Weekly Roundup: Thoughts & Prayers, But No Vaccines or Safety
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This week on Straight White American Jesus, Brad and Dan unpack a heavy news cycle that spans tragedy, politics, and cultural shifts. They begin with the Minnesota mass shooting, examining the familiar “thoughts and prayers” narrative and how political leaders like Jacob Frey, Jen Psaki, and JD Vance framed the conversation. From there, the hosts turn to the shakeup at the CDC, where the removal of its director and the installation of a biotech investor with ties to Peter Thiel signals the increasing replacement of experts with ideologues.
They also trace the troubling reemergence of eugenics in public discourse, especially in rhetoric from figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The conversation then shifts to higher education and the military, highlighting the purge of civilian faculty at West Point and the broader attack on the humanities as part of a push toward compliance over critical thought.
Despite the grim topics, Brad and Dan close with reflections on resilience, community, and reasons to hold on to hope.
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Axis Mundi Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, author of Preparing for War, The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next, and the founder of Axis Mundi Media here with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
barely able to string sentences together Brad because there's a lot going on and the world is not always a great place, but here we are.
Yeah, this is one of those weeks where we did a bonus episode.
It's like, oh, I hope we have enough material.
Oh, yeah.
We could probably do a, if we go long today, people, it's because there's so much to talk about.
So we're going to begin with what happened in Minnesota, a mass shooting that once again marks an American tragedy and is an auspicious beginning to the school year.
We will then transition into what's going on at the CDC and how the quote-unquote shakeup there is intricately tied in logic and in policy to what's going on with Minnesota and the discourse on prayer and thoughts and prayers and mass shootings in this country.
I'm going to talk about Robert F. Kennedy's eugenicism and how the man who is now in charge of the CDC is a Peter Thiel acolyte who comes straight from the world of Silicon Valley technocratic monarchists.
We will then get into what's happening in higher ed and how it's all tied together with the DC federal takeover.
Lots to cover today, Dan.
Let's go.
Yeah, so I'll walk through.
I'm not going to go through all the details of the Minnesota shooting.
People have heard about that and, you know, can take a look at that.
But what we're sort of interested here in particular, as always, is obviously the tragic nature of it.
But the response is to it by different people.
And so after the Minnesota shooting, there were the typical right wing appeals to prayer.
And then there were the sort of liberal critiques of it that have become typical of the left.
And so, for example, Minneapolis Mayor J. Jacob Frey said, this is what he said, quote, don't just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now.
These kids were literally praying, end quote.
And that's a moving, intense statement.
They were at a Catholic school.
The shooting occurred while they were praying at a mass.
So this is a real thing, a real dimension to this that he's highlighting.
Former Biden press secretary and now MSNBC host, Jen Psaki said this, and this is what really spurred the response from the right that we'll get into in a minute.
She said, prayer is not freaking enough.
Prayer does not end school shootings.
Prayers do not make parents feel safe sending their kids to school.
Prayer does not bring these kids back.
Enough with the thoughts and prayers.
End quote.
But this time, the Trump administration being the Trump administration decided to double down and, I don't know, just make things worse or wait into this or whatever.
And so specifically, JD Vance and press secretary Carolyn Leavitt responded to this.
Leavitt said at a briefing, quote, It's utterly disrespectful to deride the power of prayer in this country.
And it's disrespectful to the millions of Americans of faith.
And we're going to get to this.
That's go ahead, Brad.
Let's play the tape.
I got the tape.
So here's, here's, here's, here's Carolyn Leavitt at her press conference yesterday.
I have two questions for you.
Democrats, including former White House press secretary Jen Saki and Minneapolis mayor Jacob Bray, attacked Prayer and pushed gun control in the aftermath of yesterday's shooting.
What's the White House's response to their comments?
Yes, I saw the comments of my predecessor, Ms. Saki, and frankly, I think they're incredibly insensitive and disrespectful to the tens of millions of Americans of faith across this country who believe in the power of prayer, who believe that prayer works, and who believe that in a time of mourning like this, when beautiful young children were killed while praying in a church.
It's utterly disrespectful to deride the power of prayer in this country.
And it's disrespectful to the millions of Americans of faith.
And I would encourage Miss Psaki to pray for these families themselves who need it right now more than ever.
So there, there it is in her own words, saying that.
Obviously a mischaracterization.
We'll get into this in a minute.
Nobody is saying that there's something wrong with praying.
It's when we pray or hopes and prayers are offered as an alibi of not doing anything else.
But JD Vance decides to wait in.
I've got a lot to say about Vance on this, as I always do.
But he posted several things on X. He was also on Fox., and he said this, he started, he said, of all the weird left wing culture wars in the last few years, this is by far the most bizarre.
And I just want to pause.
Notice the appeal to weird.
Remember how they got picked on for being weird all the time in the election.
So JD Vance being JD Vance can't come up with like a vancism.
He can only like sort of crib stuff from other people.
So here he is trying to be like the right wing walls or something and talking about things being weird.
But he says, this is weird.
He says, how dare you pray for innocent people in the midst of tragedy?
What are you even talking about?
On Fox, he accused Democrats.
This is JD Vance doing the Trump thing of trying to flip the script all the time and just say the opposite.
He accused Democrats of saying that you have to choose prayer or action.
He says, why does it have to be one or the other?
Why do you Democrats try to act like we've got to choose or something like that?
And then again on X, he said, it is shocking to me that so many left-wing politicians attack the idea of prayer in response to a tragedy.
Literally no one thinks prayer is a substitute for action.
We pray because our hearts are broken and we believe that God is listening.
So I want to say a couple things and I'll throw it to you.
One is we've used the word tragedy.
It's tragic.
But I use that word advisedly because a tragedy makes it sound like something that's unforeseen.
It can't be stopped.
There's no way of knowing what'll happen.
Some car driving down the road and a boulder rolling off a mountain hits the car.
That's tragic and weird.
And this is completely predictable.
It's not even predictable anymore.
