Straight White American Jesus - Weekly Roundup: Project 2025 in Action: The Indictment of the SPLC
Aired: 2026-04-24
Duration: 01:03:11


=== Manufacturing White Supremacy (14:24) ===

[00:00:07]  Axis Mundi.
[00:00:14]  The Trump administration is indicting the group that historically helped to bring down the KKK.
[00:00:21]  It is doing so using a framework from Project 2025, an openly Christian nationalist document.
[00:00:29]  And the larger goal is to say that any group within the United States that opposes MAGA and Trump, the regime, the unbound executive, will be labeled a domestic terrorist organization and they will be.
[00:00:45]  Punished on that basis.
[00:00:48]  Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
[00:00:49]  This is the weekly roundup.
[00:00:51]  I'm Brad Onishi, author of American Caesar, founder of Axis Mundi Media.
[00:00:56]  Today, here with my co host.
[00:00:59]  I'm Dan Miller, Brad Onishi, and I am professor of religion and social thought at Lamart College.
[00:01:03]  Glad to be with you as always.
[00:01:06]  Losing my mind, as I think a lot of people are, as we look at what is going on in the world this week.
[00:01:11]  We're going to get into the indictment of the Southern Law Poverty Center and what that means going forward for the persecution of.
[00:01:19]  Political and nonprofit groups that the Trump regime does not like.
[00:01:23]  We'll then go to the redistricting story out of Virginia and the various dimensions of what's at play there, complete with some commentary from James Tallarico, the Senate candidate in Texas.
[00:01:37]  Finally, we'll get to Palantir's post on Twitter recently that really raised eyebrows for folks who are not necessarily familiar with Palantir and its what I would call a tech fascist outlook on Western civilization.
[00:01:52]  We'll touch on that, explain why those folks in the tech world are finding common cause with Christian nationalists and Christian supremacists.
[00:02:00]  Lots to cover.
[00:02:01]  Let's go.
[00:02:17]  This week, Dan, the Southern Law Poverty Center was indicted by Trump's DOJ, and the charges are a little confusing.
[00:02:26]  I'm going to play for you a clip of Todd Blanch, who took the place of Pam Bondi at the DOJ, explaining to a reporter what these are all about.
[00:02:38]  Of KKK and other groups to continue their operations?
[00:02:43]  Is that.
[00:02:44]  I'm not alleging it.
[00:02:45]  The grand jury returned an indictment that says that.
[00:02:48]  What the investigation found, according to the indictment that was returned today, is that they were paying.
[00:02:54]  So, Southern Poverty Law Center is raising money, asking folks to give them money to dismantle racism.
[00:03:00]  And over a very long period of time, they were using some of the money they raised from donors to pay to, they call them field, you know, basically to informants, for information, for access, to just pay them for certain things.
[00:03:17]  And so, what we have here, Dan. Is a situation where the Southern Law Poverty Center was paying people to get them access to white supremacist organizations like the KKK.
[00:03:31]  And according to Trump's DOJ, that's a crime.
[00:03:35]  I got more clips to play, but give us a summary so that there's some chance we might understand what this indictment is about.
[00:03:42]  And in a minute, we're going to link it to Project 2025 and Project Esther and the Christian nationalist dimensions of the whole ordeal.
[00:03:50]  The allegation, which comes back as an indictment, they basically alleged that the Southern Poverty Law Center, SPLC, defrauded donors by using millions of dollars to get information from paid informants inside extremist groups.
[00:04:04]  I understand it's a program that no longer functions.
[00:04:07]  I read that it was now defunct.
[00:04:08]  I don't know sort of how long that is.
[00:04:10]  And that's what we just heard Blanche talking about.
[00:04:13]  And the prosecutors apparently also alleged that some of that money was used by extremists to commit crimes, but they didn't provide any details about that.
[00:04:20]  That's just a claim, not something that they've actually said.
[00:04:23]  I think that that's important.
[00:04:24]  Another statement.
[00:04:25]  From Blanche, in line with what we saw, said that they were not dismantling these groups, that they were manufacturing the extremism that they purport to expose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.
[00:04:37]  So, the idea I think that they're trying to pitch to everybody is that the SPLC was essentially, it's like they were donating to these organizations at the same time that they're busy supposedly highlighting the evil things that they do and so forth.
[00:04:52]  So, they now face charges of wire fraud, bank fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering, a whole bunch of different things.
[00:04:59]  That's the presentation.
[00:05:02]  The sort of, as I understand it, reading legal experts and things like that, the nitty gritty is a little bit different.
[00:05:07]  Most legal experts are pretty skeptical of this.
[00:05:10]  We know you've already alluded to this.
[00:05:12]  We'll talk about it more.
[00:05:13]  But conservatives, especially in the MAGA regime, have long hated the SPLC.
[00:05:18]  They view them as a quote, you know, one of the woke organizations.
[00:05:22]  They've labeled them as extremists.
[00:05:24]  Some people have called them a terrorist organization.
[00:05:26]  They really, really hate them.
[00:05:27]  It's another case, clearly, of the Trump administration targeting a political foe.
[00:05:32]  And so, why do I say that?
[00:05:33]  So, here are some facts that Blanche is not going to say in his press conference.
[00:05:37]  Often the SPLC says the information that they would gain from these informants was passed on to law enforcement.
[00:05:44]  Until recently, under this administration, there was a pretty tight relationship between the FBI, for example, and the SPLC, who would pass on information about right wing extremist groups and white hate groups and so forth.
[00:05:55]  Under the Trump regime, they've kind of broken that off.
[00:05:58]  And so they've sort of created this opposition that wasn't there before.
[00:06:02]  I think the bigger thing is that legal experts have also noted that what's being described here.
[00:06:06]  Is exactly what law enforcement agencies do all the time.
[00:06:10]  They pay informants or otherwise incentivize informants within organizations to give them information, to give them access, to quote, get them to do certain things, all the stuff that he just listed in the press conference.
[00:06:23]  And one legal expert said this is grandstanding on the part of the Trump administration.
[00:06:27]  This is them identifying a group that they hate, that they view as opposed to conservatives.
[00:06:31]  And I think you have some clips to this effect.
[00:06:35]  They view this as a leftist, anti conservative, anti MAGA organization.
[00:06:40]  So, they're targeting them, and that essentially this is an abuse of the criminal law, trying to take it and apply it to this.
[00:06:46]  I think most observers think this is not going to amount to anything.
[00:06:51]  Getting an indictment is one thing, successfully prosecuting an organization, especially for doing exactly what law enforcement does, is another.
[00:07:02]  Sorry, go ahead.
[00:07:03]  I was just going to say, I think that's the big takeaways for this they're targeting this organization.
[00:07:09]  I have more we could say maybe after the clips about.
[00:07:13]  Why we think it's targeting and why it is that this is a weaponization, and why the right really, really opposes the SPLC and what they do so much.
[00:07:21]  Sorry, I got trigger happy with my clip.
[00:07:23]  So let me play a clip that backs up everything you just said here.
[00:07:26]  We've long heard this very laughable claim from the left, where the SPLC lies politically, that white supremacy is the greatest threat to our republic.
[00:07:36]  I mean, we've heard this for so long.
[00:07:37]  They've been pounding this into, you know, I think the identity of this country to make this country feel as though it is inherently racist, that it is bad because they want to.
[00:07:47]  I think they want to destroy the country from within.
[00:07:49]  But actually, the truth is that allegations of white supremacy, I think, are being largely manufactured to keep the people of this country quiet as their country and their culture is decimated by so many different things that we're doing in regards to the open borders in this country.
[00:08:07]  And just we're changing this country radically and culturally very fast in a way that makes Americans feel uncomfortable.
[00:08:13]  And then you label everybody white supremacist if they complain about it, it's going to make people shut up and just accept something very bad happening to them.
[00:08:22]  Yes.
[00:08:23]  And look, this is a great example of that because you have conservatives in this country who are afraid to speak their minds, afraid that if they're nominated for a judgeship, for example, that organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center will come out attacking them simply for their beliefs.
[00:08:39]  And so you have an effort, a successful effort at times, to muzzle and to keep quiet conservatives.
[00:08:48]  So let's just stop there.
[00:08:50]  Dan, going off of everything you just said, There is this sense that the Southern Poverty Law Center, I was saying it backwards earlier, my dyslexia strikes again, but the Southern Poverty Law Center is somehow, I mean, this is, let me run this by you and you tell me if this sounds right.
