Weekly Roundup: Cruelty as Policy, From Healthcare to Trans Panic
Dan Miller unpacks how Republican policy and ideology are converging around harm rather than governance. He begins with healthcare, breaking down how congressional action allowed Affordable Care Act subsidies to lapse and what that means for millions of Americans who rely on them. Rather than offering alternatives, the GOP continues to frame healthcare through an ideological lens that treats public support as illegitimate, even when the human cost is clear.
From there, Dan traces the familiar shift from policy failure to moral panic, focusing on the escalating attacks on trans youth. He examines the House passage of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Protect Children’s Innocence Act, the Trump administration’s push to ban gender affirming care for minors, and recent FDA actions targeting breast binders. Dan connects these moves to a broader right wing strategy that defines itself through opposition to marginalized groups, warning that restrictions justified in the name of protecting children and morality often pave the way for wider government overreach. He closes by looking at Pete Hegseth’s influence inside the military and the dangers of folding Christian nationalism into institutions meant to serve a pluralistic society.
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Hello and welcome to the Straight White American Jesus Weekly Roundup.
I am Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought of Landmark College.
Joining you solo today, Brad couldn't be here this time.
Nothing wrong, nothing serious, anything like that.
But you get just me this week and you might get just Brad next week.
We'll see.
As always, I want to say thank you for listening.
Thank all of you who subscribe and support us in so many ways.
We do a lot of different things on Straight White American Jesus.
We can't do it without you.
We're very aware of that.
And thank you as we come up on the end of the year, just very conscious and aware of what this means to us, what it means to you, what it means to others, and the ways that you make that possible.
So thank you.
I want to dive in.
It's the, you know, I'm recording this.
It's the week before Christmas.
And I have, for those who can see, I'm wearing my Krampus shirt.
And the reason I'm wearing my Krampus shirt is it's a very Krampus-y sort of mood.
I would like to send Krampus to Washington and Krampus can gather up certain key figures, political figures, and put them in Krampus' bag and haul them off to wherever Krampus hauls them and do whatever Krampus wants to do to them.
A lot of things we could talk about this week that we're not going to have time to get into.
We could talk about Trump's prime time address using a teleprompter, made it very evident why Trump doesn't like using a teleprompter.
Apparently, they told him to try to make it 20 minutes or less.
He was super fixated on that and kind of sped through the thing.
And at times you can't understand what he's saying.
And he's not good when he's off script and so on.
But, you know, trying to get to the affordability issue.
We're not going to get to talk about that.
We could talk about Susie Wiles, a Vanity Fair interview.
She's his advisor.
There's apparently, I guess, a series of interviews over months that was released in Vanity Fair.
Very unflattering.
Basically confirms every criticism of Trump that people have.
But weird because the Trump administration has come out in full-throated defense of her.
And like everybody in the cabinet is coming out and defending her.
And she says her comments were taken out of context, but doesn't say that it's not what she said.
It's weird that Trump seems to be defending her, that he's not defending himself and so on.
We could talk a lot about that, the content of it, what it might mean that Trump's not coming out after her.
I really think that Trump's grip is slipping on the GOP, on his key players.
And I think this is part of that.
But again, we just don't have time for that.
What I want to do today is focus on really three things.
It's really kind of two things.
The first is healthcare.
And then I want to talk about Pete Hegseth because, you know, what would the weekly roundup be without a segment on Pete Hegseth?
But I want to start with the Affordable Care Act debate and the debacle that it was for the GOP.
And we saw this play out in Congress this week basically the way that we thought it would.
And 15 years in, the GOP still has no answers on health care.
And I've said for a long time, the reason they have no answers on health care is because they don't see healthcare as a problem, really.
They don't believe that people deserve health care.
They have long had, I cannot tell you how many times I've had this conversation with people, this view that, well, if you have a job, you know, you'll have health care, as if they're not aware that that's not quite how it works or how expensive even that is.
They've insisted always on a private for-profit system for all Americans outside of those who fall below an income threshold and qualify for Medicaid.
And they've tried to mask that in this debate by suggesting payments that, quote, go to the people, not insurance companies.
Trump talked about this.
This is, of course, because he talked about it.
This is what caught on with the GOP on Capitol Hill, that we're going to send payments directly to the people.
We're not going to pay those fat cat insurance companies.
Well, guess what, GOP?
You're the ones who insist on having a system with fat cat insurance companies.
You are the ones that insist that the only way to do health care is to have a free market with private health care providers.
Those are insurance companies, which means it's a for-profit system.
And giving the money to people doesn't change any of that.
It's no different than the subsidies in the sense that they're going to turn around and have to pay it to the insurers, except that they're going to be on lower tiers and have less protection and all of that sort of stuff.
I don't want to get into the nuts and bolts of it here.
But the point is that for purely ideological reasons, the GOP has chosen to allow the ACA Affordable Care Act subsidies to lapse.
Now, some of this remains to be seen.