It's assured.
We live in a country where it is assured that children will die in schools because of mass shootings.
So I often feel like when people use the word tragic, and I use it, and I'm not slamming everybody who says it's a tragedy, it is.
But when JD Vance uses the word tragedy, I'm absolutely convinced it's a way of trying to encode this as something that, well, you know, gee, what are you going to do?
There's just no way to know.
There's no way to anticipate whatever.
That's the first thing.
Here's the takeaways, right?
So number one, the critique is of prayer as an alibi for inaction.
And this has been going on for years, and it's been going on on the right because you would have all the senators and the congress people on the right and pastors and everybody else who would hold their prayer vigils or send out their thoughts and prayers, but they don't they don't want gun reform.
They don't want to pass laws.
They're not going to do things to actually make schools safer and so forth.
That's the critique.
They know it.
I'll set that aside.
Here's the thing.
The GOP does nothing to deal with the issue of guns.
as opposed to their real priorities.
So this is the thing.
When the GOP wants to do something, they don't pray about it.
When they want to make America into a Christian nation, if they all wanted to sit in their living rooms and have prayer groups and pray that America would set aside the Constitution and become a theocratic state and that traditional, you know, traditional values of women staying at home and raising kids and pronatalism and all that stuff, if they would just, they wanted to just pray that that's what America would become, more power to them.
That's not what they do.
They tried to take over institutions.
They run for office.
They pour billions of dollars into these programs.
When they're interested in quote unquote keeping America safe by removing undocumented immigrants, we've seen what happens.
We've seen the exercises, the levels that they'll go to, the exercises they'll undertake.
When it comes to school shootings, nothing, nothing, crickets.
So JD Vance, don't give me this thing about no one, literally no one thinks prayer is a substitute for action.
You have defined it as that.
The right has defined it as that.
And there was a time when they could get political cover by defining it as that.
And that's what they're trying to get back.
They're trying to turn this into, see where you're persecuting good Christian Americans who believe in prayer.
Nope.
No.
I've got no problem with somebody praying.
I just hope that that person is then writing to their congressperson or they're petitioning in their neighborhood or they're learning about, you know, ways to try, you know, what kind of gun control laws can get it through the Supreme Court, whatever it is.
Go do that and then tell me that you're praying and I'm fine.
The last piece of this that I want to highlight is just a frustration with the kind of, you know, the legacy media.
There was an article on CNN, it was written by Aaron Blake.
And the article acknowledged the mischaracterization of this that the Democrats are not saying people are bad if they pray or something like that.
But he goes on to say this.
He says it's also a subject Democrats should probably be careful about giving Americans belief in the power of prayer.
End quote.
And he goes on to say, or he doesn't say rather, the title of the article is, listen to this, J.D. Vance and the Important Nuance of the Thoughts and Prayers Debate.
He's taken the right-wing thing, hook, line, and sinker.
Now it's a debate.
We know the Democrats are underwater.
We know the Democrats have messaging problems.
We know the Democrats don't have a leader to sort of rally around.
We know that they don't have a clear vision.
We know that a lot of of them are still stuck staring back at what happened in the last election not prepping for the future we know all of that here is somebody i think probably unwittingly just generating weaknesses that aren't really there by accepting this narrative.
This is both sidism to me.
This is it's utterly ridiculous to suggest that when people are saying this, they're saying you're evil or bad or you're a terrible American if you pray.
Nobody's saying that, but you just feed the fire and take the kinds of things that JD Vance or Carolyn Leavitt says and you amplify those.
So we've got that going on.
We have, I think, Vance and the right trying to spin this into some sort of attack on Christian Americans.
all while continuing to hide behind the fact that they won't do anything real to address gun violence.
And for those who want to say, well, they will.
And JD Vance also said that they're going to start looking at mental health issues.
Fine.
How many times at this point has the GOP said that?
That was their pivot to not talk about guns, but to talk about mental health.
What did they just do to Medicaid and Medicare?
And what do they want to do to the social safety net?
What do they want to do to medical care in this country?
And we think that that's what they're going to do is boost mental health care.
Could go on and on.
I throw it to you for your thoughts or reflections on this.
I think we need to accept.
And this is going to sound blunt and it's going to sound like the kind of statement that is made for social media and is not made for a show where we've really tried for a thousand episodes to provide layered analysis and to peel back the kind of different dimensions of what's going on in the country.
But this is going to be true of what we talk about with what happened in Minnesota.
It's going to be true of what I think is happening at the CDC and with RFK and so on.
You can call it the GOP, you can call it the American, you can call it Maga Nation.
They do not care if everyone in this country survives, much less has their voice heard in the public square.
Democracy is a story that says that everyone is worth it.
Like democracy, among other things, is a story.
The story goes like this.
Everybody has worth and dignity such that they should get a say in how they are governed and how they live.
And everyone is worth it, and therefore everyone gets a say.
We all have different abilities, different capacities, different interests.
We have a lot of differences, but everyone shares the fact that they're worth it.
They don't think a lot of certain people are worth it, and they don't think that certain privileges and powers are worth giving up if that means saving others, like children at school.
When they want to, they can.
They built the concentration camp in Florida that is now being dismantled.
They built that in seven days, eight days.
When they want to, they can.
So that's that's point number one, but they don't want to, Dan.
This is not about like they actually there are times when I think that there are folks in these spaces, white evangelicals, white Christian nationalists, RFK, who I'm going to get to in a minute, are true believers.
I think Mike Johnson is a true believer when it comes to guns and mental health and all that.
It's a willpower problem.
They want to keep the power of the gun.
They want to have handheld killing machines so that they can enforce the order they think is proper for their power and magnifying their control of the public square.
They don't want to.
That's the That's the problem here.
It's not that they don't know how or they can't.
Okay.
I think it's tied in just with that point of what you're making.
There are a lot of well meaning Christians in the world who are in the same boat.
A lot of us are in where, you know, these things are big.
And you're like, what in the world do I do?