[00:09:07]  So Joyce Vance says The Justice Department wants us to believe that one of the nation's leading civil rights groups, the people who broke the Klan and continue to expose the white supremacist groups that crop up in its wake, is actually supporting racism and domestic terror.
[00:09:23]  So that's number one.
[00:09:24]  Number two, the idea is that they are propping the Southern Poverty Law Center, propping up the KKK, giving the KKK money so that there is racism in the country that the Southern Poverty Law Center can say, hey, everybody, look, racism.
[00:09:41]  And according to Todd Blanch in the clip we just saw, that means that anytime a judge or a conservative is nominated to a place of leadership, well, look out, here comes the Southern Poverty Law Center claiming racism again.
[00:09:54]  And this is the idea that we have in a A statement, Blanche said that the Southern Poverty Law Center is, quote, manufacturing racism to justify its existence.
[00:10:06]  So, this, you know, and I just want to say one more thing, and I'll throw it back to you the SPLC is the group that helped break the Klan.
[00:10:16]  They had people inside the Klan, they had something called the Klan Watch.
[00:10:20]  They were informants, they were spies, they helped to destroy the Klan in years past.
[00:10:28]  Like this is a resource that everyone from researchers to lawyers to people bringing lawsuits to nonprofit groups rely on to expose white supremacy and racism and prejudice.
[00:10:41]  They are folks who profile white supremacist pastors.
[00:10:44]  They have, if you can find their profiles, of people like Doug Wilson.
[00:10:48]  So to me, these attacks are clearly like we don't like the fact that you are rightly calling out people we've nominated, people who are leaders, people who are public officials.
[00:10:59]  As white supremacists, as white Christian nationalists, as people who support hate speech in the form of saying that gay people should be stoned to death or something else.
[00:11:08]  That's that.
[00:11:09]  I want to get to the Project 2025 dimensions, but what else do you feel like we need to get out here before we go forward?
[00:11:15]  Well, just a couple things.
[00:11:16]  So, first of all, if you're that they say they belong on the left, they're politically organized on the left.
[00:11:22]  Here's the thing the reason why people on the right think that the SPLC is on the left is because the right has become more and more radical in recent years and more and more open about that.
[00:11:32]  They are more and more embracing of open white supremacism and white nationalism and so forth.
[00:11:37]  So, when they see the Southern Poverty Law Center come out against white supremacy, they see themselves as the targets.
[00:11:44]  That's maybe the first thing to notice, right?
[00:11:46]  And in that clip we just played, notice that there's no effort there to say, That America isn't white supremacist or the conservatives aren't white supremacist.
[00:11:54]  It's sort of like, how dare they accuse us of this?
[00:11:56]  Number one.
[00:11:57]  Number two, what they're criticizing is what some people would call free speech.
[00:12:01]  You nominate somebody for a position, and critics come out and say, hey, do you know that they said this and did this?
[00:12:07]  And we don't like them for this reason and that reason.
[00:12:10]  And all of a sudden, they're clutching their pearls about how they're muzzling conservatives.
[00:12:16]  And so they're not.
[00:12:17]  Nope.
[00:12:17]  You can say whatever you want, you can be whoever you want, and they get to say what about you.
[00:12:22]  Facts about your life and so forth.
[00:12:24]  It's called free speech.
[00:12:25]  It's called fact checking.
[00:12:26]  It's called vetting.
[00:12:28]  It's called any number of different things.
[00:12:29]  So, you know, the people who like to decry so called cancel culture are trying to pull the ultimate card to cancel the SPLC here.
[00:12:38]  But I think what it really shows to me is that normalization of how radicalized contemporary conservatives are that they can't even pretend to rally around the cause of rooting out white supremacy.
[00:12:51]  They have to be like, no, what?
[00:12:53]  You say white supremacy, you're attacking American history.
[00:12:55]  It's like they acknowledge.
[00:12:58]  That it's central to American history.
[00:13:00]  We just don't want to talk about it anymore.
[00:13:01]  And I think that that's really significant because it shows to me how radicalized contemporary American conservatism and the MAGA movement really are.
[00:13:11]  The National Review's Dan McLaughlin described the indictment as, quote, richly deserved humiliation and comeuppance for one of the most toxic organizations in American politics and, quote, objectively hilarious.
[00:13:24]  Once again, Dan, there's this sense that, like, the goal is to humiliate.
[00:13:28]  The goal is to attack enemies.
[00:13:30]  The goal is not to root out actual crime or actual fraud or actual anything else.
[00:13:36]  The National Review is basically like, oh, this is great because look how humiliated they are.
[00:13:41]  Oh, those smart mouth people are getting their comeuppance.
[00:13:45]  Yay, this is awesome.
[00:13:46]  It's not about justice.
[00:13:48]  It's not about rectifying the sins of our past.
[00:13:50]  It's not about making sure that all Americans have better lives.
[00:13:54]  The GOP never treads in those waters.
[00:13:57]  It is never about making your life better.
[00:14:00]  Making your kids more healthy, about giving you more opportunity, putting more money in your bank account.
[00:14:05]  It's always just, we're going to steal from you while we distract you with resentment politics, grievance, revenge fantasies, and the promise to bully and humiliate anyone who's ever stood against us.
[00:14:20]  So that's our political party at the moment.
[00:14:22]  We've traced it for 10 years, but it's fully here.
[00:14:26]  Now, the point I want to make just before we kind of move on from this story is that.

=== The Secret MAGA Network (09:28) ===

[00:14:31]  We have talked in several episodes about how the Trump administration's efforts to attack domestic groups, nonprofits, political organizations, to label them as Antifa, to label them as terrorist organizations, domestic terror organizations.
[00:14:49]  It comes from a memorandum that was released last year, and that's NSPM7.
[00:14:56]  And Barry Trachtenberg, writing on Substack, puts it this way The memorandum casts a wide net by identifying a wide swath of Previously predicted criticisms of American policy, capitalism, Christian nationalism, and fascism as potential threats to U.S. security.
[00:15:11]  This language reveals the government's effort to construct a political category of terrorism so broad that it can encompass nearly any form of progressive or left aligned civil society work.
[00:15:23]  This was something that came out of the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the attempt to label anybody who said anything about that as Antifa.
[00:15:33]  And the whole Mythical notion that it was an organized network of domestic terrorists who were able to not only perpetrate the assassination of Charlie Kirk, but have been able to perpetrate all kinds of violence across the country in organized and planned and strategic ways for decades.
[00:15:52]  But what Trachtenberg points out, and what we've pointed out twice before on this show in episodes, and which somebody in our Discord and somebody in our community, Dawson, doggedly points out in their research, that this memorandum.
[00:16:05]  About attacking Antifa and domestic groups as domestic terrorists was foreshadowed in Project Esther.
[00:16:14]  Now, if you don't remember Project Esther, Project Esther was the addendum to Project 2025.
[00:16:20]  Project Esther is focused on anti Semitism, and it basically says anyone who criticizes Israel should be labeled a domestic terrorist group.
[00:16:32]  That is Project Esther's approach that any group that says they're not standing with the United States.
[00:16:39]  In and for Israel is anti Semitic, and they're part of a Hamas terrorist secret network, the Hamas secret network, and therefore they should be arrested, punished, put in jail, so on and so forth.
[00:16:53]  What has happened in the wake of Charlie Kirk's murder is the framework outlined in Project Esther, which is really an addendum to Project 2025, has been aimed at any organization that threatens the Trump regime, that criticizes.
[00:17:10]  MAGA and Trump on the basis of things like white supremacy, xenophobia, hate speech, so on and so forth, Christian nationalism, et cetera.
[00:17:21]  And so, what happens to me with everything that we see in this indictment is if we break it down to its clearest parts, the Trump administration is indicting the group that historically helped to bring down the KKK.
[00:17:40]  It is doing so using a framework from Project 2025, an openly Christian nationalist document.
[00:17:48]  And the larger goal is to say that any group within the United States that opposes MAGA and Trump, the regime, the unbound executive, will be labeled a domestic terrorist organization and they will be punished on that basis.
[00:18:06]  And you're like, well, that seems crazy, right, Brad?
[00:18:09]  Well, do you remember just a couple of weeks ago when Trump said that now that Iran has been defeated, the only folks left that we need to get are the Democratic Party and the American left, basically half the country?