As you probably know, a petition was filled out and submitted to have a straight up or down vote in Congress about a three-year extension of the ACA subsidies.
That apparently will happen in January.
A lot of debate about whether or how that will influence the Senate.
It's too late, obviously, for people who have already had to do open enrollment and all of that, but some of that's still going on.
But the official position put forward, the proposal put forward by the leadership, the GOP leadership, was to let the ACA subsidies fall.
They did this knowing that it will adversely impact huge numbers of Americans.
They did this knowing that it will impact negatively their own constituents.
They did this despite their own recognition that affordability is a central issue working against them as we sort of rocket toward the midterms, less than a year out now.
And despite their biggest, you know, their own, excuse me, at-risk members begging them to talk about this, they voted it down.
Why?
Because they don't care about at-risk Americans.
They don't.
The GOP does not care about at-risk Americans.
At-risk Americans are a burden or an obstacle.
One way to think about this is think about everybody that the GOP opposes.
People of color, immigrants, LGBTQ plus people, everybody.
Who are they?
They are all at-risk populations.
So what does the GOP do?
Let's pretend they don't exist.
Just deny their reality.
Marginalize them further.
Just try to erase them out of existence.
They don't care about at-risk populations.
And this is what it showed.
Now, why am I bringing up the ACA?
Because it brings me into the thing that I really want to spend a lot of time on today.
And that was that instead of addressing healthcare affordability, they changed the subject, essentially.
And instead of just not helping regular people, they continued their attacks on at-risk youth instead.
They pivoted.
So not only did they decide we're not going to give subsidies that will help regular people get health insurance.
No, we're going to ramp up our attacks on one of the most at-risk communities in America.
A small community, numerically speaking, but but one of the most at risk, trans youth.
And they took multiple actions targeting trans youth this week, the same week that they wouldn't advance Affordable Care Act subsidies.
And so kind of under the radar, this was something that initially I think a lot of news sources didn't talk about.
It was very sort of muted underneath all the discussion of the ACA.
But Marjorie Taylor Greene sponsored a House bill.
It was the Protect Children's Innocence Act.
And this is just sort of in case we forget that she's a terrible person.
Marjorie Taylor Green, of course, is getting ready to leave Congress, has had this kind of falling out with Trump, has done what lots of Republicans do when they decide to leave Congress and suddenly they start talking about the need for civil discourse and how divisive everything is and so forth.
Even though while they're in Congress, they fully buy into all of that because they're Trump acolytes.
So unless, in case we forgot just who she is, she showed us this week with this legislation that she sponsored.
And the legislation would make it a Class C felony for medical providers to treat minors with gender-affirming care like surgeries and puberty blockers.
And it could imprison medical providers for up to 10 years.
So it'd make it a class C felony.
And it passed the House, folks.
Now, it's almost certainly not going to pass in the Senate.
It's not clear the Senate is ever even going to take this up.
Of course, the Senate needs 60 votes, which would mean Democrats to sign on.
It's fairly certain that no Democrats or certainly not enough to get to a 60-person threshold would support this legislation.
So it is, fingers crossed, almost certainly not going to become law, but it passed the House.
And it passed the House with a few Democratic votes.
So that's that.
That's bad.
That's scary.
That's terrifying, but it's something that hopefully won't come to pass.
But the next day, the next day, in a coordinated effort, so ACA subsidies, we're going to let them lapse.
We're going to have the vote.
The GOP is kind of embarrassed by this.
It can't get behind a policy.
It doesn't have a policy to advance and so forth.
So what do they do?
Oh, by the way, let's just target trans kids.
Marjorie Taylor Greene's legislation.
And then the next day, big press conference where various members of the Trump administration, led by Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr., announced a slate of proposed policies effectively banning or aimed at banning gender-affirming care for minors in the U.S.
This was a long press conference.
Lots of people got up and pontificated about different things and talked about different things.
Various agencies sort of under RFK's purview and so forth.
And what it essentially does is it operationalizes Trump's executive order from January 28, 2025.
So in January, you probably remember we talked about it here, Trump put forward an executive order essentially trying to ban gender-affirming care and saying that they were going to take away Medicare, Medicaid benefits from medical agencies that perform this care and so forth.
But that was just an executive order.
This operationalizes that.
Now, I want to step back here for a minute.
I want to pause for a moment.
I want to call out something that I said back then that still stands and that really is just, I don't know, sits with me now.
We talked about on the Roundup when this happened and the spate of executive orders that Trump was putting out in the early part of, you know, early part of the year, January, February.
And we talked about on the Roundup the preemptive acquiescence to Trump, how group after group, organization after organization, Trump would stand up.
He would proclaim some executive order, which is not law.
It doesn't have the force of law.
It often didn't have any enforcement mechanism to it, but he would stand up and say something and people would just fall in line.
And this included, I don't know, dozens, maybe hundreds of clinics and hospitals around the country that provided gender-affirming care, vital gender-affirming care to trans youth who discontinued that care.
