Weekly Roundup: Texas Gerrymander is An Existential Threat to the Republic
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In this episode of 'Straight White American Jesus', host Brad Onishi dives into the pressing issue of gerrymandering, which has recently taken center stage in national politics. Onishi discusses its widespread impact, from Texas to Illinois, and emphasizes the potential dangers to democracy if these actions continue unchecked. Special focus is given to Texas, where state Democrats have fled to avoid a quorum. The episode also touches on the problematic appointment of a former rioter as an advisor to the Department of Justice. Amidst these challenges, Onishi highlights a forthcoming series aimed at showcasing global resistance to authoritarianism, offering a glimmer of hope and strategies for effective pushback.
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I'm Brad O'Nishi, author of Preparing for War, The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next, and also the founder of Axis Monday Media.
My co-host Dan Miller is out today off on vacation with his family.
I don't know what he or who he thinks he is, getting to take time off and spend time with loved ones, but nonetheless, here we are.
We're going to get into the gerrymandering issue that is taking over the national spotlight, coming from Texas, spreading to Chicago and all over the country.
I also want to talk about the rioter who was at January 6th, who told cops that they should die and that they are the real Nazis who's now working in the Department of Justice and what that means and how it relates to Project 2025.
I want to finish today on a note of hopeful resistance and talk about the ways that it's possible for authoritarianism to be undone and a new project coming from Matt Taylor and others that is all about learning from those around the world who have fought religious nationalism, Christian supremacy, and other forms of authoritarianism.
Lot to cover.
Let's go.
Let's go.
And this should be reflected here.
And then you have Indiana Republican Governor Mike Braun saying this morning, talking a little bit about redistricting ahead of his meeting with Vice President J.D. Vance.
Let's listen to that.
Here in Indiana, we've become more Republican over time.
And these maps probably need to be looked at anyway.
I'm going to be listening to JD today and our two leaders of the legislature as well.
And we're going to have that discussion.
What do you say to that?
I would say that this is very dangerous, that everything we're doing right now smacks of the Cold War.
And what we're saying, what we're talking about is launching nukes at each other.
And ultimately, it will be the American people who are hurt.
Because if this happens, if this happens every time we change presidents, every time parties take power, this will never end.
Democrats have no choice but to respond to this in the same way.
If you launch missiles at us, we have to launch missiles at you, and it will never end.
All that will end it is our country in ruin.
And what people need to do now is speak up and tell everyone to stop it.
The Democratic states, the blue states have said we would only do this if they fired first.
And what everyone needs to tell their legislators, tell their leaders is everyone needs to stop.
If you believe in a country that still values hard work and fair play and following the rules, like you have to stand up and speak up for it now.
Not whoever wins this one time, you get to rewrite all the rules whenever you want.
That's not the American way.
That's not the way we should work.
And if we don't fight against that now, once this happens, that's the end of our democracy.
That's the end of our republic.
If you listened to the show on Monday, if you've watched any news, if you've read anything online this week, you know that there is a complete maelstrom happening with gerrymandering in Texas.
Donald Trump called Greg Abbott and said to find him five more seats.
This is, of course, reminiscent of what happened in Georgia after the 2020 election when he called Brad Raffrensberger and said, find me 11,000 seats and change or 11,000 votes and change so that we can win this state.
There's not a lot of difference there.
I just want to make a point real quick before we get anywhere today.
If you allow a man who incited an insurrection and tried to get leaders of certain states in the republic to quote unquote find him votes.
You probably have to expect him to try to find others who will find him votes or seats or other ways to stay in power once he is back in power.
So let's just make sure we don't forget that right off the bat.
As many of you have already heard, the Democrats in the Texas state house have fled the state in order to make sure quorum is not reached and thus a vote cannot be taken on the redistricting, which would in essence change the makeup of the state and its districts so that predictably,
and this is a prediction, it's not something set in stone, there would be up to five more and even eight more, according to Governor Abbott, districts that would go Republican in 2026.
This has set off discussions about gerrymandering and the role of governors and state legislatures in the 2026 midterms.
In Indiana, according to Forbes, Vice President J.D. Vance is there to talk to Governor Mike Brown and other state legislatures about redrawing the state's congressional maps.
The discussions are in the exploratory stage, according to the Indy Star.
Nonetheless, they are talking about it.
