Weekly Roundup: Trump’s Iran War? MAGA Divisions, Epstein Distraction & End Times Politics
Brad O'Nishi and Dan Miller dissect Trump's potential Iran war, labeling it an Epstein distraction driven by military toyism and contradictory GOP rhetoric. They analyze how religious figures like Lindsey Graham frame the conflict as a Crusade while New Apostolic Reformation prophets view it as end-times prophecy. The discussion shifts to Texas politics, contrasting Ken Paxton's Christian nationalism with James Tallarico's liberal Christianity, suggesting Tallarico could emulate Jimmy Carter for a 2028 presidency if he wins the 2026 Senate runoff. Ultimately, the episode reveals deep MAGA fractures over the war and shifting voter demographics that threaten Republican unity. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
I'm Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Good to be with you, Brad.
Lots to cover, Dan.
We need to talk about Iran, the really bad, no-good, contradictory, lying reasons that we are not in a war that is a war with Iran, why American service people have died, why we're spending $1 billion a day on Trump's distraction from the Epstein files.
We want to get into the Christians who are calling this a matter of the end times, those with power and influence in our culture and in our government, and also the MAGA Christians who are against it and the ways that this has torn that coalition apart in some sense.
Finally, we'll go to Texas, talk about the primaries, the win, James Tylarico, the other results that are telling for what's ahead in the Republican Party, and just how low it can go.
Lots to cover.
Let's do it.
All right, Dan Miller.
We're recording this on Thursday evening because I'm going to be on a plane on Friday morning when we usually record.
I think we're both feeling a little different.
It's not the morning.
We're not drinking coffee.
We're punchy.
We're excitable.
So we're going to have to keep this professional.
We need like a continuum.
We're not like live event recording excitable, but we're like not the days when Brad's recording at 6 o'clock a.m. his time.
Yeah.
Trying to source in between.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's happy hour.
It's happy hour excitable, not after hours excitable, maybe.
I don't know.
What does that even mean?
All right.
Let's start with this montage from CNN where we get all of Trump and Rubio and others saying we're at war and then all the Republican lackeys who are saying we're not at war.
Here we go.
And we may have casualties that often happens in war.
We're doing very well on the war front.
We set the terms of this war from start to finish.
9,000 Americans have been able to leave the region since the start of this war.
Nobody should classify this as war.
It is combat operations.
I wouldn't call this a war as much as I'd call it a conflict that should be very short and sweet.
I don't know if this is technically a war.
We have declared war.
So if we haven't declared war, then I don't see that.
The president asked us to declare war yet, but they have declared war on us.
Do you consider it a war?
It's a significant military operation.
Strategic strikes are not war.
They have declared war on us.
I don't believe in the semantics.
We've talked about the language this morning.
We're not at war right now.
We're four days in to a very specific, clear mission, an operation.
So that's just a little snippet, Dan, of the ways that the Republican Party has tried to basically say we're not at war, that even though Trump has said it and Rubio said it and others have said it, there's also this sense of, oh, no, no, this is not a war.
This is something else.
This is a targeted engagement.
This is a one-awa.
It's like we're consultants.
We're not.
No, we're not.
We don't work there.
We're consultants.
We have, I don't get a W-2.
I get a 1099 from that company.
That's not even.
I go there, what, a couple days a week, and then I leave.
And it's a six-month contract.
That's how they're speaking.
I want to give you what I think is the social media post of the week on this, and then I'll throw it to you for your thoughts on the ridiculous ways that we're being told that this is an important war is something more than a Epstein distraction, something that is not simply Trump's attempt to get our eyeballs and our attention away from Epstein.
John Brooks, the host of Pot Only Knows, another religion scholar, says this, I'm not being the slightest bit hyperbolic when I say that according to the Trump administration's own overtly stated definition, bombing a sovereign nation unprovoked is not an invasion, but migrating to another nation to flee persecution is an invasion.
And I just think this is so well put that if you remember, the justification for removing Venezuelans from this country was that there was an invasion by the Trenda Aragua gang.
There has been Trump wanted to use all kinds of different war powers in order to get rid of the invasion of Venezuelans to this country, quote unquote.
And then we bomb a country and kill its supreme leader, and that is not an invasion.
It's not a war.
It's just simply a contract job that does a short engagement and should be done within the week.
You know, no problem, ma'am.
We'll have this pipe fixed and get out of your hair as soon as we can.
It's stunningly hypocritical.
It's absurdly stupid.
And it's sadly our reality.
Your thoughts on the multiple piles of BS we've gotten about why we are doing what we are doing in Iran.
What it shows, the piece that everybody knows and that you're highlighting is there is no actual political rationale, geopolitical rationale.
I think that we have the distraction piece is there.
I also find this interesting because despite what they might say to news outlets and others, I think a lot of Republicans are really worried about this because the whole affordability thing.
Remember that when we heard that they were going to talk about affordability and Trump's going to hammer on affordability and we're not doing enough to talk about affordability.
And meanwhile, Trump does this thing that is very unpopular domestically.
We'll talk more about it, but it's unpopular with some of his core MAGA folks, including some of the loudest.
And they can say all they want about how it's going to be short and not protracted and whatever, but there are no clearly stated aims.
As we know, the way you get sucked into an ongoing engagement or series of engagements is by not having any clearly defined goals, by having a guy like Pete Hegseth as your Secretary of Defense and Donald Trump, who just views the military as like his toy soldiers.
He just, he loves the military.
He wants to use it.
It's like a, it's like a, I don't know.
I don't know if anybody else has done this because I'm a dorky homeowner who like putters around the house doing things, but you have that weird tool in your garage.
I need to find something to use that on.
I need to, I need to find some reason to use, and that's, that's how Trump is.
