Weekly Roundup: MAGAworld Splinters: Epstein Revelations, Civilizational Populism, and the Future of the GOP
MAGAworld Splinters: Epstein Revelations, Civilizational Populism, and the Future of the GOP
In this episode of Straight White American Jesus, hosts Brad O’Ri and Dan Miller discuss the tumultuous week surrounding U.S. politics, including the recent government shutdown, infamous Epstein emails, and the ensuing so-called 'MAGA Civil War.' They delve into the escalating division within MAGA ranks, highlighting the civilizational populism driving figures like JD Vance. Additionally, they explore the friction between Pope Leo and the American Council of Bishops concerning immigration policies. As a side note, the hosts announce their upcoming appearance at the American Academy of Religion Conference in Boston.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad O'Nishi, founder of Axis Moody Media, author of Preparing for War, The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next here today with my co-host.
I am Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Glad as always to be with you, Brad.
Great to be with you.
It is one of those weeks that is a true roller coaster.
You start the week and we're talking about the shutdown.
You get to the middle of the week and we're talking about Epstein emails.
And by the time we're at Friday, there's a Magazines Civil War happening and it's happening probably about things you don't expect or maybe at least don't know about yet.
We got to get to all of that, plus the friction or at least potential friction between the Pope and the U.S. Council of Bishops and what the election of the new head of the Council of Bishops means for American Catholicism.
All that and more, lots to cover.
Let's go.
All right, Dan, you and I will not be here next week because we will be in Boston at AAR.
But if you are in Boston and want to hang out, we will be hanging out a week from today, November 21st, at a pub.
And if you are interested in the details of that, let me know.
You can email me at straightwhiteamericanjesus at gmail.com.
You can reach out on Discord if you're a subscriber, but I'll send you the details of where we will be hanging out.
And there'll be a bunch of familiar faces there too.
So come share a pint with Dan.
And I'm planning on at least two Coke Zeros, Dan.
It's a long flight to Boston.
I'm going to be jet lagged.
I might dip my toe into a third Coke Zero.
And if the pub has it, maybe not.
Why not a Roy Rogers?
Just get some grenadine in there and let's get weird.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I got to see what happens there.
You know, cargo pants or not, you know, or if that's going to be a thing.
There are some people that will be disappointed.
All right, friends, let's do it.
Last point.
I'm just going to say, just watch out for the JD Vance hug coming.
That's all I'm saying.
Yeah.
So I'm worried about it.
Are you going to wear leather pants?
If you wear Erica Kirk leather pants and we staged the greeting.
I was going to say I'm going to wear protection and then I was like, ah, that didn't come out right.
Yeah.
So great Friday we're having so far, people.
It's been that kind of week.
So let's talk about the shutdown ending.
Beginning of the week, Dan, I think, saw something that Democrats did not expect.
Those who are not MAGA did not expect, and that is off of the fresh momentum of the off-cycle elections last week, the victories in New York and in New Jersey and in Virginia.
And now we know, and this is part of my reasons for hope, we have a progressive mayor in Seattle.
In fact, the entire Puget Sound basically voted for a progressive ticket.
The Democrats, at least eight Democratic senators, decided it was time to end the shutdown.
And this was truly shocking, I think, to most of us.
You can count me as the people who was pretty upset because it seemed as if they got nothing.
They did not get the ACA premiums.
The snap benefits, everything that they had been asking for seemed to go by the wayside and the capitulation seemed to come out of nowhere.
I will say, and I think we want to do this quickly because we really do want to get to Epstein and the MAGA Civil War.
There's a lot of Christian nationalists.
There's a lot of Christian supremacists to talk about in terms of that civil war.
So I do want to get there.
The best explanation I've heard came from Scott Horden, Chris Hayes, some other people who were like, look, it seems like what the Dems decided is to continue the shutdown meant to continue the suffering of people, whether that was the lack of SNAP benefits and the federal workforce not getting paid and other things that were going to be painful for Americans going forward.
Angus King and Tim Kaine, some of the other senators seem to be taking a line that goes like this.
The GOP bet on the idea that we can't stand by and watch people suffer, and they can.
So they will win this shutdown because at some point we will want the suffering to stop.
Here's my reaction.
I'll get yours and then we'll go to the Epstein stuff in the manga civil war is that is actually a fair assessment.
Like I'm actually willing to listen to that story.
I'm willing to listen to the, we don't want Americans to suffer.
We don't, and we were never going to get the ACA premiums to anyway.
So who cares?
It's just, it was not going to happen.
We can't have the federal workforce laid off.
We can't have people not getting snapped.
We can't do it.
We got it, especially going into the holidays.
It's time.
You know where my problem is, Dan?
You remember when like over the last three months, all I've been talking about on bonus episodes and on this podcast is, you know what Democrats aren't good at?
Telling stories.
Crafting a narrative, explaining why their movement is better than the other one.
You know what I did not hear from Angus King or Angus King and Tim Kaine and the gang of eight here was a story that went like that.
I didn't hear a story that was like, here's why we had to do it.
They tried.
Tim Kaine got on TV and had Bedhead.
I don't know what he was doing all night and I don't want to know, but he did have Bedhead.
Okay.
He looked crazy.
Angus King is not the guy to be out front.
I'm sorry, Angus, you're just not him.
And so he wasn't doing a great job.
There was no storyteller that coordinated a narrative that explained to the base, the Democratic base that was so high on momentum why this had to be done now.
That's my take.
Unfortunately, I don't think we can spend too much more time on this, but what is your take?
And then we'll go.
Well, just briefly to pick up on that story part, excuse me.
I think that's not a wrong analysis.
What I think is interesting is it was working, right?
There already was a simplicit story.
People were blaming the Republicans more, all of that sort of stuff.
And if you wanted to put the GOP over a bigger barrel, you would have waited until the Supreme Court ruled on the Trump administration petitioning not to have to make full snap payments.
In other words, you could have added to the story, be like, here's what the Trump administration did.
They literally argued in court papers that it was a bigger hindrance to the government to have to pay SNA than it was for people not to have food.
Like, where the hell is that story?
So I think there's that.
I think, I do think it's difficult because it's not the Democrats.
It was like these eight, right?
And, you know, you've got all the stuff with Schumer and everything.
There were a lot of Senate Democrats who are really upset about this too, right?
House Democrats certainly are, but the Senate Democrats also were.
So you've got that sort of piece to it.
I think another piece of this to at least, I don't know, maybe it's looking for silver linings, is it does put the GOP in a really hard spot now?
