Weekly Roundup: Mamdani Wins and Dems Sweep - Blame the Women!

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, and founder of Axis Mundi Media. Here today on his birthday weekend—happy birthday, Dan Miller.

Dan Miller: Thanks, Brad. I am Dan Miller. It is my birthday weekend coming up, and I'm professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College, and glad to be with you, Brad. This is the real gift, this and the advance hug that I've been preparing for you when we see each other in a couple weeks.

Brad: You'll be ready. I will be.

Today, in addition to talking about what Dan Miller is going to be doing for his birthday, we'll get into Mamdani, the blue wave that came this week, what that means—if it is as exciting or as nothing as we are hearing from different corners. We'll get into one demographic that is being blamed for Mamdani's election and for all the other problems in the world. It's not just immigrants anymore, it's not just trans people—it is also young women. So be prepared for a whole host of reports coming from the right, the American right, about how young women are ruining the nation.

And finally, we'll get into the fact that Dick Cheney died, Nancy Pelosi is retiring, all in the week that a 34-year-old man was elected mayor. What does that mean? Lots to cover. Let's go.

Brad: All right, Dan. Mamdani is the mayor of New York. I'm sure everyone listening has listened to various podcasts, read the opinion pieces, watched the news. I think there's a bunch to say. Let me—do you want me to play a video of the American right trashing Mamdani, or do you want to jump in before that and say what you think the election of Mamdani means?

Dan: Well, let's start with the American right trash. I think that tells us the significance of it, in a way. They're terrified of Mamdani for various reasons.

Brad: Yeah, here he is. Here's why Mamdani signals the end of the entire world. Here you go.

[Right-wing commentator clip]: "So his constituencies were Muslims, South Asians, and then these 20 to 30 something, over-educated, over-credentialed, downwardly mobile hipsters in Bushwick and Brooklyn who think they're the working class because they failed to get amazing jobs and have student loans from getting degree upon degree upon degree. They have enormous contempt for labor, and as a result, they want things from the government, despite being the most privileged people on planet Earth. And Mamdani is their avatar. This is a guy who's like a total nepo baby, never worked a day in his life, lives off his parents, but makes it seem cool, right? Like it's cool to live off your parents, be a total failure if you can make great content for social media.

They don't actually want him to do any of this stuff. They would never dream of shopping in an Aldi, forget about a free supermarket. These are people who spend $12 on a cold brew. It's all one big virtue signal. They feel like the government should pay them to make their shitty podcasts and protest for them.

Brad: I said it before when he kind of bolted to the head of the polls: Mamdani is everything that they said Obama was, even though he wasn't. So Mamdani was born in Africa. Mamdani is Muslim. Mamdani's parents are immigrants. He is somebody who came here at a young age. He is actually a socialist. They manifested him. It's like they told enough lies about Barack Obama that they got him.

And his middle name is Kwame because of his father and his family's deep inspiration from a number of Black Panther activists, Nelson Mandela, and many others. So there's just a lot of deep and wide influence coming from African and African American activists and figures.

So they clearly think he's going to ruin everything because of his socialism. But the main theme—and I'll get into this in a minute, but I'll throw it to you first—is there is just this sense of, like, Mamdani... and they're trying to do three or four things at once. He's antisemitic, he wants Sharia law, and he's gonna let migrants run wild over New York City in a way that will just be untenable, in addition to, of course, freezing the rent, providing free buses, and raising taxes on wealthy people. This is why he's the worst.

So take any of those you want, Dan. What do you want to say?

Dan: I think what I want to look at is some of the rhetoric around this. Because what you get about Mamdani is the same thing you get about a lot of people that the right don't like, where on one hand they paint them as weak, as ineffectual. Remember the whole bench pressing thing? We forgot to add that to the list—he can't bench press.

Brad: Yeah, he does have terrible bench press form, you know.

Dan: So you get all the anti-masculine stuff. You get that piece. You get Debra Messing this week talking about him being a "Marxist jihadist." You feel like doing a history lesson, like the Afghanistan war? I mean, let's see how the Marxists and jihadists get along back when you had the Soviets in Afghanistan. But whatever—whatever bad word you want to tar him with, that's what they're doing.

And on one hand, it's "look how bad he is, he's weak, he's ineffectual, he's gonna run New York City into the ground, he doesn't work, he depends on his parents," all of this kind of stuff. You get this on the right when they don't like somebody. On the one hand, there's this impulse to try to show us how weak and ineffectual they are—they're not a real threat. This isn't really significant. This is a bunch of liberal elites in New York who are out of touch.

But on the other hand, at the same time, he's an existential threat. And their discourse operates on these two registers that, at a logical level, are contradictory. Because if he's as ineffectual, if everybody the right doesn't like is as ineffectual and out of touch and un-American and crazy and, I don't know, effeminate or whatever that they don't like, who cares? But they're always positioned also as being an existential threat.

This is on my mind, so I was talking about this stuff with my students, and they're like, "Well, how does that fit?" I'm like, it's because it's not about reason. It is about wanting to create a sense of strength. But you have to have the perceived threat. You have to have this notion because that's how the right works now. It's always about a perception of threat. So you have to have it both ways. You have to have this claim that we have the power and we are the most powerful—this is why you should support us, this is why you should support Donald Trump, this is why you should be part of MAGA, because it's the powerful, virile vision of America and capitalism and all that stuff. But we need to also scare the hell out of you into recognizing that this is an existential threat.

So there's those two discourses together. And then I think there's the fact that for them, he is actually an existential threat. I think they are terrified that he ran away with this election, despite everything that was happening. When you start getting Donald Trump backing a Cuomo for mayor in New York, that's a sign of fear.

So there's this idea—there's just multiple layers of this discourse occurring at the same time, and they all have different significance if you sort of pull out one layer at a time and look at what's actually going on.

Brad:  I think the way for me to think about it is that he is not, by any objective measure, an existential threat to New York City, right? You know, he's going to have to fight hard to deliver on the campaign promises that he made—free buses and freezing the rent. And if you dig into the wonky nuances of that, those are two different fights through two different channels of the New York City governance system.