It's the same guy that wants like military parades because they do it in France or like they do it wherever or the Russians do it or whatever.
So there's no legitimate rationale to this.
And I think they don't even know how to talk about it.
They don't know what to call it.
They don't know how to describe it.
I think that the most obvious thing that they start with is this is about their nuclear capabilities and they were going to come after it.
But lots of media have done this.
It's the same Trump administration that assured us last summer that they had completely eradicated Iran's ability to produce nuclear weapons.
If they wanted the easy out, you just say we did eradicate it and they rebuilt it quickly or something stupid like that to not take responsibility for not having eradicated it.
Whatever.
The point is it just goes in circles and circles and circles.
Among others, Lindsey Graham has wanted this forever.
And I'm sure he was whispering in Trump's ear, Hegseth's going to do anything Trump wants because all he wants to talk about is lethality and stuff.
The callous way that he talks about American deaths in this says that it's just a focus on the media wanting to make it always sound bad and focus on negatives and whatever.
For him, it's just about, again, unleashing the toys and seeing what they can do.
All of which I think you're right overlays this idea of the, hey, look over there logic of this or the tail that wags the dog or whatever other metaphor you want.
So here's how I see it.
I see that the Epstein stuff was coming to every time we get to a frenzy with the Epstein stuff, Thomas Massey, Rokana, survivors speaking out.
That's where we were before this happened.
And then now here we are talking about it.
We're not talking about Epstein.
We're not talking about survivors.
We're not talking about Trump and the fact that there were three or four FBI interviews with somebody who claimed credibly that she had been raped by him when she was, you know, an underage teenager.
We're not talking about it.
The entire media apparatus of the country is focused on Iran for a good reason.
I'm not saying we shouldn't be because U.S. service people are dying.
The entire region is now destabilized.
We are talking about boots on the ground.
We have to talk about it because the person who's leading us and the Congress that has rolled over and let him walk all over them has gotten us into a conflict that has worldwide implications, period.
So we have to talk about it.
This is an Epstein distraction, but I think the explanations have been multiple.
One has been they attacked us first.
Okay.
You know, the difference, and I know there's a lot of similarities and a lot of people comparing the rhetoric on Iraq and Afghanistan from 20 years ago.
The difference there was that Americans had undergone 9-11.
So when you launched those, you could use rhetoric.
And there was a lot of Americans that, regardless of the lies and they're not being weapons of mass destruction and they're not being credible intelligence about any of that, a lot of Americans are like, yeah, look what happened in 9-11.
We got to get them back.
That's not here.
So they attacked us first thing is not really working for a lot of people.
The idea that we've been at war with Iran for 47 years, which is what others are saying, is also not working.
And it doesn't explain why we would do this now.
To a lot of people, it looks like we're doing this on the behalf of Israel, for Israel, in defense of Israel.
But defending Israel for a lot of Americans, including MAGA Americans, is not enough of a reason to put American lives in danger and to destabilize an entire region, to kill the leader of an autonomous country, a sovereign nation, etc.
So I think none of that's working.
None of that is there.
This is pure distraction.
But I think just to make the final point on this before we go to some of the religious leaders and the elected official and their religious rhetoric, 9-11 was so traumatic and so brutal for this country that it gave George W. Bush the string to do dumbass stuff in Iraq and Afghanistan that had terrible consequences.
And he was re-elected.
He served two terms, the whole thing.
The difference here is twofold.
There is no 9-11 that preceded this that is going to get everyday Americans on board of, yeah, they got us, we got to get them.
There just hasn't been that.
Number two, Trump ran on being against the neocon endless war machine.
He ran on being a dove.
A lot of America first people are isolationists.
They don't want to be involved in foreign wars unless it directly involves American borders, sovereignty, etc.
So explaining this to that base is really not easy.
It's just not.
And we'll get to them, but the Tucker Carlsons, the Marjorie Taylor Greens, even Megan Kelly, they are openly like, not into this.
Don't like this.
My own feeling is no one should have to die for a foreign country.
I don't think those four service members died for the United States.
I think they died for Iran or for Israel.
It still got for us.
And this feels very much to me like it is clearly Israel's war.
Mark Levin wanted it.
It's his war.
Ben Shapiro, Lindsey Graham, Miriam Madelson.
That's obvious.
They're the ones who've been pushing us.
Even Eric Prince, the mercenary billionaire, told Steve Bannon, don't like it.
This is a bad move.
So I just think that's the difference between George W. Bush and Donald Trump, between Iran and now and Afghanistan and Iraq 20 years ago.
So anyway, other thoughts on that?
And then we've got a whole bunch of folks that because there's no good reason for this war have turned to religious rhetoric to explain it.
And we can do some reaction to them because it's ridiculous.
I just, I think maybe as a transition into that, it's when you get responses that try out three or four of the supposed political rationales.
And then it's, yeah, but the Bible.
And you're kind of like, wait, what?
What?
Wait.
What?
Yeah, the Bible, Israel.
It's sort of like if you, if you like threw some words on a dartboard and started throwing darts and you're like, God, those aren't worried.
Oh, oh, yeah, Israel.
Oh, God.
Bible.
Jesus.
God.
Persia.
Cyrus.
Exactly.
Right.
So, yeah, it's just, it's just Hebrew Bible bingo stuff.
And there we go.
But it's funny because it's nuclear.
No.
Oh, they were attacking.
No.
They were about to have intercontinental ballistic missiles imminently.
No.
Bible.
Well, here's, before we go to Bible, here's Carolyn Leavitt saying Trump had a feeling they were going to attack us.
So he had to attack first.
The president had a feeling, again, based on fact that Iran was going to strike the United States, was going to strike our assets in the region.
And he made a determination to launch Operation Epic Fury based on all of those reasons.
