Weekly Roundup: From Neo-Nazi Remigration to Military Christian Nationalism

Brad Onishi: Welcome to Straight White American Jesus. I'm Brad Onishi, founder of Axis Mundi Media, author of American Caesar: How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Turning America into a Monarchy, co-host of this show, here today with my co-host.

Dan Miller: I am Dan Miller, Brad Onishi — Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College. Glad to be with you. It's always a little silly during the summertime, so here I am. We'll see what happens. Maybe I'll just really live it up. People in my office hours yesterday got a taste of, you know, summertime, summertime. Dan Brad summer, Dan. So we'll see how it goes.

Brad: We're going to start today with a brief touch on Delaney Hall and what's happening there, and let that take us into Greg Bovino, the former head of the Border Patrol, how we've missed somebody, Bovino. We just couldn't let him disappear for long, had to bring him back into conversation. He spent his time this week at a far-right neo-Nazi conference in Portugal, and we'll talk about how that involves US-European relationships, the ways the Trump administration is inspiring the European far right and neo-Nazi groups, and the ways that the term remigration is being used by those on this continent and overseas to a very disgusting and startling effect. We'll then get into new poll numbers showing dropping support for LGBTQ+ folks in the United States, and discuss what that means, and what explains it, and how it relates to a religious attack on queer people. Finally, we'll get into the military's formalization of its reduction of religious groups and traditions that it formally recognizes through its chaplaincy, and the ways that will affect our soldiers, and how it is an expression of Pete Hegseth's Christian nationalism and a revolution happening in our armed services. We'll then get to 8647, James Comey, and a recent court case on free speech — all of that and more. Lots to cover. Let's go.

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All right, Dan. It's time to jump into what's going on with Greg Bovino and Delaney Hall, and just some really unsettling things around the country. A lot of you know that across the last couple of weeks in New Jersey, there's been an ICE detention center where there has been protest. There's been escalating clashes between officials like Senator Andy Kim and others outside the facility and those officials who are in charge of it. There have been detainees who are on hunger strike. There have been people like the Governor Mikie Sherrill, who has been denied entry. This is an escalation of an ongoing effort to not only continue Trump's mass deportation brigade, but to hold people in what many claim are inhumane conditions that do not have safe food, safe conditions, safe facilities, or anything even close. So we want to talk about that today. Dan, want to just get your kind of first take on anything related to Delaney Hall, if there's anything there, and then I'll jump into what this means for our old friend Greg Bovino.

Dan: I think it's worth highlighting — this goes a little bit afield from just Delaney Hall, but the other sort of side story developing in this is the threat from Markwayne Mullin, head of DHS, to pull immigration enforcement from international airports and blue cities to target so-called sanctuary cities. So the reason I bring that up is just the way that the administration is doing these things, these awful things at detention facilities. I think clearly they don't believe that immigrants deserve sanitation and proper food, and so forth. I think that's part of the policy. But also the way that they just continue to leverage that into a political tool to try to punish what they view as so-called sanctuary cities, or any place that doesn't toe the Trump line. I don't think we're going to get into that today, but people who've been following this know that the things at Delaney Hall were sort of a key part of this — and really complex, weird stuff from Markwayne Mullin about Newark Airport, and how it wouldn't be affected by this. But for me it's telling how much the sort of dehumanization continues when there's no real focus on what's happening in these facilities. It's just like, oh, we can use this now as another cudgel to attack Democrats in blue cities. So you've got the protests going on, and there's no substantive discussion about the actual policies, but an expansion of it by trying to continue to use it as leverage to force cities that don't want to use local police to enforce federal law to try to coerce them. So I think it's just worth noting the sort of spin-off issues that are coming out of this. I think it's significant for this event, because I think it shows how callous this administration really is.

Brad: We're going to see a ramp-up of this this summer. I think that there's been a sense of a lull. Bovino was dismissed, Markwayne Mullin was put in place. You know, everything that happened in LA and in the Twin Cities over the last six months — I think there's been a kind of collective turning away from those things, and there's been an effort on DHS and ICE's part to be more quiet about what they're up to, but they haven't stopped. So we will be covering this more in the future.

But I want to just give you a tweet here from Greg Bovino: "ICE agents at Delaney, hang in there, you have the world watching and supporting your efforts to hold the line. Every one of us wants to be shoulder to shoulder with you. In speaking with the Mean Green Team, they send you support and are wishing you the best. Give them hell and live the moment."

Now, I'm going to put this on the screen. If you're watching on YouTube, you'll see it — if not, you won't — but it is a picture that accompanied this tweet, and it is Greg Bovino giving what I will say, in my interpretation, is a Nazi salute. And so you know, there's a sense here, a very real sense, of what Bovino — and I think many in the MAGA world — think DHS and ICE are doing when they are "holding the line," quote unquote, at Delaney Hall. They are doing things that fall in line — this is me now — with the Nazi regime's idea that any foreigners, any of those who were not quote unquote assimilable to German society, any of those who did not belong there, should either be deported or treated in a way that is so cruel that they will not try to stay in the country, or will no longer exist as human beings. So, here we have Greg Bovino giving the Nazi salute, and it's not an isolated incident. If you think that what's happening at Delaney Hall is some blip, some glitch — A, you've been living under a rock, but B, let's just get into what Greg Bovino did, the guy that used to lead the effort.

