Weekly Roundup: JD Vance, Peter Thiel, and Leonard Leo

JD Vance: We should fire all of the people you know like I think Trump is going to run again in 2024 I think he'll probably win again in 2024 and he'll win by margin such that he will be the president of the United States in January of 2025. I think that what Trump should do, like if I was giving him one piece of advice, fire every single mid level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people. And when the courts, because you will get taken to court, and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did, and say the Chief Justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.

Brad Onishi: That's JD Vance, senator from Ohio and the newly chosen vice presidential nominee for the Republican Party. In this clip, he offers advice to his now running mate, saying to Donald Trump that he should fire those in the administrative state and clear way for loyalists and our people. As we explained today, this is just one piece of a large puzzle that makes up JD Vance as a political candidate. He's a recent convert to Catholicism. He's an acolyte of Peter Thiel. What we unpack today is how this connects him to networks of influence from Silicon Valley to the Federalist Society and now perhaps Washington DC. I'm Brad Onishi, and this is the Straight White American Jesus weekly roundup.

All right, Dan, tell us who you are. Tell us where you work.

Dan Miller: I'm Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and social thought at Landmark College, Brad. Who are you?

Brad: Brad Onishi, faculty, University of San Francisco. And this is one of those weeks, Dan, where the Friday after the debate I didn't want to get out of bed, and I didn't want to talk in the mic. And that's just the reality. Some weeks you're just like, I am so distraught about what's happening. I just want to stay in bed. I'm going to order some french fries. And this week, you would think maybe that's how I felt. In reality, though, I am so ready to explain to folks dimensions of JD Vance, his religiosity, his faith and Catholicism that is not being talked about on other podcasts and on MSNBC, on CNN. So I am just pumped. I have only had one coffee, but I feel like I've had four coffees and a boba and like seven pieces of candy. So that's where I'm at right now. Dan and everyone, just be forewarned, because that's the mood I'm in.

Dan: If anybody's ever seen this series, The Flash, where he'll make his face vibrate so people can't recognize who he is, that's basically Brad Onishi right now. So I think if you had more coffee, you'd literally burst into flame. I do also think just real quick in these troubled times, in one of our supplemental episodes, a real important discussion revisit might be like on the days when you don't get out of bed, what food would you choose to have in bed? You mentioned french fries. I think that's a solid choice. But I'm just throwing that out there. Maybe that's something we need to think about.

Brad: I'm glad you mentioned that. So next week we will do our bonus episode. Everything we're going to do today on JD Vance, we're going to talk about Eileen Cannon, we're going to talk about Trump, we're going to talk about all of it. I think we're not going to be able to fit into an hour. So next week, our bonus monthly episode is coming. It'll appear on Tuesday. So there will be more JD Vance revelations. There will be more discussion of everything. So just hang on, in addition to what Dan and I will choose to eat on days we don't want to get out of bed and so on and so forth. So stay tuned for that.

Right, Dan, I want to get into Vance and all that business really quickly, because it's now been almost a week. Everybody listening has seen newspaper articles, reels, every news report, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, PBS. There was an assassination attempt on Trump's life. I have condemned political violence. I think both of us know that. We don't condone that in any way. I don't think we need to go over the basics of any of this. I don't want to summarize. Here's what I want to say about it, and I'll throw it to you real quick for a thought.

We're already seeing how it's going to be used, play out at the Republican Convention and in the media. So as soon as it happened, JD Vance himself came out and said, this is the result of people attacking Trump. We had elected representatives from Georgia and other places saying it was Biden who was responsible. Marjorie Taylor Greene got in a fight with a British reporter at the convention and said, you're the reason Trump was almost killed. Dan, this is going to be weaponized in dangerous ways. Hulk Hogan, who somehow spoke at the National Convention, which maybe you and I can wax poetically about our childhood memories of Hulk Hogan and what he's become as we've gone into adulthood, but he also said they came for Trump. They tried to kill him. Well, who's the they? And this is why it's dangerous, because what we're going to see for the next however many months is they tried to kill Trump. Hogan really distilled it into they're going to try to kill Trump. They already tried. And not only did he survive because of divine intervention, which so many people have already mentioned, but it's now time for us to go get them. We've been attacked. And when you're attacked, you're allowed to strike back. If someone comes into your property and tries to do stuff, you're allowed to shoot them. That's the mindset that is going to go in. I'm curious about your take real quick, because I don't think we want to spend all day on this. But we have to mention it at the top here, because it did happen about a week ago.

Dan: Yeah. So just to reiterate, all of that's completely predictable. The bogus part about it, of course, is that the party that's been using the rhetoric of violence for years is the right. So I have no doubt, we've said how many times, if you use violent rhetoric and you advocate violence, people will be violent. Somebody is going to listen to you and do it. And so, yeah, somebody did, and they did it toward Trump. And so I would just ask all those people, they're not obviously acting in good faith. But I would love for the people who put together those images with the words in different sizes of how often certain words appear, the word clouds. Let's just compare the left and the right and the rhetoric in news media, in politicians and whatever, and see where it is. It's come from the right.

The second piece is, it's like all of a sudden we have a white shooter committing gun violence, and he's not a lone actor. It's not a lone individual with mental health problems who's not connected to any movement. This is the first time in, I don't even know how long that on the right, we have a white man who attacks somebody with a gun, and suddenly it's part of a conspiracy. It's part of a group. It tells us everything we need to know about lots of other liberal people in America. So yeah, very selective rhetoric, selective pieces to highlight. And I think another piece of this I'll just throw out that I've said before, and I think that this is a real thing, is that I think oftentimes we see this all the time on the right, that the things they would do, they project onto the other side. And so this is a movement that I think would happily exercise violence against their enemies. They have, they did it. They did it on January 6th, they've done it other times. And so of course when somebody acts in this way, they see it as a kind of coordinated effort, because it's exactly what they've been talking about for years.

