Weekly Roundup: “I Love Hitler” Group Chat Leaked + The Technocrats Who Want Monarchy + No Kings!
Brad and Dan unpack a disturbing leaked group chat among young Republican leaders that reveals casual racism, homophobia, and even Nazi sympathies. They analyze how JD Vance publicly defended the individuals involved by dismissing their comments as “edgy jokes,” exposing a growing tolerance for extremism within parts of the GOP.
The discussion expands to examine the double standard in political outrage — why some are harshly punished for crossing lines while others face little consequence — and how in-group loyalty continues to erode moral accountability in American politics.
The conversation then moves into deeper territory, exploring the psychological and ideological forces driving this shift. The hosts dissect the narratives of victimhood and persecution that fuel right-wing identity politics, as well as the appeal of hierarchy and order for certain business and political leaders who see democracy as messy or unstable. They highlight the challenge of mobilizing citizens around democracy itself, arguing that the fight for freedom requires a new, inspiring story that unites people rather than divides them.
The episode concludes with a preview of the upcoming “No Kings” rallies — events centered on defending democracy through collective action — and a call for listeners to stay engaged in the struggle for a just and inclusive society.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad O'Neishi, author of Preparing for War, The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next, the founder of Axis Moody Media here today with my co-host.
Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Pleased to be with you, Brad, as always.
As always, Dan, and it's been a week, and I feel like this week we need to cover a lot of ground, but I also just want to offer folks a kind of uh theoretical framework with which to understand what's going on.
I think it's easy to get sucked into just constant bad news.
So we're gonna try to we're gonna try to Brad.
Is it easy to get sucked into constant bad news?
If you're if you're you're me, and I imagine you.
So if you're watching this on YouTube, you're you're being treated to one of the all-time great Dan Miller shirts.
It's a it's a it's a it's it's really good.
And you're just the peanuts crew and the great pumpkin, Charlie Brown.
It's amazing.
All right.
There was a debate in my class today, Brad, that you need to know about whether this is a Charlie Brown shirt or a Snoopy shirt.
Ooh.
And poor Linus just got left out.
Like, yeah, what happens?
There were no Linus advocates.
Yeah, yeah.
People want to weigh in on Discord, this is the time.
This is how you create a manga bro.
You leave Linus out, he goes finds some online community, and this is all radicalized.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
On that note, we're going to talk about the leak to group chat that has all kinds of disgusting ideas in it and includes aids to congressional members of Congress and state senators and others.
And JD Vance's reaction to that, which was like, who cares?
Who cares if these folks love Hitler?
It doesn't matter.
We'll get into a report from ProPublica that shows us that 170 American citizens have been detained by ICE and 13 children and what that means.
We'll also talk about a piece from Barbara F. Walter, who discusses the CEOs who openly long for autocracy rather than democracy.
And that'll give us a chance to discuss what is going to happen here with the No Kings protests, what they mean, and whether it's possible to use democracy as a way to galvanize people in this moment and something that will save us from rising fascism.
Lot to cover.
Let's go.
Let's go.
All right, Dan.
As I promised, I got you can always tell when when I'm like return to my theoretical roots, like my philosophy and political like theory and other things, because I want to introduce that today to start and then turn it over to you to take us through the Vance stuff.
So I promise I'll be brief.
What we're going to see with Vance, and I think a lot of people have seen this already, the clips is a doubling down.
And this is characteristic of the MAGA movement in total now.
There's so many incidents where we've discovered people have Nazi leanings or are into Hitler.
There was the statistician who was who's going to be promoted to the Bureau of Labor statistics to give us the jobs numbers, and he was the guy that does his Zoom calls with the Nazi shit behind him.
Way back in February, we discovered that the Doge team like made racist remarks and called people who were South Asian and other things really disgusting names.
And JD Vance was like, Who cares?
Grow up.
William Wolf, who is a Christian nationalist pastor, one of the 15 clergy invited to the White House in March to be part of President Trump's day of prayer and meetings, says that I don't know who needs to hear this, but refusing to participate in a kabuki theater of ritual denouncements and disavowals according to the demonic left's framework is not the same thing as approval of whatever it is they are demanding you denounce.
And he goes on to talk about how these are the same people who were cheering when Charlie Kirk died, which again, it's really hard to find leaders, thought leaders, elected leaders who were cheering Charlie Kirk being assassinated.
It was just very hard to find that.
Why the need to keep doubling down?
Why the need for when we find out that aides to co Congress and state senators are into Hitler that are saying people should go to gas chambers, are calling people the N-word, or calling people who are queer the F word.
Why?
Why the need to say it's no big deal?
And then why paint everybody who's not part of MAGA?
So the in-group, Dan, even if you love Hitler, get over it, no big deal.
The out group are criminals, terrorists, and supporters of violence.
And if you don't believe me, Carolyn Leavitt said the the very thing in a clip about who will be at the No Kings rallies this weekend.
Let me play that for you now.
...proved that the Democrat Party's main constituency are made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.
That is who the Democrat Party is catering to.
Not the Trump administration and not the White House and not the Republican Party, who is standing up for law-abiding Americans, not just across the country but around the world.
And that's we'll get into this in a minute, but there's also a bunch of CEOs who have like openly long for autocracy and dictatorship over democracy because they want stability rather than freedom.
There's Christy Gnome, who is the leader of Halloween costumes, has a lot of them, but also of DHS.
And she recently was praying for the ICE agents who were gonna go out into Portland.
Together that you give us good fellowship, Lord, but that you'd also give us wisdom and discernment to make the best decisions, not just for the people that are here enforcing the law, but also for the citizens of this country.
And Lord, I just asked that you'd continue to put a hedge protection around these officers.
Though these are the questions I want to ask today, Dan, and I want to come back to those and and do a little bit of like theoretical pondering about this.
But before we do that, let's get to our case study and our evidence at hand if we were writing our paper, and that would be JD Vance this week.
Off to you.
Yeah, so I'm gonna build up to Vance here by walking through this this event.
Some people probably saw this.
It didn't make as much news as you might have expected, which maybe isn't surprising.
So I guess maybe maybe it made as much news as we did expect.
But Politico this week broke a story that has just been kind of roiling the right.
And chats were leaked from leaders of the young Republicans all over the country.
So like leaders of the re young Republican different sort of branches or or or elements of that movement, that organization.
And they highlighted very clearly the mainstreaming of casual racism and appeals to violence among today's conservatives and homophobia and you know any number of other things.
All the bad stuff listed, it was in this this chat.
There were, and I'm I'm not gonna repeat the the specifics of this for for obvious reasons, but there were openly racist comments and jokes.