Misguided Religion and Nuclear Threats00:10:48
So Trump had a feeling, Dan.
So we're supposed to just trust him.
And this is how MAGA works.
We just trust the supreme leader, I guess, because he had a feeling.
So six service people should die and our fighters should be shot out of the air in Kuwait.
And people should have to run for safety as they eject from the planes because he had a feeling.
So again, like we all know in hindsight, like how flimsy the intelligence and everything was.
We referenced Iraq and the George W. Bush break.
Remember like you're old enough to remember it.
I'm old enough to remember.
I say remember it.
Then I'm like, I have a lot of listeners who won't remember.
But people can go and look at Colin Powell, like before Congress doing this painstaking brief to try to make the case that they had WMD and all that sort of stuff, which wound up being incorrect.
But that was bad.
That was like historically bad.
Like literally one of the biggest intelligence failures and or fraudulent appeals to intelligence in like American history.
And this is just, yeah, Trump, he felt it.
He just knew it, felt it in his gut.
His tummy felt weird.
Told him, told him that it was coming.
Like, that's all it was.
So there's, you know, the easiest thing to say here is one of the entire, like the favorite MAGA slogans is fuck your feelings.
And we have maintained for years that it's not that feelings are not credible or it's just your feelings don't matter.
Just like empathy for you doesn't matter, but feelings of other people matter.
And in fact, they're all that matter.
So we don't need evidence.
We don't need data.
We don't need congressional hearings.
We don't need readouts from the Pentagon.
We don't need intelligence.
We don't need the security services telling us we have, you know, inside informant.
Nope.
Just Trump had a feeling.
So we did it.
So I just want to ask you, like, if you, if you're a military family and Trump just had a feeling and your, your 21-year-old brother, nephew, daughter got put in harm's way because he had a feeling.
That's worse.
It's worse somehow, Dan, than Colin Powell, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and so on.
It's worse.
All right, let's take a break.
We'll come back and look at the religious justification for the war with Iran.
All right, Dan, I don't even know where to start, but I'm going to start with Mike Johnson.
Here's Mike Johnson.
Iron Mike Johnson.
Here he is.
They have been, and they say the quiet parts out loud.
They wanted to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, and they'd like to take us out as well.
We're the great Satan and their analogy, and they're a misguided religion, and there was no way to appease them.
In this clip, Dan, he says that Iran has a misguided religion.
And Brian Kaler, the great writer and Baptist minister and commentator said on Blue Sky, having a misguided religion is not enough to bomb someone.
And if you think it is, you are a terrorist, you're a fascist, you're something.
These are my words, not Brian's.
But the idea that that's the rationale that radical militant religionists of different kinds use to attack others is that they have a misguided religion.
We're using the same logic, appealing to the same rationale that people in, say, al-Qaeda used in unleashing the attacks on the U.S. in 9-11.
And I think that that's worth pointing out.
It's the same rationale that somebody like Osama bin Laden used to attack the United States and to justify that attack.
I don't always buy the like compare American evangelicals to the Taliban or whatever.
Right.
But this is one of those moments where it's right on the, it's so on the surface that it's, that you can't ignore it.
He's saying, your religion is so misguided that we have to bomb you.
And he would say, oh, no, They were going to bomb us because Trump had a feeling.
So we bombed them first.
And they were going to bomb us because of their misguided religion.
And he even says they hated us.
And even if I like grant the premise that there are leaders in Iran, people in Iran, and I'm not saying everyone, okay, but even if there are people who think of the United States as the enemy, evil, et cetera, that is not justification to bomb someone unless there is a credible threat that they are going to act against you.
And we have not seen that yet.
We have not seen any evidence of that.
All right, there's Mike Johnson.
Let's keep going, Dan.
There's just a lot to cover here today.
Here's Lindsey Graham, senator from South Carolina.
This is a religious war.
Who wins it at the end of the day?
Do the radical Islamic terrorists who want to kill all the Jews because God told them to?
Who want to kill me because I'm an infidel?
Who want to purify Islam to reject moderation and make everybody a jihadist?
This is a big deal.
I'll deal with Section 230.
So what we're facing right now is a moment of decision that will set the course of the future of the Mideast for a thousand years.
So I'll throw this to you because I think you've been following Lindsey Graham on this for a long time, but I'll just say Lindsey says it outright.
This is a religious war, like Christian nation versus Muslim nation.
This is the Crusades.
That's basically what he just said, Dan.
Yeah.
Lindsey Graham has wanted the U.S. to militarily attack Iran for a really, really long time.
He's been an Iran hawk for a long time.
And I wouldn't be surprised if as it comes out, more and more of sort of who had Trump's ear, who was with a wink and a nod that, like you say, we can maybe get past some of the upsteam stuff for a while or whatever if it wouldn't turn out that like Lindsey Graham is one of the figures who had real influence here in like pushing for this because he has been just forever.
He's one of those who has said for a long time that this is something we should do and has wanted this and he got it.
And as you say, we can find other parallels.
The slightly, but only slightly secularized version of this was the Samuel Huntington Clash of Civilizations thing that was a big thing.
Again, the last time you had the United States at war with an Islamic or Muslim-majority country, that's this, but it's Christian civilization against Muslim civilization.
And it just taps into a deep-seated and long-standing kind of discourse about this.
And Lindsey Graham and others, I think, just go to that well.
Like for them, this Mike Johnson, it just makes sense that this is an anti-Islamic, as you say, an anti-Islamic crusade.
This is a Christian war.
I think sometimes people wonder, why talk about Christian nationalism?
Look, Christian nationalism is, I get this all the time.
I get emails, I get replies to social media stuff that are like, look, Christian nationalism is just racism.
Why don't you guys just talk about racism?