Florida, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has expressed interest, according to Forbes, in recent days in asking the state legislature to redraw Florida's congressional districts, bolstered by Texas Republicans.
The same in Missouri.
The same in other states.
Now, this is also happening in states that are controlled by Democrats.
The one that you've heard about by now is California.
And there is a sense, and I know some of you hate this, and I promise I'm not going to spend endless amounts of time talking about it today.
And I hope you won't unsubscribe from the show because I am saying this.
But there is a sense in which Texas and California are the symbolic representatives of two sides of the political coin in or spectrum in this country.
Now, I don't want to be reductive, and I'm not trying to say that Texas is a red state.
There are so many people who detest what's happening in Texas politics in Texas.
There are many, many people in California who voted for Donald Trump more than in any other state.
We cannot reduce these things to one or the other.
So I'm talking about a symbolic level.
And how does that work?
Well, if Texas does the thing, maybe Florida thinks they can do the thing and Missouri and Oklahoma and others.
And if California does the thing, New York is going to jump on board, which they have.
And then you're going to get who else?
You're going to get New Jersey.
Democratic Governor Phil Murphy has left open the possibility of redrawing the state congressional map to favor Democrats.
In Illinois, where many of the state reps from Texas are currently residing, Democratic Governor J.B. Pritzker, who's been all over the television of late, has also talked about redistricting and it being, quote, on the table.
Maryland also is in the mix here.
There are ways that this is happening on both sides of the aisle.
I want to make a couple comments about this and try to zoom out to see if we can't get some perspective on it.
I said this Monday, I'm going to say it again.
I think I actually said it Tuesday.
The week is a blur at this point.
We have had a gerrymandering problem in this country for a long, long time.
And we have had a voter suppression problem in this country for a long, long time.
We have had efforts by one party to try to restrict access to the vote to make it harder to vote.
This has all been a problem in the American electoral system forever.
It did not help when the Roberts Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act, the landmark legislation from the 1960s that helped to get rid of things like poll taxes and poll tests and cleared the way for people, I was going to say everyone, nearly everyone, supposedly everyone to have The ability to vote.
Now, we should have way more when it comes to voting in this country.
We should have a national vote.
When it's voting day, everyone should get the day off, period.
Go vote.
There should be so many ways to vote.
It should be the easiest thing.
This is a country where it is way easier for many people to get a gun than it is to vote.
But the problems have been there.
So please don't think that I'm not aware of those or that I think things have been good and easy and light for folks across the country on this.
I don't think that by any means.
It's not true.
Okay.
But what I will say is that I think we've reached a different place psychologically when it comes to voting and gerrymandering in the United States with this current maelstrom.
One of the things that Donald Trump has done for 10 years is say out loud the thing that was always known, but was a known secret.
You know, the cliche now is you say the quiet part out loud.
Okay, that's fine.
But let's just, let's like dig into what that actually means.
What that means is you're saying the part that is true, but if it were admitted in public, if it were discussed in public, if it were known as something in conversation and admitted socially among people, especially those in leadership, that it would change things somehow.
And so what I think we're seeing in Texas is a really big deal.
Because what we're seeing is the president of the United States calling a governor and saying, I need five more congressional seats.
And what he's essentially saying there is something that I actually agree with him on.
And I agree with Mike Johnson about this.
I agree with many GOP congress people on this.
So it's a big day here because I actually agree with these folks that the 2026 midterms are a massive deal.
And if, as Governor Newsom of California says, the Democrats can gain control of the House and maybe the Senate, but at least the House, they can put a roadblock in front of the rest of Trump's term up until 2028.
The 2026 midterms are one of the last things we have left.
And I'll be talking about that more today and in the near future.
So he is openly calling the governor of one of the biggest states in the country saying we need to pick up congressional seats.
And the governor says no problem.
The governor calls the legislature.
And as I talked about Tuesday with Forrest Wilder on a special episode, Forrest is a reporter, a senior writer at Texas Monthly.
He's been at the Texas Capitol all week.
This is a moment where the state legislature is in session.
Now, the Texas state legislature meets every other summer, and their sessions are 30 days.
They just had catastrophic flooding and a humanitarian crisis in Texas.
So the fact that they're spending their time on redistricting and not on the flood victims, the humanitarian crisis, those who need aid, those who need relief is a big, big deal locally, statewide, in terms of the human cost of what politicians put their money and time into.
