Weekly Roundup: “No Kings" vs Christ the King Who Condones Slavery + Trump Destroys the White House
Brad and Dan unpack the symbolism and substance behind the demolition of the East Wing of the White House to make way for a privately funded ballroom. They reflect on what presidential construction projects reveal about power, legacy, and the messages leaders send through what they build...and destroy. The conversation broadens into current policies on immigration and detention centers, the expansion of ICE, and the moral failures in training and accountability.
The hosts also examine the “No Kings” protests and the growing Christian nationalist backlash that frames dissent as rebellion against “Jesus as King.” They connect this rhetoric to broader themes of exclusion, such as dismissive comments about non-Christian holidays like Diwali, and to the resurgence of biblical literalism—including a far-right pastor’s defense of slavery. Brad and Dan trace the dangerous evolution from persuasion to colonization within evangelical and nationalist movements, while highlighting protest and public dissent as vital signs of democratic resistance and hope.
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I'm Brad O'Nishi, founder of Axis Mundy Media, author of Preparing for War, The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next here today with my co-host.
I am Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Lammar College.
Pleased to be with you, Brad, on another week where nothing happened and we have nothing to talk about.
Everything is good news.
Gonna get into the destruction of the east wing of the White House, which is a thing.
And that'll lead us into the building of detention centers for migrants.
And that will be funded at the tune of $10 billion.
That'll lead to ICE and its lack of training for new recruits and basically sending people out to kidnap folks without having to meet many standards, shall we say.
We'll then get into some responses to the no kings protest, which go like this.
Hey, there's you say no kings.
We say Jesus is king.
So here's my question, Dan.
What kind of king would your Jesus be?
And I'm not talking about just Jesus as he supposedly is in his objective nature, whatever that might be, but the king Jesus of Christian nationalists who are in elected leadership in this country and have big platforms.
So we'll ask about what kind of king Jesus would be.
And that will lead us down somehow to the point where owning other humans is what Jesus wants, which is what one Christian nationalist pastor and pundit said this week.
We'll get all that in.
Lots to cover.
Let's go.
All right, Dan.
You know, this is something that this is a little more visceral.
I feel like you and I, we try to, our goal is to bring people receipts and provide analytical rigor, discipline, you know, a grad seminar while you're driving to work kind of show.
But Trump's destroying the White House.
And I think for a lot of folks, we can analyze this.
And I think there's ways that we can put this into perspective.
This feels like just a very visceral thing to a lot of people.
And that's my takeaway from just kind of what I've seen this week on social media and talking to folks.
And here's how I've come down on it.
And I want to just throw this to you.
And we can do this briefly because I think we want to talk about ICE and what it's not doing to train people.
But, you know, as a leader, as a human being, there's a sense in which your legacy and your priorities are reflected in what you build and what you tear down.
You know, I don't know about you.
I'm in middle age.
This is the moment a lot of people start asking, like, what have I even done with my life?
And what you have a midlife crisis and, you know, I call Dan Miller at 3 a.m.
Like, I'm going to buy a Corvette.
You know, I'm going to get, I'm going to get Botox for the fourth time this week.
It's, I got to figure it out.
Trump destroyed the East Wing to build a ballroom that is privately funded at the tune of over $200 million.
And he's collecting donations from others.
Like, this is not going through the normal channels.
And ridiculously massive, too.
It's just like the footprint of this thing is huge.
90,000 square feet.
Yeah, compared to the layout of the White House.
So this is like if you had a three-bedroom house and you're like, you know, let's put on an addition, a seven-bedroom back house that connects via a walkway.
It's just going to look ridiculous.
So he's destroying the White House.
And so let me give you one thought I'll throw it to you.
And that is, I think a lot of people really felt this this week.
And it's not because their priorities are wrong and they don't care about SNAP benefits and they don't care about all the other things that are happening.
I don't think that if you say to somebody at a Halloween party this weekend, oh, you care about the White House?
What about this?
Right?
Like judging them morally.
I don't think that's helpful.
And it's not that we shouldn't care about all the things that are happening, but I think if the White House is supposed to be the people's house, and when you invite someone to your house, when you invite the prime minister of the UK or the leader of Japan or any other dignitary from around the world, and they are welcomed at the White House, when they walk in, you feel as if we are welcoming them as the American people.
And sometimes that's good and sometimes that bad.
I don't know about you.
I'm married to somebody like where if we invite anyone over, whoo, we got to clean the house three times.
We got to make sure that like the back closet that not even I go into or the back like storage area that not even I go into is fully cleaned out and organized so that in case our guest for some reason decides to go in the crawl space of our house, they will see something that is spic and spam.
But I just feel like when you invite someone to the people's house, it feels like, oh, yeah, there's a dignity there.
We feel proud as Americans that we're right.
And so for someone just to go destroy half of it without going through the proper channels, without the right agency approval, seemingly out of nowhere, I think was a gut punch to people.
What do you think?
Yeah, I think it was.
I think the White House is this kind of, I mean, it's a symbolic space.
And there can be lots of ambiguity about the symbolism of that space, but it's still a symbolic space.
It is also like, you know, just in technical terms, it's a registered historic landmark and all that kind of stuff.
And so I think there's a sense in which, for lack of a better way of putting it, the iconoclasm of this of just coming and smashing this symbol callously and for nothing other than self-aggrandizement, for nothing, you know, other than the kind of ego boost that this gives Trump of, I don't know, making the White House his or compensating by having a big giant space or whatever it is.
It feels really tacky.
It feels like it's attacking something.
For me, people is this iconic American space.
And there's also the sense in which, you know, every president who comes in, they put their stamp on it.
The oval office looks different every time a person comes in.
And I've never studied the architecture of the White House in detail, but you'd like hear these things about different presidents who like, you know, they have a movie theater put in or a bowling alley or, you know, the sort of interior of the space, that kind of stuff varies and whatever.
But this is like, it's not a president's house.
It is the house where the president lives.
And to that sense of, you know, America's house, it's the house where the person who occupies that office lives.
It's not theirs.
This isn't Trump's space.
This isn't Trump's office.
I think that's a piece of it.
And then there's just the aesthetic of Donald Trump.