Because even in the House, if they don't vote on ACA premiums, they haven't voted on ACA premiums and they expire.
If they do vote on them and vote them down and so forth, they've had to put their money where their mouth is by saying, oh, we'll negotiate this and deal with it once we're back in session.
And now they are.
And I think that's the other piece that keeps, I think in some ways, the momentum of the shutdown moving forward toward midterms is I don't think, I hate the idea of having to use real people's lives as like a political chip here, but I think the Republicans don't care.
I don't think the House is going to be able to come up with anything on ACA premiums that's going to like work.
They're talking about the same pipe dream they have had since 2000 oughts of somehow doing away with Obamacare between now and like the end of December.
So I think that's probably another calculation if somebody's looking at the real politic of it of the GOP.
This hasn't changed for the GOP either.
They didn't honestly gain that much in this regard.
They now are in the position of having to do something about this.
And maybe this leads us into other things.
I think the other piece of this is they've also been denied their victory lap because of the Epstein stuff.
You talk about something that sucked the oxygen out of the room for the GOP.
So a lot of complicated things with ending the shutdown.
I'm with you.
I was really upset to see that.
I don't think I was surprised.
I knew that there were those moderate Democrats or Democrats in sort of battleground districts and things in the Senate who were feeling that pressure.
But I was still really disappointed to see it.
But none of them are up for reelection.
Yeah, yeah.
So they're safe.
It's also a moderate habit.
It's the shutdowns don't work.
You do it for a while.
It's like the moderate habit, even though all the polling and stuff showed this time.
It's looking different.
Like they were blaming the, like people were blaming the incumbent party.
It was putting real pressure on the GOP.
Everyone knew the GOP didn't have a good off-ramp because they kept calling the Democrats bluff and they kept doing it.
So I think there's that piece too, right?
Where you just have these moderate Democrats who have this long-standing, like habituated response that you don't do shutdowns, you don't do them for so long.
And I think to your point, they're like, oh, we're in the battleground.
Well, you're not up for reelection, but there's just still that kind of muscle memory for some of those moderate Democrats that I think kicked in.
Yeah.
And again, I don't want to litigate this at length today.
The thing I will condemn is the fact that you didn't tell the story.
Why is that so hard to send out somebody who can shape a narrative that articulates in a forceful and convincing way why we care about people not eating and people not being paid, including the military and including TSA workers, including everyone?
We don't want people to suffer.
They do.
There are monsters on the other side of the aisle who don't care if you eat.
That's the problem.
So we're going to end this shutdown so that 40 million people can have their full benefits.
We're going to make sure they do.
And we're also going to make sure that you know that they don't care at all.
I mean, I don't know.
It just, it just doesn't seem.
Maybe I'm just a podcaster who thinks it's not that hard, but that was the issue for me.
Then we get a couple of days later, and I, you know, again, The strategy here is clear.
I think no one's told me because I don't hear them.
The 75-year-olds who are in the Senate, who are in the Democratic Party, I don't hear them, but I'm assuming that part of what they gandered was as soon as the shutdown ends, here come the Dems releasing the trove of Epstein emails that they got from the Epstein estate.
And Representative Grijalva will be sworn in.
The discharge position will go through.
And we're cooking with gas in terms of the Epstein scandal turning up.
There is probably huge numbers of GOP expected to defect on this issue.
So they're pretty confident that this will eventually make its way through and really turn into a wedge issue for the Republicans and Trump.
And I think that's the story today for me to kind of like center our discussion around is this is, you know, for 10 years, Dan, we have been wondering what is the scandal that will actually break Trump's hold on the GOP.
What has morphed into MagaNation?
What has morphed into the Trump cult?
What has morphed into whatever you want to call it?
Access Hollywood didn't do it.
RussiaGate didn't do it.
Quid pro quo with Ukraine didn't do it.
I mean, we can point to everything, didn't do it.
He had dinner with Nick Fuentes.
Nobody seems to remember that, but that didn't do it.
There's a hundred things you could point to.
And then here we have a situation where, as you just outlined, there's four or five Republicans who promised they would sign the discharge position.
And they have been at the, you know, they have been called into the principal's office to see if they'll change their mind.
Lauren Boebert being the highest profile.
This situation, Rue, no last.
Yeah.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nancy Mace, and we have all these women.
And I want to stay up.
I want to talk about why them and why they would do this.
I think that's something to get to today.
But I think what we're seeing is ahead of time that the 218 needed for that position to go forward.
It looks like now there may be 10, 20 more GOP reps that jump on board.
Why?
Why would you break with Trump?
Hasn't the last year been a case study in how the congressional Republicans will never break with Trump on anything?
Elon Musk is at the Treasury raiding our data and taking all our money.
He's got a 19-year-old named Big Balls and they're just running roughshod over career federal employees.
Who cares?
He's doing what we voted for.
Why now?
Why Epstein?
I don't think Epstein is a distraction.
Okay, I'll give you a couple of emails.
I'll let you jump in and then we'll make our way through a lot of this.
I've met a lot of, I've met some very bad people.
None as bad as Trump.
Not one decent cell in his body.
So yes, dangerous.
That is an email from Jeffrey Epstein.
Jeffrey Epstein, Trump, let me just quote this sentence.
Of course he knew about the girls as he asked Jelaine to stop.
Other emails, of course, that I'm sure many of you have heard and read and already been kind of briefed on.
He was at Epstein's house with a victim for hours alone.
Epstein offered to provide the New York Times and others with pictures of girls in bikinis and Trump in Epstein's kitchen.
There's a lot of other details here that are really gross and disgusting.
I don't want to spend all day going through all of them.
I think if you're listening to this show, you've probably had a download on most of them already.
Now, that leads us to the reaction to this.
That leads us to, well, what is the real fallout?
Some people will say, look, all of you who are interested in the Epstein files, it's the same as RussiaGate.
still think something's going to take down Trump and it's not.
But last week, Dan, you said it, and I think it's actually worth bringing it forward today.
He's a lame duck president.
He's 80 years old.
He continues to fall asleep.
He continues to look confused.
He's not the guy from 10 years ago.
There are people looking past him.
There are.
And that is just a fact.
They were not doing that in 2020.
They were not doing that in 2016.
There are people looking past him now.
And I think we need to sort of dissect what that means.
Let me play a clip for you that proves that.
And this is Thomas Massey, the congressional Republican who has really been leading the charge and has really basically broken with Trump and the administration on Epstein and other things.
So here's Massey explaining what he thinks the vote in the discharge petition means.