It's a big deal, though, because the president calls the governor, the governor calls the legislature, and the legislature says, no problem, we're going to redistrict.
And that has now spread to blue, to Republican-controlled states and Democratic-controlled states.
Could be New Jersey, could be Missouri, could be California, could be Florida.
And what is happening out in the open now when not only Abbott or DeSantis talk about redistricting, but when Newsom and Hochold and Pritzker say, well, we're going to redistrict two.
And I'll just stop here and give you a little parentheses that says, I understand what they're doing.
And for a long time, we've been calling for Democrats to fight fire with fire, to go on offense.
And I'm not necessarily in the short term sitting here saying they should be doing something else.
I'm not saying that this is like a time when I think that they've overreached or overstepped.
They're trying to say this is an existential threat to the 2026 midterms, which may be one of the last major defenses against Donald Trump and his regime.
So we're going to redistrict two.
And I get it.
Okay, I get it.
And in the short term, I get it.
I think there's a lot of Democrats, a lot of people who are not Trumpists, a lot of non-MAGA people who are like, okay, makes sense that you're doing that.
And in some sense, Republicans have been counting on Democrats to go high when they go low for a long time.
It's a double standard in politics.
They go low all the time.
And then when Democrats respond, there's some sort of like pearl clutching.
So I get it.
I'm not here to say bad move.
Governor Newsom, bad move.
Governor Hokol, bad move, Governor Pritzker.
What I am here to say is when you have the open corruption and anti-democratic spirit of the president calling the governor, calling the legislature, saying, I need five more seats, what you're saying to people is your vote doesn't matter and you don't actually have a say in how all of this goes.
Let me read from a piece by Sean Ramaswaram at Vox.
Democracy is a pretty simple concept.
Voters vote for a politician.
The politician with the most votes wins and that politician then represents voters as an elected official.
That's the idea anyway, isn't it?
But what if, just what if, instead of voters picking politicians, politicians instead could choose their own voters and basically guarantee their own outcomes.
I want you to just hover on that line.
If you don't take anything away from today, if you're not sure about anything else I say, I think this line is really good from Ramaswaram.
What if politicians could choose their own voters?
What if we had 100 people who voted or 101?
Sorry, odd number.
We had a little village of 101 people.
And instead of saying, well, everybody come vote and we'll see who the majority decides is going to be in power.
We broke the 100 into 10 districts and said, whoever wins the most districts wins.
But we broke those districts up knowing that this family and that group and these people here all are going to vote one way.
So when we made those groups, when we made those little districts, we said, okay, all of you who are going to vote for person A are in districts one, two, three, and four.
And all of you who we know will probably vote for person B are in five, six, seven, eight, nine, and 10.
There you have it.
It's a six to four district vote and person B wins.
There is your democratic process.
Everybody got a vote.
No problem.
Nothing to complain about.
Thanks for playing.
We appreciate your participation.
You'd look around and think, well, you just made up districts and you put all the people you knew who were going to vote for one person in one place and the other in another place.
And you really just rigged the chessboard such that you knew who would win.
You generated, you produced, you manufactured the outcome.
Psychologically, what is happening in Texas and what has spread across the country is telling voters, we're going to choose the voters and group them in such a way that it's going to mean that your vote is not going to have the chance to sway or upend an election unless there is an absolute unexpected tidal wave surprise that comes.
I talked to Forrest Wilder on Tuesday.
He did throw some doubt into some of the districts the GOP is considering creating, especially along the U.S.-Mexico border, especially considering the fact that Latino voters in those districts and across the country are volatile in the sense that they are open to changing their vote on the whole from election to election.
So it's not cemented in stone.
But there is a sense that if we just group you the right way, we kind of can generate really good odds of how this is all going to play out.
It's not just in Texas.
So there are ways you could generate a map in California that sends zero Republican congresspeople to the United States Congress.
You could get really favorable maps in places like New York, places like Illinois.
And in the short term, that may be what is going to happen.
And it may help in 2026.
But I guess for me, what I can't get out of my mind this week is that we have reached a place in democracy that no matter what happens, I think those who are pushing for something that is authoritarian, something that is not democratic, something that is not about the will of the people, are winning.
No matter what happens here, because there are going to be more Americans who are going to say, my vote doesn't matter anyway.
They have rigged the game.
