Weekly Roundup: National Prayer Breakfast & ICE Theology

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

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

Brad: You too. Super Bowl weekend, amidst everything that's happening in our country—the ongoing occupation of the Twin Cities, ICE building concentration camps, all that stuff—we still have the Super Bowl. And even that is tinged with culture war controversy. We'll talk about the alternative Super Bowl show that TPUSA will be putting on, and Kid Rock. We'll be talking about the—sorry, there's too many things. And I'm eager to do this today. The National Prayer Breakfast was also this week, Dan, fittingly, and we'll talk about Trump's remarks and how he made those remarks to the National Prayer Breakfast, and then promptly went home and posted a video of Michelle and Barack Obama as monkeys. So there's that. We'll then get into Mike Johnson's defense of walls and borders and ICE and the theology behind it. It's really something to behold, and it goes into a rabbit hole that most of you will not believe, but the theological basis is there, even if it is faulty. Lots to cover. Let's do it.

All right, Dan, let us start with the National Prayer Breakfast. There's actually two competing prayer breakfasts these days. We're going to focus on just Trump's remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast he attended. If you'd like more info on why there's now two prayer breakfasts rather than one, you can check out an article at the Religion News Service by Jack Jenkins that came out yesterday. Matt Taylor has also done great work on this, and I've spoken to him on the show about it, and so we have covered it. But let me play you a clip to just to get started here, of Paula White—Paula Cain, I should say. Paula Cain White—Paula White Cain, sorry, her name has changed. Paula Cain, talking about Donald Trump, introducing him. Here she is.

Paula White Cain: He is bringing peace through great strength. In fact, President Trump has brought religion back to this nation and beyond. It is my great honor to introduce—and I think I can say this, not as Senior Advisor, but as his friend—the GOAT, the greatest of all time, the greatest champion of faith that we have ever had in the executive branch. The 45th and 47th president, stand to your feet and give him the biggest welcome—of the United States, a man I am honored to call friend, President Donald J. Trump.

Brad: So she says in this clip that Donald Trump has returned religion to the United States, and that he is the greatest protector and champion of faith in the history of the presidency. Now on one hand, this is just clearly what we expect from the Trump 2.0 administration and regime. Anybody who introduces Trump has to bloviate shamelessly in ways that are embarrassing and make anything that people say about Kim Jong Un or Putin look modest in comparison. But these are striking remarks for a number of reasons. I think one of them is because when Trump himself got up to speak, he showed himself to be, as he's always been, completely religiously illiterate.

Dan: Like, still. So he like—I just want to pause here. This happened all the way back in the first Trump presidential run, with the whole "Two Corinthians" thing and flubbing all the religion stuff. He's had like a decade to try and get this right and figure it out. And he still can't. He still just can't even pretend that he actually fits there, and it's like a total emperor with no clothes kind of thing that everybody in the room sits there and pretends that he somehow seems like a Christian person.

Brad: So as a case in point, he says here that he's talking about Mike Johnson. He's like, "Oh, Mike's a really religious guy. Sometimes at lunch, he's like, 'Let's pray, Mr. President.' And I say, I'm like, 'Pray? What are we eating? Why are we praying?'" Which—this is like, you don't even have to be a committed, diehard evangelical true believer to know that a lot of religious people do this.

Dan: I don't know if you've had this experience. I have not been a pastor for a really long time, but because I used to be, there are still contexts occasionally where I find myself—I was like, "We should say grace." And they all turn and look at me, and I'm like, "Oh, I guess that's me. I have to do that." The point being, this is just hardwired into lots of religious people who—literally, if you've ever been around certain people and they eat without praying, you can tell that they're bugged the whole time. It's like walking around in wet socks or something. It just doesn't feel right for them. And Trump still can't get it. Yeah, spiritual socks. That's the takeaway for today.

Brad: Well, and I—oh, man, I'm gonna leave that alone. So to me, I just think this is a minute where I—again, I don't want to play this game of like, "Gotcha white evangelicals, gotcha Christian nationalists. Look, your president's actually just a religiously illiterate hypocrite." Been doing it for 10 years. I just don't think it's worth it to rehash it for 46 minutes. What I will say, though, is seeing Paula White up there at the National Prayer Breakfast—this is the apotheosis of everything that started 10 years ago with white evangelicals and white Catholics supporting Trump. Here's a man who knows nothing about faith. He does not practice it. He does not read the Bible. He does not know about the Bible. And you're like, well, give him a break. And it's like, no. Ronald Reagan is a great example. This was not a guy, Dan, who was like a churchy guy. He was not raised and bathed in conservative Protestantism as a young man. This was not a guy. But he learned the language. If you watch Ronald Reagan from 1976 to 1988, end of his presidency, he learned how to talk that dialect of white evangelical and Southern Baptist. He knew who he was talking to. He did the homework. Trump shows here, after a decade, he's not done the homework in any sense. Like, prayer—

Dan: "What prayer? I'm at a what breakfast? Oh, a prayer breakfast." You know, it's just like he wakes up and he's there and—yeah, no idea.

Brad: The larger takeaway, though, is something that I want to spend some time on today, which I think is always a good reminder and lesson, which is he says at this prayer breakfast, in his remarks, that if you talk bad about me, I'll take away your protected status. Here's the clip.

Donald Trump: Charter, getting rid of the Johnson Amendment. It's gone. As far as you can say anything you want. Now if you do say something bad about Trump, I will change my mind, and I will have your tax exempt status immediately revoked. If I go into one of these houses—"We will stop Trump." You ever hear some of these guys? They said—not too many, I can tell you.

Brad: I just want to set the stage. Here are a bunch of elected officials and faith leaders gathered for a prayer breakfast, ostensibly a place to pray for national renewal and greatness for the leaders of the country and the people—that is what this was all built around. And if you've read Jeff Sharlet's work, you know there's much more going on there with the Family and the machinations and the money and the power and the control. But nonetheless, you're supposed to be at a prayer breakfast to pray and seek the best for the country, even if you and I, Dan, think that's a misguided approach, it's an exclusionary approach, etc. And you're sitting there as a pastor, you're sitting there as a congressperson, you're sitting there as a leader, and here is your president speaking like an open dictator, saying, "If you criticize me, I will take away your tax exempt status."

