Weekly Roundup: We May Never Vote Again + JD Vance Runs for President
Dan’s “demon” costume sets the stage for a serious warning: Americans may not be able to vote freely in 2026. Brad argues that authoritarian tactics and election interference are accelerating, pointing to SNAP benefit cuts, ACA premium hikes, and the creation of a National Guard “quick reaction force” as tools of social control. The hosts connect these developments to historical examples of militarized regimes and discuss how Trump loyalists embedding on military bases signal deeper threats to democracy.
They also turn their attention to JD Vance’s recent appearances at Ole Miss and Turning Point USA, where his rhetoric blends Christian nationalism, white supremacy, and populist theater. From his calls to teach Christianity in schools to his public remarks about his Hindu wife, Vance uses religion as a political weapon while appealing to the MAGA base. Yet amid the darkness, Brad and Dan highlight reasons for hope, including legal and judicial pushback against extreme policies and bipartisan resistance in the Senate.
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I am Brad Onishi, author of Preparing for War, The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next, founder of Axis Monday Media, here today with my co-host, the demon Dan Miller.
People aren't looking online on YouTube, they'll be like, what are you talking about?
I am Dan Miller, dressed for Halloween and also associate professor of religion and society at Landmark College.
Pleased to be with you, Brad.
I know a lot of you are podcast people.
You don't want to watch YouTube.
You want to listen to this on the way to work and while you're doing dishes, and that's great.
But if there's ever a reason to go subscribe to our YouTube channel, today is the day because, whew, Dan Miller's costume is incredible.
So we'll talk more about it in a minute.
What are we going to talk about today on the show?
We're going to talk about a thesis that I think is coming clear into view and we have the receipts to back it up, which is this.
You are not going to vote in 2026.
Not in the way that you think you might, not in the way that is supposed to be effective in terms of a vote in the midterms for Congress.
And we will back that up, talking about SNAP benefits, ACA premiums, the National Guard, ICE, and on down the road.
We'll then get to JD Vance's very discussed appearance at Old Miss as Charlie Kirk's stand-in and some of the comments he made there, the ways that he continues to demonize immigrants and put forth an explicitly Christian nationalist and shall I say Christian supremacist ideology, as well as many comments about the ways that Christianity should be taught in our schools and how he wants to convert his wife, Usha.
All that and more, lots to cover.
Let's go.
All right, Dan.
So.
So how long did this take you this morning?
I mean, we just have to take 30 seconds.
Folks, if you don't want to hear this, just hit the button.
Go forward 30 seconds.
But you got horns.
You got wings.
You got makeup.
You look amazing.
Yeah, I've put it on a couple of times, so not too long, but I'm not very fluid at the makeup.
And then I put on the makeup and then my daughter corrects all the things I did wrong.
And so then I got to go back.
I get basically sent back to like touch up.
So I got to give myself half an hour to do just the basic like eyeliner and mascara stuff.
But she is my, she's my coach.
So.
All right.
I mean, it's, yeah.
Again, friends, you want to see this.
So I'll put something up on Instagram, but you need to, you need to go see the YouTube video.
More like a naming contest on Discord or something.
Like what my, you know, we get demonized by the right, told that we're demonic.
So I guess, I guess I am.
So I need like my Dan the Demon like official name or something.
Demon Dan Miller.
I mean, what's going on?
Okay, we're done after this, I promise everybody, but like, I don't know what's happened to your, your dodgeball career, but if you're still playing dodgeball, demon Dan Miller is the kind of nickname that, you know, I think that's great.
You want to- It's the kind of neat nickname that would make it sound like I'm good at dodgeball instead of like being the dude that they put out there who's like always the last one left because I'm not worth throwing at earlier, right?
But, you know, yeah, it sounds impressive.
All right.
So friends, I think a lot of you like us are thinking about snap benefits.
We're thinking about the 40 million Americans who snap really helps.
We're thinking about all the people who have jobs and work hard and yet because the minimum wage is stagnant because corporations that make billions and billions of dollars don't pay a living wage.
Folks need other help in order to make ends meet every week.
We're thinking about kids.
We're thinking about older folks.
We're thinking about folks who have disabilities.
It doesn't matter.
If you're on SNAP and those benefits are gone, we have a real crisis.
We also have an ongoing congressional shutdown, ostensibly over the ACA premiums.
And I'm seeing every time I go online, I'm seeing people post the ways their ACA, Obamacare, Affordable Care Act premiums are going to go up substantially next year.
And it's going to make it really, really hard for people to have insurance if things go, if those increases go like they think.
I know that this may not seem like a sequitur that makes sense, but I'm going to give you the thesis and then I'm going to see if we can back it up here and wrap in the SNAP benefit issue and the ACA premium issue.
My thesis for today, Dan, at least for this first segment before we get to JD Vance, is that we need to accept that we are not going to vote in 2026 in the ways that we should.
And what I mean by that is that we may vote.
Some of us may vote.
That vote may not count like it's supposed to.
It may not be going towards the open and fair election process that we expect.
So you may go tally your vote.
You may send in your form and it may feel like everything's normal.
I think many other folks are not going to vote.
And I think there's a chance that none of us vote at all.
And I think that we need to just get that possibility through our head.
I'm tired of apologizing for that.
I'm tired of couching that as like, oh, I'm being hyperpolic, or maybe this is crazy, but I think it's kind of, it is a distinct possibility that we do not vote in 2026, period.
And we have a bunch of receipts on this.
So Dan, I don't know if you want to start.
You want to start with the National Guard kind of stuff or do you want me to go to the military basis and Stephen Miller hiding out on one?
We'll start with the National Guard, right?
Take us through it.
Just one piece of it.
The Pentagon has ordered the National Guard to build a quick reaction force, a QRF, of 23,500 troops.
And QRF, as I understand it, is not that unusual to have sort of a group of military or guardsmen sort of tasked with a specific purpose that could be deployed quickly.
But the trick is that these are to be trained in crowd control and civil disturbance and ready to deploy to U.S. cities.
And the way they're going to compile this 23,500 is it's composed mostly of 500 guardsmen from almost every state, smaller population states.
The numbers vary, but it totals out to 23,500.
And the aim is to be operational by January 1, 2016.
And there was an order given.
2026.
Sorry, yeah, 2026.
I don't know why I said that.
There's a memo signed by Major General Ronald Burkett, the director of operations for the Pentagon National Guard Bureau.
So the sort of head officer over the National Guard.
And of course, this is criticized, including, I think, by people like us, as an effort to normalize what one person called a national militarized police force.
And the concern is not just what we've seen in D.C. or, you know, Chicago or L.A. or threatened against Baltimore or wherever of having these forces threatening against these cities.
I think the fear that everybody has is that come election time, you accuse groups of election tampering.
You keep promoting the big lie, and you send in the quick reaction force to go in and, quote unquote, secure the voting areas, to take the voting machines, to disperse the voters, to do those things, all in the name of voter security.