It's just that piece of it of like, what kind of gold-plated monstrosity is this going to be?
I personally don't love what he did to the Rose Garden.
We've already kind of seen this and I anticipate it someday in the future that I don't know, the space is going to get repurposed or they're going to tear it down and do something else and try to return it or whatever.
But there's all of that.
And then I think tied in with what you said, the fact that there are channels, anybody who's ever had to do anything with a historic space or like make a change to a building where it's zoned in a historic space or something, there's a lot of hoops to jump through in this case for good reason.
And of course, there's nothing but disdain for that entire process, dismissal of it and so forth, having workers sign NDAs, all kinds of things like that.
So it's just, it just feels kind of gross, I think, to a lot of people, even people who don't necessarily follow politics and stuff.
It just, you know, that's just not what people want about this, this iconic American space.
Well, it happens at a time when the government shut down.
It happens at a time when people are thinking about inflation and tariffs and that holidays are coming.
And here you have the ability to go ask oligarchs for money so you can build a thing.
And I think last comment on this is it's not functional.
And what I mean by that is you don't need this for any other reason than you want to host gatherings where you can ask for donations or you can raise money personally.
Like, honestly, I think that there's a thing here where the ballroom is a place where you can invite a thousand people.
The capacity is 999 and you can charge a million dollars per plate.
And it's where's that money going?
This is a chance for when we say no kings, what we mean is you don't get to destroy the people's house and then you don't get to use that house as your personal kind of shakedown ballroom club east wing, have cocktails on the on the patio if you're an oligarch kind of kind of gathering.
And that's what I think this is.
Just a pay to play at the White House kind of thing.
That's what it is.
You're paying for access.
There's supposed to be, and I know it's always been a slippery, you know, kind of blurry line, but Trump blew through it a long time ago.
There's supposed to be that line between occupying the office and then using that office for political gain.
Like campaigning is supposed to be separate from occupying the space.
What you're describing is everything that that is supposed to be about of just not personal enrichment and personal personal personal advancement.
And that's what this is going to be.
All right.
We could talk about this all hour.
I don't want to.
There'll be more to say as it goes on.
We have a piece from CNN recently, I think yesterday, that also outlines how Trump is and the Trump administration are going to build detention centers across the country.
They're going to do it quickly with $10 billion funneled to the Navy.
And this, and I'm not a lawyer and I don't understand all the ins and outs here.
There's a lot of folks who are saying it's illegal in the way that they're doing it.
They're also just, what is the legacy here?
The legacy is I'm going to destroy the East Wing of the White House and build a ballroom to enrich myself.
And I'm going to also build, what am I going to build?
I'm going to build detention centers to the tune of $10 billion.
And it's hard not to imagine these becoming death camps, Dan.
Y'all can email me and say, Brad's on it again.
Too much Diet Coke before lunch.
But if you house 30,000 people at each facility, if you house tens of thousands of people at a facility, and we see the kind of ways people are being treated right now in ICE custody and ICE detainment and the ways that the regard, the disregard for their humanity, it's hard not to imagine this going really, really bad.
So that's there.
Here's what he's tearing down.
Here's what he's building.
And you're like, well, why do you think people are being treated with such disdain by DHS and by ICE and by others?
And it's because they're not being trained.
They're bounty hunters who are being sent out with a mission.
The more people you capture, the more money you get.
Okay.
So my incentive is the more people I bring in, the more money I get.
Yeah, sounds like a bounty hunter.
Cool.
So how should I go about it?
Should I go about this?
It's like, here, I'm just here to keep a community safe.
I'm here to help this block be less full of crime or violent criminals.
Am I here to ensure order?
No, this is not like any form of public safety.
This is I get paid if I go in and do a thing.
So I'm going to do that thing, even if it means crossing the line, not following process, not following orders, whatever.
And guess what?
I'm probably not well trained to do it because they don't have time for that.
And Dan Miller, I think you got all the notes on that.
Yeah.
So, I mean, everything you're talking about, if people listen to the ads, the recruiting ads for ICE, you already hear the kind of things you're talking about.
It's like playing on the Christian nation.
It's playing on the like the bounty hunter kind of motif.
I think you have a lot of people, frankly, who are applying for ICE positions.
They want to go bust some heads.
That's the kind of thing.
The images that people see that scare them are the same things that draw some there of like wearing the mask and being unidentified and using tear gas on people you don't like and all that kind of stuff.
It's not drawing the best of candidates.
But Trump has also had this push.
They have to hire thousands more ICE agents because they have this completely arbitrary number of like deportations that they want to do and so forth.
They're not getting support from lots of states and local municipalities because they're not going to let local police do it.
They're not going to have them enforce federal immigration law.
So they have to have this push to get more and more agents.
So they're feeding on exactly that kind of notion that you're talking about.
But a couple articles this week have shown like some of the downside of this about this rush to recruit and train agents.
And basically this idea that they have not, not only have they not been trained right, they haven't been vetted.
Standards have been lowered.
The training is fast.
They haven't been vetted.
And a few dimensions to this, there was one, this was reported in the Atlantic, that had to do with recruits not meeting fitness standards.
And it was the idea that, according to a source, more than a third of recruits at the Georgia Training Academy have failed to meet the fitness standards.
And the fitness standards are not, they're not that significant, but people haven't met them.
And there was an email from ICE headquarters, somebody at the headquarters of ICE that was leaked to the media to the agency's top officials that referred to athletically allergic candidates.
That was how they describe them, candidates who are athletically allergic.
The bigger issue, though, in terms of the vetting is that there have been recruits placed into the training program.
So they're actively training to be ICE agents.
And the vetting hasn't been fulfilled on them.
And it turns out that some of them have, they haven't passed drug tests.
So they fail drug tests.
They have failed background checks.
They have criminal records that ICE is not aware of.
ICE that positions itself as we're going and removing criminals from society and so forth is drawing criminals into the organization and not vetting them fully.
There were stories of some who had not been even fingerprinted for background checks before they started the training and so forth.
So this is what you get.
And so there's the logistical side of this.
This is what happens when you lower standards.
You have to create this big push to hire more and more people to recruit more and more ICE agents.
And you can't get enough quality applicants.