And this is just one more chance for us to say this: freedom of religion happens only when the government is free of religion. And all of the work that the Leonard Leo court and the Christian nationalists from the religious right to the present day have done to get their version of Christianity as part of our national policies, laws, and governing ethos—the anti-Christian bias task force, the Ten Commandments bills in the classrooms, and so on and so forth—what they have done is say, "We want our form, our brand, our strain of Christianity to be officially adopted." That is what makes America great.

When the fascist dictator looks you in the eye and says, "You criticize me, you'll no longer be a church when it comes to legal status. You criticize me, you might have your rights taken away. If you criticize me, we won't consider you people of faith, and we might arrest you or spray pepper spray in your face," like they did to pastors in Chicago—I can't think of anything more fitting for the decade of Trump than him standing in front of a bunch of faith leaders and elected officials and saying, "If you criticize me, you will have your status as a Christian institution, house of worship leader—it'll be gone. So don't do it."

And it's why you don't let your faith get corrupted by the state. This is—I know you're going to give me the good Baptist lesson here, and I'll just tee you up. If you let the state co-opt your religion, then the state is the facilitator, the distributor, the decider when it comes to your religion. They decide what is sacred, what is not. Who is sacred, who is legitimate. They decide how your faith is deployed. And I won't do it, but there are lesson after lesson after lesson from world history and US history that says this: at some point you will become the wrong kind of Christian in the eyes of the government. At some point, you won't be one of the good ones. We talked about it in terms of whiteness and femininity with Nicole Good, with and Alex Pretti, but we can talk about it now with faith. At some point, Roger Williams will tell you, walking out in the Massachusetts wilderness, you will be the wrong kind of Christian, despite you having all of the credentials to be the right kind of Christian. And the government, when it has the power to enforce faith, will do it in a way that will be oppressive, hurtful, violent, and so on. And that is why we have the separation of church and state. Thank you for coming to my TED talk. What do you think, Dan?

Dan: Well, Brad, I was literally just teaching on this today, the same topic. So people don't know—in the run-up to the passage of the First Amendment, and I know some people know this, the First Amendment was modeled off of the Statute for Freedom of Religion in Virginia. Thomas Jefferson wrote it. James Madison helped pass it. That becomes the model for the First Amendment. But the interesting thing is that there was an argument at the time, and Patrick Henry—one of those names of a founding figure that people might know—Patrick Henry argued that they should name Christianity as the official religion. Not a specific sect, but he said, "Let's just say Christian, not a specific kind of Christianity."

And that's the argument oftentimes that the Christian nationalists and people on the religious right have always said. They said, "Well, you know, when it says 'no establishment of religion,' they mean no specific form of Christianity. But we were a Christian nation, and the idea was that we'd be a Christian people, and we just wouldn't privilege one or whatever." It's not a new idea. It's an idea that people actually had at the time.

And James Madison argued against this. And what he said was—and I think this is what's relevant to your point—he said, "We can't do that because we can't even agree on a definition of Christian that all the Christians will accept. Invariably, some group of Christians in power is going to say, 'We're the real Christians, and the rest of you are not,' and they're going to use their version of Christianity to oppress others." His argument wins. You get a separation of church and state in Virginia. It becomes the basis of the First Amendment. That's what it is.

The point is exactly what you're saying. This is something that has been recognized literally since the founding of the country: that if you let the state define religion, then the wrong—or the right, depending how you think about it—kind of people are going to gain that power, and they're going to define everybody else out of existence.

And this, of course, is how the concept of religious freedom has been usurped and kind of flipped on its head in MAGA world. It was intended to protect religious minorities. It was intended to make sure exactly the kinds of things that Trump threatens to do here couldn't be done—that your rights are not at the whim of a president. Your rights are not at the whim of a majority. Your rights are not at the whim of the party that happens to have executive power in a given year or on a given day. They're guaranteed against that.

And this is what happens when you get the logic of Christian nationalism, in this vision that the Constitution is really about the president, so the president wants to do, and so he can come along and say, "I'm going to take away your status as a recognized religion if you oppose me." And so this is sort of how convoluted, and just 180 degrees from what the Constitution actually says and why it was developed, that we're seeing Trump at the prayer breakfast and the things that he says.

Brad: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I just wonder—when you're sitting there as a pastor, and at some point you think, here's a guy who doesn't even know that Christians pray before their meals, who doesn't know anything about the Bible, telling me, a Christian leader, that he will revoke my status or my recognition, and he will revoke my rights. Everything you just said. And at some point it becomes so bare and naked. And it is everything you just said—when the president, the executive, the dictator, has control over what counts as religion, who counts as religious, who is protected under the law, it's at the whim of that president, and he can just say, "Oh, you criticized me. Okay, you no longer have your tax exempt status." Yeah.

Okay, let's go to the other thing that happened here. He said openly that if you're a Democrat, you cannot be a person of faith. Here's the clip.

Donald Trump: I don't know how a person of faith can vote for a Democrat. I really don't. And I know we have some here today, and I don't know why they're here, because they certainly don't give us their vote. I certainly know that we're not going to be convincing them to vote for a little thing called voter ID. It polls at 97%, and even the Democrat—the people, the voters—are at 82% for voter ID. But the leaders don't want to approve it. They said they will strike. They will not allow it to happen. It's polling at over 90%. It's called voter identification. When you go to the polls, you show, "Yes, my name is so and so, and I live in the country. I'm here, I can vote." They say that's not allowed. And everyone started to figure it out, and they do something to win. You know what it is? They cheat. But let's get on to another subject.

Brad: There's something we've spoken about on this show quite often, which is this sense that over the last 75 years, there's been a concerted attempt to brand faith as a conservative thing. And that has been rebutted over and over on this show and in many other outlets and by many other scholars and journalists and researchers and faith leaders who are always saying there is a religious left.

And one of the things that strikes me about this particular iteration of this idea coming from Trump is the stark contrast we are seeing in faith when it comes to ICE and the ICE occupation of Chicago and the Twin Cities and LA. If we just go to the Twin Cities right now, we have so many clergy who are standing on the front lines, putting their bodies in between their neighbors and their congregants and their community members and ICE. People who are working to protect the vulnerable, who've been arrested, who've been thrown to the ground. I already mentioned the clergy that were pepper sprayed at point-blank range in places like Chicago and others, people in Portland. That is a living faith to many.

And those folks, I'm sure, do not all identify as Democrats, I'm sure, and I'm not asking them to, and I don't think that they need to. I'm very sure that 99 out of 100 are not identifying as Republicans, I can tell you that much. The other major story coming out of the last couple of weeks, when it has come to faith, has been the protest at Cities Church where one of the pastors is a local field officer for ICE. There's been, in the wake of that, this concert of voices who we talked about last week—whether it's Megan Basham, whether it's Megyn Kelly, whether it is others, Allie Beth Stuckey—who are basically saying, if you're not on the side of ICE, you're not on the side of God.

