Weekly Roundup: God and the Military in DC + Nazi-Loving Economist Takes Over Jobs Data
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In this episode of Straight White American Jesus, Brad and Dan reunite to break down a tumultuous week in American politics, focusing on the federal takeover of Washington DC, the appointment of a controversial Heritage Foundation economist to oversee jobs data, and Gavin Newsom’s bold trolling of Trump.
Brad & Dan explore the deeper cultural and theological roots of authoritarianism, the weaponization of fear and emotion in right-wing politics, and the chilling implications of ICE and military presence at political events. With sharp analysis, personal anecdotes, and a dash of humor, they offer listeners both a sobering look at the current state of democracy and reasons for hope and resistance.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Sprat O'Nishi.
Great to be with you on this Friday.
I'm the author Preparing for War, Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next, and the founder of Axis Moody Media here back again, reunited with my co-host.
Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College, and glad to be here, Brad.
Fair warning, I could hear your voice faltered.
I know you're emotional to be back together.
And so it's like, that's glad, but I'm tired and probably still jet lagged.
So I'm particularly crotchety.
So we'll just see where it goes.
We'll see where it goes today.
Someday soon on a special episode, a bonus episode for subscribers, we will get the full story of Dan Miller's family vacation and visiting family in Ireland.
Your partner's family has heritage there, so it's a kind of homecoming.
But anyway, today we need to talk about the federal takeover of Washington, D.C. and what that means and the ways that it is overwhelmingly scary and bad news.
I'm going to talk about Trump's new pick for the jobs numbers position.
Basically, he fired the guy who gave him the jobs numbers and he hired somebody from guess where?
The Heritage Foundation, Project 2025, who seems to love Nazi paraphernalia.
And finally, what is Gavin Newsom doing?
He's trolling Trump.
He is using Trump's verbiage and cadence and syntax in his social media.
What is going on there?
And what happened at his event to announce California's redistricting yesterday with ICE and DHS?
This is the Straight White American Jesus Weekly roundup.
Lots to cover.
Let's go.
Let's go.
All right, Dan.
The biggest story in the United States is Donald Trump released the Epstein files.
That's the biggest release the Epstein files.
Release the Epstein files.
If you're not a pedophile, release the Epstein files.
Okay, now that I've said that, Dan, release the Epstein files, okay?
Just release them.
I don't care who's in them.
Bill Clinton?
I mean, I care a lot.
So release them, okay?
Thank you very much.
None of us is going to cry over anyone in there who we think is someone we look up to.
We want to know who's in the Epstein files.
Stop covering it up, release those.
All right, Dan, now let's talk about the thing he did to distract us from that and the thing that he thinks is so great.
Here is Natish Powell writing at Slate.
The president of the United States has kicked off the week By all but declaring war on the nation's capital.
On Monday morning, President Trump joined cabinet officials at the White House for a press conference on the quote crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor supposedly running amok outside the building's walls.
Calling back to his quote Liberation Day language on tariffs, he declared he was invoking Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act and placing the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department under federal control.
Now, legally, Dan, he's supposed to be able to do this for 30 days and then needs further approval from Congress.
Just yesterday, Pam Bondi moved to basically challenge the authority of the D.C. police.
So this is from the New York Times.
Attorney General Pam Bondi on Thursday night rescinded Washington policies that restrict the local police from aiding in immigration enforcement as she moved to tighten the Trump administration's grip on law enforcement in the nation's capital.
So she's basically rescinding the sanctuary policies of the District of Columbia.
There's a sense here of wrapping in the mass deportation program with the general martial law that is now in place in Washington, D.C. I think most people listening, Dan, will already have heard news about this, been startled by it, have seen clips of FBI and others walking around D.C., randomly approaching people, checking people, harassing people.
They will have seen the clip of the dude who threw the sandwich at the Fed.
So that guy is a folk hero at this point.
I'm going to read one thing about this from Barbara Walter, who is one of the preeminent scholars of fascism and how democracies basically die in the United States, as faculty at the University of California, San Diego.
And then I'll throw it to you for some theology/slash social theory about all of this.
And I think we're going to get into a range of issues surrounding it.
Donald Trump is doing what every would-be autocrat does, building the machinery of repression before it's needed.
In the 21st century, the most common way a dictator loses power is through mass protest.
Trump knows the greatest threat to his permanent rule is Americans in the streets.
If a police state is already in place, protests are far more likely to fail.
That's why he wants it in place before the next election.
Once the machinery of repression is ready, all it takes is a crisis, real or invented, and Trump can set it loose.
Barbara Walter goes on to say that he's building secret police, something we've talked about already, and that is in the form of ICE.
ICE will have more money than most militaries in the world very soon.
And he's also weaponized the military.
Here's what she says.
For more than a century, America's military has been trained to defend the country from foreign enemies, not to police its own citizens.
Trump is dismantling that standard.
Last week, he declared a public safety emergency in D.C., took temporary federal control of the police, and ordered 800 National Guard troops into the city.
All of this, Dan, is in face of statistics that show us that crime is down in D.C. It's also down in other cities that Trump says need to be taken over, like Baltimore, which has had a dramatic decrease in murder and other violent crime in the last year and change.
We could sit here and go through all the statistics of why what he is doing doesn't make sense.
All the data.
The crime is not real.
The crime, this doesn't help.
There's all these studies that show that having a militarized zone with police harassing people on a daily basis doesn't actually drive crime down.
We could do half an hour on that.
I'm not going to do it because this is not about data.
This is not about what's real.
This is not for any reason outside of what I think you're going to get into, which are feelings, control, domination, and trying to basically preempt, as Barbara Walter says, large-scale protests so that when Trump does lose the country, and he is, Dan, he is in hot water on polls.
The new Pew data says every category, he's underwater.
He's going to lose people from his base.
He's going to lose independence.
He's going to lose part of the 29% of Americans that voted to make him president.
Like only 29% of Americans voted to make this man president.
He's going to lose 4%, 5%, 6% of those.
And the only way he can stay in power is thus to a police state and authoritarianism.
That's where we're headed.
Off to you.
Give us our theology lesson.
Give us our social theory lesson on what's going on here.
Yeah.
So part of what I want to think about, or what I've been thinking about, and you talk about this being about emotion, and it is, right?
Because we know that the part of the world that loves this is the MAGA camp.
