Weekly Roundup: Kristi Noem Implicated, Erika Kirk’s Love Language, and Bill McKibben on the Tragedy of American Christianity

Brad Onishi: Welcome to Straight White American Jesus. I'm Brad Onishi, author of Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next, founder of Axis Mundi Media. Here on a special Wednesday edition of the weekly roundup with my co-host, Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought. 

Dan Miller: Good to be with you, Brad, after having actually seen you in person. So, you know, I have to say today is kind of a letdown, since I'm not actually with the man, the myth, Brad Onishi.

Brad: We were in Boston for the American Academy of Religion conference. Got to see colleagues and collaborators. Got to hang out with folks from this show's community. Shout out to all of you—Andrew and Charlene and Tony and Rebecca and Rocco, everyone else who came by. It was awesome to hang out. Today, it's Thanksgiving week, so we're here on a Wednesday to talk about Kristi Noem, Erika Kirk, Bill McKibben...

Dan: Talking about nothing makes you give thanks like Erika Kirk and Kristi Noem, right?

Brad: And the outlines of a plan for healthcare coming from the Republican Party, which we will explain. There's a lot more we could cover. There's a lot of things we could discuss today, but we're going to drill down on these things that pertain to not only politics, but our expertise in Christian nationalism, American religion and so on. So let's cover as usual. Let's go.

All right, Dan, let's start. Let's just ease into it. Let's ease into the week. It's Wednesday, we're off schedule here. So let's ease into it with a story about Erika Kirk. Erika Kirk was, of course, in the news a couple of weeks ago when she hugged JD Vance on stage at a TPUSA event at the University of Mississippi. The hug went viral. We talked about it on this show. It's one of the few times on the show I did feel a little bit like, I'm not sure I went to graduate school to talk about a hug between Erika Kirk and JD Vance, but I'm going to do it anyway. Let me play a clip here of what Erika Kirk has said about all of the hubbub surrounding her very handsy, face-touching, arm-around-the-waist hug with JD Vance, minutes before JD Vance said, "I really hope my current wife Usha Vance converts to Christianity. Wouldn't that be great?" Here's what she said:

Charlie Kirk (interviewer): Forgive me. Did you see people didn't understand the hug that you and JD had? They went to the weirdest places, Erica.

Erika Kirk: Oh my gosh, you guys, please. So for those of you who know me, I'm a very—I love—I hug. Is like, you're an intense hugger. Is like, hating on a hug needs a hug themselves. I will give you a free hug anytime you want a hug. My love language is touch, if you will. But seriously, that hug—so I will give you a play by play. Walking, they just played the emotional video. I'm walking over, he's walking over. I'm starting to cry. He says he's so proud of you. And I say, God bless you. And I touch the back of his head. Anyone who I have hugged, that I have touched the back of your head when I hug you, I always say, God bless you. That's just me. If you want to take that out of context, go right ahead. Again, that, to me, shows that you need a hug more than anyone else. So if anyone—

Interviewer: They were acting like you touched the back of his ass.

Erika Kirk: I feel like I wouldn't get as much hate if I did that versus—but no, seriously. So now, when I go and hug people, I'll bring them back in and be like, I obviously didn't give you the right hug. Like, come, let me touch the back of your head. I don't know what to do with my hands.

Interviewer: Can’t touch the head, what can I touch? If you touch the back of my head, I'm like, oh, she's feeling the extensions.

Brad: All right, Dan, when I saw you in Boston, we did hug. There was no leather pants. There was no, you know, arms around the waist. It was—I'm sorry if that disappointed you in terms of how hugs go. I apparently am not a "love language is touch" person, because I just don't hug that way normally, whether it's you or really anyone outside of my wife, probably, but that's just me. Take it away, Dan. What do you want to say about Erika Kirk and her explanation of love languages and grabbing the Vice President's frothy beard on stage?

Dan: So I was disappointed that you didn't gently place your hand on the side of my face, Brad, but I've learned to live with disappointment. So one thing—so everybody knows, we've talked about it. Everybody's known—real speculation. I think it's real speculation about whether or not, essentially, this is like the preview of a move for, you know, Erika Kirk as FLOTUS, as First Lady. So you have TPUSA, and Erika Kirk now is the head of TPUSA, saying that it's in the works to support Vance for 2028, and there was already all this talk. And I think it's real. Like, I want to be clear, I think this is real. I'm not making a call or anything. I'm not promising this will happen. But JD Vance is leaning in heavily to that super right-wing young male demographic within the GOP—the Charlie Kirk wing of that. Excuse me, Charlie Kirk, Erika Kirk and Charlie are mixing up in my head—the Charlie Kirk wing. We talked about that same event in Mississippi in the way that, you know, he fields questions that are clearly antisemitic and doesn't draw, you know, doesn't make any distinction about that, doesn't push back on that at all. So it's going to be a liability that he has a woman of color who is his wife, that he has children who don't look white to most people, that she's not a Christian—all of that stuff.

And so there's this speculation about whether or not sometimes there's essentially going to be, you know, the JD Vance Wife Swap that goes on and he's gonna, like, you know, there'll be some announcement or something. We talk—if we want to, I've had people ask and say, "Well, how do you think they would swing that?" I've got some thoughts, but I want to point out, you know, we were just at a conference with a bunch of academics, not a bunch of radical conspiracists, people who are smart, people who look at things. They don't all look at politics week in, week out like you and I do, but I was asked numerous times by other academics, "I've got this thought that this is a thing that JD Vance might do, what do you think?" And the point is that it's a real thing.

Erika Kirk did nothing to shoot that down in this. She did not say just, you know—I mean, she talked more about it, but she didn't just say he was consoling me, you know, the loss of my husband or something. I think she makes a very pointed effort to call him JD. But there's the weird thing too—you can tell me if this tracks, the weird rhetorical thing. You know, "JD, Vice President Vance said," you know, whatever. It's an—I feel like it's such a calculated, like, misstatement. I do that with colleagues—"my friend, it's just Mary down the hall." Then I'm like, "It's Dr. Smith, that's who that is." But it feels really calculated when she does it. Anyway, there's a lot there. And I think that this stuff with Megyn Kelly didn't dispel it. I don't think it was intended to dispel it. If nothing else, if you're Erika Kirk, you're getting more clicks, you're getting more listens, you're getting more attention because she and JD Vance both are trying to ride the TPUSA wave as long as they can. Neither of them are Charlie Kirk, and so we'll see where that is in six months or a year. But I think it's a real thing, and I think this did nothing to sort of quiet that, and I think it's worth speculating, because it would be a huge boost to JD Vance if he was partnered with Erika Kirk. It would be a huge boost to that demographic.

