Weekly Roundup: Pete Hegseth’s Military Vision, Violent Prayer & GOP Tax Dogma
Brad Onishi and Dan Miller unpack a series of troubling developments surrounding Pete Hegseth’s vision for the military chaplaincy, where chaplains may soon wear only religious insignia instead of rank and operate within a drastically reduced set of approved faith codes. The hosts explore how Hegseth’s language—framing the role as a mission to “preach the truth,” “shepherd the flock,” and fulfill a “sacred calling”—signals a distinctly Christian nationalist framing of military service, reinforced by his claim that the armed forces have been “infected by political correctness and secular humanism.” They place this in historical context, noting how Japanese American Buddhist soldiers in World War II were denied adequate chaplain support despite serving in one of the most decorated units in U.S. history. The conversation also touches on reporting about Hegseth’s crusader imagery, including tattoos and a Bible stamped with “Deus Vult” and the Jerusalem Cross, raising deeper concerns about the ideological direction of military leadership.
The episode then shifts to a controversial Pentagon prayer calling for “overwhelming violence” and the damnation of “wicked souls,” which the hosts connect to a broader pattern of rhetoric that glorifies brutality and frames military action in theological terms. From there, Brad and Dan examine the near-religious devotion to tax cuts within the GOP, highlighting reporting that red states are facing massive budget shortfalls as a result of Trump-backed policies—yet lawmakers continue to support them as a matter of ideological commitment rather than evidence. They close by discussing Trump’s absence from CPAC, the unease among attendees regarding Iran, and the irony of Trump mailing in his ballot despite his long-standing opposition to mail-in voting, underscoring what they describe as a deeply transactional and contradictory approach to politics.
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I'm Brad O'Nishi, author of American Caesar, How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Taking Over America.
Founder of Axis Mooney Media, here today with my co-host.
Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Pleased to be with you, Brad.
Brad is joining us from exotic locations, and we're recording very early.
And so it's always fun, Brad, when it's this early, because I don't know, we just, maybe a different Brad will show up, the early morning, Brad.
The early morning, Brad, is here.
I'm in beautiful St. Louis.
I was here for a seminar.
And yeah, it says 6.49 a.m. St. Louis time, but my body thinks it's 4.49 a.m.
So we're doing great.
All right, folks.
We're going to talk about Pete Hegseth and some changes he's made to the chaplaincy in the military.
It may seem like a minor story, but there's actually some reasons that it is worth noting.
This, along with comments he made this week about total obliteration of enemies, praying for destruction, and what that reveals about the Christian nationalist ideology that we've been discussing on this show for some time now.
We'll then get into something that I think is, again, under the radar, but with the ongoing Iran conflict is something we want to bring attention to, and that is the GOP dogma over taxes and cutting taxes,
and that in conjunction with the overwhelming cost of this war and the ways that the government is both shrinking and growing at the same time, and how that is bad for everybody.
Finally, CPAC is this week, and Trump is not there.
Why?
We will tell you in a couple of minutes.
Lots to cover.
Let's go.
All right, Dan, I'm going to throw it to you.
There's some, we'll get to Heg Seth talking about obliteration, and we'll even get to a piece by Brian Kaler about his Bible and how his Crusader tattoos, the famous ones, are also tattooed on his Bible, which you're like,
how does that work?
Well, we'll explain that in a minute.
First, let's talk about the chaplaincy and what he did this week.
Yeah, so this week he announced some changes to the chaplaincy on X, Twitter.
And so what he argued, or didn't argue, but announced, is that chaplains will no longer wear rank insignia.
So they'll keep their rank.
He probably knows chaplains as military officers, they have rank as well as representing whatever religious tradition they represent.
So, but they will no longer wear their rank insignia.
They'll keep their rank, but they will only display their religious insignia.
And this kind of goes in line.
Hegseth had previously said, we talked about this at the time.
Excuse me.
He had previously said that service members' spiritual health was as important as their physical and mental health.
And he, we know he's emphasized the whole Crusader army, Christian army thing.
He has tried to elevate, again, spirituality within the armed forces at the, as I just said, at the same level as mental or physical health.
But what he said is, and this is why it struck me.
You're like, okay, like they don't have to wear rank insignia.
Like, what?
Like, okay, so what?
And a reason given for this, one, and I think there's probably some validity to this, is that it can help kind of remove barriers between, especially maybe enlisted service members and chaplains, right?
Coming to a chaplain for spiritual guidance and the person's a captain or a major or something like that.
And that maybe that can be intimidating if you're like a corporal or a private or whatever.
Okay, fine.
But here's what else Hegseth said, and this is what caught my attention, and this is what I think makes this significant, and I'll be interested in your thoughts.
He said that the chaplains, not having their rank, he said, quote, they will be seen among the highest ranks because of their divine calling.
And then he went on to kind of address chaplains in this video.
He says, you have a sacred calling.
So preach the truth, be steadfast in your faith, and shepherd the flock entrusted to you.
And then tied in with that, another thing that he did is he also announced the reduction of faith codes.
It's like the, you know, service members they want, they can kind of code.
It was like a list of codes of like religious or spiritual beliefs, reduced it from over 200 to 31.
And he had talked about this in the past too.
So for me, it was this notion of saying, well, you know what?
They don't need rank because they're called by God.
They have the highest calling.
So in the military, an organization built on rank, obviously, explicitly hierarchical in structure for various reasons, like maybe the most explicitly hierarchical organization in American life.
It's like chaplains don't need rank because they have a divine calling.
They're messengers from God.
And so to me, it communicated this notion of almost they're above rank.
They are beyond rank.
They are far superior to anybody else in the military because of this so-called divine calling.
And I found it just another sort of chilling thing and leading into these other things we're going to talk about.
But your thoughts on that?
Walk me back if I'm overreacting.
You're like, no, he just wants privates to be comfortable talking to chaplains.