And how many Republicans do you think will vote for this on the floor?
Well, I've already had a couple of Republicans tell my office privately that they're going to vote for it.
And I think that could snowball.
You know, the deal for Republicans on this vote is that Trump will protect you if you vote the wrong way.
In other words, if you vote to cover up for pedophiles, you've got cover in a Republican primary.
But I would remind my colleagues that this vote is going to be on your record for longer than Trump is going to be president.
And what are you going to do in 2028 and 2030 when you're in a debate, either with a Republican or a Democrat, and they say, how can we trust you?
You covered up for a pedophile back in 2025.
Massey puts this really well.
He's, look, this is going to come back.
A long after Trump is out of politics and he's dead.
People are going to ask you, did you vote to release the Epstein files?
So if you're a 2028 person, a 2032 person, you want to be in Congress for a long time, you have aspirations, you better think about it.
And this is one of those moments where there's just clarity.
There's no more like myth-making.
The emperor is wearing clothes when he's clearly not.
Like it's just a congressional Republican actually saying something like, if you vote to keep these hidden, you're voting to protect pedophiles.
Good luck in 2030 when he's gone.
Good luck in 2032 when he's dead.
Is that where you want to stand?
And that's a point.
So let me throw it to you.
I mean, there's a ton more to go through, but I can keep going if you want, but jump in here too.
I think a few things with the why pieces of it, I think that are here.
I think, you know, I said last time to tie to the lame duck, he's part of the establishment now, whether he wants to be or not.
There's that piece of it.
He's not the new shiny thing in Washington.
There can't be any more drain the swamp language because he's the swamp.
I think it's also the conspiracist dimension to this.
Trump has ridden conspiracy theories very effectively from birtherism, from the Central Park issue, you know, years ago all the way forward.
He always, even if he wasn't sort of full-throatedly endorsing them, he was always like sort of with a nod and a wink, right?
That's how he was with QAnon, where he wouldn't condemn it.
He'd just kind of smile and nod, but he'd still like, you know, repost things and so forth.
This was one of them, right?
When it suited his political interests to have this, you know, what are the Democrats hiding?
What is Clinton hiding?
What is, you know, because pretty much every big name American elite is in there somewhere as, you know, because Epstein had connections everywhere.
There's other stuff too about him talking to Vladimir Putin about Trump and all of this kind of stuff.
So I think part of what it is, is the endlessly devouring monster that is conspiracism.
And I'm kind of thinking about this.
I'm actually teaching a class on conspiracism right now.
And there's some interesting scholarship about, you know, what psychological needs does conspiracism fill?
Like, why do people buy into conspiracism?
But a line of reasoning I've been coming up with that I think is there and you're reading some of this is that, you know, people, it provides answers.
It makes things simple.
It gives you a sense of control, all that stuff that we've talked about before.
But I was reading something recently from some psychologists that pointed out that it doesn't, there's evidence it doesn't actually fulfill those needs.
Yeah.
Right?
It's sort of scratching.
It becomes maladaptive.
It's like any other thing that we do where we like, you know, we got these things and we're trying to meet, you know, meet our emotional needs or whatever, and it doesn't work.
And so we argue with people all the time or whatever.
We all know how that works.
But what that does is that's what, to me, more and more, I think, keeps conspiracism in motion.
And so this, I think Trump is now on the devouring end because he showed up in the conspiracy theory that's being spun, but not as the player.
He's not the rescuer who's going to save us all from the deep state.
QAnon said.
He's now showing up in this.
And then on top of that, you layer Trump's tried and true responses of not just denial, never being able to say, you know what?
We didn't realize what a monster this guy was and we shouldn't have hung out with him.
That's our bad, you know, 20 years before or 10 years before or whatever.
Nope.
Has to be the, I never knew the guy, which is all the demonstrably false things that he does, that it's all or nothing.
And now, even if there's never a smoking gun here, even if there's never anything that shows Trump with scantily clad women or there's no evidence besides what Epstein said that he knew about the girls or whatever, Trump has classically, by stonewalling this so much, he has created the very thing he's trying to say isn't there, which is the image of guilt.
He has fed the conspiratorial model.
So I think you have the political pieces, right?
Lame duck president, people looking past Trump, people seeing him fall asleep at news conferences, people the true social thing where he's talking about telling the GOP not to deflect on the Epstein issue.
He means defect, not deflect.
Like it's the wrong word that he's got, you know, in there.
All of that stuff.
You got people looking past him, but then you've also got the conspiracism that has served him has done what it's going to do.
It's going to turn around and devour people.
And he is now on the inside of a conspiracy theory where he doesn't want to be.
And I don't think there's a way out.
And the last point that I'll make to your point that people might say, this is going to be the same as Russia Gate.
It's going to be the same.
MAGA people didn't buy into any of that.
They never bought into it.
Many, many, many people in MAGA are buying into this.
That's what makes this potentially different.
And if it doesn't bring down a Trump presidency, I don't think it's going to end the Trump presidency, but it does do things like make it so he doesn't get his victory lap about quote unquote breaking Chuck Schumer to end the lock, the shutdown.
He doesn't get to take credit for reestablishing snap benefits and things because nobody's listening.
And I think that that's another significant feature.
Here's Jack Poso.
December 30th, 2021.
The DOJ and Jelaine Maxwell's lawyers have made a deal that her little black book of contacts will never be made public.
JD Vance tweets, quote tweets this.
What possible interest would the U.S. government have in keeping Epstein's clients secret?
Gonna get to JD, but I think that proves the point you just made.
There has been an investment on the part of MAGA in the Epstein files and the Epstein conspiracy because it plays right into everything that QNAN is based around and Pizzagate 2.
A cabal of elites who are monsters devouring children, abusing children, and doing so without impunity.
Trump was elected on the basis for many, not all, but for many, the idea that he would rescue us from those elites.
And I want to take this after the break to something that often you bring up, but I think actually I'm going to bring up this time and I know you'll have a lot to say about, which is the idea of populism and elites and why this does actually mean more to some people than Russia Gate and how Trump has become an elite.
And there's actually people in Maggie Nation who are really, really, really openly upset with Trump.
But it's actually not about Epstein.
It's about something else, which is kind of good news and bad news.
We'll talk about that after the break.
right back.
All right, Dan, I'm going to offer a new vocabulary word to the pod.
You ready?
All right.
And it's one you probably will understand more than me, but I do want to sort of offer some interjection here.
So here's my vocab word for the week.
You ready, everybody?