And so you have to lower the standards to bring more of them in.
It's in fact what people like Hegseth say is happening in the military, but it's like actually happening in ICE.
But to your point about legacy, I think this is the more significant point.
It's the sort of thing of like, what is the legacy going to be?
What are the priorities?
So let's think about you.
We've got the shutdown and there's been debate about paying the military and so forth.
And Trump has talked about, you know, he's found the money to pay the military, but we're also going to take $10 billion of military funding and fund detention centers, right?
At a time when supposedly the politicians are worried about paying military families during the shutdown.
That's a part of legacy.
This is a part of legacy.
Your legacy is not building, regardless of what somebody thinks about ICE, regardless of what somebody thinks about immigration policy, your legacy is not to have the best agents you can.
Your legacy is not to, if you really believe that this is about protecting America, to have the best agents that you can, to have quality people in those positions, to people, have people of good character, to have people that can meet the standards, all of that.
Your legacy is just to get brown people out of this country.
That's your legacy.
Your legacy and your priority is to try to make this a more white America at any cost.
And if that means that we're going to kind of waive the vetting and maybe bring some potential criminals into ICE, yeah, okay.
If it means we have to get people who are there because, as you say, they're essentially bounty hunters.
Yeah, all right.
You know, what are you going to do?
That's the price we're willing to pay.
I think that tells us more about that legacy and that vision of what kind of America are we looking for to bring it back to the no kings thing.
If Trump wants to be the king, what kind of king?
What are the values?
What are the values of this kingdom of America that he and the Christian nationalists are building?
We see that with this.
So to be clear, and I just, I want to be, I want to be clear, like ICE agents don't get paid per person they bring in.
But if you want to get your signing bonus and you want to get the bonuses that come with retention and staying on board, you have to meet performance standards.
And what we know is that Stephen Miller is putting quotas on how many people need to be around up every day.
So if you want to stay in the organization, you have to meet performance quotas.
And that's how you get your bonuses.
The bonus right now is between $50,000 and $60,000 if you stay on long enough to get the bonus.
So for a lot of people, that's big.
Now, especially, Dan, folks that maybe are not able to pass a test to be a local police officer.
Maybe folks who were not able to meet the criteria of actual law enforcement are like, well, I can be an ICE agent and nobody's really testing me there.
Okay.
So I think that's one.
I think two, I think all of you can see this when you see ICE raids and detentions on screen, when you see this in your social media feeds or if you're witnessing them in person.
There's no sense from those.
Okay, let me back up.
For a long time, there's been a critique of American policing that has said, if you treat your communities, if you treat your neighborhood, if you treat your block as the enemy, then you will turn your policing and your law enforcement into a war.
It's you against them.
They'll become your enemy.
You treat them.
They will be your enemy.
They're going to respond to you like you're an enemy.
Yeah.
So we've seen that critique of American policing for a long time.
We've seen the fact that instead of having neighborhood community investment, cops who walk a beat and get to know the people there who are in their neighborhood, who are in their patch of territory, instead of having mutual kind of enforcement between community leaders and citizens and police, it's most of the police do not live in the neighborhoods or the cities where they are serving.
They don't know these folks.
They're not invested in those communities.
It's not where their kids go to school or where their kids play ball or any of that.
That's a longstanding critique of American policing that we could spend however many hours on we want.
ICE is that to the most disgusting nth degree because it's people who've been hired and said, look, we'll give you 50 grand if you stay on long enough.
We'll give you great bonuses.
We'll give you overtime.
You have one goal is to go into that neighborhood and get as many people as you can.
And we may find out later that they're green card holders or citizens, but whatever.
We'll figure that out later.
There's no sense here of any investment in the American people, any investment in that community, any investment in those human beings.
That is not part of the incentive structure.
It's not part of the job title.
It's not part of the description.
It is everything people said about American policing, like to the exponential marker and militarized to the point of unmarked cars, masked men showing up.
And what we know from what you're telling us, Dan, is that they don't even barely have to meet any standards.
They don't even barely have to pass the test.
They don't barely, like there was a percentage in that article that you're talking about that said like well under 50% could not pass an open book exam about the standards that they're supposed to keep.
Like so under 50% of the class didn't pass the open book exam, Professor Miller.
That tells you I think something's wrong when it comes to like the teaching and learning going on in that setting.
Yeah.
I think, I mean, just to put this again in perspective, there are standards in place that by all the accounts, former ICE agents and so forth, say have been lowered.
They've lowered the existing standards.
And then they're getting people that aren't even meeting those standards or they're not, they're not really trying to enforce those standards.
So it's even lower.
And I just, for me, you know, for those who say, well, I need standards.
So first of all, again, I'm just going to look at the different discourses that you have from this administration when it comes to the U.S. military, where they're creating a sense of an organization that has no standards, even though it's had standards for decades and so forth.
And here they're erasing standards for the purpose of doing this.
But these are people who are authorized to use lethal force, right?
In the right circumstances.
I don't mean that they just get to go out and do that, but they are in situations where they're trained in the use of deadly force.
There are situations that arise where lethal force is authorized and so forth.
We need high standards.
Like if you're going to grant some people that kind of power and potential in society, we should have the highest standards, in my view.
And again, I think it speaks to everything about the actual priorities of the Trump administration and what they're after.
Well, a U.S. Marshall was shot in a raid in L.A. two days ago.
And so law-breaking marshals, nothing but violators.
All right.
So, you know, the thought at the top here was, well, what do you build and what do you tear down?
And Trump is tearing down the people's house to build an object of veneration to himself.
We didn't even mention the Arc de Trump, Arc de Trump he wants to build near Arlington Cemetery across the river from the Lincoln Monument.
And I'll just, can we just say one more thing?
Can we just come back to like, what do you build?
You're the president who's going to build $10 billion worth of detention centers where I think people are going to be treated less than human and may die in droves.
You're funding unqualified masked men to show up in unmarked cars to terrorize neighborhoods.
That's what you're doing.
They can't meet the standards.
Pete Hegseth is out here saying that it's the black women and the gay folks in the military who can't meet the standards.
And it's, we look at ICE, as you just said, Dan, and it's these guys who are out of shape.
