Brad Unfiltered: Troops in Portland: A Symbol of Authoritarianism
In this livestream from 9/29, Brad Onishi discusses the implications of sending troops to Portland, the gathering of military leaders, and the broader context of political authoritarianism in the United States. He explores the motivations behind these actions, the framing of American citizens as enemies, and the potential threats to democracy and voting rights. The conversation also touches on how Christian nationalists see the death of Charlie Kirk as the bullet to the neck of lefitsm in the USA.
The deployment of troops to Portland is largely symbolic and politically motivated.
The American right views Portland as a representation of everything they oppose.
The gathering of military leaders raises concerns about loyalty and the potential for oppression.
The current administration is focusing on domestic threats rather than foreign adversaries.
The framing of American citizens as enemies is a dangerous trend.
Voting rights are under threat, and the system is being manipulated to ensure votes don't count.
Christian nationalists are increasingly vocal about their desire for a violent response to progressivism.
Historical parallels can be drawn between current events and authoritarian regimes like Franco's Spain.
The definition of the 'enemy' is expanding to include various groups and individuals.
Awareness and mobilization are crucial in the face of these threats to democracy.
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I'm here to talk about uh a bunch of things that I think are really important.
And first thing is we got troops headed to Portland.
We've got uh Pete Hexeth calling a meeting of all the generals and four stars and three stars and others, and we've got some Christian nationalists who think that Charlie Kirk's murder is really kind of the end of liberalism and progressivism in the United States.
And so I want to jump into those things and tell you how they're all related.
And one of the things that I think we need to conclude from today is just the fact that we're getting closer and closer to seeing that the midterm elections next year are not gonna be normal.
Okay.
They're gonna be anything but what they're supposed to be.
And so we will see how all this crystallizes together here in one second.
So thanks for joining me.
Really appreciate y'all.
Excited to jump in.
So let's go.
All right, so you all know this already, but Trump has declared that he's sending troops to Portland.
He says he's authorized Pete Hickseth to use quote full force to do it.
Now, I just happened to be in Portland this past weekend, and I was there with a few friends, saw a comedy show, hung out, and just like you know already, and I don't think I need to tell any of you this, but Portland is far from a war-ravaged place.
Portland is one of those American cities that is both a real city with a somewhat small uh skyline, but nonetheless, some big tall buildings, and is quaint, uh is cozy and is just weird in the best ways.
My social media feed has been full of people showing pictures of tree-lined streets of a place where fall leaves are starting to hit the ground, a place where cozy cafes and hip bars and uh really nice walkaways are uh seemingly what's on offer.
We all know that Portland, though, represents something different for Trump for the American right.
Portland, especially after 2020, became a symbol.
It became a symbol of dissidence, became a symbol of rebellion, and it became the place where if you asked anyone on the American right who listened to uh right-leaning media, they would tell you Portland is a hellhole.
Portland is chaos.
Portland is nothing but riots and communists and anarchists, and it is burning to the ground.
And it has stayed that in the imagination of MAGA world and so on since then.
Portland is sort of the epitome of everything that America is not supposed to be when it comes to cities.
In one sense, it's it doesn't represent crime or blight, perhaps, like Baltimore or what they're trying to tell you Washington, D.C. is like, but it does represent politics, progressiveness, queerness, alternative culture, non-Christian culture that is the opposite of what is supposed to be in this country.
Now, Trump is doing this, and you know, he's already done it.
He sent troops to California, he sent troops to DC.
The reality though is that this is not a politically winning uh thing for him.
And uh I'm gonna prove that to you right now with a clip from Harry Anton at uh CNN.
This is fact check time, you know, the idea, oh, we're gonna be hawkish on crime, we're gonna be hawking on immigration.
It's good for us.
But in fact, not necessarily.
What are we talking about here?
All right, Trump deploying National Guards to cities in the United States, America.
Look at this.
Just 42% of Americans support that idea of sending troops into cities like Portland.
What about the opposition?
Look at this.
It's the lion share.
58% opposed, and we're talking about 64% of independents who are opposed.
So if Donald Trump thinks that potentially sending in the National Guard in a city like Portland is a winning political issue, the polling says, uh-uh, you are wrong, Mr. President.
The most analogous situation is what happened in Los Angeles, correct?
What happened to the numbers there after The president did that then.
Yeah, we've heard this music before, right?
We've heard this song before.
And what happened the last time that Trump sent National Guards into a Western city?
Well, take a look at the change in Trump's net approval.
Overall, it dropped four points.
How about on immigration, which of course those protests were about?
Look at that.
It dropped by seven points.
So we have history of Donald Trump sending the National Guard into a Western city.
And what happened was there were clear political ramifications for the President of the United States, and they were not good ramifications.
What happened was his overall approval rating dropped by four points, and his immigration approval, which had been his best issue up to that point, dropped by seven points, went from net positive territory to net negative territory.
