Weekly Roundup: Tylenol Trump at the UN + Political Violence
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This episode of Straight White American Jesus dives into a wide range of pressing issues, from the Trump administration’s controversial advice for pregnant women to avoid Tylenol—driven in part by RFK’s influence despite a lack of scientific support—to the broader political and patriarchal implications for public health. The hosts examine how the right manipulates media through distraction and “flooding the zone,” using high-profile events like the murder of Charlie Kirk to bury stories such as the Epstein files. They also unpack the escalation of political violence and rhetoric, highlighting the dangerous labeling of teachers and opponents as “terrorists” by figures like JD Vance, Kash Patel, Kristi Noem, and Steve Bannon. Megan Kelly’s dismissive response to an ICE bribery scandal serves as a window into how loyalty now trumps principles, while the erosion of good faith dialogue underscores the deepening polarization tied to identity and ideology. Yet, amid the bleak landscape, the episode also points to reasons for hope, from Ryan Walters’ resignation as Oklahoma superintendent to Disney’s challenge of Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension, offering reminders that pushback and positive change are still possible.
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Welcome to Straightwide American Jesus.
I'm Brad O'Neishi, founder of Access Moody Media, author of Preparing for War, The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism.
And what comes next here today with my co-host?
I'm Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Glad to be with you, Brad.
Always great.
Yep.
Always great to be with you, Dan.
Every Friday, we get to hang and talk about the worst stuff.
So it's the best.
This week we're going to talk it's like a best of times, worst of times thing.
Like we hang out, but it's to talk about it.
Well, it gives me a headache.
I might need to go get some Tylenol, which we're going to talk about today.
And just dive into what's behind the announcement from Trump and RFK about Tylenol and autism and all of that.
We'll then jump into the rhetoric surrounding political violence.
It seems as if we are getting close to a day when the Trump administration is going to label the Democrats a terrorist organization.
They are getting very close, and we will prove that in a minute.
And finally, we'll look at Tom Holman, the leader of ICE, and a scandal of him taking a bribe and the reactions from the right, which are basically like, who cares if he's corrupt?
He's kidnapping people we want kidnapped, so leave him alone.
This is the straight white American Jesus Weekly Roundup.
Lots to talk about.
Let's go.
I think you summed it up all pretty well.
We just call it a day.
Like, there it was.
Like, you know.
So it's like, yeah.
Everybody gets a day off.
Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna go get some Tylenol.
Cue up the reruns of the wire.
All right, Dan, tell us about Tylenol.
Tell us about what RFK and and and Trump are up to.
I'm sure people listening are already heard the snippets, watched the news, read the tweets, all this stuff, but sort it out for us and let's figure out what's going on here.
Yeah, so for those who might not have heard, or just to tie some things together, the Trump administration, living out a kind of RFK fantasy, really, and we'll sort of come back to that, has advised pregnant women to avoid taking Tylenol, you know, acetaminothen, if you buy the generic like I do, or paracetamol is what it goes by in like lots of other places, to avoid using it for any reason other than very high fever.
And RFK said that the FDA would be changing safety labeling.
There's a plans to launch a public health campaign to improve awareness of this.
The FDA issued a statement that was actually more measured than Trump's rhetoric might have suggested.
Too bad nobody likely goes to like the FDA website to read the statement, but this is what they said.
The FDA said the doctor should consider limiting the use of Tylenol.
Note the consider limiting the use of Tylenol, while also taking account that it is the safest over-the-counter option to treat fever and pain in pregnant women, which can also harm maternal and fetal health.
And in quotes, they said, to be clear, while an association between acetaminothen and autism has been described in many studies.
This is very debatable as I understand it from every expert in the field.
A causal relationship has not been established, and there are contradictory studies in the scientific literature.
So a more measured statement.
The purported issue, of course, as it suggests, is a supposed Link between Tylenol use among pregnant women and autism.
Every major medical group, the medical community at large, international health agencies, health agencies, and other countries, they've all slammed this move.
Nobody is behind this.
The vast majority of studies, including a recent Swedish study, looking at about a quarter million people.
It was a really big study, considered sort of a gold standard study.
Found no association between Tylenol use and autism.
The American College of Obstet Obstetrics and Gynacology, the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynacology, and the Society for Maternal Fetal Medicine have all extensively reviewed the data.
None of them support this move.
What does that mean?
It means it's obviously not based on science or standards of medical care.
Big surprise.
So what's going on?
These are some of these are the pieces why I think this matters, and in you know, the sort of broader takeaways of how this fits.
The first is that it's it's just part of the quack medicine and the search for the quote unquote cause of autism.
This is a long-standing issue among some on on now the political right.
This is a this is a a sort of snipe hunt that in my view didn't start on the political right, it started other places, but it's very much a part of right-wing ideology now.
And it's really just a slight spin in all the discredited anti-vaxxer links between vaccines and abortion.
This this notion that there's excuse me, autism, not abortion.
This this notion that there is some quick fix, like like silver bullet thing we're gonna find that this is what causes this neurological development and so forth, and we can just stop using it a magical wave of wand and it's gone.
I think it's it's whatever that is, and I also want to be careful.
I'm not aiming to pathologize autism here to talk about people who have autism or something like that.
That kind of language is rife here, and I think that that's its own sort of concern or issue.
I think also people get really confused, people who should know better, people that talk about autism rates have been rising and it's through the roof.
And and most observers will say it's because we have different diagnostic criteria.
We have better tools for recognizing this, for recognizing that we call it a spectrum because it is a wide spectrum of behaviors and positions that people land on, and so people on you know on the autism spectrum can range all the way from people who the average person in their life might be really surprised to find that out to people who are non-verbal and need help communicating and different kinds of things like this.
So, anyway, point is it's a complex problem and it's it's a search for a simplistic and simple solution.
I think it's also throwing a bone to RFK Jr.
I think this is just like a pet issue of his, and this is Trump, you know, kind of giving him a pat on the head and saying, okay, let's let's do this thing, which takes it really far from the science.
And I think there's also a patriarchal dimension to this.
There's a dimension that that I think feeds in all the other stuff on the right about the disregard for women's health and autonomy.
We for years have seen a male-dominated party push against and regulate women's health care, whether it's abortion access or birth control.
And this was also on display.
Trump's advice to pregnant women.
He said to fight like hell not to take Tylenol and to basically tough it out.
You know, sorry, I hear pregnancy is painful, it's really hard, tough it out, you know, you can do it, kind of thing, from somebody who's never going to be pregnant, from a man who's never had to tough out anything in his life.
This is a guy that, you know, decided to complain, like to the UN General Assembly that de-escalators weren't working enough because Trump can't take the stairs.
And we have to ask ourselves, would this advice ever be given to a drug that's prescribed to men?
Would we ever tell the man you just you just need to tough it out?