Brad: The reason I know that her calling him JD is a big deal—and again, I never thought I'd go to grad school and be like, "Oh, let's analyze Erika Kirk calling JD Vance 'JD'"—but here's how I know it's a big deal to JD, the Vice President Vance, I mean: he had this whole thing where he was making up, like, a dialogue, at least making up in my mind, where he's like, "Oh yeah, I was talking to Pete Hegseth, and he said, he said to me, 'Okay, Mr. Vice President.'" And I was thinking, like, really? So when you and Pete talk, he calls you that? Like, is that just like, even when you're just like texting and you're being like, bros, and—

Dan: It's not even just "he said blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." He has to put the title in there to foreground that this is how people talk to me.

Brad: JD Vance is certainly somebody who, if you don't call him Mr. Vice President, there's trouble. So I know this is a big deal for her to call him JD. That's a point I'd like to make. You know, I don't want to spend all day on this, but I will say that my friend Matt, who's a really devoted listener to this show, and somebody I've talked to throughout the years, is also an academic, is also somebody who I really respect, had this great post on social media the other day that said, "Erika Kirk is running for First Lady." And I think Erika Kirk might be the first person in US history to run for First Lady. I mean, she is basically making a case there to be, you know, the First Lady.

Now, Dan, part of this story is that Erika Kirk has said that TPUSA support for JD Vance in 2028 is, quote, "in the works." So that did nothing to tamp down the, you know, any of the speculation either. Let's just go through it one more time, and then we'll jump to Kristi Noem, who's in the news as well. I think that two things are really possible here, and one of them has to take place for JD Vance to be a viable presidential candidate. It's either Usha Vance becomes a Christian—which I've talked about, and since I floated that idea on this show, many people have written me to say it's not going to happen. And those could be folks who are South Asian and have sort of insight into the culture and caste and other things that Usha Vance comes from. Those are just listeners who are like, "No, I don't think so." So I think that is one possibility. And if JD Vance wants to be president, I think that has to happen. There's no way the ethno-nationalist, racist, Nick Fuentes-sympathizing MAGA young bro dudes—and by young, I mean under 45—are going to support a man who has a Hindu wife, or comes from a Hindu family. She may not identify as Hindu. They're not going to care.

Or they split. He plays the victim: "She wouldn't come to Christ, she wouldn't believe in the one true Savior, she wouldn't fully assimilate to the United States. Therefore, I had to marry this grieving widow who loves Jesus and is an Evangelical," right? And Dan's camera is going absolutely off the walls. That's all right. Go ahead.

Dan: Camera is going off the walls. I'm going to try to fix that. In the meantime, there can't be any—they can't be unequally yoked, Brad.

Brad: Yeah.

Dan: I've had people ask me, they're like, "So how do you go about doing that? How do you square the circle?" The people who still seem to think that somehow or another, the ethics matter here, that like this is still like classical evangelicalism—you can't be divorced, you can't have your, you can't be remarried, etc. That's how you couldn't be unequally yoked. There's a passage in the New Testament about not being—and that's where the victim card will come. "I did everything I could, Brad. I tried, I pled with her, I shared the gospel. I did all that. She wouldn't do it. We couldn't be unequally yoked. Can't do that to America," etc., etc.

Brad: Etc. And he wasn't a Christian when they got together. So there's a way, you know, you and I think know how this goes, where it's like he was not a Christian when they married and when they met. So he became—he was received into the Catholic Church in 2019. So the story can also just be, "Well, when we met, you know, I was not with the Lord and in the church, but now I am." There will be complications just because of the Catholic Church and divorce and the way that works, and that will be tricky for him. But I just want to remind everybody that JD Vance has been willing to criticize the US Conference of Bishops and the Pope openly. So you know, this is not somebody who I think is like scared of the Catholic hierarchy, or scared to challenge the conventional marriage doctrines and procedures within the church. So I think that's just a way to put that. All right. Any last words on that, Dan, or should we go to Kristi Noem?

Dan: No, I think that's the big thing. And again, people will still wonder about the rationale. If we know anything about the brand of conservative Christianity, the brand of conservative Catholicism that JD Vance espouses, you'll find the reason you do what you're going to do, and you'll generate the theological rationale for it. But yeah, this does nothing to silence the people who think that this is a real thing, perhaps in the works, to use the words of Erika Kirk.

Brad: Let's go to a story that just broke today, Wednesday, November 26. It's everywhere. Dozens of outlets have covered it. I'm looking at a story from The Guardian by Anna Betts. The Department of Justice said in a statement that Kristi Noem, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, was the one who made the decision to continue with the deportation flights of Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador in March despite a federal judge's directive that the flights must be returned to the United States.

So if we recall this situation, there were these flights out of the United States. The flights were full of Venezuelan immigrants, and they were taken to the harsh and inhumane prison in El Salvador. That is the same prison that Kristi Noem stood in front of. She visited there, and she had this really grotesque video of her standing in front of people who were imprisoned, I mean, in a crowded, overflowing jail cell. And it was, I mean, to me, it was reminiscent of Nazi kind of propaganda. There was a lot of talk about it in the moment. Now we know that the DOJ is basically pointing to her as the figure who decided that even though the judge had said "you need to not do this, it is illegal and you need to turn the flights around," they did not.

Okay. So the Justice Department on Tuesday says that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove gave DHS legal advice regarding the court's order, and after that advice and hearing, Noem directed the flights to keep going. This is a big deal because it gives you a glimpse into what's going to happen when the MAGA movement and coalition and administration falls apart—when the autocratic regime falls apart. You start to get the crimes against humanity. You start to get the finger-pointing. You start to get the, "Oh, it was actually her who said to do it, and she's the one who made the decision. So you should probably go—she's the one that should be in jail."

This is the first, in my mind, Dan, of many to come, of times when people in the administration are going to get called out for the illegal decisions they made on behalf of Trump and the administration. But this just puts Noem right at the center of a maelstrom that is totally about: you did not listen to the judge when the judge said to do something. That's illegal, that is unconstitutional, that is not the rule of law, so on and so forth. So now that we said it's always something when it's like DOJ or DHS—no, it's no longer an institution. It is now Kristi Noem, who is being fingered. The fingers are pointing at her, saying, "You are the one that made this decision." So thoughts on this?

Dan: I think I agree with you that you're going to start—because what that'll do is all the Republicans, everybody in the Republican Party has been part of MAGA, the—I should say, the institutional Republican Party, people in office—that's how they'll try to insulate themselves from all of these things. All the lackeys in DOJ, the people who stepped into the spots that were vacated when everybody who didn't get on board with the Trump administration was forced out, or stepped out or fled the ship, all the loyalists who will try to say, "Hey, we weren't loyalists. We were just doing, you know, what they said, and working at the behest of them." And whatever—you basically insulate it by saying, "Well, it was this person, and they're gone now. Problem solved. It's all fixed." So I think you'll see that.