So there is the overarching police state preparation, all that stuff.
That's all real and that's there and that hovers over all of this.
I also want to look at like, why does this resonate with MAGA folks so much?
Because as you say, those of us who care about facts and data will cite facts and data and say this doesn't work and look at, you know, violent police action in different places.
And again, it doesn't work.
And people ask us all the time, like, why do people keep buying into this?
Or who does this appeal to?
Or, you know, if people are listening to you and to you and I doing this, right?
This, this isn't something that they like.
This isn't something that they support.
And it feels really, really foreign.
And so I want to try to highlight some things that I think get at why this resonates so deeply.
And for me, why this is something that has been a part of the religious and cultural and political right for decades.
Again, that Trump is this kind of apotheosis of this.
He's not something new.
He's not something different.
He's not the inbreaking of something we haven't seen.
He's a kind of culmination of a movement on the right.
And so one of the first things is, and this is something I think people can identify with, is I think everybody, most humans have a tendency to privilege anecdotal evidence over data.
And that's, you can look at that at a micro scale.
Every time you've talked to somebody, you say, well, you know, I don't know.
Statistics say that you're more likely to have this happen than this, or you're more likely to, I don't know, have this beast vending machine fall on you than be struck by lightning or whatever it is.
But you'll have the person who says, well, I don't know, my aunt Mildred was struck by lightning.
And, you know, so I just don't believe the data.
We all know those.
We have this.
What kicked this whole thing off?
What kicked it off is that a Doge staffer was assaulted and Trump is like, oh, Washington, D.C. is dangerous.
Again, it's all a pretense.
I understand that.
It's a pretense for these other things.
Trump drives around in his motorcade and he sees homeless people.
One of the things we didn't mention is the rounding up of homeless people, the dispersing of homeless encampments, all of that being wrapped up with this notion of crime and everything else and immigration enforcement and all these other things.
What I think it shows is this pattern that's important to understand is that people tend to react to and to generalize personal experience.
So you see a crime, you hear about a crime, somebody you know experiences a crime, and what do you do?
That becomes your model.
The other one is like, you know, I spent the last 10 days walking around, you know, a couple of major cities in Ireland.
And, you know, if you've ever been around somebody who's like, they don't spend much time in like big cities and they go to one and they walk by like an alley that's full of dumpsters and it's the day before the trash comes and it's like smells awful.
And then they're like, next time I'm done, you're like, you know, I just don't like city life because cities just stink.
And you're like, what, what are you talking about?
It's like they walked by like an alley in New York City, like with a bunch of restaurants and the alley was smelly.
And so they're like, yeah, cities are just gross.
It's that generalizing.
So yeah.
Can I just say a couple of things on this?
Like, A, you're basically saying, I feel afraid of everything.
Therefore, we should police everything so I don't feel uncomfortable.
And the irony and the tragedy and the grotesqueness of a 19-year-old who's supposed to be the most brash, bravado that we only know him.
I don't even, his name is Corstini.
I don't, I can't remember his real name and I don't have it in front of me.
We only know him as big balls.
So you're 19, high to testosterone, full of machismo that we only know you by big balls.
You charmed Elon Musk into a job where you were at the treasury intimidating lifelong career federal workers and telling them to give their data.
A man who helped steal all of our data is out at 3 a.m. in DuPont Circle.
I used to live so close to DuPont Circle, Dan, that is, of all the places in DC you think might be the rough parts, DuPont Circle is not that.
It's the doorway to Georgetown.
It's whatever.
Okay.
Don't get me wrong.
It's a city, whatever.
But the fact that a white boy who is called big balls at 3 a.m., something happens after he leaves the club, and now his, his like daddy has to lock down the city, harass people.
And if you look at the people they've arrested, they have this thing on social media.
Every one of the 55 is a person of color.
So there's like three hours of that.
I'll shut up.
I'm just saying the irony here that it's big balls that is supposedly the reason for locking down.
It just gives like you pause when you think of those Trump guys in the big trucks with the testicle things hanging off their F-350.
What's really happening there?
Sorry, go ahead.
There's a lot of compensation going on with those guys.
Yeah, it's this generalizing of a pattern.
And I bring this up not just because it's something that like a habit that people have, but this is something that the right has taken and used and weaponized for decades.
This is why when you talk to Uncle Ron or you talk to whomever and you say, yeah, but like, hold up, I hear everything you're saying, but the statistics say this or this or this or Brad, you know, you say, well, I mean, you say, dude, Pond Circle is not that bad, but, you know, well, I don't know about all that, but, you know, here's what happened to me.
Okay.
And you just invalidate facts.
You invalidate data.
It cuts to the heart of that sort of appeal to emotion.
But this is something that the right has been doing for a long time.
And we see it all the time.
We see it when they constantly cite specific examples of things.
Those who listen to It's in the Code know we've been working through Ali Beth Stuckey's book on toxic empathy.
The book is full of examples of that.
Like here's an anecdotal example of something that now we then will generalize into some big data thing that lets us deny medical facts or historical facts or political facts or whatever they are.
So that's that's one piece of why this taps in is because you have an administration and an entire movement that has been feeding into a fear machine for decades.
And so it's primed for this.
Just make people afraid, make people afraid of individuals of color.
It's a reason why all the people arrested are people of color.
And you feed that fear and that emotion trumps, pardon the pun, anything else that can come out in terms of data and all these other kind of things.
Here's the next piece of this, though, that I, and this, I think, has a number of effects is that number one, the show of force, it's not going to have any lasting effect in terms of like actually fixing quote unquote DC.
The police state stuff, all that, again, real.
But what do I mean?
I mean, if you roll in a bunch of ICE agents and FBI agents or whatever alphabet soup you want of like federal agencies that are there and the federalizing of the police force, all that sort of stuff, eventually when Trump loses interest in it or it gets too expensive or Congress says, hey, wait a minute, we can't do this or DC has now sued the Trump administration.
And so if they get sort of a cease and desist from some court or something like that, it's not going to have fixed any of the issues that actually cause crime or cause homelessness or dependency or, you know, undocumented immigration, all the things that are feeding into this.
And none of that matters.
And the question is why?
Why doesn't that matter?
Because this is such a typical response on the right and it doesn't work to deal with the stated goals.
And I think that that's the question that people need to understand.
So why?
Why does it, why is it as popular as it is?