You need it can cause problems.
You need to just tough it out.
So I do think that there's a patriarchal dimension here.
The long and short of is all of this for me is in a certain sense, it's nothing new.
This is just another outflow of these impulses we have seen growing on the right for years, appointing RFK to the position that he has is you know, was just pouring fire, gasoline onto this fire.
We've seen this, but it's it's going to impact public health and the well-being of lots of people, and it shows how ideology and loyalty is what drives this administration.
So a couple, I want to I want to zoom in and zoom out.
I want to think long term, I want to think short term, I want to think into the past.
So uh here's the dimensions I want to look at.
In the very short term, we went from Charlie Kirk coverage to Tylenol coverage.
And if you looked at this week's news, if you watched legacy media, if you were on blue sky, if you were on your Instagram reels, it was it was Tylenol, it was autism, it was RFK, it was Donald Trump talking about this stuff.
They're saying some of the dumbest things possible.
Trump is saying tough it out.
Trump is saying, don't take Tylenol unless you really have to, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And I think everything you laid out makes sense to me.
The thing I'm not hearing people talk about, the thing I'm not seeing in in most outlets and most commentators and most coverage is this.
The Charlie Kirk thing.
Let me back up.
Charlie Kirk's murder.
It's not a thing.
Charlie Kirk's murder.
And the thing that followed, which was a mythmaking in real time of making Charlie Kirk an American saint.
Okay.
Happened at just the right time for Trump.
Because we were Dan, like at one of those moments of like the Epstein files might be coming.
Like if you just backed up on the timeline, and if you were like, what would be the most beneficial thing for Trump in the next month?
It would be something that would disrupt the news cycles so heavily that getting back to Epstein would feel like a gargantuan, her Herculean, almost impossible task.
And also something that would would blunt the efforts of kind of his right flank calling for the Epstein, right?
Like so it brings them back on board.
It brings them back into the fold.
So it's both the media coverage and the sort of public awareness of that, but I think also on his own right flank, it blunts the force of the Marjorie Taylor Greens and people like that that are coming.
It does, right?
So like think about it.
If if you have a place where, and we covered this.
So everybody, let's just think back two and three months.
We had Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Green criticizing Israel, saying, I'm not sure that we should be involved with Iran and Israel and everything that's going on.
That's happening.
You had the the Manosphere podcast bros saying I don't he won't release the Epstein files.
I'm out, bro.
I'm done.
I can't believe I voted for this.
He's a traitor.
Charlie Kirk happens.
The murder of Charlie Kirk and then the following kind of mythmaking in real time.
You galvanize your base.
When you're in wartime, there's no there's no room for factions.
So now all of that chatter, all of that, like it's still there.
There's still some people talking about APAC and and Tucker's, you know, talked about at least in my view, the Jews killing Jesus at Charlie Kirk's memorial, the whole thing.
But but for the most part, the right flank, as you said, the critics of Trump, the the calls for like Trump's a traitor, he won't release the Epstein files, that's gone.
That's gone.
Is anyone is that is Theo Vaughan and all those guys talking about that these days?
I don't think they are.
And then he comes out with RFK, and it's like Tylenol and autism are linked, and this and that, and just quack science as you put it.
I think for Trump, this is sure throwing a bone to RFK.
I think this is also just like, hey, watch this.
Shot, Charlie Kirk's memorial, and the whole myth making in real time, labeling left-wing groups major terrorist organizations, Antifa, whatever that is, is now our our number one site.
And everyone is just like covering that, me included.
Okay.
Then Chaser.
Shot, Chaser, Tyler, Tylenol.
Throwing a crazy UN speech, and you're hey Dan, how far are we from talking about Epstein now?
Like, how are we even close?
Is Epstein part of the zeitgeist?
Is Epstein part of the ether?
Are there journalists out there?
What are the what is every journalist in DC and beyond doing right now?
They're chasing down Tylenol stories, autism stories, tariff stories, IKEA is going to be tariffed through the roof or or out of the country.
Epstein's gone.
So I think that's one.
I think that's just one you have to like.
I and and I just don't hear enough people like sort of saying that.
Or two is the long view for me historically is that Trump represents the breakdown of the post-war consensus that after World War II, catastrophe globally was so universally agreed upon.
What we just experienced as a globe was so bad.
Nazis, Mussolini, fascists, Holocaust, war on almost every continent from Australia to East Asia to Western Europe, bombed out London.
We're not doing it again.
And for better or for worse, the U.S. became this global leader.
It benefited economically from the war, and we're often running with the kind of post-war consensus that was in place since World War II.
The US and Western Europe and the UN all kind of holding things intact, Russia as an outlier, China as this dark horse, you know, competitor for the last however many decades, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
When you elect Trump the second time, you give license to say, I don't want that anymore.
We're done.
We're gonna, we're gonna, we're out of the UN, we're out of the Paris Climate Treaty, we're out of the world order.
Go ahead, Putin, do what you want.
JD Vance says, I don't really care about what's happening in Ukraine.
And you know what else is there?
The FDA, the CDC, and the United States, which has led on science and innovation for decades.
And we're like, nah, we're done with that.
Let's put quack people in every spot and tell you that I'm gonna use some words that Tylenol is what leads to autism and this and it's just a revenge porn.
It's revenge authority porn.
And I'll give you one example and I'll shut up.
CJ Engel is a renowned white Christian ethno-nationalist.
And when the Tylenol thing came out, he said, don't trust anyone at in in science or or medicine.
Trust people on Twitter, trust the Trad wives.
They're the ones who know what you need when it comes to your health.
And it was just a complete like F U science, F U C D C U authority, F you post-war consensus, F U liberalism.
I'm not trusting Tylenol because nah, I trust the Trad wives and the Twitter.
He said this were his words, Twitter, squit, schizos, and others.
So there's the short term where like a light years from Epstein.
There's the long term, which is like the Trump presidency represents the destruction of everything in the world that has at least kind of worked for the last 80 years.
There's been a phrase floating around, you know, in the Trump world since the election of you know, flooding the zone.
And they were talking about enacting policies and doing things like deploying the National Guard or firing period or whatever.
And the point is just doing it like a lot really fast, this kind of blitz, so that there just wasn't time to react to it.
And we've talked about that a lot with the courts, the lag of the courts and the courts untangling that, and like you know, the Democrats figuring out to respond to it and governors figuring out how to respond to it.
We we've begun to see that.
But I think it's important to recognize that the flooding the zone strategy, when it comes to media, this is something that Trump has done for a really long time.
I think this is tying in with your point as well of the constant distraction media stuff.
And I don't say that to minimize the significance of this statement about Tylenol.
I think it's I think it's a dumb statement for a lot of reasons.
And I think again, it can cause real harm and and so forth.
But it's it's flooding the zone to do what?