What can I do?
I can't.
And so people who do believe in the power, like, all, like, more power to them.
Like that is their expression of real hope.
I think a real belief that God acts in the world and so forth.
And that for them is a resource they have and one of the only resources they have.
I think your point is the people, the JD Vance is the world that's not them.
The people with the loudest megaphone talking about prayer are the people who are using it because they don't want to do anything else that they could do.
They have the resources.
We've seen, as you say, what they do when they want to do it.
All right.
So let's just talk about Carolyn Levin and JD Vance real quick.
This is a classic, if we were in logic class, it's a classic false binary.
So Carolyn Leavitt and JD Vance took a statement by Jen Sackey who said that prayer is not enough, meaning that prayer might be helpful, but it's not enough.
Jen Sackey responded to Carolyn Leavitt and said, I'm a praying person.
I pray.
It's not enough.
Okay?
But they turned it into a false binary.
Oh, well, I guess you're attacking prayer now.
It's either this or that.
It's either you choose this or you choose that.
I guess it's also a strawman fallacy.
They set up an argument that Leavitt didn't make so they could knock it down or that Sackey didn't make so they could knock it down.
Oh, she says prayer doesn't work.
Oh, are you an American of faith?, well, she's offensive to you.
And this is boring at this point.
This is just classic right-wing victimization BS.
It's boring at this point.
So we could spend, you know, and I don't think we're going to, I think we could spend the next hour talking about how JD Vance and Carolyn Leavitt as Christians are just dead wrong.
Like, I can read, you all want James chapter two?
What does it profit my brethren if someone says he has faith but does not have works?
Can faith save him?
Can prayer alone save us from the handheld killing machines at our churches and our schools, in our neighborhoods, at our places of work, at Walmart?
Can faith alone save us from that?
James chapter two.
Do you want me to do a sermon?
I can.
I'm good at sermons.
Dan, you've seen me.
That's fine.
JD is not interested in that.
JD has practiced and perfected the voice of a psychopath who when the figurehead of the MAGA movement, Donald Trump, dies, JD Vance will never win an election in fair and free open water territory.
But he can be the stalwart psychopathic reply guy leader who simply refuses empathy or dialogue or negotiation with anyone who disagrees with him.
He's always going to be able to put on the 42-year-old I'm drinking whiskey and smarter than you voice that says, well, I just who I guess prayer's wrong now.
Is that what you're saying, Democrats?
You hate religion and Jesus?
Okay.
Well, I just think that's weird.
I'm I'm I just think that's weird, okay?
And he's just pitch perfect, Dan.
He's perfected it.
That is his role now, and he knows it.
He knows his role in the epic, and he's playing it.
So I think, I think that's the final one.
I'm going to give you one more, and then we can, we can switch here because we've got a lot to talk about.
DHS tweeted out yesterday, pray without ceasing.
And like of all the things yesterday that made me want to just, like, Dan, I got, like, you know, you got kids.
I got kids.
I, you know, you get news of what happened in Minnesota, and then you go look at your four-year-old who's like, Dad, do you want to play this game with me?
You know, and then like the next day, and I know every parent, I'm not trying to be special.
I'm saying this is just what I this is not me trying to be like extraordinary.
It's me saying then you drop them off at daycare, you know, and every parent in this country knows what I'm talking about.
And every human in this country, whether you have kids or not, knows what I'm talking about.
Because it doesn't matter where you go now.
Church, ball game, parade, Walmart.
Who knows?
You could and might be the victim of gun violence.
So DHS, Dan, for weeks has been posting advertisements of, here I am, Lord, stand with me, Bible verses.
overlaid on images of young men going to war.
DHS, who is passing laws and laws are the wrong word, policies such that you now can be part of ICE if you'rere 18 years old.
So here's what we want to do in this country.
We do not want to give any protection to kids in school from guns.
We're not going to change that.
But if you're 18, we'll give you a gun and we want you to come and mass deport people here.
If you're 18, you might get shot in your school or you can come join ice and we'll give you a gun so you can kidnap others.
That's what this country is.
That's how this country works.
So when DHS says pray unceasingly, if there's anything that got my blood boiling to the point of like being unbearable, it is when you want people to get kidnapped and families destroyed.
I watched a video this morning, Dan, of a guy who walked out in a school with his kids and they, they, people in masks grabbed him.
And when his kids held on to his legs, they tore those kids and pushed them to the ground so they could grab this man and take him into custody in a school.
Pray unceasingly, except for when we need to recruit you to kidnap people, wear a mask, be unidentified, Gestapo, and then it is, here I am, Lord send me.
So in one instance, it's send me, and in the other instance, it's pray unceasingly.
We hope things get better.
Fuck that.
Fuck all of it.
That is the worst verdict on this country that I can imagine.
And we just do it over and over again.
It's all yours.
I just want to see what happens next time DHS decides to launch their diatribes against the sanctuary cities.
And that's what gets tweeted back.
When they're like, oh, we need you to, we need your police.
We need you to help us enforce it and say, hey, pray without ceasing.
And maybe, maybe it'll happen.
We'll see how vacuous that is and see that, of course, that is not the issue that's really a problem.
What happens if today we sign off and it's like Donald Trump in critical condition in the hospital?
And Gavin Newsom just tweets out, prayers up.
What's going to happen to him?
But prayers your way.
And I'm not laughing about someone dying.
What I'm laughing about is if he does that, Karen's leave it, it's going to be like, well, that's a pretty callous response from the governor of the biggest state in the country.
I can't believe Gavin Newsom, prayers up.
And we, you see what I'm saying?
It's just, it's beyond, it's inhumane and ridiculous.
Any final thoughts or should we take a break so I can get a Coke Zero, wipe my brow and try to keep it together for the rest of this?
Just just that.
Yeah, it's as you say, it's tired and it remains tired even when J.D. Vance tries to sort of spice it up on X. And I think the long and short it is.
This is another thing that I think plays really well with that MAGA base.