And so I just think, Dan, that after however many decades of culture wars and not wanting to relitigate all of the battles of the religious right from the '70s and the '80s and the ways that they shaped abortion and sexuality and what counts as a family and what counts as religious liberty—we've done that on the show for 1,000 episodes, other people have done it as well—but as somebody who's covered this stuff forever, I'm just like, man, we've just gotten to this almost Manichaean version of the culture wars. They're so starkly opposed, and there just is such little ways that they talk to each other at all.

And when you have a president basically saying you cannot be a Democrat—or you cannot be a non-MAGA—and a person of faith, he is saying to all of those clergy, all of those pastors and priests putting their bodies on the line when it comes to ICE: "I am speaking as the executive of the government. You are domestic terrorists. You are domestic enemies. You are threats from within. I don't care if you're wearing the cloth. I don't care if you're wearing a collar. You're not a real Christian. I'm the one who decides that, and I'm the one who doesn't even know people pray at lunch, and I don't even know what books are in the Bible."

Do you see how weird and dangerous it is to have this situation? Anyway, I want to get to the Obama video. So thoughts on this.

Dan: Just briefly. I'll just add one more dimension to this, and that's something we talk about a lot. And people that have interviewed with you talk about a lot, but it's that appeal to "Judeo-Christian" all the time. And you've got this, again, this bizarro world logic on the right, where for years now, they've been going after liberal institutions and Democrats—"Oh, they're anti-semitic" and this and that and whatever. Jewish people in the US overwhelmingly vote Democratic. And so that's a whole other piece of this. When he says, "People of faith can't be Democrats"—I'm aware the language "people of faith" is problematic, but people use that as a shorthand for religion—so I think there's also the piece here. What is he saying about the Jewish community?

So he's got this religious community that's always busy appealing to, quote unquote, "Judeo-Christian values" and trying to give this faux inclusiveness, that somehow it's not narrowly sectarian and narrowly Christian. And we've talked about how "Judeo-Christian" is kind of a post-1950s, post-Cold War—sorry, post-World War II—made up concept. But I think it's another piece to it that he is also saying—he has said this too. He said that good Jewish people can't vote for Democrats, whatever. So it's not even just the Christians that he has in view here. It's also a shot at Jewish Americans who overwhelmingly don't support his party—that they also are not people of faith if they don't support him. And that ties in with Israel politics and everything else. I think it's just a place where these things tie together. We can talk about the immigration stuff and everything going on in Minnesota and other places. But I think it's important to recognize that this is a systemic kind of issue for Trump and a systemic vision that cuts across the grain of a lot of what happens in the realm of MAGA and the Trump administration.

Brad: Not to mention all those folks who are not theists, who are Buddhists. Not to mention folks who are polytheist, who are Hindu. Not to mention Sikhs. Not to mention folks who practice Wicca. Not to mention—I mean, yeah, on and on and on. At the prayer breakfast, Trump announced that in May, there will be this gathering in the National Mall to recognize that the country is dedicated—"we're one nation under God, the same God"—and he is completely, categorically excluding anybody who is not Jewish or Christian. And as you say, the "Judeo" was always added on as a kind of "if you behave, you can come in with us. If not, we'll get rid of that." And he's also just excluding so many other kinds of Christians that he and Mike Johnson and others don't consider actually to be true Christians. So it's all there. It's stuff we've seen forever, but this prayer breakfast was so depressingly stark in the cravenness of the remarks, and just that we're not hiding anything.

We're people of faith who want the approval and the legitimacy and the weapons of the federal government. We will gladly call Donald Trump the GOAT and the champion of religion while he blithely talks about how he knows nothing about faith or the practice of our religion.

He then goes home that night, Dan, and he posts a video that depicts, among other things, Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys. Which I don't think I need to explain to anybody is a centuries-old racist trope that has been used in this country forever and ever. It is undeniable. Tim Scott, the erstwhile presidential candidate and Republican senator, a Black man, posted this morning, "Praying it was fake, because it's the most racist thing I've ever seen out of this White House. The president should remove it." He has removed it. They're now blaming it on an unnamed social media person, as if there's a—but all of that to say, this coupled with the National Prayer Breakfast was one of those moments where you're like, it's been 10 years of this man. And these white Christian nationalists are willing to go to this event and listen to Paula Cain talk about him as the champion of Christianity throughout American history, the greatest of all time. And then he goes home and he posts the most racist video one can imagine. There is no dog whistle, there is no symbolism, there is no implicit message. There is just—Black people are this. And you're like, "Well, what does that mean?" And it's like, it means for 10 years, the same Christians have been on board with Trump precisely because of this racism. You all are familiar with Anthea Butler's great book White Evangelical Racism, where she makes this case. Overwhelmingly, I have made this case in my own work. Many others have too. The racism, the anti-Black racism, is a feature of this. And after 10 years, to have the National Prayer Breakfast and this video come on the same day—it's just hard to put into words how we've arrived at this moment. But here we are.

Dan: Just one final thought about this. I still talk to people and engage with people and hear from people—and I think you do too—who struggle when they've got people in their world, people who are super MAGA, they're super into this, but like, "Yeah, but they're also Christians. They're good Christians, and I don't know how to criticize them." And this isn't really Christianity.

And it's just the reminder, I think, that at this point in time, the Christians in your life have shown you who and what their Christianity is. If you've got people in your world—and it's hard, if they're family, if they're friends, if they're your old college roommate, if they're a brother or a sister, or just a co-worker or whatever—I realize it's hard. We've been playing this game, as you say, for over a decade now. At this point, if you've got people in your world, over the last decade, these Christians who tell you that this is what Christianity is, they're telling you what their faith is. And it's time to name it for what it is. It is time to call it out. It's time to walk away from it.

I think this just highlights that—as you're sort of setting it up—this room full of people who are not just suffering through this. They're celebrating this. They're going to their congregations and they are preaching this. This is what they've been waiting to hear. I just feel like we have to—I still meet well-meaning people, I think, who want to give people a pass because somehow they're Christian, and somehow this is something else. And at this point in time, this kind of Christian—this is who they are, and it's time to just name it what it is.