Well, you spent a lot of time this week looking into this.
And I guess one question I'd have for you is, so what do you make of reducing the codes from, you know, what does that mean in your mind?
Because that's something that I came into today trying to figure out.
So what I think, and I'm not the only one.
There are lots of people that are concerned about this.
The rationale that's given is that the system is too big and too unwieldy and so forth.
For me, he wants to make the military more Christian, right?
I think he's one of those people who's like, well, yeah, yeah, yeah, religion is good, but we've gotten carried away.
You're talking about six all the time, or you're talking about, I don't know, pagans or Wiccans or whatever, whatever groups are.
No, no, no, no.
Religion's about Christianity.
And why do I say that?
He didn't come out and say that.
He didn't say that explicitly.
But number one, that language he used about the chaplains is just super Christian language.
When he says, you have a sacred calling, so preach the truth.
Guess what?
Preaching, preaching is not a part of all religious traditions.
Not everybody in religious traditions preaches.
Like that's a really, really Christian conception of what religion is.
Be steadfast in your faith.
We've talked about this before.
Both of us are religious studies scholars.
And as all religious studies scholars know, and even though it surprises some people, we don't like the language of faith traditions because the concept of faith, the category of faith is a very Christian concept that then gets kind of exported and imposed on to other religious traditions where it just doesn't kind of fit.
Shepherd the flock entrusted to you.
Chaplains are not pastors.
They play a role, but I think every chaplain I've ever talked to would say, I'm not a pastor.
I'm a chaplain.
Like this is a different thing.
My role is different.
It's just so Christian, the language of that.
And I would argue pretty Protestant as well.
So his articulation of what chaplains do sounds really Christian.
And for me, this reduction of faith coding, instead of saying, you know what, we have a diverse group of service members.
And yeah, it's a clunky system, but we're going to have it because it reflects who our service members are.
And if we're serious about, if I'm Pete Hegseth and I'm serious about saying that spiritual health is as important as mental or physical health, then we need as many codes as we need.
We want to be inclusive and we want to validate and recognize who all of these service people are as individuals.
Then we need as many codes as we need to cover that.
What he's doing is saying we don't.
If you're not the right kind of religious person, you don't have a space in the military.
And we've, and so I would say that's why I'm interpreting it because of his language.
But we've also seen the thing where like he obviously has tried to get rid of anything that's seen as quote unquote DEI or woke within the military.
But he also reduced the number of exceptions for haircut requirements, the number of exceptions for facial hair requirements.
Some of those were sort of religious exemptions that the typically non-Western, non-European, non-Christian religious adherents, like perhaps Six and others, would have been able to kind of get a waiver and say, well, okay, like the facial hair can be allowed because it's a religious accommodation.
He's already cracked down on that.
So for me, tying it with the tattoos and everything else, Pete Hegseth wants a Christian crusader army.
And I see this as continuing to shape the military in that image.
That's the significance I attach to it.
Here's some of the language he used.
He said that the military had been infected by political correctness and secular humanism, and that the chaplaincy had been watered down to be nothing more than therapists focused on self-help, self-care.
And I guess what I want everyone to notice here, just going off of your analysis and reading these comments, is this is the Secretary of Defense explicitly stating that unless you have a certain religion in the military,
you will not be recognized, period.
And I think you just said that, but I just want everyone to sort of realize what's happening.
He is telling, secular humanism might be a bad word among certain evangelicals.
Humanism is a tradition.
There are humanist groups all over this country.
I have been part of them.
I have spoken to them.
There are great people who call themselves humanist.
And I can tell you there are humanists in our military who are serving, who have dedicated their lives to this country's armed forces.
And they are being told that the tradition they adhere to, their values, their morals, their ethics, their histories, their ideas about what it means to be a good person, are being characterized as nothing more than watered down self-help by our Secretary of Defense.
So I think that's number one, is that this is an, I mean, there to me is no other way to interpret what he's doing.
He is Christianizing the army.
Absolutely.
And I want to make two points.
One is there's a history here of this.
So let me just give you something that comes from the work of scholars like Duncan Williams in American Sutra, a really notable book.
Japanese American soldiers fought in World War II while their families were incarcerated back home.
And if you listen to the show, you know, I've talked about this.
I'm Japanese American.
This is all part of my family's history.
I had family members who were incarcerated in camps during World War II.
And my grandfather also was a codebreaker during World War II.
He was part of the armed services.
Now, the 442nd 100th Regiment was the most decorated, is the most decorated regiment in American history, per capita.
Per capita, in terms of the amount of people in that regiment, the medals and awards given to them, Purple Heart, Medal of Honor, so on.
You will not find, and I'm not exaggerating, I'm not being hyperbolic, you will not find a more decorated, armed, more decorated regiment in our armed services.
However, a lot of those guys were Buddhist And they did not have chaplains.
And it was really hard for them to get somebody in their military atmosphere who shared their religious tradition to help them through the overwhelming violence, destruction,
trauma of what they were going through.
They lost more men than almost any regiment in the war.
So if you think this doesn't matter, and you just, you're like, oh, who cares?
It's like, all right.
So do you care about sending our 19-year-olds to Iran on the ground?
Do you or not?
Do you think it's the greatest country on earth?
Do you think that, you know, as people like to say, all gave some, some gave all?
Do you?
Okay, that includes people that don't look like you.
It includes people that don't worship Jesus.
Do you still care or not?
Do they matter?
Yes or no?
And I think that's what he's saying.
I want to know if he thinks they matter or not.
And just back around, right?
I talked about the language he used.
You have a sacred calling.
Preach the truth.
Be steadfast in your faith.
Shepherd the flock and trust you.
None of those are Buddhist concepts.
None of those are visions of religion.
Now, if you grew up in church, if you're a white American who grew up going to church or maybe your grandparents did, even if you didn't, but you got dragged to it sometimes or something, that may be the vision of religion that you have.