Dan: Everybody's watching you, everybody's standing shoulder to shoulder, everybody's supporting you. Who is the "everybody" for Greg Bovino? When he says everybody, who does he mean?

Brad: And this is — I mean, this is the guy that used to be the face of the deportation crusade. This is the guy that used to lead the effort. He is somebody whose life, worldview, ideology, tactics, and strategies were implemented at the head of the snake. So who is this guy? Well, he's the guy that spent this week, Dan, at the second annual European Ethnic Cleansing Conference. That's not the official name, but that is what the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism called it in an article from June 3. On May 30, around 500 far-right activists and their supporters traveled to Porto, Portugal, for the second annual Remigration Summit.

Now we're going to talk about what remigration means in a second, because it is not a harmless word. It is a coded word. Alfonso Gonsalves, the chief organizer of the event, said, "Weimar conditions require Weimar solutions." Well, there we go. He's the founder of the far-right group Reconquista. God, there's just like layer after layer —

Dan: Layer after layer of Eurocentrism and xenophobia and racism. There we got the Weimar Republic stuff and the references to Germany. You've got the expulsion of Muslims from Spain — that's what that Reconquista language is, the Muslims and Jews, basically all non-Catholics from Spain. The enforced expulsion: you could convert, you could be executed, or you could leave; those are the options. So just to put that out there — there's nothing sort of sneaky about the names if you know anything about Western history.

And once again, I'll just say that we have been arguing for a while — I argue at length in my book, American Caesar — that one of the things that is no longer true is that the Christian nationalist movement wants to go back to the 1950s. I think that was true ten years ago. I think there was a large-scale sentiment that if we went back to the 1950s, we would be better off. That was kind of the MAGA Pax Americana. Now the idea is we need to go back to like the 1150s — just get, as you just said, get all the Jews and Muslims out of Europe, get the Muslims off the Iberian Peninsula. In America —

Brad: In the United States, that means getting rid of 100 million people. That's what Greg Bovino now says — that's how many "illegal immigrants" there are, quote unquote. Not true, not even close to true in terms of how many undocumented people are here. But when you start using the 100 million person language, you're saying anyone who is not white, anyone who's not European. Just to put it in perspective, that's —

Dan: A third — approximately a third of the US population. That's the kind of language that they're using. And we talk about this all the time: part of how populism and nationalism work is that not everybody who's in a country — even if they're legal, even if they have citizenship, whatever — they're not all actually Americans. "Real Americans" is only a subset of that. And you get that with this language, that a third of us don't deserve to be here, a third of us are not real Americans, a third of us need to be expelled. And you tie this in with the pronatalism and all that, right — getting white Christians to have more kids — so we can expel the third of Americans that we don't think are real Americans and —

Brad: Breed our way to a Christian nation. It's ironic you say that, Dan, because as I've read the experts on this — Cynthia Miller-Idriss and others — here's what they've said about remigration.

So this conference was called the Remigration Summit. Well, what is remigration? Remigration — the word is rooted in the white supremacist great replacement conspiracy theory, which purports a planned replacement of white people by politicians and other elites. Jews are often targeted as driving this plan. And remigration is therefore based on a series of policy proposals drafted by an Austrian white nationalist named Martin Sellner, but picked up by others — the AfD far-right group in Germany, the group I just mentioned in Spain, and so on — to end the so-called replacement by purging the continent of non-white people and eliminating all forms of multiculturalism. The goal is to make countries "European again."

Believers in the conspiracy theory have committed several acts of targeted mass violence against Muslims, Jews, LGBTQ+ people, Black people, and others. The Christchurch, New Zealand mosque shooter, who murdered 51 Muslims in 2019, donated 1,500 euros to the Austrian Identitarian Movement and exchanged emails with Sellner, the guy who really coined the term.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss, who is a scholar I respect a lot, says remigration is "this idea that you should send people who don't belong in this country to another place." It's not a term you hear every day, Dan — remigration — but it is intricately tied to great replacement theory, and it's based on the idea that any particular state that has a white majority population and wants to retain that majority, you would have to get rid of people of color. That's a direct quote from Cynthia Miller-Idriss, who is an expert on all of this. And you either do that violently, she says, or by re-migrating them — in other words, you deport 100 million people from the United States: the UK, anybody who is Muslim and South Asian, anybody who is Black, anybody who is not white and Christian. They need to go away.

There's more to say here, because Greg Bovino not only attended the conference, but in an interview ahead of it he could not help himself but give homage to a German leader. Nonetheless, I'll throw it to you for thoughts on remigration and anything.

Dan: Yeah, it's just — I think, first of all, the word remigration: it's related, not the same, but related to when people in the US talk about "self-deportation," people self-deporting — basically making things so bad that they flee the country. We don't say they fled the country, we don't say that we coerced them into leaving. We say that they "self-deported," right? We're not removing people, we're not deporting people, they're remigrating to some place that they probably have no connection to. Oftentimes, these are people who've been in these places for generations. They're not re-migrating to anywhere. They're just simply being forced out.