They all cited Trump's threats.
They all cited Trump's executive order.
And I said at the time, the executive order didn't mean anything.
There was no enforcement mechanism yet.
Well, here it is.
It's still not in force yet.
There's a 60-day comment period before it goes into effect and a 30-day for other parts of it.
So we've still got another at least 60 days before these proposed revisions that I'm going to talk about go into effect.
But what does that mean?
It means that all of those medical agencies could have spent another year, more than a year, providing care to their patients, and they chose not to.
And shame on every one of them, on all of them that bowed to Trump and abandoned their patients and abandoned their Hippocratica oath and threw those patients, at-risk, vulnerable kids, under the bus because they were afraid of Trump and something that was going to be 12 to 14 months out in the future.
So I just want to call that out because here it is.
Here's what we, and we talked about that this would eventually be operationalized, but it hadn't been.
It took the administration almost a year to give concrete shape to this.
That's a year that kids all over this country have not had the medical care that they need.
And I don't know.
I don't think anybody knows.
But I fear the lives that were lost and just sort of permanently altered in really terrible ways because the rug was pulled out from under people who needed that medical care.
So this is not just about Trump.
It's not just about HHS.
It's about all those people who fell in line behind him, citing a loss of funds and so forth that was going to be 12 to 14 months out.
So that's sort of a side thing.
Let me come back to what we're talking about.
As we'd expect from this administration and from RFK's, you know, anything attached to RFK, the statement was a litany of ideological misinformation and lies mixed with appeals to pseudoscience.
And if you follow RFK on vaccine science, you know where this is going.
For example, gender-affirming care was described as involving, quote, sex-rejecting procedures.
Doctors providing care were accused of violating their sacred Hippocratic oath, exactly the opposite of what I just said that they were doing.
The American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics were simply accused of lying.
Anytime you have these discussions and you point out, as every advocate will, that every major medical and mental health agency in the United States all support gender-affirming care as best medical practice.
You are not met with counter evidence.
Or if you are, it's these studies and white papers that people put out that are highly criticized, put out on dubious premises, often not written by experts and so forth.
But generally, you're not going to get any response to that other than, well, they're lying.
And that's what they said.
They just said that they're lying.
Like, okay, but the American Academy of Pediatrics says that this is best practice.
Now they're lying.
They've been ideologically duped.
They're woke.
They're lying.
There it was in the press conference.
And RFK Jr. said, this is not medicine.
It is malpractice.
Okay.
So what does all this mean?
It means that it's ideology on the surface.
There's no basis for this.
They cite a desire to protect children.
It's not based on that.
It's not based on science.
It is simple assertions of the truth of fixed binary gender with no medical or biological evidence.
The reasoning is always circular.
And here's how that'll work, by the way, in case you have this discussion with someone.
They'll say, well, what about chromosomes?
Chromosomes determine gender.
You're like, well, yeah, but some people with like the chromosomes that you're saying regulate gender, people with those chromosomes actually experience gender as something different than what most people, those chromosome pairs match.
So like, wouldn't the obvious kind of objective scientific view be that, well, yeah, most people with certain sets of chromosomes identify with a particular gender, but a significant, small but significant minority don't.
So whatever gender is, it must not just be pro just be chromosomes, but then they'll insist that it is.
It's just circular reasoning.
They're presupposing what they would need to demonstrate.
Or they'll just cite the Bible.
In the Bible, it says God created man and woman.
Okay?
Great.
An ancient Near Eastern text produced a millennium and a half ago.
Like, that's our authority.
Okay.
Or they'll just cite common sense.
Well, everybody knows there's two genders.
Okay, do we?
There are lots of people who would say that they know something different.
They feel something different.
They experience something different.
That's the kind of reasoning we get.
And that's what was on display with a thin veneer, thin, paper-thin veneer of scientific authority in this long press conference.
And again, we're talking about the same department that links Tylenol to autism.
So that's no surprise.
So what is the plan?
I said it operationalizes Trump's executive order.
The plan is to starve providers of funding.
So hospitals, and I admit I'm a little unclear on the language here.
They keep saying hospitals, I'm not sure what counts as a hospital under this nomenclature.
I have reason to believe, I don't want to get too far into it, but reason to believe that there are other kinds of care providers that might not fall under this umbrella.
But the idea is that hospitals will lose Medicare or Medicaid funding if blockers and hormone therapies are provided to minors for this care.
Okay?
In other words, that if hospitals receive any Medicaid or Medicare funding, and most do, some, that's a huge portion of their funding, that funding will be cut off if they provide gender-affirming care for minors.
So you're starving them of funds.
I want to make it really clear, that doesn't make it illegal.
You're going to hear people say that the Trump administration is making gender-affirming care for minors illegal.
They're not.
They're just trying to starve providers of money so that they have to stop providing the care.
That's what they're trying to do.
For this purpose, so-called puberty blockers, they're still affirmed and allowed for other uses.
There are clinical uses.