I don't I don't think and we'll come to this later in the episode and reasons for hope, but I don't think to the to a lot of moderate voters and things that this this resonates at all.
I think that this is very much something that plays with MAGA and nobody.
nobody else Let's take a break and come back and talk about the CDC and RFK.
All right, Dan.
So the CDC director was ousted yesterday., and I'm going to read from the Guardian piece by Betsy Reid.
The White House has chosen a top aid health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy.
Excuse me.
The White House has chosen a top aid to health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, to temporarily lead the CDC, an appointment that is expected to bolster Kennedy's goals of remaking federal vaccine policy.
Jim O'Neill, a biotech investor and speech writer for the health department during George W. Bush administration, was tapped as acting director.
Sorry, sorry, just real quick, Brad.
A what?
A biologist.
A doctor, a researcher, a gen geneticist, just, yeah, remind us what he is.
No, he is a biotech investor and speechwriter and he's replacing Susan Monares who has deep and long and just proven expertise in medicine and infectious disease science.
So this is what's happening.
I'm going to get more into O'Neill in a minute.
I want to stop and talk about RFK first, okay?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Dan is a eugenicist.
Like if you all want to take something away today, he's a eugenicist.
And if you don't believe me, here's one of those doctors who left the CDC, a top official, yesterday speaking on cable news last night.
Escorted out, by the way.
Would agree with you, but from your perspective, tell us more about what you mean by that.
Yeah, I mean, I think that the whole rhetoric behind the movement that Secretary Kennedy thinks that he's launched is really that only the strong survive.
So whether it's cutting social programs that are important to children, whether it's cutting access to food, so making America healthy means good food.
So cutting things like food benefits for children seems like it's not a really good idea to be able to achieve that end.
So I think that he clearly has a belief, if he actually does believe in viruses and bacteria, which I don't know if he actually does, in the fact that they exist.
But he has this belief that sometimes infection is better than vaccine because it creates, I think, the people who survive are the people who should continue to propagate the species.
I'm never going to forget, there was an interview that he did at a restaurant talking about the importance of using beef tallow in french fries.
And in that interview, he was talking about his desire to have avian flu burn through chickens and the chickens that survived they're the ones that should be bred and that is that's those are the words that he said they're available to watch and he said because those chickens have the superior genetics and then one minute later he said that the president also has superior genetics so I mean from my perspective as someone who you know has sort of the cultural background of you
know a grandfather who was killed fighting fascism in Greece that's sort of like embedded in my brain and I heard that and I'm like so that's what this is all about so you know if there are are kids who get infected and do well, that's great.
We shouldn't be giving them vaccines, I guess, so that we can really propagate the strongest of the species.
I feel like what he said about chickens is what he believes about people.
And that's scary.
So he says it here, eugenesis.
Now, what is eugenics?
I talked about this when it came to James Dobson.
Eugenics is the idea that you can breed and somehow engineer those with superior genes to be part of your society.
One of the things that I want everyone to know today is that throughout the 20th century, This is one of those moments where the topic that unites.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, you look at the 20th century, Dan, as much as I have from every angle, and it's really hard to find a time when the atheists and the evangelicals, the white evangelicals are like, you know, just raising the hands, like, you know, holding hands together, the crypts and the bloods, like coming together to like, you know.
And one of those was eugenics, because why?
Well, let me read from a book I wrote a couple of years ago that I think will help us on this topic.
There's a special ingredient at play when it comes to conspiracy theories in white Christian spaces, but also I think in spaces like those RFK swims in.
When they feel their influence and power dwindling, conspiracies become a tool for reasserting their worldview as legitimate.
In these instances, they are a group used to privilege and they are trying to hold on to it by changing the standards of the real and the true.
Changing the standards of the real and the true.
Who would dare to have that kind of authority, Dan?
Who would dare to show up in public and say, I have the authority to change the real and the true?
Well, this is why the atheists, at least the white male atheists of the 20th century and white Christians often were able to get along here because they both thought, when you have an authority like science, when you have an authority like democracy, you're going to wind up in a place where me as a white man or a white Christian are no longer going to be the standard bearer of what is real and true.
Dan, think about Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for a minute.
He has spent the how many of the last decades., peddling conspiracy theories in order to gain legitimacy.
This is how he became a public figure after meth addiction, after a brainworm, after being someone who was willing to admit he left a bear carcass in Central Park, after it was reported that he had over two hundred mistresses in his phone at one time.
He's a damn, I just want you to think about this for a minute.
He's as close to we have as royalty in the United States.
The Kennedy family is as close as we'll ever get to royalty.
I don't know.
I mean, you all and I know you're going to email me everyone and tell me Beyonce and I know.
You don't.
What I'm trying to say is that if you're a Kennedy in this country, that's like as close as it gets.
And this guy was completely discredited and he's also a psychopath.
So if you're him, you're going to show up and say, I have the authority to change what is real and true.
That is my mission.
And you know what?
You know what is real and true?
Only certain people should survive.
The strong, the healthy, the vigorous.
Those with the genes to carry us forward.
When he talks about autism as being caused by anything else except for just.
Is that just how it happens?
When Robert F. Kennedy wants to say that you should not have a vaccine, when Robert F. Kennedy thinks that we can talk about gun violence in this country as a result of kids being on certain kinds of medications, he is a eugenicist.
He is someone who's saying we only want certain people to survive.
And I'm just going to go on the record for that.
I'm not alone.
One of the top folks who just walked out of the CDC said it himself.
Let me make one point, Dan, and it's yours.
Democracy is a story that says everybody's worth it.
The Trump administration is anti-democratic.
They chose RFK because the anti-vaccine, anti-science, anti-data, anti-research stance that he's taking does not think everybody's worth it.
If you're an autocrat who thinks only some people are worth it, you want guys in charge of your health and human services and your CDC who think not everybody's worth it.
And there's a further story to this in terms of who they put in place, Jim O'Neill, but off to you.