But to your point, Buddhism is not a fringe tradition.
It's not small.
It's not unknown.
It's as American as anything else because people served and died and fought expressing that tradition.
It doesn't fit that description.
That description is not what a Buddhist monk does.
It's not what a guru does.
It's not what those who help guide in, say, meditative or mindfulness practices.
It's not what they do.
And that just reflects it, the absolute, at best, deafness to difference.
At worst, and this is where I think Hegseth is, the active erasure of difference.
And I think even better yet, I think Hegseth would love it if people left the military over this.
I think that's what he would love.
He'd love for people to just be forced out to be like, well, there's no place for us.
Like, I'm going to leave.
He'd be like, cool, great.
You're right.
There's no place for you.
But I think it just reflects exactly that point, even in the language he uses.
I think many Americans who maybe don't know better, they might say, well, that sounds fine.
Like, that's just religion that he's describing.
It's not just religion he's describing.
It's Christianity that he's describing.
So I think one takeaway for people here is that what Pete Hegseth has done for the military is enact the Christian nationalist vision for society that so many others want to see across American life.
And so what he's doing here is Christianizing and saying, you know, in essence, we're not going to recognize other religious traditions.
So this is about preaching and calling and all the words you've just used.
It's not about other things.
It's not about, oh, you're a little therapy.
No, we're not doing that.
Sorry.
Okay.
So this in conjunction with, let's just read from the ACLU, what's the ACLU say?
That, you know, this is Jillian Thomas writing a couple months ago that Pete Hegseth has done things like get rid of advisory committees and all kinds of different apparatus that make it possible for women and racial minorities to be part of the military.
Okay.
Among Hegseth's pronouncements was that each service will ensure that every requirement for every combat specialty, for every designated arms position, returns to the highest male standard only because this job is life or death.
Standards must be met and not just met at every level.
We should seek to exceed the standard, push the envelope.
If women can make it excellent, if not, it is what it is.
His directive puzzled military observers because all combat occupational specialties already impose gender-neutral physical requirements.
That's been the case since the early 90s.
He's done a lot of things, and I don't want to just go through them all today, but he's done a lot of things, like basically making it such that transgender folks cannot serve in the military.
The facial hair requirements may seem small, but for black men, for sick Americans, and so on, it is not a small thing.
It's a big thing.
I don't want to go through all that today.
What I want to say is you can look at all the evidence, and he wants a military that is male and Christian, and no one else to be recognized.
And last time I said that on the show, people like went for it.
They were like, you know, YouTube comments and everything else that are just like, no, you guys are lame.
I can't believe you'd say that.
But I would just say, just examine the evidence in total.
If we move on from this and not move on, but just go to like, you know, sort of related things.
Some of this came at the same time that Hegseth held a religious service at the Pentagon this week, which he's been doing.
And Brian Kaler is the one who's covering this doggedly.
So you should go follow Brian Kaler at Word and Way and everything he does and writes.
But he prayed for overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.
Grant this task force clear and righteous targets for violence.
Surround them as a shield.
Protect the innocent and blameless in their midst.
Make their arrows like those of a skilled warrior who returned not empty-handed.
Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation.
Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.
Preserve their lives, sharpen their resolve, and let justice be executed swiftly and without remorse, that evil may be driven back and wicked souls delivered to the eternal damnation prepared for them.
For the wicked flee when no one pursues, but the righteous are as bold as a lion.
We ask these things with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ, King over all kings.
And amen.
Amen.
And may the righteous be as bold as a lion.
May we pray such prayer for our men and women in harm's way right now to think that such Americans exist on our behalf, on behalf of the American people.
And that is certainly our prayer for them today.
Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation.
Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.
This, so, Dan, I know we could spend three hours on this.
Last week, we talked about Pete Hegseth's pastor, wink-wink with Josh Hames.
Like, oh, we hope that James Tyrico is crucified.
And then, but if not, well, let God stop him by any means possible.
Since then, the Daily Beast and the HuffPost and everyone else has written about that, but we talked about it last week.
This week, we have Hegseth himself praying for obliteration, for overwhelming destruction.
These are some of the words that are used here against those who deserve no mercy.
And I just want to point out that you can call this Christian, and I'm not going to say it's not Christian because obviously he is envisioning this as a Christian prayer, and that's what he's doing.
It's really hard to square this with the teachings of Jesus, as we've pointed out in previous episodes.
But even more than that, I don't think on this show you and I want to legislate what is Christian and what's biblical, whatever.
That's, you know.
What I do want to say is this man seems to be sadistic.
Like, he seems to enjoy death.
Like, that is all he talks about.
We mentioned this last week, and I'll throw it to you.
Lethality, this job is life and death.
And he also said this week, we negotiate with bombs.
That's a direct quote.
I'll get to that in a minute.
You can't negotiate with bombs, but when you use violence, you're not negotiating.
Anyway, whatever.
We'll talk about that in a second.
What do you make of this praying for destruction against those who deserve no mercy?
What does that say to you in conjunction with everything else we've seen over the last months?
A couple of points.
One, to echo, as you say, we're not here to sort of legislate what's real Christianity or not.
But I think it definitely shows who is Pete Hekseth's God.
What kind of God is this?
It's a God of violence.
It's a God of punishment.
It's a God of, it's clearly an American God.
You know, America is the force of righteousness.
And we've talked about this before.
That becomes sort of tautological.
In other words, whatever America does is okay because America is righteous.
It's not that America does certain things because it's righteous.
It's just we are going to assume that America is righteous.
So whatever we do must be good.
That's a certain kind of theology all by itself.
Whatever God does must be good because he's God.
And it's essentially mapping that onto America.
But I think it's this God of war, this God of violence, a God that revels in punishment.
And then about Hegseth himself, I think sadism is not a bad word for this.
Like he revels in violence.