They're not seemingly fit for this kind of work.
They can't pass the test, whether it's in the book or whether it's physical.
And here they are, give them a gun, lethal force, go get as many people as you can.
And if you have to wave that gun around in a neighborhood near a school or a hospital or a court, whatever, it doesn't matter.
The biggest priority is, as you said, getting any brown person you see off of the street.
Okay.
And then you come back to D.C. and you're like, the whole government is shut down.
There are hundreds of thousands of people on furlough.
And the president's priority is a ballroom.
And Dan, I lived in D.C. I don't know how you feel when you go to D.C., but living in D.C. on a daily basis, you can feel the pride of people visiting there and walking the National Mall, the Capitol, the White House, the Smithsonian buildings, the museums, the monuments, Lincoln, FDR, Martin Luther King Jr., and so on and so on and so on.
You feel the pride of the person coming from Wichita or Portland or Baton Rouge that they're in the nation's capital and it is this majestic place filled with monuments to a past that in some ways they're very, very proud of.
When one guy decides he can just destroy a symbol of that while building detention centers, it's almost the perfect kind of example of everything we talk about with the Trump administration and the idea of a king who does not seem to have the people in mind at all.
So any final thoughts before we take a break?
Just again, I mean, tied in with this, and others have noted this, the overall tone deafness.
I mean, Trump's beyond tone deaf to even call that.
I think calling something tone deaf implies that they're capable of hearing what that is.
But not just the government shutdown and how you spend the money, but you've got the inflation that Trump did not magically get to bring down.
You have reports that say that about half of states are probably actively in an economic recession right now.
You have people who, you know, they're busy trying to figure out if they can afford to repair their car or like, you know, they've got that plumbing leak in the basement that's going to be a few hundred bucks to fix.
They don't have the money to do it.
Or whatever.
Real world concerns that millions and millions of people know and understand.
And you have the president who's like, yeah, we're going to drop $200 million on a ballroom, a completely literal, absolutely frivolous and unnecessary project.
Because there are plenty of places in D.C. that if you actually need to host a big event, you can host a big event.
They do it all the time.
But nope, it needs to be there.
It's a vanity project.
And I think it communicates, it communicates to all of that.
I think, and it's not falling on deaf ears.
There are millions of Americans who I think are seeing that dimension of this and realizing just completely how completely out of touch with reality this president is.
It's a collapse of the office into the person, which you always talk about is not supposed to be what American democracy is.
If you have a president, they hold the office of the president.
They're a placeholder.
There's a political theorist I've talked about him before named Claude LaFour, famous political theorist, and talks about democracy.
He says democracy is defined by the empty place of power.
There's this space and there is no permanent occupant of that.
There's nobody who embodies that.
It's a space that is filled and emptied and refilled.
And I mean, that's what this office is.
That office is the authority space.
Who holds it is a matter of a decision for the people and so forth, but they're not one and the same.
And as you say, Trump completely collapses them into the cult of personality around which he has built everything that he is, everything that MAGA is.
Let's take a break.
We'll come back and talk about the fact that in the wake of the No Kings rally, we have a lot of Christian nationalists screaming, yes, there is a king.
His name is Jesus.
And so my question to them is, well, what kind of king would your Jesus be?
And it turns out he would be a slaveholder.
Be right back.
All right, Dan, here is Chip Roy, Representative Chip Roy, used to be a Ted Cruz staffer and now in Congress reacting to No Kings and saying that there is in fact a king and that is Jesus.
Political rallies.
And the truth is, the Marxists, the radicals, and the Islamists, the Democratic Party promoted this weekend.
They cannot handle the truth.
The truth is that there is a king and that king is Jesus.
And the president has been willing to say it.
His administration has been willing to say it.
And Charlie Kirk was willing to say it and he got killed for it.
The thing that should arrest everyone here is that Chip Roy, Dan, basically just takes it for granted that to be an American is to be a Christian who thinks Jesus is king.
The administration has said it.
I'm saying it now.
And there's no recognition here of American diversity, the fact that very far from all Americans are Christians, that there are many, many Christians who are non-religious, who identify as atheist, agnostic, who also identify as Hindu, as Buddhist, as Muslim.
It doesn't matter.
For Chip Roy, it's like, here's the thing.
To be an American is to be a Christian.
This is Christian nationalism in its sort of most distilled form.
It collapses identity, a Christian identity with an American patriotism and citizenry and says you cannot be one without the other.
Now, it was not just Chip Roy who had this kind of reaction.
There's a lot of folks in the wake of the No Kings rallies, which were, as we said they would be last week, record-breaking.
Some reports saying up to 7 million people being there.
A lot of folks energized.
A lot of folks feeling like not all hope is lost.
But there's folks who had this reaction.
So Andrew Isker, who is a Doug Wilson acolyte and a Christian nationalist in Tennessee, trying to create a homogeneous Christian society there, said on Twitter, X, no kings versus Christ the King.
So that's how it's being set up.
So you say no kings, we say Christ the King.
Charlie Kirk was killed because he said Christ is king.
He was killed.
Is that okay?
Again, it's amazing how many reasons, for how many reasons Charlie Kirk was killed.
And it's always by a leftist.
And somehow, Dan, can I just interject something that's not on the script for today?
And Dan's like, oh, yeah, sounds, I know this.
I know how this goes, Brad.
I've been doing this with you for a while.
Dan, when's the last time you saw anything about Tyler Robinson?
You seen anything about Charlie Kirk's killer?
Like, do we have a 5,000-word deep dive on him from somewhere?
Like, do you, have you heard anything about Tyler Robinson?
He's gone.
Gone.
And what's in his place is a nebulist left who supposedly killed Charlie Kirk.
So I'll just put that there.
Okay.
C.J. Engel talks.
Well, let me see.
Let me go to Oren McIntyre.
Okay.
Who has a picture here of the Denver communist booth.
Okay.
He says, you can't reason with these people.
You can't allow them to take power.
The only option is to rule them.
Okay.
So that's a thing.
I believe that this Denver communist stand that he has a picture of was at the No Kings rally.
Okay.
But then the best example is really Benny Johnson.