He is going to try to raise taxes, which will be difficult. There are ways he can strategize that. It's going to be difficult. This is a mayor trying to enact an agenda.

What he is an existential threat to, though, is those who envision the United States as a white Christian homeland. And not only Mamdani, but it is all of those people, as we have said for a thousand episodes, who do not fit the white, straight, Christian, patriarchal, native-born frame, who are an existential threat to that vision of the United States.

And I can tell you, Dan, that the existential threat theme was very clear on Twitter once we got word that he was elected. So here are some of the reactions from election night:

Elon Musk: "This are simply facts" [sic]—I don't know what happened there, if he got the... this is a singular pronoun, "are" is plural. Anyway, I don't know what happened there, but he was responding to somebody who tweeted, "Just so we're clear, illegals are voting, illegals are receiving benefits, illegals are changing congressional maps."

Matt Walsh, the provocateur on the right, said: "Just to recap the last two months: Charlie Kirk shot in the throat, thousands of leftists spend weeks celebrating"—again, sure, buddy. "Leftist militants take to the streets, committing and calling for more violence"—okay, really, strike two. "Attorney general candidate for Virginia expresses his desire to murder conservatives and watch their children die."

So this is all—if you don't know what that is, there was a text message sent by the man who was elected Lieutenant Governor. It's a whole thing. I'm not going to explain it. "Democrat voters turn out in mass to vote for him, the guy in Virginia. Do you understand who your enemies are yet?"

Jack Posobiec: "2026, it will be worse if we don't course correct."

Megan White Santa Kelly said: "God save Republicans and their children in Virginia." Elon Musk favorited that.

Orrin McIntyre: "Really need the GOP to understand that Mamdani did not win because he won the argument, because he convinced people that communism works. He won because NYC is flooded with immigrants who don't care about fleecing the country they came to."

So there's that.

Josh Abbotoy, who's a noted Christian nationalist leader of a Christian nationalist movement: "This week, the biggest political scandal in decades broke. Tonight, a communist cruises into the New York City Mayor's office."

Congressman Randy Fine, who is Jewish in Florida and is the man who would like to nuke Gaza—we've talked about him before: "Illegal immigrants who hate America elected a communist, Muslim, jihadist. New York City has fallen. America is next if we don't stop it."

And here's the one that I think really speaks to what you just said about existential threat. Here is CJ Engel, the Christian nationalist, the Christian ethno-nationalist who says only heritage Americans with white European family stories are actual Americans: "Mamdani won because demographics is destiny. People vote along identitarian lines, and because democracy has always been and always will be a mechanism for eventual communism."

Yeah, I know. A lot going on here.

Let me just make two comments. I'll throw it back to you. One is the theme to me of existential threat—what Engel says here is "demographics is destiny." And if you want a white, Christian, patriarchal, native-born country, you are right, the demographics do not look that way. I can't explain that any differently.

And one of the things that means for them—and you see it in Engel's tweet here, and I can show people other tweets from Engel that make this out even more explicitly—is the next conclusion, Dan, is: this is why democracy is bad. Because what they're doing is telling you there are so many people in this country who are not white and Christian, there are so many people who are white but not Christian, there are so many people who are Christian but not white, there are so many people who are neither, that democracy is doomed because we don't have the numbers anymore.

So Mamdani's election really does pose the existential threat, not to New York City as the most important city in the United States in terms of finances and culture or whatever else, and obviously the preeminent city on the world stage. But yes, if you want a certain country, then Mamdani does represent an existential threat.

So back to you.

Dan: Yeah, I think—and I know I keep shifting to these different layers of discourse, but it's just really fascinating to me and I think really key to understand the dynamics of this.

So on the one hand, when you hear all of that—"illegals voted for him," "immigrants who hate America voted for him," and so forth—on the one hand, you have a certain strategic marginalizing of voters. Because what they can't say, what they don't want to say, is there were a lot of people who voted for Donald Trump who just voted for Mamdani.

And people are going to say that's crazy, but let's remember the discourse coming out of the right and some people on the left that I always thought was overblown—and I think I said that—was, "Oh, there's this huge electoral realignment, and Donald Trump made huge gains with suburban women and Latinos and all of this, these minority populations, Black men," and so on. And there were these triumphant claims that the GOP had sort of overcome demographic destiny and all this other stuff.

And what we've seen in lots of polls and lots of other things—that's why people were watching not just this election but other elections—was it appears as if, yeah, those were real gains in 2024, but not necessarily lasting and so forth. Yeah, Trump hasn't delivered or whatever.

So they can't say lots and lots of white people voted for this person. Lots and lots of, I don't know, middle-aged men voted for this person. They can't say that, because—so they have to strategically marginalize the voters, if that makes sense, because they can't acknowledge that this was what most people wanted.

And we could talk about all the demographics of the U.S. and New York City, one of the most diverse cities in America, all of that stuff. But the reality is, he doesn't win by that margin if lots of white people aren't voting for him. So it's not just illegal immigrants or what have you.

But that brings me to the second piece of this rhetoric. What that also does, going back to this idea of threat, is it radically inflates in people's minds and perception the number of immigrants that this country has. There's also lots of polling data that shows that if you interview people and you ask, "What percentage of the United States population is African American or Latino or of Middle Eastern descent or whatever," a lot of conservative white people radically overestimate those numbers. They think that white people are much more of a much smaller group than they are. They're still not a minority yet—they're trending that way.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is, again, these two discourses come together where, on the one hand, you want to marginalize these—"these weren't real Americans who voted this way"—because we don't want to acknowledge, on the right, that you could have real Americans who didn't vote for Donald Trump. You don't want to acknowledge, still, that he's president twice and he hasn't won a majority of votes yet—49% in 2024. You don't want to acknowledge that.

And so what you simultaneously do is you marginalize everybody who voted for him, and at the same time, what do you do? You continue to jack up that sense of threat. Look how many illegals are in this country. Look how many immigrants there are who hate America. Your proof is that Mamdani just won an election because real Americans wouldn't possibly vote for this guy—with the exception, we can get into this in a minute, of women. That's the new target demographic here: white women.

