Weekly Roundup: Everyone Who Opposes Trump is Antifa + MAGA Christians Are Being Visited by Charlie Kirk

Brad: Welcome to Straight White American Jesus. I'm Brad Onishi, author of Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next, founder of Axis Mundi Media. Here today with my co-host

Dan: Brad's like, "I wrote a book." Yeah, I don't remember what it is.

Brad: It's one of those weeks.

Dan: I'm Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College. As always, glad to be with you.

Brad: Great to be with you, Dan. Gonna jump in today to a thesis that goes like this: if you do not agree with Donald Trump or oppose him and his policies in any way, you are an insurrectionist, you are lawless, or you are Antifa. And we'll see how he has directed that at judges who he appointed, at governors, and at Antifa, who is the rest of us. That'll include touching on Pam Bondi's—I don't even know the right adjective, Dan—ridiculous Senate hearing the other day. And we'll fit in

Dan: contentious content. That's what the media always calls it. They always use the word contentious. "This is a contentious hearing." Yeah.

Brad: We'll then finish up with just the ongoing ways that folks are drawing on Charlie Kirk in order to make myths, both theological and political. And that includes some prophets who are saying that they have seen images of Charlie Kirk in heaven, and he has various horses and fields and other things that he's enjoying.

Dan: He landed on his feet, Brad. Yeah, so we can feel good about that.

Brad: We will. We'll get there too. This is Straight White American Jesus, weekly roundup. We got a lot to cover. Let's go.

All right, Dan, a bunch going on here, and I want to—we didn't prep this. Let's just do one minute on this. You're like, "Brad, what are you doing right now?" This is your off script. You're a football fan, and Bad Bunny is going to be at the Super Bowl. Do you want to chime in on Bad Bunny? Do you have any Bad Bunny thoughts? Bunny thoughts? Because the American right has a lot of Bad Bunny thoughts, and Bad Bunny is living in their head rent-free.

Dan: So I don't have a lot of Bad Bunny thoughts, except number one, if the right's upset about it, then maybe we're on the proper track. Number two, as a football fan, I'm one of those people that, like, you know, like you always have, especially at the Super Bowl, you've got the groups of people that are there for the commercials and for the halftime show, and then often you get people that are there for the game. So I'm always the one, like, during the halftime show, I'm like, "All right, I'm gonna get the chips now. Like, let me know when the halftime show is done." So I don't tend to watch it, but just the level of faux outrage about everything—and you said a minute ago, everything that's not pro-Trump is anti-Trump and Antifa and everything else—and it fits right into that narrative. People are really, really upset about this.

Brad: Well, I think the thing that's caught me this week is that people are like, "Oh, this should be an American show." And then people are like, "Well, Bad Bunny isn't American." Puerto Rico is an American territory, and I don't know what you mean by not American. And they're like, "Well," and it's very clear, like, "Well, he sings in Spanish," and, you know, and the part that's not said is he's Latino, and he's Latino, like, really Latino. He's, like, really, really into being Latino. And so anyway, we'll get to more Bad Bunny stuff here in a minute. But TPUSA has already announced they're going to host their own Super Bowl, "All American," quote, unquote, halftime show. Mike Johnson has suggested that Lee Greenwood would be a better choice than Bad Bunny. Bad Bunny who gets 79 million streams per month on Spotify, perhaps would be less popular, Dan, than the 82-year-old Lee Greenwood, who I'm sure a lot of Gen Alpha and Gen Z are just really in love with. I mean, when I talk to the eighth graders and the 18-year-olds these days, they're like, "I need more cowbell." And by that, I mean Lee Greenwood.

Dan: To the kids. Yes, this is what they're into. That's what they say.

Brad: All right, y'all. Here we go. Last weekend, a federal judge blocked Donald Trump's call-up of 200 National Guard troops in Oregon, ruling that Trump's claim of daily unrest in Portland were untethered to facts and risked plunging the nation into an unconstitutional form of military rule. This is from a piece by Kyle Cheney. "This is a nation of constitutional law, not martial law," wrote US District Judge Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee.

Now, Trump claimed that Portland was war-ravaged, and he's done that as well with Chicago. And the judge said these incidents are inexcusable, meaning protests of ICE, which I'm not sure I agree with that. I think there are reasons people are protesting ICE, but we could talk about which ones might be inexcusable. “But they are nowhere near the type of incidents that cannot be handled by regular law enforcement forces,” Immergut wrote. I want to note, and I think many of you know this already, that the judge was appointed by none other than Donald Trump. Judge Immergut is a woman Donald Trump said on camera that he did—did him wrong, and he sounded like a demented president who's not in the loop.

Dan: This is also the standard things of the quiet part out loud. Say, "Got bad advice about the judges," right? So like, you know, the president appoints judges. Trump doesn't even pretend that this is something he did on his own. He's always like, "They gave me bad advice and I picked a bad judge." So his deflections of responsibility also show us that, like, he doesn't actually know these people that he appointed. He just somebody handed him a sheet of paper and said, "These are good people to appoint." And he did it, and now he blames them when they rule against him.

And you know, that leads us to a thesis for today that we're going to try to defend across numerous domains, and that is that anything opposed to Trump is insurrection, lawless or Antifa. And you may be thinking, "All right, how does that work?" Well, it works with judges, who we just mentioned. It works with governors like JB Pritzker, and also Mayor Brandon Johnson in Chicago, who Trump said should be put in jail—like he just said, "Put him in jail," this week. And it also means Antifa. And if you're like, "Who's Antifa?" because that's not an organization, you are correct. But under their definition and their understanding, anyone who opposes Trump in the general public is Antifa, and I want to prove that to you now.

So let's listen to a clip from Jack Posobiec talking in the White House at the Oval Office yesterday. Might have been actually—I don't remember if this clip is from the Oval or somewhere else in the White House. It doesn't matter. Here he is speaking about Antifa and what needs to be done about the organization.

Jack Posobiec: Mr. President, thank you so much for having us here today and holding this roundtable. Antifa is real. Antifa has been around in various iterations for almost 100 years, in some instances, going back to the Weimar Republic in Germany.