Brad: Well, in a poll last year, 28% of Republicans said they think political violence might be necessary to fix the country. So what you just said is not unfounded. It is not a conspiracy theory. It's none of those things. So, okay, let's jump into JD Vance.

I want to just state the things that I think most people listening know about Dan, and I'm happy for you to jump in. I'm going to get into story mode. So I need you to just stop me at any point that you'd like to comment or ask a question or something.

Dan: Okay, I will. I will preface this. You know, we're trading ideas back and forth. I think the direct quote from Brad Onishi is, I have enough advanced stuff for months. Yeah, so buckle in. Think the episode will end sometime mid September. We'll see how it goes. Want to thank Dr. Tiffany Wicks for help once again this week with research on this and just very helpful.

Brad: So here's what we know about JD Vance. I think most of you who read, who listen, who watch, whatever you do, wherever you get news, you know that he has indeed called for an abortion ban. I played a clip at the top of the episode where he really is interested in firing federal workers and instituting loyalists. That's right out of Project 2025. He wants, in essence, to destroy the administrative state. If you listen to speeches with Vance, he talks all about how the problem with our country is the executive can't do anything because there's so many civil servants in his way. He says, don't listen to SCOTUS, as you heard at the top. He's connected to Project 2025. I think all of you are becoming aware of the litany of other Vance things that I'm not even mentioning here. I think you also know, if you're paying attention, that he's connected to Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley magnate who founded PayPal and has a new company called Palantir that has defense contracts and other things with the federal government.

Now, the question Dan that people have asked, and I don't want to spend a ton of time on this, but I will ask your opinion is, why did Trump choose him? People have given various answers to this. I think it's fairly simple, and I think it's this. I think Peter Thiel and Elon Musk told Donald Trump to pick him. The day after he chose JD Vance and it became public, there was an announcement from Elon Musk and Donald Trump that Elon Musk would give $45 million per month until the election. Peter Thiel has been a long time backer. I mean, some people think of JD Vance as basically a Manchurian Candidate controlled by Peter Thiel. I think this was about money number one. If you ask yourself, what motivates Trump and what has always motivated Trump, if you just do Occam's Razor, it's always money and power, right? Has there ever been a time when Trump has strategized in a way that prioritized something other than money and power? The man tried to sell Bibles, he tried to sell sneakers like three months ago because he needed money. This was about money. Now I think it's about other things. I'll throw it to you though. What are your thoughts on this? Some people are calling this a mediocre pick. Some people are calling this a it's not going to help him much pick. I understand that, but I think you're missing how Trump thinks when you go that route.

Dan: Yeah, I think multiple things. I think we can view it from different perspectives, right? And I think what you're saying has a lot to it. I don't know, because we know how people play Trump. We know how Putin plays Trump. We know how other people do. So I don't know that Thiel and Musk had to come and strong arm Trump, or if they do that thing where they flatter him and talk about how smart he is, and like, we know you're really thinking about JD Vance, and that's really, you know, whatever. However they got there, I have no doubt that they were, as you say, part of this. He also had big backers, apparently. And Donald Trump Jr was really pushing for him. Tucker Carlson really pushing for him. So a lot of people who can stroke Trump's ego and appeal to him that way, and people that he does trust and value leading to this. What that looks like behind closed doors, I don't know, but I think to put it in slightly different terms, it's transactional. It's always transactional. Everything is transactional for Trump. So I think that's a piece of it.

I think obviously people are going to look and say, okay, so what's the strategic value of this pick? And there it is a lot murkier, right? Some people say, well, he's Ohio Rust Belt, Trump's trying to shore up there and so forth, but he's also a white guy. He doesn't add any kind of reach in the ticket to other people. He underperformed in Ohio when he won. He was something like 11 points behind other Republican candidates who were elected in Ohio when he won his Senate seat, funded by Thiel, as we know. He doesn't do anything to try to assuage concerns about white suburban voters or women who are upset about abortion. He doesn't do anything with the trying to run away from Project 2025 line. He doesn't do anything with the, you know, he's been trying to backpedal on his own statements on abortion. So in that regard, it looks like, I'd say a mediocre pick. If you look at it strategically, the pros and cons of JD Vance for Donald Trump, it looks like a net loss, which I think adds credence to the question, well, but why then? I think that serves as some preponderance of evidence that, yeah, I think that your hypothesis, I know it's not just yours, that Thiel and Musk and other big backers are a key part of this in the transaction. I think there's real weight to that. And it's not Wall Street money. It's not the people that Trump has never felt like respected him in New York, in terms of like he's always been this sort of bravado, braggadocio, real estate money guy in New York. He's never been accepted into the aristocracy there. These are Silicon Valley types. So I think that's another piece.

Brad: Okay, so everything you said makes sense, but if you think about it like Trump, Trump's like, I don't need anyone else to win. I'm Trump. I will win. So I don't need all the stuff you just said. And what do I get if I pick Vance? I pick a guy from the Midwest. Okay, so I do think that's a part of it, but he will not certify the election. Who failed me last time? Mike Pence. He wouldn't go along with the plan. You know who will? JD Vance. He will. Nikki Haley? I don't think Nikki Haley would go along with that plan. I think when push came to shove, Nikki Haley would have done what Mike Pence did. I think Marco Rubio would too. I don't think Marco Rubio has the stones to not certify the election. I think JD Vance does. I really do.