[00:18:22]  He said it himself.
[00:18:23]  So I don't want to miss the religious and Christian nationalist dimensions of the SLPC, the SPLC, dyslexia again, SPLC indictment and the ways that it follows along a playbook that was given to the Trump administration from the Heritage Foundation in and through Project 2025.
[00:18:41]  Thoughts on this one, Dan?
[00:18:43]  I think all that's accurate.
[00:18:44]  And the kind of expanding of these definitions of a national security concern to cover really any kind of speech, any kind of activity, any kind of thing that is critical of the administration.
[00:18:58]  I think it'll be interesting watching as we go forward with this.
[00:19:01]  People like to make a big deal about getting an indictment.
[00:19:03]  I think anybody who knows anything about the American legal system knows that what's presented to grand juries is very limited, it's a low burden of proof.
[00:19:14]  There's no sort of.
[00:19:15]  Cross examination and things like that.
[00:19:16]  So, the point is, getting an indictment is one thing, supporting it in court is another.
[00:19:21]  And so, it'll be interesting to watch this.
[00:19:22]  I don't think this is going to go anywhere.
[00:19:25]  I wouldn't be surprised if you wind up having the government actually drop this because I think at some point, some judge somewhere is going to say, Hey, by the way, if you win on this, you might be cutting the legs out from under law enforcement.
[00:19:38]  You might make it so the law enforcement is not allowed to do these things.
[00:19:41]  If you're really going to like push this and argue it, it's only going to be a matter of time before somebody says, Hey, you're using taxpayer dollars to support.
[00:19:48]  Criminal organizations, how can you do that?
[00:19:50]  And whatever, and they may pull the thing because they're like, Oh, well, we can't take that tool away from you know every law enforcement agency there is who puts people undercover who do what, who participate in these organizations.
[00:20:02]  And yes, there are crimes committed while they are there, they're not actively doing it, but they're sort of pretending to be part of the organization or getting information.
[00:20:10]  All of those things, I think it'll be interesting to see how much of this is you know the red meat to the MAGA crowd, the gloating.
[00:20:19]  The look what we did versus any lasting impact.
[00:20:21]  And I think one last piece of this is a thing other people have noted I don't think this is going to hurt the SPLC in any way.
[00:20:29]  I imagine that their fundraising is going to skyrocket now in the near term.
[00:20:34]  I wouldn't be surprised if there's a defense fund that more than covers the costs of this.
[00:20:39]  I think it's going to make them more and more visible.
[00:20:42]  I think it's actually going to aid their work in the long term.
[00:20:45]  I think this is going to wind up being another short term.
[00:20:49]  Kind of win for the Trump administration.
[00:20:51]  It can show that we're going after the enemies of MAGA, whatever.
[00:20:55]  But I think long term, this is going to prove to be another really poorly calculated move on the part of the Trump administration.
[00:21:01]  It illustrates everything you're talking about, but I think that strategically, I think it was a real stretch.
[00:21:07]  And I think that's what we're going to see long term as it plays out.
[00:21:11]  Well, you're already seeing so many organizations come out in support of the SPLC.
[00:21:17]  That's number one.
[00:21:18]  I agree.
[00:21:19]  So I think one of the ways to interpret this is like, as you say, getting an indictment is one thing.
[00:21:24]  One of the ways that I've been interpreting Trump here for the last however long is that he bullies, and if he wins, he wins.
[00:21:32]  And if you back down, he just is going to try to humiliate you and destroy you.
[00:21:36]  And if you don't, and it takes longer than he thought, and it's a little more complicated than he wished, and it requires strategy and implementation and nuance and a little negotiation back and forth, outflank you, do it this way, do it.
[00:21:51]  He just finds someone else to bully.
[00:21:53]  He just gets, he goes somewhere else and bullies someone else.
[00:21:56]  We saw this with the universities.
[00:21:58]  He tried to bully Harvard.
[00:21:59]  Harvard didn't back down.
[00:22:00]  He tried to bully Columbia.
[00:22:01]  Columbia did.
[00:22:02]  I mean, that's a really reductive telling of those histories.
[00:22:05]  But there are universities that really said, no, we're not going to back down.
[00:22:09]  And the courts, in the end, defended them, stood up, and they came out okay.
[00:22:17]  Others just gave in immediately.
[00:22:18]  And it was like, well, there you go.
[00:22:20]  You're trampled on now.
[00:22:21]  You've had states that did the same thing.
[00:22:23]  The law firms, everybody remembers him coming in, the law firms, and the law firms that gave in to him and donated.
[00:22:28]  However, many thousands of hours of pro bono work and all that stuff versus the law firms that fought him.
[00:22:33]  We're starting to see that pattern where those who stand up to Trump win in the long term.
[00:22:39]  He doesn't have the staying power to stay with it.
[00:22:41]  As you say, he's not playing 3D chess.
[00:22:43]  He's playing checkers.
[00:22:45]  When people don't just back down, we see it internationally.
[00:22:47]  We see it with Iran.
[00:22:48]  We see it with the trade war.
[00:22:50]  We see it over and over and over again.
[00:22:52]  I think that's the playbook that's emerging.
[00:22:54]  And I think that's what we're going to see here.
[00:22:55]  The SPLC is not going to back down.
[00:22:57]  They're going to fight this.
[00:22:58]  I think they're going to be successful fighting it.
[00:23:00]  It's going to be another case of Trump.
[00:23:03]  Looking like the playground bully who, like when he gets punched back, just moves on to the next target.
[00:23:08]  And the problem is his power is diminishing pretty regularly at this point with humiliation after humiliation.
[00:23:16]  Just one more comment on this.
[00:23:17]  I mean, I just want to remind everybody that if you think that this is not the playbook and if you think that this is, you know, any of this is exaggeration, this is an administration that wanted to charge Renee Good's wife after they shot and killed her in a car.
[00:23:33]  It's an administration that called Alex Pretty.
[00:23:37]  A domestic terrorist.
[00:23:40]  I mean, they shot citizens and then said they were the terrorists.
[00:23:44]  If you want to know what they're trying to do with the Southern Poverty Law Center in an indictment and organization, it's very clear to me what they're doing.
[00:23:52]  They shot an American citizen and then got on TV and said, That's a terrorist.
[00:23:56]  That's why they got shot.
[00:23:57]  That's what they want to do to anyone who stands up to them.

=== Gerrymandering as Bullying (13:24) ===

[00:23:59]  This is not the last time it's going to happen.
[00:24:01]  We're going to see ICE and DHS do this in another city.
[00:24:05]  We're going to see them try to do this to another university or another nonprofit.
[00:24:09]  And Minnesota and the Twin Cities stood up and said, Keep coming and give it a shot.
[00:24:17]  We're not backing down.
[00:24:18]  Other states and universities have done the same.
[00:24:21]  And when you do that, you realize there's so many of us and they are trying to fight on all of these fronts.
[00:24:28]  They got JD flying to Pakistan.
[00:24:30]  Oh, JD's back.
[00:24:31]  Never mind.
[00:24:31]  He didn't go.
[00:24:32]  They've got, you know, Greg Bavino's fired and now he's upset.
[00:24:36]  Oh, look, Pam Bondi's gone.
[00:24:37]  Oh, look at this.
[00:24:38]  Kash Patel's like in a lawsuit because they say he's drunk all the time at work.
[00:24:43]  They.
[00:24:44]  Are trying to cover too many bases.
[00:24:46]  And so when you give in, you're playing right into their hands.
[00:24:49]  And when you don't, you realize we have power.
[00:24:52]  We have a chance here to not give in to this administration.
[00:24:56]  All right, let's take a break, come back, talk about the VA redistricting and why it matters.
[00:25:03]  And then we'll go to Palantir and tech fascism.
[00:25:06]  Just a great Friday.
[00:25:07]  We'll be right back.
[00:25:09]  All right, Dan, redistricting passes in VA.
[00:25:12]  This may seem, you know, like a minor story, a major story.
[00:25:16]  I don't know how you feel about it.
[00:25:17]  I have some thoughts about why I think it's important and what it means, but I'll let you take the first crack.
[00:25:23]  What's going on with Virginia and what is the importance of it?
[00:25:26]  Yes, a little bit of background, and I do think it's important.
[00:25:28]  Virginia voters did approve a redistricting measure that would shift up to four House districts away from the GOP in Virginia.
[00:25:35]  Now, as we speak, it's on hold.