I think it's also interesting and worth watching the way—I think this is the point you were picking up on—that Trump has modeled this notion of the cult of personality, of Trump being involved in all things Trump and so forth. You now have this sort of trickling down to everywhere. The department—I refuse to call the Department of War the Department of Defense—it's Pete Hegseth. It's him at every level. We see this with the stuff going on with Captain Kelley. Now we see all that sort of stuff here with the Department of Homeland Security. It's Kristi Noem, all the way down to that micromanaged level of, you know, every decision, everything has her fingerprints on it. And so we see that, and I think that's a point that you're raising that this—let's call it the personalization of politics—that all of these agencies are not agencies now, they're just arms and extensions of the individuals who are nominally their heads. We see that playing out. So we see that clearly.

I'm also curious what will happen moving forward in terms of the Trump administration and Kristi Noem with this. If this turns into a problem, right, well, they're going to say she went rogue. She did this. She shouldn't have. Whatever they can cut her loose. It insulates a lot of elements of MAGA with this.

Brad: I mean, so there's a piece at Talking Points Memo by David Kurtz that is exactly that point, Dan. We're supposed to believe that the buck stopped with Kristi Noem. So you're telling me that she was going rogue, that the White House knew nothing about this? The administration did not know? The Stephen Millers of the world, the Russ Voughts, the Susie Wiles, whoever—they didn't know anything? She was just out here making decisions like, "Nah, this is my jam. I'm doing it"? You know, if you've ever watched any White House drama, if you've ever watched any Aaron Sorkin-produced The West Wing, or whatever movie, film, TV show, etc., you're really supposed to think that Kristi Noem was out here acting on her own when Donald Trump promised for months and years to do mass deportation, when this is Stephen Miller's entire dream and purpose for being alive?

Is this the point I think you're making: what this provides by naming her is they're hanging her out to dry, and if their argument that this was indeed legal—and they are arguing that. They are arguing that, "No, no, we did nothing wrong, even though Kristi Noem made the decision. The oral injunction was not binding, and we didn't have to turn the planes around. We were fine." So if they win the argument, great, we're good. If they lose the argument, Kristi Noem's on the chopping block, and the administration can decide: is this too much bad news, bad press, bad look for us that we need to get rid of her?

There's already rumors that Trump is wanting to get rid of Kash Patel, and it's just a reminder. And I think we've had some of this in this second term of Trump with Elon Musk—we haven't had as much. They've tried to be more organized. They've tried to be more grown up, and we can debate that another time. The turnover has been less volatile, is the way I'll put it for now. This is a reminder of what happens in Trump world. You go to work for him. He promises the world. You're Kristi Noem. You get this big post. You're out in front. You're dressed up and cosplaying all over the country. You're the one. You've got the power, you've got the prestige. We now know, and we're not going to talk about this at length, that there is an investigation into Kristi Noem directing $220 million of taxpayer money to businesses and firms related to her and her business interests.

So all that comes with accepting a post in a corrupt regime. Those are the benefits. You know what the downfall, the downside is? When they need to, they will pin something illegal on you, hang you out to dry and just say, "Bye. Thanks. It's been a year. You know, it's been a year and a half. Thanks so much for your help. Bye." And you'll just go down in disgrace. If you go to jail, you go to jail, whatever. We don't care. The same with Kash Patel, the same with Pete Hegseth. And so that is also part of what's happening here as well. So we'll keep an eye on this. This is brand new. We're not sure what will happen here, but this is the news for today. Any last thoughts on that? Sorry, Dan, any last thoughts?

Dan: No, no, the only thing I was going to say is the Trump administration has operated on the other sort of unified executive thing, pushing back on judicial review and all of this. We know the Supreme Court gave Trump that huge boost by basically saying almost anything he does as president he's immune to, but all of that only applies to him. And so it'll be—because the administration has been moving as if that's like an executive branch kind of thing—it's not, and it'll be interesting to see as we go forward, just as you say, not just throwing her under the bus, but I'm really speculating here: what happens eventually, and I'm amazed this doesn't happen more—what happens eventually when somebody like Kristi Noem is thrown under the bus and called to testify before Congress and just spills the beans, just comes out and says, "Here are all the people that were involved, and here are the texts." And you know, when she has to cut a deal to avoid jail time or something, I don't know. I think this could be a really volatile pattern moving forward.

Brad: Well, but—and this is why, to me, the Marjorie Taylor Greene thing is interesting. I know this is going to open up a whole other can of worms, and I don't want to chase every thread with Marjorie Taylor Greene, and she's going to—if you haven't heard yet, Marjorie Taylor Greene is set to resign from Congress here in about a month and a half, right to the day when she's guaranteed a pension from Congress. So that's a discussion for another day. But Marjorie Taylor Greene essentially looked at Trump and said, "I'm good. I'm not doing your thing anymore, and I don't want to participate, and I'm going to help get the Epstein files out." I don't think of her any highly, any more highly than I did before, really, but it was one significant thing to me that somebody was willing to look at Trump and say, "Nope, no, I'm not doing that." Whereas back in February, March, April, it didn't matter who it was—Tim Cook, Elon Musk, you know, Mark Zuckerberg, not to mention every Republican congressional person—they all just seemed to bow to Trump, no matter what. Harvard, Columbia. I mean, it just felt like no matter who he intimidated, they gave in.

To me, this is the kind of stuff that you have to notice when it happens. And people can say it's no big deal. People can say, "Who cares?" And it may be no big deal in two years. I don't know yet, but this is why it's worth watching, to me, for those reasons. So let's take a break. We'll come back and talk about a piece from Bill McKibben that is really, really fascinating, and the exact kind of thing that Dan and I, I think, love to analyze because it's about Christianity, United States and what happened to it in the Trump era. We'll be right back.

Brad: All right, Dan, there's some folks in the Discord this week who were talking about this piece. Appreciate you and your comments. There are some folks online talking about it. But at The Guardian, there is a new article called "They're Doing to America What They Did to Christianity." This is by Bill McKibben, who's a really prominent author. And there's some good things here, Dan, and I'm gonna play the good cop. So I'm gonna play the good cop. I'm gonna say some of the things that I think are positive, and then I'll let you be the bad cop. Because I think, as scholars of religion, we do have a critical lens on this, and we really do have some disagreements with Bill McKibben.