I talk about this in "It's in the Code" a lot of times — the kinder, gentler way of trying to package these ideas. Referring to it as remigration, I think, is supposed to do part of that.

Another thing — you mentioned it briefly, and I want to circle back to it — is the targeting of LGBTQ+ people and the queer community. I think another thing that people need to recognize is the fluidity of ethnicity or whiteness as we talk about these things, because it becomes a category that can sweep in other groups or other people. Somebody who doesn't know them might say, well, wait — queer folks are affected by this, but that's not an ethnic category, that's not a racial identifier. But these are all fluid categories that those in power can use to sweep up whomever they want. We could think about the history of the US, where if you were Catholic, you were not considered white — Catholicism was essentially a kind of ethnic marker as much as it was a religious marker, and it's only with time that that changes. I think you see the same thing in the European context, you see it in American Christian nationalism. This is why these things come together as a package. If we oppose people of color being in this country or immigrating to this country, we also oppose trans rights, and we also oppose queer rights, and so on. We see that same parallel in this European context. That's really important to remember, for a number of reasons — not least of which is a theme we've talked about for a long time: if you're somebody who stands on the sidelines and watches this, and you're like, "Well, that's really bad, but I'm not an immigrant, my family's not immigrants, we're okay, we've been here long enough" — it's only a matter of time till they find something about you that puts you under the umbrella of people they want to target and remove.

So, Bovino, ahead of the conference, gave an interview to a French outlet. And I want you to know, Dan Miller, that I'm sight-reading from the French, okay?

Brad: Oh, so just give me a minute, Dan. Okay, I'm doing my best, all right. He says that basically, in times like this, one thinks of people like Rommel — the Desert Fox from Nazi Germany — J. Edgar Hoover, and Patton, or Lawrence of Arabia. Those are the examples he picks. You know, I talk about Josh Hawley's like King Arthur and Gandalf — he's like Lawrence of Arabia. You're like, what? Okay, sorry, it's a serious thing, but you just — why? Okay.

Also thinks of He-Man, the Dolph Lundgren version, okay? Gen Z, Dolph Lundgren only, okay? Just muscles, blonde, who-gay hero — that's who I'm thinking of, Dolph Lundgren. All right, not the new one. All right, I'm sure Greg Bovino has explained at some point why he loves the He-Man Dolph Lundgren. Anyway, I digress. He says that you think of those like — I don't know — Nazi commander Rommel, because they had "a unique expertise in their field, and an exceptional personality and command that drove them to be at the head of the hierarchy of communication." He's basically saying Weimar conditions demand Weimar responses, and that means we need a singular figure who can basically take the reins and do what is necessary. I argue in American Caesar, my forthcoming book, that there is a desire for monarchy, autocracy, in this country, and I don't think Greg Bovino is doing anything to convince me otherwise. Thoughts on the Rommel reference?

Dan: What does he highlight? He talks about unique abilities and leadership. But you've got to ask — like, okay, why those examples? If we're really talking about unique abilities and capabilities and leadership, why people that fought for the Nazis and for global takeover? J. Edgar Hoover — people who sought to oppress, to punish, to maintain what they viewed as a true, authentic, pure people, et cetera. I think the examples that he gives tell you everything. I don't think we have to work hard to decode this. But if you wanted to — if you felt like you needed to — he didn't say anything about white supremacy, he didn't say anything about Nazis, he just said "leadership and stuff." You're like, okay, why those examples? What does that tell you? I think it tells you again everything you want to know about Greg Bovino.

And I think the other piece to tie in with all of this — with him being at this conference — is that these European far-right groups are taking their cues from MAGA. They see what MAGA is doing, and they see what is happening with these immigration enforcement policies in the US, and they're inspired by it. And I've felt for a long time that if you want to judge a social policy, or a movement, or a belief, look who jumps on board, look who thinks it's awesome. And so if you're drawing the praises of European neo-Nazis — I think if you're frankly in the MAGA camp, you're fine with that, you don't care. But for the rest of us, or people who want to say, well, what's different, or how come you guys talk about fascism all the time, or how come you make comparisons to Nazis, that seems over the top — hey, when the Nazis are looking at your country and being like, "That's how we should do it," I think that's a warning. And those who know their history know that this isn't the first time Hitler looked at Jim Crow segregation in the American South and used parts of that as his blueprint and model for the early stages of the Final Solution — what they were going to do to segregate and marginalize Jewish people and other communities in Germany. So it's not the first time, and it's not a specious comparison to make. And I think it says a lot when you need to look and say, wow, the people who are really inspired by this are the neo-Nazis. Greg Bovino, who got removed from his position heading up the deportation campaign — what's he do? He's hanging out at neo-Nazi conferences now. I think it tells us everything we need to know in actually assessing the kind of moral vision of Christian nationalism in the US.

Brad: Well, I mean, at least it's only limited to Bovino, this guy that's been fired. Let me just read from the notes here so I don't get it wrong. US President Donald Trump's use of the word "remigrate" and the American State Department's pledge to create an office for remigration put wind in the sails of longtime advocates of the policy in Europe. "When the word is acknowledged by the president of a major power, one can no longer say that it is marginal," says Jean-Yves Le Gallou, a former MEP for the French far right under Jean-Marie Le Pen. He said this at the summit where Greg Bovino was in attendance. This is from CNN.