They joked, as you you hinted at, about placing political opponents in gas chambers.
They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide.
They commented about you know, comments approving Hitler and Nazism.
They extolled Republicans that they believe supports slavery and sort of like elevated them.
So like this is just rife.
And a lot of people point out not everybody in the chat was doing this.
Nobody in the chat was denouncing it.
There were even statements in the chat where somebody's like, if this ever gets out, we're cooked, you know, kind of thing.
And of course, you know, it eventually did.
Among just a few of the the participants, and as you highlight, as this continues to come out and people trace who these people are, we find out more and more about sort of how pervasive this is.
William Hendricks, who was the Kansas Young Republicans vice chair, featured prominently here.
Peter Deonta, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing his name correctly, was the chair of the New York State young Republicans.
Bobby Walker, who was the vice chair of the New York State young Republicans.
Joe Maligno, a general counsel of New York State's young Republicans.
Annie, I can't read my own writing on her last name, but she's there.
This is how worked up I was.
She was a national committee member representing New York for the young Republicans.
And there were other leaders from others from New York State, Kansas, Arizona, Vermont.
At least one person is a uh state senator.
And so these were not like low-level people.
These were not, I don't know, you know, just rank and file.
These were significant figures here.
And what the chat outlines clearly are efforts to seize control of the National Young Republican organization by staunch pro-Trump forces.
Like that was that was sort of the overarching theme here.
Uh, and many participants, as you suggested and hinted about earlier, they already work within party politics.
And as I say, one is a state senator, which is probably the sort of highest ranking, so to speak, person represented so far.
And some involved in the chat have responded.
Most people, you know, declined to comment and so forth.
But Gianta offered a an apology of sorts.
It was the kind of like of the thousands of texts that were sent.
If there were any that were offensive, I apologi you know, I apologize, kind of thing.
But only after, and this goes to some of your point about the doubling down.
Only after lambasting the release of the chats and the quote unquote extortion involved.
So they got really mad about is that this came out.
Not, you know, oh shit, we said these things and shouldn't have, or or you know, whatever else.
I mean, it was echoed by others who didn't comment, either defending or denying, but were upset that the chats have been made public.
So this was like a common theme where they'd issue a statement talking about how terrible it was that this had been made public and it'd been betrayed and so forth, but not really dealing with you say as the like I love Hitler statements and things like this.
A lot of participants have suffered consequences of this, and national figures in the GOP have tried to distance themselves from the young Republicans as a result.
At least one chat member is no longer employed where they were.
That's Joseph Maligno, the general counsel person.
Uh one had a job offer rescinded.
Some members have been forced to step down from positions that they held.
Peter Gianta was one of those.
Sam Douglas, who was a sitting Vermont state senator, is facing calls to step down.
I I don't I haven't followed up, I don't know if that's actually happened, but under pressure there.
You of course had it some bipartisan condemnation in Congress.
Of course, the Democrats, you know, were all over this.
But people like Elise Stefanick came out and talked about how terrible this was and so forth.
New York State Senator, minority leader Rob Ort came out and talked about how bad this was.
The board of directors of the National Young Republicans called for the resignations of every member of the chat.
So there were there were all the usual noises about how this is bad.
But now, Brad, let's enter JD Vance, who put a stop to all this, you know, naysaying and so forth.
He defended he defended the comments and those making them.
One of the things he said is this, and this is a quote, this is on the Charlie Kirk show that he said this.
We'll hear this.
He says, the reality is kids do stupid things, Brad.
Kids do stupid things, especially young boys.
Let me play it for you.
It can't do justice to JD Vance.
So play the clip.
By focusing on what kids are saying in a group chat, grow up.
I'm sorry, focus on the real issues, don't focus what on what kids say in group chats.
But there's another angle to this that I just have to be honest about.
I mean, I'm like an old guy at this point.
I'm 41 years old, I have three kids.
You know, we we I I grew up in a different world where not most of what I the stupid things that I did when I was a teenager and a young adult, they're they're not on the internet.
Like, I'm gonna tell my kids, especially my boys, don't put things on the internet, like be careful with what you post.
If you put something in a group chat, assume that some scumbag is gonna leak it in an effort to try to cause you harm or cause your family harm.
But the reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys, they tell edgy, offensive jokes.
Like that's what kids do.
And I really don't want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke, telling a very offensive stupid joke, is caused to ruin their lives.
And at some point, we're all gonna have to say enough of this BS.
We're not going to allow the worst moment in a 21-year-old's group chat to ruin a kid's life for the rest of time.
That's just not okay.
Like we live in a digital world.
This stuff is now etched in stone online.
We're all gonna have to say, you know what?
No, no, no.
We're not doing this.
We're not canceling kids because they do something stupid in a group chat.
And if if I have to be the person who carries that message forward, I'm fine with it.
Yeah, so there you have it, especially young boys.
A few things here.
He says, I just want to highlight a few of the key like statements that stand out there.
People do dumb things, especially young boys.
These are not young boys.
These are are grown people.
Most of them were men.
They're grown people, at least one is in their 30s.
These are people who are are in professional positions or internships.
They're college students, sort of at the youngest, you know, what have you.
Calling these edgy offensive jokes, edgy and offensive jokes.
And then he says, and we'll circle back around to this.
He says, you know, I just don't want to grow up in a country where telling a stupid joke, Brad, it's just it's caused to ruin someone's life.
So let's just hold on to that.
That comes after earlier this week, Vance responding to this, he drew attention to Democratic candidate for Virginia's attorney general position, Jay Jones, who's been in the news for this, who had texted colleagues about shooting the then Republican House speaker and wishing harm on his children.
So he had sent texts joking around, presumably joking, about violence against political enemies and so forth.
And Vance had that to say.
He said, This is far worse than anything said in the college chat and so forth.
Doubling down, as you are saying, on the discourse on the right right now, that all political violence is on the left and that all discourses of political violence are on the left and so forth.
So this is the background, some of my takeaways, and then we can go wherever you want to go with this.
Obviously, the selective condemnation of calls for violence, that's that in group, outgroup piece that you were just talking about.
When it's our guys, yeah, they're just they're just kids.
Young boys, young 27-year-olds, young men making jokes that are edgy and offensive.
That's all it is.
When it's your people, even if they're not actually advocating for violence, but they're critical of, say, Charlie Kirk, we're going to accuse them of of fomenting political violence.
I think obviously this illustrates the pervasive culture within the contemporary GOP.
This is not, you know, the young Republicans is not a fringe movement.
It's it's it's the Farm League for what will be the grown-up Republicans at some point.
And and the the mainstreaming of this, and that's what I mean when I describe it as the casual nature of it.