Brad: Do you remember that famous passage in the Narnia books? And I don't remember what book it is now. I haven't read the Narnia books in a long time. C.S. Lewis. But in my evangelical Christian days, we loved those books, and people still love them. But there's this line where Aslan appears for the first time. And the kids are like, "Who is that?" And the response is, "That's the king." And the line goes something like this: "He's not safe, but he's good." And this was like the mic drop in our youth group. "So cool. Oh yeah, Aslan the king, the Jesus." Aslan represents Jesus, and Jesus isn't safe, but he's good.

And I was thinking about that this morning in relationship to this, because I was like—Christianity, the Christians you're talking about—the benefit that they get in the United States is Christianity is always coded as good. "Oh, you're a person of faith. Yeah, good." That was gonna pass—what? Yep. If you're a Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, atheist, agnostic, humanist, Wiccan—no, you don't get that. You don't get to show up and have that. If you're Jewish, you have to show up and be like, "Well, what kind of Jewish are you?" Yeah, we're not sure.

Christian, especially in that white Christian nationalistic MAGA vein, is always like, "Oh, positive. Yeah, you must be good. We can trust you." And I was just thinking this morning of that line, because I was like, Christianity is not always good. Christians are not always good. They're not safe—we know that from the Epstein files and from so many other aspects of American society—and they're not good. And I'm not sure if that fits, if I'm trying to shoehorn it in, but that's what hit me this morning.

So let's take a break, come back, and talk about Mike Johnson's defense of ICE and border walls and so much more. Be right back.

Brad: All right. Mike Johnson is Speaker of the House, if some of you have forgotten. He's also deeply influenced by the New Apostolic Reformation. He has adopted spiritual warfare motifs in his theology. I've written about this in Rolling Stone with Matt Taylor. Matt Taylor covers it in his work. Mike Johnson has deep ties to people who think that there are demonic spiritual warfare going on around us all the time. Deep ties to prophets and apostles who think they hear from God on a regular basis.

I bring all of that up because when he was asked about ICE recently, he gave a defense of borders and walls and mass deportation by saying, you know, somebody asked him, "Is it Christian to have people left out of a country, to put up a wall?" And he says, "Oh, we do that not because we don't love the people on the outside, but because we love the people on the inside."

So let me read his statement, Dan, and then I'll throw it to you, because you are an expert on nationalism, nationhood, the Bible, and so on.

"In the press gaggle following today's vote, I was asked to defend the biblical case for border security and immigration enforcement. I did so and then promised to post a longer explanation. So here it is. Despite the insistence of the progressive left, people of all religious faith should support a strong national border, and Christians certainly should. Critics are fond of citing particular Bible verses out of context to claim that Christians and Jews are being, quote, 'unfaithful' if we oppose their radical open borders agenda. It has become increasingly important for us to set this record straight."

You can hear the voice he's in. "We got to set the record straight." It's like a Sunday School dad voice.

"Perhaps the verse most often cited by the left is Leviticus 19:34. Whether they know it or not, that passage happens to be from the instructions Moses delivered to the Israelites when they were on their journey through the wilderness of Sinai before they reach their own Promised Land. The verse reads as follows: 'But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself.'"

Then he writes, in all caps: "CONTEXT IS CRITICAL."

"It is, of course, a central premise of Judeo-Christian teaching that strangers should be treated with kindness and hospitality. We are each called to love God first and to love our neighbors as ourselves. However—"

You know the "however" was coming. There was always going to be a "however."

"—that greatest commandment was never directed to the government, but to individual believers."

So many things to say here. Dan Miller, but I will defer to you. What do you think?

Dan: So it's like I don't even know where to start. A few parts of this.

One is, I love what he says—"Context is important. This is all about context." This is a standard move, and he's right—what he's doing there, it's what Uncle Ron or anybody else is going to do if they know their Bible and are a little bit ready. When you say, "Jesus says that if you use the sword, you'll die by the sword," or "You're supposed to turn the other cheek," or "You're supposed to carry somebody else's burden." Or you use the ethics of Jesus, or this passage in the Levitical code about the welcoming of the stranger, or it could be Hebrew prophetic passages about the poor, the orphan, the widow, and so on and so forth, or Jesus talking about the least of these—whatever. All of those are ammunition that somebody will use, as they do here. They'll say, "What about this?" And they'll say, "No, no, those are for individuals, not the government." So yes, as individuals—what they're doing is creating a distinction, saying we have an individual ethic that we're called to embody, but that is not the ethic of the government as such.

So here's my first point. Nothing about the context there—he said context mattered—it does not say anywhere in the Bible, in any of those passages, "This is for individuals, and not the state." I say this all the time, and I know people are like, "It's got to be a running joke by now," and I'm like, there's no such thing as a literalist. Stop telling me that the Mike Johnsons of the world, who say "the Bible is the Word of God," are literalists. It's not in the context. There's nothing in the context or the text that makes that easy distinction between an individual command and a corporate or communal command.

If anything, it cuts against their logic, because the whole Christian nationalist logic is that there is no distinction between the individual and the state—that individuals are Christians, and we're a theocracy, and we're supposed to be a Christian state. It breaks down any distinction between what we would call the individual, or privatized expression of the faith, and the state. That's a secular principle—the principle that the state is one thing and that religion is something that's left to individuals, that is separate from the state. That's exactly what Christian nationalists argue against.

So number one, it's not in the Bible. It doesn't say—Jesus never says anywhere, "I'm saying this to individuals. This is not a policy of how states should exist or governments or whatever else." Doesn't say it. So when Mike Johnson's like, "Context matters"—cool, Mike. What's the context? Can you tell me? If you want to talk about them walking in Sinai, what's he talking about? He's talking about the Hebrew nation—the people who are going to become the Israelite nation. He promises to make them a great what? A great nation. He is giving them rules for them as a nation, not individuals. There's some context.

But the rest of the time, it's just a simple bait and switch. It's just a way of saying, "We want to say that we're biblical, and you're going to throw something at us that's directly contrary to what we do. We'll just throw out this easy distinction and say, 'Well, you know, the Bible is not really about states.'" Until you start talking about Romans or something. And then they'll say, "No, no, no, no, that's about the state." It's just convenient. And yeah, it's sloppy and it's silly, and it's what we should expect, because they are not getting what they believe from the Bible. They are going to the Bible to find legitimation for what they believe. That's how it works.

Brad: So first of all, I really appreciate you pointing out that what he does here is an extra-biblical move. He's appealing to an authority or a legitimacy or a principle that is not anywhere in the Bible, as you've said.