And in this case, he says he's doing it to protect ICE facilities, which brings us to the issue of ICE in general.
What are opinions on this instance?
Yeah, so let's take a look at ICE approval.
All right, ICE's net popularity rating.
You know, in Trump's first term, it was at zero points.
Not too great, but not too bad either.
But take a look now.
Look at this.
Immigration and customs enforcement, that agency, look at that.
Minus 14 points.
Down it goes because of their actions during the second Trump term.
In fact, the Pew Research Center pulled 16 different agencies.
ICE's net popularity rating was 15th out of 16th.
It was close to being the least popular among all.
This bottom line is John.
The president may think this is a politically winning issue for him, but the numbers tell a very different story.
It's in fact a political loser.
Interesting.
All right, Harrien.
Thank you.
Thank you, my friend.
All right.
Now, I'm not gonna lie, I don't like that 42%.
I don't that doesn't like make me think, oh, I can go to bed tonight feeling great.
42% there just feels bad.
That should be 10%.
That should be 5%.
It's not.
Nonetheless, if if we were in a frame where your goal was to do things that made you popular, so you could win the midterms in 2026.
Maintain control of Congress.
So you could push through your policies.
A la Bill Clinton, a la Barack Obama, a la whoever.
Okay.
If this were presidencies over the last 75 years, you would be thinking, what's going on here?
This doesn't make sense.
But that's not the case, and we're gonna get there in a minute, okay?
Now, the other thing that I want to talk about is is Heg Seth inviting all of the generals, inviting is the wrong word, demanding that all the generals, the two and three and four stars, meet this week in quantum.
And this is an unprecedented meeting.
There's a great substack by Tim Snyder, the public intellectual this week.
And Tim Snyder, and and like uh 10 of you sent this to me, and I had already seen it, and it's it's really good.
So let me read a little bit from Tim Snyder on this.
My historian colleagues might correct me, but I do not think that I do not think anyone, at least in recent history, has done what Secretary of Defense Pete Hexeth is about to do.
Put all of the American generals and admirals from around the world into a single room next week in Virginia, just to say something to them.
There is no practical reason to do this.
He has easier and more secure ways to communicate with the commanders.
And there are obvious risks.
The entire armed forces of the United States spread around the world will be without its leaders.
Given that the government could well shut down the next day, the separation of commanders from their command might be indefinite.
And if exeth has his way, these generals and admirals will be one in the same.
He announced this in advance, which means that the entirety of the American command will be more vulnerable physically than in command in any conceivable military scenario, including nuclear war.
There's no scenario other than this one in which they would all be in the same place at the same time.
Okay.
So we have a situation where Pete Hexeth is gathering everyone in the same place.
And it is distressing, to say the least.
And something that I think uh a lot of people will find kind of confusing.
Why is he doing this?
And one of the reasons that that's happening, I think, is that he wants to give everybody this standard warrior ethos speech that he's been giving all over the place.
And reports are that he's gonna be doing that.
Okay, so we now know that somebody's leaked that he is gonna be doing what I just talked about.
But Tim Snyder lays out a couple more reasons that that Pete Hexeth might do this.
So let's go through what uh what he's saying here.
He has something a trivial to say.
That's number one, and I think that's true.
And he's gonna say that trivial thing.
He's gonna give his like what he thinks is a very mind-blowing motivational speech about the warrior ethos.
Okay.
He wishes to endanger the lives of the generals and admirals.
Now, I don't think that's true.
I don't think he's actively doing this to put them in danger, but you know, who knows?
He will stage a purge, perhaps involving a loyalty oath or something similar that requires personal presence.
Now, this one is interesting.
There's historical precedent precedent with this with Hitler did something similar.
And there is reason to kind of fear this.
Donald Trump, we just learned today will actually be joining.
And so there's a concern here that off the record, in ways that we won't see on cameras or in recordings, there will be a demand for loyalty.
Maybe this will be on camera.
Who knows?
But that is something that I think is worrying a lot of people.
That your loyalty is to us and not to anyone else.
And we'll see what happens there.
Okay.
Now, the final one, I think is really interesting.
He will tell the commanders that henceforth their assignment will be to oppress American citizens.
It'll be about homeland defense.
Okay.
Now this could be combined with the third scenario, which those who refuse to go along with this, to take the oath or to uh oppress American citizens will be fired.
Okay.
Now the last one really sticks out to me.
The assignment to oppress American citizens.
We got troops in Portland for no reason.
There are protests outside of ICE facilities in Portland, but they are nowhere near the level of needing troops.
The mayor, the representatives, senators, they're all saying we don't need this.
They're all saying if you asked Oregonians and Portlanders what they want and what would help, it would not be troops.
Troops are not the thing that's going to make us safer.
Troops are not the thing that's gonna change this city in ways that we might think it it needs.
But the assignment to oppress American citizens.
Well, we already have troops in DC and California.