But again, those levels of discourse—this is why it's such a convoluted commentary that comes from this, and it maps onto more broadly within the right the different assessments of the significance, or for some the insignificance, of these elections that happened.

Brad: Two more comments on—I agree with everything you just said—and two more comments on Mamdani for me. Then we can go around the country to some of the other results and some of the other notable things.

Mamdani, so if you are listening today and you are 45, 50, 55 years old or older, and you are not sure how you feel about Mamdani, I'm not here to yell at you or to say whatever. I get it. You, on your own, need to come to your understanding of who Mamdani is, et cetera.

What I would ask you to try to understand as somebody who—Dan was about 27, I think, or 26, when I first learned the name Barack Obama—is that for a lot of people in New York City and around the country who are 23, 31, 39, it has been a decade of Donald Trump in politics. So if you're 25, Donald Trump has been in your political life since you were 15. If you're 31, it's been since you were a junior in college.

Mamdani, I think for a lot of people, feels like the first win for Gen Z and young millennials in ways that some of us might have felt like when Obama won. And AOC is another figure you might think of, but AOC is not somebody who New York City gets to claim as a whole. You know, AOC has a district. She comes from one part of New York City. Mamdani is now the face of New York City. He's the face of the biggest and most important city in this country. He's the face of the city that you might call the most important in the world. We can talk about who's in that list—that can be a different discussion.

So please just understand, if you are somebody who's over 45, that the way people feel about this is there's an actual sense of hope, an actual sense of excitement, an actual sense that somebody from their generation is going to be the face of one of the most important offices and cities in the country. That's really big. And even if you still are somebody who's center-left and you're not sure, and "I don't know, and socialism makes me nervous," please at least understand that part.

We'll get into this later today, but Nancy Pelosi is retiring, and you all can email me your opinions about Nancy Pelosi and why she's great or why she's not. She's 82 years old. You know, Joe Biden is out of office. Chuck Schumer needs to be out of office. For somebody who's 31 or 26, seeing Nancy Pelosi go away and seeing Mamdani get elected is a sign that there's actually hope that a new generation of leaders might actually take hold someday in this country.

So that's one. And I don't know if you have a reaction to that, Dan. Just, you know, I think you and I are a couple years apart, but I think for our generation, the one time in my life I have felt a true sense of hope and collective effervescence was that first Barack Obama campaign. And I don't want to litigate the history and legacy of that. I just want to tell everybody that's how I felt as a guy in his twenties who was coming out of evangelicalism and trying to figure out what he believed in and what made him excited.

So I don't know if you want to talk about that. I want to make a comment about Mamdani and Elon and then we can move on.

Dan: But yeah, I think—bear with me just a minute here. But if people remember back, Brad, to a time when the Avengers were cool and when the Avengers movies came out, everybody was like, "Wow, that was cool."

Brad: I have never watched a superhero movie in my life. I don't know anything about anything. I know nothing.

Dan: Everybody who had doubts about you because of your French existentialist novels, like, there we are. We knew it. All right, so other people listening will probably have seen superhero movies. The point is, it's a franchise that now feels kind of old and tired and lost its way and whatever. But there was a time when you stick an Avengers movie in the theater, the parking lot's full, the theater is full. You can make the damn movie three and a half hours long, and everybody's gonna go. And now it's kind of a has-been franchise, and that's part of why it struggles.

Guess what? Donald Trump is the establishment now. You just highlighted that for a whole generation of people. You know, 10 years—I'm old enough now that 10 years does not mean what it used to mean. But as you're saying, people who couldn't drive when Donald Trump was elected the first time are now adults. So this is a piece of it, I think: there were lots of people who voted for Donald Trump both times because it felt like something new, it felt like something different. He came in as anti-establishment, all that stuff.

And that's one piece of this that I think people need to recognize—he is now the kind of old, stale guy. He is the lame duck. We can talk about it. We'll have issues with election integrity. We'll be visiting a lot between now and 2026, 2028. But he himself has acknowledged that it appears, apparently, in the Constitution, that he can't run for president again.

You also have just the mundane fact of affordability. This has come up a lot. He ran very successfully on Biden not making people feel like the economy was doing what statistics said it was doing. And every analyst everywhere across the political spectrum is saying the same thing about Donald Trump right now. He's doing the same thing that Biden did. He's citing statistics and saying all the prices are down when they're not, and nobody feels it.

So he's now part of the establishment. Part of that is that he inherited—if people want to put it this way—it's easy to campaign against something, but once you're president, you own it. He's been in office long enough that blaming the Democrats isn't working anymore. Blaming Biden isn't working anymore. That's part of being the establishment.

And affordability was an issue that ran across these elections. And so back to your point, Mamdani, for many, is something new and something different and something hopeful, something that says, you know, we're going to place affordability right at the front of it. And he's like, "Yeah, I'm a Democratic socialist. Let's call it that." But I think that can mean trying to make your housing more affordable. I think that means that maybe your daily commute is something you can actually pay for. I think that the people who have tons of money should actually be taxed more—all of those kinds of things.

So I think there's a lot of those dynamics that I think just comes in with—I guess what I'm trying to say is not even things that are sort of ideologically based. We could talk about the ideology of these people, but just as you're saying, something that feels new, that feels fresh, that feels different.

And one of the real politic pieces that I think the GOP is having to contend with right now is they have a lame duck president, and they're—it's the establishment now. There's no more talk of draining the swamp and stuff. So I think that's a piece of it, to your point about Mamdani feeling like something new and different and sort of one of their own if you're talking about those younger voters.

Brad: Yeah, let's take a break and stay on this, because I think there's more to say here about what can Democrats take away nationwide from Mamdani. And then we'll get into Spanberger and Mickey Sherrill and some of the other things from around the country. Be right back.

[Break]

Brad: So Dan, what I think you just said highlights something that I think can be taken across the country. Greg Sargent's talked about this this week and others.