And there's folks in this country who've talked about the game being rigged forever, especially those who've been marginalized for a long time.
If you spoke to people in the black community, they would say, voting won't help me because the game is rigged.
Both candidates don't have my interest at heart.
Others would say that from other marginalized communities as well.
But the mask is off now.
If you can just gerrymander districts at your will with no pretension of any kind of fairness or justice or any kind of integrity, any kind of sense of trying to be fair, you're telling people, yeah, you'll vote, but they may change the districts.
They've manufactured the game.
They've set the rules such that this is all kind of, it's all kind of destined already.
This is a form of voter suppression.
This is a form of anti-democratic strategizing.
This is a form of trying to say, don't vote.
It doesn't matter anyway.
And if you think about Democrats trying to get people who don't usually vote to vote, low-propensity voters, if you think about people who are young, people who are coming from communities where they have felt in the past like their vote doesn't matter.
If you're trying to convince somebody it is actually worth it to go wait in line for two hours in November of 2026 to vote so that Congress is not given over to a wannabe fascist.
It just gets harder and harder to convince people to participate, to care.
So no matter what happens here, there's a win for those who do not want people to vote and who think voting is something that actually favors them and their movement.
Excuse me, people not voting favors them and their movement.
Here is John Nichols writing at the nation.
This principle of electoral accountability has tended to be a powerful corrective in American politics.
In its mildest form, it requires presidents and members of Congress to explain their choices and try to win the American people over to their points of view.
In more extreme circumstances, it has led to epic political shifts.
Now Trump wants to upend the accountability calculus by having his allies rework the already highly skewed maps of Texas in a way that could give Republicans a chance to hold on to the House.
Nichols says this is a life and death struggle for the future of representative democracy as Americans have understood it and for the people-centered policies that, in the best of circumstances, have historically extended from at least reasonably free and fair elections.
We're going to take a break and we'll come back and continue this discussion and other aspects of what's happening with gerrymandering and the FBI.
As a reminder, for subscribers, you can listen ad-free.
And if you haven't subscribed yet, it's just 40 bucks for the entire year.
You can get all the info in the show notes or go to axismundie.supercast.com.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, a couple more thoughts on this, and then we'll jump to something else.
One is, I think this is what I'm trying to say here is if you feel like it's rigged, if that is out in the open and the people who are in charge of the game are telling you that, it's going to diminish enthusiasm for any participation in democracy.
I'll give you two examples.
I think a lot of you will recall how you felt when Bernie Sanders was not allowed to have the or have a chance at the nomination for the Democratic Party's presidential ticket, presidential nomination in 2016.
That's an open wound for many of you.
And it really felt like a rigged game.
Here's Bernie, who ran a great campaign, was enormously popular.
And it felt like the Democratic Party just said, no matter what happens here, Hillary Clinton will be the candidate.
Well, that definitely suppressed enthusiasm for the Democratic Party for a lot of people who said, what am I doing?
Why would I support this party?
Why would I go all in here?
Another example is from my childhood, and it may resonate with some of you as well.
Up until I was about 12, I loved watching professional wrestling with my brothers.
We loved it.
We loved all of the people from the 1980s, Andre the Giant and Hulk Colgan, who turned out to be a villain after all, the Ultimate Warrior, all of it.
We were in.
And to this day, my brothers are still kind of like into it.
They're not like fanatics, but they still follow a little bit.
They went to a WrestleMania at some point.
But like at age 12 or 13, I kind of stopped with wrestling.
And the reason was, is I just started to realize that it was rigged, like they had chosen the winner beforehand.
And they weren't really like fighting in any way.
Now, don't get me wrong.
When I, as a man in his 40s, now look at those guys wrestling.
I'm like, I don't want to do that to my body.
My back hurts just looking at that.
That takes a tremendous amount of athleticism, skill, all that stuff.
Great.
But it felt like the KFAB of professional wrestling just kind of like took the fun out of it for me.
They weren't really fighting and they already know who was going to win.
No matter how hard we cheered, no matter how inspired the wrestlers were, no matter how hard they trained or what they did strategically, the winner was already chosen.
So I was kind of out.
I was like, I'll just find other things that I'm interested in.
I'm just not into this as like a spectacle or as a like a drama or a theater.
Some people are.
That's great.
Awesome.
There's a chance that there's people who are going to walk away from this and think like, what's the point?
It's theater.