Civilizational populism.
And this is an idea that has been kind of developed in scholarly terms by Roger Brubaker and in papers by a bunch of scholars who are trying to think about what people mean when they talk about Western civilization, the real people, and how religion plays into that.
So Isan Yilmaz and Nicholas Morrison, who are primarily working out of Australia, are the ones who've really developed this and whose work I'm drawing on here.
So what is civilizational populism?
Civilizational populism goes like this, according to Yilmaz and Morison.
It's an ideology that uses a civilization-based classification of peoples to draw boundaries around the people, elites, and others.
It declares that the people are pure and good and authentic because they belong to a civilization which is itself pure and good.
In this case, that would be the United States and Western civilization.
Religion plays a key role here because to be part of the civilization, you have to be the right religion.
In this case, Christian, in some cases, Judeo-Christian, although that's a big issue right now with the Nick Funtes stuff, and we'll get there too.
Okay.
Civilizational populists describe religious minorities as dangerous others who are morally bad, and they belong, Dan, to a foreign civilization and thus cannot assimilate.
So if you're a Muslim, if you're from South Asia, if you are from South America, assimilation, this whole thing we hear about all the time, is near impossible for you because you're just from a different civilization.
This is like Samuel Hunting stuff, Dan, right?
Clash of civilizations.
I know you were thinking it.
I was just writing, I was actually writing it in my notes as you were talking.
I'm like, Samuel Huntington, clash of civilizations.
Yep, there you go.
So why is this matter now?
And this will take us into a bunch of stuff related to the MAGA Civil War and people who are openly calling to look past Trump.
Is if you're a civilizational populist, your worldview goes like this.
We have the best, superior, pure civilization on the planet.
We are Christians of European heritage who have created a unique civilizational iteration in the United States.
That's one.
The people who are part of us, the real people, the Christian American people, the white Christian American people, they are pure and good.
CJ Engel this week posted a really cringy thing where he was like, name one thing that a foreigner could never understand and assimilate to in the United States.
I'll name the first, the Thanksgiving turkey.
And I was like, bro, what are you talking about?
God.
Of all the things.
Okay.
Jesus.
All right.
So the people are pure and good, and the others cannot assimilate.
But there's a third part of civilizational populism that is a key part of any populism, which is the elites.
The elites are traitors to their civilization because they've sold out the real people in order to get rich.
They've sold out the real people in order to benefit themselves.
And they've often done that by allowing foreigners to invade and pollute the civilization.
This is a, you could say, well, isn't this Christian nationalism?
And I would say, well, it's a form of Christian nationalism, but it kind of goes bigger than that.
Because instead of saying, well, I'm a Christian, I should get more say than you in the country.
Like, you can be here, Hindu.
You can be here, black Muslim, but I get more say.
This is saying, hey, Hindu, hey, black Muslim.
You'll never be able to assimilate to this civilization.
You'll never be one of the people.
I'm sorry.
There is something called the West, and it's based in Christianity.
You just, this is just not something that you'll ever be part of.
This is Christian supremacy.
But I think the populism part and the civilization part helps your why.
The civil war in MAGA and the people turning on Trump are not really turning on him, at least some of them, because of Epstein.
Let me play you a clip of Ben Shapiro.
Democrats and some rogue Republicans who do not like Trump and want to hurt his administration, they are joining forces in order to try and drive down his approval ratings with the suggestion unevidenced that Donald Trump engaged in illegal activities with Jeffrey Epstein.
And that's the reason why Trump doesn't want these documents released.
Now, again, there could be nefarious reasons why Trump doesn't want the documents released.
Could be that there's something in there that he knows is bad or embarrassing for him or embarrassing to a friend.
Maybe that's the reason.
Okay, but you have provided zero evidence.
Again, there are tens of thousands of documents here.
You have provided zero evidence to the effect that Donald Trump did anything illegal here.
And in fact, you've provided some evidence that he and Epstein had a falling out.
And yet somehow this was the big headline yesterday.
The big, big headline.
Epstein, by the way, was trying to find any way that he could to basically monetize his one-time relationship with Trump.
So Ben Shapiro says, I'm not sure Trump did anything wrong with Epstein, and I think this is a big smear job.
Tim Poole said the same thing on his podcast.
And when I do my research every week and I'm on Twitter going through the worst accounts, the people who are really mad at Trump are not mad at him necessarily because of Epstein.
Now, there are a bunch that are not happy.
Don't get me wrong.
And I do think this has teeth on the ground.
But the thing that got them completely, overwhelmingly enraged this week was Trump's comments on H-1B visas and mortgages.
Here's what Trump said to Laura Ingram about American workers.
There's never going to be a country like what we have right now.
The Republicans have to talk about it.
And does that mean the H-1B visa thing will not be a big priority for your administration?
Because if you want to raise wages for American workers, you can't flood the country with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of foreign workers.
We don't have talent in female.
No, you don't.
We don't have talent in Faithfully.
No, you don't have certain talents and you have to, people have to learn.
This is the thing that got them like overwhelmingly upset.
In addition to the fact that Trump's having dinner with billionaires, CEOs of Blackstone, J.P. Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, NASDAQ.
In addition to the fact that Trump this week proposed the idea, or at least his admin did, of a 50-year mortgage.
So let me give you some examples of reactions and I'll throw it to you and I'll be quiet, okay?
Angle, the Trump people don't realize that we are not interested in compromises or halfway deals with corporations.
The Trump administration doesn't realize, here's the amazing quote.
If you're doing the dishes, if you're mowing the lawn, just take a minute.
You ready?
We would rather go through economic hell than continue forward down the path of replacement migration.
So when Trump talks about the H-1B visas and needing to bring in, quote, talent from other places, this is the response from a noted Christian nationalist leader.
CJ Engel also tweeted this week, who is ready for what comes after Trump.
Andrew Isker, his partner in crime, on November 12th, God didn't spare his life and make him a man of destiny so we could have 600,000 Chinese students propping up failing colleges and millions of H-1Bs indentured slaves for corporations.
Joel Webbin, part of their little like Christianathem nationalist crew.
Imagine still trusting the plan.
Andrew Torba wrote the book that defending Christian nationalism and is an open and known anti-Semite.
Grandpa has dosed off behind the wheel of the car and is heading for a cliff.
It's our sacred duty not only to take the wheel, but also his keys.
This is a metaphor for the current state of our entire society.
Usually when you like give a metaphor, you don't have to tell people it's a metaphor, but you know, I mean.