And he's a good MAGA spokesperson. When you sent Mike Pence out there when he was vice president, he just looked like that disappointed, constipated dad at church. There's so many of those dads at church, Dan, that I remember. Whenever I would talk to them, all they seemed to be able to do was express disappointment in how all the young people were having sex everywhere, and the rap music was ruining things, and American morality was really different from when he was a boy. That's the only thing I can imagine Mike Pence ever telling me if I ever saw him. JD Vance, when he's on the press, he's combative. When somebody calls him on a thing, he goes right back at them. And I just think they're gonna trot him out as the MAGA wonk guy who will just outline Project 2025 and everything else way better than Trump can, who just talks in circles and can't really do that. Pence never accomplished that. Pence was chosen to get the white evangelicals. They have them. They're not going anywhere. They don't need Pence anymore. And I'm going to give you one more thing, and this is going to lead us into my big story for today. By choosing JD Vance, you get Leonard Leo.

We'll be right back.

Brad: Dan, did you see that commercial break? Did you feel like I was a real professional there with that commercial break? Like there was suspense, there was mystery, and then we went to the commercial break? Did that feel like in a bygone era you would have said, stay tuned, or something like that?

Dan: Yeah. I just want to say I'm literally sitting on the edge of my seat now. So there it is. You can segue us into how this gets Leonard Leo.

Brad: In 2019 JD Vance became a Catholic. Okay. Now what he says when you ask him about this, whether it's in various venues, he says, look, I grew up kind of non-denominationally Christian. My mama, who raised me, talked about doesn't matter if you're Episcopalian or you're a Catholic or you're a Protestant in Appalachia, they're all snake handlers, right? He did his whole Appalachia shtick that everybody critiques and has already torn apart to death if you look it up. But he says, I became Catholic. So the question is like, well, why become Catholic? What for?

And what he said about this is really telling. One of the places he explains this is at the Napa Institute gathering in California. Okay, so when he's asked about this at the Napa Institute, he says Catholicism is really old. He liked things that are old and not new. It provided an intellectual framework that he really appreciated, and all the people influencing him he knew were Catholic. So he thinks of the Catholic Church as home. That's where he thinks he has his spiritual home.

Now, Dan, this took place at the Napa Institute. I interviewed Mary Jo McConahay about two months ago. Her book is called Playing God: American Catholic Bishops and the Far Right. Let me read to you about the Napa Institute and what it means. It started a couple of years ago. It was really put together by Tim Busch, but it's that ancient organization.

Dan: He likes the Napa Institute. Yeah, I love the ancient Catholic thing and the Napa Institute, that's like brand new, amazing.

Brad: So Tim Busch and others get together, Frank Pavone and some others get together, and they start this thing called the Napa Institute. It quickly gains the support of conservative bishops, conservative big wigs in the Catholic Church in the United States, okay, and it really has gotten going. If you want to go to this it costs thousands and thousands of dollars to attend the National Meeting. They have chapters and other stuff across the country. But here's what Mary Jo McConahay says on page 61: the bishops and lay people who fill Napa's speaking roster generally do not support Vatican II. One of them, Bishop Chaput, put it this way: we got friendlier. We opened the doors of the church to the world, and they didn't come, but many of us went out. Okay.

The Napa Institute and myriad nonprofit Catholic teaching organizations linked to it offer Catholics what amounts to a parallel Magisterium, teaching and sacrament formation that is closer to strict and defensive pre-conciliar norms than it is to ecumenical, mercy-centered church led by Pope Francis. One more quote here. Napa's stance is markedly Christian nationalist in its mix of American exceptionalism and the Catholic faith. At one of the meetings, there was a prayer from Robert E Lee, okay. Chaput, one of the bishops, and Busch, the founder, echo Christian evangelical nationalist and white supremacist by looking to a mythical past when all white citizens shared presumed common instincts.

Okay, I could go on and on and on. Dan, the guy becomes a Catholic, and he immediately goes to the Napa Institute and starts hanging out with Catholics who are not supportive of Vatican II. In his remarks at the Napa Institute, he totally disagrees with Pope Francis, which is not something new Catholics usually are up to. And he starts talking about how he's Catholic because of its intellectual foundations and other things. All right, great. So JD Vance is a Catholic. All right, we did it. Dan, yay. All right. Segment over, let's talk about something else.

Nope, we can't do that. His Catholicism is a window into so many of his connections across the political spectrum. So let me tell you about Teneo. Teneo is an organization founded by Evan Baehr. Okay? Now ProPublica, as they do, just did fantastic work on telling folks what Teneo is. Okay.

So here's ProPublica from last year. It recalls this guy, Evan Baehr, sitting at lunch out of all places, Baja Fresh in Washington, DC, and he's sitting there with his old boss and good friend Peter Thiel. Interesting, right? Okay, so he says he's at this uninviting Baja Fresh in Dupont Circle in Washington, DC, and he's frustrated that left leaning people can get together and they can raise money and make documentaries. Oh, Spielberg and Bill Gates, yeah, they're everywhere.

Here's what ProPublica says. Baehr and Thiel lamented what they saw as the fragmented state of conservative networks with their hidebound think tanks and intellectual centers that hold sway over right of center politics. A rare bright spot on their side, Baehr and Thiel agreed, was the Federalist Society. Thiel had, in fact, served as president of the Stanford Federalist Society. What if there was a group similar to the Federalist Society for venture capitalists or corporate CEOs or members of the media?

So that was about 15 years ago, Dan, and in 2008 Evan Baehr took his and Thiel's conversation, and he said, let's make it a reality. And he did make it a reality. He founded Teneo. Do you know who he founded it with? Dan?

Dan: Tell us, Brad. Who did he found it with?

Brad: Josh Hawley.

All right, so, so far, here's what we have. JD Vance is a Catholic, but he's a certain kind of Catholic. He's a Napa Institute, traditional Catholic, Christian nationalist Catholic. That's what we know so far. We also know that Evan Baehr started this thing called Teneo and Evan Baehr just so coincidentally, like JD Vance, has deep and long connections to Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel somehow keeps popping up, the venture capitalist libertarian who thinks apartheid might have been a good idea. Peter Thiel keeps showing up in these Catholic conversations. In fact, Peter Thiel was part of the Federalist Society when he was at Stanford.