But here's how I would frame what Mamdani did that can be taken anywhere. And everybody wants to say, "Oh, democratic socialists in New York City, fine, but is that going to work in Tacoma and is that going to work in Baton Rouge? Okay, Democrats. Good luck."

Mamdani is 34. He owned the internet. The guys who were running against Eric Adams and Cuomo and everyone else, they did not know how to be online. That is something the Republicans have done better. I mean, all that talk of the manosphere and the 2024—Mamdani showed up, and he just owned the internet. And he was amazing on the internet. He was taking the Polar Bear Plunge and saying, "I'm going to freeze your rent." He was doing all kinds of that.

Two: he told a story. The story is, oligarchs are ruining everything for all of us. If we vote them out, we can have a different city that makes sense for you. And then people are like, "Great story. That's awesome. What does that look like in real life?" He's like, "I'm going to freeze your rent, and I'm going to make the buses free." And everyone's like, "What? Okay, all right."

That's a lot different than sort of help with your first-time mortgage, 1% off, a couple thousand bucks. Dude, what did Kamala Harris say? Who knows? He told a story and then he gave people big promises about what he was going to do—no incrementalism, no muddled policy documents.

Is it going to work? Is he going to succeed? I hope so. I hope, I hope, I hope that he does. But he told a story, he owned the internet, and then he made promises that felt to people like they would actually make a difference. That can be taken all over the country. I don't care where you go.

Let me say one thing about Elon and Mamdani, and then jump in here and take it to New Jersey, take it to Virginia, take it to Texas.

But if anyone's looking to write an essay—and I know some of you are listening, and you're the writing type of people—just quote me on this, please. Just give me a little credit. But there's a weird world here where American politics can be divided right now about how you feel about South African apartheid.

There's kind of a grand theory of American politics. It's like, "Hey, how do you feel about South African apartheid?" Okay, and then I know exactly where you stand on this. Because you highlighted this last week: the only refugees that are going to be allowed to come to this country now are white Afrikaners.

Elon Musk, South African—not going to document it today, but lots of things pointing to the fact that the Musk family was pretty interested in the privilege that came to them as white South Africans under the apartheid regime. How did they get their riches? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

We got word this week that Elon Musk is going to receive a trillion-dollar pay package. We also got word this week via ProPublica and other outlets that the cuts that DOGE made—meaning Elon Musk, specifically, who targeted USAID—had so much interest in USAID means that about 600,000 people have died on the African continent and other places.

So the man who benefited from South African apartheid, who's pretty interested in the privilege that came to him from that, has signaled the fact that he wants Afrikaners and others to be given a privileged place in our immigration and refugee system. The richest man in the world who's gonna get paid a trillion dollars did everything he could under DOGE to cut U.S. aid, and now 600,000 people are dead.

Zohran Mamdani quotes Nelson Mandela all the time. He is a real and true inspiration to Mamdani, and he talks about Mandela as an inspirational figure who did the impossible.

So, I mean, if you go on a Bumble date this week, you can just ask folks if you're trying to get to know them, and if they're going to be a potential life partner or even just someone you want to date: "Hey, how do you feel about South African apartheid?" And then, you know, that's your decoder ring for American politics at the moment.

That's my last comment on Mamdani and Elon. Tell us something about something else—Virginia. I mean, you jump in if you want to do whatever you want, but you know, there's other things to talk about. There's Virginia, there's New Jersey, there's Mickey Sherrill. There's the first woman governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia. There is an absolute bloodbath of a blue wave in the Virginia Legislature, where the Dems gained about three dozen seats. That's all newsworthy, too. What do you got?

Dan: My biggest is, you know, people go online, they find all those things about how to write an online dating profile. So I think you just nailed it. That's free advice.

Brad: "Are you pro-apartheid or anti-apartheid?" Just have it on my dating profile, and just see who swipes right, you know?

Dan: "If you’re pro-apartheid? Don't swipe on me." Anyway, yeah. All right, yeah. I think at a meta level, all the things you said point to one thing. Another way that the Republicans have been trying to downplay this election—because right ahead of it, you've got everybody... the Republicans were trying to temper expectations because they kind of saw this coming. Most people are saying this is kind of a weird election, there's not national issues and so forth. But it's like, remember when midterms, each thing was like a bellwether for the presidential election, almost like the bellwether for the bellwether and all of this? But the idea being, will this give us a kind of barometric reading, as it were, on where the country is with regard to Trump and MAGA and whatever?

And the Democrats over-performed. I think they over-performed best case scenarios for a lot of people.

Part of what interests me are people like John Thune saying, "Well, you know, we expected them to win. These are blue states." You know, Virginia is not a blue state, but was conveniently defined as a blue state by a lot of Republicans this week. New Jersey, New York City, which is a kind of stand-in for New York State in many people's minds, and so forth—trying to play that down.

And I think there's an element of truth to that. New Jersey is not, I don't know, Alabama or Georgia or something like that. But here's the thing: there's a saying people know—I watch football and it applies to other sports—that good teams beat teams that they should beat. You know, so if you're a really good team and you're playing a team and everybody knows you're the better team, you should beat them handily. And that's what happened. These were blowout wins.

And that's where I think what's significant is when people look and say, "How many more votes, or how much higher of a percentage of votes did this person get than, say, Kamala Harris in the presidential election, or than another gubernatorial candidate in a prior election," or things like that. And I think that's the piece that's really significant—the over-performance, whether we're talking about the Virginia Legislature, whether we're talking about governorships of different kinds.

And I think that's the significance. And again, I think the efforts on the right to downplay that—you read between the lines, and they're nervous. And you've got others who say this, you've got others who say, you know, "This was a disaster for us. We've got to figure out what to do about this. We've got to talk about affordability." And, you know, Trump comes out just blaming the Democrats again and things like that.

But I think that's a piece that, if people say is there a national significance to this, I think that there is, because if they had won these seats—you know, a lot of these seats or some of these, but had been tight margins, or it had been closer to what people think—I think then you'd say, "Well, yeah, I don't know." But it's the lopsidedness of these victories that is, I think, a really significant issue.