One of this is, and I hope I can make sense of this.
I've been trying to think how to present this without becoming too wonky as Dr. Miller here.
But one of the things is that Trump and the right, they do not understand and they have actively worked for decades not to understand the complex social causes of things like crime and homelessness and addiction.
And I was thinking about this in academic terms.
The way we could put it is that they think in terms of psychology, individual psychology and not sociology.
And what do I mean by that?
In case people are like, thanks, Professor Miller, what is sociology?
Sociology is the field that looks at the dynamics and behaviors of social groups.
It basically looks at how groups of people work.
And it often finds the group identities and behaviors, they don't reduce to the psychology of individual group members.
And all anybody has to do to think about this is just think of like crowds that do crazy stuff.
Or when you get mob actions or things like that, and you get a bunch of people who are otherwise reasonable, regular people who do things that they would never Do sort of individually.
What does it mean?
It just means that groups are more than the sum of their parts, that they don't often reduce to the individual psychology within them.
And what sociologists and other social scientists have done, again, for decades and decades and decades at this point, is help discern patterns of social behavior that reveal the dynamics at work behind things like homelessness, addiction, immigration, crime, what have you.
And they will recognize and say, if you want to address these issues, you've got to fix these bigger sort of systemic things.
The right sees none of this.
For them, criminality is always about the psychology of the individual involved.
Dependency is a psychological failure on the part of an individual.
They don't have enough willpower or they're not a person of good moral fiber or whatever.
Homelessness or poverty is due to the failure of individuals to work hard or to pull themselves up by the bootstraps or whatever.
There are no systemic or social causes to these things.
There are only individuals.
And that's the only level they can answer, the answer to and understand and assess at.
And there's a theological analog to this.
I've had people, again, who reach out and say, how can good Christian people possibly support this kind of action or this kind of attitude toward homeless people or what have you?
The reason is that for lots of conservative Christians, for most conservative Christians, I think especially conservative Protestants, sin is always understood as an individual moral failing.
There can't be a social explanation for why people do bad things.
People do bad things.
It means they're bad people.
It means they have a bad motive.
It means that they're not a person of good character.
It can't be something other than the individual.
And this resonates for me because when I was a pastor back in my evangelical days, I remember when I was first, I was reading, you know, sociology of religion stuff, and I didn't know that that's what it was, but that's what I was reading.
And I was trying to understand more about things like homelessness and crime and poverty and was learning.
Again, I didn't have the language at the time, but I was learning about things like social dynamics and social systems and systemic issues and so forth.
And Brad, I remember trying to talk to parishioners about this.
I remember trying to talk to the pastor that I worked with and just they literally could not comprehend the kinds of things you were suggesting.
If you were like, well, maybe people like do the things they do, it's not just because they're bad people.
And like, it doesn't mean that there can't be assignment of responsibility and so forth.
But like, yeah, maybe you got to like fix the social ills that put people in these positions if you're going to like actually do away with these fell on deaf ears.
And more than deaf ears, they just could not even comprehend it because there's a fundamental theology there that says if we're going to say people are sinful and fallen, it has to be on that person.
It can't be, they can't quote unquote blame other things and so forth.
So all of this is reflected in what Trump is doing.
So what do you do if you want to stop crime?
You go in and you attack the criminals.
What do you do if you want to address homelessness?
Go disperse the homeless because I don't know where he thinks they're going to go.
You disperse them to where, but, you know, suddenly they're going to go out and get jobs.
But what do you see?
You see demands for work requirements and different kinds of things like this.
So you see that.
And that blindness and that unwillingness to recognize the social dimensions of these issues, I think this is part of why it resonates with huge swaths of American conservatives because this is how they understand the nature of human relationships and human behavior and human moral responsibility.
And so I think all of that is there.
There's also obviously a political interest because guess what?
Fixing society is expensive.
You would have to like actually spend money to do things like helping people and so forth.
And we don't want to do that.
So we have a vested interest in making sure that we blame individuals.
So that's one of the big pieces of this that I think is there, where if you're talking to Uncle Ron or somebody, you're like, this isn't going to fix anything.
So we mean it's not going to fix anything.
We've got a bunch of evildoers.
Go put them in jail.
That'll fix crime.
It doesn't.
We know it doesn't, but it feels like it does if that's how you think about the world.
So I've got more to say, but I want to throw it over to you.
See if you have thoughts on this or things to add or, I don't know, you radically disagree with me and you think everything's about individual evil criminals and everything Trump is doing is right.
I actually Have the perfect piece of evidence to back up everything you just said.
So let's take a break.
We'll come back and I will present that evidence to you in a form that I never thought I would do on this show, but nonetheless, we'll be right back.
All right, Dan, Janine Pirro is now the U.S. District, is now the U.S. to the District of Columbia, Judge Janine.
So once again, never thought I would say those words, but here we are.
And here's a clip of Judge Janine talking about crime, D.C., the federal takeover and everything.
And it proves your point.
My prosecutors.
You just walk through the changes you'd like to see from the punitive aspects.
What about preventative?
Do you or the president plan to do anything to address the root causes of crime in DC, such as truancy?
My job is to try to heal the victims and prosecute the criminal.
Everybody else can deal with rehabilitating the individual.
I honestly am not concerned about why they commit crimes.
My concern is if they commit crimes.
My concern is the victims of the crimes.
That's my job as a U.S. attorney.
Go ahead.
Just follow up on that quickly.
This is a felony one.
Exactly.
Here it is.
So what Janine Piro says there is, I don't care.
I mean, she literally says, Dan, I don't care why they are doing the crimes.
I care about punishing the crimes.
It goes along with everything you said.
And I want to give two thoughts on this.
One is I'm a parent of little kids.
Yeah.
And, you know, I have a four-year-old who's reached a place of, A, she's independent and wants to challenge me and just have her own kind of autonomy.
And, but two, she's, she's at a place where she's developing and like everything is the end of the world where you're like, hey, we got to do this now.
And she's like, you know, falls on the ground.
It's like, I can't, it's like, I can't believe you would do this to me.
This is the, right.
And, and as a parent, there is a temptation.
And I think parents out there know this to think that if I yell or scream or if I'm forceful or if I'm somehow like, yeah, go to your room, that does something.
At least I'm doing it, you know?
And there are times as a parent, we have to be firm with our kids and all that stuff.