Here's ProPublica: in 2008 Baehr, Hawley and others launched Teneo. And this is Latin, Dan, we got more Latin. I know it's your favorite. Latin for I grasp or I endure, I hold, like tango, I hold in Spanish. Hawley, then an associate lawyer in private practice, authored Teneo's founding principles. Now, if you read those things, Dan, they're pretty much like, you know, standard, what you would think Josh Hawley would do, right? You've got your small government, small taxes. You've got limited government, individual liberty, and yet you also have something else: civil society based in a transcendent order, founded in tradition, philosophy, theology. All right, so Josh Hawley is writing this. He's working with Baehr, and it didn't go well for a while. It just wasn't taking off. They didn't have a ton of funding. It really was not going places.

Guess who entered the mix in 2020, right after JD Vance became a Catholic? Leonard Leo.

So Leonard Leo gets in here, in this organization that Evan Baehr, the Peter Thiel acolyte, and Josh Hawley have started. So it's fledgling, it's going but it's not making a deep impact, and all of a sudden their revenue is in the millions. In 2021 they got 5 million. And then they get these huge infusions of cash from the Leo-run group, Donors Trust, and they get a ton of money from them. And you know what other people are now on board, Dan, you know who's on board now? Charles Koch, the DeVos family, Bernie Marcus. Y'all know that Bernie Marcus started Home Depot, so when you shop at Home Depot, that's who you're supporting, and others.

So now we've got this organization, Teneo, and this is where we have a sort of coalescence of Josh Hawley, Evan Baehr, Leonard Leo, okay, and you kind of wonder, well, what were they about? You know, what did they want? What is it that they think that they're doing, and why do they want to exist?

Here's ProPublica: Baehr explained in a 2020 presentation that they have a surreptitious and exciting effort to map key institutions in major cities, private schools, country clubs, newspapers, rotary clubs, and find ways to get Teneo members inside those institutions. For those Teneo members who run for elected office, the network offers easy access to a large pool of donors and allies. A Leo acolyte and member of Teneo Midwest membership committee, Will Scharf, is now running for Missouri Attorney General. Campaign finance records show that dozens of Teneo members made substantial early contributions to Scharf's campaign, including Leo, Baehr and other members of Teneo leadership, who last year each gave the maximum allowable donation of $2,650.

Now guess who decided to speak at Teneo when he was running for Senate in 2021? JD Vance. Guess who happens to be a really good friend of Evan Baehr and seems to hang out with him? JD Vance. Guess who they both have in common? Peter Thiel. They're both venture capitalists. They've both been mentored by Thiel. They've both made their careers off of Thiel's coattails when it comes to Silicon Valley and so on.

All right, there's more. There's a lot more. Do you want me to stop? I can't tell if you're just glazed eyes. What's going on over there? Dan, does this make sense? What do you got?

Dan: Well, no, there's so much. It's hard to know where to pick up. I can't help but get caught by, and I don't want to short circuit your story. So if I blow the punch line, which I don't think I am. But like, here's the thing about Vance and the Catholicism and all the pieces. You mentioned some stuff from the book. You know, words like the magisterium and this, what that is, for folks who maybe don't know, you had the Second Vatican Council, and it kind of loosened some things up in the Catholic Church. It's why there's mass in English now. And it's various things like this. And you've always had conservative, more reactive Catholics who didn't like this. Okay, so it's this appeal to an old school, authoritarian, traditionalist Catholicism, but with the mix that it's also mixed in with contemporary American nationalism. So like, for me that's always the piece that when you want to claim this ancient tradition, but that piece is there, you want to claim this fundamental American identity when Catholics weren't considered white and were discriminated against for a long time in America and different things like this. What it also all screams out is another piece about Vance. And I think this is part of where this comes. Yeah, he has all these big connections. As you say, he's pugnacious. He's a good public speaker. He wrote Hillbilly Elegy, and it got lots of, you know, sort of created this window people thought into the Appalachian experience and so forth.

I look at him, and I'm like, this dude is just blown by the winds of whoever can influence him, right? He'll talk about, as you say, this kind of nameless, any old Christianity will do. But he also talks about being an angry atheist for a while, and he was a never Trumper, and talked about how Trump was going to take the white working class into really dark places. But then he becomes a super Trump guy, and he becomes the super Catholic guy, and he's a smart guy, Yale Law School grad, whatever. But the pseudo intellectualism of these appeals to Augustine, and you know, whatever, we're gonna come back to Augustine. Yeah, we're coming back to Augustine. All of which is just to say that I look at this and I see him as this piece that they have, that they're like, here's this dude who just blows in the wind. We can steer him, we can bring him in. We can sell him this bill of goods, and he is going to be a speaker, a figurehead that kind of puts himself out there as just the regular old rust belt guy. He's not, but he puts himself out that way. That's the piece that stands out to me as you talk about these big players and the ones pulling the strings behind the scenes. And I look at Vance, I'm like, that's what I see Vance as, not the leader in this, not the instigator in this, not the guy that's capable of pulling all this together, but another person, frankly, very much like a Donald Trump when it comes to people like Putin, who can be played, who can be manipulated by the real powers, who are never going to be on screen saying the things that Vance is saying, but he can be steered by them. So this is what I see of his role in these really complex networks. They look at him and they're like, yeah, this could be our guy. This could be our guy to carry our views out into the public and pitch them in a way that we can't do and that we don't want to do, right? We don't want to talk about the evils of Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos or whatever, when we look like the evil that we're portraying, when we're pumping millions into these groups and so forth.