To can just keep the news cycle continually moving.
It's and we are not the ones to talk about this.
They're the only ones.
Everybody's talked about this media studies, people have been studying this for years, but one piece of the 24-hour news cycle, one piece of the commercialization of news, where like, you know, CNN and everybody else, everybody from Fox News to CNN to YouTube, whatever, they have to get clicks because of ad revenue and you know, whatever.
And so you have to constantly have new topics to talk about.
And so you keep flooding the zone, and that that's what it does.
And so, as you say, something like Epstein just sort of disappears and evaporates.
And this this will too.
Next week, it's entirely possible.
Who knows what is going to be the main thing, and it's gonna be like, oh, remember that Tylenol thing?
Wasn't there a Tylenol thing like 12 12 months ago that feels like a big deal?
And that that's what it feels like.
And that's I think it's important to recognize that that is also part of a strategic move by this administration.
And they've said the quiet pirate part out loud for months about flooding the zone.
This is part of what they're doing.
And let's not leave this segment before just saying, and Dan, this uh this is really your bread and butter, and it's something you're an expert on.
You wrote a book, you know, about queer democracy and and a kind of national body dysphoria.
And I I think that comes into play here, because I don't want to leave this segment without saying that RFK to me represents eugenics and represents the idea that if you don't have the right kind of body, then you're not worth it.
And that, right, on this show and so many other places, we've talked about that in terms of if you don't have the right kind of body in terms of your race, your phenotype, if you don't have the right kind of body in terms of your your sexual identity and who you love and are attracted to, if you don't have the right kind of body in terms of your gender expression,
if you don't have the right kind of body in terms of you being a Woman who doesn't know what having a uh uh uh a body that can be pregnant or a body that menstruates and and obviously there are people who don't identify as women who whose bodies do those things, then you're not worth it.
But it also is like if you're disabled or different or divergent, you're not worth it.
And I do think that's at play with with RFK.
RFK is a notorious, infamous, legendary womanizer who is like in his uh late twilight years of his life, who is still taking steroids and crank and going to like you know, military workout video sessions with Pete Hegsaf.
Um he wants to have what he thinks is the right kind of manly body.
And I do think that blaming, you know, when he when when they say quote unquote, you have autism, they're saying you're doing something wrong.
Rather than saying some of us have a body like this, a neuro and a nervous system like that, a brain like this, a whatever, and just accepting the fact that there is a grand, wide, wondrous diversity of of human incarnation, and that's a fact of life.
We can call it good, we can call it we can call it all kinds of things.
I mean, to me it's good, to me it's whatever, but to them it is oh no, no, you don't fit.
And it's not just that we like that doesn't mean we don't like you or not attracted to you.
It's we're not we're not gonna think that you're worth it.
And we're gonna create health conditions, public health conditions that make your life either way harder or such that you may or may not survive.
Yeah, so I mean, you you said a key word diversity, and this ties in with everything else, you know, anti-DEI initiatives and so forth.
And we think of this in terms of like, you know, primarily race or ethnicity, or maybe maybe you know, hiring people who who have disabilities, you know, things like that.
But why you know, if you go take that Ben Metalevel thing, like what is wrong with diversity, I think you get to that really affective visceral gut level response.
The difference is just bad.
Yeah, right.
We should all be embodied in the same way.
We should all have the same kind of bodies and capacities and so forth.
And as you're you're indicating, that spreads out throughout the social.
I think it's here worth pausing here that I mean, if we just talk about women, we could go into the you go into the whole history of like the medical establishment and women's embodiment and women being, you know, dismissed as as hysterical when they would talk about pain and study after study after study that we'll talk about how women traditionally have been like sort of disregarded or not taken as seriously when they report medical conditions to doctors, or I did the the series on it's in the code on you know uh the sexuality materials.
And and one of the things that comes out is and it's shocking is how much doctors and medical people still don't know about women's sexuality and sexual satisfaction and things like this because it has not been studied anywhere near as much as men.
Like men have been the focus of this.
And so you could go on and on and on to that point that female embodiment is already suspect in some ways.
And and I I hear all of that when Trump says you need to tough it out.
You're weak.
If you need Tylenol, you're weak, you're not tough enough.
If you got the Trad wives out there tweeting about how I don't know, you should never have pain and anything other than natural childbirth is bad, and all the things that come with that.
It's it's all part of that notion of making sure that the bodies are the right kind of bodies.
Feminine bodies are already suspect within that, and they have to fit into a sort of a narrower window for acceptance.
I think this is all part of this, and you're right, everything about RFK.
This is this is who he is.
Let's take a break.
We'll come back and dig into JD Vance, the UN uh Steve Bannon.
It's gonna be a super fun party, y'all.
See in a minute.
All right, y'all.
There was a shooting this week at a nice facility, and I'll just go through a couple of those details.
The man accused of opening fire, according to ABC News, is uh at a Dallas Ice field office on Wednesday, killed one detainee and wounded two others, has been identified as 29-year-old person.
I won't say his name.
He very likely acted alone, and he did not expect to survive the attack.
He did not.
He died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Has Dan eerily a similar profile to the Charlie Kirk shooter, somebody who does not seem to have a coherent political ideology, has no clear influences.
Once again, I'll say this is not Luigi Mangioni.
I feel like when you when we got to know Luigi and Mangioni, we got to know somebody who clearly had a radicalization path, had a political ideology, he carried that out, and it it it went from A to B. This one is is similarly not, except for, and I'll just I'll I'll stop here.
The shooter's friends say he was an avid gamer, just like the Charlie Kirk shooter.
Now, this led to all kinds of discussions and reactions about political violence and what is causing it in the country.
This is of course a carry-on to the discussions that were happening after Charlie Kirk was murdered.
So I want to start this by playing you a clip of JD Vance, who is going to say that violence happens because violence like at the ICE facility or Charlie Kirk because people call Republicans and Trumpists and Trump himself bad words like Nazi or fascist.
Here he is.
Stop attacking our law enforcement as the Gestapo.
If you want to stop political violence, stop telling your supporters that everybody who disagrees with you is a Nazi.
If you want to stop political violence, look in the mirror.
That's the way that we stop political violence in this country.
And we got to do it.
Okay.
So JD Vance is taking the line that is is pretty popular these days on the American right, which is Dan, and I'm pretty sure this is the technical term.
That's a term that I remember from political theory.
It might be in Derry Da, but it's the strategy of whoever smelt it, dealt it.
Dan, do you remember that?
It might be Jean-Luc Nancy.
I can't remember where I read it.
I'll try to remember the original French.
Yeah, the French, the French phrase is is notoriously tricky on this.
Yeah.
Hello.
Okay.
So basically they're saying you are causing violence because you're calling people like J.D. Vance and Donald Trump and Cash Patel and Stephen Miller, fascists and Nazis.