I'm going to also be the one that says, yeah, but he loves it from a distance.
He's not the one who's going to have boots on the ground.
He's not the one who's going to be flying in the planes.
He's not the one who's going to be doing anything.
He's just gets to sit back and point all of what I think for him or his toy soldiers to go do things.
I promise whatever discussions they're having about what to do in Iran and potential escalation, I think Pete Hegseth is dying for boots on the ground.
He wants those Marines that are sort of like ready and ready to be deployed.
He wants the airborne forces that have been sort of sent over there, ready to deploy.
He wants them to be deployed because he wants death and destruction and violence.
He wants his crusader army.
And you map that onto it.
There is no kind of, for somebody like him, more symbolic nation than Islamic Iran against which to exert a kind of crusader war.
And that's what he thinks that this is.
And so reveling in violence, I think honestly thinking of the military as just these toys that he gets to deploy.
Like if anybody's ever known somebody who has like a shop full, like a garage full of tools, and like they're always just finding stuff to do because they want to use the tools.
Like they don't really have anything to do.
They're just like, oh, I'm going to go do like, why are you taking the bumper off your car?
Like, well, you know, I have this new tool that I can.
That's Hegseth, but with real lives and money and everything else.
And so I think, yeah, I think it's chilling.
I think it tells us who he is.
It tells us who his God is.
It tells us what his version of Christianity is.
It tells us what his conception, I guess, of peace is.
It's peace through destruction.
It's peace through eradicating your enemies.
It's peace through it's not diplomacy.
It's not peace-loving.
It's not approaching your enemies.
It's not building common ground.
It's none of those things.
It's the opposite of diplomacy.
I just, we're going to take a break and we can talk a little bit about the Crusader stuff and we can prove this to you.
You all can sit there and say, oh, is that what he really wants?
And we'll prove it.
I just want to say that I think that Hegseth's bloodlust Is representative, unfortunately, of a large portion of Moganation of Christian nationalism.
So, Dan, just hear me out, and I'm curious if you agree.
But my argument in American Caesar, my argument, even in preparing for war a couple years ago, is that democracy has not worked for white Christian nationalists since the 1960s, at least in their eyes.
They have sort of seen the fact that if we rely on votes and majorities, we don't get what we want.
And folks can be like, well, you got George W. Bush twice, and you got, you know, and yes, that's true.
But what they would tell you is, like, look, everything else has gone away.
Like, the country's less Christian.
Gay people can get married.
We had a black president, and he was communist, and he was Muslim, and he was woke.
And, you know, we had Joe Biden and the pandemic and all of this stuff.
And what I tried to argue in preparing for war, and I argue more explicitly in American Caesar, is like you don't have the majority.
So democracy becomes a problem.
And if democracy is a problem, then you have to use force.
You just have to use like, we will take it.
We will not vote about it.
We will not negotiate about it.
Okay.
What that means to me with Hegseth is that Hegseth represents a group of people that is like, it is time for violence.
It is time to kill and maim and bomb and just until people realize we're the ones who should be in charge, period.
There's no more time for talking.
There's no more time for negotiating.
There's no more time for voting.
There's no more time for persuading.
When Hegseth talks, I see this representative of folks for three and four decades who have just been like, yeah, it's time.
Like, why did they elect Donald Trump?
It's because what did they tell you from 2016 onward?
Oh, I didn't elect a pastor or a Sunday school teacher.
You know, they wanted somebody, and Sam Perry's been the one that really has talked about this.
They wanted somebody who would hurt the people they think need to get hurt.
And that would make the country Christian again.
It would make it godly again.
It would make it great again.
Hegseth to me is really the symbol of that.
I want to hurt who needs to be hurt.
What do you think about that?
Then we'll take a break and we'll come back and talk about the crusade stuff and fantastic.
I think it's accurate.
I think what you're saying is accurate.
And I think we've been saying it since 2016.
One of the people can go back and listen, like literally the first probably like five or six episodes that we did.
And we talked about these.
And I said at the time that Donald Trump was not something new.
He was sort of the id of the right.
It's like the sort of raw emotional sort of truth of what people had been feeling for a really long time.
And I don't think any of that has changed.
And I think the leadership of the MAGA movement, including Pete Hegseth, reflect and express that movement.
They express what is there.
So yes, I think that for every Hegseth, and people can point him and be like, well, yeah, but he's an extremist.
He's, you know, he's an exception.
I don't think he's an exception.
I think he's an illustration.
I think he's a dyed-in-the-wool, through and through Christian nationalist who just shows us what the Christian nationalists want and think.
And he happens to be Secretary of Defense.
But I think that for every Pete Hegset, there are probably a million Christian nationalists out there who think exactly the same things and who cheer every time he stands up and says something like this.
All right, let's take a break.
We'll come back and finish this and talk about taxes.
Be right back.
All right, Dan, here's Brian Kaler writing on March 22nd at a public witness.
Pete Hegseth's Bible, like his body, is stamped with two crusader tattoos.
So a lot of us have talked about this.
I went on PBS and talked about this before Trump was inaugurated the second time.
But he has Deus Volt, the words Deus Volt on his body.
He also has the Jerusalem cross.
What Brian is reporting for the first time is that he also has a Bible with those symbols on it.
So the Bible he was sworn in on has Deus Volt and the Jerusalem cross on it.
You can see this in the pictures that Brian has over at Public Witness.
The Jerusalem cross, also known as the Fivefold Cross, served as an emblem of the kingdom of Jerusalem, which was a medieval crusader state.
So, Dan, you know, it's like you've been saying crusader army.
We've been talking about how he wanted a Christian army that would fight against the Muslims and only men would be allowed to do.
It's kind of like this medieval version, you know, but how would we even know he's into that, Dan?
It's like kind of hard to know what a man's thinking, but I don't know.
He put the symbols on his body and then he was like, I need that on my Bible too.