Brad: So Posobiec says, Dan, that Antifa has been around a long time, and it's a real thing, okay? And he says it goes all the way back to Weimar, Germany, meaning, Dan, that Antifa, as he defines it, goes back to those who were opposed in the Weimar Republic, I guess, to the rise of the Nazis. So Antifa is an anti-Nazi group

Dan: Those terrible anti-Nazi groups.

Brad: That's basically what you can take away from the comments. Okay?

Dan: I, yeah, I'm just gonna throw out, I'm not a trained historian, I'm not an expert in World War II, but I've watched movies, Brad, and it's my understanding that the Allied forces were anti-Nazi. That's my sort of layperson's understanding of World War II. So I guess Winston Churchill was Antifa, and the entire Allied forces were all Antifa. Yeah, all those American veterans, all those British veterans, Australian troops, the Russians, everybody, everybody was Antifa, except I guess we thought that was a good thing back then.

Brad: I have also read those Wikipedia pages, Dan. Just skimming. But I think, in all seriousness, there's two things happening here. One, Posobiec is using Charlie Kirk and the murder of Charlie Kirk to say that was Antifa, and we've been talking about this for weeks. I'll make the point again. What the Charlie Kirk murder did was create a way for them to use Antifa, or the impersonal "they" word. "They, they did that. They do this." So Posobiec says, "Charlie Kirk, far leftist," and then "Antifa is real," and the way he defines it is Antifa is basically anything opposed to Trump, and the correlation with Trump as a fascist is implicit there. And I think all of you can draw that conclusion. I'll give you another quote. This is from Senator Jim Banks of Indiana, talking about redistricting Indiana so that it is nine to zero in terms of congresspeople from that state. He says, "They killed Charlie Kirk. The least we can do is go through a legal process and redistrict Indiana." So he's saying "they," meaning the Democrats, meaning people who are not Republican, are not MAGA, people again who are opposed to Trump.

I just want to make something clear and jump in here, Dan, if you want, because I want to go to Stephen Miller next, and that is, they are defining Antifa as anybody who opposes Trump, you in the general public. And they know, and we know, and everyone knows, Antifa is not an organization. There's nobody who's filed papers. There is no board, there is no nonprofit status, there is no CEO, there is no president, there is no chancellor. There is no Antifa organization, and that is to their benefit, because if there is no Antifa organization, they can basically say, "Well, anybody who opposes us, whether that is nonprofit funding, whether that is activists opposing ICE, whether that is people who don't want the National Guard in their city, they are Antifa, and therefore they are terrorists, and therefore their rights, their due process, their constitutional protections, can be overrun." I just want that to be clear on this show, and I want to say it as long as we need to say it. I want to get to Stephen Miller, Dan, but you want to jump in?

Dan: I mean, just I think the point you're making is that it is intentionally vacuous. So like, to introduce a theoretical term at the risk of showing everybody what a wonk I am, it's what we could call a floating or empty signifier. It's a word that doesn't have any kind of fixed meaning. And so that's the point of it is to have no fixed meaning. It doesn't say, "This is what it is." There's no dictionary definition. If you look it up, it's just going to say "anti-fascist." That's, I mean, that's it's short for anti-fascist. But what does that mean? That means whatever we want to fill it in as. And it's the same thing as woke, right? The word woke. What does woke mean? It means whatever opponents of wokeness want it to mean. And so we say it's an empty or floating signifier. You can fill it in with whatever meaning you want. And that's the key. And I think that that's the important thing to recognize is, as they would say, right? That's not a bug, it's a feature. The lack of definition is why they can just point to an amorphous "they." It's like when they—well, "a lot of people say," and you're like, "Who says?" Like, "Nobody says." "A lot of people" just becomes this kind of grab bag for whatever you want to be in it. It's the same thing. And I think that that's the real key to recognize here is that this is what they're doing. And so as you say, who is it going to be? How are we going to fill that term in? We're going to fill it in with everybody we don't like, which is everybody who opposes Trump.

Brad: And I think going with your concept, there have been empty signifiers that have been used in the very near past and are still in use. I would throw out socialism and communism. Socialism and communism have very specific definitions. There's history, definitions, there's histories there. There's ways that you can identify what is communism, what is not. It doesn't matter. The way that those terms have been used is just, well, anybody who's a Democrat, anybody who's opposed to Trump. Now Antifa is really—to me, it's really come into focus since Charlie Kirk. Posobiec's comment there really highlights that. One example of Antifa, and the way they're using it, is the Rutgers Professor Mark Bray, who has had to leave the country because he wrote a book called Antifa, and he basically is outlining, like, how Antifa is this loose kind of idea of those who oppose fascism, as you just said. But TPUSA and others identified him as the "Antifa Prof." He's been doxxed. He's been threatened. So he and his family left for Europe because they felt like they were unsafe in this country.

Now that leads us to another clip, Dan, that I think some folks might already be familiar with, but Stephen Miller was on CNN, and he's being asked about, you know, Trump, the judges who are not allowing Trump to call up troops and send troops from California or other states to Portland, talking about judges stopping Trump's efforts to do whatever he wants when it comes to the National Guard, the military and so on. And he slips here, and it's one of the most odd clips, not only of the week, but I think you'll see in a while. He says something he's not supposed to say, and then he just absolutely freezes.

CNN Host: Does the administration still plan to abide by that ruling?

Stephen Miller: Well, the administration filed an appeal this morning with the Ninth Circuit. I would note the administration won an identical case in the Ninth Circuit just a few months ago with respect to the federalizing of the California National Guard. Under Title 10 of the US Code, the president has plenary authority—

CNN Host: Has—Stephen? Stephen, can you hear me? It seemed, Steven, I apologize, it seems like we're having a technical—

Brad: So Miller is talking. He's doing his normal like, "Well, this is sort of anti-Trump. It's these judges are activist." And then he says, "According to Article 10, the president, Donald Trump, has plenary power," and then he stops in his tracks. And if you watch this, some of you are listening—if you watch this clip, he just stops. It's like he knew he messed up, and he just stopped. And when CNN re-uploaded this clip, Dan, they did it without the freeze. They totally cut what happened here.