But he starts like this after—I mean, he goes through why Trump is novel in American history. And this part, I agree with, Dan, you know, he recalls the AI video that Trump posted, wearing a crown and putting himself as a fighter pilot. And then, you know, the animation is one where he drops a load of human feces onto American citizens. And for McKibben, this really illustrates the ethos of the current administration. And I think he's right in saying that there is no other American president, not Richard Nixon, not Andrew Jackson, not Warren Harding, who would have ever boasted about defecating on the American citizenry. I think that's fair. Whatever you think about Nixon, and I think a lot of things—I was born in Richard Nixon's hometown. We share our hometown. I come from Richard Nixon's church. I'm a Richard Nixon Quaker. Not anymore, but I was. I don't think he ever thought about defecating on American citizens. Maybe he did, and I don't really want to speculate. I don't want to go down that rabbit hole. Andrew Jackson—

Dan: Usually what you would have are presidents trying to convince you that everything he did was good for everybody. Not the active targeting of Americans who didn't vote for them or whatever.

Brad: Even if in private, even if in the interiority of his own heart and mind. I don't know what he thought, but nonetheless, the idea that you would put it out in public, I think, is exactly right. No American president has ever done that. Okay, now here's what McKibben says next. This is why he's saying that what they're doing to America is what they did to Christianity. So if everyone wants the thesis that McKibben is putting forth: they are doing to the United States what they did to Christianity. So let me read a bit:

"As disorienting as it was to watch the president try to upend the old idea of democracy and replace it with its polar opposite, there is one large group of Americans who should not find it completely novel, that is those of us in older age cohorts, a near majority who were raised as mainline Protestant Christians. We have watched over the years as right-wing evangelical churches turned the Jesus we grew up with into exactly the opposite of who we understood him to be. At its most basic, they turned a figure of love into a figure of hate. We went from 'the meek shall inherit the earth' to 'the meek shall die of cholera.' This has happened more slowly over decades, instead of months, but it is nonetheless unsettling in the same ways, a disorienting gut punch for many of us."

So Dan, the claim here is that what they are doing to the United States, in terms of Trump defecating on American citizens, and that being the overall spirit of the Trump era, is what they did to Christianity when they turned it from Jesus, the mainline Protestant neighbor-love, who welcomes the stranger and helps the vulnerable, into the evangelical right-wing, reactionary Catholic Jesus, who might condone defecating on American citizens and certainly condones mass deportation, inhumane detaining of migrants, unmarked cars with masked men kidnapping people, so on and so forth. So that's the thesis.

Let me read a little bit more, because I know, Dan, you're going to jump in and get at it here. "In no small measure, it made me who I am," talking about Christianity. "I grew up in the suburbs in the 60s and 70s, when mainline Protestant Protestantism retained its strength." He talks about being baptized a Presbyterian, going to a church headed by a pastor who marched with Martin Luther King Jr., confirmed in a Congregational church in Massachusetts that was a direct descendant of the church where the original Minutemen had worshiped 200 years before. He goes through these bona fides and then talks about how, despite the fact that Christianity has trafficked in angels and had some serious, serious trouble with the role of women, the actually distinctive thing about this newly ascendant version of Christianity is that it meshes easily with the savage cruelty of the new political order.

Dan Miller, scholar of religion, critical reader, one-time minister and now co-host of Straight White American Jesus. What would you like to say to that?

Dan: So I mean, first, it's good. It's good that we're picking up on some positives, because I can get too analytical on this. And one of the things that we're critical of, let's call it the religious left or mainline Protestants or whatever, all the time is, as you say routinely, they don't tell a story. And here it is. We've talked for a long time, years—the entire time we've been doing this podcast, 1,000 episodes—about how the sort of the conservative, specifically white conservative evangelicals, but now this kind of coalition of, you know, theologically conservative movements under the MAGA umbrella have kind of won the branding battle of like, what is Christianity? What is American Christianity? What does it mean to be American and be a Christian? And they kind of win it, right, by default. And so the mainline has not been great about sort of countering that. And so I think McKibben is trying to do that, and I understand, for those within these traditions, why there's the first of all the desire to do that.

But I think also, and this is where it starts to become problematic for me, the oversimplified story that this is, I think, sort of misses significant things. And so that's what I want to pick up on. Some are, I guess, two things. Number one, Christianity has always been defined by lots of Jesuses. He contrasts that mainline Protestant Jesus with the evangelical Jesus. But you can go back literally to the Bible and what we can discern about Jesus movements before the Bible was written, and you can discern multiple Jesuses, different understandings of who this figure was and what it means to be his follower, and so forth. And I think that he sort of misses some of that. And I think this is also a very nostalgic white guy kind of theology. And so I'll explain what I mean by that.

So the first thing is, yes, there are two different visions of Jesus. If I put my religious studies hat on, take my foot out of a church and say, "Okay, let's look at this as religious studies scholars," yeah, they're very different visions, but they always have been. So for example, when he talks about, he says, "A very different Jesus than the one I grew up worshiping, who was emphatically not"—or it was emphatically not "the story of a mighty king arising." I wrote in my notes on my book of Revelation, in the same New Testament, at the end, you've got Jesus coming back as the divine conqueror who slaughters all of his enemies and, like, tramples in their blood and all this other kind of stuff. Very different visions of Jesus. And that is how Christianity has always been. And that doesn't mean that I'm like, "Well, different visions of Jesus. One can't be better than another," but I think that there's a mistake when we fall into the kind of nostalgia that I hear here, that, well, the American Jesus was always this, and that's the nostalgic piece.

And as you know better than I do, let's talk about the antebellum Southern Jesus. Let's talk about the Protestant—I live in Massachusetts. I spent time this week at AAR in Boston. I went over to Boston Common and I was reading about the Quaker martyrs, the four Quakers who were executed on the Boston Common because of their religious faith. Like, let's talk about the Jesuses that have reigned in American society. He points out rightly that those mainline denominations, he rattles off a list of them, that they were all affirmative of the African American civil rights movement. But he also has this nostalgia like 1958 when 52% of Americans identified as, you know, white mainline Protestants and so forth. Like, okay, but let's look at American society in 1958. Do we really want to give a pass to all of those Christians and say, "Yep, there were good, you know, progressives, whatever"?

And we can talk—and this is another piece of this that you get sometimes, this nostalgia. And this is why I say to me, it's a kind of a white guy mainline nostalgia. Let's talk to the people of color in America and see if that kind, loving Jesus was always what they were experiencing from the mainline or anywhere else. Let's talk to queer folk. Let's talk to, yes, women. As he notes, he also has a place in there where he kind of says, you know, that there have always been those who twist this message, you know, going all the way back to the Crusades. You look at Western Christianity, its dominant institutional forms, from Constantine forward, have been about power. They have been about the marriage of what we would call church and state. They have not been a kind, loving, compassionate, inclusive Jesus. Have there always been countercurrents? Absolutely. Have there always been multiple Jesuses circulating within that? There absolutely have. But I feel like this gives this sort of—ironically to me—almost the same like 1950s nostalgia that you get on the right. Only here, it's this 1950s mainline nostalgia. "Oh, look, look at what a great, you know, good Christian American church we were at the time."

