Weekly Roundup: Epstein, ICE & the Super Bowl Culture War: What MAGA Prioritizes
Pam Bondi’s Congressional evasion exposed the GOP’s hollow "pro-life" stance—deflecting Epstein ties with a $60 "Trump Bible" while ignoring survivors’ trauma, mirroring QAnon’s weaponized narratives. Meanwhile, Minnesota clergy resisted ICE crackdowns as Christian nationalism’s antithesis, contrasting Mike Johnson’s selective Romans 13 justifications with progressive faith leaders prioritizing Jesus’ ethics over state violence. Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance sparked right-wing backlash, with Megan Kelly and TPUSA framing it as a "middle finger" to white culture, exposing how "white identity" masks replacement theory, while Hunter Hess’s defiance and Twin Cities clergy’s resistance redefine American cultural pride—fascism’s rise demands collective pushback. [Automatically generated summary]
axis mundi welcome to straight white american jesus I'm Brad O'Nishi, author of American Caesar, How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Turning America Into a Monarchy, founder of Axis Mundy Media here today with my co-host.
Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Lamar College.
Glad to be with you, Brad.
Glad to be with you too, Dan.
We're reaching, it's the day before Valentine's Day, and there's a lot to talk about.
So, going to get into Pam Bondi's fiery appearance before Congressional Committee and her back and forth with various congressional members and what that reveals about the administration's approach to the Epstein files to protecting vulnerable people and role, not only as Attorney General, but as one of the key players in the anti-Christian bias task force.
We'll then head back to the Twin Cities where clergy and faith leaders are really leading the charge and putting their faith and bodies in the streets between their neighbors and ICE.
Finally, we'll go to the fallout from Bad Bunny's epic performance at the Super Bowl.
Check in with White Santa, aka Megan Kelly, and some of the others that had a hard time, along with a white nationalist who was nominated to a top post at the State Department and his really revealing and sad explanation as to why we need to defend what he calls white culture.
Lots to talk about.
Let's go.
All right, Dan, I always tell my students February is one of the hardest months because, you know, most months of the year, it's like summer or spring or there's a holiday.
There's a Thanksgiving, a Halloween.
There's a there's a Hanukkah.
There's a Christmas.
January, you're still hungover from all that and you get all these like Monday holidays off.
We get MLK Day off.
And February is that month.
It's the worst weather of the year.
And the only major holiday is Valentine's, which for some people is fun.
And for most people, makes them really sad or anxious or lonely or nervous or something.
February 13th Roundup00:14:55
And so to me, February 13th is a pretty apt day to do this weekly roundup.
On Friday the 13th.
On Friday the 13th.
There it is.
There it is.
That's why you get paid this year.
The good news, Brad, and I don't know if you've thought about this yet, is that there's also going to be a Friday the 13th in March because February is the month that keeps on giving.
So it is.
There it is.
There you go.
See?
This is why people turn to Dan Miller for expert commentary.
Okay.
Pam Bondi, Attorney General, appeared before Congressional Committee this week and the news clips went everywhere.
She did appear, I will say, unhinged, volatile.
She did a lot of yelling and a lot of trying to basically accuse whatever congressperson was asking her questions of wrongdoing or failure.
She called people, she called Jerry Nadler a loser.
She, you know, this was kind of her tactic.
But I want to play for you to start a campaign ad that Pam Bondi had when she was running for office in Florida, where she promises to do nothing else but protect children from trafficking.
Here's that ad.
Florida ranks third nationally in calls for help for human trafficking, where young women and children are enslaved and abused.
I knew we needed all hands on deck.
Businesses and hospitals to spot it, our great law enforcement to stop it, and tougher penalties to punish it.
We're taking on Medicaid fraud, pill mills, gangs, and more, and all fight to put human trafficking monsters where they belong behind bars.
Pam Bondi, our Attorney General.
If you fast forward to this week, some of the Epstein survivors were in the room, and they stood up, and Pam Bondi was asked to turn and acknowledge them.
Others acknowledged them, and there was a sense there of there being a real heaviness to the moment because these were people who had been trafficked and hurt and groomed and abused by Jeffrey Epstein.
Pam Bondi refused to look back.
She did not acknowledge them and she would not look at them, which seemed to be telling.
Here is a clip from one of the exchanges that Bondi had in the committee regarding Howard Luttnick and his involvement with Epstein before he was appointed to Trump's administration.
Was the president aware of Secretary Luttnick's ties to Epstein when he chose him to lead the Department of Commerce?
Was he aware?
Chris Malin was a border patrol.
Okay, so I'm going to conclude that the president did know about his ties because he was the next door neighbor.
Shame on you.
Oh, for goodness sakes.
This is pathetic.
This is pathetic, Mr. Duty won't be in order.
I am not asking trick asking trick questions here.
The American people have a right to know the answers to this.
These are senior officials and the Trump administration.
So Bondi there is asked if the president knew about Lutnick's association with Epstein before he was appointed to his cabinet position.
And she says, shame on you.
I can't believe you would ask me this.
In other moments, when asked questions such as this, she pointed to the fact that the Dow was over 50,000.
And why in the heck are we talking about Epstein and all of this still when the economy is so good?
You can start to see the hypocrisy here in clear view when all of this comes up.
I want to play one more clip, and I think this to me will really highlight what we talk about on this show, which is the religious elements of all of these political phenomena.
And that is an exchange between Bondi and Jared Moskowitz about Trump and his appearance in the Epstein files.
Here it is.
Kash Patel under O said Trump's name appears less than 100 times in the files.
We now know that's not true.
Trump's name appears more times in the Epstein files than God's name appears in the book about God.
Okay, by the way, this is the Trump Bible.
Move over, King James.
Trump's name also appears more times in the Epstein file than Harry Potter's name appears in the seven books about Harry Potter.
Lutnick says that in 2008, he went to Epstein's home, says he had a massage table in the living room.
That Epstein said he got one every day, that it was the right type of massage.
He and his wife decide to leave and say they'll never be in a room with him again.
Howard then says, I'm sure the Epstein stuff is all on video.
He was the greatest blackmailer of all time.
Well, how would Howard know that?
But now the files are public.
And in 2012, we find out that he and his family are on Epstein Island after, after, after Epstein pled guilty to state charges.
I'm from Florida.
I take my family to Disney World, not to Epstein Island.
There are documents in the files that dispute the president's claim that he kicked Epstein out of his club.
Allegedly, the president said Epstein, that he asked Epstein to leave.
Supported now that that's disputed, though, statements from the manager of the club.
Now, Madam Attorney General, I have like 25 seconds left.
So because I'm curious, and I just, I'd like to see you flip to the Jared Moskowitz section of the binder.
I'm interested to see what staff provided on the OPPO on me.
And because we're in the Olympics, I'm going to give it a grade.
I just want to see how good it is.
So give me your best one.
So first of all, nothing is funny about mocking the Bible and holding up a Trump Bible.
That's what you did.
He made a joke, and I find it funny.
That's all I have to say.
I want it from the Burnberg.
Shame.
I want it from the Bernberg, which is the best one.
What you got?