Why was this a big deal? Because plenary authority, okay, it means complete and total power. Like, if you say somebody has plenary authority, it means they have complete and total power. Now, there's a discussion to be had about the president having power over the US military, but there's supposed to be a share in the military with Congress, because Congress is supposed to have to authorize us going to war, right? There still is a separation of powers, even with the military, in terms of Congress authorizing going to war. But he seems to be saying the president has plenary authority, and that includes over the judicial branch, like there seems to be this sense of saying he has plenary authority period in the government as a whole, and that means that the judges don't matter. The judicial branch doesn't matter. The rulings don't matter. And if you think that I'm being kind of hyperbolic here, and I'm reading between the lines, well, let me just see what he said earlier. Let's see. Let me like, find the—oh, yep, here. He said the judge's decision to block Portland troop deployment was, quote, "a legal insurrection."

Stephen Miller, the courts that have blocked Trump's actions over the past nine months, they amount to, quote, "an insurrection against the laws and constitution of the United States." He was not the only one. Matt Walsh, 3.9 million followers on social media, the right-wing provocateur, quote, "Trump needs to openly defy these judges. It is time for a showdown." Elon Musk, used car dealer, said, "It is high time that corrupt judges who violate the constitution be fired."

Dan, when he said "plenary power" to me, he knew that he had said the quiet part out loud, and that's why he froze. I got, as usual, more to say. But what do you think here?

Dan: Just to that point that, you know, if one wants to make that argument, the plenary power is within the executive—like, Trump is, technically speaking, the president is the highest executive officer in the executive branch and so forth. For those who want to say that, like, that's an unbridled power, you're just like, "Okay, why bother having two other branches?" Like, why is it set up that way? And, you know, whatever. I think this is something we'll circle back around to, maybe when we come to Bondi. But we use this phrase, saying the quiet part out loud a lot. But ideologies work best when people don't recognize that ideologies are being used against them. And so you want to be able to deploy them in a way, but use coded language like call it a democracy, or call it, you know, whatever, even though you're being anti-democratic. And this is a theme of the Trump administration repeatedly as they get kind of bolder and more out in the open, as people get more Trumpy. Trump has always said the quiet part out loud. He has never been good at couching language carefully. I think he's incredibly insecure and so forth, which is why he always, like, comes out and says what he's thinking or feeling, or, you know, whatever. But people in his orbit, I feel like, have become more Trumpy in the way that they talk. And so I think this is actually something I feel like that we see more and more and more as a mix of, like, feeling like, you know, they won a second election, and, you know, this time it was a popular win, and, you know, whatever, and feeling emboldened by that, or just trying to stay in the good graces of a person who becomes more and more mercurial as time goes on. But they routinely say this, and what this does is, this is the stuff that comes back and bites them later when they have to argue in, like, court papers or something, that this was a policy decision, not a political decision, or this or that. And people can point it like, "Well, you said this thing in this interview, and here's your title. And like, you know, whatever." We see this more and more. I think where it is is just coming out of the shadows that, yeah, what everybody's been saying, all the critics of the Trump administration about, you know, Project 2025, or the unified executive theory, or these theories of plenary power, or whatever, it's like, they just come out and say it now, and there's no way to hide that. This is, in fact, what they understand, what they believe about the president and the United States.

Brad: Yeah, I think that's becoming more clear day by day, especially with Stephen Miller. Let's take a break. Let's go to—when we come back, we'll go to Pam Bondi, and then we'll wrap it all together, because I think we still need to show how this includes Governor Pritzker and others, as well as the way that, basically, we're seeing an assault on the rule of law in order to implement the reign of Trump. We'll be right back.

All right, Dan, Pam Bondi went before the Senate this week. It was contentious, quote, unquote, and there were even some GOP senators that seemed to challenge Pam Bondi. Take us through that.

Dan: Yeah. So people can, if you want to Google around, like, see videos of this, and you know how, again, the word of the day is contentious. That's how the mainstream media is sort of always describing it. But I think what it did is it gave sort of every reason for fearing and criticizing Trump's Department of Justice, every reason people give for talking about it was on full display in this. We've seen this as Trump's cabinet members when they're called to answer to Congress, when they just get combative and angry. And really, we saw this with Brett Kavanaugh. I feel like he was the one who sort of gave the paradigm of, like, you know, at his confirmation hearings, of, like, "Here's how you take on congressional questions if you're, like, a Trump acolyte." And so what we saw—there were a number of things in there, in that hearing, there were constant partisan attacks from Bondi on those questioning her, regardless of what the question was. Anytime a question came up—and I think that this was a full vision of the Department of Justice as Trumpism in the legal sphere, with no pretense of independence, no pretense that the Department of Justice is an agency with independence and autonomy that acts according to the law and not the whims of the president.

She routinely launched into personal attacks on the senators questioning her. She said that she wished, for example, the senators Dick Durbin and Alex Padilla, loved their states, quote, "as much as they hate Donald Trump," you know, made it about Trump. She avoided Epstein questions by noting that Democrats had received contributions from people tied to him. And I think the Epstein questions were one of those few areas where he had some relative bipartisan support for more clarity and transparency about Epstein, and so that's where she would, like, come out swinging against both parties. So we saw that she consistently refused to answer questions, you know, and going beyond the language of executive privilege or something like that, "This was a conversation with the president. We can't talk about this." She just said, "I won't answer personnel matters."

She said that she wouldn't comment on the Comey case, which was at this time, was the clearest example of the DOJ carrying out Trump vendettas. And in that context, you know, Adam Schiff saying that, you know, they deserve answers, she owes answers to Congress, she simply said that he owed the president an apology for his entire career. Like I mentioned, the Trumpisms, the Trumpiness of these responses, and it's on full display. She consistently tried to shift the focus to crime. They know that this is one place where maybe they can win in the polls, and trying to focus on that. And GOP senators tried to help her by calling back their favorite issues from the Biden administration and talking about how it was Biden who weaponized the DOJ and so forth. So really combative, aggressive kind of hearing.

Some takeaways from this I think matter, and I think they matter to all the points that we're raising here about those who oppose Trump is, I think, open contempt for the Senate and the very idea of oversight. "How dare you people in Congress? How dare you courts question the president, question the executive, question the Department of Justice as an arm of the executive branch and so forth. How dare you do this?" It's the theme we've talked about since before Trump won the second term. He wants to govern, or, excuse me, to rule and not govern. Governance includes, you know, some accountability and giving answers where people ask for it, and that's what a transparent democracy requires—open contempt for that.