Marco Rubio and the State Department created a congressional notice that talked about reorganizing certain administrative agencies and putting in place different priorities reflecting core administration priorities. These offices will be substantially reorganized to shift focus towards supporting the administration's efforts to return illegal aliens to their country of origin or legal status. The congressional notice states one of those functional offices will be called — reading here — the Office of Remigration, and will be a hub for immigration issues and repatriation tracking.

Dan, do you remember — you and I are old men — there was a commercial when we were kids where this eleven-year-old boy is smoking a cigarette, and his dad comes in, and he's like, "Where'd you get that? Who taught you to do that? You can't smoke." And he's like, "I... I learned it from watching you." And the dad is just horrified. It's this great anti-smoking PSA: parents, if you smoke, your kids are gonna think it's cool. Same thing with drugs. I'm joking.

Dan: Yeah, the kid's like — dude's like, "Who taught you how to do this stuff?" And he's like, "I learned it by watching you." And his dad is crestfallen. But yeah — I'll throw out another reference — the opiate of the masses that the right wing is busy having about a notion of cultural purity and a Christian nation. Where are they learning it? They're learning it by watching the US, watching Trump. And you get this mirror play — you have the Trump administration putting policies into practice, and then you have the Europeans, whether it's in Europe or South America or wherever, different regimes sort of picking that up. And then they're bringing their language into it, and the Trump administration's like, "Oh hey, that's a good term, let's pick that one up." And then they do it, and then it reinforces it. And you just get this constant circular movement. But they are watching us, and they are doing what they think we are doing.

Brad: So I'm just going to give my takeaway for this. There's more we could say. I have clips from JD Vance, I have clips from German AfD leaders. We're out of time. Here's my takeaway.

The man that was put in charge of leading the Trump administration's deportation agenda is what we can characterize as a neo-Nazi. He is on his X page tweeting out to ICE agents at Delaney Hall with what I think is a Nazi salute. He's attending a remigration summit where Nazi ideas are being put forth, and where he, ahead of that summit, is giving interviews in which he name-checks Nazi generals and leaders. That is the chilling takeaway from this. If you don't think that the deportation agenda of the Trump administration is not marinated in ideas of not only the Third Reich but of neo-identitarian movement ideas of getting rid of 100 million of us — it's not about your citizenship, it's not about your papers, it's not about anything. It's about whether they consider you pure enough to be here. And as Dan said, if they don't, then they will find a reason for you to be on the list. To me, that's the takeaway here. Anything else, Dan, before we go to break, and then we'll talk about the Pew data that is connected to this.

Dan: I just think one can remember a time when, you know, a former head of a national agency like ICE — it would have been a problem for a political party if they showed up at a neo-Nazi rally or event, and were giving interviews and things. And here it's not even — it's a non-event within MAGA world, or something to be celebrated. And I think that tells us an awful lot about where we are and where we've come as a country under the Trump administration and the broader MAGA movement.

Brad: Let's take a break. Be right back.

All right, so hi, friends. You heard me say this at the top, and I'm just excited about it. I'm excited because Dan's here to talk about it with me, but we are expanding Axis Mundi Media and SWAJ, and we're doing that in a way that's more than just adding shows or episodes. We're building a daily independent media platform dedicated to understanding how religion shapes power in the United States. We believe democracy depends on religious literacy. We believe authoritarianism thrives when history is forgotten. We believe independent media matters now more than ever.

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All right, Dan, tell me about the new Pew data and what's going on with the numbers that tell us about dropping approval for LGBTQ+ representation and equality.

Dan: Yes, there's a new poll, actually by Gallup, that came out this week.

Brad: Sorry — sorry, Gallup, great.

Dan: And there's been Pew data on this as well, but it was — people might have seen it, it was picked up in a few different places. But one of the things that it showed is that attitudes toward LGBTQ+ communities in the US are shifting. And I think the really quick early takeaway for me is: right-wing attacks on these communities — they're working. They are having an effect. What it showed is that there have been significant declines in support for different aspects of the queer community after essentially twenty years of gains. If you sort of track this data over the last couple of decades, you had a steady, steady climb, sometimes a really rapid increase in support for these communities, and we've seen a decline. It reflects largely partisan shifts. I think that's not surprising to anybody, but for those who question the degree to which the MAGA movement is significant, those who question whether Christian nationalism is a real thing — I had another little super productive Facebook discussion with somebody this week about saying Christian nationalism is not real. I'm like, yeah, it is. Like, go read some stuff.

Moderates or independents and Democrats have largely held steady in some of their views, but people on the right have really, really, really dropped their support. It's not that they ever had a lot of support, but it's dropped.

So for a couple of examples, let's talk about marriage equality. Sixty-five percent of US adults, according to this poll, believe that marriage equality, or same-sex marriage, should be legal. That's good — that's roughly two-thirds of the population — but that's down from 71% just a couple years ago, so a significant percentage drop. But here's the key: you've got 65% of US adults, but only 37% of Republicans say that same-sex marriage should be legal. This is, what, ten or eleven years after the Supreme Court decision recognizing the legitimacy of same-sex marriage. And only 35% of Republicans say that gay and lesbian relationships are morally acceptable — that they're just inherently immoral. That's as retrograde as we get.