So he says here: "The greatest commandment was never directed to the government, but to"—all caps—"INDIVIDUAL BELIEVERS." He's trying to make you think that when Jesus says "love God and love your neighbor," that was always directed to Dan Miller the individual. Okay, great. It never says that, friend. Just to be clear—Dan already said it, I guess I'll say it again—this is an extra-biblical assertion.

And my next thing to Mike would be—you're supposed to be a lawyer. Do you know how to argue or not, man? This is really bad. Did you take a logic class? Did you take a composition class? Really poor.

Number two, Mike: you're appealing to the Bible, but I need you to show me where Jesus said it. That's all I want. I don't want to hear—I don't want to talk anymore until you show me where Jesus said it's directed to the individual. La la la, I'm not listening. Mike, my fingers are in my ears. Show me on the page, Mike. No more words. Just point it—in the red letters in the Gospel somewhere. That's all I want to see. That's it.

Third, what people like Mike Johnson try to do—and here's where, let me give you the theological apparatus, Dan, and see what you think—they will try to argue, and I know this because I have read thousands of pages of this in Doug Wilson and Rushdoony and in all of the Theo Bros. And Mike Johnson is adjacent to them as a NAR person, because the NAR has roots going back to Rushdoony and Christian Reconstructionism.

What they're going to try to tell you is this: there are spheres that have been ordained by God. Some of you have heard of the Seven Mountains—the Seven Mountain Mandate. There's business, there's entertainment, there's family, there's government, there's culture. And the argument they're going to make, going back to Calvin, who made a distinction between the civil realm and the ecclesiastical realm—the church and the government—is that the government has one function and the church has another. Now, don't get me wrong: Christians, and only Christians, should be in charge of both—clearly the church, but also the government. That's the argument they'll make. Rushdoony, Doug Wilson—and Mike Johnson is parroting some of that here.

What they're going to try to get away with, though, is this—and this is what Erica Kirk and Donald Trump did at the Charlie Kirk event—the individual is supposed to love their neighbor as themselves, but the governmental agent, the magistrate, the senator, the congressperson, the president, is not supposed to carry out the Golden Rule. They are not supposed to love God and neighbor first and foremost. They are not supposed to "do as to others as you would want them to do to you." In fact, they are supposed to be merciless. They're supposed to be just. They're supposed to be ferocious. They're supposed to kill and be lethal and violently protective of their flock and their country. That is the argument that Theo Bros will make.

And that is what Mike Johnson, I think, is drawing on in terms of a theological reservoir when he tries to separate them. I think I know the answer to this, but do you buy that, Dan Miller?

Dan: I absolutely agree with all of that, Brad. I'm just gonna walk away now because Mike Johnson and NAR, they're all right. No—so here's the thing. There are lots of ways of doing theology. Not all kinds of theology claim that all theology should come from the Bible. Not all kinds of theology claim that the Bible has a plain and obvious meaning. Not all kinds of theology claim that the Bible is inerrant, and so forth.

Calvin did not read the Bible the way that conservative American Christians say that they read the Bible. His theology is fundamentally incompatible with how they say that they read the Bible. So if somebody wants to be a Calvinist and institute their own American Geneva theocratic model—Calvin did, okay—but you don't get to play the game of saying that everything's coming from the Bible anymore. And that's the claim.

And I think lots of Christians actually believe this. And again, if you want to prove the Christian who says, "Everything I say comes from the Bible. The Bible is my ultimate authority"—be like, "Cool. Show me the entertainment sphere in the Bible. Just show me that part. Show me the free market capitalism parts of the Bible. Just please show me the part that says environmental regulation is something God opposes." I challenge you to find it.

And that's the issue—you have this mash up. There's this appeal to the Bible. And I think the reason there's an appeal to the Bible is they know full well that average conservative American Christians believe the Bible. They don't actually read it. Oftentimes they don't actually know what it says, but it's just part of their identity that believing the Bible is part of what it is to be a Christian, and being confident that what we have and what we do and what we believe comes from the Bible. The Bible is our authority.

But Bart Ehrman, a well-known Bible scholar, has a phrase, and he says something about the Bible being widely revered and little read. And his point is that even people who appeal to the Bible often don't know what it says. They don't read it, they don't understand it.

So what you have in Mike Johnson or the NAR folks or these others is bringing all kinds of theologies that they also don't fit together. I think many of them are incoherent, whatever, but they don't fit with the kind of popular theology that American conservative Christians have grown up with, where everything's supposed to come from the Bible. But they just encode it that way. So you get the Mike Johnsons who will say, "Oh, context matters. Here's this thing," and he's importing a bunch of stuff, and it's not actually there. And that's why you can pick it apart if you do know what the Bible says.

Because for many Christians, that's what it is. If they were to just come out and say, "We think all this, but it's not actually biblical. We're building on a theology that isn't beholden to the Bible that way," they wouldn't have the support of all those American Christians who believe that to be a good Christian, you have to believe the Bible is true. And so—I don't know, that makes sense—but what it is, is this is just a mash up of pieces, and because of that, it's completely incoherent.

Brad: There's also something here that I think is worth picking at, which is Mike Johnson says, "The greatest commandment was never directed to the government, but to individual believers." Okay, but then—so I'm the individual believer. I'm Mike Johnson, and I got elected to be Speaker of the House. Am I not supposed to carry out my Christian faith as a member of government? Is it not that the government is simply a group of elected officials who have been voted in by the people as individuals to then go form a collective that helps govern and provide resources, enforce laws, and so on, for states, cities, and for the entire country?

When you pick at this logic, you're going to catch Mike Johnson and JD Vance and others saying, "Thank you, God, for raising up godly leaders to put in charge of our nation." "Thank you," Paula Cain says, "for bringing us Donald J. Trump, the greatest revivalist there has ever been in the history of the United States." They're going to praise God for bringing individuals to be leaders in the government. And then they're going to turn around and say, "Oh, you know that greatest commandment thing, 'love your neighbor as yourself'? Not for the government. Individuals. Ironic."

The government becomes this nameless blob at that point. "Oh yeah, not for the government." The government becomes secular. Ironically, they're sort of like, you have to check your Christian principles at the door and become essentially an asshole if you're going to be a government official. You have to be ruthless and violent and terrible and basically anti-Christian. You have to do all the things Christians aren't supposed to do. And it's just a completely convoluted logic. It's like, "Oh, good Christian leaders." Yeah, but you just said that you're not supposed to be a good Christian anymore. You got to be something else.