They've already picked the winner.
They've already chosen the voters.
And if you're wondering, how do they choose the voters?
I just want to remind you, and I don't have time today to go into the entire story, but I will remind you that starting in Trump's first run for the presidency, there was a scandal called the Cambridge Analytica Scandal.
That scandal was all about the harvesting of data that was used by Republicans to target voters along certain issues.
I interviewed people who investigated this, Ann Nelson and Katerina Ghelane-Veekin, who's a journalist based in Europe and others.
There was a film about this, people you may know that they made.
And essentially, here's how it worked, right?
If you think about churches, churches can gather info on people.
So you visit a church and you talk about, you give them your name and your address, and you tell them what things you're interested in.
I'm interested in a newly divorced support group or somebody with young children or somebody who has, I'm interested in a group that helps people who are dealing with addiction or family members who have addiction or whatever it may be.
And these micro bits of info are taken from a place like a church and they're passed to a Republican Party and they're passed to a database.
And all of a sudden you have a sense of which voters have a propensity to care about which issues and the ways you can use those issues to garner their enthusiasm for your candidates.
It's vote harvesting.
It's exploitative.
And honestly, the GOP has it down to a science.
They've been doing it for years.
They're way ahead of the other side and they don't have the ethical scruples that some might have on the other side.
So the idea of getting to pick your voters is not ridiculous because the minor bits of data that are being collected about people all the time online and everywhere else are used to profile you, send you ads everywhere you go, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram,
and so on, such that the things you might be interested in, dealing with, fighting, struggling with things that might make you angry, irate, things that might make you sad or hurt, these can be used to harvest your vote.
So the idea of choosing your voters is not ridiculous.
And that coupled with the idea that you would just gerrymander the district such that the voters are grouped in a way that you can pick the outcome, it really means that a lot of people are going to feel like this is KFAP.
So I'm not saying today that Newsom and Hochul and Pritzker should back off.
What I'm saying is, is no matter what happens, this is a moment, a redline moment that signals yet again the weakening of any kind of sense of there being democracy and the will of the people in the United States, period.
Okay, let's talk about one more aspect of this, and that is the fact that Abbott and Senator Cornyn and others in Texas have asked the FBI to step in.
Now, Cornyn is saying, John Cornyn, senator in Texas, is saying that the FBI did agree to step in and to step in to do what?
And that is to locate and potentially repatriate the Democratic lawmakers who left the state so that quorum could not be reached.
So let's think about this.
This is a state.
Let me back up.
This is a senator asking the FBI to intervene on a state matter and to bring back lawmakers who've committed no crimes, who are not a threat to public safety, and who are not under the jurisdiction of the FBI in any way.
There's like no stated role for the FBI here.
There's no offense against the United States, as Anthony Michael Christ points out.
There's no way that the FBI should be assisting the state of Texas to like bring people back against their will because they are in another state.
Like as I laid out on Tuesday, there are quorum rules in the Texas Constitution, and this is part of what is in the Texas Constitution.
This is a scenario that was actually envisioned over a century ago.
And so to call in the FBI is wholly inappropriate.
Now, Brendan Nyan, a political science from Dartmouth, said two days ago on Blue Sky, we are closer to the precipice than people realize.
Cornyn is asking Cash Patel and Dan Bongino to arrest Democrats.
How long until other Republicans start asking for Democrats to be arrested in other contexts?
How long do norms hold at the FBI?
And I don't want to just make this worse than it already seems, but this aspect of the whole situation coming out of Texas is one we cannot ignore.
A senator is asking the FBI to arrest politicians in the other party.
The FBI has no reason to be involved here, zero.
But when you politicize institutions like the FBI by putting in Dan Bongino and Cash Patel, Dan Bongino made his name as a shit poster podcast host who stirred up controversy all day, every day.
And he's now the right-hand man at the FBI.
Now, Cornyn says they've agreed to help.
He seems to be the only source for that story.
So we don't know yet.
We've already seen Democratic lawmakers arrested, though.
Do you all remember when Senator Alex Badill was thrown to the ground and arrested?
Do you all remember what happened in New Jersey when members of Congress and the mayor tried to go to a nice facility?
It's already happened.
Friends, I think I want to say this.
This is chapter one in what is going to be a long book of antics leading up to the 2026 midterms.