Or maybe you just station them there for so-called security, but it intimidates everybody and keeps them away from the polls because you have a bunch of armed troops standing outside the polling place or doing things they're not trained to do, like verifying IDs or whatever it is.
The point being, in specific regard to the topic that you're raising about the 2026 election, I think this is the concern, not just the punishing of blue cities and Democratic-led cities that we've already seen by the administration, but using this as an act of essentially military election interference for 2026 and beyond.
In the Guardian article that outlines this, there is a quote from Janessa Goldbeck, a former U.S. Marine Corps captain and chief executive of the Voice Foundation.
And she says that the order represents an attempt by the president to normalize a national militarized police force.
In a worst case scenario, she says, the president could declare a state of emergency and say that elections are rigged and use allegations of voter fraud to seize the ballots of secure voting centers.
Again, not going to apologize anymore for this thesis.
There is a chance you will not vote in 2026.
And this creation of this QRF is a really good piece of evidence for what they see as a way to maintain power in this country, a national militarized police force.
I want to couple this, Dan, with Greg Bovino was called into court this week, the head of DHS.
And Greg Bovino has been dragged all week because he was wearing a trench coat that looked Nazi inspired and Gavin Newsome and others noticed that, whatever.
But, you know, Bovino leaves the courthouse and he's surrounded by people in like military fatigues and camouflage.
Now, what does camouflage do in this middle of Chicago?
Nothing.
It only marks you as a militarized police force.
Yeah.
Right?
Like, that's what it's for.
It's purely symbolic.
That was my point.
The reason they dress this way, the reason that Bovino has that aesthetic is they want you in the community, you American citizen, Chicago, LA, doesn't matter, to think of them as a military force that is occupying them.
They're not there to serve, protect, help Leave.
They are there to be a military presence and an armed police force at the direct will of the federal government, which is led by Donald Trump and Stephen Miller and Russell Vogt.
So, yeah.
Anything else you want to add in or you want me to go to the military bases?
Yeah, go to the military bases.
I think it just ties right in with this and is weird in the abstract, but it fits as part of this broader pattern that we're seeing.
At the Atlantic, Michael Scherer, Missy Ryan, Ashley Parker report that Stephen Miller, Katie Miller, Katie Miller, who had a complete meltdown on the internet last night, but we'll leave that alone.
Katie Miller, Stephen Miller, their kids, they have moved to a military base.
Stephen Miller has joined a growing list of senior Trump administration political appointees, at least six by our count, living in Washington area military housing, where they are shielded not just from potential violence, but also from protest.
It is an ominous marker of the nation's polarization to which the Trump administration has itself contributed, that some of those top public servants have felt a need to separate themselves from the public.
Now, there's one reading of this, Dan, that says, well, they've been protested and now they just, they don't want to deal with that anymore.
So they're going to move to a military base, poor them.
And I think to me, this just goes hand.
I mean, you said it right.
And maybe I should just defer to you on this.
In the abstract, seems like bizarre, but who cares?
But in reality, if you drill down, this is worrying.
I mean, you take it.
I think that's it.
I think it's this notion of militarizing the entire administration, of like taking the entire administration and turning it into this kind of militarized enforcement mechanism to impose the president's will.
And so, like, even symbolically, you have civilians, civilian appointees, all of whom, by the way, are busy championing free speech all the time, but they're afraid of like people standing out in front of their house with a sign.
They want to dox everybody else and point them out and have them lose their careers and everything else.
But if you're marching back and forth, you know, walking back and forth with a sign in front of their house, they don't like it so much.
But fleeing to these like military enclaves, that's what you're doing.
You're putting the administration into a military enclave.
You are creating a specialized, you know, national militarized police force to do your bidding.
I feel like it's just all a pattern of, if nothing else, the symbolism of it, as well as what it tells us about the mindset of the administration.
You're on like a war footing with what?
With every American who doesn't agree with you, with every American who might vote against you, with every American who isn't white like you, right?
I mean, you know, Stephen Miller is the, I don't know if there's anybody who's less afraid of everybody who's not white than Stephen Miller.
That's has been his entire shtick as a public figure is to, you know, white supremacy.
So I think it just maps all of that together.
And so, yeah, as I say, as you said, in the abstract, you're like, well, that's weird.
Okay, whatever.
Or, okay, snowflakes, you're afraid of like the people in front of your house or, you know, whatever.
Because of course, they all have security.
They're not just regular people who have to worry about the kinds of things that regular people have to worry about.
But I think the symbolism of it when you put these things together, whether it's ICE and the way that ICE has been used and deployed and the way that ICE presents itself, as you say, like showing up in fatigues all the time and camo, even when they're out in the street wearing camo, like it doesn't have to be camo.
Like it does, it could be, they could be wearing black, they could be wearing gray, they could be wearing orange jumpsuits, they could be like anything to mark them as a unit or whatever.
The camo is, I think, symbolic of more than that, of being on this war footing.
You get the quick response force, you get the administration basically hunkering down on military bases.
I think it communicates everything about how they view America and what they view their role in America as being.
Well, we also have this idea, and this is an ongoing idea that private donations collected by the Trump administration would pay the military while the government is shut down.
That's a direct, that's indirect contradiction to a long-standing American tradition that the military is supposed to be neutral.
If you as the president, if you as the administration, if you as the regime can pay the troops directly, then we have a problem because then it becomes a partisan military force.
It becomes Trump's army, right?
Exactly.
And by the way, we know historically, this is what the Romans did.
Everybody knows this.
When you would have Roman generals who would have their armies and they would like try to keep them out of Rome and not let them come back to Rome, it's because they weren't paid by Rome.
They were often paid based on the campaign and based on what their generals did and whatever.
And that's why you had generals and emperors who had armies like loyal to them.
It's one of the reasons we have a public military force and we have a military force that is supposed to be publicly funded and taxpayer Taxpayers support it is because it is the American military, the U.S. military, not the president's military, not Trump's military.
And I think this intentionally circumvents that.
I think I want to link this living on military bases with SNAP and also with the idea that I've put forth for a long time, which is they do not want to govern.
They want to rule.
So, you know, I lived in D.C. for a number of years.
And I know that if you live outside of D.C., this may seem strange, but D.C. is this kind of place, Dan, where, you know, there are moments in D.C. where you're like at dinner and you see a senator, or there are moments in D.C. where you see Chris Murphy getting out of a Honda pilot, like trying to get his kid, you know, out of a car seat so they can go inside for the day or whatever.
My wife famously was walking our dogs, at least famous in our family, no one else, and saw Mitch McConnell and texted me, should I throw the bag of dog poop I have at Mitch McConnell?
And I was like, please don't.
I don't want you to go to jail.
But she was tempted.
We used to see public, like I've shared on this show, like my story of seeing, like getting annoyed because there was an old man in front of me taking too long to get cantaloupes at the store, and it was Justice Kennedy.
So the point for me is like public officials are supposed to serve the public.