Illustrations of this that those who follow the news know: there were efforts to overturn the 2015 SCOTUS decision on marriage equality. They cited Clarence Thomas — Clarence Thomas has said he feels that decision was wrongly decided and should be turned over. Now that effort was turned away from the court without comment, so we don't know everything that was going on behind the scenes, but that's a sign of it. The Southern Baptist Convention, one of our favorite topics, Brad — for those of us in the room who are former Southern Baptist pastors — the Southern Baptist Convention last summer at their annual convention called for overturning that decision. Lawmakers in at least eleven states have called for legislation banning same-sex marriage. Most of that has not gone anywhere, and of course it would be challenged because of the Supreme Court decision in 2015. But the idea is that this is not going away. This is not a thing of the past. This is not something that's simply in the rearview mirror.

That topic — marriage equality, same-sex marriage — is a topic that I would argue, within the broader scheme of issues confronting the LGBTQ+ community, probably has the greatest amount of mainstream support at this point in time. When it comes to trans rights, only about 40% of Americans view changing one's gender — I would say that that was the language they use; I think it's more complicated than that, but it's a polling question they have to ask — only about 40%, about four in ten, see that as morally acceptable. That means only a minority of Americans view gender confirmation —

Dan: — somebody being able to live their life in accordance with what they feel their gender to be — as morally acceptable. That means that a minority of Americans believe that people know their own damn gender and know what it means to live that out and just want to do that. That number's down from 50% a couple years ago. That's a big drop — from 50% to 40%, that's a significant drop.

And I think this reflects both why the right has attacked trans people so much in particular. I've argued this for a number of years: there has never been as widespread support for or understanding of trans issues as there has been for other issues facing specifically gay and lesbian communities. So I think they were a ripe target for attack. And again, it has worked.

Another issue here is that the number of trans people in the US is a really small percentage — a small but significant percentage of people, to use the way I say this when I talk about this or teach on it. But to hear the right talk about it, they are a threat, they are a menace, they're threatening children, they're threatening women. And we see that rhetoric, we see those policies — we talk about them all the time. We see it having an effect. So I think this Gallup poll was really sobering. I think it shows that for those who thought — and I'm reaching back ten, fifteen, twenty years for myself now — who thought that eventually all those conservative Christians would kind of come around, that it would normalize, that as queer identities became more widespread in society, they would realize that they're not all the bad people that they think they are, and would come to acceptance, and so forth — that hasn't happened. And we see the ongoing attacks by the right, and folks are working.

Brad: Thoughts on this. I think number one is they're working because they are strategic, they are systemic, and they are well funded. And I think for me this starts in a couple of places. It starts in schools, it starts in the quote unquote culture wars, and this has been a strategy of the religious right from the '60s, the '70s, the '80s, the '90s, and all the way till now — attacking school boards, attacking those who are educators, librarians, and basically filtering into the public square, the place where there is so much at stake: our kids. What are they learning? Are they safe? Are they being educated? Filtering into those places — the school board, the PTA, all of the areas where parents congregate and converse — the idea that you need to be scared of an agenda that is trying to indoctrinate your children. Into what? Into all of these scary things: they want to show your kids pornographic books with body parts and sexual acts, and they want to turn your kid trans. And you know, you hear the President of the United States saying, "Oh, kid goes to school, they come home, and they had their genitals cut off." And when you have that rhetoric, just like the remigration rhetoric coming from leadership, you have a situation where you're going to get these kinds of numbers.

Now, one of the people that attended the remigration summit was Stefano Forte. And I know, Dan, you're like, "Brad, what are you talking about, man? This does not seem relevant." Stefano Forte is the leader of the New York Young Republicans. So along with Greg Bovino, the New York Young Republicans sent Stefano Forte here to the Remigration Summit. Stefano's role — or at least one of them in life — is to be Executive Director of the 1776 Project PAC. What is their mission? I'm just on their website here, Dan: "Changing education one school district at a time. We support reform-minded conservatives who oppose political indoctrination and believe in parental rights, safe and secure schools, fiscal transparency," all of that. What's my point? My point is these numbers can be traced in many ways to the systemic attack on our schools, our educators, and our kids coming from the right, and the ways they're using anti-queer messaging to convince you that there are predators and pedophiles around every corner, and that we should destroy the library, move the books, destroy our curricula, ban various texts, not allow people to study certain subjects, and so on. It's not an accident to me that Stefano Forte A is leader of the Young Republicans in New York, B is at the remigration summit, and C his day job is leading a PAC that is completely focused on education.