And like JD Vance wants to revive all kinds of laws that would punish people—he wants to revive blue laws. So on Sundays, all the liquor stores are closed. Others behind Mike Johnson, theologians and pastors, they want to make it so that you can't do business on a Sunday so you have to go to church. Or if you blaspheme the Lord's name in vain, you go to jail. So they want laws that are Christian, and they want Christian leaders that enact those laws. And then in another instance, they're like, "Oh, no no, sorry, the loving your neighbor thing? Individuals, not government."

So here's a final question on this, Dan. If you are the pastor—Easterwood, who is a pastor at Cities Church in St. Paul—and you are a pastor and an individual, so you go out and love your neighbor. That's what Mike Johnson says he's supposed to do. So all right, here I am, I'm David Easterwood. I'm going to go love my neighbor today as an individual. I just saw one of my neighbors getting thrown on the ground, and their little boy got pepper sprayed. In the meantime, no one's helping them. There's no phone calls. They're terrorized. And they also have documentation to be in the country. Should I step in? Should I help? Should I try to run the kidnappers off? Maybe I should. And as a pastor, maybe I should encourage my flock to do that. But oh, now I'm an ICE official. I'm part of the government. I'm a field officer in the local ICE brigade. So now I'm not required to love my neighbor as myself. Do you see how this gets super weird and broken down, and it just doesn't hold in any way?

Dan: And Christian—for those of us who grew up in these churches that said, the sign of being a Christian is that it suffuses every part of your life. "I'm not a Sunday morning only Christian. I'm a Christian all the time. I'm a Christian who doesn't swear, and I don't do this, and I don't do that. I do all these things, but I'm supposed to be a Christian all the time. It's supposed to be the defining element of my character." But yeah, as you're saying, now you've got this weird split personality thing where—yeah, I'm supposed to be a Christian all the time, but literally not if I'm wearing my ICE shirt. Then all of a sudden I'm not a Christian, but I'm still an individual, but I'm not an individual. And then—yeah, all of that.

It just goes against everything that they say that they believe. And of course, that's the point. The actions dictate or tell for us what's really at work here. When are these appeals to theology just ideological justifications for racism and xenophobia and white supremacy and everything else?

Brad: But one of the basic premises that they're going to argue is that one of the reasons you need, quote unquote, "strong borders" and a border wall and you need mass deportation is because God has ordained the creation of nations. And this goes against so much.

What you and I grew up with, too, is they're of the ilk that think God ordained people of similar ethnicities and cultures to live amongst each other as a nation. Christian bestseller The Case for Christian Nationalism by Stephen Wolfe. He argues this: "Even if humans had not fallen into sin, they would have created separate nations with warriors patrolling their borders. Those nations would have distinct ways of life that we can call ethnicities. Given that even pre-lapsarian—" And you're like, "What does that mean?" Means before Adam and Eve sinned for the first time, before they listened to the serpent and ate the fruit. "—human beings were designed to create particular communities based on in-group, out-group distinctions. It is natural for humans to live in homogeneous ethnic enclaves where they share language, religion, blood relations, and daily practices."

This sounds like ethno-nationalism. You are correct, listener, if you have thought that.

So it gets worse. For Wolfe: "Nations and nationalism are part of God's design of human nature. Christians do not have a different mission or calling from Adam. Even if Christ's redemption saved them from sin, it did not change their calling to dominate the earth by setting up distinct, ethnically pure nations. God created humans to love their own—those who are like them—more than others."

So what is at the bedrock of Mike Johnson's theology here is, I think, what is at the bedrock of Wolfe's theology, which is: God has created nations, and therefore you have to protect the nation. So as the government—whether that is the Speaker of the House or the mayor or anyone else—you have to act to protect the nation first, and you are to love your neighbor second, or not at all. It's a theological negation of the Golden Rule.

Anyway, do you want to comment, Dan? We were laughing before recording about how does Stephen Wolfe know what would have happened if Adam and Eve had not sinned? Is that in the Bible?

Dan: These are the folks where the whole thing hinges on the idea that what they'll tell you—that what they believe is supposed to come from the Bible. The Bible describes no pre-lapsarian human community. There's two humans. It's a community of two. That's it.

And the snake comes along and sin enters and whatever—people know. I've been reading Josh Hawley's book, and he is all over this Genesis stuff and the snake and whatever. But here's the other thing: if you read those Genesis accounts, the myth of where nations come from—it's the Tower of Babel. It's a consequence of what God defines as human sin. It's a fit of divine rage. That's all it is. It's divine pique.

You've got God comes along and it says the humans are building this big tower. And God says, "Whoa, they're getting pretty uppity, and they're going to be able to be like God and do great things if we don't scatter them." So he scatters them and gives them different nations and so forth. It's an origin myth of why there are different nations and languages. But the point is, in the Hebrew Bible, it's a sign of the fall. It's a kind of punishment. It's not something that God ordained from the beginning.

And if we wanted to be biblical theologians here, we could juxtapose that image—that says here's this thing about fallen human existence, we have this divided, nationalist existence—way over at the end of the Bible, in the book of Revelation. What's the vision? It's a vision of people from every tribe and race and nation unified before God, brought back together and reconciled. That's the image of a healed creation, one that doesn't have these nationalist divisions.

So again, this is not—the point is, I'm not here to defend nations or explain nations or whatever. All I'm here to say is: look, dude, if you're going to say it's the Bible, it's not. You're just an ethno-nationalist who wants to say that God said to do it. That's all it is.

I've been talking about this on "It's in the Code" too. I call this sort of "biblical laundering," where you take a really bad idea, feed it through the Bible, and then pretend to find it there. And so, as you were saying earlier, if you're religious, you're good. If it's from the Bible, it's good. I don't know how many conversations I've had with people where they say something terrible, and I'm like, "Hey, that's terrible." And they're like, "Well, yeah, but the Bible says it." So what? That would just make the Bible bad. It doesn't make the idea good. So that's what they do. They take an idea that's clearly their idea, churn it through the Bible, and it's supposed to come back out and it's washed and it's clean and it's sanctified. That's all this is. It's just white ethno-nationalism trying to say that God said to do it. That's all it is. And Christians have been doing that game for a really long time, too.

Brad: You ready? We're just gonna do it. We're gonna get hella nerdy in here. You ready?