Need that on my Bible too.
The phrase Deus Volt is Latin, for God wills it.
Also associated with the Crusades.
Supposedly uttered by Pope Urban II in 1095.
It was a chant for crusaders.
Hmm, Dan, this seems like evidence for your thesis.
It's also these symbols are also favored among white nationalists, especially the Jerusalem cross.
So there's the crossover appeal, Dan.
You know, you get the crusader callback from the medieval Christendom also win over the white nationalists.
It's just a win-win.
So Brian is reporting this.
No one else is reporting it, but it's just further evidence of everything we've talked about today.
Dan, this man had to go that far.
Do you remember being a young evangelical and being at church?
And like one of the coolest things was like, if you, if you could get a new Bible and your name was on it, you ever like, like, you know, you leave your Bible in church or in the chapel of camp and someone's like, hey, I found your Bible, dude.
And it's because your name was on it.
You know, that was fun, personalized Bible.
Well, Petey here has that.
It just happens to be white nationalist and crusader symbols on the front.
So if you think that praying for obliteration and destruction of those who do not deserve mercy is a accident, it seems like it is not.
Final comments on this and then take us into the text stuff that we need to know about.
Just the only comment with that.
I am old enough to remember after 9-11 and the fallout from that and when George W. Bush was sort of mobilizing things and so forth, people might remember that the word crusader or a crusade was used and it just caused this huge firestorm, this kind of notion.
And that was walked back and the idea was like, this is not a religious war of Christian America against the Islamic world or whatever.
I bring that up because when I say crusader, I use it advisedly.
It's because of this, as you're saying.
It's because this is not a guess.
It's not an attribution.
It's not just an epithet to level.
It's not name-calling to try to discredit somebody who just thinks something different than me.
It's a technical application of a term.
The guy views himself as a Christian crusader and he views America's army as a Christian crusader army.
And I think that that's explicit and it's there.
And I think this shows it.
Shifting out, and I want folks to stick with me because this is going to feel like a weird shift because we're just talking about Heg Seth and all of this stuff.
And then I came across an article this week and I'm, I don't know, it struck me strangely.
I'm interested in your thoughts, but it was an article that had nothing to do with Pete Hegseth, had nothing to do with Iran.
But it was about red states, so states controlled by Republicans.
And it was reported by Natalie Furdig at Politico.
The article was Trump Cuts Exacerbate Budget Fights in Red States.
Folks want to look that up.
And basically, it was about GOP-led states that are facing budget shortfalls because of Trump's one big beautiful bill, as all of the provisions of that sort of come into place.
And people probably know that lots of states link their own tax policies and spending policies and so forth to like federal policy.
So when federal policy changes, their state policies change and so on.
And she reported that it was costing some states as much as $450 million in added costs and lost tax revenue and forcing states to reduce budgets and cut services and so forth.
And the trick about this was, as I read this, and as you would expect, it was widely recognized as painful and hazardous for residents, right?
By the GOP legislators in these states, by governors, that this was causing real pain and problems for their constituents and their states.
They also recognized, they were interviewing people.
They recognized that the promised larger tax refunds don't kind of cover that gap.
And that's been the logic, one big beautiful bill.
People will get bigger tax refunds and everything will be better.
And so it doesn't matter that they don't have these things.
People have noted, number one, those tax refunds for most people are not going to cover the, like make up for what they might be losing in other services and so forth.
But just from a sort of strategic perspective, and I've made this point on this show and political strategists are starting to make it, that, yeah, a tax refund is nice in April, but people aren't going to feel that in September,
October when they come, when it comes time for midterms and so forth.
So if you're in the GOP, they're starting to have worries of being like, well, yeah, okay, like maybe they're going to get an extra grand or $1,200 or whatever in their tax refund, but what's that going to feel like in October?
It's going to be a distant memory and it's not going to change the fact that like they lost their SNAP benefits or their Medicaid eligibility or whatever else it is.
Okay.
But here's the trick.
The red states keep sticking with the cuts.
If somebody looks at this and says, wow, if all of this happens, like, and this is so bad and you recognize this and you keep talking about this electoral disaster you're coming up to and everything, like why do it?
Like you're not required to adopt federal tax cuts into state budgets.
There's no federal obligation to do that.
You can select what to adopt.
And some red states have made carve outs.
For example, a lot of them are not making tips tax-free or overtime.
That's like one provision that some red states aren't adopting.
Lots of blue states are just not taking any of these things on board.
And Trump has railed against this.
People can go back and look at the statements he made about Democrat-controlled states that are not popping on board with this.
So the thing that struck me as I read this and this article brought to mind was like, why do the red states stick with this?
Why do this?
Like you see that it's painful.
You yourself, red state legislator, red state budget officer, red state governor, you're saying, we don't like this.
This is hard.
These are hard cuts.
This is going to hurt real Americans, all of this.
So why do it?
And then I came across this statement, and this statement struck me, and I hope I can explain why.
This is from Idaho Senator Jim Guthrie.
So there's a state of Idaho GOP senator, Jim Guthrie.
And this is what he said.
He said, the right answer for a conservative is, yeah, I love tax cuts.
I always vote for tax cuts, whatever.
That's all great, but still, there's got to be some balance to it.
But as that language of like, you know, the right answer is tax cuts.
Always vote for the tax cuts.
What struck me about this is you get this dynamic where for people on the right and the GOP, tax cuts, they're not policy.
They're not a tool in a toolkit that we look at and we find that they're effective and they work and they do certain things that are important to us.
And so we're going to use those.
They're an article of faith.
And that's exactly how they operate.
That's what we hear there.
We're going to hurt people.
We know it might cost us the election.
We legitimately feel bad about this.
But hey, you know what?
We're conservatives.
And so tax cuts are an article of faith.
We don't have a choice.
The answer is always yes, even when they're self-evidently negative in what they do.
They're raising deficits.