Didn't he also, and that didn't he also type, I don't have it in front of me, did he all say he dosed off?
And I was like, huh.
He did.
He's dosed off.
He's not dozed off.
I don't know what else we might be claiming here, but he dosed off behind the wheel.
Joel Webbin, it's long time to pass to admit that Donald Trump is not our guy.
He was merely the precursor to another.
MAGA is dead.
CJ Engel is like, that's my point.
He was here to buy his time.
Okay.
This at Woman Definer, which is a terrible name, but that's the handle on X with 60,000 followers, quotes, in a weird position where I like JD Vance more than I like Trump.
I think that's something that to me sticks out.
Clint Russell, who has 250,000 followers on Twitter, is a popular MAGA figure.
Trump is going to lose the house and get impeached in 2027, and I'm not going to lift a finger to defend him.
You did nothing you promised to do and dedicated your entire second term to the donor class.
You are on your own now.
Good luck.
Let me just tie this together.
I'll throw it to you.
Civilizational populism says the elites betray the people and they allow invaders to come in.
What did we just have this week?
Trump says this about immigrants and talent and H-1B visas, the mortgage and the unaffordability crisis with houses, and they turn on him quickly.
Why?
Because he turned into the elite.
There's a generational divide here, Dan.
Everybody under 40 is pretty much, I'm looking advance.
I'm done with Trump.
I can't wait for who's next.
What's going to happen in 2028?
Like they are openly saying it.
Everybody over 40, for the most part, Ben Shapiro, Steve Bannon was this week.
I'll play you the clip.
Did I mention that Trump's not perfect?
He's an imperfect instrument, but he's an instrument infused by divine providence.
If you had not had him and you didn't have him today, you wouldn't have anything.
And I realize there's some days and some comments that get you all worked up.
We're here to calm you down and say, let's keep.
This is 12 o'clock high.
You're in a bombing run.
Stay focused.
Don't be getting off the main event here.
Trump's not perfect.
He's our guy.
Here's my argument.
The people over 40 are now part of the elite with Trump.
They have so much to lose if Trump goes down.
The people who don't, the 36-year-old pundits and those, they're like, you're not our guy.
You betrayed us.
You're not the populist.
You're not the leader.
And the true American people who they consider to be white Americans are getting run over by H-1B visas and all, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
This is why they're turning on him, Dan.
Some of it's Epstein, at least with this crew.
A lot of it is them seeing him as exactly what you've been saying as the elite, who is now the guy that is out of touch with the real people.
A lot of great points there on the populism piece.
So the populism about the true or the authentic people, but that's like an empty category.
You can build that category in lots of different ways, right?
And so, what this notion of civilizational populism picks up on is that populism has never been like a unified political ideology or something.
It's more like a sort of cultural logic.
And this is one that says the people are defined not by political beliefs, but by a shared culture, cultural identity, Christian background, European ancestry, all of that sort of stuff.
And so, what that's highlighting, number one, I think that's why people miss the boat when they're like, why did people vote for, I don't know, Obama in one election and then Trump in another election?
And, you know, why are they so contradictory in what they say they value politically?
Because it's not about politics.
It's about serving this idealized vision of American culture and cultural identity.
And whatever is thought to serve that is what I believe in advance and so forth.
So it's not going to be a unified policy sort of thing.
It's about civilizations.
So I think there's that piece of it.
And to that other thing that, you know, people often are like, well, you know, populists say they're anti-elitist.
The rhetoric is, but they always have elitist leaders.
Somebody within a populist movement is going to become the elite.
And on Werner Mueller, who's another scholar of populism, has pointed out that like it's about the right elite.
And Trump is no longer the right elite for exactly the reason you're highlighting.
He's now with the Clintons or whatever.
When he said that, I couldn't, even the language that he says with Ingram, if you listen to it, when he says, you don't have the talent, he's a we and you language.
It's like he's talking to everybody else as if you, you, not us.
We don't have the talent.
America doesn't have the talent.
We need to develop the talent something.
There's no we language there.
It is Trump, the elitist, the technocrat, you know, wannabe tied in with Musk and everybody else, working on a you, an us versus you sort of mentality, but now he's talking to other Americans.
So like all of that, to your point, is he's now the wrong elite.
And this group of people is picking up on this.
I think you tie it in with that.
So like that's, that's the MAGA alienation, the young, at least the young MAGA set alienation.
And I think that's significant.
I think it's significant because obviously a lot will happen in the next year.
But right now, polling data shows that Republicans are way less motivated for the 2026 midterms than Democrats are.
Often happens, the people that don't have the White House, but that's playing out, all of that.
But Trump managed in the last week or a week and a half, not just to alienate like some of his base constituency, but a lot of regular people too.
And I think that's what's significant about the 50-year mortgage thing.
That's not just about being out of touch for MAGA.
That's about being out of touch for a lot of people.
He had these statements about the mortgages about how, well, you know, it's just, you're just going to pay a little more.
That's what he said.
All it means is you pay less per month.
That's all.
He leaves out the whole issue of interest.
Like he doesn't understand how interest works.
And I was geeking out this week and I looked up some analysis somebody did.
And they were like, if you had a $400,000 home at 6.25% interest with 10% down, a 50-year loan, you're paying 800, a three, a 30-year interest rate, a 30-year, you're paying $378K in interest.
It's $816 over 50 years.
It's an 86% increase in your interest rates or your interest payments rather.
It's unreal.
And Trump just doesn't get it.
People confront him.
What are you going to do about the affordability crisis?
And he's like, it's a con job.
There's no affordability crisis.
Prices are down.
Again, his all or nothing rhetoric.
His rhetoric can never, ever, ever be measured.
It's always yes or no.
It's never that Trump's in good health.
He's in superlative health for a man his age or any of that stuff.
So he managed to alienate a lot of those blue-collar MAGA people that this supposed coalition that we've heard so much about over the last few years from the right, but also a lot of those undecided voters, those unaffiliated voters, those people who swung to him last time on affordability issues and so forth.
So he is appearing more and more and more like somebody who's absolutely out of touch with any kind of regular American, which is what his critics would always have said.
Has Trump ever had to worry about being able to afford interest payments?
Of course not.
Has Trump ever gone to a grocery store and bought his own groceries?
I sincerely doubt it.
But it's all coming into view now in a way that is also catching the attention of the MAGA faithful.
And I think, again, to the point that we're reiterating here, that's what feels really different and potentially significant about this.
There's one more cleavage point that I think we should notice before we go to the person who is trying to talk to the younger American populist, and we'll get there in one second.