Now we're gonna get troops in Portland and probably Memphis.
But here's the thing.
We already know that Heggseth has his eyes on domestic operations.
Here is Politico from about a month ago, September 5.
Pentagon officials are proposing the department prioritize protecting the homeland and Western hemisphere, a striking reversal from the military's years-long mandate to focus on the threat from China.
A draft of the newest national defense strategy, which landed on Defense Secretary Pet Pete Heggs' death last week, places domestic and regional missions above countering adversaries such as Beijing and Moscow, according to three people briefed on early visions, uh versions of the report.
That report is basically saying, hey, China, we're not, we're not gonna step up to them.
They're not our concern.
And Putin, yeah, Trump seems to feel like he got burned by the guy he thought he was his bestie, but we're not, we're not taking on Putin, really.
The focus is not there.
The focus is on us.
It focuses on us.
It's on the homeland.
It's on the domestic.
It's on American citizens.
And if you just take everything as a whole here, the troops, the invasions, what they're doing with ICE, Chicago, and so on.
Here's the goal.
It's to wage war on an enemy.
They're gonna wage war on an enemy.
Pete Heggseth has people, he has groups who he considers the enemy.
And so does Donald Trump.
The enemy is the American public.
And I know that sounds broad, it sounds general, it sounds extreme, and you're like, that that you need more nuance here.
Come on, aren't you supposed to be a scholar?
You have a PhD, you write books.
Come on, man.
Like, let's let's let's be a little bit more detailed here.
The goal is to wage war on the enemy, and the the enemy is the American public.
That might seem ludicrous to you, but I think we all need to accept something.
We have what they want.
If you think about Donald Trump, if you think about the small circle of oligarchs around him, if you think about the people who have power in this country in relationship to Donald Trump, they want what you have.
They're not gonna fight Putin or she.
The war is with you.
Because you have the money, the property, and the power that they believe is theirs.
Let me say that again.
You have the money, the property, and the power that they believe is theirs.
And you may be thinking, well, I don't own a lot of property or any, and I don't have much money, and you know, blah, blah, blah.
When you have a regime like the Trump regime, they see citizens as enemies because citizens are citizens.
They're people with a voice.
They're people with power.
They're people with the ability to dissent.
They're also people with money.
If you have money and you're not sending it up the chain, like in a in a mafia situation.
If you have money and you're not sending it up to Trump, via like Mark Zuckerberg saying he's going to invest 600 billion, but you know, what, and Jeff Bezos and all the tech lords who've gotten on board with Trump, all the tech oligarchs, just like the Russian oligarchs.
All the people who said, okay, I'll kick up 10% to the mob boss so he leaves me alone.
I'll kick up 20% to the mob boss.
I'm Intel.
I'm now owned literally by the U.S. government.
TikTok.
We'll kick up money up the stream.
And as long as you do that, you're fine.
If you don't, you have things they want.
You think, well, what do you mean property?
Well, think about, let's think about this way.
They want to destroy our national parks.
And those are our parks.
Those are the places that we as taxpayers have because they've been designated as land for all of us.
National parks.
And they they're like, well, that doesn't do anything for me.
I don't get any of that money.
I don't own that land.
I don't have access to that land as the ruler, as the regime.
I want that.
They want that from everybody.
They want that from every person.
The ultimate goal, that just the goal in like the most pure sense, is to have all the all the power, all the property, and all the money.
You will be allowed to be a peasant.
You're allowed to be somebody who has the basic things that serve the regime.
And you're like, come on, man, this is this seems just way too simple.
But I'd rather simplify it this way, in a manner that's that's perhaps reductive, so that the point comes across.
Sending troops to Portland is not popular.
What Pete Hexeth is doing is moronic.
But the goal is neither to be popular nor to be strategic in terms of being a Department of Defense and a Secretary of War who actually is a competent leader in the eyes of your generals and your admirals.
The goal is to wage war on us so that they can extract from us everything that they don't have yet.
All the property, all the power, all the money.
Now, right now, that is framed as a war with immigrants.
I mean, we are seeing people being chased on bicycles, people being stopped while they're roofing, putting a roof on and having ice surround them so that if they come down from their roofing job, they will be taken away.
We're seeing women assaulted in hallways by ICE agents trying to plead for mercy.
People are being killed, people are being hospitalized.
If you are a Latinx person in this country, it is a terrifying time where you're not sure if you can go to work or be at home or socialize without being accosted, without somebody asking for your passport or your papers.
The goal right now is to say it's the immigrants.
They have what we want.
They have the jobs, they're not paying taxes, they have the power.
California and the Democrats, they want to give them your health care.
They want to give them your benefits, your houses.
They have what we want.
Money and power.
And in some cases, property.
But the frame expands like every week, right?
If you're a foreign dissident, if you're somebody here on a green card, if you're uh Mosin Madawi, Mahmoud Khalil.