[00:25:38]  State judge blocked the certification of the results.
[00:25:40]  And there have been some complications there.
[00:25:43]  The Virginia Supreme Court had ruled that the state could move forward with the vote, but didn't rule on the underlying legal issues.
[00:25:49]  And so we're waiting for all of that to be sorted out.
[00:25:52]  I think most observers think that eventually this will go forward.
[00:25:55]  As people know, there's been this redistricting war.
[00:25:57]  Red states started it, blue states responded.
[00:26:00]  All of those state by state actions have been challenged in court.
[00:26:03]  None of them have been sort of blocked so far.
[00:26:06]  And the two that made it to the Supreme Court or sort of came before the court in Texas and California.
[00:26:11]  SCOTUS declined to sort of block either one of those.
[00:26:15]  I think most people think that this will go forward.
[00:26:17]  So let's say that it stands, and this is why I think it's significant.
[00:26:21]  It's the latest move in a battle that Trump started.
[00:26:24]  He very publicly urged GOP controlled states to undertake mid decade redistricting.
[00:26:30]  In other words, to sort of states periodically go and evaluate their redistricting and look at gerrymandering and all of that.
[00:26:36]  He very, very clearly, openly, explicitly said Republicans need to do this now.
[00:26:41]  Don't wait till the end of the decade.
[00:26:42]  Don't do it on your normal schedule.
[00:26:43]  Do it now so we can have a better chance of holding the House.
[00:26:46]  For the midterms.
[00:26:48]  I don't know if he thought the blue states wouldn't respond or exactly what happened, but everybody knows that California in particular responded.
[00:26:57]  And so you've had this kind of knock on effect.
[00:26:59]  The long and short of it is this that now, because of Virginia, Trump's redistricting war appears to have backfired.
[00:27:06]  Republicans now, as the count stands, will be favored in fewer house races than if the redistricting battles had never taken place.
[00:27:14]  Now, we also know that Florida is looking at this, and DeSantis says that they're going to do redistricting.
[00:27:19]  But a lot of GOP operatives and politicians are really nervous about that because, number one, there are things in the Florida Constitution that make that difficult.
[00:27:27]  This is the last chance before the midterms.
[00:27:30]  But we just saw recently elections in Florida that flipped seats.
[00:27:34]  And a lot of GOP operatives think that this could backfire in Florida.
[00:27:37]  It's not clear.
[00:27:38]  They don't have good population numbers to work with.
[00:27:39]  They're not even sure exactly how to draw the districts and so forth.
[00:27:43]  A lot of the GOP are at this point saying we need to stop.
[00:27:47]  This has backfired.
[00:27:48]  This has turned into more of a liability in a midterm cycle where we were already facing significant headwinds.
[00:27:54]  If stuff in Iran wasn't going on, if the economy wasn't going the way that it was, if you didn't have the redistricting, Republicans would still be at a disadvantage just because the party in power usually struggles in midterm elections.
[00:28:07]  You add all of those things on, this has become yet another significant issue.
[00:28:11]  So I think it's really significant for a number of reasons.
[00:28:14]  One is that I think Republicans started it.
[00:28:18]  I wish gerrymandering wasn't a thing.
[00:28:19]  I think it's ridiculous.
[00:28:20]  I think it's abhorrent.
[00:28:21]  I think it's terrible.
[00:28:23]  But the GOP has used this strategy for a long time.
[00:28:25]  And in my view, Democrats finally had to respond in kind and have.
[00:28:31]  And this is another example, I think, of a policy and a plan that Trump had trying to bully things, trying to take an election instead of having to win one that appears right now to be backfiring.
[00:28:44]  Last point, predictably, of course, Trump said that it was a rigged election.
[00:28:49]  I don't know if anybody's even listening to that.
[00:28:50]  Anymore at this point, when Trump says something like that about this, I understand the sort of national discourse about that.
[00:28:58]  But at this point, I think Trump just sounds like the boy who cried wolf.
[00:29:01]  Every election predictably says, oh, it was rigged.
[00:29:04]  And I think at this point, people just yawn and move on.
[00:29:06]  So I think it's significant.
[00:29:08]  I think it's interesting that it shows really a backfire and a sort of self inflicted wound by the Trump administration.
[00:29:16]  But I think that's where it stands right now Democrats have apparently come out on top in the redistricting wars.
[00:29:23]  I think that this is a moment, I think, to comment on what we need from what would be an opposition party.
[00:29:34]  And for, you know, in many cases, it doesn't feel like one, especially given the leadership of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries.
[00:29:41]  But I think both of you and I, I think if we sat here, cup of tea, me and you sit down and, you know, talked, somebody said gerrymandering, and you and I would probably say, yeah, gerrymandering bad.
[00:29:54]  Don't gerrymander.
[00:29:55]  Bad.
[00:29:56]  We need a system where votes count as they should.
[00:29:59]  We don't need to be drawing these weird districts that look like misshapen.
[00:30:05]  You know, somebody spilled water on a glass table and oh, look at the shape.
[00:30:09]  Well, that's the House District 2.
[00:30:10]  Twitter Warshack test, right?
[00:30:13]  Yeah, ink blocks.
[00:30:14]  Yeah.
[00:30:15]  Jackson Pollock, whatever.
[00:30:16]  And that's bad.
[00:30:19]  But Brian Boytler had a good take this week that I think makes sense to me, which is this is one of those instances where Democrats realize that unless they do something that feels Not as it should be, that is fighting in a way that we're, yes, we're in the mud.
[00:30:34]  Yes, our hands are dirty.
[00:30:37]  Yes, we're doing things that are not ideal for any functioning democracy, but they did them in California.
[00:30:46]  They talked about, we can talk about other states, we can talk about Illinois, or today we're talking about Virginia, we can talk about New York.
[00:30:54]  This is what we have to have in this moment.
[00:30:56]  And I think going forward, I think someone like AOC has voiced this really well.
[00:31:01]  You can't give up this fight.
[00:31:03]  You have to fight to the point that, and Brian Boytler said this this week, that Republicans relearn the lesson of why gerrymandering is bad.
[00:31:13]  Like Republicans have played the game for how many years of we're going to play dirty, we're going to play tricky, we're going to play in ways that undermine democracy from, you know, going back to Newt Gingrich and the new millennium, all the way to the Tea Party and the absolute like, Blockade of Obama to Mitch McConnell and now the Trump administration in its second iteration.
[00:31:41]  It's basically like, oh, every time there's a chance for us to undermine process, undermine democracy, undermine good faith, we'll do it.
[00:31:48]  But then when you do it, Democrats are going to be like, oh, I thought you guys like democracy.
[00:31:52]  They decry it as a power grab and all the other language that they use when Democrats do it, when they're the ones who invented the game.
[00:31:59]  Yeah.
[00:32:01]  So you have to destroy them on the front of electoral politics.
[00:32:05]  You have to show them that actually, why don't we just have a situation where these things are drawn fairly by an independent commission and the party with the best ideas and the best platform will win?
[00:32:17]  How about that?
[00:32:19]  Here's James Tallarico saying that very thing a couple of months ago on Fox News.
[00:32:23]  You ready?
[00:32:28]  Change the rules for the second half so they can win the game.
[00:32:31]  All of us would be throwing food at the TV if that happened.
[00:32:35]  We don't accept cheating in our politics.
[00:32:37]  We don't accept cheating in our relationships.
[00:32:39]  We shouldn't accept cheating in our elections.
[00:32:41]  You've done the same thing as us, and we are going to, by the way, if you do it, we're going to ratchet it up even more, in the words of Gavin Newsom.
[00:32:47]  My party has never gerrymandered in the middle of the decade at the request of the president of the United States, nor would we.
[00:32:52]  The only way this is going to happen in blue states is if.
[00:32:55]  Texas executes this power grab.
[00:32:57]  You mentioned Massachusetts.
[00:32:58]  Do you know the party of the governor that signed that map into law?
[00:33:01]  He was a Republican.
[00:33:03]  It was a Republican governor that signed that map into law.
[00:33:05]  So I just want to be clear with our facts, and I don't want to muddy the waters.
[00:33:09]  All of us, whether we're Democrats, independents, or Republicans, we should stand up to politicians who don't want to face accountability at the ballot box.
[00:33:17]  That's exactly what's happening here.
[00:33:18]  And I asked you if Republican policies are popular, why do they need to redraw these maps?