So the practice of interpreting the Bible through the text—it's called exegesis. A lot of people listening will know this word: exegesis. So if I exegete the text, I take the text, what it says, all of the clues—I might read the Gospel of Matthew with the Gospel of Luke or Mark, and think, okay, what's in both of them and how do they compare? But exegeting the text is about taking textual clues, textual context, and drawing conclusions the best you can about what the Bible or the Scripture is teaching you. That's exegesis, and it's E-X, because it's coming from—to take out. I'm taking—

Dan: "Ex" means to take out. You're taking the meaning from the Bible.

Brad: Now, if I do eisegesis—E-I-S-E-G-E-S-I-S—"eis," into. Your Greek's better than mine. Is that fair?

Dan: Yeah, it means "into." Reading your meaning into the Bible.

Brad: If I do eisegesis, I take what I want the Bible to say, and I go to the Bible and I put that all in there, and then afterward I'm like, "Look, it's in there!" And you're like, "No, no, no, you did eisegesis. You put it in there. You didn't take that from the text. You put it in there."

And that's what I think Mike Johnson and Stephen Wolfe are doing. But what I think they're really doing is ICE-egesis. I-C-E-egesis. They're reading ethno-nationalism and racism into the text so they can justify what ICE is doing to their neighbors, to their communities, to children, to people who are being killed on the street and executed, to people who are in their homes trying to rest and have the doors knocked down—journalists, American citizens, and so on. It's ICE—their theology is ICE-egesis. So there we go. There's our word for today. Hope that makes sense.

Brad: All right, Dan. It is Super Bowl Sunday coming up here. Do you want to get into your team not being there? Is it too fresh? It hurts? Should we just leave it alone?

Dan: I'm just gonna say there were three plays. Three plays cost that game. And that's all. And I'm a Seahawks fan this week. That's all I'm saying. That's my partisan thing.

Brad: You're Denver first, but you lived in Seattle. You like the Seahawks. All right. So there is going to be an alternative halftime show. Bad Bunny recently appeared at the Grammys and said, "ICE out. We are not savages." Billie Eilish says at the same award show, "Nobody is illegal on stolen land." Nonetheless, TPUSA is doing as they promised and putting on an alternative "all-American Christian" halftime show, and the headliner of that is none other than Kid Rock.

Kid Rock. Kid Rock, to me—there's two issues I want to get into. But here's the first: Bad Bunny has won either six or seven Grammys, and I think 16 Latin Grammys. Bad Bunny is like the worldwide leader in Spotify plays and downloads. Bad Bunny is a renowned artist who is oozing with talent. Now, you may not like Bad Bunny's genre of music or something else. When you examine Bad Bunny, though, my argument would be—and sure, some of you may not agree—but this is a phenomenal musical talent, even if you are not somebody who is a Bad Bunny music fan and have it going in the car or whatever.

Kid Rock was always—I'm going to be careful.

Dan: I don't know what's coming next, but I can imagine.

Brad: Kid Rock was always hillbilly comfort music. And what I mean by that is—Dan, just take it easy. Dan, okay, so I have a Japanese American dad, and he does not listen to country music. Surprise, surprise. He's from Maui. But my mom is a white woman from West Tennessee. My mom loves country music. I grew up listening to country music in the car. I am a fan of Sturgill Simpson. Anyone? Sturgill Simpson out there? Country music?

There are tremendously talented and overwhelmingly blessed country music folks out there. Do not walk away from this like Brad is just completely trashing country music. It's not what I'm doing. I don't love all country music. There's a lot of problems with a bunch of country music. But do my kids and I sometimes sing along to Shaboozey? Yes. Shaboozey is country music. Sorry.

Just take—if you want to argue with me, you can. Kid Rock was never in the discussion as, "Oh, wow, overwhelmingly, tremendously talented new artist in the country genre doing crossover work with rap or hip hop or rapcore"—whatever that was called 30 years ago when he was actually popular. That was comfort pop music. We all have our comfort foods, Dan. I've been eating Top Ramen for some reason. I don't know why, but I have been eating it. It's disgusting. You all can judge me. Email me if you are also Asian. You can email me and say, "Your Asian card is in jeopardy." That's just what is happening at your house. Okay, you're a Japanese man. Have some pride.

We all have comfort food. Dan, I don't know what yours are—fried chicken, meatloaf. What do you like to eat, Dan Miller, on a cold day? I don't know what it is. The best that Kid Rock ever was was just poppy comfort hillbilly music. You go to the club, you're in the dance hall, you're with your pals in 1998 and you're like, "Oh yeah, that remake of Alabama or whatever he made. That was cool. That was fun because we had had nine beers and it actually sounded like good music."

The point for me is this: 26 years later, beyond his prime, as Trump and the National Prayer Breakfast are the apotheosis of the craven, transactional relationship between Christian nationalism and authoritarianism, Kid Rock is the headliner of an alternative Super Bowl show. This is the apex of—we would prefer a guy who was mediocre at best 25 years ago to be the headliner of our cultural phenomenon show, rather than participate in or even just sit back and go get some dip and chips while Bad Bunny performs—the guy who's the leading plays getter on Spotify at the moment, 23 Grammys in total, a worldwide phenomenon, somebody hailed as an overwhelmingly musical talent. We just can't have that. We prefer mediocrity to diversity. We prefer broke-down Kid Rock who can barely sing anymore, who looks like someone's stepdad who isn't even allowed to see his stepkids on the weekends because he messed up so bad, rather than just participate in the regular mainstream society.

I'm ranting now. Talk about how this is an instance of Christians creating an alternative culture that's way worse than the other culture.

Dan: Well, so for a long time—rewind a bit. People know some of this. I know you talk about this history. I've talked about this history. After World War II, you had fundamentalists who'd sort of withdrawn from culture, and what emerges—they were called the Neo-evangelicals—and they wanted to reengage culture. The modern evangelical movement takes shape from there. And one of the things that has always defined it is this kind of creation of a parallel subculture.

When I was an evangelical, this was a selling point. It was always like, "Oh, you've got your music, we've got our music. You've got your books, we've got our books." It was this creation of a parallel culture, because it has always lived in this tension of—we live a different life, but not so different that you can't still be okay, or that you have to be weird, or that you have to be like a monk in a monastery or something. You can still be in the world but not of the world. That was the language.

So on one hand, this is the new iteration of that, where we're going to have our own sort of Christian culture halftime show, whatever. And somebody could look at this and say, "Well, is this really that different? Isn't this what evangelicals have always done?"