It's always the same purpose, which is to stop or slow, delay the onset of puberty.
And there are different kinds of medical reasons why sometimes like children go through puberty way earlier than they should, and they put them on puberty blockers, so-called puberty blockers, to prevent that.
That's still fine.
Hormone replacement therapies are still affirmed as long as they're not for trans kids.
As long as it's to help somebody conform with their assigned gender.
Maybe they just have a hormonal imbalance.
Maybe they have, you know, their reproductive organs are not producing the hormones at the levels that they normally would and so forth.
So they have to go on to hormone replacement therapy, HRT.
But if it conforms with their assigned gender, it's fine.
So they're going to put warnings on things talking about how unsafe these practices are and hormone therapies are unsafe and so forth, but only for trans purposes.
The same therapies for non-trans kids, no concerns at all.
No extra concerns.
It's ideological on its surface.
Okay.
And Medicaid funding won't be allowed for such care.
So they'll stop provision of those services to anybody that receives that funding.
You can't use Medicaid funding for it.
In addition, Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights is also proposing a revision to its guidelines, which excludes gender dysphoria from the definition of disability.
Why?
So that prohibiting such care doesn't amount to an act of discrimination.
So if somebody says, well, you're discriminating against somebody with a so-called disability, gender dysphoria is listed in the DSM-5, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders.
It's listed as a disorder and therefore eligible for treatment.
It's saying we're going to sort of not pay attention to that so that you can't say you're discriminating against people with gender dysphoria.
Okay.
All of that makes it clear it's about ideology.
But if we really wanted the evidence, here it is.
Okay.
The FDA is also issuing letters to 12 manufacturers and retailers of breast binders, so-called breastbinders, marketed to minors to treat gender dysphoria.
Hmm.
Let's think about this for a minute.
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What is a breastbinder?
Maybe you're like, Dan, I don't know what a breastbinder is.
It's basically a compression garment.
It's like a compression sleeve for the torso.
It's a compression garment, something that you wear that is worn to compress chest tissue.
That's what a so-called breastbinder is.
I want to repeat that.
It's a garment.
It is something you wear.
It's not a food or a drug.
FDA, Food and Drug Administration, is sending a letter basically like threatening them with action if they market this to minors.
It's not clear to me why in the world it would be under the purview of the FDA.
This is an organization that won't regulate like dietary supplements and things that you ingest.
I made protein shakes in the morning and there was this study of like all the lead in like a lot of protein powders.
I had to go through the list and find one that was like certified lead-free and all of this other stuff because the FDA won't regulate that stuff.
But an item of clothing, the FDA is now going to regulate.
It's not a medical treatment.
You don't need a prescription to get a breastbinder.
You just go online and find one.
You can order one.
You can go into, if you go to the right kind of store that sells them, you could go in and buy one.
And it's a garment with multiple uses.
Like they're targeting it if it's aimed at transgender minors.
Number one, they don't say anything about trans adults who also might wear binders.
But there are other people who use this.
So it may be used to counter gender dysphoria, but it can also be used by male-identified people who want a more traditionally masculine appearing chest.
And here, I just think Bob from Fight Club.
Poor Bob.
Some unflattering things are said about him.
If you don't know the reference, you can go look it up.
Yeah, you might want to have a breastbinder.
It can give a more traditionally quote-unquote masculine appearance.
It can be used by people involved in cosplay for different reasons.
It can be used by bodybuilders sometimes for different reasons.
It can be used for post-surgical recovery.
And I don't mean gender-affirming surgery.
Other kinds of surgeries, it can help support incisions.
It can help ease breathing if people have issues sort of breathing because of incisions and so forth.
And it can also provide support during exercise.
So there are other reasons why people would wear this.
None of these other uses fall under censure.
And as a garment, it's not clear how it could ever be regulated.
But this is part of what was announced, these letters to these distributors saying you can't market these to trans youth.
What are they determining?
What is this?
Is the government telling about a garment who can wear it, when, and why?
Just think about that.
And we talk about this all the time on here.
If you get the traditionalist who talks, you know, still uses the language of small government.
I know that that's like the GOP of the past, but I still run into people like the GOP is about small government.
I don't want intrusive government in my life.
You don't get more intrusive than this.
It's a garment nobody sees.
It's like underwear.
We start regulating underwear.
You're going to start telling us whether we can wear boxers or briefs or what materials they have to be made out of or why.
Hey, if you're a woman who likes to wear men's jockey shorts, nope, sorry, can't do that.
And if you're marketing it to that, we're going to come after you.
We see how ridiculous this is.
What does the ridiculousness tell us?
If we decode this ridiculous claim, what does it tell us?
It tells us this is just about ideology.
This is not about anything else.
And this is also not about protecting children from so-called invasive or irreversible hormonal treatments or medical therapies.
None of this is even a medical treatment.
This is about appearance and appearance alone.
That's what this is about.
And that's what they're regulating.
And of course, you know, people can email me.