And I just think it misses all of that. And it's that nostalgic piece that I think is dangerous. I don't like these nostalgic movements, whether it's a right-wing nostalgia that says, if we just look to the past, we can—what, make America great again? We can go back to that time. I hear kind of the same thing in McKibben. I hear the impulse there to do something different. But I also hear that nostalgic thing that can't help but create a mythic past that if we just institute in the present, everything would be good, and it's just the mirror of the MAGA movement. And I have a—I think that that's a problem.

So I think it overlooks lots of things. I think it's not going to build—I can just, I can hear it now, him trying to sort of build a coalition of well-meaning, maybe Christian people who are not on board with MAGA. But I'm like, what people are you gonna leave out with this story when you have, like, the Black church tradition that knows—they know how that worked? You also, I think the last point I'll make here is this is also an elitist story. I think that story as if all of the right-wing evangelicals, it came out of nowhere, this inbreak. And of course, if you study American religious history, we know the currents that were there. We know the real, you know, the fundamentalist—but the fundamentalism was always there. What emerged is what were called the neo-evangelicals in the post-World War II period. They were always there. And some of those people will look at people like McKibben and the mainline and academics like you and me and accuse us of elitism. And they're not always wrong with this simplistic story that this was somehow something that sort of came into America from nowhere. And those people are legitimately going to say, "These are traditions that are American too."

Now, should we counter them? Yes, I believe we should. We spend a lot of time trying to do that. But I think the kind of nostalgic, revisionist history here is a problem. So those are some concerns that I have with McKibben's piece.

Brad: I think that the nostalgia covers over the ways that much of what we are experiencing today—and emphasis on much—is not new. Now, some of it is new. The president posting, talked about that, right? Posting AI videos of defecating on American citizens, that is new. Yes, 100% I agree. The things that the Trump administration has done, gestured towards the ways that it has argued against things like separation of powers, or the ways that the executive branch is held in check by independent agencies and other branches of government, the ways that it has levied tariffs, destroyed the White House itself, sent in troops to our cities. Some of this is absolutely brand new. Some of it has not been done in a long, long time. I am not arguing that what is happening in America is old news. It's not. There are new, novel tragedies that the Trump administration has brought.

I actually think it's easier to say that than it is to say that the grotesque and cruel versions of Christianity we're seeing are also new. I actually think it's easier to say what Trump is doing is novel, but the Christianity we're seeing is not. Now, that can be debated for three, four or five hours. We're going to get emails on both sides. People are going to agree. They're going to disagree. Here's what I'm trying to get through in a brief argument: when I think of US Christianity, I think of everything from the slave owner's Bible, to, as you mentioned, the antebellum South, the ways that, in some renderings, Black people were not considered human enough to evangelize to. In others, they had to be evangelized so that they would be docile and subservient. And if they had the same God, then that would lead to a teaching of obeying your master and your Father, who in many cases was the slave owner.

I think of the gospel of the KKK, which Kelly J. Baker—the seminal book on this—four, five million people in the KKK during the 1920s. In order to be in the KKK, you had to be white and Protestant. That left out all the Catholics, all the Jews, all the Black people. Now we could look at what percentage of the American population that was, but the KKK gospel said that Jesus is King, and immigrants, Jews, Catholics, Black people, they all need to go because they're not welcome in the United States at all. We could go to redlining. We could go to Jim Crow. We could go to all the Christians who wanted the Chinese excluded and the Japanese incarcerated. We could go to all like—I guess my point is, like, it just doesn't feel hard to think of this Jesus that we're countering now in our public square, whether it's Allie Beth Stuckey's lack of empathy, whether it's Pete Hegseth's warrior ethos, whether it is Kristi Noem's evangelical mass deportation crusade. This is all a punch in the mouth today. It doesn't mean that it's new, and it doesn't mean that it hasn't been part of this country's Christian ethos for a long time.

Now, I also, however, want to recognize with McKibben that if you are one of our mainline friends, Dan—you've been associated with the mainline church at times over the last decade or two. I have so many friends and I visit mainline churches often. This is not me saying you've done anything wrong. This is not me saying that I don't love the fact that if you're Episcopalian, you are fighting for reproductive rights to protect trans people. That if you are an American Baptist, or somebody who is PCUSA, and you are working to continue to say Black lives matter, or to fight for racial justice or to protect migrants in your church, that I am somehow like, "No." I applaud you. I see myself as on your team, on your coalition. I want to be in relationship with you. I want to be helping each other, help others, all of that.

I think the thing that we have an issue with here is that the idea that the King Jesus, who is a cruel king, is new to American history, which is simply not true. And when you tell it like that, Dan, I just want to agree with you. You introduce a nostalgia that can be fairly hurtful, whether it's the African American churches you've talked about, whether it's we think of Martin Luther King Jr. writing the Letter from Birmingham Jail to the white moderate who would not get on board with what was happening in Birmingham and other places, whether it's just all those folks who were just not ready to get on board with justice for any number of marginalized groups. To think that in 1958 when 52% of Americans were mainline Protestants, things were awesome. Some things were better. Some things make more sense. I get your gesture, Bill McKibben, I totally do. But the story is more complicated than that, and unless we're willing to tell it that way, I don't think we serve ourselves very well.

Dan: A couple more points here. I think one thing, I think that this gets to and, you know, I think I tried to talk about this—little conversation I had with some folks at AAR—people know their experience, and I think that there is a strongly experiential element to this from McKibben, and he's giving, I think, real voice to what feels like a loss and what feels like a perversion of what he grew up understanding Christianity to be, what was clearly very formative and meaningful to him. And I think lots of people have that experience, lots of people that experience on lots of sides of Christianity. The people that are coming out of a church where they always grew up knowing that, for example, women can't be pastors, or that, you know, people of color are second-class citizens, or whatever they were socialized into those traditions as well.

And that's why what is so necessary and hard for people to do, and I think this is, you know, an advantage maybe of having the opportunity you and I have had to study these things the way that we have, is you get that broader view, and you can say, "Oh, okay, like, here was this experience, but over here, there was this experience, over here, where there was this experience." And so that kind of activity of recognizing that one's own faith experience, if we want to call it that, was not universal. I think that that's hard, and I think that that's a challenge.