Brad: Well, on that note, here is what Vance told Baehr in their interview at Teneo. So Baehr, Evan Baehr, the founder of Teneo, the guy who started Teneo because he had a conversation with Peter Thiel at Baja Fresh—hope there's a plaque at that Baja Fresh someday outlining the significance of that—interviewing his friend JD Vance at Teneo in 2021. So here's Vance:

One of the things that really does worry me is that we have very few oligarchs on our side. And I don't mean just rich people, I mean people who are smart about deploying their resources in a way that advances the cause. Maybe only Peter Thiel on our side. I think maybe a few others. The left has a lot of oligarchs: Bloomberg, Soros, Gates. They have very wealthy people who aren't just rich, they're smart about accomplishing their objectives with their resources. We need a lot of that. We need a lot of it so that young conservatives have places to work where they can speak their values. But we just need resources to fund the institutions that would be necessary. So the next time we really get a chance at governing, we really take advantage of that shot, because the left has shown over the past couple of months that they don't really want to give us that shot ever again.

Dan, this is a guy that I think, going off your comments, is really into powerful people who can build the institutions in a way that he thinks are right. This is a guy who, at the top of the show, everybody heard him say, fire everybody from the federal government, the civil servants, all those people. Get rid of them, institute loyalists. This is a guy thinking about institutions. So he's willing to work with the Peter Thiels of the world, because they're the ones that offer power and influence, right? Is he a Catholic? Is he an atheist? Is he a hillbilly? Is he a Silicon Valley magnate? What is he? Well, he's a guy that wants to be with the oligarchs and rule the world.

Dan: Yep.

Brad: And so this is what he tells Baehr at Teneo. Now, it's worth just commenting on Thiel. Now I'm going to spend way more time on Thiel next week, but I want to comment on Thiel just momentarily. Thiel's South African born, just like Elon Musk. He's a billionaire. He once stated that Apartheid was a positive economic thing. He was a libertarian for a long time, Dan, but guess what? Around 2009 he starts saying something like this: freedom and democracy are no longer compatible. That's it. That's a quote. Okay, now I'm gonna come back to that on Tuesday, but I want to link everybody to last week's episode about Josh Hawley and NatCon and Augustine. Okay, I'm going to link Peter Thiel and Hawley and the Napa Institute and everyone right now. Here is the through line.

Freedom and democracy are not compatible. What is he saying there? He's saying that I don't think it's possible to be free if you live in a democracy. More on this Tuesday, I promise. The point to take away, though, is this: if we're going to be free for Thiel, we have to work to impose ourselves on the moral order. Libertarianism isn't going to do it. Libertarianism, just laissez faire, let the market decide, and let everybody who's capable rise to the top, that old kind of white guy, billionaire line, no more, that can't do that. The libertarianism isn't going to work. You know what we're going to have to do? We're gonna have to get into the government, order it how we want, tear up the institutions and build new ones.

Who did JD Vance say in 2021 to Evan Baehr, his other Peter Thiel son, right? He said, Peter Thiel is our only oligarch. So Peter Thiel is the oligarch who wants to remake the country. What did I say at the beginning of my little JD Vance story? I think Peter Thiel and Elon Musk called Donald Trump and said this is your man, and if he's your man, you'll have all the money you need.

I also think, and I just want to come back to my final point here, and then I'm going to lead you into Augustine and let you roll. I think that if you get Vance with Donald Trump, you also get Leonard Leo. You get Leonard Leo who's so happy about the Federalist Society picking three judges in the first Trump term. Well, you got him again, and he's fully motivated. Leonard Leo thinks the judiciary is in the bag, Dan. He's not even worried about the judges anymore, because you're going to tell us about Eileen Cannon in a second, and he's good. He doesn't go to bed at night worried about judges. You know what Leonard Leo goes to bed at night thinking about now? American culture, American institutions, everybody that Teneo is trying to get into places, right? Mayor, Attorney General, county supervisor. Leonard Leo wants his people, the people that are the mirror image of whether it's Gorsuch or whether it's Coney Barrett, whether it's Eileen Cannon. They want those people as your attorney general, as your mayor, as your county supervisor, right, as your state representative, as anybody with any influence. That's what they want.

Now when Vance became a Catholic, you know what his patron saint is? Every Catholic chooses a patron saint. Take a guess, Dan, just take a guess.

Dan: I'm gonna go wild and guess it was Augustine.

Brad: It was Augustine, and Rod Dreher asked him about it in the American Conservative. Let's take a break and come back. I'm gonna tee you up, because I know you're gonna get so angry. Be right back.

Brad: So he gets asked why Augustine? And again, he's like, oh, intellectual and Augustine. And here's what he talks about, though. He says, yeah, the City of God, or excuse me, Augustine's Confessions. So touching. If you read Augustine's Confessions, there's a death of a friend, and there's a lot of other things. Then he says, and the City of God, there's a chapter in the City of God that, as I think about policy, it just has so much influence on me.

Dan, let's pull together another thread. Last week, Josh Hawley. Josh Hawley, Saint Augustine, some BS Augustinian historical theology that you debunked with force. Josh Hawley, the guy that helped found Teneo. Josh Hawley, who, when JD Vance was asked, who is your friend in the Senate, you know the first person he said? He said Josh Hawley.

So here we have the guy, JD Vance, connected to Thiel, connected to Leo, connected to Baehr, connected to the Napa Institute. This newly minted Catholic saying the same stuff as Josh Hawley and Augustine is lurking back there, City of God policy. It seems to me that JD Vance is pretty sympathetic to Catholic integralism, which is another way of saying Catholic Christian nationalism. I've been talking a long time. Jump in wherever you'd like, including Augustine, Hawley, whatever. But there's my story.

Dan: So I keep picking on this, and I'm armchair psychoanalyzing, whatever, but JD Vance, it's also this faux appeal to these deep seated convictions. Like, I don't know if people remember, I mean, for a lot of us, right? JD Vance was a name we learned because of Hillbilly Elegy and this book. And the whole, you know, oh, poor working class Americans, white working class Americans. And like, they're maligned and picked on and if people just understood that, it would be better, you know, whatever. Where did they go? Like in his worldview on this, right? This is not about helping factory workers who have been downsized. This is not about helping people who grew up in a coal mining town, and coal mining is just simply not an economical possibility anymore. This is not somebody who is concerned about people who have been steamrolled by outsourcing and offshoring of jobs and different things. All of that's gone, completely gone from this vision, because that Catholic vision is a vision of power. It's a vision of a Magisterium. It's a vision of consolidated power and elites and so on and so forth. So that's one piece.