I think lots of legal observers noted, so for those of us who are laypeople and not lawyers, or, you know, we're not career prosecutors or something, this is not just our impression that this was clear that the Department of Justice is basically acting as Trump's personal law firm. This is how Trump sees it. This is how Pam Bondi sees it. This is what she sees her mission to be. The real test is not law enforcement. It's loyalty to Trump. Everybody knows this about things like Comey that Trump gets on social media and says, "Hurry up and prosecute," and whatever. And lo and behold, we're going to go get some indictments in a case that most observers think is not going to survive in court for very long, because there's simply nothing there.

Former White House attorney Ty Cobb—he's one of these weird figures, if you don't know him, he's, like, kind of a bad guy turned good guy, or wants to be a good guy now, but you want to be like, "Well, where were you? Like, why were you the White House attorney for so long?" But he came out in interviews this week, and he just highlighted the level of corruption currently within the Department of Justice. He said that Bondi had displaced Watergate Attorney General John Mitchell as the most, quote, "reprehensible Attorney General in history." And again, there's just no longer any pretense about what the Department of Justice is. All the saying, the quiet parts out loud. There's no way you can watch that hearing and come away with the view that this is not about partisanship and politics for Pam Bondi and the Department of Justice, so it fits into everything we're talking about. And it is Trump consolidating that branch or that institution, that part of the executive to serve as his personal weapon, to attack everybody who opposes him.

Brad: I want to take something you said that I think is actually really, really important and insightful, and what you said, I think, is something we can miss because we expect it, and it's now just part of the playbook. So Dan, when I see Kash Patel or Pam Bondi or RFK or Pete Hegseth, when I see any of them in front of Congress now, they exhibit what you just said, disdain. And what they're exhibiting disdain for is what you said rightly, is any kind of oversight or any kind of accountability. They're basically telling Congress, "I look at you with disdain. I look down on you. I don't see you as a co-equal branch of government. I don't see us as having to have a relationship that is in any way reciprocal or that abides by the kinds of give and take of the separation of powers. I look at you as my enemy."

Friends, do you see a pattern for today and for what we're trying to get across? If you stand in the way of plenary authority of this president, you are treated with disdain, with attack, and you become an enemy. That includes the Senate and Congress, because if you try to implement any kind of accountability, if you say to Pam Bondi, "Hey, when are we going to get the Epstein files? What's going on here? Why are we prosecuting Jim Comey?" etc., the answer is not to give some kind of rational explanation, even if it's specious, even if it doesn't hold. The reaction is to say, "How dare you, you, you, you hate your state. You hate America. How dare you? You loser, you moron, you idiot." It turns into—and if you envision Bondi, Hegseth, Patel, Kennedy as just extensions of Trump and the idea of plenary authority, then it makes sense. He's basically saying to Congress, he's basically saying to governors, he's basically saying to judges, he's basically saying to all of you, "If you stand in the way, I treat you with disdain. Who are you to stand up to me?"

And I think what you're highlighting, Dan, is that we can just get used to this playbook. "Oh, it's Kash Patel. He's going to yell at Adam Schiff. Oh, yeah, I know what's gonna happen here. Oh, look at that. It's RFK. He's gonna yell and say, 'You're lying.' It's Pam Bondi. She's gonna do what Pam Bondi does." But if you examine that as disdain for another co-equal branch of government, then you start to realize what's going on here. That anything less than plenary authority is treated as like, "I can't believe you're getting in my way. Who do you think you are?" Does that make sense to you? I mean, there's more to say on that, but what do you think?

Dan: Yeah, I think that's what it is. It's, as you said, even if one doesn't like the term oversight, it's like just any question for "Hey, what's the reason for this?" Yeah. "You guys just like, what's your rationale?" Lots of people out there have jobs. Even somebody to supervise you, I don't know. Maybe a boss, maybe a co-worker, maybe somebody sends you an email or something like, "Hey, I saw this happen. Can you just explain that to me?" And just explain it, even if they don't like your reasoning or something. You explain. Even that level of disdain, that level of dismissiveness, that level of Trump acting almost, you know, by divine fiat. Trump speaks it, and it is true. Trump wants it and it is done. Trump declares it legal and it's legal. He declares it illegal and it's illegal. And, you know, that's what we see with the executive orders and everything else. This fits into a kind of tightly woven pattern that tells us what this administration works like, and what the Trump America is, what it's like. But it also—Trump says it's real, and so it's real.

Brad: Yeah, yeah. And so, like, if you look at the images of Kristi Noem standing on the rooftop this week overlooking the quote-unquote "war zone" in Portland, which is like 28 people with signs, like, protesting, standing behind a fence. And that is, in quote-unquote, a "war zone." But if they say it is, it is, and they're going to make it real. They're going to go shoot content and social media video and drum it up with heavy music, and they're gonna have all the troops in their biggest, baddest gear, so it looks like it is a war zone. And this is, if you don't believe me, here's Stephen Miller, once again, talking about how ICE agents, DHS, are going in hand-to-hand combat every night with people in Portland and other places. Here it is.

Interviewer: You make the claim of terrorist assaults and violence attack over 100 nights, and yet the judge overseeing this case says that that's untethered from reality. And local officials on the ground say that Trump's assertion of what's happening in Portland, that it's war-ravaged and burning to the ground, is far from true. I looked at the police data, and police have made something like 70 total arrests since June, and there are no reports of buildings being burned to the ground. Are you concerned that that response weakens your legal argument?

Stephen Miller: No, they are actually, as we speak, trying to overthrow the core law enforcement function of the federal government. Of course, this is, I think, what we're talking past each other. When ICE officers have to street battle against Antifa, hand-to-hand combat every night to come and go from their building, when they try to exit in a vehicle, when they are swarmed and surrounded, and they try to tip the vehicle over, when people bring weapons to an ICE facility to try to engage in direct violent assault against ICE officers. What is the purpose?