And part of being a citizen elected to office is that you live among the other citizens.
Now, I know that there's a lot of public officials who are filthy rich and they live in neighborhoods that are cordoned off for most of us or whatever.
But there is this ongoing sense that like in D.C., you run into the people that are elected for this country.
When those people start fleeing to military bases, it not only starts to put the military shaded towards the administration and the regime, it not only like creates this situation of like, you know, where you, where you lay your head is where your loyalty is.
And it's kind of where people start to see you as part of their ecosystem.
It's also that they don't want to have to be part of the normal hub and bub and noise and friction of living in a city like D.C. Traffic and running into people and having neighbors and the whole thing.
It also goes to SNAP benefits.
I don't think that they imagine the 40 million people who are losing SNAP benefits as real people with real needs and real suffering.
JD Vance said in a quote this week, the suffering will continue.
And then there were just U.S. representatives, Republican representatives, time after time saying that, I can't believe we have 40 million people on SNAP.
You should get off your asses.
You should get a job.
You should stop.
I mean, there were posts that were disgusting talking about people being quote unquote ghetto.
People should not be reproducing anymore.
And we could spend in, and I'm sure that many people would like us to, three hours about how a system run by oligarchs that doesn't pay people enough to live demands that we have something like SNAP so people can meet their needs, even if they work 40 or 80 hours a week.
And then those same oligarchs and elected leaders criticize those people as lazy and this and that because the system they created has completely failed them and their families.
That's three hours.
What's the point?
We now have a country that looks like Russia.
The oligarchs live on the military bases.
The president pays the military and everyone else is told, screw you.
You don't need these benefits.
You don't need this help.
You don't need health care.
Go figure it out for yourselves.
I have a thesis here and I'm going to give you my conclusion to my thesis in a minute, but any other thoughts on this before we go there?
One thing to add is Trump, I think today, screaming out on social media, telling Senate Republicans to do away with the filibuster and so forth.
But in it, he said, we are in power.
Like he appeals to that.
We are not, we were elected or we have a majority or whatever.
We are in power, so we should be able to do whatever we want to do.
We'll get to it.
I'm going to anticipate it.
But J.D. Vance at the Turning Point USA event saying essentially, we can't be afraid to do authoritarian things just because the left will do it when they're in power.
Like we just have to be willing to do it.
It's all over the place.
All the pieces are there, and it's not hard to connect the lines or to connect the dots.
They've been laying this groundwork for a long time.
They've been doing it since the first Trump administration, and we're just seeing it play out.
So to me, the easiest way to decipher human behavior is to ask, like, what is the reward one gets for engaging in this behavior?
So if you think about that famous line from The Dark Knight or Batman Begins or whatever those movies are, they're now like 30 years old.
You know, the Joker said, talking about the Joker, you get the line, some men just want to watch the world burn because they couldn't figure out the joker.
Does he want money?
Does he want power?
Does he want status?
And he just wants to watch the world burn.
So there's a common wisdom here that says, well, they're making themselves very unpopular.
You cut SNAP.
You raise ACA premiums.
You shut down the government.
You are running ICE throughout neighborhoods and cities and throughout the United States.
You're creating an armed military force.
This is not going to be popular.
And we could sit here and go through all those numbers.
And my argument would be their behavior is not designed to get the reward of being popular.
And therefore, their behavior is not designed to win another election.
Like in their mind, the calculus is not like, let's do all these things.
And that will guarantee that we will stay in power, whether it's Trump 2028 or J.D. Vance or anyone else.
The behavior is not designed for the reward of popularity.
It is designed for the reward of power and riches, period.
Trump has become so much richer since he has been in office the second time.
Ann Coulter said on a podcast the other day, there is so much grifting going on in this administration.
They are stealing everything you can actually touch.
And then Ann Coulter goes on to say, but I don't care because they're getting rid of all the immigrants.
It was like the perfect distillation of Ann Coulter's white supremacy.
She admitted the Trump administration is stealing everything they can get their hands on.
Resources, money, the crypto grift, the meme coin grift, all of it.
Their behavior is designed to control this country without the will of the people or free and fair elections.
That's why they're doing that.
And that is why I come back to the thesis that I will no longer apologize for, which is there's a very good chance you will not vote next November.
And if you do vote, you may only be part of the electorate that is voting because others are so scared to leave their house or their city's been occupied, or your vote may not count in the way it should because of the big lie, the ways that they're going to problematize certain elections and say, well, there's funny business going on there.
We can't do this or that.
We've already seen that Representative Grihalva is not sat in Congress a month after she won election.
You think that that's, you think that that's just a one-off?
You think Mike Johnson's not going to see that as like, oh, this is a prologue to a larger tactic of not sitting Democratic representatives because there might be irregularities with the elections and the voting.
And the Senate already did that with the Supreme Court, right?
Like that's why we have the Supreme Court we have now is by not confirming justices that were put forward by Obama or by Democrats.
The plan is there.
It's in place.
They've been using it.
And of course, we're seeing it expand.
And I think we're going to keep seeing efforts to do that.
Yeah.
So I think if you take this all together.
Now, let me just make one more point.
Like they cut, let's take it all together.
Military bases, National Guard, using the military to tamp down voter turnout.
Steve Bannon already saying Trump's going to get a third term.
He's going to get a third term.
So Trump 28.
Trump is going to be president in 28, and people just ought to get accommodated with that.
So what about the 22nd Amendment?
There's many different alternatives.
At the appropriate time, we'll lay out what the plan is, but there's a plan.
We had longer odds in 16 and longer odds in 24 than we got in 28.
Then you cut SNAP and ACA premiums.
I think, Dan, that if you listen to experts on Democratic backsliding, people like Barbara Walter, they will tell you that you need a huge event, an unsettling, disruptive event right before election time.
And I think if you cut SNAP and you cut ACA, you are creating a scenario where there are going to be more uprisings from more Americans.
People that are just simply like, there's no food.
Like, there's no food for children, for old people, for all kinds of folks.
We cannot make it in America right now.
And it's going to lead to more uprisings.
And strangely enough, if you take my thesis about human behavior and the reward, that is a good thing for Trump and Stephen Miller and Rust Vote because then they have the riots and the uprisings and the violence and the this and the that, the out of control people in Philadelphia and in Baltimore and in Chicago and in LA.
And they can say, see, emergency powers time.
There's no way we can vote like normal.
These people are out of control.
We need to take this back.
That is how I see the SNAP stuff fitting right into the other aspects.
I'll give you one more thing and I'll be quiet.
There are emergency funds for SNAP that could be released.
And Trump officials are like, no, don't do it.
And people are like, so there's money for food, but you don't want us to use the money for food.
We've already allocated in the budget for food, even though we could, and less people would go hungry and really have a true suffering moment.
And the Trump administration is like, yes, do not do that.
Do not buy food.
Do not allow those funds to go through.
Why?
Well, one explanation is because they want people to suffer.