Okay.
So because you are calling us that, that is leading to people like doing violence.
That's that's the idea.
Okay.
Now the reaction it from the right is then, as we've discussed so for so long, Dan, is to say, well, this means that Democrats and leftists and others are extremists, they are terrorists, and they should be labeled as such and pursued with a kind of abandon and and uh and chase that is fitting for someone like Osama bin Laden.
So here's Kash Patel saying so much in the Oval Office.
And thanks to your recognition of this and this executive order and the AG's leadership to lead out and prosecute these individuals, we are properly going to chase them down, like the domestic terrorists that they are, and our streets and our communities are gonna be safer because the JTTF and the FBI and Treasury and DHS and DOJ are going to combine forces like never before to root out this new evil that is perpetrating our criminal activities across our societies.
And we we are just so thankful for your leadership and recognition of it.
It's not easy to hear.
Could you have it?
Now, I noted this last week, Dan, and I'll note it again.
This is a this is a basically swapping of the language of Project Esther, which was ostensibly a project on anti-Semitism and defunding the what Project Esther calls the Hamas support networks.
This is they they did a find and replace and they just put in Antifa and leftists.
The case though they are trying to make is that if you recognize Trump and Vance and anyone else as doing things that are like fascism or like Nazism, then you are the one who's causing the violence.
Okay.
That I mean, think about that logic.
And it's a classic logic.
It's it's not they're not original in this, but it's basically like this.
Hey, why is there so much division?
Let's play it out in a couple of stages.
You ready, Dan?
Why is there so much political division in this country?
Why can't Democrats come to the middle?
And Democrats try to come to the middle, and the the American right says, oh, actually, The middle's over here and they move it like four steps to the right.
Democrats are like, oh, okay, yeah, we can well we'll scooch over.
We'll scooch over.
All right, we're scooching.
Okay.
Oh.
Middle's over here now.
And it's four more steps.
And then finally they have enough.
Anyone who's not MAGA is like, this is not the middle.
And what y'all are doing seems like fascism to me.
It seems like something.
I don't know.
There's like people wearing masks with no marked cars kidnapping our neighbors.
This seems like the Gestapo.
And then the right's like, oh, okay.
Guess you didn't want actually to come to the middle and have dialogue, huh?
He's just gonna call us names.
Yeah.
So we show up in masks with no marked cars or warrants, and we kidnap people.
Some of them die.
Some of them are injured seriously?
Sure.
Oh, now you want to say that's Gestapo.
Okay.
Seems like you're the terrorist.
Oh, yeah.
Did we send people to El Salvador?
Even though we weren't supposed to, even though there was no due process?
Maybe.
But you want to call us anti-liberal and anti-constitutional?
That you're the one who I think is probably the terrorist or the one causing violence.
I mean, you whoever smelt it, dealt it.
You smelled the fascism.
I think you're the fascist.
I'm pretty sure it's you.
Okay.
So this is the position they're taking.
And I have more to say because there's I'm gonna give you two more examples, Dan.
But do you you want you're a political, you know, you you're much more steeped in political and social theory than I am.
Do you want to jump in?
I mean, all of that is there, the the piece of taking what they say and then trying to reflect it back.
And and this is a Trump strategy that he's always done.
Like somebody says you're cribs, oh yeah, you're corrupt.
You know, yep.
It's like I'm the rubber, you're glue kind of kind of thing to use another, you know, highly theoretical concept that can help us understand this.
But the ling the the discourse about language and name calling, I mean that that can be a real thing.
It's the selectivity of it.
Everybody knows this.
Like, let's go through a list of names like un-American or enemies of state or socialist or demonic or anti-Christian or political enemies.
These are the words that are used on the right to describe everybody who's not MAGA and have been for a very long time.
And and this is what the critics of of Trump will say is the rhetoric in my view did not originate on the left.
I think the left has actually been slow to like call some of these things what they actually are.
Remember the days of like referring to Trump things Trump said as something that some construed to be racially insensitive?
That's that's how people used to talk about this.
We've come like a long ways from that.
My point is if you want to talk about the name calling, cool.
Let's let's talk about the name calling.
Let's talk about the discourse.
But this is I think all of this about the rhetoric, about the language, about so-called free speech, because I don't think these issues are really about free speech for the right.
It's about what I would talk about, not free speech, but it's about talking by which I mean saying the right things in terms of things that are approved, things that those in power like.
So if you're calling somebody a name that they like, they're not gonna worry about the fact that you're name calling.
If you're out there saying that these people are enemies of America, remember, remember that with like the the media calling the the media the enemy of the state, and you know, and you had media people worried about shootings and things like this.
Remember all of that happening?
That was not left-wing rhetoric.
That was rhetoric coming from from MAGA world.
It's not about name-calling, it's about calling people names that we on the right don't support.
So it's about talking right, saying the right things, but also saying the things that the right says.
Anything the right says, by definition, now is acceptable and is allowable.
Anything to contest that, they're they're working to define it as violent speech or hate speech or what have you, and do all the the sort of cancel culture stuff that they used to cry about and accuse the left of doing, right?
In very explicit cases like Kimmel or you know, other things that we could talk about.
So I think all of this is there.
So yeah, if somebody and this is what I what I tell people all the time, you'll hear this.
Uncle Ron will talk about this or whatever, and you've got to discern when somebody wants to have a good faith conversation and when they don't.
That's it.
There are people in the world who will say, Well, yeah, but I mean, like, isn't it bad to maybe like call them fascists or or Nazis?
Like if people hate that and they take that really seriously, isn't that bad?
And you could say, Yeah, maybe let's talk about that, but what about terms like enemy of the state or un-American, or telling people that I don't know, a whole party is is like a bunch of groomers who are kidnapping children.
You know, the pizza gate rhetoric, All of that sort of stuff.
If you're talking to somebody who can actually hear that, who maybe can reframe that, they've just never thought about it before.
Or maybe they just, like a lot of people, we talk about these shooters who don't have a coherent political ideology.
Guess what?
Most people in our lives don't either.
And there are people in our lives that when you can say, look, here are things that this person said, or here are examples of this.
They they honestly did not know those examples.
Because they are also caught up in the fire hose of the 24 hour news cycle, and they don't remember things that happened three months ago or six months ago or two years ago.
If you can engage people, I'd great.
But most of the time, it's not somebody acting in good faith.
And when they come at you with this kind of language about language, it's not because they're worried about the language.
It's because they are grinding their ideological acts, and we have to recognize that and try to respond.
Just real quick, this is why I was talking to some of this week.
I I have people in my life who are like, who is Charlie Kirk?
Can you help me understand?
I don't know.
And some of them are family members who are conservative, some of them are just others.
And what one of the things I said about Charlie Kirk is look, I said when he would show up to quote unquote debate, the reason I never considered that a true debate or dialogue is this.