[00:33:23]  Why can't they just run on their policies?
[00:33:26]  I'm getting wrapped on time.
[00:33:28]  I'm enjoying this conversation.
[00:33:29]  I want to let it go on.
[00:33:32]  Yeah, he's enjoying the conversation.
[00:33:34]  You can see how much he's enjoying the conversation.
[00:33:39]  If Republicans are so popular, why don't they just run in a race that is fair?
[00:33:44]  You know what?
[00:33:44]  I got in my earpiece here.
[00:33:46]  Wait a minute.
[00:33:47]  We've got a new winner.
[00:33:48]  Best dog in show.
[00:33:49]  Yeah, we're going to have to go to that clip now.
[00:33:51]  It's like you're on a date that's not going well.
[00:33:53]  You're like, oh, it's on silent.
[00:33:56]  I just got a call.
[00:33:56]  I'm going to go take this now.
[00:33:58]  I'm going to have to go to the bathroom and just start sprinting.
[00:34:01]  Crawl out the window.
[00:34:02]  I always told my students, I was like, let's go over the three different words imminent.
[00:34:10]  We have imminent, imminent, and eminent.
[00:34:13]  And we would go over it.
[00:34:14]  I'd be like, eminent, hella powerful.
[00:34:16]  Imminent, hella soon.
[00:34:18]  Imminent, hella close.
[00:34:19]  That's how I did the three imminents.
[00:34:21]  And then I was like, look, if you go on a date with somebody and it's like the third date and you think you like them, you need to ask them about, like, you need to use.
[00:34:30]  A sentence that puts them in a situation where they need to use the word imminent correctly.
[00:34:34]  And if they get it wrong, you just say, Hey, excuse me, I have to go to the bathroom.
[00:34:39]  I have explosive diarrhea.
[00:34:40]  And then you just never come back.
[00:34:42]  That's what you do.
[00:34:43]  That's how you know that that's not your life partner.
[00:34:45]  All right.
[00:34:46]  This is a freebie.
[00:34:47]  None of you paid for this, but I'm giving it to you anyway.
[00:34:49]  You do that with lots of things like tenant and tenant and all different kinds of words.
[00:34:53]  Yeah.
[00:34:54]  Yeah.
[00:34:54]  There we go.
[00:34:55]  Effect.
[00:34:57]  I'm going to put it out there.
[00:34:57]  Our next live thing could be a dating advice show.
[00:35:02]  Because clearly, we're the two experts on these things.
[00:35:04]  I'm sure, yes, this is really going to take us viral.
[00:35:08]  We will be, I'm sure the Netflix will call with a deal soon if we start giving out dating advice.
[00:35:14]  Back to Tallyrico, Dan.
[00:35:15]  He basically says, Look, you are now complaining that we're doing the thing you're doing and you're just hurt because you lost.
[00:35:23]  And he basically says, We should not accept cheating in any way.
[00:35:26]  And I think what the VA thing shows is something you've already said Trump's losing something he thought was a slam dunk.
[00:35:33]  He's like, Oh, we got extra seats in Texas.
[00:35:36]  Tell Greg Abbott and Dan Pachter to get on it.
[00:35:39]  Democrats aren't going to do a damn thing.
[00:35:41]  This is a way for me to get ahead.
[00:35:42]  What happens?
[00:35:44]  California, Virginia, New York, they're all like, no, we're not having that.
[00:35:48]  And now it's sort of, what's the recourse?
[00:35:50]  What are they going to do?
[00:35:51]  And if you listen to districting experts and people on the ground who do have voter data, they're like, there's going to be districts that were like plus 11 that are like reshuffled into like Trump plus three.
[00:36:04]  And Trump plus three is not safe.
[00:36:06]  Even in places like Nebraska or in Georgia or wherever.
[00:36:10]  So, if you do this in Florida, if you do this in Texas, you may not come out with the outcome you're thinking you will.
[00:36:18]  Anyway, further thoughts on Virginia redistricting, and then we can go to Palantir and tech fascism.
[00:36:25]  I will just, as a general rule, point out as well.
[00:36:28]  And I think this is also, you know, this is dirty.
[00:36:32]  This is not ideal.
[00:36:34]  This is not, I think, what anybody thinks, as you say, a functioning democracy should be.
[00:36:38]  There have been red states that refuse to do this.
[00:36:40]  There were blue states that refused to do this.
[00:36:41]  And so there have been states who, at the urging of Trump, stood up to him and said no.
[00:36:45]  And there have been blue states where they said, we're not going to do this.
[00:36:48]  And so I think it was necessary.
[00:36:49]  But I also, at the same time, as contradictory as that may seem, I view it as, I don't know, a sign of hope that you also have states that chose not to do this, that were like, we're not going to go down that path.
[00:37:01]  That's just not something we're going to do.
[00:37:03]  And so I think that that's just another piece of this that, I don't know, gives me some hope for the future that this doesn't have to be the only way that American democracy works.
[00:37:13]  All right, before we go to tech fascism, let's just combine our first two segments together, shall we, Dan, into a nice little bow here.
[00:37:21]  Let's tie a bow.

=== Defining True Americanism (05:34) ===

[00:37:23]  In the first part of this episode, we talked about the Southern Poverty Law Center and the claim by Todd Blanch that they are manufacturing racism in order to exist.
[00:37:32]  All right.
[00:37:33]  Okay.
[00:37:34]  Racism is a black flag operation.
[00:37:36]  It's a.
[00:37:36]  I just, yeah.
[00:37:38]  I'm just going to start a nonprofit, get in there with some friends, put it on the board how to manufacture racism, and then rake in the dollars.
[00:37:47]  Okay.
[00:37:48]  That's number one.
[00:37:49]  Number two is something that I think goes along with the gerrymandering situation, which is that.
[00:37:55]  When you gerrymander, you get weaker candidates winning because they don't have to face a fair fight.
[00:38:00]  So, someone like Mike Johnson, if you look at the history of Mike Johnson in Congress or in his state legislature in Louisiana, in Louisiana, there was an election or two where he ran unopposed.
[00:38:11]  Oftentimes, you're going to see people like Marjorie Taylor Greene get into Congress because her district is written in a certain way.
[00:38:18]  There's no good Democratic candidates.
[00:38:20]  Some of this is on the Democratic Party, needs to run more candidates and good candidates everywhere, but that's for another day.
[00:38:27]  But you will get people in Congress like Andy Ogles, who is somebody who talks like this.
[00:38:34]  And I just, this is for you, Todd Blanche.
[00:38:37]  If you think that the Southern Poverty Law Center needs to manufacture the racism, this one is for you.
[00:38:45]  Let's tee it up.
[00:38:47]  You ready?
[00:38:49]  We're not a melting pot.
[00:38:50]  This is not some giant fondue pot.
[00:38:52]  I like fondue, right?
[00:38:53]  But that's not what America is, right?
[00:38:56]  I like fondue.
[00:38:57]  Good one.
[00:38:57]  Put that on a shirt.
[00:38:58]  Oh, I like fondue.
[00:38:59]  Andy Ogles.
[00:39:00]  All right, Andy.
[00:39:01]  Good.
[00:39:01]  Good one, Andy.
[00:39:03]  How many times has Andy had fondue, do you think, Dan?
[00:39:06]  Okay.
[00:39:07]  Like, I just want a shirt with his face on it that says, I like fondue.
[00:39:11]  That's what I want.
[00:39:12]  I like tally marks, whatever.
[00:39:13]  The number of times he's ever had it.
[00:39:14]  Like, you just have those on there?
[00:39:15]  Yeah.
[00:39:17]  Yeah.
[00:39:17]  Okay.
[00:39:18]  Pow.
[00:39:19]  And so this is, and I understand what he was trying to say, but the delivery, I think, and ultimately his misunderstanding of who we are as a people.
[00:39:29]  If you want to be an American, you've got to earn it.
[00:39:32]  Right?
[00:39:32]  You've got to be part of our culture.
[00:39:34]  You've got to own and be a part of our heritage.
[00:39:37]  You have to want to build this country in the same way our founding fathers did.
[00:39:41]  And so if you're building temples or mosques and you're undermining Christianity, you're not assimilating.
[00:39:51]  No, it hasn't.
[00:39:54]  I'm getting it in my earpiece.
[00:39:55]  Todd Blanch called in.