Brad: They want to make you think that there is a war every evening, that is an insurrection. And I think that that is, you know, if you want a way to think about what we're trying to say today, get across today. Stephen Miller called the judge's rulings against troop deployment in Portland a, quote, "legal insurrection." Now, Dan, I don't think that that's—I think that's an oxymoron, because I think for an insurrection, you have to be attacking like—it's an extra-legal attack on your government. So I don't think a legal insurrection is a thing. I'm sure people will email me and tell me it is, and if it is, that's fine. We can talk about it. But if you think about January 6th as an insurrection, they are basically telling anyone who opposes Trump, "No, you're the insurrectionist. You're the one attacking the concept."

What did Elon Musk and Matt Walsh say? "These judges are not obeying the Constitution. They're violating the Constitution." And this brings up a point for me with Bondi, with Antifa, with all of it, and that is that the Constitution is only what we live and recognize as a people, because clearly, you can make the Constitution be anything you want. Like, I don't know what Elon Musk means when he's like, "They're violating the Constitution." I mean, it seems to me, this judge ruled in accordance with the case brought before her under the authority given to her as part of the judicial branch. I don't know where there's, like, a violation there. I don't know where there's, like, an overrunning of the Constitution, because there isn't. And the Constitution is only what we recognize. Like, Trump, the Trump universe, the MAGA nation, they're going to make the Constitution into this thing that is not part of the text. You talked about an empty, floating signifier. Dan, you know, I'm wondering, if you want to give us, like, a tidbit here of textual theory, I'll—you know, Derrida and others about the ways that a text is living. A text is detached from the author. A text is only how it's received. A text, an author, is only that which the audience recognizes. And the same goes for our Constitution. Is that fair? I got one last thing I want to say about this, but I don't know if you want to—

Dan: I'm drawing—I mean, you might be, yeah. I mean, the point that you're making is we talk about texts, whether it's the Constitution or, I don't know, a book you're reading for your book group, or whatever it is, as if they are these containers that have meaning in them. You have to unpack the meaning, but the reader and the way we engage those texts is always part of that meaning that emerges. And so there's a sense in which, just to give an example, if an author meant something and everybody misinterprets them. Everybody reads what they wrote and misinterprets it, and that becomes the widely spread meaning. It just becomes a question that I put it to people. It just becomes kind of irrelevant what the text, quote-unquote, said, if, like, nobody read it that way. And that's the kind of dynamic you're talking about.

The other piece that comes in with this, you talk about the way that people appeal to the Constitution. So most people, most of us who say that's not constitutional, most people don't read the Constitution. I don't have any idea what the Constitution says. If they talk about the Constitution, they usually mean the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments. Occasionally you'll get outside the first 10 and get to, like, the 14th Amendment or something. But most of us have not read—have not read the Constitution with regularity. We don't read it. We don't know what it says. You talk about articles such and such, and someone's like, "I don't know what that is." "What about the Second Amendment?" you know, or something.

But that's also a cultural habit to me that we see on the right among conservative Christians, who always appeal to the Bible. They always appeal to the Bible. "That's not biblical." You press some of them and you say, "Okay, but like, where, where does it say that? Like, what are you looking at? Like, you say the Bible is, like, literally true, and everything you say is supposed to come from the Bible and so forth." And they can't, because they don't actually read it. They just project whatever they want into it, and then sort of retroactively claim that authority. And that's how the Constitution works here, when people appeal to it, which is why you have often these colossal gaps, even on the right, between what people like Elon Musk say and what lawyers defending the Trump administration have to say in court, because they actually know what the Constitution says. Sometimes I know that they've got to try to convince—

And have to try to convince a judge somewhere to read it the way that they're reading it, and so forth. And I think that that dynamic, I think—this is not what you were doing when you're like, "I don't know what he's talking about when he says it's unconstitutional." I think sometimes people take them way too much at their word. Elon Musk says it's unconstitutional. Where's he finding that in the Constitution? The mistake is to think that Elon Musk has any interest in what the Constitution says, or any level of familiarity with it at all. By saying it's—this is so obvious that maybe we don't say it enough. If you can attribute something to the Constitution, it gains authority and legitimacy. That's how our system works, just like if you're a conservative Christian, if you can say the Bible says it, it is now legitimate. If I believe, like you, that the Bible's supposed to be our authority and so forth, I'm beholden to it. I don't think that about the Bible, but I think that about the Constitution. So if you can convince me that the Constitution says that the president is this kind of, you know, superpower king guy, well, okay, then I guess, you know, if we oppose Trump, maybe we're all Antifa, maybe we're insurrectionists. Maybe, "Wow, I didn't know that the Constitution said all that." But you know, that's the dynamic that you're highlighting, and that's what's real, and I think that's the dynamic we have to keep in front of us and not get caught up in just sort of taking people seriously whether the Constitution doesn't say that. "Sorry, Elon, you're not reading the Constitution." Yeah, like, or just, you know, "Next time Uncle Ron says the Constitution doesn't say that," be like, "Cool. What does it say?" Yeah, like, "Where are they misreading it?" And they're gonna have no idea what to tell you.

One of the best examples of this—this might seem too reductionistic, Dan, and the Derrida and you may not like this, but I think, you know, you walk—it's Halloween time, and you walk through the store and there's a monster, and you're like, "Hey, who's that?" And it's like, "That's Frankenstein." And you're like, "Well, actually, in the book, it's Dr. Frankenstein who creates a monster, and the monster is the monster, and Dr. Frankenstein is the man who created—it's Frankenstein's monster." Yeah. But nope, yep. It's just like, "Who are you going to be for Halloween?" "I'm going to be Frankenstein." And you're walking down the street, everyone's like, "Yo, Frankenstein. What's up? Happy Halloween." It doesn't matter that that's not in the text. The public, the common agreement, the social agreement, is that Frankenstein is the green monster with the plugs in his head and the whatever, the weird walk. So it is, and that's kind of what we're talking about here.

I want to close this out on or bring us back to some concrete ideas and stuff. And this actually is a quote from The Bulwark in a piece by William Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift. It's called "The Rule of Law Versus the Rule of Trump," and they talk about the rule of law. And then the rule of law is everything you talked about earlier, which is, "Hey, I am part of a government that has different branches. We share power, and so what is applied in our country is the rule of law, not the rule of Trump, not the rule of one or a small group. It's the rule of law, and that is always what's been characterized of the DOJ. It's what's made the US, despite all of its flaws and hypocrisy and the tragedy and travesties of American Empire, when people came to the United States, the rule of law applied. It was not bribery. It was not—and I know, I know you can email me all the examples, but there has been this sense that when you do things in the United States, the rule of law is supposed to apply.