And this is not a parenting podcast.
But the temptation is to think you're doing something because you are using force or a firm voice or yelling or go to your room.
You don't get to watch TV.
You don't get to do the thing.
And in reality, going along with what you just said about government, parenting requires that you, you know, have a mix of discipline, but also like, let's talk about this and understanding and communication and strategies for success and all that.
Well, that's complicated.
That takes a lot more for me as a parent, emotionally, psychologically, intellectually, than just saying, go to your room.
No more TV.
So that's one.
I think number two is this is about feelings.
And as you're saying, anecdotes, feelings, et cetera.
Fascism is about feelings.
And I want to just put that clearly.
There are so many millions of people, as you've alluded to, Dan, across this country who when Donald Trump was like, we're going to clean up the DC, that there were people out there who are like, finally, yeah, get them.
That's right.
It's about time someone does something.
And then someone else shows up and is like, actually, crime is down.
Violent crimes have gone this way on the graph.
Here's what's happening in schools.
Go to Baltimore, a place that has been largely seen as an American city with deep issues surrounding violent crime and et cetera.
And it's that things are vastly different right now in terms of the statistics, but it doesn't matter.
It's about feelings.
I had a friend from home when Elon Musk was doing Doge and just giving me like nightmares about what was happening at the Treasury, what was happening at USAID at the Institute of Peace.
I had a friend from home who I talked to, and he was like, hey, man, I know you probably disagree, but I think Doge to me, it makes the Trump thing all worth it.
And I was like, why?
He was like, because like, dude, we got to get rid of all this like waste and abuse and stuff, man.
Like, don't you think this is important?
And I was like, if there is waste and abuse, yes, but statistically, I'm not sure there is.
And there's a lot of watchdogs in place that already do this for the federal government.
And do you think taking a 19-year-old named Big Balls into the place and like hacking the data is going to fix the problem?
It didn't matter to him.
He was like, no, this feels awesome.
They're doing it.
They're finally going to get them.
Fascism is about feelings.
And I interviewed Leah Lippmann on Monday, Dan, and she said something that I think I just want to make sure I repeat today about what's happening in DC.
And that is, she said, you know, every time they said the facts don't care about your feelings, they meant the facts don't care about your feelings, you, because you don't count.
And the you there could be Brad and Dan, but it's most likely women, people of color, black people, trans people, gay people, lesbian people, bi people, non-binary people, and immigrants, and Muslims.
Your feelings don't matter because we don't consider you as much of a human, if human at all, as us.
But it's not that feelings don't matter.
Feelings matter a lot.
It's our feeling.
Our feelings matter a lot.
I need to feel like I went to New York City, that alley stank like, I need to feel a certain way.
And I'm going to make one more point about this in terms of like fascism.
And, you know, I want to see what you think here.
The narcissistic authoritarian brain says this.
I feel like I should be in charge.
I feel like I should be able to dominate every relationship in every setting that I'm in.
That could be a marital relationship.
That could be a work relationship.
That could be as president of the United States.
I feel like that is true.
And all of the data, Dan, says that when you have an autocrat, when you have a despot, when you have somebody who is a narcissist who's in control, it's usually just really, really bad for every marker of your country.
The economy, the flourishing of the people, the health, the longevity, the stability, the happiness, the security.
It all goes down when you have that one person who is hell-bent on thinking they are in charge.
It's not about data or facts.
It's about you feel like you should be in charge and therefore you're going to be in charge, even though the data says we'd be better off if we did something different.
This is about feelings and it's just about whose feelings count.
Now, Dan, you've been going through Ali Bestucky.
We've been talking about empathy and the way that Christians want to call empathy a sin on this show for like three months.
The reason they think empathy is a sin is because not everyone deserves to be empathized with because not everyone is as human as them.
We're trying to inculcate in you that if you empathize with the wrong person, you're empathizing with somebody who doesn't deserve it because they're not as human as you or their feelings don't matter as much as your feelings.
Your feelings matter a lot.
If you're the right kind of person, if you're Donald Trump, if you're a white Christian, if you're Pete Hegseth, if you're Pam Bondi.
If not, your feelings don't matter.
But this is all about feelings.
Okay.
I got more thoughts on this, but you want to jump in here on fascism, feelings, any of that business.
I just want to maybe carry this forward and say, okay, so the feelings matter.
And so you're right.
If you're the narcissist, authoritarian Trump and you have the mechanisms of power right at your disposal, that's what you exercise.
If you're one of the millions of people that sort of he taps into, I think, again, one of those primary emotions is fear, often masked under anger.
Anger is what like creates the energy or whatever.
But if you probe beneath that, it's fear.
It's fear of people of color.
Those are the two feelings you're allowed on the American right: fear and anger.
That's the whole emotional spectrum.
Yeah.
That's sort of it.
The question is: all right, so what do you do about those feelings?
Like, like, I mean, we can all feel fear.
We can all feel insecurity.
We can all feel anger, but that doesn't make us all like want, I don't know, police occupation of a city, right?
Like, that's not the only response.
Why that response?
Here's where I want to get theological again.
And I want to say it's because, again, I'm thinking of, you know, we talk about Christian nationalism and people ask all the time, like, is there anything distinctively Christian about the American nationalist moment and so forth?
This for me is one of the things because that model, that narcissistic authoritarian power, that's what God is on the right.
Donald Trump is doing exactly what the right says that God does.
Exercising authority and punishing and smiting and coming along and identifying wrongdoers and like casting them away and all of those kinds of things.
That's what the right-wing authoritarian God does.
That's what the God that millions of Americans worship and have worshiped for decades and decades and decades.
That's what that God is.
That's what that God is defined as.
God is defined as power.
God's primary attribute on the right, it is not love.
It is not compassion.
It is order, power, will, right?
God imposing order.
What defines that order?
God's will and God's authority and God's power.
And God will, you know, in that biblical language, smite anybody who stands in the way of that.
And when you talk to people on the right, and I've had this conversation and you've had this conversation and we've read the books and we've listened to the sermons and we've done all of those things.
Well, yeah, but like, doesn't it say in the Bible that like God is love?
And they'll say, well, yeah, of course, of course.
Brad, of course, God is love, but that love is never going to contravene divine law.
That love is never going to contravene obedience to a supreme divine will.
It's about absolute obedience, the exercise of authority.