I think also, you know, to emphasize your point about not—I'm not here to, like, jump all over, you know, contemporary mainline churches. That are fighting—all the mainline churches I know, and the people that are in them, they will always say, "We're still learning." They know those histories. They will often look with pride, and I think justify that. You know, sometimes, as white churches, they were marching with MLK. Great. They will also say, "We didn't recognize the queer folk in our community at that time, and we didn't recognize this, we didn't recognize that." And you got your own, you know, denominational histories of how and when they came to that. So I think a recognition that we have not always been where we need to be, but we really try desperately to do that and to be open and to put it in theological terms that they might speak in, to be aware of the continuing movement of God and the calling to be these things and so forth.

And I think that that's a way of recognizing real historical limitations, while at the same time being able to say we continue moving forward. And whenever somebody says, "I continue to learn and move forward and evolve," and whatever, what they're saying is, "Yeah, I'm not going to claim that I'm right where I need to be or nor have I ever been." And I think that that's the difference. That's the sort of non-nostalgic way to build on this and to move forward. And so that's, I think, a current that's very alive in a lot of the mainline right now. And I think that that's what probably against his intentions sort of disappears in a way from this kind of presentation that McKibben has. It really gives the impression that once upon a time, America was kind of where it needed to be Christian-wise because of the mainline. And as the mainline has declined and evangelicalism has drifted further and further to the right, it's departed from that. I think that that's the problem.

Brad: And you know, I think McKibben gestures at some of this. He does gesture at the fact that there are mainline figures and congregations that, you know, Reverend William Barber, Mariann Budde, you know, who have stood out in terms of their visibility and their impact here in the contemporary moment. I want to just make one more point, though, that I think is what is probably bugging me most about this piece is that, once again, Episcopalians, PCUSA people, Quakers, others listening: we are not criticizing you. This is not us being like you're not doing whatever you should be doing. It's none of that. I think it's what you just said, Dan, this nostalgia that thinks, "Well, if we could just go back to when Christianity was great, we could make America great again."

And I think what is bothering me is that if you take the nostalgia piece on one hand, and then the future—I'm going to say something that might hurt some feelings, and you may not listen to the show anymore. I don't know how you're going to take this. I don't think Christianity is going to save the United States. And what I mean by that is I don't think that a robust mainline church of Americans is on the horizon in terms of not in terms of 52% or 46% or 32% or 20% of Americans being mainline people. I just don't see that on the horizon. If you are a mainline person, does that mean you should stop doing what you're doing, protecting migrants, helping trans kids, working to feed the poor and the underprivileged in your communities? Not at all. Does it mean that your churches are not wonderful, pro-social, amazing loci of community and love? Not at all. I've been to so many of those churches, and I love them so much. My last book came out, I got to give a talk at the oldest Japanese American church in United States, in San Francisco's Japantown, and it was one of the most meaningful nights I've had in so long. I spent so many weekends at churches across the Bay Area, helping them understand Christian nationalism. Those people and those communities, to me, are wonderful, and they make people's lives better for the most part.

But I think what McKibben is—what's the subtext, Dan, and I'm curious to see what you think of this—is like, if we just got back to when Christianity was great, then America would be great again. And he's not that simple. And I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to, you know, Bill McKibben, I'm not trying to reduce your argument and make it, you know, sort of a blunt object. But that does seem to underlie some of that nostalgia you've outlined, Dan, and I think that's what's bothering me. Christianity is not going to save this country. Like we need a story that is one that unites people beyond Christianity. Because Christianity is not the through line for the diverse, pluralistic, multi-ethnic, multi-religious population that we have in 2025. It's just not. It doesn't mean that Christians need to go away. This is not me saying no Christianity or no mainline and no Episcopal—none of that. I just don't think that if we think about renewing, restoring, rescuing democracy from the jaws of defeat, that like Christianity is what will do it.

I think it will—now hear me out people—it will take many Christians in the image of Reverend Barber, in the image of Mariann Budde, in the image of Alba Onofrio, in the image of James Talarico. But it doesn't mean that Christianity will save us. And I think part of when I read this piece that kind of turned me off is it felt like he thought that. Is that fair? Am I being too hard on him? What do you think?

Dan: So I don't think you're being too hard on him. And I don't know if this is exactly where you're going with this, but this is where I go, which I think is close: I don't think this is his intention, but it goes right up to the line of suggesting that if we had a progressive Christian nationalism, maybe that'd be okay. And I'll direct a person that I've had the opportunity to speak with and get to know a little bit. Bo Underwood wrote a book about, you know, the sort of the mainline contribution to contemporary Christian nationalism here.

Brad: Yeah, thank you. He talks about, you know, Eisenhower laying the cornerstone of the church in New York City.

Dan: The church in New York City, yeah. And for a lot of us, that's going to be a concern. I don't want Christian nationalism full stop for lots of different reasons. Now I'll take all the Christians acting in legitimate good faith. They'll want to take this country where it should go, along with all the atheists and the humanists and the Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, everybody, everybody. We can like, let's cool, let's all do that. And I really, frankly, don't give a shit if you're doing it because you go to church on Sunday, or you don't go anywhere on Sunday, or you think religion is a bunch of bunk, but you're a big believer in science and reproductive rights or whatever. I don't—I kind of don't care where you're coming from as much as I care where you're going and where you're aiming.

And so I think that's part of what I hear as well is that concern. Again, I don't think if you have McKibben sitting here, like, "Yes, what I want is a left-leaning Christian nationalism," but I think the logic is kind of there, and I think that that's also a problem. And so I think that's what I hear you saying, or something, something like that, is that that's not what we need. We don't need religion to save America. We need Americans to save America.

Brad: And we need the separation of church and state to save religion.

Dan: Yes, absolutely right. I say it all the time. You know, old school Baptist that I am, I'm a hard believer in separation of church and state and freedom of religion. And if people aren't sure what I mean by saying that's a Baptist thing, we can talk—I've talked about it before. Yeah, you're absolutely right. This is not about being opposed to religion in some way. This is about affirming religion and saying, let's just keep the—like, yes, as citizens, we can act in the public square in whatever way we want and from whatever motives we do, but we don't need a, quote unquote, Christian nation, or a religious nation or something like that. That's just not what we need. And I agree with you, I don't think that's what's going to save us.

Brad: Because what we're seeing is—and we are, you know. And I also, I think one of the issues I have with the Bill McKibben thing here is there are actually more examples of mainline Protestants in the news, in the visible spaces, fighting back than I think he gives credit for. So he talks about Mariann, but he talks about Reverend Barber. He mentions James Talarico. And those are great folks. I've—you know, we've highlighted Mariann Budde here. I've met Mariann Budde. We've had James Talarico on the program. Those are great examples. But I mean, just this week, or two weeks, three weeks, this last month, there's been a number of priests and clergy who have been arrested, detained and on the front lines against the ICE in Chicago.