Moskowitz says, and this is a pretty good line.
I have to admit, Dan, Trump appears more in the Epstein files than God does in the book about God.
And he holds up the Bible.
And it's a Trump Bible.
And Bondi does this thing.
And if you watch the video, she does look rattle.
I will admit in the video, she looks rattled.
She does not look like she's on offense.
She looks like a person who's had a long day, is tired.
is not on her game and is sort of like at the end of her rope.
But one of her like argumentative, rhetorical things that she grafts onto to respond to Moskowitz is, I don't think there's anything funny about making fun of the Bible.
Shame on you.
And there's just something really telling here.
So let me give me 30 more seconds.
I'll throw it to you and see what you think about the Pam Bondi experience this week.
Pam Bondi ran in Florida on protecting children.
The people who are now adults who were trafficked as children were standing behind her and she wouldn't acknowledge them.
She was asked about cabinet members who are associated with the man who trafficked children and she won't answer.
And then Moskowitz holds up this Bible and it is the Trump Bible.
And some of you know what that is and some of you don't.
Back before the election, Trump sold Bibles with his signature and the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence in them.
And he sold them for $40.
And I've talked about this on the show.
I went on TV and talked about it.
To me, it was so disgusting and blasphemous, but it was also emblematic of Trump.
Unlike the Gideons, we're not going to give you the Bible for free.
I mean, you could just go around.
I mean, we always hear about how rich Trump is.
If the Bible is so important, go hand out the Trump Bible on the corner.
Like, send out MAGA Nation on the corner of every street in America handing out the Bible.
That's not what happened.
They were $40.
They were $60.
They were whatever.
Okay.
And a man who's willing to sell you a Bible with his name on it.
And Moskowitz is holding it up.
And Bondi's like, I don't think it's funny to make fun of the Bible.
And I don't think Moskowitz is making fun of the Bible.
I think Moskowitz is making two points.
I think he's saying your president has already denigrated the Holy Scripture by turning it into a commodity he could sell alongside his stakes and his shoes and everything else.
And you, the head of the anti-Christian bias task force, the person who's supposed to stand up for Christian values, Christian morals, Christian ideas in the administration, you won't even look at the women who suffered abuse at the hands of the most notorious sex trafficker in modern memory.
And finally, finally, Donald Trump appears in the files of that sex trafficker more times than the name God does in the Bible.
That is a really, really, really illustrating way to look at it.
I got more to say.
What do you think?
Trying to think of like where to even pick it up.
There's so many elements.
I mean, one, I think the overarching thing, you talk about Bondi looking tired, unhinged, thrown off, what have you.
This was like one of like many examples you could find of people trying to do what Trump does and it just doesn't work as well when other people do it.
Like Trump calls everybody losers and all that kind of stuff.
And other people try it and it doesn't work and Bondi's that.
But I think I think we're also seeing Bondi who's getting pressure from all sides, like real pressure from congressional oversight, including in some cases, and yes, in my, you know, sort of minimal ways, but even Republicans who are starting to ask questions about various things, whether it's Epstein, whether it's the occasional Republican defector on, you know, ICE tactics and what have you.
But I think she's also on Trump's hot seat because everything in Minnesota is blowing up and blowing back on the administration.
And I think that we know that Trump is never going to say that he made a mistake or that he ordered things or whatever.
So I think there's that.
I think that, and that I think is just something that bears watching is how much pressure is she under from all sides.
This isn't limited to Trump, but whenever the president has to come out and tell you that he supports a cabinet member, it's usually a sign that the cabinet member is in trouble.
And so Trump has had to say this, you know, this stuff about Bondi.
So I think that's just worth watching generally and overall.
We've seen her look more gathered, I guess, is a way to say it, you know, in these hearings, more sort of prepared, more put together, more like ready for these responses.
And so I think that all that was notable.
I think the selling Bibles thing is so emblematic to me of all the, you know, the Christian Americans who support Trump, who like, you know, there's that, it's an old translation, but the translation of a passage that says you can't serve both God and mammon, God and money.
And of course, you know, that's what Trump does.
But like the number of Christians who have literally like bought into this version of faith, this like literally buying into it.
I mean, think about like a Trump-branded Bible, like just branding the Bible and getting a bunch of free documents.
You can pay a bunch of money for free stuff.
Like you, you know, if you want to find the Bible, you can read the whole thing online.
You know, you don't need to pay for it.
You could go, you can get copies that you don't have to pay for.
The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are not expensive documents, but as you say, Trump's going to profit on it.
And I just find something so emblematic of him cashing in on Christian faith when I think, you know, it's just this metaphor for MAGA world that has bought into this vision of Christianity as all of these things.
And then so to bring that in, as you say, the Christian values and the trafficking and whatever, Republicans have loved for a long time and conservatives to talk about protecting kids when it serves their interests, but not when it doesn't.
So like, let's think about QAnon, the QAnon controversy, you know, or conspiracy.
What is it?
It was about, you know, trafficking at the heart of it and so forth.
But as long as Democrats and the deep state were the bad guys, it was really popular.
And now it's kind of fading.
Pizzagate was about conspiracies about Democrats and child trafficking.
The Epstein files, when Trump was not in office, were a nice rallying cry that everybody could get behind about protecting the kids and so forth.
And now that Trump is there, not only is Pam Bondi, you know, doing everything she can to like minimize the effect of this requirement to release the Epstein files and so forth, as you say, she won't look them in the eye, the people that she said she was going to defend because you say she ran on this.
And we see this just sort of throughout.
And you could go down the list of policy positions.
You could see it essentially eliminating people's insurance.
Was that going to hurt?
That's going to hurt kids.
Taking away different kinds of social safety net programs.
Who's that going to hurt?
It's going to hurt kids.
Targeting transgender minors.
Who's that going to hurt?
It's aimed at kids explicitly.
So I think that that's another piece of this is to recognize that the GOP does not care about kids.
They will call for protecting children, again, when it serves their interests, when it'll get Pam Bondi in office or when they're not in power and they can try to say that the Democrats are doing bad things.
But now that they have the mechanisms of power, as you say, she won't even turn around and look at the people who are right there.
She won't even pay lip service to serving the interests of children and protecting them.
And I think, so I think there's a lot of layers of stuff going on with Pam Bondi in these hearings.
I think one of the things I was trying to say last week, and I didn't really succeed in the way I wanted to, was that you and I grew up in the heyday of the anti-abortion movement that really was spearheaded by evangelical Christians, Catholic Christians, and so on.
That, of course, continues today.
And I think that one of the things we've wrestled with on this show, and you and I have wrestled with for 20 years now, is all of the rhetoric about saving lives, the sanctity of life, protecting children, protecting the unborn, the most vulnerable.
We've tried to bring for to the fore on this show for anyone who would listen that the rhetoric of protecting the unborn and the most vulnerable doesn't match up with how you treat actual living human beings.
As soon as that child is in the world and it takes its first breath and it is given over to original sin and its fallen nature, the care seems to stop, whether that is in social safety net programs, whether that's in pre-K, whether that's in ways to help mothers and families, whether economically, whether in terms of education programs, whether that's in terms of health care.