And you look at what Bible passages, what Bible stories do they want to tell?
It's not Jesus telling the woman to go and sin no more after he protects her from being stoned by people who would accuse her.
It's not somebody coming along and saying, oh, there's neither Jew or Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female.
Everybody's welcome in the kingdom of God.
No, it's not that.
It's we're going to knock down the walls of Jericho and we're going to occupy the promised land and we're going to take what God says is ours and we're going to use force to do it and all of these kinds of things.
So when Trump does this, this is exactly what, again, a deep religious resonance says power and authority is.
When you are angry, you punish people.
Are there different Christian visions?
Of course there are.
Is there a vision that says that God is about love and redemption?
And if we want to quote unquote redeem society, we have to work to like deal with these deeper issues and make it so that people don't need to turn to poverty or so that people have the resources they need.
Or I was reading an article this week about issues trying to help homeless people gain housing so that they can then focus on things like dealing with dependency or getting a job or whatever.
And guess what the Trump administration is doing?
They're suspending all of those programs.
Why?
They're not punitive enough.
Their God is about punishment.
The God of the right, the God that I grew up worshiping, the God that I preached for a period of time in my life, that God is a narcissist.
That God is an autocratic, authoritarian monster who will kill you and condemn you and punish you for all of eternity if you don't do what that God says you should do.
That's the divine model of quote unquote love.
So when earthly leaders come along and exercise the same thing, again, for me, this is why it resonates with so many people, not in a way they could probably identify.
Uncle Ron is not going to be like, oh, I like Donald Trump because I think he's a good analog of divine governance or something like that.
But I think that's why it resonates.
This is James Dobson.
You were talking about your kids earlier.
Generations of people.
I would be curious.
It'd be interesting to look at people of the Heg Seth generations.
How many of those people grew up either raised by parents reading James Dobson or raising their kids reading James Dobson?
What does James Dobson say?
Kids are sinful.
They're fallen.
They're disobedient.
You need to break their will.
You need to force them to be obedient.
And what was he doing that?
Because that's what God does to humans.
That's what parents need to do.
We see the same model here.
Those people and those, those homeless people, they're sinful.
They're bad and they need to be punished.
Those criminals, they're all sinful, bad.
We need to smite them and punish them and break them.
And that's what Donald Trump is about.
And I think that's why it resonates with huge swaths of Americans.
So I don't know if that makes sense, but if we talk about the feelings, it's like, okay, like fear, anger, like we all feel these things.
Why don't we all celebrate this?
It's because we haven't all been steeped in this notion that that's what you do with fear and anger.
You lash out, you exercise authority, You punish people who make you feel afraid.
And so this is a very natural response.
Yeah, there's, I mean, we could spend the rest of the hour on this.
I think I just want to wrap this segment by saying that this is unprecedented.
You know, there's no reason for this to happen now, except for A, there are reasons, but there's no good reason.
And there's no one that's even provides a veneer or a kind of machine of like legitimacy.
It's distract from Epstein, you know, and as Barbara Walter says, create a situation where you have the ability to take over American cities and thwart protest before it happens.
I think that's also why it starts in D.C. It's not because D.C. is unique in crime or something.
It's because D.C., as this sort of weird political entity, has an easy way for Trump and the federal government to federalize everything in a way that other cities don't.
And so it's the logical first step.
I don't think it's the only step.
No.
But it's a logical first step.
He's already talking about New York City as well, New York City being next and Baltimore, as you say.
So I think that, as you say, there's no good reason for this, but there are perfectly calculated reasons.
And this is why, as you say, he's losing support.
He's not going to lose his core MAGA folks on this.
There are other things that are causing trouble for him, but this resonates with them.
And I think that's why.
All right.
Two more comments on this before we break again.
And that is, Uncle Ron's going to tell you that these cities are just hellholes.
San Francisco, Baltimore, Seattle, Portland, et cetera.
And there's a couple of reasons for that.
One is just racism.
That's just there.
And I think one thing that you can say to people in those instances is like, hey, I know that you don't live in a big city.
And so when you visit New York or you visit Memphis or you visit Baltimore or you visit Seattle, there's like sounds and smells you're not used to.
That's okay.
And I understand you're not used to where you live.
There's not cars hunking all the time and people using elevated voices on the sidewalk and bikers and trucks and da-da-da-da-da.
Okay.
You're just not used to that.
Okay.
And everyone looks kind of different.
They dress different.
It's a whole thing.
You go to the city, it's just not like you're in the suburbs or in the country.
Any person of color, any queer person will tell you right now, they are scared to death when they go into the country, the rural parts of the country, because they're like, if I turn down the wrong road, if I go down the wrong pathway to get to the river, if I'm in the wrong town after dark, what am I going to experience?
Going to the wrong driveway because I don't know where I'm trying to go.
Am I going to get shot if I turn around in this driveway?
So you can, if you have opportunities to have those conversations with any kind of semi-reasonable family member, colleague, friend, that is maybe a place to start.
Is like, you know, I'm, I'm a mixed race person.
I've been with my dad in rural Idaho, and I can explain that story some other time while we were there.
And my dad is like not aware of these kind of things.
And we, you know, we get out of a gas station and people are staring and we go into a restaurant and people are staring.
And I'm like, my, every like spidey sense in me is like, let's see who's looking at us and not looking at us.
And we should probably get out of this restaurant before it's dark and all this stuff.
And he's just eating a salad, having a great time, you know, pointing out the moose that's on the wall and everything.
So that's number one.
Number two is this point's been made online forever or a million times this week.
I'll just, I'll just make it here.
Trump didn't call the National Guard on January 6th.
Didn't call them.
Supposedly, it was Nancy Pelosi's job, but I guess now it's his job.
I don't know who I guess Judge Neen has the power, but Donald doesn't.
What's the logic there?
Supposedly Nancy Pelosi stopped it, but she didn't stop at this time.
Okay.
And I know she's not speaking of the house anymore, et cetera.
The point is he didn't call the National Guard on January 6th.
Dan, everything in the Trump presidency right now can be seen from so many different viewpoints.
The long march of the religious right, an authoritarian God for an authoritarian government, white supremacy.
There's so many ways we get to where we are today.
One of them is revenge for what happened after George Floyd and January and the big lie.
Like after George Floyd, American cities rose up.
Portland, Seattle, Baltimore, Philly, they all rose up.