[00:39:57]  He's saying Andy Ogles might be being paid by the Sovereign Poverty Law Center.
[00:40:01]  That's the only way he could be that racist.
[00:40:04]  I'm getting it in my earpiece.
[00:40:05]  Andy Ogles paid $500,000 last year by various nonprofits, hoping that he would, as a congressman, peddle racism so that they could rake in the money.
[00:40:15]  Yep.
[00:40:15]  Okay.
[00:40:15]  There it is.
[00:40:16]  Reactions to Andy Ogles, Dan, on the front in light of the SBLC indictment or the gerrymander thing.
[00:40:23]  People like him getting into Congress.
[00:40:25]  Just gonna say the mainstreaming of the radicalization.
[00:40:28]  There is a time, like, I am not the person, I think everybody who follows what we do or reads what I write or has ever, I don't know, I don't know if I have any students who listen or not, but if I do, has ever heard me talk, I'm not gonna be like, oh, American conservatives were never racist before.
[00:40:45]  Yes, of course they were.
[00:40:46]  Race has always been a sort of constituent part of the political life of this country.
[00:40:50]  But there was a time when those were the quiet parts.
[00:40:52]  Those were the times when you had the dog whistles and you pretended not to say that and you used carefully coded language.
[00:40:58]  And so on.
[00:40:59]  And it's just a prime example of the mainstreaming of it.
[00:41:02]  That's basically like, yeah, if you want to be an American, you don't just get to be an American.
[00:41:06]  You got to earn it.
[00:41:07]  You got to be Christian and you got to be white.
[00:41:09]  And that's, I mean, that's what it means.
[00:41:11]  Otherwise, we're just a messy fondue pot and you can't have that.
[00:41:15]  That's the mainstreaming of the radical positions.
[00:41:17]  That is why when something like the Southern Poverty Law Center, some group comes out and says, hey, white supremacy, that's why actual candidates and congresspeople on the right see themselves in that statement.
[00:41:30]  I mean, it illustrates it perfectly.
[00:41:32]  And the idea that somehow or another this is all made up by the SPLC is completely laughable and ludicrous.
[00:41:41]  First of all, Andy Ogles, you like fondue.
[00:41:43]  Well, I say to you, fondue.
[00:41:45]  Andy Ogles.
[00:41:47]  Okay.
[00:41:47]  That's number one.
[00:41:50]  Number two.
[00:41:51]  The t shirts just roll out.
[00:41:53]  The t shirt ideas just, they roll off the show.
[00:41:56]  Oh, God.
[00:41:57]  All right.
[00:41:59]  The second thing I think is like just when racists like him talk, you got to be part of our culture.
[00:42:04]  It's like, all right, Andy, well, whose culture is that?
[00:42:07]  Because you don't talk like me and I don't talk like you.
[00:42:09]  This country is 250 years old.
[00:42:11]  You've been talking about founding fathers, man.
[00:42:12]  There's been a lot of people coming and going since then.
[00:42:16]  What does our culture mean?
[00:42:17]  You don't get to define our culture.
[00:42:18]  It's not your country, it's our country.
[00:42:20]  There are 340 million of us.
[00:42:22]  And yeah, there's a Mayflower society and a Mayflower compact, and that's great.
[00:42:26]  But there's also so many people that have been in what is this country for so long.
[00:42:32]  People who were enslaved Africans, a third of whom were Muslim.
[00:42:36]  The people that built the railroads, a lot of those folks were Chinese and Japanese and Buddhist.
[00:42:41]  There have been Jewish folks.
[00:42:43]  There have been Italian folks.
[00:42:45]  There have been South Asian folks.
[00:42:48]  You don't get to just say, well, you got to be part of our culture.
[00:42:50]  Well, what does that even mean, dude?
[00:42:52]  Because I bet you we don't eat the same food at night.
[00:42:54]  You seem to be eating a lot of fondue.
[00:42:56]  I don't eat a lot of fondue.
[00:42:57]  I'm staying away from dairy.

=== Clash of Civilizations (16:39) ===

[00:42:58]  Okay, Andy?
[00:42:59]  But, you know, the idea that there's one monoculture is such a wet dream of the American right.
[00:43:06]  And it's why they don't like it when the Southern Poverty Law Center is on the attack and exposing them.
[00:43:13]  I'll shut up.
[00:43:13]  I just wanted to play this clip so that anybody who thinks about the manufacturing idea and the fact that there's a need to sort of add kindling on the part of like leftists and nonprofit groups to the racist fires in this country, they're doing just fine on their own without it.
[00:43:30]  So I will also point out, Ogles does not appear to have been muzzled.
[00:43:35]  Remember that, that the SPLC muzzling those on the right.
[00:43:38]  He seems to open his mouth and have plenty of stuff spill out.
[00:43:41]  He doesn't seem to be muzzled by the all powerful leftists at the SPLC the way that is being alleged by Todd Blanch.
[00:43:50]  Let me see who he's talking to in this clip.
[00:43:52]  Oh, it's Benny Johnson.
[00:43:53]  Remember Benny Johnson?
[00:43:54]  He spoke at Charlie Kirk's memorial.
[00:43:58]  So every time they tell you Antifa and a growing network of people who are trying to silence everyone and do domestic terrorism, the guy who spoke at Charlie Kirk's funeral.
[00:44:09]  Memorial.
[00:44:10]  Just interviewed the representative who said that unless you're a Christian and if you're building a mosque or a temple, you can't be American and you're not assimilating.
[00:44:18]  So keep that in mind about what they really want and who they really are.
[00:44:22]  Be right back.
[00:44:24]  Okay, Dan, let's talk about Palantir.
[00:44:26]  Palantir raised some eyebrows last week because they posted a kind of 22 point summary of the book, The Technological Republic by Alex Karp, the CEO, and his co writer, Zamiska, who Karp has said openly, Zamiska doesn't know anything.
[00:44:46]  You ever?
[00:44:48]  Karp has said in interviews that he's like, 90% of the book came from me.
[00:44:51]  Zamiska just kind of made it.
[00:44:53]  He wrote it down and he smoothed out some of the sentences.
[00:44:57]  So, if we ever write a book together, Dan, I hope we go in interviews and you're like, you know, 90% of this was me.
[00:45:02]  Onishi was in there kind of, you know, messing around with some syntax, but it was really me who had the genius to put this on the page.
[00:45:11]  It's an interesting collaboration, right?
[00:45:12]  Yeah.
[00:45:14]  If you're not familiar, Palantir is the surveillance company with hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts with the military and the U.S. government.
[00:45:22]  It was founded by Peter Thiel, among others, and he chose his law school friend, Alex Karp, to be its CEO.
[00:45:29]  Alex Karp likes to play the milquetoast centrist Democrat.
[00:45:35]  At least he used to.
[00:45:36]  Back in the Biden era and before, he often would sort of play the part of somebody who said, Well, I was, he's, his mother's black, his father's Jewish, I came from a communist household, lefty politics through and through.
[00:45:49]  It's a regular fondue pot.
[00:45:51]  Yeah.
[00:45:52]  I love that.
[00:45:52]  You know, we had fondue a lot at home, right?
[00:45:55]  And all kinds of European cheeses.
[00:45:57]  Okay.
[00:45:58]  You know, and so he often said that he donated to the Biden campaign in 2020.
[00:46:03]  He was the antithesis of Peter Thiel.
[00:46:05]  But to me, and the reason I'm so fired up about this is I write about this at length in American Caesar, my new book.
[00:46:12]  I had to read so much of his writing and his words and his interviews.
[00:46:17]  So there's a 22 point summary of the technological republic on Twitter.
[00:46:23]  And I'm just going to give you three points, Dan, and we can discuss.
[00:46:26]  Okay.
[00:46:29]  Point 20.
[00:46:30]  The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted.
[00:46:35]  The elite's intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.
[00:46:45]  Now, CARP has made an alliance with what I would call Western Christian supremacists.
[00:46:54]  I talk about civilizational populism a lot on this show.
[00:46:57]  Karp is a Western civilizational populist.
[00:47:00]  He's arguing that the West is superior to all other cultures.
[00:47:05]  And what he says in The Technological Republic is that we need to bring back religious orthodoxies and we need to get rid of things like pluralism.
[00:47:14]  And so when he says here, or at least the summary says here, the pervasive intolerance of religious belief, that works one way.