So Benny Johnson is somebody who spoke at Charlie Kirk's funeral.
He has become a huge, massive deal.
He was also caught up in the Russia funneling money to MAGA influencers scandal.
Okay.
Now, if you all remember, it's been a week, so things move fast.
In the wake of No Kings, Trump tweeted this AI or true social, this AI thing where he's a fighter pilot and he's dropping fecal matter on the American people.
Yeah.
And then J.D. Vance decided he was going to send out a whole AI thing of Trump being crowned a king and the Democrats like Pelosi and Schumer and others bowing to him.
And this is where our president and vice president had their head in response to the No Kings rallies.
Benny Johnson responds, and here's the guy who's he is a Christian leader.
It's a man who's leading prayers.
He was at Charlie Kirk's funeral speaking about Jesus.
And he called this a golden timeline that we're living through.
The White House has been on an absolute barn burner for the last 24 hours with presidential communications.
I would argue is the single greatest run of presidential comms in the history of America.
And let me explain myself.
One, you have Donald Trump posting this meme where he's flying in an F-16 wearing a crown.
It says King Trump on the side of the plane and he dumps raw sewage on all of the No Kings protesters.
JD goes viral and then also follows up with this meme of Donald Trump as a king and Nancy Pelosi and all the libs bowing to him.
And if you're not done yet, in the exact, all of the same news cycle, on the same day, Caroline Levitt decides to whip out the your mom card.
This is a real exchange from Caroline Levitt with a Huffington Post left-wing reporter.
This is the single golden timeline.
This is the single greatest series of presidential communications to the press in history.
You're living through it.
It's just remarkable to see.
One of the things he mentions there is not only the AI and posting from Vance and from Trump, but also the fact that Caroline Leavitt this week, it was revealed, was asked by a HuffPost reporter about Budapest as a potential meeting place for Putin and Trump.
And the reporter saying, look, there's a lot of history in Budapest that is quite dicey when it comes to Ukraine and Eastern Central Europe.
And Budapest is kind of symbolic of certain things.
Who chose Budapest?
And Leavitt's response was your mom.
So like, so far, Dan, if I asked these folks who, Dan can't stop laughing.
She actually tweeted.
It's just so, it's just like these are our national like spokespeople.
It's just so immature.
Your mom.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It just, if you'd have made this up 10 years ago, people would tell you you're crazy.
But this would be the discourse of the supposed like governing party of the United States.
So here's, here's what I know so far.
Okay.
Here's what I know so far is that if the Jesus that these Christian nationalists want to be king is king, if he is the king of America, their Jesus, their version of Jesus, that is the Jesus who really loves when the president, I guess his representative on earth depicts himself as going to the bathroom and dumping all over American citizens.
I guess that's the, that's Jesus the king.
So that's the kind of king Jesus is.
He's like, if people protest, if people voice their dissent, you should symbolically do this to them.
Okay.
I also know that as Oren McIntyre says, that you should rule them.
You should rule people.
You can't persuade them.
And then Carolyn Leavitt, I guess, as a Christian and serving King Jesus, responds to people asking her earnest questions about geopolitical matters with 13-year-old jokes about your mom.
Okay.
So so far, that's what I know.
I'll give you one more example.
And that is William Wolfe, who I've talked about before.
William Wolfe is one of the 15 leaders who was invited to the White House in March of 2025, is connected to Doug Wilson, is connected to other high-profile pastors and pundits, and is the executive director of the Center for Baptist Leadership.
He is a former employee of Heritage Action, meaning the Heritage Foundation, and was also an assistant defense secretary, was kind of one of the assistants to the assistants as a defense secretary.
Nonetheless, Dan, kind of a triaffecta there of like Heritage Foundation, Defense Secretary, Center for Baptist Leadership, and Doug Wilson.
And he tweeted on October 18th, a picture of Donald Trump as Napoleon.
And he quoted, he who saves this country does not violate any law, which is a kind of rehash of the Napoleon comment.
So I guess this is kind of where we are.
If Jesus is king, we're going to put in place an earthly tyrant, strongman, autocrat leader like King Trump.
This is what William Wolfe did.
It's what J.D. Vance did, who is going to shit all over his people and tell them your mom anytime they're asked a legitimate question about geopolitical issues in that country.
And I think, Dan, you're going to tell us other things that this king Jesus might be for that somehow are worse than everything I just talked about.
Yeah, even before diving that, something to think about is that there can be a lot of Jesuses, right?
People talk about, you know, reading the Bible or Jesus or whatever.
And it's worth thinking, like, not just sort of positively say, like, what is their Jesus like?
But what is there Jesus not into?
He's certainly not into service.
He's certainly not into like sacrificing for the good of others.
Certainly not into peace or saying if you live by the sword, you'll die by the sword and advocating peace or service to the least of these or any of that.
That's not their Jesus.
So it's just worth pointing that out.
If people, you know, I don't know if you ever engage others or whatever.
There's lots of, there's lots of other Jesuses you can find if you wanted to sort of draw out, you know, their image of Jesus.
Can I give you, before we go to slavery, can I give you one more thing here?
Just a segue.
Before we go to slavery, yeah.
Yeah.
Stick around, people.
This week was Diwali.
It's the Hindu Festival of Lights.
And I'm going to, if, if my family can not get over the cold we've had all week and not be sick, we're going to go to a Diwali party this Saturday.
We have tons of folks in our neighborhood who celebrate Diwali.
And there's about a billion people in the world who celebrate as Hindus.
Okay.
Cash Patel tweeted this week about Diwali.
He said, let me read what he said.
Happy Diwali, celebrating the Festival of Lights around the world as good triumphs over evil.
The post received nearly 3,000 comments, many of which were repulsed by Patel's religion.
This is at the New Republic by Ellie Quinlan Pooteling.
Sorry, Ellie, if I said that wrong.
This is a Christian nation.
Check your foreigner stuff at the gate, said John McLone on X. A Christian nationalist known as Sons of Korah responded, not today, Satan.
Someone else just said one word, deport, as like deport him.
Rusty Shackelford, who is a self-proclaimed Project 2025 respecter, said, we need to deport all Hindus.
Ben Garrett, a pastor at Refuge Church in Utah, said, go back.