I welcome you to, to point out that the government has been regulating clothing for a long time.
You have a whole other debate about why women are required to wear more clothing in public than men and different things like this.
All fair points.
And I'm with you.
I'm here for it.
And what it shows in every case is that there's an ideology about gender at play here.
This is not about science.
This is not about protecting children.
This is not about medicine.
That's not the aim.
They also recommended counseling services instead of gender affirming care.
You hear this a lot.
Those who want to try to make this sound medical-you will say, well, they just need counseling.
They just need mental health support.
Well, first of all, they also acknowledge that there's not enough mental health support to do this, nor do they propose creating any more.
But here's the other thing, and this is the line you'll hear.
You'll hear the people say, well, there's not enough clinical evidence that things like hormone replacement therapy and puberty blockers actually help people with gender dysphoria.
There is.
There's lots of studies that indicate that.
But they'll tell you that there aren't.
But you know what there isn't?
There's no clinical evidence that like talk therapy fixes gender dysphoria.
None.
So the same people who will tell you we're passing these rules because we want to protect kids from unproven therapies, the only alternative they have is a therapy that has been demonstrated over and over to not work.
That's their response.
They don't care about at-risk people.
In fact, they target at-risk people.
That is what this administration does.
And they're doing it again.
Again, it's all medical and scientific nonsense.
Dr. Susan Kennedy, American Academy of Pediatrics president, said this.
She said the health and services policies and proposals misconstrue the current medical consensus and fail to reflect the realities of pediatric care and the needs of children and families.
Another organization that provides gender-affirming care to minors released a statement that I came across.
I'm not going to say which organization, just in case there's blowback to them.
But this is what they had to say.
They said by proposing these new rules, the Trump administration continues its dangerous and discriminatory pattern of attacking transgender, gender-diverse, and intersex people.
While millions teeter on the brink of losing their health care, instead of focusing on policies which should help American families, this administration has chosen to expend energy and resources on launching another cruel assault on vulnerable communities in an attempt to score political points at the expense of the most marginalized among us.
Through anti-science rantings, mass disinformation, and the weaponization of the federal government, politicians are threatening the fundamental right of trans and gender diverse people to have happy, healthy futures and inserting themselves into the private decision-making that should be left to patients, their families, and their healthcare providers.
End quote.
Talking about trans minors?
This is the same party that says they're into like, you know, parental freedom all the time, parents' rights, but not in this case.
Not in this case.
So why am I talking about all this so much?
It bothers me.
We've been waiting for it.
We've seen it on the horizon.
Here it was.
I've talked about the consequences of these policies on trans youth and families before.
We could talk about the kind of dystopian Orwellian world where children are actively targeted, all in the name of fulfilling the Hippocratic oath to do no harm.
We've talked about those things.
I don't want to repeat all those.
You can go back and listen to those episodes.
But I want to focus on another issue here.
And it was summed up well by Sarah McBride.
And if you don't remember who Sarah McBride is, excuse me.
She's the first out transgender member of Congress.
Ahead of the vote on Marjorie Taylor Greene's bill, she said that Republicans are, quote, obsessed with trans people.
She went on to say, I actually think they think more about trans people than trans people think about trans people.
And I think she's on to something, folks.
I do.
I think she's onto something.
Because those on the right are absolutely fixated on what they oppose.
Absolutely fixated.
I said this in my, it's in the code series, We've Got to Talk About the Sex Stuff.
I did a series on high control religion and sexuality.
And in there, what I was talking about is that, you know, within that high control religion, they will accuse quote unquote secular culture of being hyper-fixated on sex.
But I made the point that like, you won't hear anybody talk about sex as much as those on the right.
Right?
We talk about like pornography or something.
You will not hear anybody like fixate on pornography the way that opponents of it fixate on it.
Out in the real world, like kind of nobody cares and nobody's that, nobody's that into it.
But the people on the right talk about it all the time.
They'll decry those who are woke.
But you want to hear about DEI?
Go listen to the right.
It's not a conversation that happens in a room full of quote-unquote woke people.
I spend a lot of my time among those people that Heg Seth and others would decry as woke or as cultural Marxists or whatever.
We don't talk about this stuff all the time until the right does.
They'll say the left focuses too much on race, but let me tell you who absolutely can't be colorblind.
It's the people on the right.
They can't not see race all the time and get upset about it.
It's on the right that we constantly hear about the things that supposedly the left is obsessed about.
It's an act of projection.
They will tell you all the, oh, you on the left, you're always talking about woke topics or sex or queer stuff or whatever.
And you're like, we're not.
Until you bring it up, until you hammer on it all the time, they're absolutely fixated about it.
And I think that there are multiple reasons for this.
I think they protest too much.
A little Shakespearean here.
I do think that there's a dimension where their frantic attacks and denials speak to a lack of assurance of their own views.
I think there is a strong sense in which those conservatives who are always telling us about the evils of these things and the moral certitude that they have, I think they are trying to convince themselves as much as they are trying to convince any of us.