Christian nationalism is just xenophobia.
Just talk about that.
Christian nationalism is just homophobia, queer phobia.
And A, we do talk about that stuff all the time.
Like, I mean, if you listen to this show, we talk about those three things, racism, xenophobia, and queer phobia a lot, because Christian nationalism is totally based on those things.
However, I think this instance is a reminder of why the Christian part of Christian nationalism is actually something that is really helpful to want to be authoritarian like Trump.
Someone like Lindsey Graham, we can go down the line.
Why?
It's because they really don't have a good way to explain it.
They are trying everything.
We've been at war with Iran for 47 years.
They were going to attack us.
But one of the things that Lindsey Graham, Mike Johnson, we're going to get to Kevin Kramer, the congressperson from North Dakota, and we could play you a dozen other clips, has been this is a Muslim regime that hates America and they hate their God is not your God.
The Christian part, the appeal to the Bible, the appeal to scripture, the appeal to the United States as a holy land, as a new Israel, this all is so helpful for the causes, for the reinforcement of xenophobia, queer phobia, and Islamophobia.
Like it really, really helps.
Like we're not just trying to talk about Christian nationalism because we used to be theologians and pastors and we know a lot about it.
It's actually really useful for people like Lindsey Graham and Donald Trump in cases where they want to get people to trust them and believe in what they're up to, like starting a stupid war for no reason.
Tying in with that, and just to feed on that, I know this may take us a little bit astray, but I get the same question of like, why the Christian nationalism?
Why not these other things?
Because analytically, all those things are separable.
In other words, there's no reason why if somebody, I don't know, opposes immigrants, undocumented immigrants in the United States, there's no logical or necessary connection between that and like supporting bombing a country like Iran or opposing transgender care for minors.
Those are analytically separate issues.
But all the Christian nationalist folks hold to all of those things.
And it leads to that question of like, why?
Why for these people is it obvious that if you support one of these things or oppose one of these things, you oppose the others, that they come as a kind of a package deal.
And for them, that's the part that's the Christian identity part as they understand it, as they experience it.
Obviously, there are other ways of being Christian.
But for them, all of it is part of what it means to be a Christian, to be a Christian nation.
And so I would just extend what you say and say that religious peace is always there with the xenophobia and with the racism, with anti-trans rhetoric.
It doesn't have to be.
You can be racist for other reasons.
You can be transphobic for other reasons, although I actually think you're hard pressed to find non-religious adherents who oppose those things, but it's still there.
And I think what this does is just bring it into view that this is the kind of anchor point around which these different discourses or practices or feelings or whatever, this is what holds them together into a coherent identity for millions of Americans is that label Christian.
That for them, what it is to be Christian America is to oppose Islam and to oppose queer people and to oppose people from south of the border and whatever else.
Hagee's End Times Prophecy00:13:25
Let's go to maybe the best one of the day, and that's Kevin Kramer, congressperson from North Dakota.
Here's Kevin talking to somebody in the hallways of the Capitol walking to his office where I shall say he has the Israeli flag flying outside his door.
There are several good reasons for us to take off Iran's nuclear capabilities.
First of all, because they're willing to use it.
There was an Iran nuclear deal signed in 2015.
Yeah, thank God we got out of that.
Remember, he agreed to a deal that allowed Iran to have a nuclear weapon.
No, they didn't.
Thank God we intervened in that.
And they were on their way to doing it.
No, they weren't.
Yeah, they were.
They were licensed to have, to enrich to a level that would allow a nuclear weapon.
No, they weren't.
The Republicans kept saying, they almost have a nuclear weapon.
They almost have a nuclear weapon.
It's not true.
They don't have a nuclear weapon.
And I have one question.
Thank goodness they don't in that idea.
Listen, the United States and Israel are ironclad partners.
We need them in the Middle East.
We need them to be strong.
We have a biblical responsibility to them as well as an allied responsibility.
Israel, we should never, we should never sever that relationship, particularly to the benefit of killers like Iran.
Well, I'm not sure if you have your office.
Is that the flag right there?
This guy says we have a biblical responsibility to Israel.
And here he is, a U.S. senator with an Israeli flag outside his office.
So for Senator Kevin Kramer, what the F?
Are you representing the interests of the U.S. where the vast majority of the American public don't want a war with Iran?
Or you're representing Israel because we have a biblical obligation that's insane and dangerous.
All right.
So they're talking.
It might be hard to understand every word that's being put back and forth there.
He's asked the question, like, why this now?
And, oh, they shouldn't have nuclear weapons.
And the person talking to him is, they don't.
You said they don't.
And he doesn't really answer.
He's, thank God we got out of the deal from 2015.
That was a mistake.
Doesn't say why, but I guess he says, oh, that would have allowed them to have a nuclear.
He says just blatantly false things about it.
Yeah.
But then he says there's a biblical responsibility to protect Israel.
So there it is, American.
Bible.
Yep.
Bible.
Just cut them off.
Bible.
Okay, I guess we're done.
You're done, Brad.
Bible.
No more.
I'm laughing because that's what my four-year-old does to me.
It's like in this is going to date me, but in Austin or no.
Yeah.
Austin Powers when he's like that.
It's like that.
Yeah.
But with the word Bible.
Bible.
But what about Bible?
Yeah.
But I think this is probably the clip from today that illustrates what we just said, which is he starts off with nuclear.
It doesn't go great.
He's still getting pressed.
And it's a biblical responsibility to protect Israel.
And I think most of you listening are familiar with this line of theology, but I'll just, I'll do like a 20-second here, and Dan, you can fill in and then we'll go to some other stuff.
But there's this idea for many evangelical Christians that Israel, and that doesn't mean Jewish people, as we've said many times, they conflate the government of the Israeli state, the land or the territory that makes up the state of Israel and the Jewish people.