[00:47:21]  We need to bring back Christian civilizational rhetoric, the kind of rhetoric that someone like the JD, the Drizzler, Vance has always given us.
[00:47:28]  Andy Ogles is out here saying things that I think Carp was like, sure, he can talk.
[00:47:32]  Yeah, we need to be Christian and build churches.
[00:47:34]  Doug Wilson, everyone needs to go back to hearth and home, get back to the place where there's a little house on the prairie, women in long dresses, men telling everyone what to do.
[00:47:45]  But if you have a mosque or a temple, as Andy Ogles just said, well, you might be out of luck because that's not Western.
[00:47:53]  That's not Western.
[00:47:54]  So the intolerance of religious belief goes one way.
[00:47:57]  I can expand on that.
[00:47:58]  I can show you from Carp's writing. how he does this.
[00:48:02]  Karp is somebody who, if you read the Technological Republic from beginning to end, he says this a lot.
[00:48:10]  He quotes Roger Kimball, the right-wing critic and author who encourages Americans to take heart in the nobility of their way of life.
[00:48:19]  Karp calls the American left in this book a caged animal unable to offer an affirmative vision of a virtuous or moral life.
[00:48:27]  He quotes, among other people, Alan Bloom and Samuel Huntington.
[00:48:33]  Jack McCordick summarized the thoughts here as if there's a single pattern of thought that defines the technological republic, it is that of a wavering liberal hair splitting his way towards civilizational chauvinism.
[00:48:46]  To me, Dan, that's where all this is coming from.
[00:48:49]  I want to read you two more parts of the Palantir Manifesto that got posted.
[00:48:54]  But thoughts on point number 20 here from the post?
[00:48:59]  I think, I mean, you've picked up on it.
[00:49:01]  It's maybe one of those points that's so obvious that sometimes you're like, do I bother making it?
[00:49:07]  But then it keeps coming out.
[00:49:10]  Religion never means religion for these people, it never means religion.
[00:49:14]  It is a specific.
[00:49:15]  Articulation of Christianity.
[00:49:18]  And if you are not that, you are part of that, you know, religiously intolerant mass of people.
[00:49:24]  And I think that that's the real key because you get people who sort of fall for that language and they're like, well, yeah, I believe in religious freedom and people should be able to practice their religion.
[00:49:34]  And religion's really important to lots of people.
[00:49:36]  And lots of Americans are really, you know, all of which is true.
[00:49:39]  All of which is real and true.
[00:49:40]  That's not what they're saying.
[00:49:42]  It's always coded language, the religious freedom rhetoric and just the language of religion.
[00:49:47]  They don't mean religion, they mean their form of.
[00:49:49]  Christianity and everything else is a foreign import.
[00:49:54]  It's a foreign import that needs to be driven out.
[00:49:56]  And I think you just see this sort of over and over and over and over again.
[00:50:02]  And as I say, for those who are kind of aware of this, it can feel so obvious that we stop pointing it out.
[00:50:08]  But I think we can't afford to stop pointing it out because it still becomes a part of the rhetoric that draws in so many people.
[00:50:16]  The pervasive intolerance of religious belief must be resisted.
[00:50:19]  Thank you, Alex Karp, for standing up for the Pope.
[00:50:22]  Against the president's attacks.
[00:50:24]  We salute you.
[00:50:25]  Thank you.
[00:50:27]  Point 21.
[00:50:28]  This is where it gets super fashy, Dan.
[00:50:31]  Some cultures have produced vital advances, others remain dysfunctional and regressive.
[00:50:37]  All cultures are now equal.
[00:50:38]  Criticism and value judgments are forbidden.
[00:50:41]  Yet this new dog monk glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures have produced wonders.
[00:50:46]  Others have proven middling and worse, regressive and harmful.
[00:50:53]  So, there you go.
[00:50:55]  One of the things that I think this does, and I've said this before and I'll say it again, is there is a clash of civilizations idea here that says the goal is not for us to live together.
[00:51:06]  The goal is not for us to understand each other or make our cultures richer by interaction with other cultures and folks from other traditions and contexts.
[00:51:17]  The idea is not that we might come to a sense of peaceful, diplomatic coexistence.
[00:51:25]  Pluralism and a world order that's based on peace and democracy rather than one based on domination and will.
[00:51:33]  But that's what they want.
[00:51:34]  The idea here is that we have a better civilization mainly because of Silicon Valley.
[00:51:41]  And because we have a better civilization, we need to say that.
[00:51:45]  And we need to go dominate others who are less than us militarily in foreign policy.
[00:51:52]  And we need to recognize people in our own space in the United States who are.
[00:51:56]  From inferior cultures, and we need to root them out.
[00:51:59]  Does everybody remember what Andy Owens just said, the congressperson?
[00:52:03]  Okay.
[00:52:04]  What really makes America great, the book claims, is not our system of government or ideals and values, but the software industry and our ability to bring violence and death to our enemies.
[00:52:16]  That is what you get when you read The Technological Republic.
[00:52:20]  Okay.
[00:52:23]  Thoughts on this, Dan?
[00:52:24]  I mean, I can keep going.
[00:52:25]  There's more I can say.
[00:52:27]  There's quotes I can pull up, but I don't want to get on with it.
[00:52:29]  I don't think this is a term that anybody else has used.
[00:52:31]  I just now thought of it.
[00:52:32]  But if there's somebody out there or you know somebody that uses this term, then by all means, you can credit to them.
[00:52:37]  But it's almost like a form of cultural eugenics this notion where it shifts to a civilizational register.
[00:52:45]  It's the same discourse of eugenics, it's the same discourse of racism, it's the same discourse of.
[00:52:51]  Earlier visions of like sort of social Darwinism and, you know, and whatever.
[00:52:55]  But now it's been sanitized and it's the way that it works.
[00:52:59]  People are going, oh, no, no, no, we're not saying anything about races.
[00:53:02]  What are you talking about races?
[00:53:03]  I didn't say anything about races.
[00:53:04]  I didn't say, I said cultures, civilizations, these civilizational units.
[00:53:09]  But that's how it works.
[00:53:10]  So that you target people in American society who are viewed as being from a quote unquote inferior culture.
[00:53:16]  It's just the same game that powerful Westerners have been playing for a very long time at this point of, Of social Darwinism and eugenics and racism with this kind of slapped on veneer that this is about, that it's a form of multiculturalism in a way.
[00:53:34]  We should respect all these cultural differences, which is why they should get the hell out of here and go live over there and do their thing and we can do our thing.
[00:53:41]  I think the other piece about this, and I think the Ogles piece illustrates and relates to this those cultures they imagine don't exist.
[00:53:50]  There aren't these like these stark demarcating lines between these different cultures.
[00:53:55]  Fuzzy constructs, and it depends how you look at them and where you look at them, and like what time period are we talking about, and so forth.
[00:54:01]  And it's why people like Ogles struggle.
[00:54:03]  We say, like, well, okay, what is this quote unquote American culture?
[00:54:06]  Everything you just ran through a few minutes ago, when is that?
[00:54:10]  Where is that?
[00:54:11]  Who is that?
[00:54:12]  Who defines that?
[00:54:13]  The reason we can't answer those questions is because they're all just inventions that are designed to make sure that those in power remain in power.
[00:54:21]  And there's a reason that the tech fascists always place the tech fascists at the top of that sort of social hierarchy.
[00:54:27]  It's because they want the power.
[00:54:29]  And they want to hold on to that.
[00:54:30]  But something I said last week, Dan, on my solo episode was that these people want to tell a myth of Western civilization that is based in a myth.
[00:54:40]  And therefore, when actual institutions or figures who are part of Western civilization get in their way, like the Pope, they're like, oh, no, no, not that guy.
[00:54:49]  And what I said in my episode from earlier this week was you have this weird thing where they're like, we're defending Western civilization.
[00:54:59]  Against the Pope.
[00:55:00]  And you're like, well, isn't if you define like the 20th one of those pillars of quote unquote Western civilization, Western Christendom, the legacy of Rome, all of that stuff that they harken back to all the time.
[00:55:13]  You're like, yeah, but not the Pope.
[00:55:15]  You're like, wow, that's a weird exception.
[00:55:18]  But like whether it's Andy Ogles or whether it's Alex Karp or whether it's JD Vance or what, you know, they don't actually want the institutions or people on the ground.
[00:55:26]  They don't want the flesh and blood.
[00:55:28]  They don't want the reality.