When you say good faith, Dan, it's you go into a conversation where it is possible for you to utter these words.
Here are the here are the words that have to be possible for me to think that good faith and dialogue are actually happen, happening.
I'd never thought about it that way.
I'm gonna I'm gonna reconsider.
I'd never thought about it that way.
I'm gonna I'm gonna ponder that for a minute and see what I I arrive at.
Dan, you and I have disagreed on a lot of things over the years.
It could be derida, it could be social theory, it could be you know, where to go eat it, you know, after a conference.
And if you enter a conversation with somebody, and there's a possibility of you saying, Hey, Dan, uh I see your point.
I'm not sure I totally agree, and I'm not sure I'm ever gonna agree with you on this, but I at least see it differently now.
And you're you've given me something that will cause me to reevaluate.
That's dialogue or debate.
Now, the good faith part of this has been gone for a decade.
That is what Trump represented.
There was never going to be good faith after Trump became the leader.
And what you're left with is what they want.
You know what they want?
They want a situation where people who are not MAGA have no choice but to say, what you're doing seems fascist.
What you're doing is illiberal.
What you're doing is anti-constitutional.
What you're doing reminds me of the Nazis.
And for them to come back and say, Well, you're the extremist, you're the terrorist.
You're the one causing the violence by cause it calling us the bad names, even though some of you are thinking this right now.
JD Vance is the one who texted all his friends that Donald Trump might be Hitler someday.
Here's one more piece of evidence.
If y'all don't believe me, he's here's Christy Noam talking about Democrats this week.
But as the DHS secretary, would you say that Democrats are a domestic extremist organization?
Yes or no?
And I wish that our media, and I wish reporters like you, Caitlin, would talk about the victims every day.
That so she says they are extremists.
Okay.
All right, let's let's let's do some some more good faith banter.
I don't know, Dan.
Here's Steve Bannon at Charlie Kirk's funeral.
Let's hear what he says about terror teachers, public school teachers at Charlie Kirk's funeral.
I think it's important too to talk about Erica's role and Shelly's transformation.
You know, he was such an advocate of marriage.
All of Turning Point are advocates of marriage and young marriage and lots of children and all the things, and these are throwback ideas, Steve.
These are not popular on college campuses right now, probably.
Well, I actually think they are popular, but it's not the way those kids look from kindergarten all the way up, they are essentially, you know, a third of the teachers are terrorists that are trying to form them.
If you look at the radical SEO, you look at all this radical, the way they're formed.
Yeah.
I think underneath, though, and that's why Charlie was brought such a big audience, because a big part of turning point, people should realize when Charlie was going, he's not just talking about practical MAGA politics or Republican politics or tax cuts.
It was turning point family.
It was turning point fake.
I happen to think in his explosive growth and his message getting out is that underneath that, those people are searching, right?
Particularly young men who have been told you're bad, you're, you know, you're everything evil, you've got to change, we have to change you, we have to give you drugs.
That's what I think underneath about the family, about marrying early and about having lots of kids, right?
About being a good dad.
I think that that is right below the surface.
That's why his message, remember, if you look at even in Utah, a lot of those young guys are coming, they're kind of hanging in the back.
Yes.
Right?
Yes.
They want to see what this is about.
What is this Charlie Kirk guy?
What is he talking about?
But here it is.
If you missed it, Steve Bannon just said that one-third of public school teachers are quote terrorists.
Do you know any school teachers?
I do.
I got a brother who teaches third grade.
And he he spends a lot of his own money making his classroom something where kids can learn the best he they can.
He gets up every day and goes in there and says, they're never going to pay me enough money, and I'm never going to be wealthy person, but I'm here because I love these kids.
And this dude's calling him a terrorist.
So let's talk about good faith and all that.
The point is this.
You know what they want, Dan?
They want a situation where there's no chance for talking and it's just force.
Let me give you one more piece of piece example of this.
Okay.
Here is Tom Barrick.
Now, Tom Barrick is the U.S. envoy to Syria.
And he's in a he's in a an interview.
And he's talking about the Middle East.
What's the end game?
I was hoping you weren't going to ask that because I don't know.
I don't think anybody knows.
Look, end game one.
We say peace, it's an illusion.
There's never been peace.
There will probably never be peace.
Because everybody's fighting for legitimacy.
So people say, well, they're fighting over borders and boundaries.
It's not what they're fighting over.
A border or boundary is the currency of a negotiation.
The end result is somebody wants dominance.
Which means somebody has to submit.
In that part of the world, submit, there's no Arabic word for submit.
They do they can't wrap their head around submit.
So eventually prosperity is the only answer.
He's talking about the the situation there, conflict.
And here's what he says.
He says there's no Arabic word for submit.
They can't wrap their head around it.
And he really says that peace is not possible because one group wants to dominate and the other has to submit.
Dan, they want the Carl Schmidt friend enemy.
You submit or or I do.
It's a fight to the death.
The days of dialogue, understanding, and Dan's dying.
I know I'm gonna let you in.
The days of dialogue and understanding are gone.
There's no good faith discussion.
There is only either you're the terrorist or me, and we'll figure out who has the bigger guns and the most force, and that'll decide it.
So first, I know you get this too.
People all the time ask, how can you actually talk to people?
Or how like, is there any point in engaging and how do you engage and whatever?
And so just to kind of come back to that, again, one of the points is that often there isn't any point.
But one of the questions that I suggest asking to people is if you could ask somebody what would count as evidence for you, like what would make you change your mind.
I'm not asking you to change your mind.
I'm not telling you you're wrong.
I'm not saying that evidence exists.
But what evidence could be brought forward that would make you change your mind?
And I like to think most of you, my my really deeply held things.
I I think I can answer that question if somebody asks me.
I can say, like, here are if this or this or this evidence came out, I would I would have to reconsider my position.
And if somebody can't or won't answer that question, it's because nothing will allow them to reconsider their position.
And often these positions are a part of their identity.
In other words, if you're on the political right at this point, if you're part of MAGA world, you can't not hold certain positions without losing your place in that group.
It's it's literally an article of faith that defines that identity.
People aren't gonna give that up, not without like a you know, something really radical happening in their lives.
It's not something that's gonna happen in a conversation over Thanksgiving dinner, you know, or something, and that's just something to recognize and to see.
And I just want to I know just again the selectivity of this, the the uh the submit thing.
So once upon a time, the same Republican Party inner Islamophobic and anti-Islamic things would emphasize the fact that of course the word Islam means submission, it means submission, submission to a lot.
That was that's the whole, that was the whole thing.
The one submits well, and it was that Muslims are violent and dangerous, and they want everybody to submit Because their religion is built on submission and so forth.
I accept none of that.
I'm not putting that out there to say that that's what Islam is, but that was the line.