And when people suffer, they will engage in backlash.
And that backlash will actually serve the administration in the overall scheme of things.
Final thoughts before we take a break?
Just on the snap point, that the stronger argument is not only that they're not allowing it, but that they're legally obligated to do it, right?
That this is the definition of the kind of emergency for which those funds have been allocated.
And that by not allocating them, they are violating the law, which is why something like 25 states have now sued the administration over that decision.
Yeah.
Let's take a break.
We'll come back and we'll get into J.D. Vance, which I think connects directly to this because J.D. Vance, I think at Old Miss the other night, was auditioning to be the leader of the MAGA movement in the most J.D. Vance way.
So be right back.
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All right, Dan, we've got to talk about JD Vance.
And I...
It's like, where do you start on this, man?
Like.
Yeah.
Do you want to just take a minute and react to J.D. Vance and Erica Kirk's hug?
It's made a lot of, it's made a lot of headway on the internet.
There's been a lot of reaction.
So, yeah.
If you just invite people to go take a look, it's just everything about it, everything about this was so cringy.
Like, and it's all weird.
Like, that's weird.
The hug is weird.
And you can take weird a lot of different directions there.
You have like Usha Vance there.
There's that piece of it that you're kind of like, yeah, that made it weirder.
His comments, we'll get into this about, you know, praying for his wife to become a Christian, you know, and stuff was, was, was weird.
While hugging the blonde white Christian lady on stage.
Yeah.
And clearly like trying to occupy the space of her late husband, you know, sort of symbolically and being the next Charlie Kirk.
Though he does not have the gravitas of Charlie Kirk as a speaker, clearly.
Yeah, it was, it was weird.
I guess weird is the word I have.
I'm like, I'm brought up short by it of just cringy and weird in so many ways.
So Vance walks out, like Vance walks out and hugs Erica Kirk.
And here's my, here's, there's, there are some Instagram posts on this that are amazing.
Gold, solid gold.
So Vance, okay, let's just paint the picture.
And if you haven't seen the picture, you should go look it up.
But Vance hugs her by putting his arms around her waist.
Like, okay, so it, it, it's, it's, right?
It's above the equator, but way below the shoulder.
All right.
That's how I would put it.
Okay.
And then she grabs his like face, like, like two hands on the face.
So there's people on Instagram who are like, a male friend, this is a woman saying a male friend and I have never hugged like this.
221 on Instagram.
Okay.
And here's my response.
I mean, somebody else says, Katie O'Sorrer says, guys, they definitely are not leaving room for the Holy Spirit.
And it does not look like there is any room for the Holy Spirit here.
Not, yeah.
CD Cope says, when I tell you my wife would beat the brakes off any woman who tried to hug me like this, you know, and it shows that the hug.
Yeah.
I mean, there's, there's more.
There's a lot more.
Some of them I'm like very reticent to read.
Somebody posted a picture of the like famous couple at the Cold Plate Cold Play concert that got caught cheating.
And then, you know.
So there's another person who's like, look, Usha Vance, I don't like you and I'm not, I'm not into you, but you need to file for divorce and get away from him before the breaks go out in your car on the way home from the store.
Okay.
Here's my, here's my take, Dan.
And I know we're veering into like territory that might seem trivial to people wanting political analysis, but I'll just be really quick.
If you if we have a straight man and a straight woman hugging, I don't, I mean, I assume both of them identify as straight.
Okay.
And here's my argument, Dan.
Straight man, straight woman hugging.
If that is not your romantic partner, if that is not someone you have an intimate relationship with, whether it's romantic or sexual or something else, you hug as the man, you hug behind the shoulders.
It's a shoulder hug.
It's a shoulder-centric shoulder.
The hemisphere in question is the shoulder ania.
You stay around the shoulders.
Anytime a straight man hugs a straight woman with the like dude is hugging around the wait.
Like if I'm just, if I approached a colleague after not seeing them for a year or like a friend even and was like, hey, great to see you.
And I hugged around the waist like that.
I think everyone's just like, whoa, what?
That's not, that's not, that kind of hug is not called for in this genre.
You're out of bounds.
The genre you're looking for is romance and fantasy.
This is not that.
What are you doing?
And then when the woman grabs the face, when Erica's grabbing the face, it's even another sign of like, what, what?
We're grabbing the face.
This is, this is not a standard hug by any stretch.
We can be done, but what do you want to say?
Well, I mean, so I was thinking, you know, before you even went into that, we need like a typology of hugs, like a graduated scale.
Like there's the side hug.
Yep.
You know, the kind of pull them into your shoulder, but like side to side.
There's that.
There is, and as you say, very much the like upper, like around the shoulders, three pats, you know, whatever.
It's a pat.
Yeah, it's all of that.
The long and short of it is if the hug brings the pelvic region into contact, you've crossed a line typically.
This was a slow dance.
This was a slow dance standard.
This is what like every eighth grader at their first dance is hoping, hoping the posture will be.
That's what this is.
And it was, it was weird at the same time that we're going to talk all about Christian morals and virtues and JD Vance is going to put himself forward as just a nice guy and like, yeah, just cringey all over the place.
All right.
Yeah.
I just don't.
I just, so if you don't think there's a typology of hugs, here's my last, here's my last comment.
If you don't think there's a typology of hugs, just go to France.
And the reason I know that there's a typology of hugs is because French people don't hug.
They kiss.
So you go, you go to France, you go to Spain, you go to Italy.
There's many countries like this, but I spend a ton of time in France and you see your friend and I see my male friend, two cis, cis hetero guys, and we haven't seen each other for three weeks, three months, doesn't matter.
What do we do?
We kiss on the cheek twice.
And as an American, just got to get used to it.
I'm not used to kissing anyone, you know, like men, women, doesn't matter except for my wife.
So we get used to it.
All right.
We're kissing.
And you do that to everybody.
It just happens.
And you try to leave the dinner party.
You got to go kiss everybody four times.
It takes a long time to get out of there.
Oh, Lord, look out.
But I remember so distinctly, my one of my mentors in France was in the States.
And I think he thought, well, I'm in the States, they don't kiss here.
So there's no B-zoo.
So we're going to hug.
Like American men or American people hug.
That's what they do.
And we hugged.
And it was the most awkward, weird.
He didn't know where to hug the shoulders, the elbows.
It was like, it was like two giraffes like trying to, you know, get on.
It was ridiculous.
And that's when I knew that there are different types of hugs because he had clearly never done that before and was just as uncomfortable hugging me as I was when I first got to France, kissing everybody every time I got to got to see them.
I'm sure this is why everyone comes to Straight Right American Jesus for this hard-hitting analysis.
So you are welcome.
Anyway, Dan, do you want to say anything else about hugging?
All I'm going to say is you and I will see each other in two or three weeks here at a conference.
And I don't think I've ever been more nervous about how that's going to go when we see each other after a long time.