Brad: So New Jersey had a rightward shift in 2024. New Jersey was a place that people were like, "Whoa, is New Jersey the next frontier of MAGA-ism?" Yep. So the Republicans were not saying that in 2024. They were like, "Look, we almost did it." Yep.

That's one. I think the story out in New Jersey, for me—as well as New York City—but New Jersey is that the Black, brown, and Asian voters, Black and Latino and Asian voters, were like, "Nope. You know what Trump is doing is not working. We don't want this." And they want, overwhelmingly, to change what's up in the state, in this country.

There's a high propensity among Latino voters to vote for those politicians who can actually do things that will make a difference in their lives. And the same goes for some communities of Asian voters. And so I think that's the story out of New Jersey and the election of Mickey Sherrill and other things.

Virginia is a true bloodbath. I mean, we're talking three dozen seats

Dan: At least 64 seats. I mean, I just kind of looked it up for what appear to be the latest, at least 64 seats will

Brad: go to the Dems. And then Abigail Spanberger, the first woman to be governor of the Commonwealth.

To me, there's a bunch there, but Virginia is now a purple state. Virginia had a Republican governor. Virginia is a place that in Northern Virginia, you have so many folks who lean left, and in the rest of Virginia they don't. But this is a message to me.

And there is something here. Now I want to put the brakes on, and I want to go to something I think is really important, which is: I don't think any of this is bad news. I'm not trying to throw cold water on it. I'm not trying to say, "Oh, you know, you're stupid if you're excited." Nope, not doing that at all. I think the Mamdani victory, I think the Spanberger victory, I think the 64 seats in the Virginia Legislature, I think Mickey Sherrill, I think all that is really noteworthy.

I want to play a clip for you, though, from Michael Steele, who was on MSNBC on election night, who's a former RNC chair, who said this:

[Michael Steele clip]: "Here's the side of the Republican Party, this Republican Party, you cannot lose sight of. The reason they don't care, it seems like they don't care, is because they got a Plan B. Well, definitely. And the Plan B is the state election offices that they now control, and setting up those operations going into '26 to make sure not just that you have ballot watchers and poll watchers, but they have their fingers, in some degree, on the system. That is something that you need to be mindful of, because you can't lose sight of that side of this equation of how they get the ultimate control."

Brad: And what Michael Steele said is what I've been saying for six months. I don't know—he's probably, you know, I don't know if he listens to the show, but you know, Michael, I know you got... okay, just kidding.

To me, there is a sense among the Mike Johnsons of the world of like, "Yeah, this wasn't a good night, but this was a scrimmage."

You're using the sports metaphors. I see them as almost looking at—well, you’re a football fan, I'm a basketball fan. The NBA season has 82 games, and the older I get, the harder it is to care about the basketball season until March, because when I'm watching a game right now, which I don't ever do because I have young children and I don't have any time to do anything except for work or be with my children, but watching a game now, I'm like, "Oh, the Lakers lost. Cool. 77 more games to go, we'll see."

And I feel like Mike Johnson was doing that, like, "Oh, you guys won tonight? Fine. 81 to go out of... we'll see what happens in a year," is what I was that.

And when Michael Steele says they've got something up their sleeve, I think we should all listen. I said it last week. I'll say it again. Are you going to vote in 2026? Probably yes. Is the vote going to count like it should? Not sure.

To be clear, I think there is a very low possibility that nobody votes in 2026. I think most of us will go to the polls like normal, but I think most of us will see soldiers and ICE and DHS somewhere in and around the polls. And I also think that, as Michael Steele just said, they got some weird tricks up their sleeve when it comes to the voting, the state houses, the mechanisms and other things.

Some of you are going to email me and say, "There's no way they can do that." That's fine. They destroyed half the government in a month with big balls and Elon, and then they got out here and are running the military through our streets. So I think they can do things that a lot of people thought they couldn't.

Do you want to jump in on that? You want to talk Texas? What do you want to go?

Dan: I'll get to Texas. I love it whenever there's the preface of, "I'm not going to throw cold water on this." It's like, everybody put on your raincoats. Here comes Brad.

Brad: I'm not. No, I'm not. Look, because look, here's Dan. Cold water would have been, "This doesn't matter. I don't know why you losers are so excited." No, I don't feel that way at all. This is good.

I was on Bluesky all night on election night, and it was actually fun. It wasn't like doom. It was actually like people making jokes and being joyful. That felt good. It was a good night.

I'm just saying we got to look ahead, and I'm still not sure 2026 is going to go how

Dan: Here's just for whatever it's worth, this is how I see 2026 playing out: a level of voter suppression, and that's what I mean. You got armed National Guard troops, and that just freaks people out. And so maybe somebody pulls up into their school parking lot for their polling place, and it's like, "Yeah, that's weird. I'm going to go home."

What I think is that it's going to be delayed certifications and stuff. You're going to get states who say we're not going to certify. It's going to go to the courts, and I think a lot of them will be forced to certify whatever. But what it's going to do is it's going to push that narrative that it wasn't a fair election, or that there was rigging, or, "Oh, if they won, how come it took 90 days for them to be able..." And I think eventually it'll get untangled, but that's gonna just—it's gonna feed into the Big Lie mentality that was spawned two presidential elections ago and continue spinning to just create this sense of uncertainty and to make it so that the right can always claim that any election they lose was rigged and that if it had been fair, they would have won.

I think that's probably best best-case scenario. So I'm teasing you about the cold water, but I don't think anything you're saying is incorrect.

Brad: Do you remember that kid, though, that you would—when you were like nine, and you played any game, and then you would beat them, and they'd be like, "I wasn't trying anyway." And you're like, "All right, Shane, sure, sure you weren't." And then when they beat you, they're like, "Oh, I beat you. You're such a loser. I got you." And I feel like that was the attitude with the Republicans this week anyway.