Dan: I think it's worth noting here — just a couple of points tying up with education. Another role of this are the de facto Christian charter schools — the number of charter schools that are publicly funded. And I was rereading Katherine Stewart's book recently, as I taught it this semester, and I think the statistic is there: something like 75% of charter schools are effectively publicly funded Christian schools. Now I want to be clear — not all charter schools are that. I have a kid who goes to a charter school that has no religious affiliation at all, so I'm not here to decry the phenomenon of charter schools per se. But this is a wedge area where, as you're saying, conservatives have sought to reshape education. Oftentimes people don't even know from the outside. One of the points that people will make — and I think this is a good point — is if you don't have a child in a school, you don't tend to know a lot about what's going on in that school. And if you do have a child in some of these Christian-funded charter schools, that's why you sent your kid there. So it kind of goes under the radar oftentimes. But it means that it's formal religious indoctrination that your tax dollars and my tax dollars are paying for, that often goes sort of unremarked and unknown.

The other piece of this is that all of this is aided and abetted by the Supreme Court, which has systematically dissolved any conception of separation of church and state over recent decades. And as the court has become more and more conservative, they've essentially given the green light to various kinds of Christian nationalist efforts to remake America into an authentically Christian nation. And I think this just makes the point that you're making: if you want to shape society, shape the kids. And you can do that through the education system, and through banning books from libraries and all of these kinds of things that we've been talking about so much over the last several years.

Brad: Yeah. But let's draw a conclusion that I think is sort of evident to me from everything you've laid out with these numbers, the discussion on education, what you said about charter schools. Here's the takeaway — if y'all want to just have something to chew on tonight.

When you fund vouchers and schools that are public money, tax money, your money, that are led by religious institutions, the statistics tell us that by and large, those tax dollars are going to a whole bunch of things that many of you probably don't like — teaching religion, advocating for one religion over another, teaching homophobia, teaching queer-phobia. By and large, if 75% of charter schools are in essence Christian schools, and the large majority of those Christian schools hold — whether implicitly or explicitly — the view that there are only quote "two genders," and that the only legitimate form of love is between a heterosexual man and a heterosexual woman, there's no such thing as trans people, there's only gender dysphoria that's a mental disease, blah blah blah — if those schools by and large hold those views, then what we're saying is: every time that money gets funneled to vouchers and to charters like that, it gets funneled to creating a public square where fewer and fewer Americans are going to see same-sex marriage, marriage equality, LGBTQ+ folks as a whole, as in any way moral, legitimate, equal, or anything like that. That is what is happening. I don't know, Dan, if you see that takeaway. I think there are other things to say here about these numbers, and there's a million ways we could go into them, but that's one that struck me.

Dan: And on the flip side, I want to state something that's maybe so obvious that some people listening will be like, "Okay, thanks, Dan, that was pointless." But I think it's worth noting, and I want people to think about this: how many people who oppose marriage equality and who oppose queer rights, and so on, do so for non-religious reasons? I mean, it's overwhelmingly a religious issue. So when people say, "Well, I'm not really sure that this kind of religion is the kind of social menace that you say that it is" — look at the spread of anti-queer sentiment. And I would just invite people to think in their own lives: if they think about family members, or friends, or people they know, or the weird dude down the street with the signs in his lawn, or like whoever it is — how many of those give you non-religious reasons for the views that they hold? How many people who say, "Well, according to biology, there are two genders" — how many people are really looking at biology, and how many people are looking at the story of Adam and Eve in the Bible and saying —

Brad: See, God made biology. Here's how it is. It is an almost exclusively religious area of opposition. And I think it's worth keeping that in front of us.

I would add two things to that. One: it's a religious opposition, it's a religious basis for the opposition that can be made by people who are at best nominally religious. So if you repeat long enough — "This is what the Bible says: God meant Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve" — if you say that enough in the public square, even the person who doesn't read their Bible often or has not been to church in two or three years, when you say to them, "Well, why do you care if gay people get married?" they will say, "Well, God, the Bible, that."

Moreover, I think this is a reason that this strategic attack on queer people starts with trans folks, because there are a lot of folks who are not religious who are not sure, not comfortable, who have wavering ideas about trans people. So they are people that can be picked off by that religious bigotry and brought into the fold. And I think that is what you see when you see the attack on trans people in schools, trans athletes, and so on — we're trying to get those non-religious folks who probably don't care if gay people get married, but who are interested in student athletes and trans folks and young people. "Now we can get them on our side." And I think that's part of what you just said too.

All right, let's take a break. We'll come back and talk about what's happening in our military, and the ways that most of our founding fathers would not be recognized in our military if they were alive today. Be right back.

Brad: All right, so we covered this in March, but Pete Hegseth signaled that they were going to reduce the number of codes that are used to kind of taxonomize religious traditions of our troops in the armed services. And for Hegseth, this was a matter of cleaning up, restructuring, efficiency, et cetera. Well, here is the Religion News Service reporting this week. The Department of Defense is substantially reducing the number of religions it officially recognizes, reportedly excluding atheists, pagans, humanists, and new age faiths. An independent military-focused news website reports — that website is military.com — the reduction of recognized faith groups represents the first time the military has revised the list since 2017, when it vastly expanded the list of recognized faith groups to about 211. I'm trying to remember who was president in 2017. Nope, I'm getting it in my earpiece: it was Donald Trump. Okay, so something's changed since then, Dan, and we can get into that.