We have tried to reckon with that.
That when you say pro-life, you have a very narrow idea.
The Epstein files and Pam Bondi not being able to look at women who have suffered abuse at the hands of Epstein, to me is like, is that whole conversation an effort of trying to show that the quote-unquote pro-life movement doesn't really care about humans in total is right there?
Because Pam Bondi, if you just say the word abortion, will give you 20 fiery minutes of how abortion is murder, abortion is Holocaust, it has to stop now, and so on and so forth.
Pro-Life Movement's Narrow Focus00:03:13
We have to protect life.
We have to protect the children.
And then when you look behind you to women who are grown adults that were trafficked as children, she cannot even acknowledge them.
She continues to serve the president who's in the files of that sex trafficker and abuser, to quote Jamie Raskin, one million times.
And all the others that are in that, in those files, I'll just say briefly, and I was talking about this with a friend yesterday, Dan, in Europe, you're seeing resignation after resignation of officials who are now known to be in the Epstein files, elected officials, politicians, corporate leaders.
And in this country, that is not happening.
Whether that is Elon Musk, whether that is Howard Luttnick, whether that is Peter Thiel, whether that is anybody, we're not seeing that.
And it comes directly from the fact that the president is in there more than anyone and that Christians like Pam Bondi are protecting him at every turn.
And so I guess what I'm trying to get at, and I'll be quiet, and then we can take a break and go to Minnesota, is every effort we've made to show that quote unquote pro-life doesn't mean life in total explodes in a collision of Pam Bondi in this hearing,
not being able to look in the eye sex-trafficked women who were done so as children, who are trafficked as children, while being the anti-Christian bias task force spokesperson and one of the figureheads of the anti-abortion movement.
And then we'll circle back around to this, but there's polling data that show that, you know, gee, Republicans, you know, voters are starting to not care so much about the Epstein files, right?
Now that it's, it's their people that are in power.
It's their people who are implicated.
They're like, oh, maybe it's not so important to turn over and so forth.
You talk about, as you say, everything that we've, not just us, anybody who's a critic of the right has said for decades, don't give me the pro-life stuff.
Don't give me the sanctity of life stuff unless you're going to talk about the fullness of life.
I can disagree with Catholic social thought at various points, but they're at least consistent.
They oppose the death penalty.
They support social safety net programs.
They oppose abort.
Like there's a consistency there.
The death penalty, who's put more people up for execution than anyone?
Trump in a second term.
Sorry, Henry gets it.
Exactly.
That stuff.
But what is the right really worked up about this week?
A guy speaking Spanish at the halftime show.
Like what matters more, the trafficked women, trafficked children who are now grown adults, as you say, or an entertainment event that nobody was forced to watch or had to watch or whatever.
If you were to just sort of like, I don't know, map the time and energy that the right has spent, you know, in the last week or so on this issue, we see where the priorities are.
And it is not with Epstein or bringing people to justice or trafficked children or things that matter like that.
We're going to come back to, yeah, we'll come back to all that.
Let's take a break.
Be right back.
All right, Dan.
Let's head to the Twin Cities.
And I just want to set this up by saying that what the administration is saying and what Tom Homan is saying is that the operations in the Twin Cities are winding down and there's going to be disengagement.
Christian Nationalist Paradox00:15:15
And like a lot of people have said on Blue Sky and on social media, we will believe that when the people on the ground say that, when the activists, the neighbors, the clergy, the organizers, when they say ICE is no longer around, we will believe it.
Not when Tom Homan says it, because Tom Homan and Donald Trump want you to look away from the Twin Cities while they continue to ravage neighborhoods and kidnap people and destroy communities.
So I'll set it up that way and tell us what's happening on the ground there with faith leaders.
Well, so we've talked about this summer.
We've talked about faith leaders being pepper sprayed and being arrested and being assaulted by ICE.
And we've talked for years about faith leaders providing sanctuary in churches and doing all of all of these kinds of things.
But there's an article in Axios this week about Josephine Walker that's worth noting.
And she summarized it this way.
She said, Christian clergy are deploying spiritual infrastructure from organizing prayer circles to acting as human shields to resist the Trump administration's immigration agenda.
And the reason this struck me this week, we've talked about this.
We spent a lot of time talking about Mike Johnson last week and the defense of walls, the defense of immigration crackdowns, the language of this.
And it's interesting that what is said in this article, as I'm talking to them, said that their issue is for them, they find Christian nationalism incompatible with their faith.
So it's a different articulation of Christianity.
And that's fairly obvious.
You've some Christians that are busy cheering this on and you've got other Christians who are on the front lines feeling some of the brunt of the ICE response to this.
But they said in the article people interview said it's about quote resisting state authorized violence.
And I think that that gets it a fundamentally different Christian worldview, if you like, from the MAGA Christian nationalists on the right.
And the article title said it, the article title said that for these Christians, Jesus' teachings leave Christians no choice but to resist ICE.
And I think two points come together here.
One is a statement that I've made it here before, but I made this statement years and years and years ago.
And I made it kind of, kind of off the cuff, kind of in jest, but it might be one of the better ideas that I think I've had when somebody just a long, long time ago, I don't remember who said, what is the difference between like Protest, liberal Protestants and conservative Protestants or mainline Protestants and evangelical Protestants.
And the person who was asking was asking because if you name certain theological doctrines, they may well say that they say the same thing.
They might all affirm the Nicene Creed or hold that God exists as a Trinity or that Jesus is incarnate or something like that.
And the statement that I said is that liberal Christians read Jesus and conservative Christians read Paul.
And more and more, I'm like, I think there's something to that.
And the reason I say this is we talked about Mike Johnson.
And remember that Mike Johnson and MAGA Christianity is about defending state authorized violence.
That's what this is.
When he cites all the stuff supporting ICE, when he cites quote unquote law and order, whatever, they are using Christianity to define and authorize state-authored violence.
This goes back to the first Trump administration.
This is not new with the second Trump administration.
But I think it's important to think about how is it constructed.
So if you listen to what Mike Johnson says and the administration, to me, I say this all the time and it's in the code.
We look at the people we look at because they're not unique.
Mike Johnson is not special.
He's not unique.
He doesn't have some special Christian insight.
He is saying the same thing that, I don't know, thousands of Christian pastors say that millions of American Christians would say.
What are they going to cite?
They're going to cite Romans 13.
They're going to cite Paul in Romans, who says that all human authorities are put in place by God and so forth.
And so if you oppose human authorities, you're opposing God.
That's what he's going to cite.
They're going to go to the Hebrew Bible and they're going to cite theocracy.
They're going to look at like, you know, a nation with God.
They're going to cite walls.
Jerusalem had walls.
Yeah.
So it's, it's a, you know, Jerusalem wasn't a nation.
It's not a modern nation.
Virtually every city in the ancient world had walls.
Whatever.
The point is, that's what he's going to cite.
But you talked about this last week, Brad.
When somebody asked him about Jesus, and I say, well, hold up.
You know, sorry, Mike.
Christian has the word Christ in it.
There's this Jesus guy, supposedly the center of the faith.
He says, love your enemies.