And now you have this notion that Arabic doesn't have a word for submit.
And it's because they don't understand submission that they're dangerous.
It is just such a moving target that we have to understand that it's not about reasons or evidence or rationale.
It is deeper, and it's about deeply held emotions and biases and anger and all of that stuff.
And we just have to understand that that's it's about feelings.
This is never about facts.
You you all come on.
There was never any facts involved with this.
Tylenol, submission.
It doesn't matter what we talk about today.
It's all feelings.
There is no facts involved.
All right.
Let's just do some more like, okay, so here's the here's what we're talking about.
We're talking about political violence, what causes it, what leads to political violence, and and all that.
And JD Vance was our our top of the segment guy who said, Well, you guys keep calling us bad names.
And so that's causing the violence.
And so what do they do in turn?
They say Democrats are extremists, Christine Ohm, Cash Patel says we're gonna hunt them down because they're terrorists.
Steve Bannon says teachers are terrorists.
And then this week, Trump went to the UN, and the elevator stopped abruptly.
And this turned into, I mean, this was like the Dreyfus affair meets JFK assassination, meets I mean, this was this was a, you know, this was a uh a world-changing event on the right.
And you got you're all are like, no, Brad, you're just being funny.
You're trying to score some points.
You and Dan are not funny anyway.
Cut it out.
All right.
Well, here's Jesse Waters.
Jesse Waters says that in response to the escalator stopping Dan, that the UN should be bombed or gassed.
Tell me again about good faith dialogue about I don't know, not using violent language.
I don't know.
Weren't there people who were supposed to be fired for like this kind of thing when Charlie Kirk was murdered?
There's there, this was not alone.
I mean, this is not like the the only um one of these, right?
Cernovich, the like provocator, the very popular right wing uh person who gets people going on the American the second that escalator stopped, bullets should have been flying at the UN staffers who orchestrated this attack, rendering our president a sitting duck.
So the minute the escalator stopped, we should have started shooting.
Not sure who, we don't know who did it.
We still don't know seemingly who did it, but start shooting anyway.
Well, I have I've actually read they think that they're like, you know, safety mechanisms at the top of the escalator, so you're like, you know, things don't get sucked down in.
And what I've read is that they think somebody in his group triggered one of those.
And apparently it happens all the time.
People always complain, I guess, about the UN escalators because I guess it's sensitive or whatever.
Yeah, no, no grand conspiracy, just a safety sensor on the escalator that stopped it from moving.
But we need to unleash all the shock and awe of America's military might against the UN because an escalator stopped and Trump can't walk up.
Think about all the times Trump has made menacing violent remarks about people.
All the times he said shoot them, punch them, hurt them.
All the times he said, Oh, maybe the American citizens are next for deportation.
And it's and what's the line?
He's joking.
We don't take that stuff seriously.
He's joking.
And then an escalator stops.
And it's like gas them, bomb them, shoot them, because we know they did this on purpose, and we gotta get them.
And you know what that shows me, man, is like they saw Trump and Melania for like 10 seconds, kind of embarrassed, like, oh, that the thing stopped.
And it stopped at a time when it seems like maybe it was on purpose.
I don't know.
We don't know, but it just kind of stopped.
And everyone's watching.
And what do we do now?
And is Trump have the physical fitness to walk up these stairs?
We have to see.
And that one iota of embarrassment is justifies shooting gas and killing.
That's what this has always been about.
It's always been about humiliation, embarrassment, and revenge against those they think have done that to them.
James Comey's indicted, Dan.
Why?
Revenge.
James Comey.
Because he let, you know, an investigation against Trump.
I want to give you the last thing on this.
Okay.
And I think it ties in.
You can tell me if it doesn't, and then we'll take a break and go to something else.
But Orin McIntyre is a columnist at the Blaze.
Most of you listening are gonna have no idea who Orrin McIntyre is.
But he's he's often retweeted by Elon Musk.
He's much beloved by Christian nationalists on Twitter.
He's kind of that guy.
And he had a quote this week.
And here's what he said.
Jimmy Kimmel got reinstated, free speech, Dan.
We talked all about it, okay.
The liberals have spent the last week claiming to be safe to be sacred free speech warriors, but every single word was a lie.
For the liberal, a principle is a weapon to beat you with, nothing more.
So he's like free speech.
They don't believe in that.
Jimmy Kimmel, they wanted Jimmy Kimmel back on the air.
They lost their minds, they canceled Disney.
Oh, no more Disney cruises.
I'm I'm done.
Somebody just burned a Moana doll.
It's going bad.
Ah kids are throwing Elsa out the window.
Parents refusing to play frozen.
It's all gone bad, America.
Okay.
We're not doing Disney until Jimmy Kimmel's back.
Now he's back.
Okay.
So why is Orrin McIntyre saying that they were lying about free speech?
It's because you know why, Dan?
Alex Jones and Nick Fuentes both started YouTube channels again.
And they started talking both of them like straight up Nazis.
And I some of you are gonna think I'm being funny, I'm not.
Alex Jones literally dressed up as Hitler.
And so YouTube was like, you're out.
So let's just be really clear.
Jimmy Kimmel says something about the Charlie Kirk shooter.
He was not making fun of Charlie Kirk.
Not making fun of it, but and he is taken off the air.
And everyone's like, put him back on.
Two guys go on YouTube, start talking like Nazis.
One literally dresses up like Hitler, and Oren McIntyre's like, see, they don't care about free speech.
It's the same thing.
It's the it's the exact same thing.
I can't believe you guys want free speech when and to me, this is what we started this whole segment.
Oh, you want dialogue?
No, you don't.
I mean, Jimmy Kimmel's over here making a joke, and these guys are dressing up like Hitler, and well, if we can't have one, we can't have the other.
And look what he says about this.
For the liberal, a principle is a weapon to beat you with, nothing more.
Dan, they don't want dialogue or debate.
There's there's nothing left in American politics except for you're a terrorist, and we're gonna get you because you called me a fascist, and we'll just see who wins.
There's no sense of speaking in a in a society that is based on lies anyway.
If you have a society that's just based on lies about Tylenol or about Islam or about autism, or about tariffs, or about anything.
If the whole discourse public realm is based on lies, what's the point in talking anyway?
They know that.
So let's just fight and see who wins.
That is that is where we are.
Final thoughts before we take a break.
I want to just that phrase, a principle is just a weapon to beat you with.
Like, I mean, what that says to me is we don't have principles.
We can't win on principles.
We're we're just gonna throw in the towel on pretending.
Remember, remember when the GOP used to call themselves the party of ideas?
That was like one of their their things that they had, that they had principles and good conservative principles and so forth.
And now you have these these figures, and and we know that these are the figures who drive the right now.