These are comments that not in the distant past would not have been circulated widely in a chat this way.
The language, even if the sentiments were there, and I think that they were, would have been much more coded.
It would have been much more guarded, and so forth.
And I think obviously it it highlights the mainstreaming of these elements.
But I think the the big takeaway from because none of this surprises me.
People are like, are you surprised that young Republicans, Maggie young Republicans or no?
I'm not surprised.
This is the same thing most of us have said that they believe for years.
We're the ones who've been told over and over and over that we're painting with too broad a brush and that this isn't mainstream in the GOP.
And well, here it is.
But I think Vance's comments for me are what really stand out.
If we contrast not just what he says here, but the response that he has had that he has helped lead against all criticism or commentary about not even the the killing, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, but Charlie Kirk's views or his political positions and so forth.
The JD Vance who now says, can't ruin someone's lives over some jokes, some calls for violence, some saying we're gonna put people in the gas chambers, some calls for, you know, we like Hitler.
No, we can't ruin people's lives, but we're happy to ruin people's lives if they say, I don't know, talk about Charlie Kirk's defense of the second amendment or say that Charlie Kirk was a divisive figure or something like that, even while condemning the political violence undertaken against him.
So it's a really telling kind of phenomenon this week if we put those pieces together.
Let's play that clip of J.D. Vance hosting the Charlie Kirk show days after Charlie Kirk was killed, and see what he said about what you should do if you find people who are saying negative things about Kirk or celebrating that he died.
So when you see someone celebrating Charlie's murder, call them out in hell.
Call their employer.
We don't believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility.
And there was no civility in the celebration of political assassination.
So that clip from just about a month ago is pretty clear.
Hey, if you see this, if you see people celebrating death or what happened, go report them and make sure they're punished.
These guys who are who are leaders, as you say, Dan, the the farm team, the Republican backbenchers, the Republicans in waiting are openly talking about gas chambers.
Hitler, they're and let's just be very clear, friends.
They're using the N-word a lot.
Yeah.
It's not, it's not isolated and terrible phrases like referring to black people as the watermelon people.
And just like every racial stereotype that you can bring in repeatedly in this chain.
As I said, using the F-word, the F-word slur to talk about queer folks and so on.
Dan, look, we all have professional lives and personal lives.
We have group chats with friends.
We have group chats with colleagues.
Those might be different.
Okay.
I say things in group chats with my friends from like 30 years ago in high school that I don't say in group chats with like people I'm organizing a panel with at an academic conference or something.
Okay.
That's fine.
I mean, that I think that we all know how that works.
I think we all know what it's like to be with people who are our close confidants and friends and those who are professional.
We all know that we dress differently, we speak differently in those cases.
I don't have any friends who come over to my house or gr or text me and say blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, n-word, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, gas chamber.
That's just not a thing I participate in.
And if you did, you're not putting the heart emoji under it.
You're not doing the laffy face under.
Like that's the other piece of this.
If you look at the responses to these things, even just the emoji responses and so forth.
You're not chiming in that way, giving that kind of tacit support to it, even if you're not actively advocating it yourself.
So I I'm gonna get to this more in a minute, but I just let me just at least bring it in now.
ProPublica released a report this week and found, and I quote, among the citizens detained by ICE are nearly 20 children, including two with cancer.
That includes four who were held for weeks with their undocumented mother and without access to the family's internee until a congressman intervened.
Have something up here from CNN by Andy Rose that talks about a boy from Brazil and in Evert, Massachusetts.
And it's a family who is seeking asylum.
They come from Brazil in 2021.
And the mother in this family, Jose L was told that her son, who's 13, was arrested.
They didn't give me any information.
I asked where he was being taken, then they said they weren't allowed to say.
They took a 13-year-old boy, Dan, and held him for days and weeks without telling his mother where he was, even though there was an asylum case open, even though they had followed the rules.
And so one reaction that we can just give that's sort of evergreen and right there for everyone to see is that JD Vance is calling a 31-year-old man a child or a boy who's telling offensive jokes and leave them alone.
That's what we do.
I don't want to live in a world where you can't tell offensive jokes about, oh, I don't know, the using the N-word or gas chambers or Hitler.
But I do support a regime that will hold a different boy, a boy who's actually a boy.
Who's actually 13, not 31 for weeks without telling his family where he is, or children with cancer, or who will arrest 170 American citizens and say, well, we just had to, because that's just part of like collateral damage.
Mike Johnson was asked about this recently, Dan, yesterday.
And here's what he said.
Thank you.
Okay, questions.
Mr. Speaker, what's your message?
There's 170 or so U.S. citizens who have been detained by ICE.
About 20 of them are children.
And to your GOP colleagues, do you support ICE rates and the agriculture and hospitality sectors of your districts?
I'm not, I don't know what you're talking about with the children.
I do know that ISIS 170 U.S. citizens, according to ProPublica, have been detained by ICE so far since January.
Okay, I haven't seen that, so I'm not going to comment on it, but I will tell you that ICE is doing the job that the American people demanded that they do.
If you go look back at the election results of 2024, it was overwhelming.
And virtually every poll noted that the border and the issues that come from the open border, came from the open border were the number one issue on the minds of Americans.
It's largely why President Trump Trump won such an overwhelming victory in the election, won all seven swing states and 75 million popular votes.
I don't know what you're talking about.
ICE is just doing what the American people want.
I don't there wouldn't, there can't, that can't be happening.
So I think one easy thing to say here is like only certain people deserve to have lives that are not ruined.
Lives that where they're given grace and second chances, where they're allowed to be transgressive and to say things that are really hurtful about others and just be left alone.
But not the 13-year-old boy in Everett, Massachusetts, not the 20 children who've been held by ICE.
And not, Dan, let me just mention a story from the BBC by Brandon Drennan published yesterday.
The Trump administration has canceled the visas of at least six people for public comments made about the murder of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk.
So six people made comments, and and they did.
I mean, they they honestly did say things out loud.
Let me just pull up a couple here.
Anyway, I'm not gonna do it.
They, you know, some of them did say things that were celebrating the fact that he died.
These aren't leaders, elected leaders, pundits, people with big followings.
They're just people on social media, Facebook or wherever else saying this.
Now, I don't think that's a good thing to say.
But I think we all know we've all heard the diatribes about free speech absolutism, transparency.
Oh, Barry Weiss had to start the University of Austin because campuses are so woke they won't let anyone say anything.
So now we find a group chat with Hitler stuff everywhere, and J.D. Vance is like, Lee, bro, calm down.
You're a loser.
Just God.
What's the big deal?
