood tests to the doctor and you're going through it and some of those things are like, oh, yeah, those numbers aren't great.
It's just kind of that.
If you're doing like a health of the Republic checklist, this kind of stuff, not outstanding.
Yeah.
So that's, that's there.
But as you say, what we're going to see and be faced with time and time again is who is going to stand up, right, on the grounds of states' rights, on the grounds of local rights.
And I'm thinking not only when it comes to reproductive rights, as in this case, I'm thinking of governors, local law enforcement when it comes to ICE.
ICE is going to have more money than most militaries in the world.
What's going to happen when ICE is everywhere?
And that's for another day, but I think that's going to be another frontier of all of us.
Well, we've seen it even on another level with book bans, where you had libraries in states making it so that people from out of state could access their materials and like access books that were banned in another state.
So I mean, from everything from like really big scary stuff like ICE to book bans, you know, just allowing information, the free flow of information between states.
We see this play out on a number of different fronts.
Couple more reasons for hope.
Canada intends to recognize the Palestinian state in September.
That's one.
And that goes along with everything we've talked about today.
And then two, there's something coming out of Indivisible where they are training and attempting to train one million people for non-cooperation.
And I actually just interviewed Leah Greenberg, the co-founder and co-CEO of Indivisible, and that interview will be out soon.
But she talked about the way ways that they are going to train one million people this way and set up 2,500 small groups across the country.
Friends, I know it may not feel like it, but there is an infrastructure of resistance, as my friend Jane Hung calls it, and people are participating in that.
And I would say that if you don't feel that, be intentional about trying to find it in your community, in your local, because there are infrastructures of resistance and there are people who are working to put structures in place in the very ways Dan just talked about in terms of what's happening between Connecticut and New York, actually I should say New York and Texas Texas.
So I think that's good news too.
Okay, y'all.
We will be back next week with a great interview with it's in the code and the weekly roundup.
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