The other one is this. And I've been trying to think of like, everybody knows me and my analogies, right? I've got these weird analogies and things, but I want people to think about, if you've ever been super into something, maybe you're into a style of music, maybe you're into a sport, maybe you're into a sports team, and you have that person in your life who suddenly becomes the convert to what you've actually spent your life doing, and they throw out terms or names or like, you can imagine this, right?

My example of this is I think about Maui, and my family immigrated to Maui in 1890 and all of that. And all of that is always in mind of Native Hawaiians, whose people have been there way longer. But my family's immigration story to Hawaii is like a lot of others, which was like, hey, you know, there's ways to get rich here. You can go home to Japan in a few years if you do this, whatever, there's a more complicated story there. But the point is, every once in a while, I'll meet a white person who's like, oh, my aunt moved to Hawaii like seven years ago. My family's from Maui too. And I'm thinking of all those native Hawaiians and all those Filipino, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese families that have been in the Hawaiian Islands for like 150 years. And I just look at that, and I just look at Brittany when she says that to me, and I'm like, cool, that's neat, right? Anyway, there you go. It's just, you can name it, right? The person who name drops whatever. Like, I'm a sports fan, and anybody who's a quote unquote real sports fan, you get the person who's the bandwagon person, and they use the we language all the time. Yeah, we looked really good on Sunday. And you're like, who are you? Man, where were you when we sucked for 20 years? Or you started watching soccer during the World Cup and you're like, yeah, we look great talking about the American team. And you're like, we? Exactly.

Yeah, all that stuff, that is Hawley with Augustine. That is Vance with Augustine. So Augustine, people, huge pillar of the quote unquote Western intellectual tradition, a genius, super systematic thinker. I'm not Augustinian in almost any ways. But I can respect the intellect and the significance of some of these figures. I just invite you, whoever you are, go somewhere and read some Augustine, because you're gonna get all fired up. Like, yeah, Augustine, Hawley, Augustine and Vance, yeah, I'm gonna go read. And you're gonna read it and be like, what? And I know you get some of the angry Augustinians who are gonna be like, I love it. But here's part of what Vance says, right? And you mentioned this, this book called The Confessions, which is probably the most accessible Augustine thing. He said, this is his quote: I was pretty moved by the Confessions. I've probably read it in bits and pieces twice over the past 15 or so years. And I'm like, oh, yeah, you're super into it. Long time fan, huh? Two times in a decade and a half, in bits and pieces. You haven't read the damn Confessions. Give me a break. He's like, there's a chapter in City of God. That's really cool. A chapter. Have you, like, if you need to kill roaches, the City of God's a weapon that you can use to do it. It's a big book, right? Oh, I've read a chapter of it. Never mind the whole thing. And this is the thing, there's Augustine is a very systematic thinker, right? The pieces fit together. And part of the reason I am not an Augustinian is I've got real issues with substantial pieces, and it's hard to be an Augustinian if you can't take on the whole package, in my view, right? So there's a whole metaphysics there. There's the whole metaphysics about how Brad, you and I and the world we live in is not real. It's illusory, and it's a shadow realm grounded in the real forms that exist only in the mind of God and blah.

Does Hawley really think that? JD Vance really? No, they don't think any of that. What they like is the Pope, not our Pope, or the current pope, because he's too liberal, the idea of an absolute earthly authority who represents divine power and can institute force and so forth. That's what they're after. But it's the faux intellectualism that's there where they can throw out this name Augustine, and they can sound really clever, and they can sound really smart, and they can sound really sophisticated. And somewhere, JD Vance is like, there's a book called The Confessions that's really touching, and I read part of the City of God, and you're like, cool, awesome. You did the religion 101 syllabus part on Augustine and the Catholic tradition or something. Awesome. Good for you, buddy. It's just such a farce. And I think what it is, it's just naked aggressive power. It is harnessing a certain vision of authority within a certain articulation of the Catholic tradition to baptize a clear vision of authority in American nationalist context, and then you slap this stuff on to try to convince us that there's real intellectual foundations to this, that it's not just about power, it's not just about authority, it's not just about naked aggression. Because Augustine. And it drives me nuts. I know people are not going to not vote for Donald Trump because Dan Miller said JD Vance probably doesn't actually know anything about Augustine, but I think it does highlight, again, part of his role. And I think Hawley's role. I said last time, Hawley, Hawley's great delivery. And I said, man, that'll preach. That sounds great. It sounds sophisticated. They can communicate it well. There's nothing there. The emperor has no clothes. But they can make us think that it does.

Brad: Well, two points, and then we'll go to Eileen Cannon and some other stuff for today. One is, you know, Catholic integralism. And I'll quote Professor Matthew Schmalz here from College of the Holy Cross. Catholic integralism argues that there are two areas of human life, the spiritual and the temporal. Catholic Integralists argue that the spiritual and temporal should be integrated with the spiritual being the dominant partner. So basically, the reason I think Hawley and Vance agree, one Catholic, one Protestant, is that they just want the president to be a spiritual leader who exercises power in the temporal realm. They want to basically bring to bear and impose on everyone. I mean, Josh Hawley said it last week, guys. He said Christian nationalist. That's what this country is. People will say, I'm a Christian nationalist. And so am I, however he said that, right. And so what they're into is Augustine gives me permission to argue that imposing Christianity on everyone through our institutions is what I should do as a Christian. That's what they get from Augustine. When I started reading and learning about Vance's Augustine, I went down a rabbit hole. I tried to find every place he talked about Augustine, and I couldn't stop laughing. I was laughing maniacally as I walked this morning, thinking about him and Josh Hawley in successive weeks doing their Augustinian Christian nationalist shtick. So I think that's the key.