Six people say things about Charlie Kirk, and they are escorted out of the country.
And I could go on and on about that.
Let me give you one piece of theory on the stand, and and we'll we'll we'll take a break and we'll we'll pick up the theory in a minute.
But there's there's a piece by Moira Weigel about Theodore Adorno, and some of you are like, Oh, okay, buddy.
What did you just say?
Leave it alone.
But there's a sentence that I I really highlighted the other night, and it really caught me as something I thought was pretty interesting.
I'm gonna read the sentence, it's gonna make no sense, and then I'm gonna tell you what I think it means.
Jargon turns fascist insofar as it leads the person who uses it to perceive historical conditions of domination, including their own domination as the very source of their identity.
I know it's a mouthful, it's straight out of like German critical theory.
You're driving to work and are like, I didn't ask for this, Brad.
Just put it, put it back in the bottle.
I think what that means to mo to me though, is this Dan is that when you see Vance doubling down and and defending these folks, they interpret their identity in terms of who has victimized them, who has tried to dominate them, and who they in turn will dominate, not for any other reason, except for that's part of their identity.
Like we are the ones who are the real Americans.
We are the ones who have a rightful place in this country.
We are the ones, the heritage Americans, the Christian Americans, the whoever's.
And so we, as part of our identity, are not just those who should have some power, not just be in charge.
This is not Jerry Falwell to me.
This is not Christian nationalism, this is Christian fascism.
This is I dominate you because of who I am and because of who you are.
And the dominating and being dominated is goes to the core of who I am.
There's another piece that one of our listeners sent us this week that's really great, and it's from the Substack Rational League by Edward Harrington.
And Edward says this Trump's persona is built on persecution.
He is forever the martyr, hunted by elites, journalists, immigrants, feminists, anyone who can be cast as a tormentor.
As John Dean and Bob Altmeyer note, authoritarian followers find comfort in such theater because the leaders' suffering mirrors their own.
When you're attacked for your group chat, well, Trump's been attacked for his access Hollywood video for the things he says out loud.
And his suffering is your suffering, and his revenge is your revenge.
And that is why J.D. Vance will never say, Yeah, that was wrong.
I'm sorry.
Not our best look.
We really got to work with these young Republican guys to make sure they understand that, you know, this is a country full of people who would be very hurt by these comments.
You're never going to hear JD Vance say that because JD Van Stan is in a race to be more performative of this persona than Trump so that he can be Trump's heir someday.
He's always he has to out Trump Trump now with the rhetoric.
He has to be the one who outlines the in-group vision of being a martyr and being hunted and taking revenge, being the one who either dominates or is dominated and not allowing any inch of the enemies to creep in.
That's part of my theory for today.
You want to jump in before we take a break.
Well, I'll jump in with another piece of theory then.
Long as we're playing the theory game, I've got some some Jean Baudrillard in here.
Yes, there it is.
There it is, Neo.
The the safer, safer spaces of Jean Baudriar, but he has a concept called the precession of similocra.
And it's it's more of a usually like a cultural theory piece.
But what that means is a similar is like a like a simulation.
And he's got this this notion of what we might now call something like hyper reality, where the basically the simulation displaces the reality that it's supposed to simulate.
How do I think this relates here?
You have these discourses of crisis, you have these discourses of persecution.
Historically, they don't measure up.
You cannot look at the history of America and say that like straight white men have been like you know, primary people who have experienced persecution.
You can't look at the history of of the United States and say that you know, white Christians have been the primary people who have been persecuted and so forth.
But you have that narrative of that this narrative that has been carefully cultivated for decades, that these groups that have experienced historic privilege are being persecuted, that their loss of privilege through the expansion of rights to people who have been disadvantaged by them, that this is persecution and that narrative, that simulation, that that that that simulacra of what has actually happened, that takes on the form of reality and that becomes the basis of identity.
And I think that's that's the kind of echo that you hear then is that you have this this false narrative that goes on and on and on, and it is in place long enough that the JD Vance of the world and the MAGA world in general, they believe it.
It becomes the reality.
So that when people are outraged about a bunch of texts extolling the virtues of Hitler and gas chambers and everything else, this is just another act of persecution.
And when a 13-year-old kid is locked up and denied any kind of constitutional rights or you know, he just writes as a minor rights to their their legal guardian or whatever.
Well, they're a persecutor.
So, yeah, but it's a 13-year-old kid.
No, nope, nope.
He is part of what is wrong with this country and what has been attacking, you know, good Christian white people for decades, and so they deserve this.
So I think that's the other piece of this that that as you say, like legitimates this doubling down.
It's this persecution narrative that can't, it has no objective basis, but it's not about objectivity.
It is about a narrative that has actively displaced it and become the reality for millions of Americans.
And it doesn't matter if you can display, you can't displace it with data.
You can't displace it with evidence.
You can't displace it with reasoning.
At that point, there is no possibility of that.
The, you know, in the in Edward Harrington's piece that I just referenced, he talks about how authority authoritarianism has been awakened.
And I think one of the ways I'll think about this, Dan, and I know we need to take a break, but I I I do want to just get your thoughts on this because I think this is going somewhere that's important for people to understand is like, you know, when you go into fight or flight, like for me, I'm a I'm an on-time person.
All right, hear me out.
I'm an on-time person.
I get really panicked, and my wife will tell you this.
If we're late or if people are waiting on me.
If someone is like waiting on me, I can't function.
I'm like, I told them I'd be there at 12:30, and they're waiting on me, and I'm not there, and this is not okay.
It's like 1233, right?
Yeah.
I'm just like, yeah, it's rising.
The panic is rising.
And, you know, my wife's like, dude, calm down, you know.
And I'm like, no, and I'm like, you know, like In like a GTA video game at this point, driving, trying to find a parking spot, and you know, it's terrible.
And what happens in those cases, you all ever have this, you're rushing out of the house, and you can't see things right in front of you.
You can't, you you where's my keys, and they're right in front of you, but you're running around all around the house because you're in panic, you're in fight or flight.
You know, you're in you you you you forget things that you're supposed to remember.
You don't bring the bag, you don't bring the whatever.
And what happens is when when that certain panic, that certain threat is awakened.
Very, very often you don't see what's right in front of your face because the panic has overtaken your vision.
It's overtaken your senses.
I think what we have here is like you cannot displace what Vance is saying to the Maga right.
You can't, you can't say that to others because what's right in front of them is not available.
What has been awakened is an authoritarian ethos through fear, through a sense of disorder, through a sense of anarchy.
And what becomes a reality then is that your identity is wrapped up in dominate or be dominated.
And we have to get rid of the threat before I can relax.