Dan: And I know it was at least an ideal—an ideal that people would profess and that a lot of people tried to put into practice.

Brad: Yeah, here's what they say: "As opposed to the rule of law, the rule of Trump starts from a different place. Under this rule, the conflict between armed men of the state and the people they are deployed against is a conflict between angels and demons. Trump's military police are heroic patriots by virtue of being his military police, and the law need concern itself only with getting out of their way as they do what must be done." And I'm just going to annotate here and say, "Well, what must be done? Well, the will of Trump." "Meanwhile, the people who object to his will, whenever, wherever, are dangerous insurgents who must be rooted out." I'm going to annotate again: "If you object to his will, you are Antifa. You are a terrorist. You are an insurrectionist. Under the rule of law, the best-case scenario is one in which everyone follows the law, and violent clashes between the state and its citizens are not necessary. Under the rule of Trump, the best-case scenario is darker and more nebulous. Ostensibly, it is state-enforced calm, but the absence of conflict is also inherently suspect. The deep state is still plotting. The demons are still out there. The criminals are still getting away with it."

What's the point, Dan? The point is the will of Trump is cosmically good, and anyone who stands in its way is evil, insurrectionist, demonic, or a terrorist. So that, to me, is the conclusion of everything we're trying to get at today. Let me play you one more clip, and then we'll take a break and go to what Kim Robinson is saying about Charlie Kirk. Here's JB Pritzker talking to Rachel Maddow.

So what Pritzker says here is, like, "Look, there's a Governor's Association, and if the Governor's Association is not going to stand up to the executive calling in troops to their state as a governor, despite their objections, despite them making the case that they don't need military troops in Chicago or Portland or anywhere else, that if you're not going to stand up against that as a Governor's Association, then what's the point?" Like, Pritzker is like, "I'm done." And Gavin Newsom said the same thing this week.

Rachel Maddow: Governor Pritzker is, interestingly, calling on his fellow governors around the country to rally to Illinois's defense in a letter to the National Governors Association. He says, quote, "If the president continues overriding governors to deploy military assets into another state against the governor's will, we have abandoned the foundational principles that have protected our Republic for nearly 250 years. This action must be denounced immediately and unequivocally by the National Governors Association. Should National Governors Association leadership choose to remain silent, Illinois will have no choice but to withdraw from the organization." Joining us now from Chicago is JB Pritzker, a Democrat, the governor of the great state of Illinois. Governor Pritzker, I know there's a lot going on. Thank you for making time to be here with us tonight.

Governor JB Pritzker: Good to be with you, Rachel.

Rachel Maddow: Let me ask you just first about this call to your fellow governors around the country. What are you asking them to do here to support you?

Governor JB Pritzker: Well, let's start with—we should stand as one against the idea that Donald Trump has the ability to call up our National Guard against our will. I want to remind you that just last year, Joe Biden tried to call up National Guard, federalize them, to take Air National Guard and move them into the Space Force. And all 50 governors signed onto a letter, including, I might add, Greg Abbott from Texas, saying that it was improper for the president of the United States to call on governors to either send their National Guard or to federalize the National Guard so that the president could use them however he wanted to.

Brad: And to me, Dan, this was one more little drip, drip, drip piece of evidence of this is how you tear a union apart. And it's also something we said a couple of months ago, which I hear people say in drips and drabs, but I have not heard folks focusing on, which is there is a transformational shift happening when it comes to states' rights in this country, that it is blue state or Democratic governors like Pritzker or Newsom saying, "Don't states have rights? Are you allowed just to invade my state with your police and your military enforcement and your men in masks? Is that allowed? Do states not have some form of sovereignty and say over what happens there? If they don't, why am I in a Governor's Association? The next question is, why am I sending taxes to the federal government? Why am I doing that?" The next question is, you know, on down the line, and you all can see where this is going. Any final thoughts on this before we shift over to something quite different?

Dan: Just, you know, to stick with that metaphor of drips in a bucket. You get enough drips in a bucket, a bucket fills up, right? And that's the question is, where does this go as that bucket gets fuller and fuller and you get more and more of this movement, primarily of blue state governors in different ways, trying to do what they can, to take on the administration and so forth. Where does that go? And I think that that's a really sort of key question and the key thing to watch. And I think you're right about this transformational thing, and we've talked about it a lot. You know, once upon a time, not that long ago, states' rights was always a, supposedly, an issue of the right. And the transformation of this over the last few years, I think, is really, really significant, and one of the more potentially far-reaching changes that we're observing, and I think that that's going to become a really significant issue moving forward.

Brad: There are no rights in the face of Trump's will, like you don't have any rights in the—I mean, they're even saying, Dan, that if you burn a flag, that's inciting violence, and there's been, you know, Supreme Court cases that have ruled and said that's not true. So if you take what we read from The Bulwark there, if you stand in the way of the will of Trump, well, no rights you have are sacred, and any of them can be taken away. That's what I conclude. Let's take a break. Go right back.

All right, Dan, we got to do this the best we can. We need to keep it real, as the kids say. The kids don't say that. They haven't said it since 1984, but I just said it. We do need to keep it real, though, because we're gonna talk about some folks who are claiming that they have seen Charlie Kirk in heaven. Want to say again, we're not making light of the fact that Charlie Kirk was murdered. We don't take any joy, happiness, glee, goodness, anything from that set of actions. We've said it 100 times already—saddened, fearful and thoroughly startled by what happened in the assassination of Charlie Kirk. We do not celebrate it in the slightest. But we now have not only Jack Posobiec, his friend, saying that because of what happened to Charlie Kirk, we need to fight Antifa. We not only have congresspeople saying, "Well, they killed Charlie Kirk, so we should gerrymander the hell out of our state's congressional map," but we also have Christian prophets saying that they have seen Charlie Kirk in heaven, which some of you might be chuckling at, but to me, is actually—and this is just me, Dan—is on par in terms of being disgusting as anyone who was actually celebrating Charlie Kirk being murdered. The idea that you would say to someone's grieving family, "Oh, I saw Charlie Kirk in heaven. He was riding a horse," to me that—like if someone did that to me when it came to a relative of mine, a family member, a friend, I would be not happy. So anyway, enough pretext. Take it away. What do we got here?