If you're someone who speaks out and you're the least bit vulnerable, the the war is against you.
We might send you away.
We might hold you in ice detention.
Since the murder of Charlie Kirk, it expanded officially to Antifa, whatever that is.
So the war is now on Antifa.
Left-wing organizations that fund terror.
So is that George Soros?
Is that universities?
Is that what?
Well, we don't know, but the war is on them.
And they're just going to decide who is in that group, and then they will wage war on them.
Woke education, war's been there for a while now, right?
Whether it's Harvard or Columbia, whether it's other places.
The frame continues to expand.
The people who fit into the category of domestic enemy, it grows by the week.
The autocrat sees the people as his enemy when the people are anything but submissive peasants.
When you have no capital and no property and no voice, no power, no ability to organize or speak freely, to practice your religion in ways that don't conform with the state.
You are uh an enemy.
Your problem.
You're something that needs to be uh put in line and have those things extracted from it.
Property and power and voice, these are the currencies of their riches.
And as long as you have any of them, you are the enemy.
And what this leads to, in terms of like troops and the military, in terms of jailing citizens, building camps, that's all on the table.
We'll see what Pete Hexeth says next week.
We'll see what reports we get or this week.
We'll see what happens in Portland.
We'll see what happens in Chicago.
We'll see what happens in Memphis.
We will see what happens as they start to crack down on left-wing organizations.
Is that is that arresting people?
Are you gonna arrest Reed Hoffman?
Are you gonna arrest the executives at the George Soros Foundation?
The ACLU.
I mean, we'll see what this means.
Are there gonna be professor watch lists?
Is TP USA going to hand over their list to the federal government and say, oh, you guys take over?
Maybe they already have.
Jailing citizens without due process, building camps, I think all this is on the table.
But you might be thinking today, well, that's not today.
That's far off.
Here's what I know today.
They're making sure your vote won't matter like it should going forward.
Let me say that again, because I want you to get that point.
They're working to make sure your vote won't matter in 2026 and in 2028, like it should.
Now you may vote.
Don't give me like you may vote, don't get me wrong.
But they want to make sure it doesn't count like it should.
Now we've already seen that.
They're gonna redistrict Texas, done.
They're gonna redistrict others other states.
California says we're gonna do it too now.
So they're basically saying you might vote, but we've organized the board such that we already know that your vote won't make a difference, or organizing 10 votes or 100 votes or a thousand votes or 10,000 or 100,000 votes won't matter.
We've we've we've gamed the system here.
Sorry.
It's really hard to get out of our little maze.
We want to make sure your vote doesn't matter like it should.
And there's evidence of this.
There's already evidence of redistricting.
There's evidence of Trump saying we're going to nothing but mail in ballots.
But there's another piece of evidence here, and I want to play that for you now.
And uh I think it's something worth paying attention to.
This is Cleta Mitchell, the famous election lawyer for Trump who is in many, in the eyes of many of us, disgraced, but she's still around, and she's still uh doing her thing.
But look, I mean, the president's authority is limited.
The chief executive is limited in his role with regard to elections.
Except that where there is a threat to the national uh sovereignty of the United States, as I think that we can establish with the forest system that we have.
Then I think maybe the president is thinking that he will exercise some emergency powers to protect the federal elections going forward.
Yeah, that is the issue here.
I mean, we all know that the Constitution says that the time, Place and manner of elections is something that is left to the states, not to the federal government.
But as you brought up, there are national security reasons why we need to make sure our elections are protected and not corrupt in one way or the other.
Did you all hear what she just said?
Exercise emergency powers to protect the elections going forward.
So we need troops in Portland because Portland's so terrible.
And that's what you're gonna hear on Fox News.
That's what you're gonna hear on Newsmax, which you're gonna hear on Tucker Carlson.
It's what you're gonna hear all over Instagram and TikTok and everywhere else.
It's been that way for a long time.
I'm glad they're doing it.
And let's just go back to what we learned about like whether or not this is popular.
42% say let's do it.
So that's four out of ten.
That's not two out of ten.
It's not one out of ten.
It's four out of ten.
So what happens when Trump says, look, it's so bad that we had to send troops?
It's also so bad that I'm just not sure we can vote like we're supposed to, or I'm gonna do things that will just make it hard for your vote to count like they should.
And I know some of you know your stuff out there, and you're like, well, Brad, the states control the voting, the states are in charge of that process.
You can't get in the way of that, this and that.
And my response would be, you're right.
But how many things from January of this year till now has happened that you thought never would happen?
Did you ever think that that Elon Musk and Big Balls would be at the treasury?
Doing God knows what?
Do you ever think that they'd be just sitting there looking at your Social Security information?
Telling career staffers to leave today?
A 19 year old named Big Balls saying, get out.
I don't care if you've served for 25 years at the State Department.
This is your last day.
Do you think that was gonna happen?
I mean, did we think that they were gonna send National Guard troops to California?