Like, you know, if you've ever, you know, I think all of us can imagine that the the place we're in when we're panicked for some reason, stressed for some reason, and then and then you get through it and and you come down, and you're like, you can actually take a breath, and your body finally relaxes.
They cannot do that.
They are convinced that they cannot relax until America's enemies have been vanquished.
So if that means a 13-year-old boy, that means a little baby with cancer, who cares?
Until they're gone, until they're out of my purview, until they're out of the imagined community of my country.
I cannot relax.
I will be in fight or flight.
And therefore, whatever happens in the meantime, you know, these texts being released will be defended, and it will be taken as just one more piece of evidence of the reason that we are panicked and in apocalyptic mode of thinking.
Anyway, we need to take a break.
Does that make sense?
What do you want to say there?
That does make sense.
Just briefly, I know I know we need to take a break.
The first is like that fight or flight.
It's it's also the cultivation of the fight response.
It's the the eradication, the moving away, like like flight is not an option.
We're not gonna count, we're not gonna bow down to this anymore.
We're not, you know.
So to say these texts are a problem, they shouldn't have happened.
Oh, that's too passive.
That's weak.
That's not a fight response.
And so there's that that element of like elevating the fight.
I think the other piece, just when we say it's not about facts, why?
Because that response is what filters out what sort of makes it in as a fact or not.
It filters out the very kind of facts that people will try to counter with.
And so until you can deal with that affective emotional level, the facts can't sort of register for people.
And then the final one, this is the other authoritarian piece, as you say, we're not done until all the enemies are vanquished, but all the enemies will never be vanquished because they construct new enemies.
That's a key component of this.
It is driven by that fight response and attacking enemies, which is why the list of enemies is always expanding, always evolving, always changing, because you can't ever get to a point where you're done fighting the enemies.
And you can look at every authoritarian movement that that we know of in the 20th century and earlier and since, and you'll see that proliferation.
That's why those movements always become these like cannibalizing themselves, and why it is that the people that were the party leaders one year are the ones who are in gulag the next year.
That's a great point.
Let's take a break, be right back.
All right, Dan, let's continue on this this thought.
And I I I kind of want to I want to throw two juxtapose, I want to juxtapose two very different things for you right now, and and see what your response is.
One is tomorrow we're gonna have the no kings rallies, and I think we're gonna have records broken.
I think there's gonna be millions of Americans who come out, and I think there are gonna be people who are really fired up, people who are normally not the kind of rallying protest attending kind of folks.
These are gonna be big, and ahead of this, the GOP has tried its best to vilify them as the I hate America rally.
Mike Johnson has said this many, many times already.
It's filtered down the pipeline, the trickle down propaganda machine is working in the GOP as it always does.
And Caroline Leavitt, as we played for you just a couple of minutes ago, has said that the people who support Democrats are nothing but her words, illegal aliens, Hamas terrorists, or violent criminals.
Okay.
So tomorrow, Dan, we're gonna have marches that are like there's no kings in this country.
So I want to hold on to that piece.
Everybody just stay with me.
The march is about there's no kings in the country.
And then I go to Barbara F. Walter, who wrote the book, How Democracies Die, okay?
And Barbara F. Walter has a substack called Here Be Dragons and had a piece from October 8th, just about a week ago.
Here's how it goes.
In 2024, I spent hours on the phone with business elites, heads of major corporations, leaders of industry.
I was interviewing them for a book I wanted to write about business and democracy.
I had chosen the topic for a simple reason.
If America was going to strengthen its democracy, business had to be on board.
Why?
Because business is the most powerful player in America today.
The way our campaign system is built gives big corporations and wealthy donors disproportionate influence over who runs for office, wins elections, and what laws get passed.
If democracy is going to be strengthened, it requires business to act.
But as I began those conversations, it became clear that business wasn't necessarily on board.
Many of the CEOs said they didn't care about democracy per se.
For them, democracy wasn't a moral good.
It was a source of volatility.
What they wanted was stability, predictable rules, consistent tax rates, and as little policy whiplash as possible.
When I asked them if there was a political model they admired, many said the same thing, Singapore.
Okay, I'm going to give you some even more theory, Dan.
Here's a thesis is that we really do have kind of a political spectrum right now that can be broken up, broadly speaking, in a very reductive way, into those who prefer stability over democracy, or those who prefer democracy over authoritarianism.
And when I read this piece, it went right into the research I've been doing for the book I'm writing.
And the idea in my book is that what you have in this country right now are Protestant Christian reconstructionists.
And if you're like, what does that mean?
Just imagine Doug Wilson, the Doug Wilson people.
You also have traditional reactionary Catholics, a la JD Vance, a la Kevin Roberts, Heritage Foundation, a la Adrian Vermule or Patrick Danin, if you know who those people are.
You also have tech lords, people like Peter Thiel, people like Curtis Yarvin, people like Mark Andreessen.
And what they all agree on, Dan, those three groups I just mentioned, Protestant, Catholic Tech, is that they want stability over democracy.
They want order and hierarchy over egalitarianism, equality or representation.
They all agree and they're open about it.
You could not have said that 10 years ago.
But they're all like the CEOs, Barbara Walter talked about, they all say, look, democracy is not something I'm interested in.
And I actually think it's holding us back from human flourishing.
What we need is order and hierarchy.
What we need is to overrun the voice of the people and the constitution in the name of creating a new kind of country.
And Singapore for the techies is high high on the list.
If you ask Curtis Yarvin, if you ask Nick Land, if you ask any of the folks on the tech right, what country do you think got it right?
It's always Singapore.
Singapore is their thing, okay?
And here's what Barbara Walter says about Singapore.
Singapore is stable because it's sui generis.
It's a tiny, exceptionally wealthy, ethnically homogeneous, tightly managed city-state that has never been replicated anywhere else.
The idea that America had become a Singapore is never going to happen.
Instead, if we become an enocracy, something much worse will.
Now, what is an inocracy?
An innocracy, Dan, is something that Barbara Walter calls a middle place between autocracy and democracy.
And what she argues is that when you have something like a country, the United States, that has been a democracy that slides into autocracy and it kind of lives in this middle place, which you get is economic instability, political instability, social instability, violence, and so on.
They are the most violent, unrestful places in the world, according to Barbara Walter.
Now, the thing I want to throw at you, Dan and see what you think is this.
And it's an open question.
You and I haven't Talked about it.
I don't know what you're gonna say.
This is not scripted, it's none of that.
What we have are people in this country who are overwhelmingly willing to say at this moment, democracy is not sacred and democracy is actually bad.