They put all that together.
And they envision that not only are the Israelites, the Jewish people, God's chosen people, but the land is a place where the end times will play out.
It's the theater where Jesus' second coming will essentially happen.
And so Israel has to be the United States' number one ally and friend because in supporting Israel, we're supporting God and Jesus.
And we're essentially brokering the second coming of the Messiah.
So America is matchmaker here, accelerating the marriage of Jesus and the world by defending Israel.
And that's the way to do it.
So when he says biblical responsibility, that's what he's saying.
A lot of you out there listening, a lot of MAGA people are like, that's not a good enough reason.
A, that reason doesn't hold.
There's reasons that that's ridiculous.
But also, B, that's not a good enough reason for six Americans to have already died to spend $1 billion a day.
American, you don't have healthcare.
American, you don't have public transportation.
American, you don't have a social safety net.
American, you don't have Medicare.
American, you don't have Medicaid.
American, you are one paycheck away from financial doom, but we are spending a billion dollars a day on this war.
What do you want to say about your pal, Kevin Kramer?
Me and Kevin.
So we're talking about the apocalypticism, the whole like end times, at the end of time, Jesus will come back and these things have to happen.
And if you're a friend of Israel, et cetera, et cetera.
What always strikes me and has since I was a kid is the fluidity of apocalypticism.
And I've said this before, but I grew up in a time whenever people talk about the end times and the threat against it or whatever, it was always the Soviet Union.
Like you go prowling through the Bible and there are these weird places that like don't exist anymore.
Nobody kind of knew what they were referring to in the first place.
Gog and Magog and whatever and this and that.
And you're like, ooh, what is that?
And I remember going to anybody out there remembers Dawson McAllister conferences?
I went to that, like these big youth conferences of going through the book of Revelation.
Like it's always the Soviet Union.
It's like you're going to blow the, you're going to blow the punchline for everybody because you know where the story ends.
It always goes to the Soviet Union.
And now it all goes, it goes to Iran.
We're like, wait, what?
No.
Like, that's the wrong story.
It's supposed to be this.
Oh, there is no Soviet Union.
Then it was going to be Russia, but oh, oh, oh, we like Russia now.
Like Trump likes Russia.
The Christians like Russia.
Vladimir Putin's a good Russian Orthodox kind of figure.
We're going to, we like Russia now.
So now it's the Persians.
And then you'd be like, but hold on.
Remember when in the first election, when all the Christians were nervous about Trump?
And you said, no, no, no, he's like Cyrus.
He's like the leader of Persia from the Hebrew Bible.
When God called the leader of Persia, the prophets called him a Messiah.
Said it was the Messiah.
The leader of Persia is the Messiah.
You're like, wait, but that's the, wait, that's the end times thing?
The same place that we said made like the biblical model of Trump as an okay ruler because he's a messianic figure is now the end times place.
And okay, I'm confused.
And the reason you're confused, if you're confused, is that for 2,000 years, Christians have been playing the like apocalypticism end of the world card.
And the target and the explanation for it always changes.
Like, it blows people's minds that you can talk about apocalypticism in, say, the Middle Ages when there was no state of Israel.
The state of Israel didn't exist anymore.
And Christians were still busy trying to identify what these places were and what it meant and so forth.
So it's just, it's this completely vacuous discourse, but because it's vacuous, because it's empty, you just fill in whatever you want.
And right now, what we want to fill in is Iran.
You're the one who's vacuous because listen to this clip.
And what you're going to realize is you are not paying attention and you need to be.
All right.
Here's a montage made by Media Matters of NAR prophets and evangelicals talking about how this is all part of the end times.
That Dan Miller just said it wasn't, but they said it is.
We thank you for our president, Donald Trump, whose wisdom and courage has crushed the enemies of Zion.
Today we rejoice in the prophetic scriptures of Ezekiel, revealing God's operation fury for the enemies of Israel.
The Lord said a ferocious February, setting up for a roar in March.
Now listen to what these operations were named.
This was prophesied back in December.
It is a very, very good time to be alive where we're seeing President Trump literally become Constantine the Great.
We should be celebrating and being in comfort and being at peace, knowing that God is in control, knowing that God is having his way and he is removing every evil leader out of their powerful positions.
I believe God has this position there for the end time open doors of what he's going to do in Iran when this regime is prayerfully removed and the people are able to freely worship Jesus, Yahweh, that we are going to see, we're going to see the gospel go forth like never before.
When we see this kind of activity in that part of the world, it reminds me of the words of Jesus who said, when you see these things begin to happen, look up because your redemption is drawing near.
Once the first domino falls, the others will fall.
The emergence of the Antichrist, the tribulation period, the Battle of Armageddon.
The Spirit of the Lord is working in this.
And I believe we're going to see, we're going to see an absolute revival come to Iran.
All right.
That's quite a ride.
Some of you are not sure who you just heard.
So the folks that you just heard, the first voice was John Hagee, 85-year-old pastor in San Antonio, Texas, who's talking about prophecy.
And our friend and colleague, Sarah Posner, wrote a piece at Tugging Points memo about that this week.
You should check out.
You have a bunch of NAR prophets in there, new apostolic reformation prophets who claim to hear directly from God.
And then at the end, some of you might have noticed or understood that one of the voice, the second to last voice was Greg Laurie.
Greg Laurie is a Calvary Chapel pastor in Southern California, very big from where I come from.
He is not NAR.
He's what I would call a kind of normie evangelical, a religious right evangelical.
He's not a Doug Wilson person.
He's not a New Apostolic Reformation person.
He's the heir of what we might think of as normie megachurch evangelicalism.
And these are the folks that really see this as part of end times prophecy.