Some of the other groups that are not recognized, I think, are deists and Unitarian Universalists. I saw Thomas Lecaque posting about this the other day — a lot of deists and our founding fathers. We could talk about that in a minute too.

Let me give a couple more rundowns on the pieces, and then I'll tell you what I think. The faith and belief coding system, renamed to the Religious Affiliation Codes, was simply due to a system that had become too big, according to the secretary. The previous system had ballooned to well over 200 faith codes — it was impractical and unusable, and many codes were never used at all. Hegseth said in March, adding that 82% of members who identify as religious use only six of the codes. He also said that chaplains are "first and foremost called and ordained by God," which not all the chaplains in our military believe — in God, or one God, or anything like that. There are former US Army chaplains who have said that this is not the American way, this goes against the First Amendment, and so on.

Hemant Mehta, the Friendly Atheist, questioned the exclusion of so many faith groups, including atheists. Mehta says this: "There are good reasons to include more faiths, not just for accuracy, but because it makes it easier for people of minority beliefs to get the help they need and to gather with other people who may share their beliefs within the military."

And I just want to agree with Mehta here, and I'll give you one impassioned reason that this is ridiculous and un-American, Dan, and then I'll throw it to you.

We can look at the statistics and say some of these codes are not used very often. We can look at the statistics and say the large majority of our military members use six codes, seven codes, ten codes, whatever. That's fine. Great.

You know, Dan, I hear a lot about supporting the troops. I just feel like supporting the troops is a big deal when I walk through the airport sometimes, especially in the South where I used to live, where my mom's family's from. And when I see military members in their military dress walking through the airport, many people stop and say, "Thank you for your service." We just had Memorial Day, where we remembered those folks. Supporting our troops is a big deal in this country, especially to the American right, but I think it is to most Americans.

Both my grandfathers fought in World War II — Purple Heart, code-breaking medals that hang on my mom's wall, remembering her dad's service. I think a lot of Americans have those memories too. I want to come out and say full-throated, Dan, on this show: I support our troops. And I'm going to say this — if you're going to sign up as a twenty-year-old kid being sent to Iran for no stupid reason other than the whims of a madman who falls asleep in meetings and is trying to divert your feelings about the fact that he's a pedophile —

If that's why this twenty-year-old kid is in Iran, and that kid identifies as a humanist or a deist or Wiccan — you know what I say, Pete? I support the troops. Didn't you guys just get — or aren't you trying to get — a trillion dollars from the President and from Congress? Isn't there enough money in there to hire the chaplain, to hire the person, to filter the codes, so we can support anybody who signs up?

If you're going to put your life on the line for this country, a country that promises you the freedom of religion — guess what, I think we can afford to say yes. If you are going through a life-altering moment where you have been shell-shocked in battle, where you are going through an existential crisis because you're overseas engaging in violence and warfare, where you're preparing for a trip where you are leaving your shore in San Diego or in Massachusetts, going across the world for the first time as a nineteen-year-old — I think we can fucking find you a chaplain to talk to, to help you, one that shares your religious tradition. I believe that, because I'm an American, and I support our military. Do you, Pete? Or do you just support some of our military — the real military? Because to me, the real military is everybody who signs up to say, "I'll do whatever it takes to defend this country." I think you think it's just that pure real American military, right? The men, the Christian men, the white men who should be in charge — they're the ones that should get the help, they're the ones that should get the aid, they're the ones that should get the chaplain who can walk them through the dark night of the soul. Everybody else — nah, you don't count, even when you signed up to —

Dan: Defend this place, this soil, this country, this Constitution. That's Christian nationalism in essence. That's the idea of remigration we've talked about all day — that's it in implementation.

Off to you. I think I'll pick up on that point about the "real Americans" — only the real Americans, as Pete Hegseth imagines them, being in the military. We talk a lot — it was in the news again — of him striking women and minorities from promotion lists over and over and over again, making sure that white men are the ones who are promoted and systematically denying anybody else promotion. Why? Because he doesn't believe they belong in those roles. They're not what he envisions as the real Americans and the real American military. And neither are the at least 18% of people looking for a faith description who don't fit into those six.

This is just straight-up what we call majoritarianism — the view that there shouldn't be minorities, that minorities should not have protected rights, that rights should not exist to protect minorities, whether they're religious minorities, gender minorities, whatever minoritarian group we're talking about. Because there shouldn't be any divergence from the kind of authentic, true American military.

And I think this ties in with the other issues we've talked about — women and people of color, and all the other efforts to do away with DEI and "wokeness" and everything else. This is all part of the same program from somebody like Pete Hegseth.

And another piece I just want to highlight — this will tie right in. We could extend it to the tech bros and whatever: that word, efficiency. Whether you're coming from the economic side, or you know Bezos and his talk about AI and digging foundations with bulldozers, or you're talking about Pete Hegseth here saying it was an inefficient system — when people hear the word efficiency, your ears should perk up. Because it's usually coded language for targeting people who are considered inconvenient. It's for targeting people that we don't like, people that we want out. And we're going to do it by appealing to efficiency. We're going to put the coded language of efficiency to mask the fact that we are simply targeting people who we think don't belong, who shouldn't have a place, who are unnecessary or extraneous to society or the military or whatever other domain we're talking about.