So I'm, I'm now, I'm now have this hug anxiety afflicting me about next time I see Brad O'Nishi.
So the worst part about the kissing ritual.
Well, the kissing ritual, because it's like as an American, you're doing it wrong all the time.
You're trying not to mess it up.
You're thinking about the dance steps, not doing the dance steps.
And you end up kissing someone on the lips because you're like, yeah, should I, do I rear this way?
Do I veer that way?
You meet in the middle.
There's even the whole, do you actually kiss?
You do that like near like smooch sound, like kind of near the cheek, like you touch cheek to cheek.
Yeah, there's all these nuances that I think Americans are just not schooled in.
The further south you go in France, it's not too busy.
You got to give like six.
It's like three, three, three times on each cheek.
You know, it's a lot.
There's a lot happening there.
All right.
Let's go to J.D. Vance.
Here's what J.D. Vance said at Ole Miss as he was giving a TPUSA event, as you said, Dan, standing in the place of the late Charlie Kirk, really taking on that role.
We covered it when he did Charlie Kirk's podcast.
He is now continuing that.
That is on purpose.
This event was J.D. Vance trying out for president, period.
I don't believe anything else.
If you want to know what J.D. Vance is going to do to be president of this country, it is what he did at Ole Miss.
So here's the first clip, Dan.
JD Vance talking about Christianity in the public square.
What the Europeans found when they came to North America and, quote unquote, Christianized the continent and all the ways that Christianity is a moral good for everybody.
So one thing he says there, and I just want to come back to this in a minute, is he says, oh, they saw, they stopped child sacrifice and people, they were eating all kinds of things.
Okay.
And historians will tell you this is just not true.
But JD loves telling anyone who will listen that the people he wants to demonize eat dogs and cats or children or anything else.
That is a go-to move for him.
The overall idea is that Christianity is this moral good and that the country was built on that foundation.
Let me get your reaction.
Just, yeah, so the eating, the literal, like, I don't know, projecting weird eating habits and cannibalism and stuff onto your sort of opponents is like, I think a unique element of what J.D. Vance is doing.
But I think the standard, you know, it was a dark and terrible continent and the Christians came and enlightened it and so on and so forth.
That's a discourse that's been around since the colonial period.
And he's just like, it's still there.
It's still there with this notion that, you know, Christianity is what brought morality and religion and truth to these shores and so forth.
We could spend, we have, if you go back and listen to episodes, we have spent hours talking about that silly notion that like, you know, which Christianity are we talking about?
What moral teachings?
Is it the like going in and slaughtering cities or, you know, destroying every living being in this so-called promised land or, you know, whatever.
We could talk about all of that.
But the point is that it's, as you said, everything about this is about Christian supremacy.
And so you project that onto the founding of the nation and you carry it forward.
Right.
So the reason why we need a Christian supremacist nation is we brought civilization.
We brought morality.
Before that, it didn't exist.
You know, if you even get the acknowledgement that there were people here to start with, you literally demonize them so that we are cleansing the land, just as, you know, the Israelites were told to cleanse the promised land in the Bible or whatever.
It's an old discourse, but I think the function is to give a starting point to that story, the start of the narrative, and then you carry forward.
And that way you can implot what we're doing now as part of this ongoing narrative.
This is all part of this continuing settlement, this continuing civilization, this continuing Christian mission in the Americas that we conservative Christians in America right now are still carrying forward in places like Chicago, places like LA.
That's what ICE is doing.
It is all part of a 250-year, you know, earlier, if you're talking about the early colonial period, a multi-century project.
And so he's just very much projecting that vision of America.
And that's how you make America great.
What?
Make it great again.
Return to that vision of Christianizing the continent.
He says that, you know, he wants to talk about the fruit of your actions.
It shows your heart.
And he talks about how Christianity has created the most moral, the most just, and the most prosperous society.
And this is such a, this would be such a dangerous line of argumentation because you and I and 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 other people could point out all the ways that Christianity and its fruits on this continent and other places has not always been good fruit.
Doesn't mean it's always been bad fruit.
I'm not saying that.
I'm not saying it's one or the other.
That's how JD works.
It's one or the other.
I'm saying, go ahead.
I was just going to say that comes up over and over in these responses, the false dichotomies.
He talks about, here's a piece of it, Christopher Columbus, he talks about Columbus.
He's like, was Columbus coming in and committing genocide or was he a brave explorer?
And you're like, can't be like, from a European perspective, an explorer or whatever, and also from a European perspective, want to commit genocide and cleanse the land of these native populations.
It can be both, but it's always this false choice, this false alternative, which is also how Charlie Kirk worked in his debate style.
And, you know, we could talk all the ways that the fruit has not been good, the fruit of chattel slavery, the fruit of the Middle Passage, the fruit of breaking treaties and attempted genocide in Native Americans.
I mean, we can go through the history, but the Trump administration wants to erase that history.
It doesn't want that at the national parks.
It doesn't want there to be any knowledge of it.
So the argument would be dangerous.
He'd be opening himself up to a backdoor attack, except for that history no longer works in the Trump universe.
All right.
So this is one response about Christianity.
Let's play another one about public schools and how Christianity should be taught in public schools, according to J.D. Vance.
Here it is.
So go ahead.
So the school system.
Do you agree that there should be Christian implementation, or do you think that school system should be neutral and be focused on science, literature, reading, writing, arithmetic?
Well, I reject the idea that anything is purely neutral.
Okay?
There are, for example, let's say, let's take a basic scientific fact.
And this is a little spicy.
I'm not trying to make this too controversial, but take the basic scientific fact of can you take a pill to change your biological gender?
Okay?
Now, that's something that 15 years ago, quite literally, every single scientist in the Western world would have said, absolutely not.
That's crazy.
And now people will.
I actually, I think the premise of your question, I don't totally share it because I don't think perfect neutrality is possible.
What is the, you talk about history.
Was Christopher Columbus a great explorer or was he a guy who committed genocide against the native populations?
These debates, I'm happy to have them, but I reject the idea that there are truly neutral debates.
Anybody who's telling you their view is neutral likely has an agenda to sell you.
And I'm at least honest about the fact that I think the Christian Foundation of this country is a good thing.
Next.
Okay, thank you.
And so he does this thing again, Dan, which is what you just outlined, which is to say he says perfect neutrality is not possible and therefore we shouldn't try.
Oh, is Christopher Columbus, as you just said, is he a great explorer or is he somebody who commits genocide?
And he's like, scientific objectivity, neutrality, that's a dream.
So we shouldn't even try.
We should teach Christianity in public schools because that's how the nation was founded, as he just said in his previous comment.
And that's just how it goes.
Now, we shouldn't apologize for that.
And that's just how it should be.
And the response is so easy here, right, Dan?
It's to say, you know, perfect neutrality is probably hard.
We can try, though.
Like we can really try to make a public school system that honors the identity and background perspective and experience of every student that walks in.
We can try that, even though we'll probably never get it absolutely right.