Gabriel Wrench, the host of the Cross Politic podcast, offered Patel a choice.
Here's the deal: either go back to your home country or assimilate into a Christian America.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Now, C.J. Engel said this.
C.J. Engel is also in the Doug Wilson, William Wolf, Andrew Isker, and he was watching J.D. Vance very closely, Dan, because of Usha Vance and her Indian heritage and whether or not there would be a celebration of Diwali and, by extension, Hinduism.
Here's C.J. Engel.
If Vance is really a Christian, let's see him disavow the celebration of demonic third world religions in the White House.
At J.D. Vance, choose between your God and your wife's God.
Hinduism never had a place in Heritage America, and we will fight against it for the rest of our lives.
And then somebody jumps in and is like, CJ, why are you being so un-Christian?
And CJ says, quote, Christ commanded us to make disciples of all nations and declare his kingship against all false gods and religions.
So the Jesus who is king here also tells Cash Patel and every other person who is not a Christian, get out of the country.
That's what King Jesus says.
Go back, get out, deport, out of here.
So that's another aspect of what Jesus would be like as our king in America if the Jesus that they are promoting, as you said, there's many Jesuses, if the Jesus they're promoting were ever to be our actual king.
That is what he would do.
So I apologize.
That was an interjection, but I wanted to make sure we got Diwali in there.
And now we can finally, at long last, get to slavery.
It's all these things that once upon a time, like I'm old enough that I remember time before social media and things like that.
And you would say, there are lots of Americans who believe.
They'd be like, no, nobody really thinks that.
Nobody would actually say that.
This is a caricature.
And I guess for good, bad, or otherwise, with social media now, that's all you have to do.
You can just go to X or the comment post anywhere and just pull out like all the people.
Be like, here they are.
These are real people saying these things, thinking these things.
Nobody's making stuff up.
On the note of you can't make this stuff up.
So this week, Joshua Hames, who's a far-right pastor and podcaster and sort of, I guess, Christian influencer maybe would be a title here.
Former pastor at Pete Hegseth's Church, among other things, we want to draw some connections here, recently posted a video defending the practice of slavery because that's a practice that needs defense, Brad.
Now, so he was reacting to a video by Ali Beth Stuckey.
So anybody who's listening to it, it's in the code.
We know who Ali Beth Stuckey is.
And she was like debating a group of liberals, and he didn't like how she responded when she was pressed about the Bible allowing slavery.
So here's how this works for people who haven't had these discussions or whatever, is you're talking to a conservative Christian.
They say, well, we believe the Bible.
Everything should be based on the Bible.
So the standard move is take something that they're going to find offensive or morally reprehensible that the Bible doesn't condemn or the Bible actually advocates and say, well, what about this?
Do you support this?
And then you sort of trap them.
That's how it works.
And slavery is a prime example because the Bible nowhere says don't have slaves.
It's much more ambiguous and slavery is a common practice in the Bible, et cetera, et cetera.
So Alibuckey is in the position that lots of conservative Christians are, where she has to find a way to not to condemn slavery, but also say that she believes that the Bible is true and that we should do what it says and so forth.
That's the standard kind of dilemma for conservative Christians that say that the country is bounded on biblical principles and so forth.
It's the kind of classic trap discourse if you want to like call out people on the right.
So Hames recognizes this trap and his advice is to just double down then and be like, all right, the Bible does affirm slavery, so we should too.
That's the mistake.
And so he's critical of Alibestucke because she's just, Brad, not conservative enough, not far enough to the right, not sort of Christian nationalist enough to just come out and say that we should have slavery.
So here's some of what he had to say.
He said this is a, should we play the clip?
Yeah, play the clip.
All right, let's do it.
All right, buckle up, people here.
The institution of slavery is not inherently evil.
I know.
Some of you guys are upset by that.
Some of you guys are saying, I've been saying that for years.
Okay, I'll take it a step further.
It is not inherently evil to own another human being.
I know.
Just wait.
Some of you guys are really upset, but let's talk through this because it is very important that every Christian affirm what I just said.
And not only should they affirm it, every Christian in today's society should be able to defend what I just said.
Okay.
Every Christian should be able to defend it.
Big Eva, big evangelicalism has been getting this wrong for years, basically since the Genesis, since the advent of Big Eva.
They haven't had a good answer for the slavery issue.
All right.
Christians in America have been led astray on this topic.
They've been led to believe things that the Bible doesn't teach.
And when we go beyond the Bible, there are dire consequences.
So there is, has it, and this is the key.
The institution of slavery is not inherently evil.
He's basically, yeah, you know, there are a few bad slaveholders.
You know, they weren't kind to their slaves, but the institution of slavery itself isn't the problem.
The Bible doesn't say to get rid of it.
It's not bad and so forth.
But here's the trick for me.
And this is why it matters.
If somebody says, okay, so why is he saying this?
He believes the Bible is literally true.
He believes, okay, maybe.
But he also gets into what I think is the real issue here.
And it takes us into, I think, the mindset of Christian nationalism.
And I want to kind of walk through this and I would welcome your thoughts as we go here.
But what he says is, it's a mistake, he says, to say that slave owners lived in grave sin.
He goes on and he's, you know, part of what he says there is that Christians in America have been led astray on this topic and so forth.
And he says, we have to acknowledge that people like the founders and men like Jonathan Edwards, he cites Jonathan Edwards, who was Jonathan Edwards.
He was a pastor and preacher who was a figure in the Great Awakening, kind of this sort of hero in the mythology of American conservative Protestantism and so forth.
He says, we have to acknowledge that people like that and Jonathan Edwards, who owns slaves, they weren't inherently evil.
And that means that America was not founded on inherently evil principles and so forth.
What's this about?
The real issue is Hames' hero worship.
It's something, Brad, that you've talked about for years, that on the conservative religious right and within the Christian nationalist model, everything is about reducing complexity to simplicity.
It's reducing society to two sides.
There is us and there is them.
There is us and our enemies.
There is good and there is evil.
There is light.
And they're like just dichotomies all the time.
And so what that does is says, well, you know, we can't say that the founders, that there were problems with them.