They're hurting real people.
And then there was a budget chair.
I'm trying to, sorry, I lost my place in my notes.
Missouri GOP House budget chair said this.
He said, we're faced with hard decisions, but it is what it is.
What struck me about this, and let me try to like land this plane and throw it over to you, is this logic of, well, you know, we're just stuck with it is what it is.
It's the way it is.
We have tax cuts.
It's going to do these things.
What you going to do?
The trick is that they chose this.
It's an easy fix.
Just don't link your state budgets to federal tax policy.
It's all you have to do.
And what struck me about this, when I say it's an article of faith, I think I mean that very seriously is if we think about religiously, you and I were talking before the show, and you've spent a lot of time in these conversations.
I've spent time in these conversations.
I'll bet a lot of people listening have spent time in these conversations.
One of the reasons why some of us don't believe in maybe the evangelical God that we used to is somebody's like, yeah, God, God's in control of everything.
There's the article of faith.
God is in control.
You're like, oh, wow.
Okay.
But like the earthquakes, the tsunamis, the natural disasters, all that stuff, like that seems really bad.
Like you're saying like God, that's kind of God.
Well, yep, that's God.
It's hard to understand.
May be painful and awful, but that's God.
Okay, like childhood diseases, leukemia, childhood poverty, things like that.
Those are God too.
Yep, that's God.
You're like, oh.
Terrible people who benefit, I don't know, the Hitlers of the world, the Stalins, the awful people who slaughter millions and so forth.
Like, yep, that's God's will.
What's never considered there when you get a certain articulation of faith is maybe we need to rethink the question.
Or maybe we need to say, wow, like, okay, like maybe we need a better answer than God's in control of everything.
Maybe we need to rethink that.
But faith militates against it.
When you get a kind of faith that denies reality and cannot be moved and holds on to the truth of something, this is the same logic we see in the GOP.
And that's what struck me when they say, you know, well, what are you going to do?
It is what it is.
Ah, shucks.
We're sure sorry to hurt all those people.
And this is really bad.
We're losing millions of dollars in our state budget.
But, you know, hey, tax cuts, it's an article of faith.
And so this is what struck me.
When people ask me sometimes, how does, let's call it a religious way of thinking, a religious cognitive style, or how do certain cognitive styles or ways of approaching the world impact both what we think of as religion and what we think of as politics?
It struck me when I read this, and it really answers that question.
When people say, why would they do this?
They think that it's bad.
They think it's bad for the election.
They think it's bad policy, but they're still choosing to do it.
They said the quiet part out loud.
The answer is tax cuts.
Always and automatically, it is what it is, and so on.
So I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on that, if I'm stretching what you think.
So this is dogma, I think is what you're saying.
Tax cuts are dogma.
And, you know, as Jim Guthrie says, the right answer is we always vote for tax cuts.
And there's no consideration there.
When you give up critical thinking, I think what you're pointing at in the religious comparison you're making is when you give up critical thinking, when you give up any ability to question something, you've entered dogma or doctrine.
You have not entered in, well, dogma is a better word.
Rather than something that is a political ideology or a political foundation that at times might need to bend or be flexible or need to be considered, reconsidered, and so on.
If you're unwilling to reconsider something basically because it's an article of faith, then the religious comparison makes sense.
To me, this is something, Dan, that I have been thinking about a lot.
And I think will connect with stuff that folks are thinking about in terms of Iran, in terms of this country, in terms of the Trump administration.
And that's this.
Here's the holdover from the Republican Party from just call it Reagan till now.
And we can go back further, but just give me Reagan, okay?
The 1980s until now, Dan, taxes are bad.
We always vote against tax cuts.
Like when Jim Guthrie or anyone else says we always vote against taxes, we always vote against taxes.
We always vote for tax cuts.
That is Reagan orthodoxy, okay?
And what that does is in some sense, it makes the government smaller.
That's what they want to do, just in very basic terms.
Less taxes means the government can do less things.
It can do less things for healthcare, less things for roads, for infrastructure, for, I don't know, making sure we have enough air traffic controllers so planes, Air Canada planes, don't crash at LaGordia airport and people lose their lives.
I don't know.
That seems important.
Make sure we have enough money for schools and for everything.
Okay, great.
So less taxes means less government, means less government services, less ability to take care of kids and older folks and everyone else in our communities.
But nonetheless, they would tell you, well, that's better.
It's better for you to have more money in your pocket than for you to have, you know, tax, have to pay taxes to the bad, big, bad government.
Okay.
The interesting, and interesting is like a very benign word here thing about Trumpian orthodoxy is that it has abandoned everything about Reagan orthodoxy in this sense.
And I've been on this soapbox for two years now.
The new idea about conservatives is that government is not the problem.
It is the answer.
You need more government to fix all of the wayward children and the unruly women who need a spanking by daddy so that they will get back in line.
So you need more government.
You need the government to regulate more things.
You need the government to make it such that you have to obey.
Okay.
The government is going to be menacing your life, your bedroom, your love life, your sex life, everything about your religious life.
It has to be regulated by the government.
Otherwise, people get out of line.
But this leads to this weird paradox where the government is getting smaller.
So Dan, not only is it that we don't want to collect tax money, I think a lot of people are like, should I pay my taxes this year?
Because it doesn't seem like a good deal.
Not sure what I'm paying for anymore.
How many folks have been laid off?
300,000 federal workers laid off.
How many government services have been cut?
How many people have lost health care?
The government's getting smaller.
The government is losing its ability to do things that it did for its citizens in this country.
And yet the government is also getting bigger.
It's getting bigger because the government is taking more liberties with what it can do in your life.
Donald Trump and the very few people he has in charge are like, we can do whatever we want.
We have full lateral control.
And what this leads to, Dan, is something like an autocracy or a monarchy where the government's really small in terms of the amount of people who are employed by it, working for it, service members of it.