Does anyone here golf?
Have you ever scored 18?
No, because that would be a perfect score.
Does anyone here bowl?
Like, do you bowl every time to get a perfect score and say, I failed?
Because a lot of bowlers I know that are like, hey, I bowled a 240 today felt pretty good.
Meaning you missed 60 points you could have had, but you still for some reason feel like that was a good thing?
Why?
Because it's not just one or the other.
But JD is abandoning that line to say, well, neutrality is, that doesn't work.
So we should just, yeah, teach the 10 commandments on every, put them on the wall, teach the Bible, and let's not apologize for our Christian ethos in public schools.
I think one of the things that highlights that's worth noting is the double speak in this whole thing where like he would say things like that, the whole, we're a Christian nation.
This is the foundation of the nation.
I'm not going to apologize for this.
I'm not, you know, on and on and on and on.
But he also had these places where he's like, you know what?
We're going to talk about it.
We're going to listen to those disagreements.
If you're a different religion from me, he said, you know, God gave us free will and we have to trust that and just trust that it's God's plan to bring about what he wants.
Or, you know, he talks about prayer in school.
He's like, I'm not going to force you to believe in anything because that's not what God wants and it's not what I, and that's not what I want.
And like, so he had this whole, hey, I'm a reasonable guy.
And when we disagree, we really got to talk and listen.
And, you know, a good Christian knows that God gave people free will and it's not our job to force them to believe anything.
But that's what needs to be taught in the public schools.
And that's the foundation of America.
And I'm like going to, you know, be Mr. Supreme Christian nationalist guy that is going to enforce my vision of a Christian America on everybody while at the same time, this weird tone he was trying to strike of like being Mr. Reasonable and willing to talk to people of other faiths and not force forced traditions on them and so forth.
And it was, that was one of the weirder, I felt like rhetorical pieces of this, this whole thing was this, this dichotomy of enforced Christian indoctrination together with the notion that, hey, I'm not here to tell you what you have to believe.
I'm just going to tell you what you're going to be taught in the public schools and that Christianity is the only religion we're going to talk about and things like that.
All right.
Let's go to the comment, the clip that is probably the one that will have the widest distribution here.
I think it's the one people are going to focus on.
And that is J.D. Vance talking about his wife, her faith, and their relationship to religion.
Here it is.
And yes, my wife did not grow up Christian.
I think it's fair to say that she grew up in a Hindu family, but not in a particularly religious family in either direction.
In fact, when I met my wife, we were both, I would consider myself an agnostic or an atheist.
And that's what I think she would have considered herself as well.
You know, everybody has to come to their own arrangement here.
The way that we've come to our arrangement is she's my best friend.
We talk to each other about this stuff.
So we decided to raise our kids Christian.
Our two oldest kids who go to school, they go to a Christian school.
Our eight-year-old did his first communion about a year ago.
That's the way that we have come to our arrangement.
But thank you.
My eight-year-old was also very proud of his first communion.
Thank you, guys.
I'll tell him that old miss wishes him the best.
But I think everybody has to have this own conversation when you're in a marriage.
I mean, it's true for friends of mine who are in Protestant and Catholic marriages, friends of mine who are in atheists and Christian marriages.
You just got to talk to your, the only advice I can give is you just got to talk to the person that God has put you with, and you've got to make those decisions as a family unit.
For us, it works out.
Now, most Sundays, Usha will come with me to church.
As I've told her and I've said publicly and I'll say now in front of 10,000 of my closest friends, do I hope eventually that she is somehow moved by the same thing that I was moved in by church?
Yeah, I honestly, I do wish that because I believe in the Christian gospel and I hope eventually my wife comes to see it the same way.
But if she doesn't, then God says everybody has free will and so that doesn't cause a problem for me.
That's something you work out with your friends, with your family, with the person that you love.
Again, one of the most important Christian principles is that you respect free will.
Usha's closer to the priests who baptized me than maybe I am.
They talk about this stuff.
My attitude is you figure this stuff out as a family and you trust in God to have a plan and you try to follow it as best as you can.
And that's what I try to do.
Dan, this is a line that Vance has been practicing and has been preparing since he became a vice presidential nominee.
Because there is always going to be this reality.
The people that Vance is appealing to are white Christian nationalists who are increasingly open about the fact that they think that if you are not a quote-unquote heritage American, a quote-unquote assimilated American, if you are not a Christian, if you're not European, you should go back.
And you should not be here.
We should never have let you in.
And so what Vance is going to have to do from now until he leaves public life is figure out a line that explains how he is married to a brown Asian woman who grew up Hindu, is the daughter of immigrants, and somehow he's still your guy.
Ethno-nationalist, white Christian nationalist, white nationalist.
I'm still your dude.
And here's the way he does it.
And he's like, I pray for her all the time.
I pray that that brown lady I married would come to Jesus.
She comes with me to church.
I'm hoping for her conversion.
We're raising our kids.
You don't have to worry.
We're raising our kids Christian.
Don't worry.
Don't worry.
She knows the priest better than I do.
She hangs out with the priests more than I do.
She's practically a Christian, Brad.
Like, you know, that's what he's busy telling us.
Let me give you some takes from Twitter, the Christian nationalist side of Twitter.
Jason Howardin, who is this guy who says he made millions.
This is the kind of guy's like, I made a million dollars and I hated it.
So now I'm super into imposing Jesus on everyone.
He says, my comments are filled with people saying it's disrespectful for Jay to say he wants his wife to come to Christ.
The answer is always in the Bible.
Don't you wives realize that your husbands might be saved because of you?
And don't you husbands realize that your wives might be saved because of you?
Comes from 1 Corinthians.
Smash Bales, which is B-A-A-L-S, an account with 80,000 followers on Twitter, retweets the clip and says, this is what Christianity and Christian patriarchy look like.
Pray for Usha to come to know Christ.
William Wolf, who, as I've talked about on the show before, one of the 15 leaders invited to the White House in March for prayer and meetings with President Trump, says, absolute amazing for the vice president to speak about his faith and his family like this in public.
May God bring Usha to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ.
Megan Basham, author of the book, I'm going to forget the title, Sheep Not Wolves or Wolves Not Sheep or whatever it may be.
How can you not be encouraged by how openly and earnestly senior members of this administration talk about their faith in Christ?
Praying God grants Vance's prayer that his wife will come to faith.
There's a lot more.
I'll give you one more, and I think this is so damning.
This is C.J. Engel.
According to the Constitution, the vice president doesn't have any actual duties.
So it's pretty based that he just spends time on Twitter and dunks on the libs.
I don't, I just, yeah, he has all this time on his hands.
The coolest thing he could do was be on Twitter all day rather than using his office or his power or his authority or his anything to help people.
But it's awesome.
He's on Twitter.
Responses, Dan, about Usha Vance and JD and all that.
Yeah, everything you said about him having to try to shore up his bona fides with this community.