So should I play the clip? You want me just to play the clip and then people can—

Dan: yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. Play the clip because I can't do justice to it. 

Brad: Here's Kim Robinson describing what she has learned about Charlie Kirk in heaven. Here she is.

Kim Robinson: This morning when I was praying and going over my notes, you know, and reading this, the Lord showed me that—he showed me Charlie in heaven. And like I said, I don't know anything about Charlie, so I hope somebody puts in the chat or lets me know, if you know, if this is, you know, what you know about him. But I saw Charlie this morning riding on a horse with Jesus, and Jesus has given him, like, a horse ranch. He has a ranch, and he has all these animals, and I just feel like Charlie loved horses. And right now, this morning, then, you know, he was on his—he was on these horses, and he was riding in his horse ranch with Jesus. And I'm just like, "Isn't that amazing?"

Brad: Who's Kim Robinson? What's going on, Dan?

Dan: So it's hard to describe exactly what Kim Robinson is. I, you know, Christian, I guess, influencer, wants to be an influencer, minister, author, as you say, prophet. And what do we mean by prophet here, coming out of a kind of Christian tradition where people will claim that they sort of have special insights given directly by God and so forth. And so she wrote a book, and it's on her website as well, called Heaven Is Real and Fun. And I'm looking at—if you read the—just the summary of this on Goodreads. And this is how she describes what it is that she is talking about. "Just since 1988, the Holy Spirit has been taking me to heaven. Jesus would show me various fun places and allowed me to do fun things. I asked, 'Why is he showing me these places?' The response is, Daddy"—slash God said—"so God is Daddy here—because people think all they do here is float around, wearing diapers, eating grapes or doing nothing but bowing before me. I have planned for each person in detail what makes them happy to be here with me. So you are to tell them heaven is real and fun and Jesus is coming soon."

That's the statement, and it lists some things that were you to read Heaven Is Real and Fun. She has a follow-up book as well. You can come slide down the treehouse slide with Jesus. You can play with Jesus in the river. You can play in the snow. You can ride a roller coaster. You can—not making this up—see where the babies go that were aborted. You can see where did your pet come from. You can play gel balls with Jesus and others. And the cover of the book is, like, there's, like, an extreme skier and a roller coaster and all this other sort of stuff.

Brad: So she's also claimed you can ride dinosaurs in heaven.

Dan: Yes, which

Brad: Dan, yeah, I'm rethinking this whole deconstruction thing at this point.

Dan: Signing up because, I mean, I'm old enough that I rode them to class as an undergraduate. That's what I tell my students. That's how we used to—it's how we used to go to class.

Brad: But I wish we had a sound on the show for a dad joke, a dad joke alert. Like, "Oh, dad joke." Like, I wish, because that was—that was like, wow.

Dan: So there's the Discord project, yeah, for the week, because by, like, you know, Sunday afternoon, there's gonna be, like, 15 people will have posted, like, sounds.

Brad: Need a dad-joke buzzer—because that was—that was bad. I mean, that was good in terms of dad jokeness, and also, like, I'm even a little startled right now.

Dan: So Brad's in physical pain right at this moment.

Yeah. So on one hand, this feels so silly, but you hear in the clip, you hear the emotion of this and that apparently, you know, what Charlie Kirk got was a horse ranch. He's riding a horse with Jesus and so forth. And lots of things stand out about this to me. We were just talking a few minutes ago about people attributing whatever they want to the Bible, just broadly speaking. The theologian in me and the Protestant theologian who has a Bible degree and things like that, and, you know, believed in sola scriptura and all that kind of stuff, that everything should come from the Bible. The Bible says startlingly little about heaven. It says almost nothing about what that is and what that place is, and so forth. And so on one hand, if I'm sort of decoding this, one of the things that shows us is how much these popular presentations of Christianity from people who claim to be, quote-unquote, biblical and biblical literalists and all that stuff—and everybody who listens to me knows I talk about this a lot, but this is one of the reasons—the Bible didn't say anything about heaven being this, like, literal, active form of wish fulfillment, that whatever you like best is what you're going to get to do for all eternity. Never mind the fact that, I don't care what you're into, I think it's going to get boring if you do it, like, literally forever. But that's a separate issue.

But I think to your point, it's this notion of, you know, what is the significance of saying that? This is how we saw Charlie Kirk and so forth. This is a theological model, and that creates this kind of saccharine, sickly sweet God who rewards people by giving them whatever they want. Right? You know, it's like, it's the parent in the sky or the spoiled, you know, the grandfather who spoils you is like, "Hey, you want a lollipop because I don't know, you did well on your test at school or something," this notion of reward, this notion of you get whatever you are most into, and so forth. And I think the significance of this is, this is where Charlie Kirk is. Yeah, everything that he did, we've talked about the kind of sainting of Charlie Kirk. And I'm not here to disparage Charlie Kirk. I am here to say that lots of people didn't agree with Charlie Kirk, and that was Charlie Kirk's stick was, like, you know, freedom of speech and disagreement and debate and all of this kind of stuff, to where it has become so sort of mainstream that has dribbled down into this form of Christianity, this form of popular Christian expression, shared with Kelsey O'Malley, that's the person that she's doing the interview with there.

But this notion that what he did was so good, he's rewarded in eternity by getting to do whatever is most fun, whatever is best for him. And just so many pieces of this that number one, that highly individualistic sense. Two, that the eternal reward we get is something tailored to each of us, whatever's best to me, God is about serving my needs and my wants and my eternal reward will be what I am into. It serves that self-aggrandizing vision of ourselves that I think feeds the right. I think it illustrates how much the language of religion is coded to a certain kind of identity and the rewarding of a certain kind of identity. In America, it's not about belief. It's not about theology. This is terrible theology. You want to talk about theology, this is, like, this is some of the dumbest theology you'll ever run across. We could psychoanalyze it. This sounds like somebody who was never allowed to have fun, and so, like, their vision of heaven is, "I get to do fun stuff." You're like, "Really? Like, riding a roller coaster, dude, I'll just go to Six Flags." Check it off the list. I don't, like, I don't need to go to heaven for that. We could look at it in all those ways. But I think the significance is what it tells us about the purpose of religion for the right and the role that it plays in sanctifying a particular political position, in sanctifying a political social position, a range of social positions, in sanctifying particular people and elevating them in a way that they are beyond question and becomes yet another mechanism for legitimizing anything people do. Because more and more on the right, what we're going to see is, "Well, you know, Charlie would have said this." "That's what—yeah, Charlie would want us to do that." He is becoming posthumously, one of those mechanisms of legitimizing what happens on the right.