[00:55:29]  They want a myth.
[00:55:29]  Yep.
[00:55:30]  They want a story.
[00:55:31]  They want an epic.
[00:55:32]  They want a grand narrative.
[00:55:33]  And then they want to convince you that that's what's real.
[00:55:35]  There's a piece from the French thinker Arnaud Bertrand.
[00:55:42]  I just said that terribly.
[00:55:43]  Excuse me, as much as I love French.
[00:55:45]  What does he say here?
[00:55:46]  He says So many catastrophes and so much human suffering in history trace back not to the fact of plural civilizations, but to one of them deciding it could no longer tolerate the others.
[00:55:57]  The problem, in other words, has almost always been exactly the worldview Palantir is now selling.
[00:56:02]  Their manifesto isn't warning against the cause of some of the worst periods in history.
[00:56:06]  It's arguing for reviving them.
[00:56:09]  And that's how I see it too.
[00:56:12]  They want to revive the strongest, most aggressive win.
[00:56:19]  And that's the only way we can exist.
[00:56:21]  Sorry.
[00:56:21]  Okay.
[00:56:22]  All right.
[00:56:22]  Last point, Dan, and then we'll go.
[00:56:24]  Point 22.
[00:56:25]  We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism.
[00:56:30]  We in America and more broadly the West have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity.
[00:56:36]  But inclusion into what?
[00:56:38]  So we have to resist pluralism in the name of America and the West.
[00:56:44]  So reactions to this, Dan Ellen?
[00:56:48]  This is like the faux philosophy.
[00:56:52]  It's like when they cite Augustine and they want to be like, we're intellectuals.
[00:56:55]  Look, we can say Augustine.
[00:56:57]  Inclusion into what?
[00:56:59]  Okay, there doesn't have to be an into anything.
[00:57:01]  I don't know.
[00:57:02]  What if our identity was the fact that we are an inclusive society?
[00:57:06]  What if we had notions of identity not in some fixed, eternal, immutable cultural vision, but that we're like, I don't know, we're organic and we grow and we develop like all organic things do, or whatever.
[00:57:18]  The point is, it's a fundamental failure of imagination.
[00:57:22]  This notion that culture has to be fixed, it has to be immutable, it has to be one thing.
[00:57:28]  We're having inclusion, but inclusion into what?
[00:57:31]  It's like, but the hell does that even mean?
[00:57:33]  And I, for reasons that get really complex and nerdy, and it's why I don't do metaphysics, and three people listening will understand what that means, but I get really nervous when people start.
[00:57:43]  Telling me that if you're going to, like, I don't know, have a social development, it has to be developing into a fixed thing.
[00:57:49]  So, like, whoever gets to define what that is, that's the person who terrifies me.
[00:57:54]  That's the group I don't trust.
[00:57:56]  That's the group I don't believe.
[00:57:57]  That's the group that says this is what it has to be.
[00:58:01]  And I want to know everything about who they are and what they believe and why they have the vision they do versus one that just says, hey, you know what?
[00:58:08]  Societies change.
[00:58:10]  That's the only constant thing about them.
[00:58:13]  They're changing and evolving and developing.
[00:58:16]  And that is what makes them the unique societies they are, is the way that that happens.
[00:58:22]  But I love this idea of the failure of imagination is driving this because one of the things that you realize as somebody who read so many tech manifestos to write American Caesar is that there is no interest in those guys, Curtis Yarvin, Alex Karp, et cetera, of the beauty, the texture of actual culture.
[00:58:43]  Like it's always online, it's always an avatar, it's never an actual participation.
[00:58:49]  And if Dan, I have lived all over this country, I lived in Memphis, Tennessee, I've lived in upstate New York, I lived in Southern California, I've lived all over the place now in the Pacific Northwest.
[00:58:59]  And one of the things that you realize is there are cultures, subcultures, local cultures all over the place.
[00:59:07]  So, this idea that well, we don't have anything to be included into anymore, it's all been evaporated.
[00:59:12]  It's not, you just don't have any.
[00:59:15]  Imagination and you don't have any like actual participation in actual human community and culture.
[00:59:21]  That's the problem.
[00:59:22]  And so, yeah, I was just going to say, in sticking with this, I mean, this is a theme I think we just sort of picked up and are rolling with here, but it's ironic that these are the people who are supposed to be the creators.
[00:59:30]  These are the people who envision themselves as the inventors and the creators and the creative minds and coming up with novel things.

=== Digital Avatars vs Real Life (02:32) ===

[00:59:37]  And when it comes to this, it's just, it's so boring.
[00:59:42]  It is so stale.
[00:59:43]  It is terrifying.
[00:59:44]  Yes.
[00:59:45]  But it is just fundamental, as you say, fundamentally flat.
[00:59:48]  It's like, I don't know, it's like watching a 2D image when you could be in an immersive VR world or something.
[00:59:56]  It's that lame.
[00:59:57]  Or the real world.
[00:59:58]  Yeah.
[00:59:59]  Yeah.
[00:59:59]  You could go into the real world.
[01:00:00]  You could go outside, you know.
[01:00:03]  It's the people who are like, I don't know, at their kids' recital or whatever.
[01:00:06]  And like all you see is a bunch of phones, like all watching it.
[01:00:09]  Like it's kind of happening there, but like nobody's watching it.
[01:00:11]  They're all just staring at the phone.
[01:00:13]  That's why I always record fireworks celebrations.
[01:00:15]  Dan, when I go to a fireworks celebration, I record it because I want to look at that on my phone later.
[01:00:21]  When I'm waiting at the bus stop, I want to be like, wow, look at these fireworks I went to.
[01:00:25]  That was a fun night.
[01:00:26]  That was a good night.
[01:00:27]  I'm glad I recorded this.
[01:00:28]  This was a good use of my time.
[01:00:29]  Yeah.
[01:00:31]  Yeah.
[01:00:31]  What's your reason for hope?
[01:00:32]  My reason for hope, and I'm a little disappointed that this didn't show up more, but on Saturday, a federal judge overturned the Trump administration's ban on gender affirming care for children, ruled basically that RFKs,
[01:00:46]  And the government's move to withhold federal Medicaid and Medicare funding was illegal and violated the law, and specifically the part of the Medicaid law that states that the federal government cannot exercise any supervision or control over the practice of medicine or the manner in which medical services are provided.
[01:01:05]  So, 22 states had sued the administration, and an injunction was ruled, and I took tremendous, tremendous hope from that.
[01:01:14]  The Intercept reports April 22nd, Liliana Segura.
[01:01:18]  The short and ridiculous trial of a protester arrested in an inflatable penis costume is now over.
[01:01:24]  An Alabama cop confronted the protester at a No Kings rally, and the judge was not convinced.
[01:01:31]  The person who was in the costume, Renea Gamble, is not a little punk kid.
[01:01:37]  This is a Gen X or boomer.
[01:01:40]  I'm not exactly sure of Renea's age exactly, but this is not a smart mouth 21 year old.
[01:01:46]  So.
[01:01:47]  That is American.
[01:01:48]  You want to talk about a culture, Alex Carp, Randy Ogles?
[01:01:51]  You know what's American protest and free speech.
[01:01:53]  And if you want to dress up as a penis, I'm not sure I want to be there, but I do want it to be legal.
[01:02:00]  You're like, it's not a choice I might make, but I think people should be able to make that choice.
[01:02:05]  Some of you don't need to dress up.
[01:02:07]  I'm just going to leave it there.
[01:02:08]  Okay.

=== Live Show Announcements (01:01) ===

[01:02:09]  Thanks for listening today, y'all.
[01:02:12]  I'm just going to point out there's one person you're seeing when you say that.
[01:02:17]  I don't know.
[01:02:18]  I don't know how to take that.
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[01:02:52]  It's in the code.
[01:02:53]  The final, it's in the code on Josh Holly's book, I believe, and the weekly roundup.
[01:02:58]  Is it the final one?
[01:02:59]  I don't think so.
[01:02:59]  It's the final one for that chapter.
[01:03:00]  I think I got one more chapter.
[01:03:02]  We're almost done.
[01:03:02]  We're almost through Holly.
[01:03:03]  We're almost there.
[01:03:05]  The definitive guide to that book.
[01:03:07]  There's the definitive guide.
[01:03:09]  All right, y'all.
[01:03:09]  Thanks for being here.
[01:03:10]  We'll catch you next time.