We can't say that America has always been a complex society that espoused some great ideals, but also didn't live up to them and that there's the ongoing project of trying to bring those things into alignment or all of that.
That's way too complex.
That's way too hard.
The founders have to be saints.
Jonathan Edwards had to be a saint.
And so even if that comes at the cost of saying we're just going to affirm slavery, talk about squaring the circle.
Man, what do you do about the fact that Thomas Jefferson had slaves?
What do you do about the fact that lots of founders had slaves?
What do you do about the fact that the Constitution and the things that it says about people of African descent?
And what are you going to do?
He said, well, slavery's fine.
That's what you do.
So I think that that's the key here.
And there's another piece of this where he also, I think, kind of gets trapped because you can also tell in spots that he's not comfortable with slavery.
He's trying to act like he is.
He's trying to say it's no big deal, but he also has spots in this video where he's like, yeah, I'm not fully comfortable with it.
And so he cites C.S. Lewis, of all people.
And what he says about C.S. Lewis is he highlights this idea that quotes C.S. Lewis, this notion of chronological snobbery, basically like reading back contemporary moral standards onto people in the past.
It's chronological snobbery.
And he says, you know, we're condemning them for being a product of their time.
And we're condemning them for, you know, doing something that was common at their time and so forth.
Now, for me, that means he's actually not comfortable with the fact that the founders had slaves.
He's not comfortable with the fact that Jonathan Edwards was a slave owner.
He's not comfortable with the fact.
And that tells me that he probably doesn't actually think slavery is great.
But instead of sort of living with that, I mean, like, what do we do with that?
And that's a real thing.
I think all of us understand this.
Brad, you and I are scholars and in academia, you run into all kinds of things who've had hugely influential ideas and maybe great ideas, but they were terrible people or they were a product of their time and they, I don't know, they believed anti-Semitic things or they were super misogynistic.
And you have to wrestle with what do you do with that?
Does that disqualify everything they said or did?
Does it not?
Do we learn to live with that complexity?
Those are hard questions.
My point is that you can't have those hard questions if you're a Christian nationalist because Jesus is king.
There's one message.
There's one Bible.
There's one truth.
There's one way of being.
So everybody that you need to have on your side, the founders, you need to cast the founders as all Christian nationalists.
You need to cast Jonathan Edwards as all Christian nationalists.
They all need to be good Christians.
And you can't square that circle with slaveholding unless you're willing to just go out and say, you know what?
Slavery's fine.
Slavery is fine.
American Christians have been led astray.
Silly Alibeth Stuckey, just so far to the left that she won't acknowledge that slavery is okay.
Whoa.
Yeah.
Like, how often is Ali Beth Stuckey going to be condemned for being woke?
Those are the dynamics that I see there.
And so I just see layers to this.
I see the layers of we are going to tell history the way that we want to tell it.
There's that piece.
We're not going to study history.
Why?
Because we don't want to know that the founders had slaves and that Jonathan Edwards had slaves.
We can't accept the fact that America has never been one thing.
It has always been this complex, messy thing with really dark elements and really bright elements and strong ideals that it hasn't lived up to.
We can't accept that.
We can't accept that people like the founders or Jonathan Edwards, they're just like the people in our lives that we really wrestle with that were like, I don't know how to separate or draw the lines between I don't know the good parts and the bad parts.
And what do I do with that?
And we can have all kinds of discussions and debates.
You can't have that kind of complexity.
All you can have is the assertion of truth.
So you create your Jesus, pick out who your Jesus is, which Jesus you like in the Bible.
You call that truth and you imprint that onto American society, even if it comes at the cost of saying, hey, you know, slavery would be okay.
And by implication, to me, there are people in America now.
If they have the heritage of former slaves, I guess, you know, where do we go with that?
Where exactly are you taking us, Hames, with this line of discourse?
Let's take a break.
We'll keep this going in a minute.
Okay.
I think three main responses to all that, Dan.
One is this is why the same people have such a hard time at the Confederacy.
Because when you see people and they're like, well, the Confederacy, that's right.
That's part of my heritage.
And the Confederacy had, you know, there was this society in the South, the antebellum South, that was full of virtue.
And it was a callback to ancient Rome.
And it was a Christian society based on classes.
And then you get to slavery in the Civil War and they can't condemn Confederacy because it's part of their heritage.
As if we all don't have heritage and ancestors and stories and lineage that is not complex and full of heroes and villains and people who in the same person were good and bad and successful.
This is why this to me is analogous to why the Confederacy gets held up by so many people because it's an either or.
Either I defend my great-great-grandpa who fought or I don't.
And if I betray the Confederacy, I betray him.
There's no other way to spin it.
That's one.
Number two, you might be thinking, who cares about Josh Hames?
If you look up Josh Hames, he's a baby-faced podcaster.
He looks like he's 19 years old.
I think he's in his mid-20s.
And it's like, who cares?
Well, The Guardian has done great work on this.
And I want to shout out Jason Wilson, who's been on this, on this for the last year and a half or so.
He says in a piece from last year, Josh Hames is a member of the CREC aligned Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship.
And you're like, who cares?
Well, friends, do you remember the whole reason that Pete Hexeth moved from New York to Tennessee?
It was to attend Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship.
Like if you asked Pete Hexeth, why'd you move to Tennessee?
It was like to raise my kids at that school, at that church, to send them to that school, and to be around good Christian families in society.
Pete Heckseth has appeared on the podcast that we just played for you, the Josh Hames's podcast, the Red Pill podcast, numerous times.
He often has on the show the pastor, Brooks Pottager, who is the pastor of Pilgrim Hill Reformed Church.
The church, Pete Hexeth, moved from New York to Tennessee to attend.
So if you're like, Josh Hames, this is just a 26-year-old kid trying to get likes and clicks and whatever, you can think that, but this is a guy whose show Hexeth has been on and who has been an intern at the church where Hexeth used to attend when he was in Tennessee.
This is not a nobody Dan in a basement just trying to make his name.
And that leads to my third point.
For a long time, I've been arguing that American evangelicals are moving to an ethos of conquer and colonize rather than persuade.
We've said it on the show many times.
Let's say it again.