It is a populist party, and the influencers and the people on social media with the mass followings, they are what move the political needle right now, is not the other way around.
The principle is just something we don't need principles.
We can't win on principles.
We have no principles.
If we try to get into quote unquote principle discussions, we get our ass kicked.
They beat us with principles.
That's literally what he says.
So we're gonna do away with any kind of principle, and it's just gonna be brute force, and it's just based on feeling, sort of positive.
That's all it's gonna be.
And so I mean, if you just tease that out a little, that's exactly what it's saying.
I I had an argument with somebody years ago.
I remember you know, and this guy got frustrated with me and said, The problem with you is you just you always remember facts.
I literally said that to me.
And I was like, Oh, okay.
It was it was a theology debate we were having, and I was like, I I thought, I thought that's what we were doing.
You know, I was in my 20s, and I was naive and young, and that's what they're saying.
So when you know, a principle is just a weapon to beat you with means we're not talking about principles.
This is not about principles or beliefs or coherent doctrines, or certainly not political ideals that we should all uphold and so forth.
This is about power and authority and coercion, and that's all it is.
Yeah, I mean, for the record, you've always annoyed me with the facts.
I don't know why you were talking all the time and you're bringing up like facts.
And I'm just like, you know, I thought we were just feeling it out.
We're bros.
It's like here we go.
I just want to feel, I want to feel things.
I just want to feel things.
Like, I want to go, let's go dancing tonight.
You know, we're young, we're single, Dan.
Should we go out and meet people?
And it's like, no, I just want to go, right?
Dance for fun.
And I don't want your facts.
I just want to feel things, okay.
I'm just overreading an encyclopedia because you know that's what I do.
President got stopped on the on the escalator, and I'm embarrassed watching it.
So I want to kill people.
I feel that way.
What?
Is that not wrong now?
That's wrong.
I want to gas and bomb.
Because a man got stopped in an escalator.
It feels deep in my heart that that's true.
So I want to do it.
Because feelings is all that matters.
Feelings and violence.
Let's take a break.
No, go ahead.
No, just like in a serious point, just put it into perspective.
Everybody who's ever been in an airport, and you've got the big suitcase, like maybe you're actually leaving, or it's one of those weird things.
You gotta like take all your luggage off and maybe go through customs before you get like on another plane.
So you got like the big suitcase, and the escalator is shut down, and you gotta haul the big suitcase up the escalator.
Everybody has been in this situation.
Everybody's been in like, I don't know, Macy's or a big target somewhere or whatever, and the escalator was shut down, and like, eh, I gotta walk up the escalator, I gotta use the stairs or you know, whatever.
Most people, their responses aren't gassing and bombing and bullets, and I think that that tells us what we need to know about the response in this situation, how aberrant it is, how dangerous it is, what it says about the people who call for what?
For political violence because an escalator stopped.
That's a good point.
Let's take a break.
All right, Dan.
Uh let's finish the day with Megan Kelly.
Why not?
Megan White Santa Claus Kelly.
Um Megan's streetball name is White Santa.
She's just that good because she brings presents every time she plays.
All right.
I don't know if Megan Kelly plays basketball, and I don't know if anyone calls for that when she plays basketball, but they should.
If you don't know about Megan Kelly and White Santa, go Google it.
I'm not going to explain it now.
Here's what I want to talk about today.
Uh Tom Homan, the leader of ICE.
There was a credible investigation against him, Dan, before the election by the FBI because he was taking bribes, apparently, allegedly.
They have him allegedly on tape, taking 50,000 bucks in an envelope for access to Donald Trump.
Now, all of this came out this week, and MSNBC was reporting on it, so was everyone else.
MSNBC says Trump borders are Tom Homan under criminal investigation for potential bribery and claims he would steer Fed contracts in the new administration, undercover FBI agents recorded him, accepting 50K.
And of course, all of this was squashed as soon as Trump became president, and Homan is not being actively investigated.
But this is just corruption at the highest level.
This is what happens in cor in regimes like this, there's just corruption.
You the officials are getting as much money as they can, Trump included, etc.
But Megan Kelly, the supposed journalist, said, we do not care.
That's a direct quote.
We don't care.
Don't bother real talk, don't bother just as her tweeting.
Don't bother Tom Holman.
He's a national treasure.
And I just think that that is more of what we're talking about here of just being completely honest.
We don't have prints.
Dan, you just got done saying it.
We don't have any principles as as American conservatives Anymore, including we don't care if people are corrupt.
You know what we care about?
That Tom Homan is leading the charge to kidnap people, to terrorize people, to send people away from the country, even though they're just trying to live their lives.
That's what we care about.
She she this is just everything you said in an example.
Tell me I'm wrong.
What do you want to add here?
I got one more thing to say about it.
The only thing is, first, it always blows my mind that Megan Kelly tried to pretend that she was like mainstream for a while.
The people fox and like went.
Yeah, tried to be credible, tried to be whatever, and it didn't work, and nobody listened to her.
So she's like, I'll go back to like my bigot spigot politics, and you know, go, you know, she's got the following she has now.
What stands out to me there is the we.
We don't care.
That's not a journalistic phrase to me.
She's posing as a journalist, and this is this is what the Fox world does.
This is what a lot of people on, you know, independent shows and things like that do.
They they pose as journalists, and I think journalists are supposed to be a voice for the people.
They're supposed to communicate to the people.
And I recognize journalists had perspectives and identities and all that sort of stuff.
I'm not talking about some, you know, very Pollyanna-ish vision of objectivity or neutrality or whatever.
But when somebody claims to hold that position and says we don't care, Megan Kelly is not speaking for Americans.
She is speaking for MAGA.
She is one of their mouthpieces, and you know, she's touring with with TPUSA now.
She's taking on college students who dare suggest that Trump rhetoric added to violence and so forth, and says it's like an article of faith that that's not what's happening, and so forth.
So the we, I think it says everything.
Number one, it says there's a huge swath of people who like to hide behind journalistic credibility to try to have a pass for the things that they say.
I think I think Fox has done this for years, right?
Of this this notion that somehow what they're doing is journalistic, even though when somebody comes after them for not being journalistic, they say, well, it's entertainment.
Fox and Friends is entertainment, it's part of the entertainment wing, it's not really the news wing or whatever, but they they they trade on the capital of being journalists.
Megan Kelly has made a career out of this.
So when she says we don't care, I think there's that piece, the disinformation piece, the piece that says I'm speaking as a journalist, and you can trust me.
She's not speaking as a journalist, and we can't trust her.
But also the the the quiet part again of we MAGA, we don't care.
We have no principles, as you say.
It's the quiet part out loud.
It's right there for everybody to see.
Don't come at us with this stuff because it just doesn't matter.
So I know a lot of people out there are gonna have like complicated feelings about journalists, but ostensibly, in a vacuum, why would you trust journalism?