I was going to say, I mean, we can go back to COVID and a broader discourse about this, this notion that the only way forward was to have herd immunity.
Right now, I think we all recognize, like we don't have to be like, you know, public health experts to recognize that, yeah, it's better if you can get to a point where, like, enough of the population has, you know, immunity or resistance and so forth that it's not the kind of situation we had.
But if you're the person who says, you know what we need to do?
We just need to expose everybody and do the herd immunity.
And you know that there are people who will die if you do that.
You know that there are people who are immunocompromised who will die.
What you're saying is they don't deserve to live.
Sorry, they're just too weak.
This is the survival of the fittest thing and i guess i guess you weren't one of the fittest and that's that's the logic here behind so many of these these so-called policies and so i think i think that that's really key and i think you know if people are like i don't know that much about rfk oh that seems really wonky to go cool just look at covid just look at our recent memory and look at the arguments that were made because you're kind of like okay like yeah eventually we'll get to herd immunity what the hell is wrong with like immunizing people in the meantime Like,
you know, until that day, and we're largely there now.
We're, there are still people affected by COVID as they were.
But for the most part, for most healthy people now, it's, it's basically like a seasonal flu.
Great.
But we didn't have to have a bunch of people die to get there if we had the political will not to do that.
Okay.
I want to briefly, and I know you've got a lot more to say, Neil, but just to come back to this with, you know, a speech writer and investor.
And of course, anybody looking at this on the outside or with any level of objectivity, anybody in like, I don't know, the corporate world who's like, excuse me, like competence, where does that play out here?
The CV looks a little thin on here.
You know, where are the position papers they've written, whatever.
We have to remember.
And I think we've seen this over and over and over with this administration.
In the first Trump administration, we see it now.
I think we see it in spades now.
The lack of competence is the requisite requirement for this job.
Because obviously at the CDC, anybody who's competent in these things, they just got marched out of the building.
The ones who were willing to say something or forced to resign or they chose to resign or people who have been fired, the people who resigned in protest, they were escorted out of the building.
That's what happens to competence in the Trump administration.
You're escorted out.
You're shown out.
Why?
Because we want somebody in there.
who has no competence because then what do they do?
They just defer to somebody else.
And he just got the biggest, like the biggest promotion of his life.
He works for R.J. Jr..
What he's..s suddenly going to become a pro-vaccine person, right?
The lack of competence is what they want.
It's a feature, not a bug.
But if you don't have competence, then the standard of what is real and true is bent to the leader.
Like, absolutely.
And, like, we've been over this how many times in these weekly roundups since Trump got inaugurated the second time.
You've said it so many times.
The incompetence is a feature.
And if you have incompetent people in place, then if you are trying to change the standard of what is real and true, whether that is in history, whether that is in not.
allowing certain books to be taught or reviewing the Smithsonian or making sure that national monuments have signs that don't disagree with your view of American history, whatever.
If you want to stay, if you want to change what is real and true, you have to get people who are willing to bend to your will, not facts, not data, not research.
The same goes at the CDC.
It's the same thing.
One more piece of that, if we just like you mentioned appealing to an authority.
So it's often described as a fallacy, the appeal to authority.
And it kind of is and it kind of isn't.
Some say, well, we all appeal to authority.
And that's absolutely right.
If I'm sick, I like you, Brad.
I think you know a lot about a lot of things, but if I wake up feeling sick, I'm not texting Brad Onishim.
I'm like, I don't know.
Today, do you think this is viral?
Or do you think it's bacterial?
What do you think I should do?
Coke zero.
Yeah, that's right.
I'm going to go to a doctor.
And, you know, and we've all had conversations where we do some things like, why are you doing that?
Well, my doctor said this, and then they sent me to this specialist, and they said this, and they explained it this way.
So this is what I'm doing.
And they're like, oh, okay.
Well, you know, we all appeal to authority.
We all, none of us know everything about anything.
So we have to appeal to people who know more.
The question is always, what is, is it a legitimate authority or is it not?
Or how do we scale that?
That's where that question of competence comes in.
If I've got medical questions, I go to an authority who is competent in medicine.
If I have questions about, I don't know, maybe raising kids, maybe I go read some books by child psychologists, specialists and others who have that.
Maybe I even talk to friends who have more experience or they're further along in that or like something went really wrong that they tried.
They're like, hey, don't do this.
You're like, okay, note to self.
The point is we all appeal to authority, but when you make it.
a conscious structure to make sure that those in authority lack any kind of competence so that it's just whatever they want that becomes the measure of the real and the true.
That's when you find yourself in the kind of situation we are now, where you now have a CDC, the Centers for Disease Control, that basically doesn't believe any basic science about diseases.
It's the Center for how to prevent them.
They dropped the control.
It's the Center for Disease.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, so it's just...
And so I think that that's the key because you will talk to people on the right.
I've had that conversation like, well, everybody appeals to authority.
Are you saying you don't want to be like, that's dumb.
Everybody has to depend on something.
You're like, okay, yeah, everybody appeals to authorities.
But what's the basis of the authority?
Why listen to them?
And for those of us who value competence and expertise, that's the basis.
And that's what we see here with this.
Well, let's talk about Jim O'Neill, because it gets worse.
So Jim O'Neill is not only incompetent when it comes to disease and infectious diseases and medicine, but he is straight up coming from the Peter Thiel pipeline.
So Dan, just to recap the last six months, we had the whole Elon Musk thing, co president, Flame Out, Doge.
Where is Elon now?
Who knows?
I don't know where Elon is right now.
He seems to have taken whatever advice people were giving him to, like, Khan, maybe cool it for a bit.
Let's get off the whatever.
He's not in front of the cameras all the time right now.
We maintained for a long time on this show that Peter Thiel is really the one you should be watching.
He is the one that put in JD Vance to where he is now.
And guess what?
Remember when JD did his whole like Silicon Valley thing?
Well, he was working at the same firm as Jim O'Neill.
This is a Peter Thiel plant.