Did we think that they were gonna occupy DC?
I mean, we can go down the line.
And to me, when you go from having troops sent to these cities, declaring war on Antifa, a quote unquote major terrorist organization, whatever that means.
And then saying, you know, we might need to declare emergency in terms of a threat to American sovereignty.
And that'll just mean voting will be tough.
It'll be tough to vote if we have a threat to our national sovereignty.
Do you all remember when they said that Venezuela was invading us?
So they could deport Venezuelans and do whatever they wanted without due process?
Remember that?
So when there's this quote unquote threat to national sovereignty, and that's what Cleeta Mitchell's talking about now.
One of the takeaways I have when I think about Heg Seth and a focus from the DoD or the Department of War on the homeland and troops and the war in Antifa is this.
We need to prepare for us not voting in 2026 like we're supposed to.
And if you are an organizer, if you're somebody who has the ability to start preparing and mobilizing and organize people on that premise, you should start now.
What do we do if voting does not happen like it should?
And you're like, well, okay.
I mean, yeah, I mean, sure, man, this is fun.
Like you're doing scenarios and stuff today.
Maybe it's Monday.
It's a you have a case of the Mondays, you're being a little more stark than usual, Brad.
You're usually more measured.
You're a scholar.
Like, we're we just had an election, a special election.
And representative Grijalva was elected.
Representative Grijava, and and some of you know the story already, New Mexico.
Is the 218th person who would sign the Epstein petition once she is sworn into Congress.
Now she she's ready to roll.
All of the election results are in.
Now the official account isn't done, but they're all of the projections, all of the data's in, she won.
She's on TV.
She's on media saying, I'm ready.
Let's go.
Swear me in.
Mike Johnson and Mike Johnson's like, we're going to wait till October 14th until the official count's over.
He's never done that before.
This is completely against protocol.
This is completely like not normal.
This is completely singular.
There's no reason to do it, except for they don't want the Epstein petition out.
I'm sorry, the Epstein files out by way of the petition.
Not going to go through all The mechanics of that today, you can look it up.
Representative Grijava, New Mexico will be the 218th signer of the Epstein petition once she is in Congress, but he has not sat her yet.
And she was ready to go five days ago, and she won't be sworn in for another 15.
And what's going to happen October 14th, I don't know.
What are they going to do at that point to make sure the Epstein files don't come out?
What are they going to do then to make sure the news cycle or the mechanics or the process or the parliamentary actions something?
Like the Grijalva story is a prologue.
They're going to disrupt voting on the front end.
They're going to call into question elections they lost on the back end.
They're going to refuse to seat and swear in new Congress people, because they'll lose their majority.
These are the things I think about all the time.
When I see think about troops in Portland, I think about people getting hurt.
I think about people being afraid.
I think about people who are targeted for no other reason except for that they look and sound like somebody that ICE wants to talk to in their raids.
I hate that.
And then I zoom out and I think about what this means for voting and the fact that you are the domestic enemy.
And you may not feel like you are today, but we all know how the poem goes, right?
First they came for and then the enemy list just gets so big that eventually, no matter who you are, you're on it, unless you submit, unless you give, unless you let all that you have be taken by the regime.
Now, since Charlie Kirk died, there's been uh a growing chorus among Christian nationalists that this event, as tragic as it is, may be the thing that destroys leftism and progressivism in the United States for good.
And none other than Doug Wilson has been talking about this.
I believe that history will show that Tyler Robinson, if he is convicted of firing the shot that killed Charlie Kirk, will also be revealed as the man who put a bullet in the neck of progressive leftism.
But only if one of the most important principles of war is pursuit.
In electoral politics, pursuit means that any Republican legislature that has the opportunity to redraw their congressional districts has a moral obligation to do so and to do so before the midterms.
Be like Texas.
This should all be done according to Hoyle and no dirty work.
Of course not.
The adversary will say that I'm urging legislators to go out there in order to mander the Jerry, but I laugh this suggestion to scorn.
More likely any manifestation of spine by Republicans on this issue will result in a significant number of Jerry's getting themselves unmandered and about time too.
This should be part of a strategy to have the midterms be the time when a strong angel from Revelation pours out the contents of the seventh vial over the top of the Democratic Party as it is currently constituted, resulting in it being reconstituted as something else.
Something resembling a quivering gelatinous mass, and then after the seagull's take it away, a wet spot on the pavement.
In short, the goal for the midterm should not simply be to retain the House, too obvious and hardly ambitious enough.
The goal should be more than to put the recapture of the House by the Democrats out of reach during Vance's two terms.
Also too obvious.
Rather, the goal should be to have all the discussion among TV's talking heads after the midterms to revolve around whether the Democrats can survive as an organized political party at all.
And the consensus should be something like, no, they can't.
There's more.
I think that's enough.
Y'all can listen to the full clip if you want to.
I think I'll spare all of uh us any more of that.
So I wrote a book.