Because journalism, when done correctly, is supposed to be based on what reporting, investigating, and and bringing to people in print in audio, however, and and corroboration and multiple, you know, checking out exactly and all that kind of stuff.
You know, this is what journalism is supposed to be.
She tried it, Megan tried it, and Megan, it was a good try.
If you're listening, Megan, you really did try, and that's okay.
We all try new things, and sometimes they don't go well for us, okay?
But she tried it on NBC, and no one watched or listened.
That's okay.
But her new hobby is to be now this this voice for malganation.
Let me let me give you let me give you another quote from Megan Kelly, and then we'll we'll go to reasons for hope.
I'm gonna give you one sentence, Dan.
You ready?
I want you to react to this, just one sentence.
See if it just embodies everything we've been discussing this this last hour.
We have not felt we have not felt like ourselves since Barack Obama.
So it's just it's just Megan Kelly saying, since Barack Obama, I have not felt right.
We have not felt right.
Something's been off.
Something in my body hurts.
There's an ailment, there's a problem, there's a sickness.
We haven't felt like ourselves since Barack Obama.
Next sentence.
He was such a slick snake.
Okay.
She goes on.
He's the one who started to inject race where no one had been doing it.
Okay, Megan Kelly.
All right, white Santa.
Okay, okay, white Santa.
Whatever you say, homie.
He's the one who shoved through an entitlement to our health care that nobody wanted, which the American people have shown over again they do want.
He is the one twisting the knife on the racial issue.
And then this is the kicker.
Are you ready?
You ready, Dan?
All right.
You took the shot of White Santa whiskey.
You ready for the sh the he do we get the Tylenol Chase?
Here's the Tyler and All Chaser.
Donald Trump was the antidote to the divisiveness of Barack Obama.
The thing that you have to give her credit for here is she's just stopped being a journalist.
And she's like, I just Obama made me feel not good.
So we needed someone like Trump.
And when there's people around Trump or who are extensions of Trump who are corrupt, like Tom Homan taking bribes, I don't care.
I just want to feel better.
I don't care if whatever's making me feel whole and better and healthy and good about me.
Hurts others, is bad, is coming from a source that's unethical, etc.
etc.
etc.
I don't care if he's a a bribe-taking corrupt official.
He's better than having that slick snake of an elected official Barack Obama.
That's what she she's she's just abandoned all journalism here for feelings.
Last thoughts, and then give me a reason for hope.
Just kind of come full circle to that notion of society as a body, what didn't feel right, it wasn't the right kind of America.
An America where you have the first black president and all the people like her, like he injected race where it isn't supposed to be.
You're the ones who are effing bothered by the fact that there's a black president.
Or a black Santa.
Yeah, yeah.
I don't know which is worse for them.
Like which one, which which myth is worse?
That like America is a white, a white nation only, or that like Santa exists and is is white.
Yeah, so it's it's that it's that deep sense that something was fundamentally wrong.
And what?
What was fundamentally wrong for them?
What was quote unquote divisive?
It called into question the normativity of a straight white patriarchal America, that that's what America is.
And so Trump has brought that back.
And so if you are somebody whose entire identity is wrapped up and you feel better sleeping at night if you live in a straight white patriarchal Christian America, then yeah, I guess you know it's it's not divisive.
And I mean, that's what it's getting at is this fundamental sense of identity and real Americanness and what the American body is.
So those are my thoughts.
All right, I'll give you my reason for hope.
My reason for hope is that Ryan Walters is resigning as the superintendent of schools in Oklahoma.
Now, he's gonna go to another organization.
He's gonna keep attacking schools, so I'm not sure it's good news overall.
But I will say, I don't think that you could replace Ryan Walters with someone worse than Ryan Walters for Oklahoma schools.
So, like him leaving that job means it can only get better.
Now, it may still not be someone that I consider qualified or good.
I just don't think they could be worse than him.
Oklahoma's 50th in a lot of metrics for education.
He has been mandating Prager U videos be watched as part of curricula.
They are doing ideology tests of teachers who move from out of state to make sure they're not woke and they're allowed to teach in Oklahoma.
I don't think you can put someone in the job worse than him, even if that person is an idiot.
So that's good news for Oklahoma in some sense.
What he does from here, he'll probably still be hurting teachers and education, and we'll keep an eye on that.
But nonetheless, that seems like good news for Oklahoma.
Mine, I'll be honest, I don't know if mine rises to the level of hope, but it it's something.
And I'm waiting to sort of see how this plays out.
We talked last week, and I said that all of these the layoffs and the firings and the all of this about Charlie Kirk, that the there would, you know, they're they're gonna be challenged in court and so forth.
We're starting to see this.
This week, the Disney board demanded internal documents from Disney about the suspension of Kimmel.
And and the reason is this is the part why anybody listening is gonna be like who didn't know this.
Because they allege, Brad, that the decision was made for political reasons, not the fiduciary interests of the board.
No, nah.
In other words, they're saying we think you caved a political pressure and didn't do this because it was a good financial decision.
This week Kimmel's back and kind of not back because Next Star and others still won't like air him, but it's on YouTube.
If people take a look, the the numbers are crazy.
Some of the highest ratings that Kimmel has ever had, the most views and so forth.
He he took a poke at Trump because Trump was mocking his ratings, and he said, Welcome to the bad ratings club, Trump, because you know, polls and whatever.
The point is, what does this do?
If nothing else this brings out into the open the obvious point, this was about political pressure.
Now it's like the open secret, because if you're a company and you do something like this, you have to justify it to the board, and you have to say we did this because it was in the best financial interests of the company.
That clearly wasn't the aim here, and that's out.
But this this kind of friction, I guess, is where I find some hope of bringing things to light of having to have some of these companies, and I think the same thing will happen in universities.
You're getting lots and lots of lawsuits against these universities, the fired faculty and so forth.
We're seeing that, and I I think that that's hopeful.
And I and I have a hard time saying why I'm not positive that it is.
I'm I'm I'm gonna sit with those feelings, Brad.
I'm gonna explore those feelings for a while and see if they can turn into hope, and I'll I'll update everybody.
But I I thought that this was hopeful and a really telling point that the Disney board is raising questions about this because it won't that won't just be Disney taking this kind of move.
I don't really play basketball anymore, Dan, but I if I start again, I might start calling myself White Santa.
You know what I mean?
Just because like just I just bring gifts, you know.
Like I draw I uh make a good pass, White Santa.
Bringing you bringing you, I don't know.
It just might be a good nickname.
We'll we'll have to.
I'm gonna think about that one too.
It's probably not some of your stopping your cars to write emails to me right now on your phone to be like cut it out.
All right, we appreciate you all.
We'll be back Monday.
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Dan will be here Wednesday with it's in the code.
Be back with the weekly roundup on Friday.
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