Dan: No, I think you're right. I think we would talk about all of these things that are significant and big in this election. There's another thing that caught my eye that I think also gets at—I guess the theme for me is the sense of existential threat that people on the right have. And we've talked about this for years. This is how you build a kind of movement like MAGA—out of fear, constant fear of queer people, of brown people, of immigrants, of anybody who doesn't fit that prototypical "real white Christian American" model.

And in Texas, among other things, voters approved a constitutional amendment stating that people must be citizens to vote in Texas. And why do I snicker at that? I snicker at that because it's already state law in Texas that you have to be a U.S. citizen to register to vote for federal elections. We know you have to be a U.S. citizen to vote. That's not a thing that can't happen. I can't go to the UK as a visitor or sneak in or something and cast votes. It's the same thing in the U.S. It's already there.

It just shows you how ridiculous the idea is. You say something like that, and people are like, "That's ridiculous." But that's what the GOP says is happening all the time—that we have busloads of illegal immigrants, quote unquote, that are—that's what Elon said on election night: "Illegals are voting."

Yeah, all of that. So they pass a constitutional amendment that doesn't do anything. And if somebody said, "Well, why do that? Why does it get on?" And it passed by a two-thirds margin or something like that, 60-something percent.

Here's what it tells me: millions of Americans have bought hook, line, and sinker, and feel deeply that there is some existential threat to them in America, and it's about people who aren't white.

And I think it communicates this from the top, where I think people know that this is nonsense. I don't think that Donald Trump actually believes that immigrants are... he just wants power. He wants authority, and he's going to say anything he can to have that. But the trickle-down effect of that on millions of Americans—I think this is the flip side.

So I think that there are millions of Americans who are terrified that Mamdani won in New York. Why? Because they believe everything that those right-wing influencers say about Mamdani and that threat. They have a decade and more of the GOP consistently feeding fear, fear and terror, and "They're out to get you. If you're a white Christian person in America, they're out to get you. If you're a U.S. citizen, they're out to get you. They're out to take away your rights."

And so this is another piece of these elections. When you look at things like this and say, "Well, why did they really vote for that? Why did they even get on the ballot? It's not necessary. It doesn't do anything."

It does do something. It speaks to that fear and that anxiety, and the centrality of that for those who vote on the right. And I think that's just another piece that we have to recognize that would bring us back into everything you were talking about—telling a better story, casting another vision. How do you speak to people on that level, that sort of emotional level where the right has lived for so long? That's where we're still playing catch-up. And I think we still see that in this election as well, or these elections.

Brad: How much money did it cost to pass that amendment for something that was already the law? How much money did it cost the state of Texas to do that?

You know, the other day Ben Shapiro—there was this thing online where somebody said, "What would you outlaw in New York City?" And people said some humorous things and funny things. And Ben Shapiro thought he was being funny, and he tweeted, "Notice nobody said crimes. Nobody said they would outlaw crimes." And somebody, some random person, just responded, "Ben, crimes are outlawed by definition. That's what makes them a crime."

And I just feel like that's the same here with this Texas amendment. Anyway, all right, let's take a break. We'll come back and talk about the real people who are destroying the country, those that have fallen for the Mamdani—the Mamdani mommies, okay Dan? And that's women. They're—

The GOP reaction to, or at least right-wing pundits' reaction to Mamdani's win and the other election results, was to say women should not vote. That is the issue that will fix everything, and we'll discuss that when we get back.

Brad: All right, Dan. So one of the things that you and I have tracked on this show for a long time is the idea on the American right, and especially among Christian nationalists, but also Elon Musk, that empathy is a sin—that if you feel empathy for other people, it's a sin. You covered Allie Beth Stuckey for how many weeks. You're covering Josh Hawley at the moment. We've done that on this show extensively.

One of the extensions of the "sin of empathy" idea is that women are more prone to empathy, and therefore they are more prone to the sin of empathy. And you hear that now when it comes to why women are ruining everything by voting how they are.

So here are some statistics: 81% of young women 18 to 29 voted for Mamdani in New York City. 80% voted for Mickey Sherrill in New Jersey. 78% voted for Spanberger in Virginia. So eight out of 10 young women, 18 to 29, voted for Mamdani, Sherrill, or Spanberger.

What that has led to are a lot of reactions from the American right that you might expect, but this is what was coming out in the wake of those things.

Joel Webbon, noted misogynist and ultra-Christian nationalist who says that revival in the United States would look like giving the death penalty to women who get abortions, says: "We sincerely love women, and in love we must take away their right to vote."

This was in response to a tweet from somebody who said, "Women overwhelmingly vote for pro-migrant policies, and now men must risk their lives to fend off a world that leftist female votes created."

So what's happening, Dan, just to connect all these dots, is that when it comes to Mamdani, especially, but anyone who's a Democrat generally, if you're an 18-year-old woman, a 26-year-old woman, et cetera, what they are saying is you're voting for leftists. Those leftists are pro-migrant. Migrants are violent and prone to commit all kinds of crimes against young women—and we all know they're thinking, "If you're a young white woman"—and therefore women have ruined everything by voting for the pro-migrant, i.e., pro-criminal, i.e., pro-sexual assault and other things against white women demographic.

Let me play you a clip from Avery Day, who is a right-wing voice with tens of thousands of followers on Twitter, who I think distilled this very well in New York City:

[Avery Day clip]: "In New York City, women aged 18 to 29, 84% of them voted for Zohran Mamdani. I guarantee you most of them could not tell you why, besides something about empathy towards migrants—the same migrants that want to implement Sharia law, which takes away women's rights. The irony of this is women aged 18 to 29 are probably likely the target demographic for men. So they are voting to make their city less safe for themselves.

When they are getting stalked or harassed or raped or worse by a mentally ill homeless person, a social worker will show up—an unarmed social worker with no training—because Zohran Mamdani wants to defund the police. They want to protect the illegals in our country and make New York City a sanctuary city because orange man bad. But what they don't understand is that idea that there is a hierarchy to civilization, that the rest of the world is so bad, we have to open our borders for other people to come in because their lives are worse outside of the country."