Some of you in the chat have have like have said about this, have have noticed.
I wrote a book called Preparing for War, and I was like, hey, they're preparing for war.
And I had people ask me, like uh when I gave book talks and stuff, like, hey man, why why do you like super aggressive title?
You know, I got kind of turned off by that.
I don't want to read about that kind of thing.
Or and I don't want to prepare for war.
I'm I'm not that kind of person.
I don't like war.
And I was like, I don't like war either.
Sounds terrible.
I'm not the one preparing for war.
They are, and they have been for 75 years.
And Doug Wilson just says it here, right?
He just distills it into one minute.
This is war.
We need to put a bullet in the neck of progressivism.
They they shot Charlie Kirk, whoever they is, Tyler Robertson, whatever he represents, well, he represents Antifa, leftism, progressivism, and the Democrats.
So we need to put, they put a uh a bullet in in Charlie's neck, we're gonna put a bullet in in theirs.
That means it's war.
That means we pursue.
That means we redistrict.
That means we do everything we can to make sure that there is no more democracy, no more democratic party, no more leftism, no more difference.
Okay.
Now, why are they willing to go along?
Like, so hang out with me for a minute here, okay.
If the goal of an autocrat, if the goal of a regime like Trump's, is to take from you, your power, your property, and everything you have.
Why would they go along?
Like, why would they want to give Trump their money, their voice, their property?
And it's because they see most of you as their enemies, just like he does.
If he sees the public, the American public, citizens, free citizens with a voice, the right to assembly, the right to free religion, and so on, free press.
If those are the enemies, the Christian nationalists are like, yeah, most of them too, for us.
Yeah.
Most of them also.
Now you're trying to destroy them.
We're on board.
That's kind of like Christian nationalism and authoritarianism 101.
Like I've been talking about that on this podcast for a thousand episodes with Dan.
Like that's kind of why the Christian nationalism is always bent towards authoritarianism, because the enemy are all those people around the American table with a voice, who are not them, right?
Who are Hindu, who are atheists, who are humanist, who are Buddhist, who are non-religious, who are spiritual, all those people who are mixed race and immigrants, those people who are queer and non-binary, when they look around them, the American table, they're like, no, no, this American table is whew.
This is uh was set all wrong.
None of these people should be sitting here.
So if you over there authoritarian are trying to get rid of them, yep.
Well, we're with you.
They see you, right, in the public square, living in a way that is not their way, as the enemy.
They want those things and those people who embody them crushed.
That's what they want.
Now, what this has led to, and I think this is a good place to kind of go today and kind of finish up, and I can take a couple of questions if y'all are interested.
There's a piece by John Meyer at Slate from last week, and he he says, look, you're comparing Trump to the wrong dictator.
A lot of people want to talk about Hitler.
People want to talk about Mussolini, people want to talk about whoever.
But he really points to Francisco Franco.
And Franco, you know, is this mid-20th century fascist leader.
If you want, if you don't want to use the word fascism, you can say autocratic leader, et cetera.
But Franco reigns for four decades.
And he does so by way of kind of two mechanisms.
One is getting conservative and big business interests on his side.
And when he was able to do that, he was able to consolidate power because those interests had so much sway over land, over resources, over media.
Does that sound familiar?
The Washington Post is now Jeff Bezos operation, which is totally in the pocket of Trump.
Meta, Instagram, Facebook, check, Twitter, check, CBS fired Colbert, ABC fired Kimmel, he's back, et cetera.
Okay, great.
Paramount, CNN, these are all gonna be taken over, it seems like, by Trump allies.
TikTok is on its way.
So that's happening.
That was Franco.
And, you know, you're so far, you're like, all right, well, most of, you know, we could talk about Orbon, we could talk about a lot of authoritarians who play this game.
That's a pretty universal authoritarian tactic, Brad.
He did something else that was really important, is he he tied the Catholic church to his government.
John Meyer says it's late, framing his rebellion as a holy crusade against godless socialists, Franco strengthened the church's role in Spanish life by funding church reconstruction, anti-Christian task force, anyone, reinstating religious education in schools, Prager, you, anyone, giving the clergy Authority to censor anything they deemed anti-Catholic.
White House faith office, anti-Christian bias task force, once again, the Catholic hierarchy relished their restored privileges and did little to oppose Franco's secret and not so secret oppression and incarceration of his enemies.
To some of the faithful, Franco was the lesser of two evils.
To others, his dictatorship was ethically righteous, God's imperfect vessel to preserve the power of the church.
Franco made it so that you could not practice any religion in public other than Catholicism.
He made it such that if you try to practice a religion that was not Catholic, you were an enemy of the state.
The Catholic memorials and icons, the Catholic statues, they dominated Spanish public life at this point.
And to be Catholic was to be a good Spaniard.
And so the Catholics, as Meyer say here, many of them at least, love this because he destroyed all difference, all plurality, all diversity, all dissidents.