He says, turn the other cheek.
He says, if you live by the sword, you'll die by the sword.
He says, whatever you've done for the least of these, you've done for me.
Like, what about all of that?
And Mike Johnson says, well, yo, that's, that's personal morality.
That's not about the state.
That's about how we're supposed to live as just private individuals.
Unless you're a clergy member in Minneapolis who's acting as a private individual, then you get pepper sprayed.
The point is, what does he have to do?
He has to wall off.
I guess there's a terrible pun in there about walling, but he has to like take Jesus and set it aside to construct a Christianity that authorizes state violence.
And the contrast here that I think we see, and I think it's worth highlighting, is those Christians on the ground whose vision of Christianity says, nope, when it talks about loving your neighbor, these are our neighbors.
When it talks about defending the least of these, these are the least of these.
If we're going to talk about human dignity and the sanctity of human life, we have to mean all lives.
And so we're going to come out here.
We're going to do this.
But I think it's important for people to recognize that if you ask those Christians, what's your rationale?
Give me the Bible verse that does it.
Mike Johnson's going to give you Romans 13 and a bunch of Bible passages about, I don't know, Walls or Joshua taking over the promised land or whatever, something like that, militaristic, theocratic kinds of models.
These are the Christians who are going to quote what Jesus says in the gospels.
And I think that we have to understand that notion.
And I think, you know, you get the emails.
I get the email sometimes.
People are like, you talk a lot about Christian nationalists.
You don't say enough about the Christians who are opposing them or these other kinds of Christians.
They're there.
They are there and they are on the front lines.
And MAGA will do everything they can to discredit that as an authentic form of Christianity, despite the fact they're the ones who are saying, yeah, all the red, you referenced the red letters.
For those who don't know, in a lot of Bible translations, all the words of Jesus are in red letters.
So they'll talk about the red letters.
They're the ones quoting Jesus.
And I think it's telling when Mike Johnson, self-appointed spokesperson for Christian America, has to basically say, we need to ignore Jesus.
We want to understand ICE and border.
We just got to leave Jesus out of it.
Let's just leave the Jesus out of our Christianity.
And so that was something that struck me this week reading this article and hearing these faith people saying the teachings of Jesus require that we oppose this.
And I think that that's a real difference because Mike Johnson, we talked about it last week, is saying, nope, the teachings of Jesus are irrelevant to this.
When it says love your neighbor, it literally means I borrowed my neighbor's lawnmower and like, you know, I did, like, I ran over a rock and chipped the blade.
I better fix that up because he's my neighbor.
I got to be nice to him.
It's not really about, you know, helping the oppressed or the marginalized or anything else.
So just some thoughts.
And I think things that stood out this week of a really useful contrast between these Christian visions of a so-called Christian America.
You know, sometimes when we do this show, it's Friday and I've like already done like two or three podcasts that week, written a bunch of stuff, taken care of my kids who have been throwing chicken nuggets at my face.
And just, I'm tired.
And sometimes I worry when we go into recording this that I'm like, man, I don't know if I got it today.
And then Dan Miller, you know, you spit out a, as the kids say, you, you spit out a bar as you just did.
And like, you know, it's like when you don't want to go to the gym, but halfway into the workout, you're like, you're feeling great.
And you're like, why would I ever not come to the gym?
I'm feeling good.
That's how I feel right now, because what you just said is so important and so, it's so clarifying that, you know, conservative Christian nationalists love to quote Paul.
Progressive Christians love to quote Jesus.
And that doesn't mean that if you're a progressive Christian and you're an Episcopalian priest out there or you're a UCC person, we're not saying that you don't read Galatians or Romans or Colossians or Ephesians, I can name them.
It just means that, you know, there's this pattern here that the Sermon on the Mount, the parables, the Beatitudes, these scenes seem to be at the core of the progressive Christian vision of ethics, the state, Christian morality.
And every time you turn to someone like Mike Johnson, it's always Paul and a Romans 13 without Jesus.
And I'll give you a really good example from this week.
This week, Russell Moore, the guy, and I don't think either of us feels like we agree with Russell Moore on all things, most things, whatever, but Russell Moore did take a stand in the Southern Baptist Convention.
He stood up for sex abuse survivors and he's basically no longer welcome there.
He wrote in Christianity Today, again, a publication that I don't think either of us is like reading all the time or really that, you know, seeing as like our place where we align politically, theologically, but he wrote in Christianity Today this week about what the Epstein files are really about.
And one of the claims he made there, Dan, is that Christians use Romans 13 to quote wave away state violence.
And in doing so, they do the opposite of what Paul intended.
Now, we can debate what Paul intended, and that's a whole nother podcast.
But there's a piece at a site called Protestia by David Morrill, who really hates this.
And he wrote this this week.
My charitable response to Russell Moore, listen, idiot, God, so very, just so full of Christian neighborly love there.
Listen, idiot.
God ordained state violence is exactly what Romans 13 is about.
It's the point.
Why do you think that God's word describes what the governing authorities bear as the sword?
This is just like a whole can of worms that I think that like goes right back to what you were saying.
You said progressive Christians primarily are quoting Jesus and Christian nationalists are primarily quoting Paul in opposition to Jesus.
And I would take it a step further and I'm wondering what you think here.
I'm sure we're going to get emails, but I think that the progressive Christian pastors in Minneapolis and St. Paul and around the country in Chicago and other places are basically like, I don't think Jesus wanted there to be state ordained violence.
And as a member of the clergy, my job is to combat state ordained violence at every turn over and against empire.
That's what I'm supposed to do.
Christian nationalists are like, state-ordained violence is exactly what God wants.
That is part of our worldview.
And if we have to like sideline Jesus and go to Paul and Joshua and Nehemiah to get there, no problem.
Additionally, additionally, those folks are going to try to tell you that the teachings of Jesus, I'm going to take this another step further.
So I just said one thing, which is that progressive Christians are like, my role as clergy is to combat state-ordained violence.
And the Christian nationalist is like, that's why, that's what God intends.
That's what God is for is state-ordained violence.
He condones it.
He promotes it.
He wants it.
Another thing I'll say is the Christian nationalist wants you to think the teachings of Jesus are about the individual and the teachings of Paul are about the collective.
That the teachings of Jesus is about you and your neighbor and that lawnmower.
And the teachings of Paul are about statecraft, foreign policy, defending borders.
And that is some more of the gymnastics at play here.
I'm wondering what you think of those two distinctions there.
And if I'm sure I agree with them.
And I'm, you know, as long as we're going to be provocative and, you know, see where we go kind of thing.
Like, number one, I mean, this isn't provocative.
Jesus was executed in an act of state violence.
And the Roman authorities.
Are you sure?
Wait a minute.
Yeah.
The Roman authorities.
What gospel is that?
The Roman authorities who executed him did absolutely did not believe that his teachings were just for individuals and so forth, or they would not have executed him.
They didn't actually see him as a threat.
They didn't think he was going to overthrow the empire or anything, but he went around talking about the son of God and all of this.
And, you know, Caesar gets that title and so forth.
And if they had thought he was just talking to a bunch of individuals and telling them to go live good private lives, they would not have had to execute him.