Brad: So Avery Day lays it out as to how women who voted for Mamdani have ruined everything. And she was not the only one who released a video this week along these lines.

Another one is Dale Partridge. Dale Partridge is a pastor in Arizona. He leads several initiatives, Dan, from what I can tell, about how to create real men, hard men, the right men, true men. I don't know what other adjectives we want.

And here is the video he released this week in the wake of these election results, saying explicitly why the 19th Amendment should be repealed:

[Dale Partridge clip]: "Is it good that women can vote in America? I don't think so, and here's why. Nearly every legalized moral atrocity of the last 100 years was made possible by the female vote. Abortion and homosexuality would likely still be illegal if not for the female vote. Mass immigration and the welfare state rode on the backs of the female vote. Nearly every modern Democrat, including Obama and Biden, were elected because of the female vote. Even last night, the new Muslim New York City mayor Mamdani won specifically because of the female vote.

The 19th Amendment has been a moral and political tragedy for America. But why? Women were not made to lead, but to follow and to feel. This is God's design, and it's good within the family and the household. But emotions cannot be what is used to rule and govern a nation.

Statistically and generally speaking, women vote for whatever feels most kind or peaceful or safe to their emotions. Women crave security and comfort, and whoever promises those things wins their loyalty. The problem is, evil men know this and they exploit it.

For example, women are twice as likely as men to be seduced into an affair. They are 26% more likely to be financially scammed online. They are three times more likely to fall prey to psychics and tarot card readings and astrology and mediums. The same emotional vulnerability that shows up there also shows up in politics. Many call it suicidal empathy.

So I believe that we should return to the household vote, where women share their thoughts with their fathers or their husbands and the men in their life make the final decision. Men are not perfect, but they are far more fit to rule with logic, and they are less likely to be deceived in political matters."

Brad: All right. Dan, lots there. Avery, Dale—this sounds like some sort of Carpenters tribute band, but whatever. Do you want to talk about Avery? You want to talk about Dale? What do you got? You want to talk about none of it? I don't know. Maybe we should just go home.

Dan: There's so much there. Thinking about Avery in particular here—yeah, a few things that I find myself trying to explain to others that I get asked about.

Number one, this discourse about women is not only a discourse about women. Lots of women hold these views, and we can think about all the things we've talked about with the radical traditionalism stuff, just kind of more old-school, right-wing, evangelical, gender complementarian, anti-feminism. I think people often make the mistake of assuming that women don't hold these views, and they do. And we saw some of that in the 2024 election, when so many people were surprised that so many women voted for Donald Trump and so on. So you get these views from women about women and women's votes and so forth. I think that's something that people sometimes misunderstand about this.

I think the other piece is, for somebody on the outside, they're going to look at this and say, "Actually, how can this be about protecting women? How can you say that?" For example, Dale says we need to—or other people say we need to do what's best for women, to repeal the 19th Amendment for their own good. And somebody could say, "Who are you to tell them it's for their own good? Who are you to do that?"

Well, within that model, the role of women is to nurture, to care, to raise families. To get the pro-natalism in here, women's role in renewing the nation is to make lots of little new Americans, basically, and help raise them. But women, there—it's every stereotype that there is. They're too emotional. They're too given over to empathy and so forth. And the role of men is to protect, even from themselves. To protect them from themselves.

And the way we protect them from themselves is by patting them on the head and letting them recognize that they're just not suited for this political decision-making. Brad, they're just not suited for this. And we can couch that in language that they're voting against their own interests.

How? Oh, they're bringing in, as you say, all the violent criminals who are going to attack them and so forth. We have to understand that language of care—that's what a lot of people actually believe and actually think care is, right? I am caring for you by limiting your autonomy. I am caring for you by telling you if you're pregnant, you have to carry a child to term. I'm caring for you by saying you just really haven't caught on yet. You just need to not be voting. Go home, have your babies, renew the nation, make sure you take them all to Sunday school. And that's your role.

And that's the language that we hear this condescending, masculinist vision of America as a straight, white, male nation, a patriarchal nation. And women have their place within that, but their place is very specifically in subservience to men, serving the interests of men. And this is where we see this. So it's just louder and more strident and more explicit than I think it's been in a long time.

Brad: Yeah, I agree. And you know, this is one of those places where you could kind of see this coming in 2024. We talked about the young men and the manosphere and the podcast and all that. We haven't really touched on it today. You know, the results were mixed, I think, from these elections with young men and how they voted. Now, again, this is one of those—whatever. We don't have to get into the young men today.

Young women did not vote that way. Yeah, but young women are that demographic that the GOP has not been able to make inroads with in any real, you know, move-the-needle kind of sense. And it happened again in these midterms. It's just eight out of 10 young women, 18 to 29, do not vote for Republican candidates.

And what you have is what you just said, but I'll say it again, is over the last 10 years, a growing movement that has changed the Overton window, where it is increasingly often that you hear pastors, Christian nationalist leaders, Pete Hegseth, Doug Wilson, and people in that whole orbit saying, "Repeal the 19th Amendment." I mean, that is something that is on the table.

Is it likely? No. But to say that out loud, Dan, in the Obama years, people would have just looked at you like, "Get this guy off the stage and get these people away from us."

Dan: If you had said then—and this is the other thing—if you had said, "In their heart of hearts, this is what a lot of people on the right want. They want to take away, not just women's rights to health care or whatever. They want to take away their rights to have any say in political life."

If you had said, "This is what lots of pastors believe when they stand up there and they talk about male headship and all of this—this is what they actually think," because I had these conversations, and I would tell people, "This is what they..."—"Oh, you're crazy. How do you know what they actually think? What are you, a mind reader?" And like, yeah, here it is. They're just saying the quiet part out loud. This stuff isn't new.

I've been saying that since Trump first appeared on the scene, that he is the expression of these deep impulses. It's out loud, it's out and proud now—the misogyny, the anti-women rhetoric, all of it. It's been there for a long time, and it is just now out and loud and screaming and more mainstream than it's been certainly in my lifetime.