The other is, is Israel in anti-Semitism?
We, of course, have had the Nick Fuentes Tucker Carlson interview hanging in the background.
And for those of you who've made better decisions than me in life, and you don't spend your days tracking this stuff on Twitter and other places, there has been an all-out civil war over the Groipers and anti-Semitism and Nazism on Twitter among many, many, many elites.
And by elites, I mean pundits and intellectuals and thinkers and podcasters with hundreds of thousands of followers.
But what is happening with these fault lines in MAGA is that the people under 40 are coming down on this place.
A, Trump sold us out.
He's welcoming in the H-1B visa immigrant folks.
Two, everything you just said about mortgages and affordability.
Three, he is loyal to Israel more than he's loyal to the true American people.
That's their words, not me.
Don't think that that's what I think.
Okay.
So the third fault line here is that the younger MAGA types or the former MA types, the reason that Fuentes is appealing to them in his gross, disgusting anti-Semitism is he's saying Donald Trump is not sufficiently America first.
He's not sufficiently loyal to us.
They give billions, not just to Argentina, but to Israel.
They do whatever Israel wants all the time.
And this fits in with their theology.
Like many of the people I quoted you earlier, C.J. Engel, Andrew Isker, others, they are openly like, they have theologies that go like this.
There's no more Jews.
There's just Christians and non-Christians.
The Jews are not special.
And in fact, when you give them any kind of status as a chosen people, that's actually really bad for Christians and for America.
So the Israel piece is a really big part of the fault line here, and it will continue to be.
Let me play you a quote.
Let me play you a clip from Nick Fuentes, who talked about this on his pod the other day.
And this is the guy that is appealing to the 25-year-old and 32-year-old conservative, alt-right, dissident right, anti-Semitic, racist-right people.
And we played this game in the first term.
We're 10 years in.
And you still have these people.
I hate to say it, but they're just like in denial.
And they're like, okay, everybody, let's all go on Twitter and let's tell Trump, don't screw over your voters.
Okay.
Hey, Trump, don't hire John Radcliffe and the CIA.
Like, what are we doing?
We lost.
It's over.
The time to make demands was during the election when he needed the votes.
He's a lame dog president.
He doesn't need anything from us.
He's not even on Twitter.
He's on Truth Social.
So what are you talking about?
We're going to all rally and tell him, don't hire yet another neocon?
Forget it.
We tried that.
I'm not playing that game anymore.
Trump sold us out.
He is the problem.
He's cooked.
And you know what?
Look, I'm not saying damn him to hell.
I think he's a net positive.
His movement was necessary, but it was never the end all be-all.
He's a patriot.
God bless him.
But here's the point.
He was never the end-all be-all.
He was always a John the Baptist.
He was always a prefigurement of what will come in the future.
But people forgot that along the way.
They thought we really were playing for like heritage America and like whatever.
Trump was a stepping stone towards America first, white identity, towards a true nationalism, true revanchism.
He was always a stepping stone.
He did his part.
God bless him.
He created me.
He created so much of this, but he was never the end all be all.
He's on his way out.
We just need to be realistic about it and not in denial and not coping and not having these delusions that, you know, we have to wrest control over the ship from Trump using our Twitter accounts.
It ain't going to happen.
This is why I say the real battle is 2028.
And I think if you pay attention, I think today that you can really see a distinction here.
JD Vance said this this week about affordability and housing.
A lot of young people are saying housing is way too expensive.
Why is that?
Because we flooded the country with 30 million illegal immigrants who were taking houses that ought by right go to American citizens.
And at the same time, we weren't building enough new houses to begin with, even for the population that we had.
So what we're doing is trying to make it easier to build houses, trying to make it easier to build factories and things like that so that people have good jobs.
We're also getting all of those illegal aliens out of our country.
And you're already seeing it start to pay some dividends.
So JD Vance's approach is basically to say, oh, no, no, no, not a 50-year mortgage.
I mean, he doesn't say as much, but he's, you know what we really need?
We need to get rid of 30 million undocumented immigrants, which is a wild and stupid number.
And I think if you pressed him, he'd be like, oh, I included actual documented immigrants, but I don't consider them real Americans or to be here legally.
So I just include them in the undocumented number.
They're the real problem.
That's a claim the Jews, the Hitler made about the Jews, by the way.
He said, oh, you know why you can't afford a house, German?
Jews.
Just put that out there.
So JD Vance is, we need more houses and we got to get rid of all these undocumented immigrants.
That'll do it.
That is not only dangerous, xenophobic, false rhetoric.
That is all there.
But it is also, it is not what Trump is saying, Dan.
To me, if JD Vance two weeks ago was talking to the MAGA group, the young MAGA group at the University of Mississippi and TPUSA and he was hugging Erica Kirk.
Now when he's talking about this stuff, he's talking to the under 40s, the 2028 people, the 2032 people.
And he's, I'm your dude.
And they noticed.
I mean, I can read you the tweets again if you want.
Kind of like JD Vance more than the president.
I don't know how to feel about that.
JD is becoming their guy, Dan, because JD is actually a civilizational populist.
I'm a Christian.
I don't want non-Christians here.
I don't want to allow people in who are going to take away our way of life.
America is a people.
That's not an idea.
America is an ethnicity.
America is a history.
It's a lineage.
This is how JD talks now all the time.
And they're starting to notice.
They're like, oh, I think that's our dude.
Not the 80-year-old grandpa having dinner with the Goldman Sachs CEO, talking about a 50-year mortgage and saying, we don't have any talent.
Our guy's JD.
This is where the fault lines are.
Thoughts on that?
Just briefly to that, re-emphasizing that point about civilizational identity here.
Notice the answer he doesn't give.
He doesn't give economic answers or political answers.
It's not, I don't know, we need to spur the production of housing.
We need to get people to build more housing.
We need to incentivize, you know, real political solutions people have talked about.
Like maybe we create policies where it's harder for investors to buy properties and beat out regular people.
Certainly the GOP is not going to support more sort of government help for people to get started on buying homes or something to mitigate interest rates, whatever.
The point being, there are like lots of solutions, none of them easy, but solutions that people have of how do we improve the housing crisis.
His go-to is racism and xenophobia and the logic of white Christian America.
And I think that's the telling point of, you know, if somebody were mapping what kind of populism is this, what kind of message is this, what kind of economic vision is this, this, this language of civilizational populism captures that really effectively.
So if you're like, well, maybe you're nitpicking, Brad, here's Christy Noam talking about H-1B visas and immigrants and people becoming citizens.