I think that's a real dimension to this.
I also think, and this is the bigger piece of this for me, their identity is only oppositional.
Their political and cultural and religious identity, it is only defined by opposition to others.
They have no positive, constructive content.
You ask these good Christian people, what does it mean to you to be a Christian?
They will give you a litany of things that they oppose, but most of them can't tell you what it is that it's supposed to be positively in their life.
It's just opposing things that they think are terrible.
It's a list of grievances.
It's nursing a sense of being oppressed and marginalized themselves.
That's all it is.
And the only way that you can maintain that kind of identity, the only way you can maintain an identity that is built on, that only exists through opposition to others, is by having to generate more and more opposition.
If the only way you can have an identity is to have enemies, you have to create enemies.
And this is why their efforts to consolidate power will never be enough.
They will never be fulfilled.
Because no matter what they achieve, no matter what goals they reach, they will have to generate new enemies.
It leads to an endlessly hyper-vigilant manufacturing of enemies, looking for enemies everywhere and creating them if you can't find them.
Because there's no identity without it.
And there is no political energy on the right other than that.
It has nothing.
There is no other right effectively in this country at present.
And I think that that matters for this reason.
Even if you think things like this issue aren't relevant to you, they are.
Even if you're sitting there and you listen and you're like, well, you know, I don't like the Trump administration, but I don't think I know any trans people or my kids aren't trans or I live in a state where trans health care is protected or whatever.
Okay, maybe I don't need to get into it.
I'm safe.
You're safe for now, but you won't be.
I have had people say to me more than once over the last several years, and especially in the second Trump administration, politics always felt distant.
I never thought I was somebody who would be targeted by those in political power until now.
And there are plenty of Americans who have experienced that targeting, plenty of communities have experienced that targeting for centuries and decades.
I understand that.
I'm not trivializing that.
But that's the point.
Those people who called out for generations pointing to that targeting, often it fell on deaf ears of those who didn't experience that, who thought that they were safe, who thought that they were secure, who now find that they're not.
I don't care who you are.
They'll come for you eventually.
If you don't fit the straight white American model of this country, the straight white Christian model of this country, they will eventually come for you.
And that's what we see with the attacks on trans identity.
We also, there's all the political calculations, as I say.
There's the change in, change in topic, try to pivot to something else.
This is red meat to their base.
They're hoping that in the midterms that this will drive their base to come out.
The base of the party that has the White House in midterm elections tends to have depressed turnout.
They're trying to counter that.
All of that's real.
But in the meantime, what we see with healthcare and the trans attacks is they have no qualms, none, none about sacrificing Americans to their own ideology.
I want to shift topics now, set that aside for a minute, and I promised we would get to Heg Seth.
So here we are.
As I say, no week could be complete without having to talk about Pete Hegseth.
I feel like he's there all the time.
And there was a new article this week in USA Today about Hegseth's, excuse me, Pentagon prayer services.
And we've talked about this before, okay?
We've talked about these services before, but I want to revisit this, and I want to tie it into another development this week related to Hegseth.
This focus, the article I'm talking about, focused on the service from December 17th.
So again, it's the week before Christmas is like the holiday service.
And you want to talk about like, I don't know, a scary vision of the holidays.
It's this service.
Among others, a Christian message, excuse me, a Christmas message was given with a sermon by Franklin Graham, who we know is his own special kind of asshole.
We know this about Franklin Graham.
And here was just a piece, just a snippet from his Christmas message.
He says, we know that God loves, but did you know that God also hates?
That God is also a God of war?
We talked in our bonus episode about this kind of Christian nationalist manifesto that you can find online.
And Franklin Graham's reading astray from it.
That's Franklin Graham's vision of Christian America.
He's a God of war.
And Jennifer Hegseth, who's Pete Hegseth's wife, described Graham as one of these special forces of Jesus.
So you had this whole thing about the militarization of Christianity, but also, I think, the Christianization of the military.
And why does it matter?
We've talked about this, again, some of these elements before.
These services, they're monthly, they're held during work hours.
They're held at the Pentagon.
I just want you to think about your own workplace.
It's not as somebody who, I don't know, they're like, I do a Bible study on Tuesday nights.
If anybody ever wants to come to my house, we're going to have some cookies and some coffee, and we'll just talk about Bible verses, you know, or whatever, and you're welcome to go or not.
No, this is held in the workplace.
It's held during work hours.
So people who attend this basically get like an extra time off.
They don't have to work during this.
It is led by the Secretary of Defense.
Not just some guy down the hall, not even just your supervisor, which would be kind of its own weird thing if your supervisor is like, hey, over in the conference room on Tuesdays, we're going to have a prayer meeting.
You ought to check it out.
No, not just your supervisor, but like your boss's boss's boss, like the company CEO is in the conference room having a prayer service and you're invited to go.
Okay?
And it is attended by people in uniform.