So when we say that like the likes of Lindsey Graham and others claiming this biblical mantle is helpful for them, it actually is because there's people like this out there that are like, oh yeah, this is part of biblical prophecy.
Despite Dan Miller saying that this has been going on for 2,000 years and the targets keep changing, every time Lindsey Graham, Donald Trump, Mike Johnson explain it this way, they get the people that you just heard from talking exactly like they just talked.
And this is a way to drum up support for what they're up to.
The one who's always driven me nuts is Hagee.
I've been annoyed by Hagee since, I don't know, since I was in my 20s.
I was an evangelical and I thought he was like full of shit.
First of all, he always says Israel and it drives me nuts, but that's not a big thing.
I'm like, just you could be like all pro-Israel.
Just learn how to say the word.
But this is the thing.
You get the so-called prophecy experts and that's how they're built, right, within this world, prophecy experts.
The Bible is this book full of prophecies that give us insight into what's going to happen and they're prophecy experts, Brad.
We've all known him.
And Hagee was like one, his entire ministry was about end time stuff.
I don't know how many thousands of sermons the guy has preached because everything is always about this and prophecy experts.
And they suck at being prophecy experts because you're like, cool.
Who had Persians 10 years ago?
Show me the envelope where you wrote, it'll be the Persians.
It'll be Iran and stuck it in an envelope and put it like a safe deposit box or something and pull it out today and be like, see, here I was in like, I don't know, 20 years ago or in the war in Iraq.
Yep, we, we told you, we told you it wasn't really Iraq.
It was Iran.
We were in the wrong Gulf state.
It's just like, it's like sports analysts, except that it matters more, like sports analysts who like get paid lots and lots and lots of money to make predictions.
And then when they don't happen or they're totally wrong, it doesn't matter because it's sports and who cares.
But here it's these people who have been making these predictions for decades and it's a moving target all the time.
And so here they come out.
You just fill in the blank.
The biblical threat at the end times is fill in the blank.
And right now it's Iran.
It was Iraq.
It's been Russia.
It's been the Soviet Union.
It's wherever.
But yeah, anyway, Hagee in particular just drives me crazy.
Yeah, it's amazing Hagee's still at it.
Hagee's one, if y'all are keeping score, if you remember going back to 9-11, he's one that said that that happened because of the fornication happening in New Orleans and all the things God was displeased with in New Orleans and that led to Katrina.
So, you know, that era of 9-11 and then Katrina led to John Hagee saying that.
You can look that up.
All right, let's take a break.
GOP Runoff Drama00:14:41
We'll come back and go to Texas and talk about the results there, what they portend for the future, and what they say about both parties.
Be right back.
All right, Dan, James Tallarico is the Dem nominee for Senate in Texas.
We have results in the GOP as well.
We have a Senate runoff between John Cornyn and Ken Paxton.
We have the ouster of Dan Crenshaw.
We got a lot.
Where do you want to start in Texas?
Off to you.
So I think what's interesting is the Paxton-Cornyn thing.
Lots of people noted this, but it'll be interesting to see how it plays out because lots of people in the GOP were afraid that Paxton was going to win outright.
So like for people who don't know, like Paxton's this another scandal-plagued, super pro-Trump, like attorney general.
The MAGA crowd loves him, and their concern was that he's going to be too far to the right and too scandal-plagued and so forth.
And so you had the very establishment candidate of Cornyn who, you know, ran.
And so there's a real concern in the GOP about what happens with the runoff now.
Who will Trump support?
Trump has, as Trump does, he often waits to see who he thinks is going to win and then throws his support behind them.
Trump hasn't thrown his support behind anybody.
I think last I saw, he dangled it and said whoever he doesn't support should drop out of the race.
So essentially he can't be wrong about having supported that person.
But it's interesting because it adds a dimension.
I think a lot of Republicans were really afraid that if Paxton won outright, that Tallarico would really, really perhaps run away with this, which would be a big deal in Texas.
So now we got to see, are they going to have to spend lots of money in a GOP runoff for a Senate seat in a red state and all that kind of stuff?
I think the fact that that's a possibility is what gives great hope to Democrats and others.
Again, everything right now is about real things that are happening in Washington, but it's about looking toward the midterms and trying to read the tea leaves.
So I think that that continuing battle within the GOP about who do they actually think can get elected?
Who do they think can win?
Who are they worried about as a Democratic opponent?
I think that that's all really telling.
And I think it's also significant that Crockett, who raised concerns about disenfranchisement of voters and people were turned away from polls and different things and the court had to get involved and whatever, was willing to concede and not turn that into a battle.
And I think that that is a legitimately other serving move of saying it's more important to be united against the GOP candidate than it is to sow further decision, excuse me, divisions among Democrats.
And there's a lot of stuff there that will be interesting to watch playing out as this runoff happens for the Republicans.
Yeah, if we go back to Cornyn and Paxon, Cornyn is a, I believe, a four-term senator, has been in the Senate a long time.
And Paxton is scandal-plagued.
I mean, his wife, going back to biblical, his wife divorced him on biblical grounds.
So she divorced him and claimed it was on biblical grounds because she didn't want to be seen as doing something civil.
Like she herself is a committed evangelical.
And some of you out there know, when are you allowed to get divorced if you're an evangelical?
Oh, yeah, when your partner cheats on you.
So Paxton had an affair and she divorced him because of that.
Paxson was also impeached by the GOP-controlled legislature.
Like he is unpopular among his peers in his own party, and yet he's immensely popular with the MAGA crowd.
He has run to the right of Cornyn and made himself out to be the real MA candidate.
He hangs out at Mar-a-Lago any chance he can.
So we'll see what happens there.