There was no big round table where everyone was trying to raise their hand and say, hey, I have a voice too, right?
I'm a citizen.
There was no freedom of religion, freedom of assembly.
There was no ability to say, well, yeah, we're a small group of Hindu people, and we are have our gathering place over here.
There was no place to say, well, yeah, we're we're Baha'i or humanist.
We get together on this day, do this thing.
If you did that in the privacy of your own home and you kept quiet and you didn't talk about it with anyone, you might be okay.
Otherwise, no.
And if you go back and look at Franco, Franco is a fascination of the current American right.
Franco was the guy that people in mid-20th century American life revered as Catholics.
I've been doing a lot of work on this for a book I'm writing.
And the amount of right wing American Catholics who went to Franco, Spain, who went there because they specifically wanted to be in a country like his astounding.
Franco Spain was seen as right-wing American Catholics as the ideal place while Franco was in power.
So one major example, some of you know this example was Brent Bozell Jr.
Brent Mozell Jr. is not an everyday household name, but Bozell Jr. was William Buckley's William F. Buckley's best friend, brother-in-law.
They met at Yale, they were debate partners, the whole thing.
He helped him start the National Review.
William F. Buckley seen as the father of modern conservatism, that whole that whole story.
Buckley was his right-hand guy.
But Buckley takes his family to Spain for a number of years, specifically because he said, in Spain, the Catholic thing is everywhere.
He was enchanted by it.
It was like he was able to return to the medieval period, where instead of going out into a world full of difference, taking your kids to school with people who don't look like you or practice like you, going out into your local eatery or shopping market and seeing people who are of different ethnicities, speaking different languages, wearing different kinds of clothes, having red dyed hair or green hair, or expressing themselves in ways that don't match up to your traditional gender expectations.
All of that.
It was amazing.
And I think that we have to take into consideration the fact that the Christian nationalists, since Kirk's murder, are now basically saying there's only one way forward.
And if you don't get on with us, you're going to be, you're not going to be considered a Christian.
You might be on that enemies list.
The way forward is war.
The way forward is violence.
There was an op-ed last week by Dillinger, Tim Dillinger, I believe his name is, but his last name is Dillinger at the Daily Caller that said, I am calling for explicit violence.
Some people say what I mean is this.
And he said, I'm not, I'm not doing that today.
I'm I'm calling for violence against those who are not real Americans.
So if I just back up today, I think, look, we've got troops in Portland, we've got Heg Seth gathering the Admirals and the Generals.
We've got people saying in the Department of War that the focus is on the homeland.
And my takeaway is you're the enemy.
My second takeaway is the Christian nationalists also see you as the enemy.
So they're on board with this war.
They're framing it differently.
Doug Wilson doesn't talk like Donald Trump.
But they both are fighting the same enemy in their mind.
And that's why Trump remains their guy.
That's why they remain on board with what's happening.
They love Pete Heggseth.
They love JD Vance.
They love RFK.
They love everything that happened at Kirk's Memorial.
And that could be, as we look back, a kind of deciding event in all of this, but time will tell.
All right, y'all.
If you uh, I got a couple more minutes.
So if you want to ask a question or two, go ahead and feel free to put those in the chat.
I'm going to jump there now and see what folks are talking about and go from there.
Somebody said 2026 is a long way away, and JD Vance being a heartbeat away is tough.
And I just I'll chime in on that real quick uh before uh anyone else jumps in with uh questions.
But I think J.D. Vance would be would be worse and better.
Like he would be better in the sense he does not have the charisma of Trump by any uh stretch.
He can't do what Trump does.
Um the problem is is that you've already got now a machinery that's been put in place, right?
Like we've got a situation where the charisma of Trump is being translated into the bureaucracy and machinery of the federal government.
That did not happen in Trump presidency one, but it's happened in Trump presidency two.
And because of that, you're gonna see a situation where even if Trump died today, tomorrow, next week, and JD Vance, who has much less aura, much less charisma, took over.
Think about what's already in place.
Whether whether it's the Department of War, whether it is um the judiciary, whether it is all the purges at state, all the purges at all the other places.
Think about what you would see there.
Okay.
It's already in place.
All right, what else?
What else can I talk about here?
Vance is more beholden to Teal, and you're exactly right there.
And Peter Teal's a big part of this.
I'm not going to do Teal today.
I'm writing a whole chapter on Teal.
Um, I got more Teal to talk about.
So hang on tight there.
But yes, that is somebody who definitely is on my mind.
All right.
Other questions.
Somebody says, can Congress ask for UN advisors or supervisors, UN election supervisors?
They could.
I don't know what Congress would do that.
It's not the one we have right now.
So, right?
Like there's no majority for it for the party that would do that if that party had any guts, which it's not sure, not clear that Hakeem Jeffries or Chuck Schumer have any of those.
So I don't see that as a thing.