I think I guess maybe that's the other piece of this that I want us to highlight is, you know, in the first Trump administration, remember that time when there was this hope that somehow, I don't know, Melania was going to be like a counterbalance to Donald or whatever, and there was a lot of sympathy for her.
And at some point, you're like, you know what?
She chose this guy.
This is the dude that she chose.
And I think that, I think there's some of that here too, where you look at this and there's a lot of stuff about, you know, as you say, you know, Usha Vance, get out now and so forth.
You know, she chose not to get out.
There were, I don't know if people remember when he was nominated or sort of tagged to be vice president and so forth.
And there were all those things that like look into her and like liberal ties and this and that, being like, how could she like be with this guy who now says these things and whatever?
She's fully on board and she's there and she's choosing to be there and she knows that she's going to be on camera.
And, you know, I just think that that's part of this to recognize as well is that however strange it may seem, she's, she's party to this game he is playing of trying to downplay her heritage and her religion and trying to make sure that everybody knows that she's not influencing their kids or something.
That whole thing about like how her kids are raised in public.
It's, you know, don't worry, she is isolated.
We've we've walled her off from the kids.
They're going to Christian school and whatever, but she's there and she's a willing participant.
And I think that that says a lot about Vance and this movement.
And I think all the women that are at the turning point events and different things like that.
I think it's easy to criticize these patriarchal models and forget the fact that lots of women can be patriarchal too.
And that's that's a piece of this.
And I think, I don't know, I just think that's another dynamic to this discussion that was that was taking place.
Here's my prediction.
And then we'll take a break and go to something else with Vance.
We'll go to immigration.
My prediction is that if and when the Vance's need this, Usha will convert.
So like if there is an election, which there may or may not be, if Donald Trump dies tomorrow, J.D. Vance becomes president and then runs for president in 2028, my prediction would be Usha Vance at a very key moment in that campaign comes out and says, I love Jesus.
And the rousing, overwhelming applause from the Christian nationalists on Twitter and everywhere else will just be deafening.
That is the card that they have to play here.
And it will be so, think about the symbolism there, Dan, of like the white man from the Midwest converting his immigrant daughter Brown, former, former polytheist wife to Jesus.
I mean, that is a story that that is a great testimony as the youth group kids might say.
So that's my prediction.
And I think that will happen.
Let's take a break.
We'll be right back.
Let's get to immigration, Dan.
There's a question in Ole Miss, and I think we don't have time to play the clip about somebody who says, how come you promised us a place here and then are denying immigration?
And there's these ongoing talks about people asking JD about immigration.
And he says, immigration is not all bad, but it's gone too far.
We have allowed too many immigrants in.
And then he does the classic JD thing and he says, look, having some immigrants come is fine, but having 10 million come, that's too many.
And again, it's just this false dichotomy of like, what?
I mean, yes, of course, allowing my wife and her family in was good.
I married her.
She bore me children.
But should we allow 17 billion in?
I don't think so.
Is that a good idea?
And you're like, that's no one talk.
Again, JD, there's nuance and we get, but he doesn't do any of that.
This dovetails on something that I think you want to take us through, which is the new quotas that have been proposed for immigration in this country going forward.
Well, yeah.
So part of what JD says in this interview is he poses that question, like, you know, how many immigrants should be let in?
And his answer is, you know, far less than we've been accepting.
Nice, vague answers and so forth.
And then he says this, he says, we have to become a common community again.
Yep.
And what does that mean?
It means a homogeneous community.
It means we need to be white enough and culturally unified enough that we're not so diverse and not, you know, so divided and whatever.
And he says, we can't do that when you have such high numbers of immigration.
So there it is, low numbers and the right kinds of immigrants so that we can be a quote unquote common community.
What does that look like?
Well, it looks like what the Trump administration announced this week, that they're reducing the number of refugees allowed into the country to 7,500.
That's down from, you know, hundreds of thousands in prior administrations, not just Biden, other administrations as well.
It's a minuscule number.
And almost all of them are going to be what?
We've talked about this before, white South Africans.
So JD will say, well, we've been letting way too many.
Turns out they've got a number, 7,500 refugees, as long as they're white.
As long as they're the right kind of people who can fit our common community.
So if somebody says to me, well, you know, it talks about a common community, why do you always assume it's about race?
Well, because this is like you put the pieces together.
He says we have to have a common community.
We've had way too many immigrants.
Oh, here, what are we going to let the white guys, right?
We could go all the way back to the first Trump administration where Trump would decry the fact that people wanted to come to America from quote unquote shithole countries.
And he would whine about how like Scandinavians don't want to come to the U.S.
It's always about if you're white, you're right.
You can come on in.
And if you can't, you know, you're not.
And so it's all there.
But there's those same ambiguities, you know, how many?
Well, just less than we've had.
We're just far too divided.
Meaning, we're just not white enough.
We're not Christian enough.
Not everybody who's coming in is not Christian, is willing to raise their kids in Catholic private schools like I am.
You know, they don't all have good Midwestern Christian husbands to guide them on the right path like Usha Vance.
So we just need to, we just need to keep them out.
And it's just, it's a Christian and white supremacist vision of America.
And you're like, well, Dan Miller, are you overstating the case?
And you are not, because here's a clip of J.D. Vance in a separate interview this week talking about how it is reasonable for people not to want to have Haitian immigrants or other immigrants moving in next to them.
Here you go.
Who's out of a house is actually evicted from the house because there are people who are going to pay more for rent.
And then what happens is 20 people move into a three-bedroom house.
20 people from a totally different culture, totally different ways of interacting.
Again, we can respect their dignity while also being angry at the Biden administration for letting that situation happen and recognizing that their next door neighbor is going to say, well, wait a second, what is going on here?
I don't know these people.
They don't speak the same language that I do.
And because there are 20 in the house next door, it's a little bit rowdier than it was when there was just a family of four, a family of five.
It is totally reasonable and acceptable for American citizens to look at their next door neighbors and say, I want to live next to people who I have something in common with.
I don't want to live next to four families of strangers.
And the fact that we had an So Vance is basically like, look, it's completely reasonable for me, an English-speaking American, to not want to have Haitians move in next door or others who speak a different language.
And then he does the whole J.D. Vance thing.
He's like, yeah, it's a three-bedroom house.
There's 20 people living over there.
And it's always.
Yeah, it's just every stereotype that there is.
Like he's just a walking bundle of like racist stereotypes and tropes at this point.
The interviewer chimes in and is like, and they're eating cats and dogs.
And he says, yes, they're eating cats and dogs.
Debunked.
No truth to it.
We've been over it since he said it on the election trail, the campaign trail.
Doesn't matter, still saying it.
Said it about, you know, pre-colonial, pre-colonized North America.
Oh, they were child sacrificed.
But let's just think about the logic of what J.D. Vance is saying.
I don't want people moving in next door who don't speak my language.
What's wrong with that?
And you might be seduced into that at first.
There might be people out there who are like, well, okay, yeah, I guess, right?