Here she is.
What is the administration's position on these visas?
We're going to keep using our visa programs.
We're just going to make sure that they have integrity, that we're actually doing the vetting of the individuals who come into this country, that they want to be here for the right reasons, that they're not supporters of terrorists and organizations that hate America.
And that's what I think is so remarkable is under the Trump administration, we've sped up our process and added integrity to the visa programs, to green cards, to all of that.
But also, more people are becoming naturalized under this administration than ever before.
More people are becoming citizens because we're not just streamlining and building some processes back into our immigration policies.
We're also making sure that these individuals that are coming into our country and get that privilege, that they actually are here for the right reasons.
The Biden administration let thousands of terrorists into this country.
They opened the southern border.
They abused our asylum programs, abused our protective programs and visa programs, and we fixed all of it.
It's remarkable what President Trump has done, and it's because he's a great leader.
He's a visionary.
And this man is going to go down as a legend in history as our greatest president ever.
Madam Said.
So I'll just say, this is the last bit of my analysis, but I'll just say Christy Noam is tied to Trump.
Christy Noam's political future is with Trump.
She thinks if I stick close to Trump, I have a job.
I am the cosplay Barbie out here in front with the DHS raids and the mass deportation crusade.
JD Vance is trying to split the difference.
Sometimes he's, oh, Donald Trump, the funniest guy I've ever heard.
How he's sitting there with RFK.
If any of you watched that this week, it's the most, don't watch it.
You'll really need a bath and whiskey and other things after that to get the stink off of you and the whatever.
But oh, Donald Trump, he's so funny.
He asked the leader of Syria, how many wives do you have?
He's the funniest guy I've ever met.
But when he's in other contexts, JD's not saying what the rest of the administration is saying.
Because JD is, I have a future that doesn't hinge on Trump.
And he's talking to all of those people that we just mentioned.
And he's trying to be their guy on that front.
Okay.
Any other thoughts here, Dan, about Epstein, Trump, civilizational populism, anything that before we take a break and we go to the Catholic bishops and the Pope?
I think just to say that it'll be interesting watching moving forward, if this is the play that Vance is making, I think there's a lot of reason to think that it is, what'll happen if the knives of the administration come out for him, right?
Because everybody else in that cabinet, they're all tied to Trump, right?
A president's cabinet is tied to him.
So it will be.
And that I think is what will also be telling.
If we start seeing distance or active shots at Vance from other cabinet secretaries and things, I think that'll also be a sign of what's going on sort of behind closed doors.
Well, if Vance is supposed to be running with Marco Rubio, which is being floated, where's Marco Rubio going to land?
Right.
And it's not that Noam doesn't want to be president.
She probably does.
But if she's going to be president and successful in the primary, she's going to do so as a continuation of Trump.
And I think what we're saying is Fuentes, Engel, Orrin McIntyre, all of these people I just quoted you are like, you know, Joel Webbin, they're like, it's over.
MAGA's dead.
It's time for the next thing.
So JD is, okay, I can't run as just the continuation of MAGA.
I got to be the next thing.
That's the difference.
Let's take a break.
All right.
Enough.
Enough, Epstein.
Enough, Trump, enough Vance, enough of the MAGA Civil War.
Tell us about the Catholic bishops versus the Pope.
I don't know.
It's something really pleasant and a shift to a much more refreshing topic, right?
Without tension.
Yeah.
So people probably know that the Council of Bishops in the U.S. has been at odds with the Vatican for a good period of time now.
They were not typically fond of Francis.
They're not loving Pope Leo.
more conservative and so this week of a point of interest that you know or of news that's probably not of interest to everybody is the fact that they did i cut out No.
Sorry about that.
My computer's sending me weird signals, and I don't know what they mean.
They had a vote for their president, and they chose a guy named Paul Coakley out of Oklahoma City.
He was elected the president of the American Council of Bishops, and he's another one of these conservatives.
And what's interesting to me is, so it's not as if, from my perspective, there are a lot of people among American bishops who are super progressive or whatever, but you have a wing of this that are much more into essentially the MAGA style culture war stuff.
Their focus is anti-abortion.
Their focus is anti-LGBTQ rights and so forth.
He fits that mode.
And in that regard, if we're talking about somebody like Vance and that radical, traditional Catholic piece that is part of the intellectual movement of, let's call it the Vance wing of MAGA or whatever we're past, if you're Fuentes or whoever at this point, that's good news for somebody like Vance right this this is somebody they're gonna the one point of difference and I'm curious where this friction might come out is on the issue of immigration
The one place where this relatively conservative group of bishops representing the Catholic Church in the United States, which I should be clear is not representative of everybody in the Catholic Church, right?
But the one place where there's daylight between them and somebody like Vance is on the treatment of immigrants and the enforcement of immigration policy.
And so it's worth watching as we move forward to see where does the sort of institutional face of the American Catholic Church begin to move in this when you have things like Vance, who again, I say is like the radical traditional Catholic face of the MAGA movement as he's sort of making these moves, but also built on this anti-immigrant xenophobic sort of model, which is also the one place where there's space between these.
Interesting developments worth watching this week, and we'll see where they go and we'll see where and how that relates in relation to the Vatican.
And, you know, the first, we've talked about the first American pope, but one who's very much at odds with the kind of, you know, the movement of MA and the xenophobia and so forth.
It'll be interesting to see where it goes.
Two thoughts here.
So Pope Leo has openly basically signaled the fact that he does not like what the Trump administration is doing.
He's called for deep reflection on how migrants are treated in the USA.
I mean, these are the things that we're talking about.
Which is just Catholic code, right?
When they call for deep reflection on something, it means we really don't like this.
Like it's their very understated way of saying we really oppose this.
We need to reflect deeply on this.
I mean, he gave these remarks about a week ago.
And, you know, here's a quote from Austin, Catholic historian.
I was struck by how direct his reference was because he's obviously talking about the ICE roundups.
It's very strong.
So the Pope, we know where the Pope stands.
We know there.
I also just want to provide everybody some more words from JD Vance.
JD Vance, in his first interview or one of his first interviews after becoming vice president, I think the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has frankly not been a good partner in common sense immigration enforcement that the American people voted for.
I hope, again, as a devout Catholic, that they'll do better.
He said, also, I think that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns?
Are they actually worried about their bottom line?
We're going to enforce immigration law.
We're going to protect the American people.
That's a civilizational populist willing to attack his own church as elites, selling out the people for $100 billion.