So I think one of the things here is that he's nostalgic for a time when mainline Protestantism was dominant and the majority. But it doesn't mean that mainline folks are not in the trenches right now, fighting a good fight, whether it's Amanda Tyler, whether it's Reverend Theoharis at the Kairos Center in New York City, whether whoever it is. That is happening, I think that's there. I think separation of church and state is what will save religion in this country. Because what you're seeing is only a certain Christianity is worth protecting, according to the Trump administration, when the priests and the clergy are detained outside of the ICE, you know, protests. They're deemed as not really Christian, not really clergy. They don't fall under the purview of the anti-Christian bias task force that Pam Bondi and Pete Hegseth are on. They're not the Christians bias against whom really matters.

What's the takeaway? The takeaway is, if you let Christian nationalism of any kind, including mainline, take hold in your government, then you're going to be the wrong kind of Christian at some point, and giving that power to any state is one I'm opposed to. And that's why the only way to have freedom of religion is to be guaranteed freedom from religion. And separation of church and state is the key to saving religion in the United States, rather than to snuffing it out or hurting it. Let's take a break and we'll talk about healthcare. Be right back.

Brad: All right, Dan, we got a couple minutes here. There's a healthcare debate happening. There's a lack of ACA subsidies. People's healthcare premiums are going through the roof. The Republicans have outlines of a plan, which Trump said in the debate with Kamala Harris, however many months ago. But I don't forget things he said: "I have outlines of a plan." That's all they seem to still have. Remind us of what this is all about.

Dan: Yes, it's worth reordering, reorienting ourselves, because Brad, some people are younger than us. God bless them all. A couple people for a decade and a half, right? The Republicans have hated Obamacare. Of course, no Republicans voted for the Affordable Care Act originally. People might remember, Trump comes into office in 2016 promising to "repeal," quote unquote, "repeal and replace" Obamacare and so forth. And what emerged then is that despite the fact that it had been at that time, you know, more than half a decade, they didn't have any plan. They still don't have any proposal or policy. Here they are, 15 years later from the original passage, Trump's second term, they still don't have any policy. As you say, it's fairly straightforward, like, you know, the quick fix to this is to just extend the subsidies. I say the quick fix—there's a lot of debate about whether that would actually do anything right now, because open enrollment is already going on. People are already having to make decisions. Everybody out there at jobs and other places, and maybe you're getting Obamacare yourself. We're all doing open enrollment now. My open enrollment period, not for the ACA, but for something else, already closed, just for example.

So whether that'll make a difference or not, but people who haven't, maybe they have other things to do than follow this for the last decade and a half, are like, "Why won't they just do that?" Number one, they don't have a plan. There's never been some Republican task force putting together a grand healthcare plan for the last 15 years. They have nothing. And this is part of what we talked about when the shutdown closed—or, I guess, when the government opened, that's how I should say that—that this was going to come out, that they don't have a plan, and they can't unify behind anything. But I think the bigger question that people can ask is: why? Because they don't believe that people deserve healthcare. Conservatives in the GOP don't believe that in the wealthiest country in the world, the only advanced economic country in the world that does not provide some form of universal healthcare, they treat it like it's a unicorn. It's something that can't exist. "We can't possibly have it." Why? They don't believe that it's something that people should have. If you have money for healthcare, great, and if you don't, well, then F you. Because that's how it works.

We talked about this a million times, about the party that just doesn't actually care about helping people. They would rather foment anger and resentment and grievance and ride into office on those emotions than actually help people, and that's what this is. So I think that the more interesting question that people should focus on is, why, after a decade and a half, do they still have, quote unquote, "outlines of a plan"? They don't even have that because they don't want a plan. The only reason now that they're even feeling pressure to try to do something is their constituents now—a lot of them get healthcare through the ACA. I think I read the statistic that it's only like 8% of Americans who are uninsured now. The number was much, much higher before that. It should be lower than that. They keep talking about driving down premium prices and so forth, but they insist on a privatized healthcare system, which means a for-profit healthcare system, which means that all those health insurers are doing the things that they do to make a profit off of sick people, well, really, off of healthy people, to subsidize sick people. Point is, it's a for-profit system. We could go on and on, but at the end of the day, it's that priority of the GOP hasn't changed. This shows us who they are. They have never thought that Americans as Americans should have healthcare. They've never believed that, and they still don't, and that's why they're stuck.

Brad: All right, yeah, you're gonna accuse me of using this topic to bring in a topic that I want to talk about, but it's gonna make sense, so just give me a minute. Okay?

Dan: Yeah.

Brad: Okay, this, of course, is all about Obamacare. And like, if there's anything from the Obama presidency that people who are younger than us, people are 21 or 25, know, it is Obamacare. They may not know anything else about his presidency that has stuck. It was called Obamacare. It was not called something—I mean, in popular parlance. What I've been arguing for the last three weeks on this show is that we are seeing JD Vance and many of his allies and his friends and his fans articulate what I am calling—following scholars like Yilmaz and Morris—on civilizational populism. And this is not my term. I'm not—I have not invented it. It is all them, and they've done great work.

Civilizational populism goes like this: the elites have sold out the real people to get rich, and in selling them out, they have sold them out to foreigners who are invading the country. That's like the very basic thing. In addition, those foreigners are civilizationally incompatible with this country. They, no matter what they do to assimilate, become some of us, their religion and their culture are just not compatible with us. They need to just go, period. Okay, so that's civilizational populism. It sounds a lot like ethno-nationalism. It sounds a lot like all kinds of virulent, racist ideologies, but it's based on civilization. We have a Western civilization. It came from Greece and Rome. It went through medieval Christendom and the Reformation and Western Europe, and then we got to America, city on a hill.

Dan, you're like, "Brad, get to the point." Here's the point. Barack Obama, he of Obamacare, is the civilizational populist's worst enemy. He has a Kenyan father. He is mixed race. They said he was Muslim. Now he's not Muslim, as far as I know. But what percentage of conservative Fox News-watching people believed and still believe that Barack Obama is Muslim? Okay? He was not born here. He's a socialist. He is civilizationally incompatible with the United States, according to so many of the people we talk about on the show here. Do you know why Obama broke their brain? Because the guy that was the invader that got here only because the elite sold us out became the president. Like he didn't just become your neighbor, he didn't just become the football coach. He doesn't just teach your kid ninth grade. He's not the head of a successful business. He doesn't own 10 franchise locations of your favorite burger chain. He's the president, and it broke their brain.

So part of why they are still stuck is because there is nothing in the GOP discourse that allows for giving Barack Obama any credit for anything ever and just saying, "Yeah, that wasn't actually that bad. Keep, keep Obamacare rolling. It wasn't that terrible, after all. He was not a great president, but we'll let it go." You know why? Because he broke their brain. The foreign invader who they claimed hated America, was a socialist and was a Muslim, became the president, and from then on, whether it's Laura Ingraham, whether it's Megyn Kelly, whether it is Ben Shapiro, whether it is Donald Trump, birther-in-chief, their brain was broken, and they're never going to let Obamacare be a thing that they'll fund simply because of who Obama was.