And if we had a monarchy, an autocracy, if we had a CEO who ran the country with a board of directors, if we had a government that was integrated into the Catholic Church, that would be way better.
And the reason I think that that story is gaining traction is because it promises people belonging, it promises people uh a relief of their alienation and their pain, and it promises them that if they just submit to the authoritarian leader, the monarch, the CEO, that everything they need will be taken care of them, will give into them.
And unfortunately, and hear me out.
Unfortunately, I think an increasing number of Americans are willing to take that deal.
Because life is so uncertain, they have been addled by algorithms that have been teaching them to fear apocalypse and others for decades.
They have been told that everything from the border crisis, quote unquote, to the woke mind virus to trans people to immigrants to Barack Obama, to the coastal elites, they're gonna destroy them.
They're gonna take everything from them.
They're gonna take their guns, they're gonna take their way of life, they're gonna take their livelihood, they're gonna take their homes, all of it.
If you're a Christian, you're gonna be put in jail.
I mean, do you remember when Barack Obama and Joe Biden were president?
We heard respectively that it was going to be illegal to be Christian soon.
Okay.
I think people are willing to take that bet now more than ever.
And that is why we see the rise of these kinds of movements, whether it's Christian fascism, a la William Wolfe and CJ Engel and Andrew Isker, people I talk about a lot here who are Doug Wilson's like progeny spiritually, whether it's the Rad Trad Catholics and JD Vance willing to defend people saying I love Hitler, or whether it's tech lords who are like, you know, I'd rather just autocracy so I can have a stable environment for my business.
That's better than democracy.
It's a story about what will fix you.
Now, I want to con contrast that with the the no kings rallies in a minute, but let me stop and get your thoughts on all this.
Yeah, so excuse me, a lot of thoughts on this.
One for a long time, we've said it on here, I don't know how many times, and people have said for a long time.
Maybe it's a mistake, a big mistake to think that the federal government's like a business.
And I've argued this for years.
You had this notion that a business leader will know how to run the federal government and so forth.
And we get it in higher ed, you get it in all these domains of society where a business model becomes the model.
Why?
Oh, efficiency and all these other kind of things.
And I've argued for years, and we've talked about it here.
The mistake with that is businesses are autocratically structured.
That was the argument.
Yeah, if you want efficiency, concentrating power into one decision maker, that that's the way to do it.
Democracy is not efficient, it was designed not to be efficient.
Higher ed, you know, educating people, getting people to think critically is not efficient.
Uh, practices like I don't know, learning how to practice medicine or different things like this.
It's not efficient, it's time consuming and it takes a it's labor-intensive, and it doesn't give you a quick return on investment, and sometimes you know, collaborative decision making takes a long time for things to happen.
And there are people who you know, if it works really well, people might say there's not a clear winner and a loser.
And so that's like one piece where this is a process that's been in play for a long time, and the mistake was to ever say, oh, the business model needs to be our model for society or government or these other social domains, and this is what we see.
So, this is one of those things where this element that has been subterranean for a long time is now just sort of rising to the surface, and lo and behold, what critics of the corporatizing of all elements of American society have said for decades.
Here it is.
It's the business leaders who like, I like being autocrat.
I like being the one who gets to make the call, I like being the one who gets to decide everything.
Maybe the government should work that way.
Now, here's the concern.
Somebody says, Well, okay, like maybe that's sufficient to your point of like you know How this resonates with people.
This notion of you know it promises belonging and relief from alienation, it does, but the question is always for whom?
And that brings us back to that story of that narrative.
Today's contemporary American autocrats.
If you're the right kind of American, you've got a place.
And yeah, I mean it might be it might be great for you.
Might be a great setup, right?
If you're a person of color, you're the wrong kind of woman, you're not an alpha male, you're a queer person.
You are, we just run down the list, you're not gonna have a place.
And that's the key.
And that's the construction.
That's what ties it together with this other point that we're making about this narrative of who the real Americans are, how they're persecuted by these evil forces within the production of enemies and so forth, because that's the other side of this to keep making that work, to keep creating, and I I hope I don't take people too far in a weird direction with this.
To create that promise that we will keep you free from alienation, you have to create the sources of alienation.
You have to produce enemies that are constantly threatening you, so that there's a reason why the autocrat has to remain in power, why the system has to remain in place.
And so even after all the enemies have been eradicated, we're just gonna make new ones.
And if people think, well, that how does that happen?
We see it with the immigration stuff.
Remember once upon a time when the argument was we're gonna go after the dangerous immigrants, the ones with criminal records.
Yep.
Every analysis now shows it's not what's happening, it's just everybody.
It's children, American citizens.
It's American citizen, right?
13 year olds.
Yeah, it's not once upon a time.
The idea was that you know, we needed labels like terrorists for people who are really dangerous and hate America and hate our way of life.
Well, now that's like half of all Americans.
Yeah.
If you look at the statistics and how many people voted for Trump and all that, half of America are terrorists and evil.
So that's the dynamic there that has to be understood is you're absolutely right.
It resonates with huge swathes of people because it promises alienation, but that's an alienation that has been created by the very people who are promising that relief to put them in power.
That's the giant shell game that's at work here, and that's what we see.
Same way that you know, the same business leaders who want to talk about how we value economic stability and whatever, they're the same ones that have been driving the neoliberal economic engine for decades that that thrives on and is built on economic instability and economic insecurity.
Those are driving forces of their model.
Why?
So they have a reason to claim the power that they claim out of the instability that they created.
It's a it's a kind of protection racket.
And I talk about this all other places.
I realize that, but you sort of create the threat, and then you're the savior who can remove the threat, and that's the dynamic that works there.
And so it resonates with huge numbers of Americans, but at the cost of everybody else.
Yeah.
Let's take a break.
We'll be right back.
You know, we could obviously take this so many directions.
If you, if you create an economic system that only benefits the very one percent, then you're gonna have people who feel alienated and like they need a new system.
If you create a social system that is polarized and addled by algorithms, then you're right, you're you know, there's so many ways to go about this analysis.
Let me let me then bring this back to no kings, okay.
I think I think no kings is gonna be big, and I'm I'm looking forward to seeing people energized.
I talked to a friend yesterday on the phone who said, you know, I just want to get out on the street and yell with people who are as frustrated and frightened and angry as I am.
And I was like, yeah, that makes sense, and that's great.
And I want to see people activated.
I want to be see people brought into networks and campaigns and organizations where they can start to volunteer, make phone calls, get on board with a social issue that they can contribute to in their local community, reproductive rights, you know, voting rights, all of it.
I just I want to see everybody organized and everybody unified around the idea that we don't have kings in the United States, and we're not gonna let Donald Trump be one or JD Vance or anyone else.