I remember when I was in high school, they would—when churches, especially with youth group stuff, they finally realized that nobody was going to come to church on Sunday night on Super Bowl Sunday. So they would start having Super Bowl Sunday church parties. And I don't know if your church did this, Brad. My church did this, where they couldn't have all the beer commercials and stuff. So the youth group would make commercials and stuff that would air during the commercial breaks. And you're living this out—this "we're going to give into culture and recognize people are going to watch the Super Bowl, they are not going to show up to Sunday night service and miss the Super Bowl. So we just roll it in, kind of baptize it, make it Christian enough that it can be this parallel culture that can be attractive to people," whatever.

Here's what I think is different about this: it has morphed so that what defines this is that it's not for anything. It's just this kind of—it's not even the creation of a positive culture. It's like, "Oh, your culture is too inviting? We're going to be more exclusive. Your culture is too diverse? We're going to be whiter. We're going to speak English."

Brad, that's the sticking thing. When people really got upset about the announcement of the NFL halftime show, it predates the Grammys by a long time, and it was really the Spanish language dimension to it that was throwing people off. They just—"Oh, you can't have a Spanish language performer at a halftime show."

And so I think it just shows the morph that continues to happen with American Christianity—from "we can create a subculture, and it's inviting, and we're going to bring people in, we're going to try to show how attractive our faith is" to it's now this angry, visceral rage subculture of "we're going to show you that we don't need your inclusivity. We don't need your welcome and your affirmation and your wokeness and your whatever." And it's just—I feel like the emotional tone of it has changed to just the anger and the vitriol of this kind of angry, hate-filled Christian discourse running counter to mainstream "woke culture" or whatever.

And I'm just going to say, there's not a lot of times when—I'm an NFL fan, but I can be a critic of the NFL. You're not going to usually accuse the NFL of being very woke. That's just not—NBA, sure. WNBA, absolutely. But not usually the NFL. And so it just shows how far this is when this is the direction they go. And just as a side note, I'm going to be curious to see the numbers—if we can ever get them and they come out—of who is actually going to tune in to this super third-rate YouTube set of performances that plays during the Super Bowl.

Brad: So okay, we're going to run out of time. I'll just say quickly, when Bill Cosby came out and we learned everything about Bill Cosby—and some of you are too young for Bill Cosby, but if you're not—there was mourning there, because you're like, "Hey man, I grew up watching Bill Cosby, and I'm really sad that he turned out to be a monster." And I had to mourn that.

Nobody has had to mourn Kid Rock. He's just not—he never made anything good enough to mourn. That's my point.

Dan: He was never anything. Like, go anywhere.

Brad: Okay, now we have to get to this part, and then we'll finish. A lot of people are pointing out that the family-friendly Christian all-American show is being headlined by a man who has a lyric from a—and I'm going to put a trigger warning out here. It's about statutory rape, essentially.

But his lyric, going back 25 years, from a song called "Cool, Daddy Cool" goes like this: "Young ladies, young ladies, I like them underage. See, some say that's statutory." And then his backup MC Joe, who's called Joe C, chimes in: "But I say it's mandatory."

So this is a song about statutory rape. It's a song about a grown man wanting to do things with people who are, quote, "underage." And if those of you don't know, Kid Rock is a trust fund baby. Kid Rock is not like grew up in a rough and tumble, made it himself, really got out of a tough situation guy. Go look up Kid Rock. He's a trust fund baby.

There was nothing more fitting for the age of Trump and Epstein, of Bannon and Thiel, of Christian supremacy and vitriol, than a trust fund baby Gen X washed-up country singer who openly advocates for statutory rape, for pedophilia, being the headliner of the, quote, "family-friendly, all-Christian, all-American show," the Christian counter-programming.

Dan: Yep, the Christian counter-programming.

Brad: And when called on this, he posted a quote from Kobe Bryant, of all people, that says: "Learn to love the hate. Embrace it. Enjoy it. You earned it. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and everyone should have one about you. Haters are a good problem to have. Nobody hates the good ones. They hate the great ones."

Kid Rock, bless your heart. Oh, bless your heart, Kid. You really have a different understanding of yourself than anyone else. No one ever thought you were a great one. But second, Dan, he does nothing to address the fact that a song that he wrote and sang and performs advocates for pedophilia. Is there anything more fitting?

And when asked about this, Karoline Leavitt said that the president would be watching Kid Rock, not Bad Bunny. There you go. Final thoughts, and then give us your reason for hope.

Dan: Just again—he could have taken it out. Anybody could. You could be like, "You know what, I wrote that lyric a long time ago," or "I was young," or whatever. He could have done that. Didn't. Embraces it.

The Christian parallel—the idea when I was in this world was that this parallel culture was better and it was more pure. And here—this is the vision of the Christian parallel culture: a celebration of this guy.

So my reason for hope: once again, following various court cases and battles about ICE. In Oregon, there was a ruling that ICE agents can't make warrantless arrests—that's hard for me to say—arrests without warrants, unless there's a risk of escape. We know that ICE has been asserting the right to enter homes without a proper warrant, to stop and arrest people basically without any kind of significant notion of probable cause, and so on. And I think this was a significant court decision. We're going to see others. And people have been waiting to see what would happen in this court case in Oregon, but I think it was really significant—yet another significant piece of the complex issues related to ICE and the courts and resistance to ICE and everything that's going on.

Brad: I appreciate it. District Attorney Krasner in Philadelphia basically coming out with a set of statements that's like, "Look, we will arrest you. We will prosecute you if you commit crimes against people in our city. We will do that." Those kinds of courage breed copycats, and the best kind. Fifteen Philadelphia city council members have backed a package of "ICE out" legislation aimed at combating ICE and federal immigration enforcement operations in Philly, including codifying sanctuary protections and prohibiting federal immigration agents from concealing their identities.

All right, y'all, we're out of time. Join us at our next live episode if you're a subscriber—that's coming up in a few weeks. Join us for Office Hours if you're a subscriber. Dan Miller just did that. The next one will be in the first week of March. Join us Sunday for Annika Brockschmidt interviewing Seth Cotlar about how blood and soil nationalism went mainstream. Join me Monday, this coming Monday, February 9, at 6 p.m. Eastern, to talk about the fact that James Dobson is in the Epstein files. I'll unpack all of the dimensions of Dobson's appearance in the Epstein files, along with Putin, Bannon, Thiel, and others. Thanks for being here, y'all. We are so grateful for you. We'll catch you next time.