I don't know how many protests I went to in San Jose during those that summer.
Tear gas.
This is revenge for that, period.
It's revenge.
And the people who are nodding along at home that you've been talking about today, some of that is like, well, they burned down the city through four years ago.
This is what happens when you do that.
You get out of line.
You're going to get punished.
This is revenge for George Floyd.
Do you remember that Donald Trump wanted to shoot protesters in the leg outside of the White House?
That he walked through and cleared protesters so he could hold up a Bible.
This is revenge for what he and they saw as people getting out of line after George Floyd was murdered.
It's also revenge for the 2020 election.
All right.
We tried the insurrection, didn't call the National Guard that day, pardoned everybody who was involved.
As I talked about last week, some of the people pardoned are now working in the administration.
Guess what happens now?
We send the National Guard where we want after the people who need to be caught.
And we are not them.
We are not the people who the law comes for.
I have ultimate permission to do what I want, and the law is for you.
The punishment is for you.
This is revenge for January 6th.
If you read my book, I write over and over again in that book that January 6th was a beginning, not an end.
That it was the start, not the finish.
And this is when you let a man inside a riot and then run for office again, you get this.
And we've called it for, you know, I don't want to, I hate that we're right about this, but we talked about it for a thousand episodes now.
We called it and we've been calling it.
I wrote about it.
You've, you've said it how many times?
And this is where we are.
Let's take a break.
Right back.
All right, Dan.
Let's talk about the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Do you want to like, you know, do you need a break?
This is heavy.
I don't know.
Did you eat anything good in Ireland?
Do you want to share with, you know, did you see Castle?
I saw Castles.
And I did not, though, kiss the Blarney Stone, so I don't have the gifted gab.
So I had lots of bangers of mash and lots of Jameson and lots of Guinness.
So did you do the Guinness tour?
I did.
Yep.
Yeah.
And two Jameson tours.
So, you know, I did.
I did my part, Brad.
I did my part.
Two-fifths of Jameson tours.
Okay.
Yeah.
So I'm fortified.
I'm ready.
I've got all the liquid courage I need to fix up to this.
Yeah, you don't remember the plane ride home.
That's right.
I mean, I just woke up and I was back in Hartford.
I don't know.
I don't know how that happened.
I don't know where the Coke Zero brewery is, but when I'm going to have to look that up and then I'm going to go take that.
Coke Zero Experience.
They always call everything experience now.
It's like the Coke Zero experience.
Jameson experience.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think one of the pieces of merch we're going to make soon, and we are making merch.
It's on the agenda, people, is a shirt that says cargo shorts, Coke Zero, and Christian nationalism.
But we're going to cross the Christian nationalism out.
What do you think?
Would you wear that shirt?
I think I would with cargo shorts.
So there it is.
All right, people, here we go.
You're welcome for that interlude.
Dad vibes galore.
This is at the Daily Beast.
Donald Trump's nominee to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics has a giant picture of Adolf Hitler's favorite battleship in his office, and he isn't afraid to show it.
EJ Antony has come under fire for his comments about data collection and social security after Trump tapped him to lead the Bureau tasked with gathering and disseminating crucial economic data.
But his taste in art has turned heads.
Antony, the chief economist of Ware, the Heritage Foundation, has given multiple on-camera interviews in front of an image of the World War II battleship Bismarck that was launched by the Nazis in 1939.
Adolf Hitler gave a speech at that ceremony, making it the pride of his Kriegsmarine.
At the time, it was widely considered the most powerful, largest, and fastest ship in the world.
Asked about this, the White House made a statement that said, EJ is a history buff, as many Americans are, and has an appreciation for the significance of maritime history.
It's just because it was the biggest and fastest ship.
That's all.
Just happened to be a Nazi ship and happens to have a picture of it and happens to make sure that the photo is like, or the image of it is in the background in interviews.
And yeah.
I mean, Brad, you've done a lot of interviews.
Like you think about the background.
It's not accidental.
You're not like, oh, shit, I had a big giant Nazi shit behind me.
Like, should have put that away.
Yeah.
Somebody looks at it.
Yeah.
it's not accidental.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
It's, you know, the point is this is like calculated and obvious and intentional.
So the whole, he's a history buff kind of thing or the understated way the article puts it with his, you know, his taste in art.
It's like, yeah, the fact that, you know, it's, it's Nazi stuff.
It's, it's so, it would have been unthinkable.
You know, it seems like not all that long ago that this would be a thing that somebody would be doing.
But yeah, of course, of course, this is the Trump admin's pick for this position, this kind of person.
And so if you're, if you have a Mexican flag in LA, you're not American and you, you should, I mean, in America, we fly the American flag.
Isn't that what we heard?
Yeah.
And ICE is going to argue.
They're arguing in court right now that they should be able to like invade your home and investigate you if you have like symbols like that that don't seem American enough.
But Nazi ship behind you, history buff.
I mean, come on.
What are you guys doing?
You guys are lame.
This is so LOL.
Like, God, this is not a big deal.
He's just the history.
He likes history.
He likes boats, man.
What's your problem?
Yeah, he's really into boats.
Now, we could do the Nazi exasperation.
I mean, I don't know, Dan, what to say.
Other podcasts would go on about this for half an hour.
I am exasperated by this.
I am terrified.
This is disgusting, period.
And there have been statements by Jewish groups, by others that are like, what is this?
There's more components, though, that should be like folded in to this whole discussion.
One of these is that most people are missing is the man's from the Heritage Foundation.
Like, this is a Project 2025 Manchurian candidate for this thing.
Like, Trump didn't like the jobs number.
So he hired somebody from the Heritage Foundation, the place where we got Project 2025, which is like 52% complete at this point.
He went to a Catholic seminary.
This is somebody who thinks that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme.
He is a he's a conservative reactionary Catholic, just like Kevin Roberts, who leads the Heritage Foundation.
Like if you don't notice where he came from as the chief economist of the Heritage Foundation, you're missing part of the game.
So he's flying Nazi paraphernalia and he comes from the think tank that gave you a Project 2025.
And then I'll just give you some comments from his colleagues in the industry and then Dan jump in here and then we'll go to Gavin Newsom.
I've been on several programs with him at this point and have been impressed by two things.
His inability to understand basic economics and the speed with which he's gone MAGA, wrote David Herbert from the Conservative American Institute for Economic Research.