Brad: Well, that's where I want to go with this, because you talked about how the theology here doesn't really hold in terms of what the Bible actually outlines in terms of the afterlife. I want to go to what this does. And the term I would introduce here is the theological capital of Charlie Kirk. So what she's doing here is using the capital that Charlie Kirk brings. If you have an interaction with Charlie Kirk, if you knew Charlie Kirk, if you were his friend, if you were his confidant, you get a boost. You have more authority. So she is saying, "Well, I saw him in heaven, and he was doing this." And what that does for her—like, what does this do for her? Well, she gets more—she gets more cred, she gets more legitimacy. She gets more a sense that she is closer to the Divine than maybe we thought, because she sees Charlie Kirk, and this is good, so she's using Kirk for theological capital.

Candace Owens said that she was visited by Charlie Kirk in a dream. Here's her quote: "I want you guys to know something. I want to share this with you. You can take it or you can leave it. I've known this, really, since the first second. But I rarely have vivid dreams that I didn't have. I did, in fact, have a very vivid one over the weekend. In fact, the last time I had one of these, it was when she was pregnant. But in this dream," she says Charlie Kirk told her that he was betrayed.

So Candace Owens, some of you been following this, some of you haven't. She's been claiming that Charlie Kirk was—there's a conspiracy theory. He was murdered by people who wanted him dead. It could be Mossad, it could be the Israeli government, it could be Netanyahu, it could be others. And now we have Charlie Kirk telling her—

And this gives her political capital. It's not theological capital. It's political. It's like, "Well, everything I've been saying about what really happened with the murder of Charlie Kirk and the politics involved with Israel and the US relationship with Israel, Charlie Kirk told me directly I was betrayed," and so we're seeing Charlie Kirk become, as you just said, Dan, this authority that you can reference, like the Constitution. "Oh, the Constitution says this, or they're violating the Constitution. Or would Charlie have wanted that? Or I think Charlie would have wanted us to do this, or they killed Charlie Kirk. So we better gerrymander this state's nine congressional districts," according to Jim Banks. That's what you're seeing here. Jack Posobiec, "Antifa. We better go annihilate Antifa, because that's, I think, what Charlie would want us to do," etc., etc., etc. So we're going to see more of this. But some folks alerted me to this video, and we had to make sure we got to it today.

All right, Dan, you want me to do reason for hope, or you want to—you dive in first?

Dan: Talking about the Governor's Association, Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma. Oklahoma was in the news last week because Ryan Walters stepped down. This week, it's their governor who is a tried-and-true Christian nationalist, not somebody who I think I've ever agreed on anything with him, not somebody I look up to or think of as having any policy positions that I think are positive. Said the very obvious thing, which is red state governors would be irate if Biden had sent troops from Illinois, from Pritzker's Illinois, into their states. If you had sent National Guard troops from Illinois into Texas, everybody would be talking about a civil war. Everybody would be talking about Texas will rise again, and the Alamo and yada yada yada yada. And he's right. It's an obvious point. He said it, and it was a small, but welcome, break from the party line and the will of Trump that we have been talking about all day. What's yours?

Brad: Mine is that, you know, we talked about it. Politico had an article about it, but I think it's worth repeating. The Politico headline was "Judges Appointed by Trump Keep Ruling Against Him. He's Not Happy About It." I think it is a reason for hope that it's not just the judiciary stacking up against Trump. Trump judges are ruling against Trump, and I think that does number one show how far afield from anything constitutional, Trump has drifted in the kinds of things that he's doing, but I think it also it does help to defuse some of those right-wing attacks on the judicial system, because some of those people are going to be the ones who recommended these people to Trump. They can't come out and say just straightforwardly that this person is part of the deep state, or they're opposed to Trump, or whatever, because they're the ones that helped convince him to put him on the bench, and then they will run afoul of Trump. So I think, again, it doesn't undo everything, but I think it is significant when Trump-appointed judges are ruling against him. I think another sign of hope. I don't believe that most of these Trump-appointed judges are qualified. I'm quite certain that most of them do not interpret the Constitution and laws the way that I would, or the judges that I find myself aligned with would, but there is a sliver of hope for me that some of them might actually care about the Constitution. They might actually care about the rule of law, and I think that that's a reason to find some hope in that as well.

All right, y'all, want to make sure you know about two things. One is American Unexceptionalism, by Matthew Taylor and the Reverend Susan Hayward, coming out October 23rd, and it's all about the global lessons for fighting religious nationalism. We need to learn from our neighbors on how to fight Christian supremacy, authoritarianism, fascism. So they'll be talking to scholars and journalists and activists from all over the world, Brazil, Russia, India, about how they have seen the strategies and skills implemented to fight religious nationalisms in their countries. We talk about Christian nationalism a lot and authoritarianism. This is a limited series that will really introduce you to how to fight that, and how people have gained that perspective from around the world. So that will drop October 23rd, you can subscribe in our show notes.

And then you have Teología Sin Vergüenza which is a show that centers Latinx queer feminist theologians, who are talking about what it means in a moment where Latinx people are being attacked and kidnapped, where queer people, especially trans people, are being targeted, to center those voices and to hear their perspective on politics, faith and activism. This is a one-of-a-kind show, and you can check that out in our show notes too.

I'll be live streaming on Monday, talking, once again, about Peter Thiel, so join us on our YouTube channel on Monday at 5:30 Eastern. Want to thank all of you who've subscribed, have reached out, who've just been so supportive of us, and especially those who've reached out with kind messages telling us that this show does, in fact, make a difference to them, because that's why we do it. Other than live streaming, next week, we'll have some other great content on Wednesday with It's In The Code, Friday, the weekly roundup. For now, we'll say thanks for being here. Have a good day.

Dan: Thanks, Brad.