They executed him because he formed a mass movement that was viewed as seditious.
And so they killed him.
So there's that.
There's the obvious point that always comes up of like, well, who's state violence?
When it's Joe Biden calling somebody in, I don't hear all the right-wing Christians talking about, well, you know, it's the state.
It's ordained by God.
So, you know, there's always that, just the basic hypocrisy.
We could also like, I know some people like Paul.
I pretty much don't, but whatever.
Critics could say, yeah, you know what?
Paul didn't actually know Jesus.
And maybe it would have been better if he did.
He's got this whole really suspect story about why he's an apostle.
And he's like, I heard a voice in the sky.
And everybody else is like, we heard thunder.
I don't know, but whatever.
And, you know, I can hear the typing.
I can hear people typing emails.
Emails are coming.
What I'm saying is, if we want to be critical, we can.
Here's the more serious point.
It has been for a very long time a Protestant principle that Jesus is the principle of interpretation for the Bible.
That that was the whole point of being a Christian.
That the Bible is not self-interpreting.
Intelligent Christians have known since the beginning that the Bible doesn't speak with one voice on all things, and you have to make decisions about which passages are you going to prioritize and why, and which ones are you going to use as kind of the interpretive lens for looking at others and so forth.
And a standard Protestant principle was Jesus is the principle of interpretation.
And so if you're going to start with Paul, that's a mistake.
You have to read Paul through the teachings of Jesus.
So whatever the hell Paul's talking about in Romans 13 and, you know, following state authority and whatever, you have to read that understanding that this is supposed to be promulgating the teachings of Jesus and that has to moderate that and so forth.
But if some people want to go more radical and critique Paul, they can.
They can say, well, you know, Paul's a Roman citizen and maybe it's pretty nice and easy if you're a Roman citizen to say these authorities are instituted by God and Paul has all kinds of interests in doing this, et cetera, et cetera.
The point is it's more complicated than just the Bible supports state violence.
Yeah.
And so I guess what I'm saying is if they want to come out and quote it, that's fine.
I can play the theology game too.
I don't play it often, but I can play it.
And it's just, it's pretty, it's pretty bad theology.
It's bad Protestant theology.
I think it's bad Catholic theology.
It's just self-serving white nationalists.
If the state can serve our interests, we're going to do that.
And as I have been saying, as we talk about Josh Hawley's book, we can just sort of feed that into the Bible and pretend to find it there so that we can give biblical sanction anything that we want to say or do for ourselves.
Feeding Politics into Revelation00:03:22
All right.
For any of you out there who are worried about us talking about the more progressive side of Christianity, the non-Christian nationalist side of Christianity might be a better way to talk about it.
On Sunday, you'll hear me interview Andrew Whitehead, who is a Christian, about ableism and Maha.
And then on Monday, you will hear a post-lew to American unexceptionalism with Matt Taylor and Susie Hayward.
Susie Hayward, the Reverend Susie Hayward, is one of the clergy that has been on the front lines in the Twin Cities.
One of the people that Dan is talking about has been one of the first people there at many of the scenes that have played out tragically in the Twin Cities.
So Reverend Hayward will talk to you on Monday directly about everything that's happening in the Twin Cities and what she has seen as a faith leader on the ground with other Christians, other people of faith, people of no faith, people who are humanists.
I mean, the neighborly networks of the Twin Cities, Susie will talk about.
So you will hear that on Monday.
Don't worry.
It is there.
All right.
Final thoughts on this before we go to the Super Bowl stuff and Bad Bunny is I just want to touch real quick on the theology point you made.
And then I'll see what you think and we can move on is the technical terms for interpreting the Bible that you're talking about.
And correct me here if I'm wrong, Dan, my theology might be rusty is, right?
There's a logo-centric hermeneutics or Jesus-centered hermeneutics, meaning that you've got this book, the Bible, 66 books, 67.
Catholic Bible has more, et cetera.
But we've got books that come from disparate places, disparate times over millennia.
The Song of Solomon or the Song of Songs is an erotic love poem.
The first 12 chapters of Genesis are ancient mythology.
The Psalms are poetry.
We've got like the book of Joshua, which is violent to the hilt.
Then we've got the Gospels.
Then we've got like everything from like Titus.
Y'all remember Titus?
That's in there.
Philippians.
You know, there's 2 Peter.
These are like different genres, different books.
How do you interpret all that?
Well, one of the answers is you take the words of Jesus and everything else in the Bible has to be interpreted through those words as sort of the hermeneutical key, the decoder ring, the skeleton key.
The way that you understand everything else is through Jesus.
And what I think you're saying, Dan, is Mike Johnson is the representative of a type of Christianity that says, we are going to do everything we can to interpret the Bible despite Jesus.
We are not red-letter Christians, okay?
We are white-letter Christians because we need to use everything we have to make this about white people and defending them.
And that means we have to probably cut out Jesus, as you say, the man that was executed as a matter of state-sanctioned violence.
And I'll just throw in one more thing.
If you want to touch on it, you can.
If not, you, along with Jan Jan Lin and others, know way more about the book of Revelation than I do.
You have studied the book of Revelation in ways I haven't.
But one of the things about the book of Revelation is it is not about the individual.
It is about empire and the church standing against the state-sanctioned violence of the empire, if I'm not wildly mistaken.
Unifying Event Concerns00:15:36
So anything else on this before we go to Bad Bunny and Kid Rock?
Yeah, making it a bit more interesting.
I mean, just to your point about Revelation, the New Testament ends with a book that positions Rome as Rome, the power, the power, the world global power that the people in that world knew positions Rome as the tool of Satan, you know, as this satanic mechanism opposing God and so forth.
So, yeah, it's just, it's a deep, I think it's a deep irony when you have Christians who insist that their Christianity is about sidelining Jesus.
It's just an interesting phenomenon, to say the least.
Dive into the, as we, as we say, the Super Bowl.
So this week, everybody probably knows the Super Bowl happened.
The Patriots did not perform well, Brad.
I'm just stating that as a fact.
I'm not going to go any further.
But along with that, everybody knows you had the announcement that Bad Bunny would be headlining the Super Bowl halftime show.
I think this was back in like September, October.
Immediately, people on the right were upset, and TPUSA said that they would set up counter programming.
And all the language, he's a fake American.
He's this, it's Puerto Rican.
He speaks Spanish, performs in Spanish.
And these were the issues.
He's not white and he performs in Spanish.
Ergo, he's not really an American, even though he's Puerto Rican and American citizen and so forth.
So TPUSA, I think we alluded to this last week and curious about like, how's this going to go?
Let's see how this plays out.
We now know TPUSA.
It was led by Kid Rock.
You had Brantley Gilbert, Lee Bryce, and Gabby Barrett seeing.
Garnered something like five to six million views live.
And no, go ahead, Brad.
Go ahead.
I got things.
I'm holding my tongue.
Go ahead.
Okay.
Go ahead.
For those who are keeping score, Bad Bunny set a record with like 135 million viewers or something like that.
A few notable points about this one.
I read a sympathetic account that described it as being, quote, like an old school CMT special.