Like the civilizational populism theory here, it's kind of right on the nose, right?
Hey, Catholic bishops, you're elites.
You wanted $100 billion.
So you sold out the American people to allow invaders to come in and destroy our civilization.
JD Vance, civilizational populist, willing to attack even his own church as somebody who converted to Catholicism three or four weeks ago, I think, or maybe a little longer, but still.
Other thoughts on this, Dan, before we go?
Just it's come up before, right?
This issue has come up before when, you know, you get JD Vance and others like quoting Augustine or whatever.
And so you get, you know, some Catholic person who actually knows Augustine and, you know, is maybe an expert in that who will correct it.
And that anti-anti-elitist rhetoric becomes a very useful cudgel because you can turn anybody into the elitist, right?
Anybody.
Brad, you and I are for them.
We are elitists because we support immigration.
We're not wealthy unless you've been holding out on me.
But my understanding is you are not an incredibly wealthy person.
We're not wealthy.
We're not that, you know, love all our listeners, but we're not that influential.
We don't have the kind of sway that some other people do, right?
But by definition, you become an elitist.
And it's another one of those terms that can be filled in in different ways.
And it's an incredibly useful weapon to use, even when, in the case of somebody like Vance, you are attacking the institutional authority that you are also claiming as a quote-unquote devout Catholic.
Well, yeah.
And again, we made this point in the show again, but if you're wondering, this is why Vance, a guy who spent a bunch of time in Silicon Valley, making millions of dollars with one of the richest people in the world, Peter Thiel, after graduating from Yale Law School, can turn around and be like, these universities and these professors like Dan and Brad with PhDs are elites who hate you and hate the American people.
If you think about civilizational populism, you can think about it in terms of he's playing a game where he's, they are selling you out to allow invaders in and enrich themselves so that the real people get trounced on.
And our civilization, not just our nation, but our way of life, our people, they're being erased.
They're going away.
Can I just say one more thing that hasn't been brought up today and I think is missing from a lot of the discourse on the anti-Semitism, the Magazine Civil War, and it relates directly to this and Vance and the Catholic Church.
Nick Fuentes is a Catholic.
Like he talks all the time about Christendom.
And nobody seems to take that seriously because they're like, well, he says Catholic, but he's really a Nazi.
And this is almost the same thing, Dan, as like when Reverend Barber or Martin Luther King Jr. or people on the left are like, well, I'm actually a Christian.
They're like, yeah, that's cute, honey.
But you're really like a lefty progressive, right?
You're like, you're not like a Christian, though.
I mean, you're like a, you know, come on.
I mean, you're, you're actually just like a lefty politician.
It's the same thing with Fuentes.
Well, he's not really Catholic.
I mean, he's just a Nazi.
But there are so many versions of Catholic Nazism, xenophobia, et cetera.
Not by no means all, by no means, not even close to all.
I'm just saying there's going to come a day when we're going to talk about how Fuentes and Vance.
It's not that I'm calling Vance a Nazi.
I'm not.
I'm not saying he's a fan of Nick.
I'm not saying any of that.
But right now to me, the group that's trying to carve its place for the future are the under 40 anti-Israel, anti-immigrant, anti-billionaire group in the MAGA world that find both Vance and Fuentes very attractive at the same time.
And I think that's something to watch.
All right.
What is your reason for hope?
My reason for hope, I got to rewind a little bit here, but back in 2023, something we talked about in a town called Marion, Kansas, the police department and the sheriff's department raided their local newspaper.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Raided the town's newspaper, the home of the editor, you know, raised concern nationally about freedom of the press and freedom of speech and crackdowns on media and so forth.
My reason for hope is that this week, the town, the county reached a settlement there, and the Marion County Sheriff and Board of County Commissioners agreed to this.
They had to issue an apology.
And this is what it said.
The sheriff's office was required to issue this apology.
They said, the sheriff's office wishes to express its sincere regrets to Eric and Joan Meyer and Ruth and Ronald Herbel for its participation in the drafting and execution of the Marion Police Department search warrants on their homes and the Marion County record.
The next sentence is this, Brad.
This likely would not have happened if established law had been reviewed and applied prior to the execution of the warrants.
The county also had to pay $3 million, more than $3 million, to the paper and those affected.
The reason I take hope in that is this was a story that has always stuck with me.
It was a story that startled and scared a lot of people.
And it's nice to see that the court system moves slowly.
It's over two years ago that this happened, but to see some recompense for this taking place and some admission of the wrong, I think it's significant that they had to issue an apology and they had to say in the apology basically that we broke the law in the way that we drafted this.
I thought that was really significant and something hopeful that I really just stumbled across this week through happenstance.
My reason for hope is Katie Wilson is the new mayor of Seattle and Katie Wilson is a much less, and this is by her own admission.
She has a, I'll get to this in a minute, a much less kind of social media darling than Zoron Momdani.
Seattle is obviously not New York City, but Seattle is a major American city.
Katie Wilson is basically a carbon copy of Momdani policy-wise.
This is a progressive mayor in another major American center.
The entire Puget Sound in many ways went progressive, a place where you used to live, Dan.
This is good news.
And it drives at something that I know we need to talk about in the future and we will be talking about in the future is there are two Democratic parties at least, but you can at least say that there is an old guard, geriatric Democratic Party that is led by Chuck Schumer and is fronted by the senators that we saw and the shutdown, King, Kane, Cortez-Mastro, et cetera.
There's also a Democratic Party that is electing Zoran Lamdani and Katie Wilson and many others.
And they're not the same.
And I know that many of you listening are like, no shit, Brad.
I know I've known that forever.
And so have I.
It's not that I just learned this as Katie Wilson got elected, but it is something that I think is like becoming just you cannot look away from there being two movements in the country, right?
One is the Mamdani, Wilson, et cetera, kind of movement and momentum.
The other is like, why again did you win the shutdown?
Could you at least explain it so we can try to get on board?
Leave that there for now.
All right, y'all.
We'll be back next week and it'll be a little bit different on Friday.
We'll have something for you, but Dan and I will be at the American Academy of Religion conference.
We will be in Boston Friday night, 5.30.
If you'd like to come hang out, reach out in Discord, straightwhite AmericanJesus at gmail.com, and you can come find us and get a drink.
Thanks to all of you for your support.
I will be very honest with you.
We, like everybody, are hoping to finish the year strong.
If there's any way you can think about becoming a subscriber, it will really help us keep doing this work next year.
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We've got a big renovation coming for 2026.
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And we're looking forward to sharing that with you.