Um, here's a here's a question from Hamlet.
Um imagining the Franco-inspired future heritage wants for us.
Do you think any specific aspects they plan to oppose that might cause the corporate world to bulk?
So the question is like, look, the Heritage Foundation wrote Project 2025.
They they wrote Project Esther.
If you look at Project 2025, a lot of it has been has been accomplished already.
Is there anything that would make corporate America say, hey, I'm done, right?
With this.
And I think the answer right now is corporate America is so invested in the Trump regime and has so much power there that I don't see a way to dislodge them at the moment.
And you're like, well, what does that mean?
And I'll just give you an example.
I think Peter Thiel is so powerful in terms of Palantir, in terms of the investments that he has in every aspect of our military right now.
I think his influence, and again, I'll go over this another day, but if you look at the tree of influence of Peter Thiel throughout the executive branch and the State Department and all throughout our government, it's immense.
If you think about the investment in people like J.D. Vance, if you think about the investment in other figures, heritage is really, really powerful.
I don't think that you're gonna see those two break up.
And one of the things that I think people are missing is that Elon Musk might have been the scapegoat.
And now that Elon Musk is like public opinion turned on him, everybody's mad at him, he's basically been Run out of public eye, right?
It's like, oh, cool, we feel better.
Right?
Like he's no longer at the treasury with big balls doing stuff.
I don't hear every day about how, you know, Elon Musk is fired a hundred people from the State Department, made them cry, and and uh is hanging out in the Ovalville office again.
I feel better.
What's really happened is that all of that work continued, and Peter Thiel is is and was always way more powerful than Musk perhaps ever, ever dreamed of being.
In addition, and I'm writing this, I'm writing about this right now.
I don't have time to go into it like in full force today.
A lot of their interests align in the sense of they see the enemy and they see the goal in similar ways.
There's a desire for the building of sovereign states.
Christian nationalist enclaves, networked cities, some of you are aware of that whole thing.
There's a pronatalist element on the American right, and especially a Christian nationalist, right?
There's a deep pronatalist element that's developed among the technocrats.
Elon Musk has how many children, and so on and so on.
So one thing that I'll point out, I've made this point on the show before, I'll point it out again today.
About a month before the election in 2024, there was a conference in San Francisco called Reboot 2024, and it was put on by the likes of Peter Teal and Curtis Yarvin and all kinds of funders, Gary Tan, and so on.
The special guest speaker that was revealed there was Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation.
And it was awkward.
Not all the tech dudes were like on board with this Catholic guy in cowboy boots who was telling them about the American family and all this stuff.
But nonetheless, that's who they thought should be the guy, right?
And so all of that to say the breakup is not coming anytime soon, period.
So I'll leave that there for now.
All right.
How do we get the people around us to take these issues seriously?
Other than being a one-woman PR campaign for Swatch, thank you very much, Jess, for doing that.
We appreciate it.
Trying to educate people about the threats we're currently facing.
I feel like I'm screaming into the void.
And I hear you.
And I would just say, you know, like I always say, pick your pick your issue.
Become somebody who's knowledgeable and able to spread the word on that issue and don't give in and don't give up.
Gather with others around you that know the direness of our situation and continue to know that, you know, there are there are signs coming that everything I'm talking about today and everything I think most of you know is true.
There's a recession coming, there are job numbers coming, there is a crumbling of American infrastructure and systems coming.
There is all kinds of things on the horizon.
Now, it may be too late at that point, but the more, the more you see normal people witnessing their their neighbors being kidnapped, their cities being occupied, and so on, some of them may wake up, but nonetheless, it may be too late.
So I hear you, Jess, and I know that it's discouraging.
I have my, yeah, crumbling health care is another one, Holly says.
I think that's right.
Um I have, I mean, we can talk about the farmers, right?
The farmers are in big trouble.
We can talk about small businesses who can't like import and export stuff without tariffs.
We can talk about businesses leaving.
We can talk about, you know, whether it's the auto industry and Korean nationals being held by ICE in Georgia and that whole sort of sector.
I mean, we can go all down the line.
It's coming.
Like, I'll remind you that that Victor Orban has made Hungary one of the poorest nations in Europe.
Like it is not an economically thriving country.
That that's the goal is to take everything we have, not to challenge Putin or she or anyone else, right?
So people will see it.
It's just a matter of when.
Okay.
All right, y'all.
I appreciate you joining me.
I uh I'm my second time on the live stream.
Um, couple more technical issues today, but I think less than last week.
So thanks for being patient with me and doing this.
Thanks for spending your lunch hour here or you know, whatever time you've got to hang.
We'll be back to uh Wednesday with Tin The Code and Friday, the weekly roundup.
I'm gonna be doing these live streams almost every Monday.
So be on the lookout, but you can start to expect that I'll be here as much as I can doing these and checking in with you all.
Hang in there, keep your feet on the ground, keep your eyes forward, and don't give up.