Jim O'Neill comes from the Peter Thiel world.
Okay?
So I'm reading from a piece at Public Citizen.
Okay?
O'Neill has a lot of potential conflicts of interest when it comes to leading the CDC.
His board positions, his investments, his career choices have resulted in ties to healthcare-related companies that could pose conflicts of interest if he joins HHHS.
This was written before he was confirmed.
And guess what he has?
And guess what now he's in charge?
His former firm, Mithril Capital, which was a Peter, it's a Peter Thiel outfit, invests in various healthcare ventures.
He's also, Dan, tied to what Public Citizen calls alarming extremist projects.
Now, some of you are like Peter Thiel Aware, PayPal, Palantir, but you also might remember that Peter Thiel is involved in the Seasteading Institute with Patty Friedman, yes, the grandson of Milton Friedman.
The Seasteading Institute, backed by Thiel, founded by Milton Friedman's grandson, envisions tens of millions of people in an Apple or a Google country where the people would not vote, but rather the companies would govern in what Friedman called a successful dictatorship.
The man who now leads the CDC has been intimately involved in an effort to create network cities that are autonomous zones run by a company that are characterized as successful dictatorships.
Okay, so that doesn't seem great.
Now I could go on and on, we're going to run out of time.
One of the things that Jim O'Neill has been really invested in, personally and in terms of money, is longevity.
All the efforts to basically extend human life or make it such that humans can become immortal.
He's actually friends with Brian Johnson.
Dan, you know the guy who spends two million dollars a year trying to be immortal, who lives in a hyperbaric chamber essentially.
They're good pals, okay?
Now one of the things I want to make a point about that that goes directly what I just said about eugenics, okay?
Peter Thiel and Jim O'Neill and others are like in the top one percent of wealth in the world.
Now, O'Neill may not be in the top one percent in the United States.
I don't know his net worth.
Thiel certainly is.
But their focus as humans has been on how could I live forever?
Is that fair, Dan?
I don't.
I mean, is that a fair like the question that has like fascinated them and caused them to like put significant time and resources into something is how could I live forever?
Me?
Or how could I live at sea in a successful dictatorship away from all these pesky plebeians?
and other organisms that are not worth my time.
Like, if you think of what has animated the decades Jim O'Neill has been on Earth, it is how could I live forever and how can I get away from most other humans and live in a place where they don't have a say, where they're not worth it.
You think about Susan Menares and all the other folks who were ousted at CDC or who were walked out of the building, and guess what, Dan?
You know what the questions that have animated their life have been?
How do we cure cancer?
So millions of normal people every year in the entire world don't die of that.
How do we cure infectious diseases?
How do we make sure COVID doesn't become a recurring pandemic issue that is controlled, that it is, we are at a place where we have immunization and it is not a pandemic again.
Do you see what I'm saying, Dan?
Like, people wake up in the morning and certain things animate their life.
Why am I getting up today?
We're replacing people whose whole life has been dedicated.
to helping others be healthy and flourish.
People who I would say are into democracy because it's a story that says everybody is worth it with somebody who has been very invested in a successful dictatorship and the question of how he could live forever.
And to my reading, and I don't know Jim O'Neill personally, so maybe I'm wrong, has spent very few seconds of his life wondering, how do I make the existence of my fellow organisms on this earth better?
This is a eugenicist regime, and this is worse than you think in terms of who is taking over.
Now, he's not confirmed yet.
There needs to be a Senate thing, the whole thing, but this is what got me just livid.
Just Livid last night, in addition to the DHS tweets, off to you.
Just to say that there is noise from some in the GOP and the Senate about, you know, creating speed bumps and the confirmation and stuff, and this is not going to happen.
They make noise about everything.
Nobody ever, ever is going to run foul of Trump or the Trump administration, but you'll hear that, and that's been making the news as well.
Let's see it.
Let's see it, Bill Cassidy.
Let's see it.
Are you a Trump butt snorkeler or not?
Let's find out.
Because it's your moment.
You're a doctor.
You're the one who said, I'm going to give RFK a chance.
So let's have it, bro.
It's your, it's, this is your moment, okay?
This is, this is your final four moment.
Let's do it.
Let's take a break.
We'll come back and talk about what's going on at West Point and across higher ed in the country, which I think has a direct relation to all of this.
Be right back.
All right, Dan, these are some stories that most people have not heard and they need to know about and they connect everything we're talking about today.
So take it away.
Yeah, so I'll start with a story and Politico did a nice piece on this about the, it fits into higher ed, but specifically at West Point, you know, the Army Service Academy.
And it's well known what Pete Hegseth's image of the military is.
Secretary of Defense, obviously, a Christian Crusader Army, army, efforts to remove women from combat, expert efforts rather to expel trans troops from the military and so forth.
As Jasper Craven, who's the author of this political piece, notes, it's less known what Hegseth has said about civilian oversight of the military.
And so I'm reading from the political article.
It says this.
It says in his 2024 book, The War on Warriors, Hegseth also agitates against America's bedrock constitutional doctrine of civilian military control, casting this class of martial outsiders as weak, privileged, radically left.
During his confirmation hearing in January, Hexeth pledged to, quote, rip root and branch the politics and divisive policies, end quote, out of service academies like West Point by ridding them of civilian faculty.
Some of whom, he wildly alleges in his book, had responded to the weeks after 9-11 with a we deserved this narrative.
Okay.
The point is that part of his vision of the military is that we don't need civilian oversight of it.
We don't need civilians in it.
And for those who don't know, West Point, it's a military academy, it's a college.
It's a university, and it has majors and degrees and different things like this.
And there are a number of civilian faculty there.
And what this article is highlighting is the way that they have been under sort of pressure and have basically been sort of purged from West Point.
So the article focuses on Graham Parsons, who's a civilian faculty member there, who's teaching at West Point since 2012.
And it talks about when Trump issued his executive orders, when Hegseth issued the memo saying that there wasn't going to be anything about critical race theory, gender ideology, and DEI.