And it was not a bad description.
It had all the Christian American notes that you would expect.
Small town nostalgia, some Jesus, an anti-trans line in one of the songs, all the rhetoric.
There were other issues.
Did Kid Rock link lip-sync or not?
It was supposed to be streamed on X and they couldn't get the licensing rights, which I find weird given it's TPUSA and Elon Musk and whatever.
People can chase that down if they want.
So the event happens.
Here's what I think is interesting: number one, and Brad, you can walk us through some of the social media stuff and the outcry about this.
The level of just apoplectic anger on the right that somebody is seeing in Spanish.
Donald Trump said, Trump.
Nobody understands a word this guy is saying.
Some people do, Donald.
Number one.
Number two, it means Donald Trump's watching the halftime show at the Super Bowl and not the TPUSA like counter programming, which is its own thing.
There was not widespread anger about, I don't know, Green Day performing before the Super Bowl.
Lady Gaga made kind of a surprise appearance and was like pretty phenomenal in performing.
And I don't hear the same level of outrage about Lady Gaga.
It's all about a person speaking Spanish who's not white.
Like that's that's the whole issue.
So much so that you have congresspeople saying that they need to have hearings about it.
And he did all these different kinds of things.
I think also the language of victimization that is here.
You had this language of, you know, TPUS, we're giving viewers a choice.
How dare the NFL force us to, you're like, dude, it's entertaining.
You don't have to watch it.
You just like turn it off.
Just like, I don't know, go do something else for 20 minutes.
Refill the snacks.
Do whatever you want.
Nobody's making you watch it.
The victimization.
After, you know, of course, when they realized that you had 6 million people who watched and 135 million, you had the people who say, well, of course we couldn't compete with that.
It was never a fair playing field anyway.
You know, that kind of thing.
Kid Rock did this weird thing where, you know, he was interviewing.
He like tried to like backhandedly critique the performer, but by like saying like, oh, he's like, you know, it's just bad that they put him in that position.
I could see that they wanted that, you know, where he'd want to expand his audience, but the poor kid, he just, I think he referred to him as the poor kid.
He's like, poor kid.
Just didn't know what he was getting into.
Like, yeah, poor guy is 135 million viewers.
That's rough.
Poor kid getting to perform, you know, getting Lady Gaga to show up and like help perform.
On and on and on.
I think it just, it ties in with so many of the anxieties and the cultural anger and the animosity toward this.
So much of the TPUSA has already announced they're going to do this again next year.
This triumphal notion that they're going to dethrone whoever the performer is.
I've got more thoughts about how this ties in more broadly with some other things on the MAGA right and the world of art, but your thoughts or reflections on the counter programming and what this means or tells us about the MAGA movement and what matters to them.
We talked about, you know, whiteness and all the other stuff and not worried about Epstein people.
We're worried about the fact that a performer speaks Spanish in the Super Bowl.
All right.
Let's take a break.
Come back and I'll give you my, I got a lot to say.
Be right back.
All right, y'all.
So a couple of notes on the on the halftime show stuff.
And I want to go right to Megan Kelly.
You know, I think that the halftime, the halftime show is increasingly in our review.
Some of you are like done thinking about it and I get it.
But I think there's a couple of things to hover on.
Okay, so I said earlier, I said this last week, that the hypocrisy around Christian values is just starting to be so visible, that the veil is so off that it's hard not to just stop pretending, to stop playing the little like go-along with it game, that this is somehow a Christian movement, a family movement, a kid movement.
And you're like, well, what does that mean?
And it's like, well, here's Bad Bunny performing.
And just for the numbers, why would the NFL do this, Dan?
You know what the NFL is really good at?
Making money.
Making money?
Go look up the profits of the National Football League and you will see how good the NFL is at making money.
Bad Bunny was about making money.
This is the league that banned Colin Kaepernick.
Do you think this league is the league that is out here trying to make sure that we all appreciate Latino culture or that we recognize that Black Lives Matter?
They're not.
You know that you've gone through the looking glass on the accusation is that the NFL is woke.
Like that's just not an accusation anybody's going to credibly make about the NFL.
I would love Colin Kaepernick to jump in on whether or not the NFL is concerned with social justice.
Why did they have Bad Bunny on?
He had the number one art.
He was the number one artist on Spotify in 2020, 2021, 2022, 2025.
His 2025 album, one album of the Grammys, his music generated 19.8 billion streams in 2025.
I could go on, but he's basically surpassed Taylor Swift, The Weekend, and others in terms of like his popularity, okay?
But then you turn over, and I said this last week, I'll be brief about it.
You turn over to Kid Rock.
And Dan, I can't wait next year to watch Creed in the halftime show.
Not only because I'm sure they will be the headliner of the TPUSA Christian Family Faith event, but Creed, the lead singer of Creed, once appeared in a sex tape with Kid Rock, the leader of the all-American family-friendly Christian entertainment from this year's halftime show.
So it'll be a nice little bit of symmetry there.
Nice callback.
Have both of the male talent in the porno as the halftime.
That's really like a nice way to stitch it together.
No pun intended.
Kid Rock's some of his, and you're going to have to excuse language here.
If you don't like a foul language or off-color language, you should fast forward now.
But some of Kid Rock's most famous family-friendly, friendly, Christian values-oriented songs are Balls in Your Mouth and Cadillac Pussy.
So just those were ones.
Did you listen to those at Youth Group, Dan?
Because I never heard those at Youth Group when we were there.
But more importantly, from all the Kid Rock stuff and his lip-syncing and all of that is Megan Kelly's reaction.
And I think Megan Kelly really distilled everything about this halftime show.
She says that she was moved to tears by his performance.
She claimed that she was just blown away by the patriotism and the American pride.
Okay.
She went on Piers Morgan a couple of days later and explained why she was so upset about Bad Bunny to being at the halftime show.
And I'm just going to play it for you.
I think this is just worth listening to.
It's a little longer than your usual clip for a podcast, but I just think you all need to hear this.
So here you go.
I'm sorry, Piers, but to get up there and perform the whole show in Spanish is a middle finger to the rest of America.
Who gives a damn that we have 40 million Spanish speakers in the United States?
We have 310 million who don't speak a lick of Spanish.
This is supposed to be a unifying event for the country, not for the Latinos, not for one small group, but for the country.
We don't need a black national anthem.
We don't need a Spanish-speaking, non-English performing performer.
And we don't need an ICE or America hater featured as our primetime entertainment.
Okay, what is the national language, officially, the national language of the United States of America?
I mean, English.
And there's been a push for many, many years to make it an official documented thing.
You don't have one.
If you would have let me finish my comment, I would have pointed that out.
And people have been pushing to make it official.
Okay, so you're trying to make officials.
This attitude that you're talking about.
Hang on, why you in Great Britain have lost your culture?
You ceded your culture to a bunch of radical Muslims who came in and took over, and now it's gone.
We're not allowing that here, whether it's Hispanic, whether it's Muslim, it's not happening in the United States of America.
That's why President Trump was elected.
And whether it's Bad Bunny, who is American, but refuses to speak English in his performances, or anybody else, we have to keep the Super Bowl, which is a quintessential American event.