The 2026 midterms, everyone agrees, Republicans, Trump, MAGA, Democrats, me are a really big deal.
What happens there is going to have a huge effect on the next few years and perhaps the fate of democracy in the United States.
And there are great people running.
There are great organizations getting young people involved in running.
There are great organizations who are trying to make sure that Democrats run good candidates all over the country.
There are organizations doing everything possible to get voters to the polls to make sure people understand the issues.
But we've talked about today rigging the game.
And now we're talking about sending the FBI in.
This is chapter one in what's going to be a long, long book with many chapters of antics leading to the midterms.
That's going to include, in my mind, I'm just going to give you the things that I see coming.
I could be wrong.
I could be way off.
So I'm not reporting this.
I'm not saying that I have data for this that is coming from here or there.
I'm saying this is what I think will happen.
We are going to see this gerrymander fight escalate.
You're going to see this as something that lasts for the next couple of months.
As someone from Texas wrote to me recently, I won't show their name, but there's somebody in leadership in Texas.
They said, eventually this is going to happen in Texas.
The Democrats can't do this forever.
But then what happens in New York and California?
What happens in Illinois and Florida?
What happens in Missouri?
What happens in Indiana?
What happens all over?
You're going to see this.
And it's going to lead to unrest and uncertainty.
People are not going to feel happy that their vote may or may not matter.
And that's going to go for everyone, not just people on one side or the other.
But then I also think you're going to see ICE throughout the country in 2026 rampaging neighborhoods.
And I think you're going to see people who are afraid to leave their house to go vote, even if they're American citizens or green card holders.
I think you're going to see the National Guard in other cities that are Democratic strongholds making people afraid.
I think it's hard to go vote if you think the National Guard and ICE might be waiting for you.
If there's going to be people who are going to ask you who you're voting for, we might see the vote suspended in certain places just because supposedly there's too much unrest and it's not safe.
We might see lawsuits and ballot recounts in places where Democrats win, even though there's no funny business.
There's no reason to think anything bad happened.
But do you remember all the recounts in 2020?
Do you remember, I don't know, President Trump calling Brad Raffensberger, asking him to find 11,000 votes?
Do you remember all the times people were on their knees praying outside voting locations, asking God to drive out the demons, stop the recount, stop the count, blah, blah, blah.
What if they don't sit Democratic senators?
What if Mike Johnson won't swear them in because they just have to make sure what's going on?
Or they stole elections and all kinds of charges, funny business.
So we just can't swear you into Congress.
Like, friends, this is chapter one.
Like, to me, the 2026 midterms are the place where not only do we need to focus attention on getting folks to the polls to vote for good candidates.
We have to make sure that those votes count, that you can get there safely, that people are able to vote, that when they do vote and the will of the people is in place, it's honored, that the candidates who win the elections are sat in the Congress and so on and so on and so on.
All right, let's stop and cleanse the pallet.
Let's do a little bit of like, I'm not sure if it's hope, but I'm going to call it hopeful resistance and something that I think is important and exciting to keep in mind at this moment.
So there's a piece at the New Republic this week by Amna Khalid.
Authoritarianism is made and it can be unmade.
Autocrats do not merely fade away.
They have to be countered and stopped.
And Khalid talks about being a historian of South Asia who moved to this country in 2011 and talked about the ways that the United States and especially students at their institution really had no interest in learning about things outside the U.S., the global context, democracy, autocracy, etc.
There's just a lot of American exceptionalism.
But Khalid talks about how something's changed, that the majority of my students, they say, at Carleton College were still reeling from the results of the elections in 2024.
Many said that in the face of the fire hose of illiberal executive orders, the perversion of the rule of law and the blatant disregard for constitutional norms, they no longer read the news because it was too depressing.
Some even said they were taking my course as a means to escape the present moment.
As it turned out, it was learning about the history of South Asia that helped them ground themselves and contend with the ugly realities of Trump 2.0.
Khalid goes on to talk about all of the poets and organizers and leaders who were inspirational to the students because they led movements against authoritarian leaders, autocrats in Pakistan and other places.
At a time when my students were despairing and losing hope, reflecting on the impact of the sound technicians' initiative and the role the Faiz, this poet that they studies, played in mobilizing resistance, not only in Pakistan, but across national borders, allowed them to appreciate how individuals and groups have agency as well as the potential of art to challenge authority.
In light of everything I just talked about, I think that's more important than ever.