I'll leave this with one thought, and we'll pick it up Tuesday. If you are Leonard Leo and Peter Thiel, here's what you're betting on. JD Vance is like gonna turn 40 in a minute. Could be four years. Could be eight years. It could be whenever, when Trump dies, when Trump this, when Trump that. I don't know, but man, you got that 47 year old JD Vance, President JD Vance. Oh, look out. That's the guy you want. If you're Peter Thiel in the Silicon Valley non-democracy crowd, and there's a lot of those. If you're Leonard Leo in the Federalist Society, if you are the Napa Institute and the non-Vatican II Catholic bishops, this is your dude. You are way happy. This is why Josh Hawley got no traction. Those stakeholders are so much happier that they chose this guy than Kristi Noem or Marco Rubio. The only people Marco Rubio would have made happy would have been the Wall Street people, but JD Vance makes everybody in those camps—Leo, Thiel, the Catholic, the traditionalist, the Silicon Valley, non-democratic folks—they're all so over the moon right now. So we'll leave it there. All right, thank you for listening to my story, Dan, thank you for tempering my exuberance. I did feel like it was not overwhelming, and you survived, so I appreciate that.

All right, let's turn to one or two more things today, and that is Eileen Cannon down in Florida, and then some conservative groups running from Project 2025. What do you got?

Dan: Yeah, we'll make these quick. I know Vance is the story this week in many ways. But another story was that Eileen Cannon, the judge in the Trump classified documents case, dismissed it. And I think for those who are not pro-Trump, it's been a rough few weeks, right? And so these kind of blows keep landing. But what was interesting is the decision has already been appealed to the 11th Circuit Court. Most people that I've read say that they think it's going to be reinstated. It was a very poorly thought out decision. But I wanted to just offer some takes on this. I think it also relates to in some ways, the worst case that the Thiels and others are looking at now and the Leonard Leos when it comes to the judiciary, right? Because Eileen Cannon is an absolute coward on every level. And that's what this was really about.

So here are some things about Eileen Cannon. If you've been reading, if you've been following, if you know people who have worked with her, other outside observers, people in the legal profession, in different places, they've said, you know, overall, she's just in over her head. And that's not even intended necessarily as a criticism of her, as much as she didn't have much trial experience when she was elevated to this position. And she just does not have a lot of experience managing big cases and the complexities and so on and so forth. She's inexperienced by all accounts. She's also sort of isolated. She's in this place where it's small, it's kind of a backwater. It's not the court building that you see in movies of lots and lots of judges talking and different people. So she's kind of in over her head. She also has been all in for Trump. Everybody knows this, right? That's the easy take. She's all in for Trump. And here it is. She hands him exactly what he wanted. But here's the weird thing, and this is why I say she's a coward, is she didn't follow through on convictions anywhere, I mean, moral convictions, not legal convictions. She didn't dismiss this on the merits of the case. She did not say there's no evidence that Trump did this. Case dismissed, or there's good cause to say none of this happened, case dismissed. Now we know that she's been slow rolling it. We know that she has been entertaining every weird theory that the defense has for months. She has done everything she can to sort of slow this thing down and so forth. But she didn't dismiss it on that. She didn't actually find for Trump. What she did is she dismissed on weird procedural grounds, and basically didn't follow through either on her convictions that Trump is somebody that she's loyal to and needs to find a way to get him off, or her convictions that as a jurist, she has a responsibility to set aside the fact that he's the one that put her on the bench and actually make a decision for this. She made the decision we know based on a footnote in a concurring opinion that Clarence Thomas wrote in his recent SCOTUS ruling. Did Thomas actually talk about the SCOTUS ruling? No. Did she appeal to a case before the Supreme Court? Nope. Did she appeal to Supreme Court precedent? No. Clarence Thomas put an unrelated footnote in. Lots of people think he put it in basically for the Eileen Cannons of the world to say, here's your road map out. She cites that and says, yup, nope, nope, nope. Special Prosecutor, unconstitutional. So it's out.

She's a coward, and that's what this was. She's a coward who, I think she just at the end of the day was not willing or didn't have a pathway to just say, yay, Trump, fine. Yes, you're immune from everything. You can declare everything unclassified, whatever. But she also didn't follow through in her convictions. But let me tie this back to what you've been talking about. It worked. It worked for Trump, and we've known for a long time that this case is not going to happen before the election, and it still won't, even if it eventually goes to the Supreme Court and the special prosecutor is shot down. It can still be prosecuted, just not by an independent special prosecutor, all those kind of things. But she did what Trump world needed her to do, which means the worst case scenario for them is that they get a judge who gives them kind of what they want, even by trying to not be seen to give them what they want, right? And this is what works, and this is what we saw with Eileen Cannon, as she showed us that she is who everybody kind of has been saying for months that she is. People speculated that she would, in fact, dismiss this because Clarence Thomas put this footnote in there. But I think that was something worth thinking about this week. And I think it illustrates, again, as we say, what the judiciary can look like, even with somebody who I think is nervous about looking too pro-Trump, but can still serve those interests. And I think that the Leonard Leos will say, yep, we'll take that every time.

Brad: Why is Leonard Leo not worried about the courts anymore? Because one of his best friends in the entire world, and again, go read Mary Jo McConahay's Playing God, or listen to my interview with her. Clarence Thomas and Leonard Leo have been hanging out for 30 years, or actually longer, and Eileen Cannon is the exact kind of judge they want, and she took this weird footnote—it's not weird, she just took a footnote and made an unimaginable decision based on it. So now we're going to talk more about Project 2025 and other things Tuesday. But give us some things that happened this week with conservative groups responding to the public awareness of the plan.