The administration at West Point required all faculty to submit their syllabi for review and so forth so they could look at what people were reading and so forth.
And in the article, Parsons says he thought that West Point was preparing to resist the order, and instead he was one of the faculty for whom all of his books were banned.
West Point also initiated strict policies requiring that anything that scholars publish had to be reviewed.
Conference presentations had to be reviewed.
Media appearances had to be approved ahead of time.
Podcasts had to be reviewed.
Any kinds of blogs, media interviews, all of it had to be reviewed by them.
West Point also, as a result of going through these policies, they dissolved their sociology major.
They removed a number of history and English courses, and they abolished at least a dozen diversity clubs from campus, all to fall in line with these policies of Hegseth and the Trump administration.
So Parsons said, the same faculty member in May, this is after the policy of approval and so forth, in May, in a New York Times interview, he said that West Point was aiming to, quote, indoctrinate, not educate.
Next day, he was placed under investigation for misconduct, and he resigned and went somewhere else.
Pete Hegseth, so none other than the Secretary of Defense posted on X, You will not be missed, Professor Parsons.
So just to make this very sort of personal and petty and everything that the Pete Hagseth is.
This is not limited to West Point.
Dozens of academics have left the service academies under pressure.
Many say that it's aimed at undermining independence and critical thought and things like this.
And the article also highlights this.
So retired General Martin France, he's an Air Force Academy graduate.
He was also the former chair of the Department of Astronautics and Engineering at the Air Force Academy.
So a very qualified person.
He said this.
This is him being quoted.
So General France retired said this.
Our officers should be sentient beings who understand just war theory, the laws around conflict, the orders that they are morally obliged to disobey.
He went on to say that the Trump administration wants to breed compliance rather than teach nuance.
And he alleged that this forms an officer class of, quote, flesh and bone drones.
End quote.
Here's my point.
A lot of things here.
There weren't civilian faculty at West Point really until a requirement was passed.
A law was passed in 1993.
The military managed to get it sort of watered down so they said that there had to be civilian faculty as deemed necessary.
So this is always something that the military has been resistant to.
But what's the point?
We've seen what the Trump administration wants to do to higher ed.
The reason I find the service academies so telling is they are to higher ed what DC is to law enforcement.
Why did Trump start the federalization of law enforcement in DC?
Because DC is this weird administrative space that's not a state in its own right and so forth and so they were able to do that.
The service academies, again, they're accredited universities, but they are also subject to all the stuff of the Department of Defense and the government and the military and all of this, they're the testing ground.
If you want to see what the vision for higher ed is within the Trump administration, take a look at the service academies.
Trump famously said he wanted generals like Hitler had.
Does everybody remember that?
Generals who wouldn't question, generals who wouldn't push back, generals who wouldn't resign when asked to do things.
Everything that General France is saying generals and lower officers should do.
I love when he said they need to recognize orders that they are morally obliged to disobey.
Not to obey, but to disobey.
We see this.
But why does it matter?
Because this is what they want in higher ed generally.
When it talks about flesh and blood drones, that may not always be the military, but that's what they want.
That's what they want in economics.
They want universities that churn out people who can help the GDP grow.
They want people who can fill low-level positions.
They want people who can do that.
They don't want people who think and reason and ask complex questions or just ask the reason why.
The question why?
Why are we doing this?
Why should we do this?
Why should we allocate resources this way?
Are things that we're doing as a company good?
The kinds of questions you were just posing is what we're doing is it good for humans generally or is it just self-serving?
Does it help a narrow few?
Those kinds of questions, these are what they want.
out of higher ed.
And so when we look at the service academies, we see not just the sculpting of a military in a HEGSETH model.
That's a part of it.
But that's their vision for American society.
Not all in the military, but they want a society of drones who will do what they are told, who will go to work when they are told, who will do the jobs that they are told, and who won't ask complex questions about why they're doing that or who's being disadvantaged by it or what's happening to the environment through it.
or who is benefiting the most or why the distribution of the wealth that's created from that is so unequally spread around and so forth.
So this was a really telling article, but for me, it's one of those things that that opens a window.
In DC, we see what Trump wants to do in cities.
In the service academies, we see what this administration wants to do in higher ed, because they can't be a Harvard and fight back the way Harvard has.
We've seen other universities have simply folded.
That's their vision.
This goes hand in hand with the decimation of the humanities, and I'm not going to do my humanities professor speech, but I'll just say that the humanities are the place.
And the social scientists in sociology, as shout out here, Anthro, where.
That's why they dissolved the sociology department of West Point.
Well, because sociology does what, Dan?
It examines the human groups and the systemic ways that they operate.
And surprise, surprise, oftentimes they kind of realize that the system is biased against certain people or is designed to marginalize others.
And so sociology is super woke.
One of the things that we probably don't have time to go into at length here is that they're also trying to shorten the visa stays for foreign students.
And I'll just say that a couple of things here that I think connect.
Everything you just said about West Point and what they're trying to make the military and the key that the key point you made about it being the DC of higher ed.
What did I say twenty minutes ago?
We want to transform what is real and true.
We are the standard, Trump, Hegseth of what is real and true.
And if you don't get in line with what we say is real and true, goodbye, Professor Ferguson.
You won't be missed.
Additionally, they don't want foreign students coming because they think that they're somehow a drag on this economy.
And I just want to say quickly, I don't have time for all the stats and all the numbers.
Foreign students give billions of dollars to this economy every year.
They pay full tuition.
When you get in state tuition at your state college or whatever, they don't.
They often are not available for scholarships.
So when tuition is $48,000 or $64,000 and you end up paying $10,000 or $15,000 or $20,000 or whatever, they don't.
In addition, Dan, when you think of small college towns around this country, what does a college town do?
Yes, sometimes it's annoying.
There's 20-year-olds everywhere.
They drink too much.
They party.
I don't know, whatever you want to say about college towns.
You know what they also usually have is like tons of like shops you don't get in another small town next door to that one because there's people there that want to eat ethnic food.