If you're not a Christian, get out of the military.
If you're a woman, if you're transgender, we may not want you here.
But it's also promising that it has control over more of your life.
And the only way that they can deliver on this model of government is force and coercion and authoritarianism because they don't have a government that functions.
And they also have whittled down the workforce to the point where they only have like, well, either do this or we'll just, we'll come get you.
We'll jail you.
We'll detain you.
We'll charge you.
We'll sue you.
I mean, how many people, like they're trying to sue Letitia James again?
They're trying, you know, there's, you know, that's all that is left, Dan.
And so the ability to actually serve the citizens is gone.
And I'll shut up here.
They don't want to serve you.
They don't care about you.
There's increasing signs that there's insider training going on with the Iran and the announcements Trump is making, which we haven't even talked about today.
They're stealing from you.
I'm not, you know, you mentioned Democratic strategists.
I'm not a Democratic campaign ad person.
I kind of wish I was, because here's the ad I would make.
They're stealing from you.
They're stealing your way of life.
They're stealing your health.
They're stealing your food.
They're stealing your money.
And they're giving it to themselves.
Period.
They're putting your life in danger.
They're putting the world in danger.
They are attacking other countries, destroying the global economy, making it such that there's an 8% increase on postal services from the USPS as we speak,
making it such so that your gas is like $1 and $2 more every time, making it such that your life is worse.
They are stealing from you, and they don't care about anything but themselves.
That's clear.
Off to you, and then we'll go to CPAC.
So maybe one point to reiterate, and we've talked about it before, is if you want to see the priorities of the government, look not just on what they say they're going to do, but like on where their priorities are.
So we have a government, as you say, that's shrinking in the sense of trying to serve the population.
We don't want to try to help people get health care.
We don't want to try to help people who can't find a job.
We don't want to any number of things, but we want lots of money for Iran.
The same government that's busy saying we don't have money for anything, we need to shrink, et cetera, is pestering Congress saying we need more money for Iran for the Iran conflict.
The same Pete Heg Seth, we'd circle back around warmonger Pete Heg Seth and Trump, who has always loved playing with the military and wants his parades.
And I think this is all just like a big parade to him.
I think all he wants to hear in the daily briefings is how much damage was done and how they have air superiority.
You have Trump at the word superiority.
As soon as you say it, he's like, I'm on.
For that, they want money.
For that, they want Congress to act.
For that, they're asking for funds, not to provide health care, not to give SNAP benefits, not to help people in need, not to help the people who voted for them and put them into office,
but to kill people across the world in a war that the U.S. started without any clear provocation from Iran.
So I think that's point number one when we talk about the priorities as well with the Article of Faith.
But coming back specifically to the Article of Faith or dogma, as you say, of the tax cuts, and I say this to students too.
Anytime somebody has like the same answer to every problem, like doesn't matter what the problem is, doesn't matter what the social issue is, doesn't matter, doesn't matter.
Like you know ahead of time what their answer is going to be and it is always the same answer.
That's a marker of dogma.
That's a marker when somebody is just asserting something as a matter of radical ideology or dogma and not, hey, we're looking for solutions or here's an idea that might work or this worked over here.
Maybe it'll work over here.
Yeah, maybe it won't, but maybe we should try it out.
Like, you know, it's not anything that's going to be based on empirical evidence.
It's not anything that's going to be based on discussion.
It's not anything that's going to be based on collaboration or deliberation.
It's not anything that recognizes that we are all fallible and what might seem like good ideas to us, maybe they won't work.
Maybe somebody else will have a better one.
Maybe we need to get over ourselves and be open to that.
Anytime you have a political party like the GOP, the two answers that are always right for them are deregulation and tax cuts.
Those two things.
How do we fix the environment?
Deregulation and tax cuts.
It'll just magically be fixed.
How do we fix the economy?
Deregulation and tax cuts.
How do we eradicate poverty?
Deregulation and tax cuts.
Man, what do we do about all the uninsured in America?
Deregulation and tax cuts.
That's dogma.
And I think it's a deep-seated style of thinking that absolutely dominates across the board in MAGA world and the structures built around it.
But when you deregulate economy, but you regulate social cultural life and morality, what you're saying is, is, oh, deregulate the economy so the few can have control of the economy.
So if you deregulate economy, deregulate economically, the few rise to the top.
This is how you get oligarchy.
But then when you regulate socially and morally, the oligarchy, then the few then tell everyone else what is good, what is right, what is moral, what is virtuous.
And all of a sudden, you have the Secretary of Defense saying, oh, unless you're this religion, you can't be a chaplain in this military because you're just a therapist and a secular humanist, and that's a bad word.
So I just want everyone to see what's at play here.
Like when they say deregulate, which they've been saying since Reagan, it's like get rid of regulations on us, but then we are going to regulate moral and cultural and religious life on you.
Women, you may not be able to vote.
You cannot get health care if you're a trans person.
You cannot get reproductive care if you're somebody who wants or needs that.
You cannot get basic health care because we just can't afford it.
Sorry.
Oh, yeah, we do need $100 billion for the war, but yes, we cannot afford health care for you.
On and things we've been talking about.
All right, let's take a break.
Right back.
Very briefly, Dan, Donald Trump skipped CPAC this year.
CPAC's happening.
And this may not seem like a big deal and we're not going to spend a ton of time on it.
But just real quick, this is notable because he's basically been a CPAC regular for like a decade.
And CPAC is usually a place for the hardcore MAGA folks to gather to wear all of the kitschy, Trumpian, American flaggy and weird gear that they've had and been ready to get out of the closet.
And it really usually becomes kind of a who's who of MA and a kind of like annual party, you know?
And Trump is skipping it.
And there's just all this footage of people at CPAC, people who are attending CPAC, basically saying, yeah, I don't agree with Iran.
I don't know why we're doing that.