Yes, I'm on board.
I hope you can hear it in my voice.
Let's go, let's do it.
No kings as a rally, though, is like a starting point.
And here, here hear me out, friends.
Okay.
This is do not email me and say, Why are you throwing water On like momentum.
I'm not.
I'm I'm I mean, I I interviewed Leah Greenberg, you know, a month ago, and and the the co-director of Indivisible and had her on the show.
So this is please keep all that in mind.
The tech fascists, the the the Christian fascists, the rad trad Catholics, the people I'm writing about in my book, they all are telling a story.
And in surprising ways, those stories overlap right now.
They're telling a story that in many points is like the same story.
You never thought Peter Teal and Elon Musk would tell the same story as as Doug Wilson.
But there's points with those timelines and those narratives that line up really well right now.
But they're giving people a story.
They're giving people a bad guy and a good guy.
They're giving people a role to play, they're giving them a solution to their problem.
They're giving them a cosmic civilizational model of like how to envision world history, the future their children can inhabit everything else.
No kings is only a starting point because it's not a story.
Yes, we don't want a king.
Okay.
But I and this is where I really want to go.
And I I don't know if people are gonna think this is controversial.
I don't really think it is.
I think when you say to people we're here to protect democracy, there's a lot of people in this country for whom democracy is an empty signifier.
And and this is not me being anti-democratic.
This is not me saying, I'm Dan, I need to tell you something.
Group chat might as well tell you in the podcast, I kind of think democracy is overrated.
That's not what I'm doing.
What I'm saying is is like when you hang out with a 24-year-old whose whole adult life has been Trump, income inequality, a refusal to address the climate situation, congressional gridlock, gerrymandering, you know, the misogyny against Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris when they ran for president.
I can go on down the line.
George Floyd, the pandemic.
When you say democracy to those folks, there's nothing in their bones, it's like, oh yeah, good old democracy.
Man, I wish we could get it back.
That thing that works so well.
And I think in theory, they know.
In theory, they know democracy, yes.
Better than autocracy, better than oligarchy, better than fascism, yes.
But it's not a story right now that invites people into an epic where they're like, yeah, if we work together, we're gonna build that thing over there.
When they hear protect democracy, it almost just feels like hey, can we raise enough money to like, you know, keep the plumbing and the and the lights and the the the drywall at that kind of dilapidated community center over there?
Fix it up a little bit.
Wouldn't that be cool?
Can you guys come out Saturday and we'll all fix up the community center so that it has like plumbing and electricity and like you know, working air conditioner and stuff?
They don't feel like what's happening on the other side, which is they're being invited into a grand epic of civilizational proportions that will relieve so much of the fear and anxiety and uncertainty that they have about themselves, about their families, about their country, about everything else.
Democracy is an empty signifier, Dan.
And I'm that I'm not trying to be some kind of lefty bro who's like, ugh, you know.
What I am trying to say is you need a message that invites people into a story that they can see themselves in and that they want to build with all the other people around them.
Otherwise, if you just keep saying we got to save democracy, people are gonna look at you like you mean that thing that hasn't worked since I've been alive.
That thing that like created the 99% being like, you know, completely income inequality folks compared to the 1%.
You mean that thing that refuses to even address the climate crisis?
That thing that created the AI that's probably gonna like just destroy all of us?
Sure.
Yeah, why don't I get here and save that?
I just think it's an empty signifier.
It's one of those words that doesn't mean anything anymore.
You ever been in a relationship, Dan that's ending?
This is getting personal, and you don't have to answer.
But like you still say I love you to each other.
Like I've been in those.
I've been I've been in a couple of those.
I hope you're not listening, you know, people that that I've been in those with.
And you still say I love you, and you you give a hug goodbye or something.
But both of you know, yeah, man, both of you know, both of you know.
It's just that's how I feel is going with democracy right now.
I love democracy, but people, there's no electricity, there's no sense of like future anticipation, there's no sense of desire.
And that's what that's what concerns me.
So anyway, that was a long diatribe.
I apologize, but you know, are we just gonna get emails?
It's like Brad hates democracy and I'm I'm done listening to this show.
Or are you concerned about me becoming a monarchist?
I hope not.
That's not what I was trying to say.
I think I think what you were highlighting that makes a lot of sense.
And I talked about this, and you know, it's in the code is for whatever reason, lots of reasons.
Some I could identify, some I probably could not.
The right is better at telling stories at present and for quite a while than the American left is.
American left has been really good at criticizing certain things over, like not putting it into a narrative that grips people.
And I I suggested that I think there's a narrative there.
I think there's a story to be told, and we have to learn to tell it.
And I'll go as far, I agree with everything that you're saying.
I think one of the things is we talk about that notion of like democracy is an empty signifiers, it gets filled in in different ways.
This sort of neo-liberal disaster area that we have lived in for decades, that has been what has filled that of quote unquote democracy that's created all of those kind of things.
And so, of course, as you're saying, when people experience all the negative aspects of that, when that's got the name democracy attached to it, they're like, well, maybe democracy is not so good.
So I agree with you here to say I have a vision of it very when I say when I use the word democracy, I mean something different, and I've written about that on top of that.
But you know what?
If that word is so loaded and corrupted by that that that vision now, then cool, let's not even worry about calling it democracy, call it something else, but tell the damn story.
Tell the story of the kind of society that a meaningfully democratic society would be.
Tell that story and tell people of how they would fit in it and tell that people, you know, like get people to buy in and feel that story.
And you can energize a movement that, as I think you're saying, and I and I agree with you, goes beyond a no kings protest that takes that as a launching pad and doesn't slow down the momentum but builds momentum from there.
The power of story, the power of emotion, the power of affect.
It doesn't have to be threatening and negative, and it doesn't have to be anger, and it could be a lot of different things.
But the right really is just like has a corner on the market with that, it feels like within American society, and that's one of the places where they have to be countered.
Can I tell you two places that you will hear exactly what you just said, and they're gonna be two drastically different places?
One is from the Doug Wilson Christian nationalists.
So, like CJ Engel and Andrew Isker and William Wolfe and all of their homies are always tweeting stuff about like what would you die for?
And then they put like a picture of like a bunch of white kids playing football or like on a prairie, and they're like this, you know.
And it's cringe, and you're like, okay, cool.
Norman Rockwell, you're gonna die for Norman Rockwell, knock off great.
But what they're saying is is like I want a society where we have banished every immigrant, and we are a homogeneous Christian heritage American unit, and that I'll die for that.
Okay, and that is an advantage.
If you will die for something, that is an advantage.