Brad: So let's just tie a bow on what we started with. We've been talking since the top of the hour here about the perceived existential threat that Mamdani and migrants and others present to people who want a white Christian homeland.

If young women are going to vote for people who are not MAGA, people who are not GOP, that adds to the perceived existential threat. For a number of them, one of the perceived existential threats is that white people don't have enough babies, and great replacement theory says they are being outrun in terms of birth rates by people who are not of European ancestry.

Part of the existential threat here is pro-natalism and the call from the American right, including both Christian nationalists and technocrats—including the Elon Musks of the world, the Curtis Yarvins of the world, and the Dale Partridges and Doug Wilsons and others of the world—saying we need more white babies.

So if young women are not going to listen, if young women are going to go vote for those who are going to allow for and implement policies of bodily autonomy, reproductive rights, who are not going to talk about taking back no-fault divorce or the 19th Amendment, people who are not going to say to women, "The best role in life you have is to submit to your husband"—which is what Charlie Kirk told Taylor Swift—that's what he told Taylor Swift.

If they're not going to vote the right way, it is an existential threat, just as the migrants, just as the brown and Black and Asian people are in the minds of everybody from Elon Musk to all these Christian nationalists that we're talking about.

There's a reason that the tech right and the Christian nationalist right have found an alliance, but one of the strands that needs to be brought forward is pro-natalism. Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk agree with the Christian ethno-nationalists that white people should be having more babies. They should be top of the hierarchy, and they're the ones that need to be prioritized.

We see that in the Afrikaner refugee stories. We see that in the ways that Elon Musk targeted USAID. But we also see it in their attacks on young women and how they're so worried about how young women are voting that maybe we should just not let women vote at all. That would probably be better, et cetera.

Anything else, and then give us your reason for hope?

Dan: I think just one final thought about this is, again, the flip in 2024, when you had large numbers of Latinos, especially Latino men, supporting the GOP, you had inroads with African Americans, you had inroads with women—all of that. The line was, "We speak for a majority of Americans. Look at this cross-section of Americans we now speak for," and so forth.

Now what you're hearing them say is an increasing number of Americans are the existential threat, as you say. All minorities, all queer folk—they're already there. Immigrants are already there. But now we've also got this, maybe not all women, but that 18 to 30 demographic, the young white women and so forth.

That's a sign of a political movement that is dangerous because it's desperate. Because when you see yourself with that many enemies everywhere, and they're not all coming in from outside, they're not all sneaking around—we're now talking about all those white women, the same women that they were busy saying that they had made inroads with right in the last election. I think that's something to watch. I think it's something to be aware of. And I think that flip in rhetoric is something we see in the right all the time, that whatever suits their interests on a given day.

My reasons for hope: one, just generally, was the Democratic over-performance here. I had hoped to see something like that, but I think it kind of exceeded my expectations.

But more specifically, a judge ordered the Trump administration to make full SNAP payments. People remember that the Trump administration tried to say they couldn't use the emergency funding to fund SNAP. There was a court order that required that they do that, and they were going to do partial funding. That same court has now said you have to do full funding. I recognize the lag in that. I recognize that's not going to help people right away and so forth, but I think that says a lot about sort of where the judiciary is on this, and calling out the Trump administration for what they were doing, and just in concrete terms, helping real people.

Tied in with that, I'm sure you've seen it, others have seen it—the ways that so many communities have been coming together to help with the SNAP thing. Driving down to my house today, there was an advertisement for grocery stores in Rhode Island, which is not far from me, having special sections, setting aside discounted goods until the SNAP things are back. There have been restaurants giving away meals to people who would be SNAP recipients. So all of that, I think, has given me hope.

Brad: I have two. One is it looks like the Supreme Court is going to strike down Trump's tariffs. And there's so many issues with the Supreme Court that, I think, go without saying at this point to all of you listening. You know those.

But I think what it did this week is it gave this public perception of the GOP lost big in these midterm or these off-year elections, and here's the Supreme Court saying, "Sorry, all that tariff stuff that you think you can just get mad at Canada and impose a tariff, or you think you can just, on a whim, impose a tariff because you're upset or you want to. That's not how it works."

And that was also one of these blows to the public image of Trump as just somebody who can do whatever he wants, and we have just to take it. We just have to accept it because that's what he did.

Another one comes out of Chicago. This is from The Daily Northwestern at Northwestern University by Young Ho Wong, who says: "After weeks of heightened federal immigration enforcement in the Greater Chicago area, the Illinois General Assembly approved House Bill 1312, strengthening immigration enforcement protections. It creates the Illinois BEAVANS Act, which allows individuals to sue over civil immigration enforcement actions that violate state or federal constitutional rights."

So basically, this allows people to sue ICE agents for trampling their rights. And so if ICE does not follow procedures, or if it oversteps its bounds in the course of anything it's doing, an ICE agent is now vulnerable to being sued if and when Pritzker signs this, by an individual.

Which is a good thing, because to me, ICE agents seem to be acting with impunity and acting with this idea that Stephen Miller will always have their back if you're an ICE agent. And it, you know, let me put it this way: it takes one ICE agent, Dan, to be sued for the maximum allowable and for them to see the repercussions, for them to say, "Actually, I'm not sure we should just be running roughshod over communities and doing whatever we want, because this could have consequences for us," where before, it did not seem like there was anybody who was going to hold ICE accountable at all, especially the federal government.

So we'll leave it there.

Brad: All right, y'all. As always, hang with us next Monday for a great interview talking about book banning and libraries. Hang with us Wednesday for "It's in the Code." Hang with us Friday for the weekly roundup.

We could really use your help at the end of the year here, just finishing out the year strong and continuing to find the funds to keep doing this show as we do it, and bringing you this content and this research. You can think about subscribing—it would help us out a ton. You can find us on Venmo or PayPal at Straight White JC. Everything helps, even if it's just leaving a review, telling a friend, a comment, or subscribing to our YouTube page. Anything—we appreciate all of you. So grateful to get to do this work.

Thanks for being here. We'll catch you next time.

Dan: Thanks, Brad.