This and that.
And then you think about like, isn't that the same logic that's like, you know, Dan, it's perfectly reasonable for I just, I'm a white family.
I don't want black people moving over there.
They, they have a different dialect.
They have a different intonation and different slang, different jargon.
They cook different foods than me.
They, it's just, isn't that a deep part of this history in the United States of Jim Crow and redlining and all right?
Whites only?
It's perfectly reasonable.
I just want to be a common community.
I just want us to have unity.
Diversity is not our strength.
It's just easier when everybody's like the same and we cook the same food and we speak the same language.
And that's not unreasonable for you to want that.
And JD's your guy who's like, don't let anyone tell you to apologize for you wanting to have neighbors that are like you.
That's fine.
And to some ears, not these, to some, that may sound benign.
That is the exact logic of white supremacy.
That is the exact logic of Jim Crow.
It is the exact logic of redlining.
It is the exact logic of whites only wherever.
That I just don't want to have to live near people who are different.
They irritate me.
It scares me.
I'm uncomfortable.
I don't understand.
I feel in a way that somehow I'm just not included.
So they shouldn't be allowed to live here.
And he said everything you just outlined, Dan, he said it in his own words.
I think just again, the normalizing of that and to read through, to decode that language when they say we need a common community.
In the 19th century, racism was what they called scientific racism.
It was based on notions of science and so forth.
That's all debunked.
Now it is cultural.
So that's what you have to listen for: are the culture words.
They won't assimilate.
They don't have the same religion.
They don't eat the same foods.
They don't fit in.
I feel weird because they don't have the same practices that I, you know, whatever, whatever it is, that's the coded language.
And when it comes out, that's when our ears should prick up because that's what's going on.
That is what is being communicated are all of those racial stereotypes.
So I want to tie.
I know we got to go.
I'm going to tie two brief comments and then we'll go to Reasons for Hope.
One is this is working.
So if you watch Twitter while he was doing this, Andrew Isker, who's a white Christian ethno-nationalist and a Protestant, not somebody who loves Catholics, tweeted on October 29th, total loyalty to President J.D. Vance.
Josh Howarden said J.D. Vance is the next president of the United States.
This was a common theme.
Like J.D. knows who he's talking to.
He's talking to Catholics, yes, but he's talking to a lot of those Protestants he needs to win over who are openly ethno-nationalist.
That's one.
This was him, Dan, auditioning for president, period.
And I think in JD's mind, it's, I could be wrong, and I don't know what he's thinking.
I am trying to interpret.
So I'm not claiming I have insight into his mind, but my interpretation of his behavior is that J.D. Vance thinks Donald Trump could die at any moment.
I'm just being honest.
And I think he's trying to be ready and primed to be the leader of the next MAGA movement.
And this is his way of doing that.
Totally isolate his wife as this Hindu immigrant brown woman who's a Christian in conversion process.
Talk about the nation as a Christian nation, demonize immigrants, and get as ready as he can to be the next president.
Now, I still don't think he can win in a popularity contest.
But going back to everything we talked about in the first half an hour of this show, it's not going to matter.
As long as he can keep the devotion of certain MAGA factions, he will be fine.
And the elections, the Electoral College, the free and fair and open society is not going to be such that he's going to actually need to win a real election.
And so as long as he can keep those guys happy, the CJ Engels, the Iskers, the Howertons, the Wolfs, all those people, he has a path to be the next MA leader, even though he has no aura, he has no personality, and in genpop of the United States is not going to be the guy that ever wins over the people and starts a movement on his own.
That's my take.
Your thoughts, and then let's go to Reasons for Hope.
I agree with everything that you're saying.
You know, we wouldn't even have time to get into it, but he also waded into the casual anti-Semitism of the far right here.
There were just things that he did that are going to cause problems, not just with the general population, but with other wings of the Republican Party.
So we'll see how that plays out.
But he knows he's aiming for the most rabid, you know, MAGA, MAGA wing, and that's what that's what he's trying to do.
It was a strategy that worked for Trump.
He's trying to give it a J.D. Vance stamp.
He's trying to tap into sort of hijack the popularity that Charlie Kirk built.
We've talked about J.D. not being a very likable guy.
What's he doing?
He's taking a ready-made audience and trying to sort of step into a role where he's automatically likable without having to sort of build that following and so forth.
So I think all of that's there and we'll watch how it unfolds.
My reason for hope relates to the SNAP lawsuit of 25 states, Democrat-led states, suing.
Federal judge in Boston this week heard arguments about that and indicated pretty clearly that she thinks the government is supposed to be tapping those funds and should be releasing those.
And we'll see what happens.
No matter what, SNAP funds are going to expire before something can happen to fund them.
So there's going to be real suffering for people.
But I was at least hopeful that the legal arguments that the Trump administration are putting forward are not appearing to hold weight.
There's a ripple effect, but I was hopeful about that.
That was on my list for Reasons for Hope too.
And the judiciary continues to be a place where that stands in the way of Trump.
Even of a lot of Trump appointees, we talked about that.
Even a lot of Trump appointed judges are not letting the administration do what they want to do.
Mine is the five Senate Republicans joined Democrats to rebuke Trump's tariffs on Brazil.
This is something we'll have to keep an eye on to see if there's any teeth to any Senate Republicans ever.
And this is one place where they did break ranks.
And we'll see if this continues.
It may not be a reason for hope.
It may be a nothing burger.
Trump is urging Senate Republicans to go nuclear to get rid of the filibuster.
We'll see what happens there.
But that's something interesting, I think, that is not normal, at least for the last year or so.
All right, friends, we did our bonus episode this week.
Want to thank all of you subscribers who came to hang out with us.
I'm going to post that this weekend.
So look forward to the audio version if you were not able to join us on the live recording.
You need to go subscribe to our YouTube, even if you don't watch YouTube regularly.
So you can see Dan Miller and his demon outfit today.
It is truly a work of art.
You also need to go listen to American Unexceptionalism by Matthew Taylor and Susan Hayward.
They just did an episode this week on Brazil and the Twin Surrections, J8.
But the reason I think you want to listen to this is there are strategies on how to defeat a Christian nationalist authoritarian movement coming from Brazil.
And I think that there's a lot to learn there.
So it's not just a deep dive into what happened in Brazil.
It is a strategy guide, a skill guide, a tactical guide on things we can do as Americans.
You should also be listening to the Soul Force channel, which is where Theologia Sinferguenza lives and so much great content from Soul Force.
You can see that in the show notes.
If you're interested in decolonial theology, Latine theologians, and an activist talking about faith and identity, queerness, it's a one-of-a-kind show.
And I encourage you to check that out.
We'll be back next week with great stuff on Monday, the weekly roundup.
It's in the code, all of that.
But for now, be safe this weekend.
Enjoy Halloween.
Try to find some joy and levity in these times.
And go comment on how great Dan Miller looks on Instagram or YouTube.