I want to compare him to Tallarico, but I want to first say that the fact that Tallarico and Crockett went against each other stinks because Democratic voters had to choose between two rising stars, essentially, who are running in the same contest.
And to me, going to bed after that primary, I was like, either Crockett or Tallarico would have been great candidates.
I'm sad that either one of them had to lose.
And I hope that Jasmine Crockett reappears soon in public life because she questioned Christy Noam this week.
And we haven't even gotten to Christy Noam getting fired.
We'll get there.
And she just did a great job.
She just did a great job, like not letting Christy Noam get away with anything.
She's been a rising star for a year and a half now.
And so it's not good.
Let me frame it this way.
It was a win, but it was also melancholy in my mind that she is no longer going to be in office for the moment.
I hope she comes back soon.
Let me make a comparison and see what you think, Dan.
If you just put Paxton versus Tallerico, let me just say Paxton's going to win.
Let's just say tomorrow Trump's like, it's Paxton.
And I don't think Cornyn would drop out, if I'm honest.
I think he's too proud and I think he's been around too long.
But let's just say Paxton wins.
Hang with me for a second.
We're going to get a little weird, okay?
Paxton represents everything that ex-evangelicals, non-evangelicals, people fed up with the likes of the religious right and Christian nationalism despise about that form of American Christianity.
He is vehemently transphobic, queerphobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic.
If you're not a straight white Christian, you're not a real American.
He is the guy that enforces this like social hierarchy we talk about all the time.
And he does so as a fraudster, as a liar, and as a cheat.
This is a man who committed adultery.
Like in terms of Christian values, he has no character integrity.
He's been shown to be a liar, a fraudster, and an adulterer.
And yet he's the Christian candidate.
He's the man of faith.
He's the leader that will lead Texas back to Christian values and God-ordained provisions for how our society should work.
Then you put him against Tallarico.
And here's Tallarico, this guy that kind of looks like Mr. Rogers.
Like when I see Tallarico, I think of Mr. Rogers.
But Tallarico is immensely talented at delivering a blow when it comes to cross-examining people about the Ten Commandments bills, about talking about why Christian nationalism is a plague on his religion, about discussing how hatred and war are not in line with the teachings of Jesus.
Like he's not just a pushover.
He will quietly and unassumingly devastate you with his words.
He's pretty good at it.
Okay.
So here's the guy that went to seminary, taught public school in a difficult set of schools in San Antonio that were under-resourced with kids who are underprivileged.
Most of his classroom, when I interviewed him, we talked about the fact that most of his classroom spoke Spanish at home.
Okay.
He's been a church attending guy his entire life.
And he talks about Jesus all the time.
If this is the race we get, this is going to be, I think, the most nationally celebrated, focused on race we've had in a long time of a Christian candidate versus a Christian candidate.
And don't get me wrong, we have had Christian candidates, but they have not been seen that way.
Raphael Warnock, Stacey Abrams, those are Christian candidates, but Stacey Abrams was never framed that way.
Okay.
Tallerico is.
Tallarico just doesn't let you look away from his Christianity.
He talks about it so much.
Some people don't like that.
Some people are like, tone it down a little, James, right?
Not all of us are Christian.
You cannot look away from his Christianity.
I cannot think of a more stark contrast between two forms of American Christianity than James Tallarico versus Ken Paxton.
And watching that is going to be fascinating.
If they debate, it's going to be fascinating.
Two more comments.
I'll shut up.
One is the religious right and Christian nationalists are already going all in on how liberal Christianity is not real Christianity.
Woke Jesus is not real Jesus.
This guy supports trans people.
This guy doesn't know what a real woman is.
This guy can't answer a basic question about gender, blah, They're going to do that.
They're going to put a spotlight on liberal Christianity, mainland Christianity, and say this isn't real faith.
Then I'm okay.
I'm going to get really weird now and then I'll be quiet and I'll throw it to you.
You ready?
Alan L. Rod, Alan L. Rod, friend of the show and friend of mine, said on Blue Sky the other day that if Tallerico wins in the Senate, there may be Tallarico 28 murmurings.
So Tyler Rico becomes a senator in 26.
Maybe in 28, he's the presidential candidate.
A little bit, a little bit Barack Obama there.
A little bit Barack Obama.
But I don't think the right comparison is Barack Obama.
I think the right comparison, you ready for it?
Jimmy Carter.
So Jimmy Carter had a lightning in a bottle political career.
The guy was like on the board of education in his Georgia town, and then he was like the governor within a few years.
And then he just ran for president and he became president.
And half the country is like, who the hell is this guy?
And he too was like Mr. Rogers.
He too was like a super, super, super Christian.
He was unassuming and all shucks, kind of like James Tallarico is, right?
And he became president.
Now, I'll give you one reason that I think Jimmy Carter became president.
And there's a bunch of them, but here's one.
In the wake of Watergate and Richard Nixon, Americans were sick and tired of lying, thieving politicians, and they wanted somebody they could trust as just a good family person.
12 years of Trump.
Ken Paxton running around.
You can see people being like, this guy's a stand-up dude who doesn't lie all the time.
He's not running around with three mistresses.
He actually does what the Bible says in regard to loving your neighbor.
He cares about every kind of American.
A lot of Latino voters went for Tallerico in huge numbers, which I know you can talk about.
I think Tallarico versus Paxton is a big deal.
I think Tallerico, if he wins, might become a dark horse for 28.
And it will be because of the Jimmy Carter lane.
He'll be in the Jimmy Carter lane.
Like compared to Gavin Newsome, who looks like a billionaire car salesman with how much hair product?
This is the guy for some people.
Now, I could be off.
I could be one of those sportscasters who's just like in 18 months be totally proved wrong, but that's my theory for today.
I'm done.
Go ahead.
I apologize.
That was long.