That's from a conservative think tank.
Okay.
Senior Senator Patty Murray, the former chair of the Help Committee, shredded Antoni as an unqualified right-wing extremist who won't think twice about manipulating the jobs data and degrading the credibility of the agency to make Trump happy.
There are a lot of competent conservative economists that could do this job.
EJ is not one of them, wrote Kyle Pomolo from the right-leaning tax foundation on X. Daniel D. Martino from the right-leaning Manhattan Institute wrote, he was unqualified for the labor market data collection and analysis role.
He was nominated to.
Dan, you and I are professors and we've all had friends get jobs at like universities and we're like, well, no, it wouldn't be my pick, but all right, go ahead there.
University of Michigan or, you know, all right, Dartmouth or not, I'm just making things up.
If you work at Dartmouth, I'm not talking about you.
Please don't think I am.
I don't, I have no interest in that.
I'm just saying there's times when people get hired for jobs where like you go and gossip with your friend at Happy Hour.
You're like, oh, did you see so-and-so got the job there?
That's like one level of like snark.
A different level is if like someone gets hired and you go on X and they're like, can't believe so-and-so got hired as a professor at Cal State Fullerton because they're a complete hack.
This is really embarrassing, Cal State Fullerton.
Like, I've never seen another academic do that.
That's where we are with this pick.
So, A, Nazi, B, Project 2025, C, complete, not qualified.
Why is he chosen?
Simply a loyalist.
And we live in a fascist, fascist-esque, fascish territory now because the jobs that is just made up.
We have no idea if it will ever be good because the man who's in charge of it, A, is a Trump loyalist, and B, is not qualified to even do the job.
So we have no idea.
There's no, we have no sense in this country anymore about cancer research, about climate, about any of that kind of data, much less the jobs numbers in our economy.
What do you think?
So, I mean, just to pick up on that point, right, about not taking the numbers seriously.
It says, remember the context, like Trump fired the former BLS head for what?
For having bad news.
Like, like, like feelings, feelings.
He hurt his feelings.
The literal, you know, it's not literal, but the shoot the messenger kind of thing, remove the messenger from their position, a sort of response to the message.
So already, regardless of who's put into this position, they're going to be under pressure to give Trump numbers that he likes.
That's if this person wasn't from the Heritage Foundation, if this person wasn't tied in with Project 2025, if this person didn't have all kinds of, you should say, other right-leaning statisticians and economists saying that they're radically unqualified for this position, you would already have these concerns.
And that just amplifies sort of everything.
The point you were just making is worth reiterating.
Again, we've seen this before.
His lack of qualifications or a qualification within Trump world, because all that matters is loyalty.
If you're qualified, it means you can't tell the president you're always going to like the numbers I give you.
You're always going to like, I'm always going to take the MAGA line.
I'm always going to agree with your political, like whatever.
You're going to be like, I crunch numbers.
That's what I do.
And like what the numbers are is what the numbers are.
Well, that's a quality.
That's what a qualified person would do.
So we're not going to hire that person.
We're going to hire the Trump loyalist here.
And I think another piece, an overarching piece, I know this has gotten a lot of his head.
I'm not an economist.
You're not an economist.
And so one of the things that he has suggested is, you know, doing quarterly reports, you know, instead of like monthly reports and whatever.
I have no idea.
Maybe, maybe that's a thing that would be worth talking about.
I'm sure that there are people that are like, yeah, we have to revise these numbers all the time.
So maybe it would be like better to just look like quarterly or what.
I don't know.
You know why?
We can't have a real discussion about the one policy piece of this that could be real.
Don't know.
Why?
Because there's not somebody qualified to have it.
It's got all this other stuff dumped in there.
If somebody else wants to have that discussion, real economists who understand this stuff, people who aren't you or me who are just relying on them and they want to give me like reasons why we should stick with like monthly reports versus quarterly reports or whatever, okay.
I'm happy to defer to experts to make their case for why one or the other way of doing that is better.
We should stick with what we're doing or we should go to something else or the revisions are always confusing, whatever.
That's like the one piece of like real sort of signal and all of this noise that we can't even talk about because this is a completely untrustworthy person putting the idea forward.
So it undermines just sort of, it's like, it's like a double thing.
Like not only is he not qualified, but he sort of taints any real discussion that could happen about the wonkiness behind labor statistics and how to compile them and how to make sense of them and how to report them.
Even that becomes tainted so that we just can't trust anything now coming out of the Department of Labor Statistics because of this.
All right.
Let's do like four minutes on Gavin Newsome.
So Gavin Newsom's been doing something that people have been noticing that I think is worth commenting on.
Basically mimicking and mirroring Trump.
So his office on August 12th put out a statement that said, Donald Trump, the lowest polling president in recent history, this is your second to last warning.
The next one is the last one.
Stand down now or California will counterstrike legally to destroy your illegal crooked maps in red states.
Press conference coming, hosted by America's favorite governor, Gavin Newsom.
Final warning next.
You won't like it.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Next one, same day.
Donald Taco Trump, as many call him, missed the deadline.
California will now draw new, more beautiful maps.
They will be historic as they will end the Trump presidency.
Dems take back the House, parentheses.
Big press conference this week with powerful Dems and Gavin Newsom, your favorite governor.
That will be devastating for MAGA.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
There's Gavin Newsom's team sending out images of him looking like Rambo with his head on top, just like Trump has done.
So a couple of things.
People find this endlessly funny and he's trolling Trump and it does have some effect.
And I've talked about this on the show before.
What he's doing is mirroring Trump, who's mirroring American democracy.
And you're like, what does that mean?
I'm going to try to do this in 90 seconds, Dan.
I've referenced this book.
It's been a couple of months, but there's a book called The Light That Fails by Yvonne Kroshtev and Stephen Holmes.
What they talk about there is that one of the most effective tactics that Trump and Putin have used over the last decade and more for Putin is to basically hold up a mirror to the supposed liberal democracies of the West and say, you are hypocrites.
So what Trump did when he showed up on the political stage was he held up a mirror and said, you're a hypocrite.
Every time you said something about him, grab him by the whatever, the marital status, the sleeping with porn stars, whatever.
It's like, well, what about you?
And he's like, and he shows you a mirror and he's like, what about Bill Clinton?
What about this?
What about Nancy Pelosi insider training?