Or the Republicans are going to get destroyed in the midterms because of Iran and other things.
And there's just every indication that Trump skipped CPAC because he doesn't want to get heckled over Iran.
Could be other things, but it is notable that he's not there.
We're almost out of time.
We can go to reasons for hope here in a second, but I just wanted to raise this and some of the clips from people that have been saying this stuff because I do think that this, you know, again, we've been debating on this show.
Is there a split in MAGA over Iran?
Well, you have MAGA people at CPAC.
Like they were willing to spend money and travel to Dallas to attend CPAC saying openly, oh yeah, Iran's a problem for us.
So again, I know we can go to some of that data that some folks like Fleischer and others are like, no, there's no split.
Data says it, end a story.
It's like, okay, yeah, I hear you.
But how does this change every week?
What's happening on the ground?
What are feelings at places at like core MAGA gathering traditions?
What is the mood there?
And I think every piece of reporting I've seen from CPAC this year is like, yeah, the mood's a little, not as many people as I thought would be here.
Trump did not come.
Yeah, I'm worried about Iran.
It's not a good thing.
I mean, one woman said, yeah, he should send Baron.
Baron should probably go if they're going to send boots on the ground.
Like, there's people at CPAC worried about Iran.
So I don't know.
I just, I'm not sure I buy the idea that, oh, the numbers say there's no issue about Iran for MAGA and we should just put that baby to rest.
I just, I'm just not sure I buy it, but what do you think?
So a couple of thoughts.
I know that we have to keep it short, you know, or quick here, but one is, you know, the question of that data, everybody, including the people that are citing, every social scientist knows that you sometimes get people who are not, maybe not intentionally,
but they tell you what they think you want to hear or what they want to be true when surveyed.
So I suspect that one thing that might happen is you get people that when they're asked, you support, yes, I support MAGA.
I support Trump absolutely.
They're not going to come out and say, I've got concerns about this when they're talking to somebody, especially if they see them as part of some liberal elite and they're doing surveys and that kind of thing.
It's sort of like, I don't know, if you and your partner are arguing about something, but like your kid does something, you put up the united front and you're there and like, you know, whatever, even if maybe you don't, you're not maybe on the same page about exactly what to do about it or, you know, whatever, but you're going to put forward that united front.
I suspect that there is some bias in some of that polling data that is showing more unity or a kind of ideal of unity among some MAGA people to what they're actually feeling as this goes on.
I could be wrong, but I suspect that that could be a thing.
And just briefly, the other thing about CPAC, I think another reason or another thing that is revealed about Trump not going, Trump's done.
Trump is in this for Trump.
He's always been in this for Trump.
The language of a third presidential term, all that stuff has largely disappeared.
Nobody's been kind of talking about or floating that the way that they were, you know, even a couple of years ago.
I'm not saying the danger is gone, but like, you know, even he's not talking that way.
He's not trying to build a lasting coalition.
He's not trying to build lasting institutions.
He's not even trying to build the Republican Party to go past him.
He's done.
He got what he wanted out of this.
And CPAC's not useful to him anymore.
So I think that's another revelation about this.
I think he doesn't want to go and have to face real questions.
But I think also for him, he's got nothing to gain from it anymore.
He is the transactional person that he is.
And CPAC was good to him for 10 years.
It was necessary.
Now it's not.
So I think that that's another dynamic that I think is at play here.
All right.
Let's go to Reasons for Hope.
What do you got?
I have Democrat Emily Gregory in Florida flipped Florida State House seat.
This was notable, made a lot of news.
I think symbolically and realistically, it was a red district in a red state.
Trump won the district by 11 points.
It's his district.
It's the district where Mar-a-Lago is.
And this, for a lot of people, felt symbolic and really hopeful about the potential significance of what could happen in the midterms.
And also, you know, we've talked for months and months now, the string of wins by Democrats and special elections.
But this one, I think, really stung the GOP because of the symbolism of it being Trump's district.
And he mailed in his vote as he also tells everybody not to do mail-in voting.
Just throw that out.
It's hard.
It's hard to, you know, it's as, you know, Dan, as an American, I can tell you, it's hard to find time to vote when you golf like twice a week.
Down in Mar-a-Lago.
It's just hard to find the alley.
When are you not in Mar-a-Lago?
But to vote, he's like, I'm the president.
It was too hard to get down there.
I'm like, you're down there every weekend golfing.
Come on.
Yeah, well, golfing.
But, Dan, have you ever golfed?
I mean, it's 18 holes is like a four-hour commitment, man.
I mean, come on, give the guy a break.
You know, voting's important, but a man needs, you know, his time and he needs to be out there with Brett Favre and whatever other washed up athlete he can find to golf.
So, you know, I'll give him a break.
You know, taking a minute to go vote, that's a lot.
We didn't talk about this today.
I wish we had.
And I'm going to try to find ways to talk about this in the coming week.
But there's some really important lawsuits that were decided this week against Meta and Google and basically about addiction to social media.
And this is big to me.
And I'm not going to lie.
And again, I'm going to try to find ways to talk about this here, but this was a glimmer of hope for me against big tech and against the coming AI monsters and all of that.
And so, you know, you can read about this, but Meta lost, you know, Google lost.
And one of these lawsuits was brought by a young person who was like, you created something that is addictive.
And I really am going to sort of dig into this on the show over the next six months, but I'm really interested in the fact that we can do everything we can to make this society better.
And I think we're all focused on MAGA and we're all focused on Trump and all that.
And that makes sense.
But I'm increasingly convinced, Dan, that we're just not going to get anywhere until we regulate social media and we regulate AI.
Like I just, and some of that is like 15-year-olds.
And you're like, oh, yeah, these kids walking around with the phones in their hand.
Yeah.
Have y'all visited your mom and your grandma recently?
Because they have been addled by the algorithm.
And so that's a thing.
All right.
We'll get into that.
I promise.
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