And so I want to just take a minute and tell you about something I'm really excited about that's coming in the next few months from us here at Axis Mundi.
And that is a show that, at least for now, we're calling American Unexceptionalism.
And that is by none other than Matt Taylor, who many of you know as the creator of Charismatic Revival Fury, the author of The Violent Take It by Force, and the foremost expert on the new Apostolic Reformation.
And Susie Hayward, who is a veteran of the Institute of Peace and has been working in diplomacy and in and around statecraft and State Department and so on for a long time.
They will be hosting a limited series here with us called American Unexceptionalism.
And it will be all about ways that those in other countries from across the globe have worked to organize and resist religious nationalisms, Christian supremacy, and autocracy.
They'll have interviews with experts.
They'll have interviews with scholars.
And it's not only going to be analysis, but it will be tactics and training and tips about how individuals and groups can exercise their agency and move forward in a context that, as I've outlined for the last half hour, can feel very much like it is full of despair.
So I am just like thrilled about this because I think it's one of those, it's one of those series that's not only going to inform people about what's happened elsewhere.
It could be Brazil or Ukraine.
It could be in South Korea.
It could be anywhere in the world.
But it's going to reveal the tactics and strategies that others have used to fight back.
And I cannot think of anything better to do right now than to learn from those folks who have this muscle memory and this wisdom.
So that's coming.
And I really enjoyed Khalid's piece.
And it really gave me a chance to share what I think is a piece of good news with all of you about what we'll be doing here in the next couple of months.
We'll have stuff.
We'll have content about Hungary.
We'll have content about Russia.
It's going to be really good.
So stay tuned for that.
All right.
Let's take a break.
We'll come back and talk about what's happening at the Justice Department and J6.
Be right back.
All right.
August 7th.
All things considered, Tom Drysback at NPR.
Less than five years after urging rioters to kill police at the Capitol, a former January 6th defendant is working as a senior advisor for the Department of Justice, which has been dramatically remade under the second Trump administration.
NPR has obtained police body cam footage from multiple angles of the former defendant and current administration official Jared Wise, berating officers and calling them Nazi and Gestapo.
NPR located the footage, which has not previously been published, in a review of thousands of court exhibits from January 6th criminal cases obtained through legal action by a coalition of media organizations.
Now, I think all of you know by now that the January 6th rioters have been pardoned, but this goes a step further.
Somebody who urged rioters to kill police is now working as a senior advisor for the Department of Justice.
And I just want to take a moment and think about that.
Here is somebody who stormed the Capitol, tried to stop the certification of an election.
And in turn, that person is now working for the department that is supposed to, as an agency of the government, as a hand of the government that we all pay taxes to, is supposed to pursue cases that lead to justice in the country,
that lead to a country that is just, that is based on the idea of rectifying wrong, of punishing those who've hurt others, of ensuring the safety of the citizens.
So somebody who yelled for police to be killed and called them Nazi and Gestapo now works for that agency.
Here's what I wrote in my book, Preparing for War, in the chapter entitled Insurrection.
The video footage from January 6th is breathtaking in its scope and horror.
This was not a group of patriots patiently trying to make their way into the Capitol.
This was not a sit-in or a silent, peaceful act of resistance or a nonviolent expression of the freedom of assembly and freedom of speech.
It was a mob released from inhibition and fear, ready to overtake anyone or anything that stood in the way of them taking back their country.
It was a religious ritual carried out by the Americans who believe they have a God-given right to rule the country.
For them, a siege of the most important space in the United States government was a crusade against the enemies of the United States.
What I write elsewhere about January 6th are the myths and martyrs that came from that.
The idea that those who were involved were turned into heroes in a new lost cause.
Ashley Babbitt, the woman who was shot by a Capitol police officer that day after trying to break in, was turned into a hero.
Her face was put on patches and flags.
They were revered across the country by white nationalists, by MAGA groups, and by Christian nationalists as well.
Recently, the Trump administration agreed to pay $5 million to Ashley Babbitt's family in a wrongful death lawsuit.
That leads me to the very last paragraph of my book.
In a very real sense, January 6th was not the end of a movement, some last gasp attempt of a weakened and aggrieved group supporting a politician who didn't want to admit he'd lost an election.
No.