When cameras capture this, you have lots of people in military uniforms.
So people representing, officially representing in their official professional capacity, representing the United States of America, openly advocating and participating in a distinctly Christian practice.
Okay.
I affirm every American's right as a private citizen to believe or practice whatever the hell it is they want to believe or practice or nothing at all or whatever.
But when you represent the federal government, your job is not to try to represent Christianity.
Your job should be something else.
That's what they're doing.
And there have long been concerns of coercion and violations of religious freedom.
We talked about this before, too.
Like, what do you do when everybody's like, hey, the CEO is like a meeting in the conference room?
We ought to check it out.
Do you not check it out?
When your supervisor notes that, I don't know, you're the only person in the department who didn't go.
Do you not go?
When you don't get that promotion or you get that negative annual review, or maybe an annual review that's just not glowing.
Is it because you didn't go?
You wonder.
You don't know.
Employees and service members have reported being voluntold to attend.
And you don't have to be in the military to know what this is, the kind of thing where something is supposedly voluntary, but you better be there.
So there was this article about this.
Why did that matter to me?
Why did it stand out to me?
It stood out to me because Hegseth's views on the military are well known.
He is well known as putting forward a vision of the American military as a kind of crusader army.
It's a Christian army.
It's the army of the Lord.
And this kicked into a new gear this week because the same week that this was back in the news, the Hegseth Christian services at the Pentagon, the notion of people being coerced and told that they need to attend, Hegseth also announced this week that he's overhauling the Millennium Chat, excuse me, the Military Chaplain Corps, specifically targeting what he calls New Age concepts.
I first read that and I'm like, hey, Hegseth, the 90s and oughts called and they want their like, you know, they want their straw man back.
New Age concepts.
I remember a time when New Age was the bogeyman that would come up all the time in these discussions.
But he made some statements.
He released a video, which was later released on social media.
And here are some of the things he said.
He said, in an atmosphere of political correctness and secular humanism, chaplains have been minimized, viewed by many as therapists instead of ministers.
Faith and virtue were traded for self-help and self-care.
If you need proof, he says, just look at the current Army Spiritual Fitness Guide.
In well over 100 pages, it mentions God one time.
That's it.
It mentions feelings 11 times.
It even mentions playfulness, whatever that is, nine times.
There's zero mention of virtue.
The guide relies on New Age notions.
He later added that he had, quote, a directive right here that I will sign today to eliminate the use of Army Spiritual Fitness Guide effective immediately.
And he went on to say these types of training materials have no place in the War Department.
Our chaplains are chaplains, not emotional support officers, and we're going to treat them as such.
He said, religious soldiers are alienated by secular humanism.
And he also said, he said a lot, he said that he plans to, quote, simplify the faith and belief coding system, which has ballooned to over 200 overly complex faith and belief codes.
Reach for comment.
People reached out to the Pentagon and asked if there was more to add to this, what Hegseth was actually doing, if he had actually suspended the use of this guide and so forth.
And a Pentagon spokesperson said that there was nothing to add beyond the video.
Why does it matter?
There are a few things that stand out here.
One is, and this won't be a surprise, the Christian assumptions here.
Hegseth and everybody on the right, when they talk about religion and religious freedom, they mean Christianity.
And they don't just mean Christianity.
We talk about this all the time.
They mean a certain kind of Christianity, radical traditional Catholicism, increasingly a certain kind of Reformed Protestantism, a certain kind of like ultra-conservative, very narrow, very sectarian Christianity.
So, for example, when he says that he doesn't like the Army Spiritual Fitness Guide, in well over 100 pages it mentions God one time, that's because, Hegseth, some people are religious or spiritual and they don't talk about God.
Sorry, man.
There can be whole religions that don't talk about God.
Doesn't need to talk about God.
And if you're a Christian and you believe in God and you're reading the Army Spiritual Fitness God guide, excuse me, you'll find God there.
You can see where it is.
You can plug in your God.
But that's not enough for him.
When he talks about this, I think it's really telling when he says that he has to simplify the faith and belief coding system.
So first of all, faith and belief, those are also like distinctly Christian terms.
People talk about this all the time.
They talk about religious faiths.
Faith's a very Christian concept.
Belief, not all religion is about belief.
There are lots of elements of religion that are not about belief.
There can be about a lot of other things.
Okay.
So already calling it the faith and belief coding system.
It's already prioritizing Christianity.
But notice that he says he doesn't like that it's ballooned over 200 codes, but he says they're overly complex.
Folks, there's some coded language.
And it's what I do on its in the code.
We decode stuff.
So here we are.
You get me solo.
I'm going to decode it.
Overly complex.
Why?
Because it doesn't make sense within his simplistic Christian framework.
Within his simplistic framework where the world is full of Christians and non-Christians and Christians are good and everybody else is evil and everything is a battle between God and everything else.
All the stuff about finding enemies, that's what it is.
And he wants a crusader army, a crusader military.
So we're doing away with overly complex systems.