They want to have certain kinds of stores, certain kinds of clothes, certain kinds of services, certain kinds of amenities, whatever.
And what happens is you have a college town and it creates so much for the economy in a place that might be rural Ohio.
Rural Massa where you live, it doesn't matter.
When you try to change what is real and true according to an authoritarian, narcissistic, psychopathic standard, you hurt everyone else.
And that means you don't even pay attention to the fact that people coming to our universities every year makes this country rich financially, culturally.
We are the envy of the world and not anymore, but we were when it came to just what we had here in terms of universities.
And that is gone for a short-sighted, sad, conspiratorial movement that has totally decimated that sector of our nation.
Final thoughts before we go to reasons for hope, or if you want, give us your reason for hope.
Just final thoughts real quick about that issue is the language from DHS, right, that fits into everything they do about immigration.
A DHS statement said that they wanted to correct a system in which foreign students, quote, have taken advantage of U.S. generosity.
I'd love to hear how, right?
As you say, I've spent, I know you have too, my entire adult life has been spent around international students at every level of every kind.
I have been an international student.
They are not leeching off the American system in some way, right?
So like there's that piece, but there's also the demonizing and the fearmongering that comes along.
So this was a statement the DHS statement made.
They said for too long past administrations have allowed foreign students and other visa holders to remain in the U.S. virtually indefinitely, posing safety risks.
costing untold amounts of taxpayer dollars and disadvantaging U.S. citizens.
Safety risks.
Like it's none of which.
It's fantastic.
The most vetted, maybe not the most, one of the most vetted populations in this country are international students.
They are vetted far more than domestic students.
Your college campus is full of thousands of American students who undergo virtually no vetting at all to be there.
The international students do.
It just gives lie to the fact that what they want is a white America.
They want to keep the foreigners out.
That's the vision.
Here's my reason for hope and it's an extended.
Governor Pritzker says to the Trump administration, Do not come.
You're not welcome.
And he also calls out the media and says, You know, don't both sides this story.
So Pritzker has really stepped up.
A lot of people feel like Pritzker is the one who's given substance to what Newsom has kind of done with his smoke on social media.
The other person though that's not getting much attention is Larry Krasner, who's the DA in Philadelphia, Progressive DA.
And he has basically said that people who show up in your jurisdiction who are kidnapping others are unidentified, are committing assault.
They can be arrested.
Now, this is a big deal.
We could have spent all day today, Dan, talking about this because if you actually have a DA who steps up and says, If ICE shows up here and starts doing what they're doing, we're going to charge them with crimes like kidnapping and assault and so on.
That's not only a big deal in terms of like shoeing ICE away, that is a development in soft secession and a kind of like a cult civil war that's getting pretty warm.
Because if you have one law enforcement agency saying, we are not going to let this law enforcement agency show up here and do what they say they have the authority to do, you have a crisis of authority and that's how civil wars are made.
Okay?
So that's there.
I'll give you a couple more from the Discord just because people in our Discord are awesome.
You know, I there's so the sandwich thrower in DC not in not indicted.
Jeanine Pierrot'ss trying to give him a misdemeanor, but the grand jury was like, nah, I don't think so.
The concentration camp in Florida, casually known as Alligator Alcatraz, has been dismantled.
Now, the bad news is they use your tax dollars to make it, Florida, and now they're using it to dismantle it.
So a lot of consultants got rich, but whatever.
There are, there are more in here.
Oh, one of those is in Washington State where there is a law, and there's been a law since April, and we, we, we talked about it, but just remind everybody that does not allow troops from outside of the state to come into the state of Washington without the governor's permission, which sets up again a.
a confrontation with ICE if and when they try to show up and wait, or I'm sorry, with National Guard if and when they are deployed to a place like Seattle.
So interesting development.
We need to keep an eye on that.
What is your reason for hope?
A reason for hope.
It's a bit, I don't know, softer, but it's more polling data.
But we're, you know, all of a sudden, we're that time of year where it's like, oh, it's September.
By the time a lot of people hear this, we'll be, it's Labor Day weekend.
We're into September.
That means we're like 14 months from midterms.
Like it's right around the corner.
And so polling data shows that Trump's approval rating has hit a new low.
And that starts to become really relevant, the approval of Only 37% of registered voters approve of Trump's job.
55% disapprove.
It's a negative 18-point rating.
That's a 21-point drop since January when he took office.
More significant than that, because of course Democrats hate him.
Republicans love him.
More significant than that is the numbers on independence.
They are worse.
than they are for registered voters as a whole.
58% disapproval, only 31% approval.
I think, you know, once we get across that sort of Labor Day threshold and we start looking, we're going to start seeing a lot of focus on the midterms as we come into this fall.
and certainly into the spring, I think this becomes increasingly relevant.
I don't think it changes what Trump does, but I think that's relevant for the midterms.
And all the things we talk about, all the things we talk about in the bonus episode, all the ways that the GOP is going to try to disrupt an election as usual at the midterms, accepting all of that, I think that this is significant.
And I think that we have an administration that part of none of their strategy involves actually trying to get people to like Trump more.
And I think that becomes increasingly relevant as we move forward.
All right, y'all.
Thanks for listening.
I want to send a shout out to everybody who joined us this week on the bonus episode, another live recording, which was super fun.
It's just good to be together.
And it always feels good when we do those and get to joke around a little bit, get to know one another, and get to do this with some of you who listen with us.
And a lot of love for cargo shorts in the chat.
So I'm just going to say it.
There was a lot of love for cargo shorts.
There was a lot of encouragement of the cargo shorts, which, you know, Dan, just keep doing what you're doing.
Dad vibes matter, Dan.
Dad vibes matter.
Dad core to the core.
Absolutely.
That's me, I guess.
Dad vibes matter.
We'll be back next week with a great interview.
It's in the code and the weekly roundup.
Appreciate all of you.
If you can think about subscribing, it would really help us keep doing.
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