If we are paying attention to the extremist backstory of the people who stormed the Capitol that day, we will see that the insurrection was the logical next step for a certain diminishing white Christian population trying desperately to retake what they considered theirs.
Acclimating or adjusting themselves to the inevitable waves of religious, racial, and other forms of diversity for white Christian nationalists is no option at all.
This was not the last stand of a dying faction.
It was the first violent battle in what they foresee as the coming civil war.
I think in my mind, when I see the fact that somebody who was at January 6th urging people to kill police, calling them Nazis and Gestapo, is now a senior advisor For the Department of Justice, it seems like all of that's come true.
That justice in this case, and I think we're seeing this all over the country, we're seeing this in so many cases, is really about making sure that anyone who has prevented white Christian Americans from being on top of every hierarchy who has ever stood in their way is punished.
That it could be ICE viciously attacking communities, making it so that people are afraid to leave their homes.
It could be that there are now all of these memos and rules about anti-Christian bias and proselytizing at the workplace, the Johnson Amendment.
It could be attacking trans folks in the military, erasing trans people from existence.
It could be rolling back civil rights protections.
It could be making it harder for people to vote.
It could be all kinds of things.
But when you think about what justice means now for this government, it means getting revenge on all the others.
It means rectifying the wrong of not allowing them to rule the country that they believe they have a God-given right to rule.
I've said for months, this administration does not want to govern.
It wants to rule.
And I think that's clear in this instance.
All right, y'all.
Let's do reasons for hope.
Federal judge orders, yesterday orders a temporary stop to construction of the concentration camp in Florida due to an environmental lawsuit.
In some sense, this is good.
In some sense, it's bad.
But anything that is slowing this down, I think, is hopeful and good.
And I hope it will lead to more work to be done that will throw a wrench in all of these gears that are moving when it comes to building these camps.
In addition, I want to play for you two folks who are, I think, giving me hope this week.
One is Jolanda Jones, a state rep from Texas who has been all over social media and other places just spitting absolute fire.
So that's going to be the first clip.
The second is a man in Texas who drove three hours to speak to officials there about the gerrymander and the way he speaks about it is clear.
It is not one that is deeply about being a Democrat or progressive or leftist.
It's simply about being somebody who knows right and wrong.
And I appreciated his clarity here because it is a way to explain how this is a matter that is not about conservative or not.
It's a matter of actually having some sense of a moral conscience.
So here's those clips, and I think they are hopeful.
Why should anywhere be concerned with going on in Texas?
I'm going to tell you why.
My grandmother says this: if you allow yourself to be a rug, people will step on you.
No one was paying attention in North Carolina in 2024.
There were seven Republican congresspeople, there were seven Democratic congresspeople.
Guess what?
The Republicans rigged the game in North Carolina, and they took three seats.
Congress has a three-Republican majority.
Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
So we weren't paying attention to what was going on in North Carolina.
And look what we have.
We got that big, ugly, terrible bill shoved down our throats.
So guess what?
I was paying attention.
Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, shame on me.
Texas will not be North Carolina.
Please give us your testimony.
I drove here three hours to get here.
I came from Abilene, Texas.
And I'm on a, if I'm willing to drive three hours to come here and talk, I'm going to ask you to get off your phone and listen to what I have to say.
You got a call from Donald Trump.
He told you to go find five seats.
No, he got asked how many seats?
He said five.
He was asked on the news.
You say, we don't have any maps.
Well, how in the hell does Donald Trump know he's going to get five seats?
I bet you anything there's maps that are there.
This is ridiculous.
A man a few days ago was arrested because he spoke too long at this at the lector.
He spoke too long, and y'all said, Oh, he had to be arrested because he broke the rules.
How many of you are going to get arrested for breaking the rules of mistreating the citizens of this country?
Faith, you're breaking the rules.
We, we are the citizens of this country.
We're the ones.
It's supposed to be bottom up, not top down.
I'm gonna say this one thing to you: you know it's wrong.
In your heart, you know it's wrong.
All right, y'all, thanks for listening.
Appreciate your support.
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So on August 26th, I'll be with Dan Miller at 4:15 p.m.
Pacific, 7:15 Eastern.
It's 4:15 and 7:15.
We'll be recording live.
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And I just really love the entire community there.
Be back Monday with a great interview with Leah Littman, who wrote Lawless.
Many of you know who Leah is.
Dan will be back with It's in the Code and the weekly roundup.