I—you still may accuse me of ringing something in that wasn't relevant, but that is what I've been thinking about as we approach this whole healthcare debate and rigmarole we're in right now. Other thoughts on this, and then we need to go to reasons for hope.

Dan: I agree with everything that you just said. I'll just direct people—there's a book by a guy named Metzl. It was a great book called Dying of Whiteness.

Brad: Yeah.

Dan: Talked about—yeah, how so many white Americans are negatively impacted by the inaccessibility of healthcare, but are also tied in with right-wing populist political rhetoric and so forth, and are sort of basically willing to die to defend a white country against the legacy of a Black president. And here, I'm just going to take it further then and say what you have in the GOP and Congress right now are people who are willing to kill for whiteness. They're willing to sacrifice their own constituents. Poll after poll after poll says the vast majority of Americans support so-called Obamacare. They think healthcare is too expensive, on and on and on. Moderate Republicans and even some less moderate Republicans recognize this, and they are pleading with Trump and everybody else to just extend the subsidies, because they know that just regardless of the ideology in terms of being reelected in swing districts and so forth, that this will hurt them.

And if people say, "Well, why? You know, this that question, why do people act against their interests? Why do people, in this case—it's whiteness is at the core of it. It's one of the core answers of why this is so." I don't think that you're misconstruing anything or bringing in a topic that's not relevant at all. I'll just remind people too, you might remember a guy named Mitch McConnell, who, once upon a time, said that, you know, the whole aim of the GOP was to make Trump, or, excuse me, Obama, a one-term president, and it was the party of no and all of that sort of stuff. It all, it all maps, it all tracks. It's all part of it.

Brad: When you're a party of no, it means you're a party of no for the American people. It means you don't think about how, like, the party of no directed at the Democrats means you're a party of no directed at everybody. Because you exist not to help people flourish. You exist to oppose on ideological grounds, on—as you're saying, in terms of dying for whiteness—anything that the people you think are not real Americans stand for.

Dan: So it's the party whose president jokes about shitting on people. I mean, that's right, that's where we're at. So, yeah.

Brad: My reason for hope is Bolsonaro is in jail for 27 years, and we could have talked about today the Wile E. Coyote plan he had to break out of jail with his son and protesters and seemingly Donald Trump, who was in on the caper. That's for another day, or you'll have to go read about that at another outlet. We don't have time for that today, but he is there, and it does again, as I talked about with, you know, noticing things when they come up. We need to notice that Brazil put this man who tried to stage a coup in jail for 27 years. We could have done that. And you can say, "Oh, shucks, regret." And you know what I'll say, Kristi Noem just got sort of finger-pointed at her by DOJ. She was the one. More of that is coming, people. Like this is not going to last forever. And the question is going to become, do we have the gall for a third American Reconstruction, and to do it right this time or not? Are we going to not let—okay, the moderates and the Confederacy convince us that we need to just keep doing politics as usual? The Jair Bolsonaro, 27 years in prison, is a reminder to me: the time is going to come when we can do this again, we can reconstruct the country like after the Civil War. Are we going to have the audacity to do it? Are we going to not because we did not have the audacity to charge Donald Trump with a crime, did we, or to keep him off the ballot? But Brazil's like, "No, you could have, though. You could have." And that chance is going to come again, and we need to be ready next time.

Dan: Mine—I could go with the same thing. But for me, it's that the prosecutions of James Comey and Letitia James were both dropped, or, yes, dismissed this week. The reason being—so this is kind of complicated, because there were a lot of problems with those prosecutions, and I think that the judge in the case basically took the path of least resistance. Was like, "You know what? I'm not going to settle a lot of the really substantive legal questions. Here's this most basic fact." And essentially ruled—and again, this had been widely anticipated in a lot of ways—that Lindsey Halligan was improperly appointed, that the judge that was put in place, or excuse me, the attorney put in place here by the Trump administration was done improperly, rejected the Trump administration's arguments through the Department of Justice about the legality of this, and therefore these cases fell because of that.

I think it's significant. I think the Trump administration is running into real limits. I was texting with some friends and family actually, this week about this, and said, Trump has made—he made his career as a real estate developer, and people have heard this before, sort of bilking people like he would have contractors come in and do a bunch of work, and then he would say, "Well, you know what you did, this thing, not quite like I said, I'm not going to pay you, or I'm going to sue you." He'd threaten to sue them if they then tried to get their money. And of course, regular people cannot counter a billionaire suing them, and so he would run roughshod. What he's run into are people that are like, "Fine, you can indict me. An indictment is not a conviction." And there were questions about how the indictment was obtained as well, and people are pushing back.

And again, I've said this since Trump was elected, since before Trump was elected, it takes the judicial system a long time to catch up. It's a slow-moving thing, but it is. I think there was real hope in this, and I think it shows, once again, starkly at every level, everybody recognizes that these are political attacks, that this is a partisan kind of prosecution. Again, polling data shows that polls don't change the world, but you start adding polling data here together, with polling data on ACA premiums and polling data on the price of eggs and milk and butter, and I think things stack up poorly. So a lot of reasons why I thought this was a real sign of hope.

Brad: Yeah, it turns out you should not appoint your attorney based on how good-looking they are, and it doesn't mean that some person who has no experience—well, that's like, they're so—hey, please, if you're a good-looking person listening to this, I am not throwing shade at you. I'm saying you should be given a job as a lawyer or anything else based on your skills, not you being good-looking, I guess, unless you're a model or an actor or something. When it comes to a lawyer who's supposed to prosecute James Comey, it seems like you should not pick a former beauty pageant person based on how you like how they look on camera, rather than their competency in the courtroom. So that's another thing altogether.

All right, people, thanks for hanging with us on this special Wednesday edition of the weekly roundup. We're thankful for all of you, all of you who subscribe, you make this happen, and you know, we just need your support to keep this going. So whether that is on Supercast for 40 bucks for the entire year, whether that is on Venmo, PayPal, any way you can send us a donation and support, or whether that is just spreading the word, leaving us a review, giving us a five-star rating on Apple or subscribing to our YouTube channel—we're up on YouTube. We're going to be launching in full in 2026, but we are producing content there now, so go check it out. We'll be back next week with some great content. Monday, it's In the Code. Wednesday and the weekly roundup on Friday. We do have a really great episode from the archives coming to you this Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, so be on the lookout for that. For now, we'll say thanks for being here. Have a good day.