What he means is we're doing away with pluralism.
Because pluralism is complex.
To have a society that seeks to be inclusive, it's going to require some complexity.
To have an organization like the military that could be inclusive of people of all faiths and none, spiritualities and none, it's going to be complex.
And who cares?
Well, it turns out Pete Hegseth, the Christian nationalists, the Christian supremacists, they care.
And we have one at the helm of the Defense Department.
And so with his attacks on wokeness, they tie right into this.
When he attacks DEI initiatives and he attacks women in the military and he attacks allowances for different kinds of hairstyles or haircuts or beards, when he attacks people who have like different fitness standards for different positions in the military, whatever it is, all of that stuff attacking wokeness, it's all fundamentally Christian for him.
Why?
Because his is a white Christian Lord's army where everybody looks the same.
They're the same gender.
They're on a gender binary.
They worship the same God.
America is a Christian nation.
America needs a Christian army.
That is Hegseth's vision of the military.
And so it comes through this week in something that just sounds, you know, pretty wonky.
It's going to revamp the chaplain corps.
This is what I think is at the core of it.
So our weekly check-in on Pete Hegseth, Army of God.
I guess what'd it be?
Pete, Army of God, Hegseth.
Pete, divine warrior, Hegseth.
Maybe we could call him that.
All right.
Need to wind this down.
Let me get to my reason for hope.
I realize lots of people who listen to this don't celebrate Christmas, don't observe Christmas, and maybe aren't even that aware of it.
It, that's fine.
But there have been a lot of news stories that have caught my attention of so-called politicized manger scenes.
So, in other words, if you are familiar with American culture at all, you know, you see the so-called nativity or manger scenes with Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus in the manger.
And this is the time of year, of course, where you'll see this in front of lots of churches.
And there have been a number of stories nationally all over the country about churches that have been deemed newsworthy and in some cases have gotten into hot water for making political statements with their manger scenes.
So, for example, there was one where there were ICE agents approaching the holy family.
It's kind of chilling.
There are these like dark figures with ice clothing, like sort of looming behind Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus.
There was a video of one of these being vandalized, this guy just walking through and kicking down the ICE agents and being upset about it.
There's another one where the baby in the manger is missing and there's an ICE was here sign.
So lots of these kinds of things is essentially acts of protest, statements of protest against the Trump administration, their anti-immigration policies, the role of ICE.
And I have taken hope not just with these displays and the publicity of them, not just with the articulation of a different kind of Christian vision, a different vision of what could be, I guess, a Christian America, but also the way that you've had some very, I think, brave ministers and congregations who have faced pushback.
They face pushback from their spiritual superiors.
In some cases, these are Catholic churches and their archdiocese have put pressure on them to, you know, basically get rid of the quote-unquote politicized scenes, and they've pushed back on that.
And I think it's important because it's a reminder of the story that this season is, in my view, supposed to remind Christians of.
And what is that?
It's a story that starts with people who are displaced because of a policy that comes from imperial occupiers.
Mary Joseph, baby Jesus, why are they in a manger in the first place?
Because they have to be uprooted and she's about to give birth and whatever, but they have to go and take a census.
Why?
Because they live in a region that is under Roman occupation and that's what the occupying overlords require of them.
So they are displaced.
And then you have the story of King Herod coming and trying to find the baby Jesus and kill him.
So what do Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus do?
It says they flee to Egypt.
They're refugees, folks.
So what these pastors and others have said is we're not politicizing anything.
This is the message.
And I take hope in that because sorry, all of you Christians who somehow, if you're Franklin Graham, you want to tell stories from like 1 and 2 Samuel and your God who's a God of war.
Cool.
He's also a God of the displaced and he's a God of the migrants and he's a God of the refugees.
Not just that, but the Christian story says that God was one of the refugees, that that baby was the incarnation of God who chose to identify not just with any humans, but with the marginalized and the displaced and the refugees and those who are under threat.
I find hope in that message.
I find hope in that counter vision to the Pete Hegseth vision of Christian America, to the RFK vision of Christian America, to the Marjorie Taylor Greene vision of Christian America, to the Donald Trump vision of Christian America.
Thank you for listening.
Thank you for giving the time.
I always welcome your feedback.
You can reach us on the website.
Got a new revamped website.
Check it out.
Straight White American Jesus.
Take a look.
You can search all the episodes.
Got playlists put together.
A lot of work went into that.
Hats off, primarily to Brad, who's the driving force for that.
Really excited about that.
As we say, we've got some new initiatives and things we're trying to do in the upcoming year.
So we're excited about those.
Keep your eyes out for those.
As always, we can't do this without you and your support.
So thank you.
Again, as we kind of come into the end of the year, we sort of take stock of this.
And thank you so much for the support.
Whether you're a subscriber, whether you're somebody who gives periodically or just does what you can, whether you are somebody who just gives us feedback on episodes and ideas and sends us things that we'd overlooked, we thank you so much and we can't do it without you.