When you and I were evangelical pastors, when you and I were evangelical youth group kids, the 90s, the early aughts, what was the idea?
And you tell me if this is not true at your church, Dan.
For me, it was our country is progressively less godly.
So we've got to go out and persuade them to follow Jesus.
How are you going to persuade that kid in your English class or in your baseball team to be a Jesus follower?
And, you know, here I am, super committed, convert, neurodivergent Brad is like, yeah, I'm doing it.
I don't care if it's cringe as hell.
I'll do anything you say.
So I went and tried to convince as many people to be Jesus followers as possible.
25 years later, the ethos is you just need to colonize them.
Like if they won't become a Christian, just step on them until they agree that America and this country is a Christian place and they either need to assimilate to a Christian America or go home.
Isn't that what they told Cash Patel?
So when you have people like Hames, who's at the sort of like one entry point of the ecosystem, Hames is this like 26-year-old who other 26-year-olds are going to watch saying slavery is condoned by the Bible and you as a Christian should never feel otherwise.
They're slowly building an Overton window that says, look, subjecting other humans against their will is biblical and it's needed.
If you want to make disciples of all nations and if Christ is going to be king, you can't let people who are not Christians, who are not Heritage Americans, who are not from here, who are not like us.
You can't just let them choose.
You can't just let them like be free and go to Walmart on the weekend and watch Netflix and eat a subway sandwich and play college football.
You need to subject them until they either leave or they just give in.
And until then, you might need to put them in one of the $10 billion Navy immigration camps that Donald Trump's building, or you might need to just reinstitute, I don't know, slavery, is that too strong a word?
Indentured servants, forced labor.
I don't know.
To me, Dan, this is dangerous because it's one more instance of Christians with influence testing ideas on people.
And how many of those 24-year-old seminarians with a smart mouth are going to go out this weekend and tell people when they're asked, actually, slavery is that's in the Bible.
And if you do it wrong, that's sinful.
If you're the wrong kind of slave owner, bad.
But if you do what the Bible says, you're actually helping the enslaved because you're bringing them the gospel.
And you know, that is the gospel.
Dan, that is the theology of the slaveholding South and of the KKK.
And if you want to try to notice the differences, it's that meme of Pam in the office saying they're the same picture.
I'm sorry.
They're pretty damn close at least.
So final thoughts on this before we go to Reasons for Hope.
My only final thought is that once again, this isn't completely new.
The evangelicals am I growing with the soft version of this was the, well, you know, in Greco-Roman society, slavery wasn't as bad as it was in the American South.
And so if you had basically a more humane kind of slavery, it was, you know, that was probably okay.
So again, just I talk about this all the time.
I realize I've been talking about this for like, you know, coming up on a decade now.
What we see in contemporary Christian nationalism is not completely new.
It is the quiet parts, how loud.
It is the volume turned up.
It is the fever dream version of things that have been circulating within this kind of Christianity for decades.
And I think we just need to continue to recognize that as well.
For all the people who are like, well, you know, Brad, you just talked about when you were an evangelical, it wasn't really that bad.
And like, nope, that's not the takeaway.
The takeaway is there were always these trajectories and currents.
And that is what we now see that has become mainstream.
And that's serious.
But we have to recognize as well that this is something that this religious discourse has always had within it.
And that is part of why it is so pernicious and needs to be countered.
This religious discourse has always had.
I'm looking at a number of polls, but there are a number of polls.
recognize Trump's weaponization of the Department of Justice.
You've got all the discourse about what this is.
You're putting it on Biden.
The Biden administration weaponized the Department of Justice and so forth and calling for indictments and all this.
But a lot of polling is showing that a strong majority of Americans recognize that Trump is targeting political enemies.
A strong majority of Americans see what he was prosecuted for as different.
They don't see that as weaponization and so on.
They see what he's doing as victimizing, you know, just victimizing political enemies and so forth.
I think what's most significant about this, because of course it breaks down in partisan terms, is the number of independents.
We continue to see this.
Trump won the last election because he managed to cobble together enough people from different sorts of sort of unaffiliated groups, those very narrow bands of Americans who can be persuaded to vote for him.
And on this issue, which he won't be quiet about, he's undermining the efforts because he keeps saying things about targeting people and so forth.
Americans are listening.
And as we were, you know, getting into the one-year window before midterms, I take hope in that.
I think that the No Kings rallies were really good news and reasons for hope.
And here's my takeaway from them: those kinds of events give people permission to protest, but also to dissent and to articulate that for themselves.
And I think it goes along with everything we just talked about with Hames and slavery.
When someone like Hames does that, he's giving the listeners permission to go to that party, go to that seminary, go to that Bible study and say, actually, slavery is not condemned in the Bible.
And if you do it right, it's probably good for your country.
There's people saying that right now.
Okay?
It's good for the people.
It's a slave.
It's for their benefit.
It is good for them.
That's good.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You're bringing them the gospel, giving them a job, a place to live, even if that's somewhere totally disgusting and terrible, whatever.
These protests give a wider population access to a way to protest and a discourse as to why they're doing it.
Why are you doing it?
Well, they can walk away and say, this is why.
I just think that we need to stand up for this.
And some people are like, well, No Kings is cringe.
And look at all these like suburban white folks and these older folks.
It's cringy.
And I just think that needs to stop.
I just think that you need to say, like, if people are willing to take these steps and jump into a protest in their small town, in their mid-metro, in their wherever, more and more people are going to find the permission structure to participate in other places.
And that's what we need.
Because I can tell you right now that there's worse on the horizon.
Like, ICE is stocking up on weapons that only the military should use.
They're building these detention centers.
They're trying to like get Adam Schiff and Letitia James on mortgage charges.
They've destroyed the White House.
The government's been shut down.
So the Epstein files don't come out.
Like it's not going to get better.
So this kind of action is going to be needed.
And the more people who find ways to participate, the better.
All right, friends.
Need you to do a couple of things for us.
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And they just have great conversations on that show.
It debuted this week.
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Other than that, if you are a subscriber, make sure to hang out this coming Tuesday, the 28th with Dan and I, 7.15 Eastern.
It'll be our live recording of our bonus episode, and we have a lot to catch up on.
Next week is Halloween.
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