Now, it's it is for all the wrong reasons, it is gross, it is disgusting, it is xenophobic, it is fascist.
You know who also writes about this?
For all of the bad decisions I made in my life, Dan, and you know about a lot of them, there's way more I could tell you.
One of them is writing a book right now.
That means I have to go read almost everything Peter Thiel has ever written.
So I I have read Peter Thiels from Zero to One, co-written with Blake Masters, failed Senate candidate from Arizona, and Peter Till Acolyte.
And one of the things Teal outlines in that book so clearly is that the reason he believes in startup culture as a monarchy.
You know what you just said 10 minutes ago, Dan?
Like company as monarchy.
Teal's like, it is a monarchy.
That's why it's awesome.
Dan Miller's right.
He's not like, oh, Dan, no, you got he's like companies are awesome because they're monarchies, it's the best.
And he's like, you know what makes Silicon Valley startups work is when every employee is different to the rest of the world.
Like when you see that tech guy, you're like, whoa, weird tech bro guy, nerdy dude, you know, young Sheldon.
So they're different to the outside world, but they are the same tribe.
They all wear their like Twitter hoodie, their Facebook hoodie, the Google hoodie, because they are not just there for a paycheck, they're there because they think they're changing the world.
That's what Peter Teal's like.
If you want to start up, you need people who think they're changing the world.
You need to ask them to work a hundred hours a week.
You need to make sure that they think they're family with you, because you are their king and you're gonna do something no one else has had ever done.
That's what I mean about a story.
It's also gross.
It's also disgusting.
It's also a monarchical CEO vision of one person ruling everyone else.
But it's something that you would give a hundred hours a week to.
Right now, saving democracy for people is not a thing they will give 100 hours a week to.
Because democracy to them just means that thing that has never worked for them.
It's the reason they can't buy a home.
It's their reason there's floods and fires.
It's the reason that their kids might get sick.
It's the reason that they don't know what their future holds.
That's what they're thinking.
And you're like, no, no, no, Brad, the reason is Trump and the right.
And this, and I'm like, yes, you're right.
But saying democracy doesn't connote something that does work for them.
It doesn't connote the thing that sizzles and tantalizes them into action.
Final thoughts on this, then give us your reason for hope, and we'll get out of here.
I think just the difference between what is the fact and the buy-in into it.
I mean, that that's what you have to have.
Like, can if people argue about what democracy is all the time and how to define it and where that's fine.
It's going to be people to be invested in understanding it or in affirming that term, which again, I, you know, I think that means being willing at times to be like, if that's too much work, we're going to spend all our time arguing about that term, then just cast the vision, whatever it is.
Call it, you don't have to call it anything.
Just say, hey, this this is a society where everybody has a place.
This is a society where we affirm people as the unique individuals they are.
You can play on the things that have traditionally been American values and even values on the right and so forth.
It's about buy-in, it's about that emotional investment.
And I think for a lot of reasons, some well-intentioned, some not.
I think a lot of people who aren't on the right have been afraid of it of like speaking to that kind of emotive level.
And it's just some, it's just a habit we've got to get over that that sort of draining the emotion out of things to try to get to the quote unquote facts.
Yeah.
There's way more to say here, but we'll we'll stop it there.
What's your reason for hope?
Yeah, so I was I was sort of debating here a couple of them, but I think one I think that stood out this week was the vast majority of major media outlets, including most conservative outlets refusing to sign on to the Hegeth Pentagon rules about disclosure, you know, the information sharing and so forth.
And that was a really powerful image of dozens of people turning in their credentials and like clearing out of the Pentagon.
Yeah, there's these images of of all of these journalists right at the deadline of you know 4 p.m. leaving the Pentagon.
Now, I I think that's bad for information and all that.
There's a lot of reasons why the clamp down on information is bad, but it was heartening to me to see the media across the political spectrum.
I thought that was really, really interesting saying we're we're not going to do this, we're not going to play this game.
We're not just going to Fox News.
Yeah.
We're not just going to do whatever you tell us to do.
And I thought that that was that was really interesting to watch.
And we'll see what happens.
I think that the fact that so many conservative news outlets did this is really, really significant.
I have two.
One is it there's reports that the Pope is going, excuse me, is going to break up Opus Day, which is huge news.
And I'm going to try to get Gareth Gore, the world's expert on Opus Day, the author of Opus, who I've interviewed before, on the line here and get you an interview with him in the next couple days.
But that would be a massive development.
If you've read Opus or know about Opus Day, I think that I will just speak for myself and saying it is a really negative force in the world.
I'm not talking about the Catholic church as a whole and don't email me and eh-da-da-da-da-day.
Yeah.
Just saying Opus.
Catholic and anti-democratic brat.
I know.
I'm having a day.
I'm doing it.
It's Friday.
The other one is going to sound weird, and we're not going to spend a ton of time on it because it's time to go.
But LA County declared a state of emergency because of the federal government.
And if you all listen to this show, you know one of my theses has been.
Trumpism is a new lost cause.
And instead of the Confederacy seceding, MAGA Nation is invading.
Well, here it is.
They've invaded LA County and LA County's like, we have to declare a state of emergency because of the immigration rates.
And that means that different resources and different pots of money and different personnel can be assigned to help protect against those.
Now, what will that do?
We will see.
But there will be some movement here.
It's also symbolic of the ways that the federal Government is invading states and counties.
Another thesis from this show over the last two months has been that the discourse on states' rights has changed and that Democrats are now the ones protecting the sovereignty of states and the counties there within and Trump's regime is not.
All right, y'all.
I need you to do one of those things I asked you to do at the beginning.
Okay.
I need you to go subscribe to Teologia sinfraguenza and tell anyone who's interested in queer feminist decolonial theology about that show because it is starting and it is great.
We also have American Unexceptionalism debuting next week from your favorite person other than me and Dan, Matthew Taylor, who's with the Reverend Susan Hayward, talking about the lessons that we can learn about fighting religious nationalism and authoritarianism from people all over the world.
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Dan Miller's wearing a uh a Snoopy slash Charlie Brown shirt.
He's not doing that right for no reason.
He's doing that for you, people, okay?
And in all seriousness, even if you're not a YouTube person, you're like, Brad, I want to listen to this on the on the ride to work or while I'm doing the dishes.
That's great.
Go go go subscribe anyway, just to get us some momentum and get our channel going because we really are trying our best to create content there and to create a presence there for the people who are not yet familiar with our show.
Dan, I hear the kids, I mean, according to JD Vance, the kids, I mean the kids who are 35 and under, really like the YouTube, this newfound phenomenon called the YouTube.
And hopefully we can get a crew from YouTube to come out and film for us one time.