Dan: Very briefly. What I want to just say is this, right? So Project 2025, you've covered it, we've covered it. Other people have covered it. The Democrats are starting to hammer on it, and it has become politically radioactive, because turns out that the majority of Americans are horrified by what Project 2025 is putting forward. And we have seen a flood of people and groups distancing themselves from Project 2025. Donald Trump, JD Vance in his own ways. Stephen Miller, abortion groups, activist groups that were listed as on their board and things have come off.

What I want to look at is this, because here's what's going to happen, right? As more of these groups try to pretend Project 2025 never happened and it never existed, we're going to make it through the summer, and you're going to go to your cookout on Labor Day, and Uncle Ron is going to be there, and he's going to say, I don't know why you guys keep talking about 2025. During COVID, you told me I was a conspiracist, but all you do is fall down these conspiracist holes about Project 2025. And I think we need to be ready for that. And I've had people who have asked me about this. I've had coaching clients who've asked me about this. Had a couple of people who've emailed who said, are we falling into the trap that people who oppose Trump are falling into the same trap that we say people fall into all the time? And in one of our supplemental episodes we looked at an AMA where somebody asked the same thing about sort of dogmatic positions, right, of the risk of swapping one dogmatism for another. How do we guard against that? I'm going to talk more about conspiracism. We're going to talk more about conspiracism in that episode.

But here's what I say to folks: this isn't a conspiracy. This is not a secret. It was an advertised piece. It was celebrated. It was put out by a well known public policy group. It had a bunch of names attached to it. People boasted about this. They shared this, they circulated it. Now they want to distance themselves from it, but it's not conspiratorial when it's out in the open. And I think that's the thing to say to the Uncle Rons of the world and others when this starts to come out. You don't have to read the damn thing, but go just download it somewhere and have the file. Just have it on your computer or your phone, or it's pretty big, maybe, I don't know, fit on people's phones. Have it somewhere. And so when Uncle Ron says, oh, this is all made up, be like, cool. I just sent you a link to this 900 page PDF that lays it all out, created by Trump officials. Link the CNN article that traces who all these people are, and just say, hey, cool. Here's the evidence, positive evidence, not the lack of evidence that conspiracy theories rely on, but positive evidence.

So it has become radioactive. I mean, talking about, I don't know what's going to happen with Biden, but Biden was hammering on 2025 today. I think that it's a winning strategy for Democrats. We've seen that abortion is, and this is like abortion plus 2000 other issues. And I think it's a huge club that anti-trumpists can use coming into the election. But I think people need to be ready for the accusations that you're just being a conspiracist. You're being a fear monger. These things aren't real. And I think we can't be gaslit into thinking that we're doing the same thing that we criticize others for doing. Because, to use your phrase, Brad, we have the receipts. We know where it is. It's not secret. It's not hidden.

Brad: Yeah, we'll talk more about it Tuesday. We'll talk about this. They're trying to pivot to Agenda 47 and be like, oh, that's what Trump wants. He's never even heard of Project 2025, and it's this very blatant maneuver, but we'll talk about it soon.

All right, let's do reasons for hope. I'll start Dan. I predicted last week that I thought Biden would be out of the race by now. I think if the assassination attempt had not happened, he would be. Pelosi, Schumer, Obama, Hakeem Jeffries, they all are leaking to the press that they want him out. And when you get that far now, I think the only chip Joe Biden has left to play, my guess would be, this is a chip that the Biden folks are dangling: all right, I'm going to get out, but I'm not endorsing Kamala. And if he doesn't do that, the war chest of money they have can't be used, and there will be chaos. And then you're going to get all kinds of different candidates and other people.

I do think, though, that a Harris-Shapiro or a Harris-other ticket is polling well. And I think if someone like Harris goes out for the next four months and makes the case you just made about reproductive rights, about abortion bans, about deporting 20 million people and incarceration camps. I think if you have somebody on that case, and I think Harris and Shapiro would be really good at it, both lawyers, there's a chance here to have hope, and I think there's a reason for that. So I am not going to resign myself to a Donald Trump presidency, and I don't think anyone else should. So if Joe Biden's going to stay in, then we're going to find hope in that. If he's not, I do think there's a path forward for someone like Kamala Harris and who she might pick, but we will see.

Dan: My reason for hope was also the reality seems to be, by most accounts, settling into the Biden camp. So I'll just piggyback a little bit on what you said. There's a part of me when this first happened, like it's too late. It's too late for this. It's not, right? If this was an open election, meaning if you didn't have an incumbent Democratic President going for the nomination, and you'd had real votes that mattered coming up to this to choose a nominee and so forth. I say all the time, and I think I need to listen to myself that it's what happens after Labor Day that is what lots of people listen to. There are lots of political scientists and political psychologists who will say that a lot of people have like a three to four month kind of political memory. That's like the working memory. So there is still time, and I think that there is hope for the reasons you just highlighted. So I'm with you on that, and I think it's important for lots of reasons to maintain hope. Because I think if we choose to simply resign ourselves at this point, I think it can become self fulfilling.

Brad: I agree. All right, y'all, we'll be back Monday with a great interview. We'll be back Tuesday with our bonus episode, and we'll talk more about, I have even worse connections of Vance and Thiel. It gets worse. So we'll talk about that. Wednesday we're back. Friday, the weekly roundup. Appreciate all of you. Thanks for being here. If you can think about subscribing and becoming a premium member, it helps us immensely to do all of this work where we have at least three and many times four episodes per week. We're a homegrown show, an indie network. We're not in a studio in Manhattan. We're not backed by a big corporate network behind us, so we're just doing our best to make this pro-democracy content happen every week. We have no oligarchs funding. We have, so there's the t-shirt. We have no oligarchs. Who's that quote by? Saint Augustine. All right, Dan, we'll see you next week.