So I think all of these things are flowing together in this move by Pete Hegseth. And the last point to make: how transparent this has been from Hegseth from the start — from day one as Defense Secretary. He continues this single-minded campaign to create a white, masculine, Christian army for the US.

Brad: Okay, not only do I believe in the freedom of religion, freedom from religion — but I believe in the freedom of speech. How about you, Dan?

Dan: I do, and it turns out apparently some judges do too.

As a reminder: a few weeks ago, James Comey, former FBI director, was indicted because he posted an image in seashells. For those who don't remember the story, that part sounds ridiculous. He's going along the beach, and somebody in seashells had spelled out 8647. He took a picture, he put it on social media, and he was indicted on charges that it represented a death threat to President Trump, who was the 47th president. Most legal observers and others said this was a ridiculous charge, overreach, that it was the Department of Justice once again targeting a Trump opponent, and so on. Well, this perspective got a major boost this week.

The National Park Service revoked a permit for the 24/7 anti-Trump protest taking place in DC — a protest that's sort of manned twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, a constant ongoing protest. The National Park Service revoked the permit for a group because they had a flag that said 8647, and the idea was that this was a death threat against Trump. Well, this week, US District Judge Randolph Moss said that this amounted to, in effect, prohibiting political speech. He defended free speech and said 8647 is free speech.

Dan: He said it was an effort to limit it — quote — "without any articulable, much less evidentiary basis for concluding the speech actually threatens the life or safety of the president." In other words, he said the Secret Service and other opponents not only don't have proof of a threat against the president, they can't produce anything that says there actually is a threat, but they can't even articulate exactly why they think it's a threat — other than it's just, "We feel like it's bad, we don't like it, we work for Donald Trump, we don't want people expressing their freedom of speech." So this week it was a notable story that this same thing was defended. And it's partly notable because most observers say it's unrelated to the Comey case, but it of course speaks to the perception of the legal grounds of this, and once again highlights Trump using the Department of Justice as his weapon to go after anybody he doesn't like. But yeah — that flag is allowed to be used in the protest because it is in fact protected political speech.

Brad: All right, before we go to reasons for hope, I just want to say once again — we're kicking all this off. We have a new chapter for Axis Mundi Media. We have a fundraising campaign that starts now, and we need your help in order to deliver everything we want to do in this chapter of our network and our show. Your support will expand our live programming — Tuesdays and Fridays — and I haven't even told you about this: our hope is that after Labor Day, we'll have a new live show on Thursdays with Matthew D. Taylor. But we need to hire editors, producers, we need to ramp up our video operation and everything about our infrastructure. And we need to make sure the Daily Brief happens every day, Monday through Friday, every week. So every dollar that comes in to support us goes to the independent scholars and reporters, people like Dan and me, who are creating educational resources and expanding community spaces and live offerings.

We're trying to make this happen, folks, and we need your help to stay independent and to deliver what we think is the analysis for this moment. Some of you have heard this already, but we are moving our subscription over to Substack. If you're already a subscriber, don't worry — we're going to reach out, we're going to walk you through it. Nothing will be lost, and everything you have now will stay the same. You don't need to fret. But we are going to expand on Substack to have even more perks for members and for those who are joining us in our efforts to combat rising authoritarianism and religious imposition. You can join on Substack. You can also become a donor — there's a link in the show notes for philanthropic tax-free donations, and we are looking for founding donors to make the next chapter of our network and our show possible.

All right, Dan, with all that in mind, I hope you're as excited as I am. This gives me hope. I'm energized. I'm excited to see what we can accomplish together. And with all that in mind — if this were not reason for hope enough — I need your reason for a good segue.

Dan: Thank you. I'm excited for whatever chat comments are going to come up about both my cargo shorts and my T-shirt choices — that's the real thing. One reason for hope this week: sticking with some of these themes about queer rights and so on, the Court of Appeals this week said that the Pentagon's efforts to ban trans service members went too far and was unconstitutional. And that felt like a good reason for hope in the midst of all of this other news about declining views of queer rights, Hegseth's efforts to remake the military, and his own Christian vision, and so on.

Brad: My reason for hope is that it's June, and it's Pride Month, and we're gonna see so many galvanizing, inspiring displays of love and human flourishing — relationality, just people who are proud to be human in every embodied sense that that means. My daughter is almost five. We're gonna go to Pride in our little town, and just make sure that she understands — and always understands — that love is love. People can do that in every way possible. Families take every shape and form, and the beautiful thing is how people care about each other, and nothing else matters. I'm really excited about that.

All right, people — one week from today, we're live. Dan's gonna get a haircut, I'm gonna get a spray tan. We are gonna —

Dan: Fine, fine, whatever. Low blow, it's fine.

Brad: I am not. We're gonna be here at 1:30 Eastern. Check it out on YouTube, and join us live if you can. If you can't, don't worry — we'll be here on the podcast as normal. We will be here on YouTube after the fact. You can catch the live whenever you want. Don't worry. But if you want to hang out a week from today, it's historic, it's new, it's the first time, and we can't wait. Thanks for being here, y'all.

Dan: We'll catch you later, Brad. Bye.