Football, that kind of football is ours.
They call it American football.
And the halftime show and everything around it needs to stay quintessentially American.
Not Spanish, not Muslim, not anything other than good old-fashioned American apple pie.
There should be a meatloaf, maybe some fried chicken, and an English-speaking performer.
That's what the Super Bowl should be.
Okay, so first of all, direct quote: the whole show in Spanish is a middle finger to the rest of America.
It's not.
It's not a middle finger.
No one is attacking you.
No one is.
Yeah.
And the rest of America loves it.
That's why everybody listens to it.
It's why you want a Grammy.
It's why he's the top of the five, right?
19.8 billion views.
Megan, people like this.
When they listen to this, even if they don't speak fluent Spanish, they seem to like it, Megan.
Top performer on Spotify 20, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2025.
Okay.
So she says, who gives a damn?
We have 40 million Spanish speakers.
And if you, that really is the number of people who speak Spanish primarily at home, if you include people who speak Spanish, but that is not the language they speak primarily at home, it gets you closer to 50 or some estimates to 60 million.
Okay.
So she then makes a jump.
This is supposed to be a unifying event.
No, it's not.
No one ever said that.
When Shakira performed, was that a unifying event?
When Bruno Mars performed with Beyoncé and Chris Martin, was that a unifying event?
Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg.
Not a unifying event, I don't think.
There's a lot of people like not into Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg.
But she's imposing that on the halftime event in order to make her case as to why somebody who's performing in Spanish should not be there.
And then she, she really goes, this is the close you're going to get to like somebody in mainstream media going on a Karen rant that that really tells you what she thinks, right?
This is supposed to be a unifying event for the country, not for the Latinos, not for one small group, but for the country.
Now, Latinos are not a small group, Megan.
Okay?
A, it's not supposed to be a unifying event.
B, Latinos are not a small group.
Okay.
Then she says, we don't need a black national anthem.
We don't need a Spanish-speaking, non-English performing performer.
Why not?
Why?
Again, how did this like hurt you so much that you have to say this?
And Piers Morgan asks her, is there an official language?
And she gets all offended and she says this and she says that.
And then she says, okay, and this is where I think she really spills the beans.
She tells Pierce Morgan that England ceded their country to a quote, a bunch of radical Muslims.
And then she says, quote, we're not allowing that here, whether it's Hispanic, whether it's Muslim.
It's not happening in the United States of America.
And I just hate to say this to you, but like this is a multi-pluralist, multi-ethnic, multi-religious place.
It always has been and it always will be.
A third of the enslaved people were Muslim way back in the day.
The people that built the railroads, the people that built so many of the institutions in this country, the people that made the culture here were white.
They were also Latino.
They were also Asian.
They were also black.
They were Muslim.
They were Hindu.
They were Catholic.
They were Protestant.
They were Jewish.
That is how this country has been.
And you can give me all of your false David Barton history and I will not accept it.
Okay.
And she just talks about how this American football event is ours.
And that word to me, Dan, as soon as she said it, ours.
Ours.
It's ours.
When you listen to this clip in total, you see a white woman who's like, this is ours.
You are allowed to be second tier.
Kid Rock.
Oh, they put him in that position.
Which position was it?
The top position.
You're allowed to be second tier.
You're allowed to be underneath us.
You're allowed to perform at your special performance that is not nationwide.
You're allowed to perform in your neighborhood or with your audience, but this is ours, okay?
Old-fashioned American pie.
And then she says there should be meatloaf, some fried chicken, and an English-speaking performer.
That's what the Super Bowl should be.
And Dan, this is the like extinction event expression of a white person saying, I am so threatened that there would be different kinds of foods, different kinds of cultures, different kinds of people, that I would not see a blonde lady like me on the TV.
That is the equivalent of white erasure.
That's the equivalent of you taking away my country and my culture.
And this is as close as you're going to get to someone like Megan Kelly saying the quiet part out loud.
White Erasure Anxiety00:08:44
I want to go to another clip.
Thoughts on this?
Just first of all, I think maybe we should just start calling her Karen Kelly at this point.
Second of all, who the hell eats meatloaf at a Super Bowl party?
I'm just going to throw that out.
Like, you know, whatever.
But, but, like, like, seriously, you talk about it.
We talked about this.
Have you ever been to a Super Party where there's been meatloaf, Dan Miller?
I mean, I'm dead serious right now.
Have you?
I have not.
I have not.
Yep.
A lot of people eat nachos, which is really what I remember Leave It to Beaver eating.
Wait a minute, nacho.
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
So, I mean, but that actually gets to the point.
You talk about, yes, quote-unquote minorities.
It's all fine as long as it's in the right social order.
So if we're talking about taquitos that you warm up in the microwave or the oven, like, yeah, bring, bring it on.
Some salsa, chips, some guacamole, absolutely.
Nachos, because that's what that community can give us.
Do I hear Megan Kelly or all the white people complaining about how many black people were playing the game?
Nope.
Why?
Because that's a social role that's okay.
We can have black athletes.
We can have athletes of color.
We can have entertainers who are not white as long as they don't have that platform.
As you say out loud, this is a hierarchical society.
And anybody who's here who's not white, who isn't this kind of Christian, you are here at our discretion and subject to our approval.
And if you step outside of the roles, we say it is okay for you to play, watch out.
Like that's what's provoking the response.
And we see it on full display with Megan Kelly.
All right.
Let's go to something else that I think drives this home even further.
There is a man named Jeremy Kyle, excuse me, Jeremy Carl, who has been nominated to a State Department post, a pretty important State Department post.
And he's been in front of the Senate this week.
And it looks like he's not going to make it.
There are Republican senators who are going to vote against him and not allow his nomination to go through.
But he was questioned by Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut this week.
And I want to play that for you now because I think this is actually like, this is actually what Megan Kelly wanted to say, but didn't.
You know what I mean?
And I don't know what's in Megan Kelly's mind, so don't sue me.
But I'm saying when I listen to him, I hear the more distilled version of white replacement theory.
And so here's the clip.
Tell me how you define white identity and what you think is being erased about white identity.
Certain types of Anglo-derived culture that comes from our history.
Let me think about this.
You know, Senator, I would say if you were to look at the book by one of your former Senate colleagues, Moran Fighting, about the sort of Scotch-Irish military culture and certain, you know, pride that went with that, that would be one example.
Obviously, you can have sub-elements of that culture.
You could have Italians, you could have Irish, and those are in many ways more.
But you're worried about white culture.
You're not worried about retreating to ethnic identity.
You don't speak about ethnic identity.
You speak about white identity.
So tell me the values that stitch together white identity and that make it different than black identity.
I would say that the white church is very different than the black church in terms of its tone and style on average.
Foods, foodways could often be different.
And those are music could be different.
Those are being erased.
Music could be different.
Well, if you look at the Super Bowl halftime show, which was not in English this time.
So our ability to access white churches or white food or white music is being erased.
I am concerned with the majority common American culture that we had for some time that through particularly mass immigration, I think has become much more balkanized.
And I think that weakens us.