What about the Clinton Foundation?
He was able to tread on the fact that the liberal democracies were not what they said they were and thus do a whataboutism hypocrisy maneuver.
And he's always doing it.
Right.
So you ask him about the Epstein files and he's like, what about the president of Harvard?
And you're like, no, we're talking about you, the president of the United States.
What about Bill Clinton?
Okay.
What about what?
You know, what about Bill Gates?
That's what he does.
So what's happening with Newsom is he's holding up a mirror to Trump and he's saying, this is how the guy talks.
This is how the guy tweets.
This is how ridiculous it is to speak this way.
He's an idiot.
If I do it, someone else, it looks absurd.
Well, that's because he's absurd.
He's also Gavin Newsom redrawing.
He's trying to redraw the California maps to match the redrawn or in process redrawn Texas maps to basically say, we're not going to let you steal the election.
Now, short term, Dan, I think, and you and I can have a three hour debate.
I think this is the right move.
I'm not, you know, and I have so many qualms.
I have so many issues with Gavin Newsom.
I have so many, all that.
None of this is good if you want a democracy.
And there's a way you can frame this as like someone like Newsom is pushed into playing these tactics because of the overwhelmingly anti-democratic maneuvers that the Texas GOP GOP is making and Trump himself.
But I want to play for you one clip before we go and just give me a minute on this as I throw it to you.
Yesterday, he announced the redistricting in California.
and donald trump sent armed uh border patrol to the event so outside of this political event by the governor are armed border patrol as a message to gavin newsom and whoever and here's a clip of of greg bovino who's the the sector head uh or sector chief of u.s border patrol who was there and somebody walks up to him and says what are you doing here and here's what he says we're here making los angeles a safer place since we won't have politicians that'll do that
We do that ourselves.
So that's what we're here today.
As you can see, already making it a safer place.
We're glad to be here.
Not going anywhere.
And you know, the governor's inside right there.
I didn't.
I don't know where he's at.
He's about 100 feet behind us.
Do you have any comment from him or anything?
Again, we're making Los Angeles and California a safer place.
We're going to continue to do that.
And they can take that one to the bank and cash it.
He says we're here to make the city safer because politicians won't.
You know what that's called?
Not democracy.
Call it fascism.
You can call it military occupation.
But if voters vote for politicians and those politicians act within their roles and legal boundaries as the leaders who are elected and they conduct a city in a certain way with its police force and all of its other agencies.
And then you have an agency show up and say, we're here to do what they want.
You know what that's called?
It's called military occupation.
That is the least democratic thing I've ever heard.
That is how fascist arms of the military.
That is how military arms of the military.
of a fascist government speak do you agree final thoughts and then let's go to reasons for hope i excuse me i do agree and i think that it just shows i mean i've i've i've I've run into people who say, you know, that we're overblowing the significance of ICE.
When people say that, you know, Trump's using it as like a sort of secret police, not a secret police force, but like a Trump police force to do whatever he wants and whatever this is overblown.
And it's about, you know, I'm like, why ICE?
Why ICE saying we're going to keep the city?
That was not an immigration issue.
That was an issue, I think, of intimidation.
It was an issue of threat.
It was an implicit claim that this is sort of our space, not Gavin Newsom's space, not Californians' space, but our space, ICE.
That's a spokesperson for ICE taking on the role of exactly the kind of SS, Gestapo-esque kind of vision that Trump has for that agency.
And I think that's worth noting.
There was no pretense there to be, I don't know, protecting Gavin Newsom from, I don't know, armed, undocumented immigrants who were going to come in or, you know, something.
No pretense.
You know what an undocumented immigrant in this climate's thinking?
Well, you know, the best place for me to go right now, probably an event by the governor.
That's probably a good choice.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I think that's the big takeaway of that piece of it for me is just how chilling that is.
What that says.
And I realize there are people who mean well serving in these agencies, but for people who have joined organizations like ICE in the last few years, who know full well that this is what this is, that this is what this agency is, who are being drawn in by the social media posts that DHS is putting out, like, you know, and all the kinds of things related to that.
This is what they're after.
This is what they want.
Domination, control, a federal police force that can circumvent any kind of obstacle to Donald Trump.
And again, you have a spokesperson for ICE saying this publicly.
I think that was really chilling.
Yeah, I agree.
What's your reason for hope?
My reason for hope is, once again, a court federal judge, a Trump appointee, no less, struck down the Trump administration's attempt to enforce their reading of anti-discrimination law in public schools.
In other words, to make it so that they wanted to say the public schools couldn't sort of use any reference to race in any reason for any purpose, anywhere, anytime, et cetera, et cetera.
The judge ruled, this was not the first judge to do this, but it was a significant one, ruled that that ultimatum that the Trump administration had made went beyond anti-discrimination and it limited free speech.
And so this was, I think, significant and a reason for hope that a Trump appointee said you can't just unilaterally determine this.
They said that, you know, yes, the president gets to appoint agencies and agencies get to enforce policy and so forth, but that doesn't mean that you can stop the free speech.
And I think, as she said, even beneficial speech in public school contexts and so forth.
So I took some hope in that.
I have a piece from Laura Jade, who writes it, banned in your state.
That's the newsletter, banned in your state.
And Laura just outlines several tactics for what people in D.C. and other places can do right now.
And I just, I found this to be one of those moments of like hope in terms of this is how you can think about fighting back, even when there seems to be no good choices.
And Laura Jade goes through these ideas of demoralization, of making sure that when people from ICE show up places, they know that they are pariahs and they're ostracized and they are acting against the will of the people for a fascist will.
Friction, just making sure they can't operate.
They can't work.
They have a hard time getting in and out of places.
They have a hard time getting food cooked for them or hotels, places to stay.
Just, you know, you go into a restaurant, you order takes forever.
Then it's wrong every single time.
You go to a store and the cashier can't figure out how to ring up any of your merchandise.
Have to get the manager.
You ask somebody to move their car and they do a thousand-point K turn.
And of course, people are yelling at you the whole time.
Obstruction.
Just things.
And none of this is meant to fight the army that Trump is sending into American cities, but it's a glimpse into the kinds of tactics that are going to have to become more robust and widespread and well-known in the coming months and years, because what is happening in DC, unfortunately, is a sign of things to come.
And we'll talk more about that in the future.
For now, I'll just say thanks for listening.
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