Another thing that Tallarico has going for him, if you're going to use the Gavin Newsom comparison, I think there's a good reason to do that.
Is Gavin Newsom exudes?
I want to be president.
Yeah.
Like, and so there's an unassuming part of this.
And I'm not under no illusion.
I think, obviously, James Tallarico wants to be a senator and probably, I would think most senators probably would like to be president and for various reasons, know it's not going to happen or whatever.
But feeling or being able to not seem like that's all you want and that you're saying the things you're saying and doing the things you're doing because that's what you want, that can be a rare political ability.
And I think Tallarico has it.
I know that Gavin Newsom doesn't, doesn't have it.
He basically has a sign on his chest that says, I want to be president at like every speaking thing that he does.
Yeah.
So you brought up a point that I think is important is the Latino votes in Texas.
I keep harping on this.
We talked about in 2024, you had this kind of pretty unexpected cross-section of people who voted for Trump who are the ones that got him into office.
The die-hard Trump people are, they're not enough to get Trump into office, just as the people who really, really hate Trump, these two kind of immovable political forces, people who are not decidable, they are not open.
Trump, Brad, I got to tell you, I think I could be wrong.
I don't think that there's likely anything that could happen that would convince you to become a Trump supporter at this point in time.
I'm just, I'm going to throw that out there.
I get that vibe from you.
I don't feel that you're very persuadable on this point.
That's the point.
Neither of those two sides could do it.
And so you had this cross-section.
So you had a, you, you had lots of things at work there.
You had a lot of Democratic voters who were upset about Israel-Palestine.
It stayed out and that was a factor.
But you had lots of African-American men, lots of Latino voters and others who went to Trump.
And you had the GOP touting this new big, tense GOP coalition for the ages.
It's the new GOP.
This is a lasting force and so forth.
And I said at the time I didn't buy it.
I think a lot of other people said that they didn't buy it.
And what we've seen in this was there was a huge surge of Latino voters and they broke heavily for Democrats.
Everything that we've seen said that that block in particular, they bought into the economic messaging.
And many of them had lots of studies of this kind of that happens to all voters, A confirmation bias thing where the piece you want to hear about is good.
He's going to help us economically.
And then when everybody brought up immigration and stuff, they were like, I don't know if that's really what he's going to do.
You convince yourself that your person is going to do what you want.
I think that was a really significant part of this election.
I think it plays out obviously for Tallarico, but I think that's one of those bellwether things that people are watching in Texas about the midterm elections are was this not only does it not look like some lasting GOP coalition, it hasn't held for a year and a half since the election.
It's been less than that.
So I think that was one really significant thing.
I think one more point that's worth making about this is also just voter enthusiasm, the enthusiasm gap.
And we know that this is part of what drives the political cycle.
We know that the party that does not have the presidency tends to win the House in midterm elections and all of that.
And it's often because the party that isn't in the White House is more enthusiastic.
Voter Enthusiasm Gap00:03:09
They don't like the president, et cetera.
They're more likely to participate in midterm elections and so forth.
But there are also real things.
Trump can't talk about affordability.
We've talked about that.
His immigration crackdown is hugely unpopular.
We've talked about that.
What he's doing in Iran is hugely unpopular, and we're going to keep talking about that.
So a stat that I saw this week is that Democrats outvoted Republicans in Texas for the first time since 2002.
So the first time in a quarter century the Democrats outvoted Republicans in a Texas primary like this.
That's a sign of the big enthusiasm gap.
And I think that that could be really significant in places like Texas and elsewhere in the midterms.
Yeah, it's 100, 150,000 votes more so in the Democratic primaries than in the Republican primaries.
There's other things from Texas we're not going to get to.
Dan Crenshaw lost his seat to somebody who's further to the right of him somehow.
There's other things happening we're just not going to get to.
I also realized we didn't really talk about the MAGA Christians who are not on board with Iran.
Some of you were like, hey, we didn't get to that.
On Tuesday, I did 20 minutes on that.
So if you missed Tuesday's episode, I would say as soon as you finish this episode, go turn on Tuesdays because I really demonstrated how a lot of the Doug Wilson aligned people and the Catholics, the trad Catholics, are not into the Iran war like their religious right NAR counterparts.
And something we'll get to, I'm sure, in future episodes is that puts Mr. JD the Drizzler Vance in a tough position because he himself has argued he's against endless wars and he is in that trad Catholic camp.
So you want a figure who has not been very prominent in the last few days.
Haven't seen him.
JD, I can't shut the fuck up ever.
Vance has nothing to say because he can't come out in support of this because he's been cultivating that crowd, that America first crowd, ever since, especially since Charlie Kirk.
And now he's, yeah, he's clearly trying to feel out the territory and the terrain and figure out where he can put his feet down.
He's the one that sat in Charlie Kirk's seat.
And if you go back and see, Charlie Kirk was not interested in Iran conflicts.
He did not think it was a good idea.
That tells you something about that wing of MAGA.
And so the Drizzler has not been out front here.
We've got a lot of Mark Rubio.
We've got a lot of Iron Mike Johnson.
We got a lot of Lindsey Graham, who got himself out of his hovel and put on a suit and tie and got out there and talked about how this is going to determine what happens in the Middle East for the next thousand years and all of that.
Thanks, Lindsay, for we got a lot of Kevin Kramer, but we don't have a lot of the Drizzler.
And there's a reason for that.
And it's because theologically, he's in a tough spot here when it comes to Iran.
All right, y'all.
Sunday, we have a great interview.
Anika Brockschmidt is interviewing Tomas Zimmer about American authoritarianism.
Those two together are dynamite.
And Tomas Zimmer is someone that we've wanted to have on the show for a long time and will finally be here.
Bonus Episode: Knives Out00:01:12
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