And again, I'm not running away from that comment.
I'm not apologizing for it.
Well, I'm way over my time.
I think you're struggling to answer this question because underlying your beliefs is a sentiment that white culture is just simply better.
So Murphy asks him, how is white identity being erased?
And this is a guy that is part of the Claremont Institute, and he has posted hundreds and hundreds of things.
He erased like 500 posts about white replacement theory in hopes of getting confirmed here by the Senate.
So that tells you something about him.
And he's like, tell me how white replace people are being replaced.
Tell me how white culture is being erased.
Okay.
And he like stumbles so badly here, Dan, for a guy that cannot stop talking about how white people are being erased.
You know, he's saying things like the Scotch-Irish military culture.
Like, what?
Okay.
Cool.
Scotch-Irish military.
Okay.
Okay.
Don't even know what to do with that.
And then he goes right to, Dan, this is an amazing move.
He's like, well, you could have Italians, you could have Irish.
Those are more distinct, and I'm worried about them.
And Murphy's like, dude, that's ethnic identity.
That's not white.
That's Irish.
That's Italian.
100 years ago, if you knew your history, Jeremy, those people were not considered white because they were Catholic.
Like, so you're saying that the people that were not once considered white 100 years ago, their culture being something, something, something is the proof that white people are being erased in general.
People that were not even considered white when your grandparents were alive and growing up and so on and so forth.
And then he says, I would say that the white church is different than the black church in terms of its tone and style.
And then on average, foods, foods could be way different.
And those are being, music could be different.
And if you look at the halftime show, he does mention, you know, the Super Bowl.
And, you know, Murphy comes back and is like, so you're telling me that we they're being erased in the sense that we don't have access to white churches or I'll just use Megan Kelly's examples.
We don't have access to meatloaf or fried chicken or apple pie.
Is that not available anymore?
And I guess the point here, and I'll be quiet, Dan, and we can wrap up, is like the claim of white erasure is really the claim that other people would have representation, that they would have a place in the social order, that their culture and food and ideas,
that their music and garb would be somehow representative of the country, that it would be considered American and not sub-American, not a sub-identity, not a hyphenated identity, that Bad Bunny's an American.
Barack Obama is an American.
That the Japanese, the Chinese, the Korean, the Sri Lankan, the Indian, the black, the El Salvadoran, the Mexican, these are Americans.
And to me, when Bad Bunny like recited every country in North America at the end of the performance, that's part of what he was doing.
Saying that is America.
Anyway, thoughts here before we have to go.
Just again, that same sense of it's not erasure.
Like even the stuff he's saying, he's giving examples of like, I don't know, diverse forms of American culture.
Cool.
I don't know.
You don't like going to the black church.
Don't go to the black church.
You don't like, I don't know, spicy Asian food.
Don't eat spicy Asian food.
You don't want to watch Bad Bunny at the halftime show?
Like, don't.
Like, nobody is threatening America or white, quote unquote, same, same problems.
What is white culture?
Nobody's threatening white culture.
It's just that they've got options and there's other parts of American culture.
That's what shows, I think, the anxiety that this is not about representation.
This is about like hegemonic control, that American culture should only be white.
It's not about erasure.
It's about dominance.
And I think that's the issue.
Yeah, there's a whole rant here.
I'm not going to give it, but like, I'll just, I'll just reference it that I've given in previous episodes of like white, white is a category that means power.
Yep.
And that doesn't mean that Irish means power or Italian or Polish or English.
Like Murphy rightly points out, this is, you're talking about ethnic identities.
You're talking about people saying, hey, I'm from my, my, my parents or my grandparents came from the Netherlands and we eat the foods and we have music and we have songs and fairy tales from the Netherlands or from England or from Germany.
Okay, great.
That's, but when people start talking about white culture, they're talking about a stitched together category of those who would be in power.
And you're like, well, what's interesting in black culture?
Well, black culture is those folks who are unified by the subjugation at the hands of enslavers and hegemonic forces.
Reason for Hope00:03:28
And a unique cultural synthesis, a unique cultural energy has arisen from that collective experience.
The same goes with Asian American.
When I'm at conferences with Asian Americans, we talk all the time about Asian America.
The idea of being Asian American is such a weird category because like somebody from Laos and somebody from Japan and somebody from India are like coming from way different parts of the world with way different cultures.
But Asian American just means, well, we're in this country and the ideas of yellow peril and the and the Asian horde have and captured all of us.
And therefore we have shared experiences and shared histories that mean that we find resonances together in terms of our experiences and our place in the United States and so on.
Anyway, there's a lot more to say there.
What's your reason for hope?
My reason for hope, this week, I've been watching the Olympics and Olympic skier Hunter Hess at a press conference.
He just made some statements about, you know, he said that just because I'm wearing the flag doesn't mean I represent everything that's going on in the U.S.
It's a little hard.
There's a lot going on.
I'm not the biggest fan of.
I think a lot of people aren't.
And then said that he's doing this for his family and so forth.
He exercised his free speech to say America's a complicated place and we're all here.
We're all wearing the flag and we're all competing, but we have differences.
He was attacked as one would expect.
So first of all, my reason for hope was that he said that.
He had to know that he was going to be in the crosshairs for saying this.
Donald Trump attacked him.
Other people in MAGA attacked him.
He shouldn't be on the Olympic team.
We shouldn't root for him.
If he doesn't want to be an American, what's he doing there?
But my real reason for hope was just the other athletes who rallied his defense and just said, you know what?
We are a diverse country and we do have freedom of speech.
And he said what he said.
And that's what it means to be an American, to say what you think and to be able to do that.
And I thought that, you know, it can sound cheesy to talk about the Olympic spirit or something like that.
But I really felt that this week watching what he said and the reaction to it and the defense from other athletes.
I'm going to keep my reason for hope focused on the Twin Cities.
I think that when they replaced Bovino with Holman, the media looked away.
And I think we've tried to not look away.
We've talked about it here today.
I will say to you that in addition to those athletes at the Winter Olympics, and there's been others, Chloe Kim talked about it.
There's been a number of others.
The ordinary people in Minnesota, including the clergy, have made me proud to be an American.
And I said that last week, and I'll say it again.
I think it's been hard for a lot of us to find sources of inspiration and pride in the last years.
But Matthew Taylor said this on the episode People Will Hear Monday, that there's a chance that you're going to see the Twin Cities and history books as a site of resistance in the ways that we think of other sites of American resistance and protest from throughout our history, whether that's Selma, whether that is Stonewall and so on.
And you think, well, Brad, is that an exaggeration?
And I would say it is not an exaggeration if you look at what ordinary Americans are doing in the Twin Cities, the ways that they're standing up for their neighbors, the ways they're standing in between them and state violence.
It's not actually an exaggeration.
And if you think it's an exaggeration, I will challenge you, go look and investigate exactly what's happening there.
And you will walk away realizing it's not an exaggeration.
And if you want to whisk it away as an exaggeration, it's probably because you don't want to admit how much what's happening there, it recalls moments from American history that are understood to be watershed times in our resistance to hegemonic forces.
Stand Up, Stand In00:00:49
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