Weekly Roundup: Pete Hegseth’s Military Vision, Violent Prayer & GOP Tax Dogma

Brad: Welcome to Straight White American Jesus. I'm Brad Onishi, author of American Caesar: How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Taking Over America, founder of Axis Mundi Media, here today with my co-host, Dan Miller.

Dan: Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College, pleased to be with you, Brad. Brad is joining us from exotic locations, and we're recording very early, and so it's always fun, Brad, when it's this early, because I don't know — we just — maybe a different Brad will show up, the early morning Brad.

Brad: The early morning Brad is here. I'm in beautiful St. Louis. Was here for a seminar, and yeah, it says 6:49am St. Louis time, but my body thinks it's 4:49am, so we're doing great. All right, folks, we're going to talk about Pete Hegseth and some changes he's made to the chaplaincy in the military. It may seem like a minor story, but there's actually some reasons that it is worth noting — this along with comments he made this week about total obliteration of enemies, praying for destruction, and what that reveals about the Christian nationalist ideology that we've been discussing on this show for some time now. We'll then get into something that I think is again under the radar, but with the ongoing Iran conflict, is something we want to bring attention to, and that is the GOP dogma over taxes and cutting taxes, and that in conjunction with the overwhelming cost of this war and the ways that the government is both shrinking and growing at the same time, and how that is bad for everybody. Finally, CPAC is this week, and Trump is not there. Why? We will tell you in a couple of minutes. Lots to cover. Let's go.

Dan: So this week, he announced some changes to the chaplaincy on X, formerly Twitter. And what he argued — or didn't argue, but announced — is that chaplains will no longer wear rank insignia. They'll keep their rank — probably knows chaplains as military officers, they have rank as well as representing whatever religious tradition they represent. But they will no longer wear their rank insignia. They'll keep their rank, but they will only display their religious insignia. And this kind of goes in line — Hegseth had previously said, and we talked about this at the time, he had previously said the service members' spiritual health was as important as their physical and mental health. And he, we know he's emphasized the whole Crusader army, Christian army thing. He has tried to elevate, again, spirituality within the armed forces at the same level as mental or physical health. But what he said — and this is why it struck me, you're like, okay, like, they don't have to wear rank insignia. Like what? Like, okay, so what? And a reason given for this one, and I think there's probably some validity to this, is that it can help kind of remove barriers between especially maybe enlisted service members and chaplains. You're coming to a chaplain for spiritual guidance, and the person's a captain or a major or something like that, and that maybe can be intimidating if you're like a corporal or a private or whatever. Okay, fine. But here's what else Hegseth said — and this is what caught my attention, and this is what I think makes this significant, and I'll be interested in your thoughts. He said that the chaplains not having the rank — he said, quote, they will be seen among the highest ranks because of their divine calling. And then he went on to kind of address chaplains in this video, he says, You have a sacred calling, so preach the truth, be steadfast in your faith, and shepherd the flock entrusted to you. And then tied in with that, another thing that he did is he also announced the reduction of faith codes — it's like the, you know, service members can code, like a list of codes of religious or spiritual beliefs. Reduced it from over 200 to 31. And he had talked about this in the past too. So for me, it was this notion of saying, well, they don't need rank because they're called by God. They have the highest calling. So in the military, an organization built on rank, obviously explicitly hierarchical in structure for various reasons — like probably the most explicitly hierarchical organization in American life — it's like chaplains don't need rank because they have a divine calling. They're messengers from God. And so it communicated to me this notion of almost they're above rank. They are beyond rank. They are far superior to anybody else in the military because of this so-called divine calling. And I found it just another sort of chilling thing, leading into these other things we're going to talk about. But your thoughts on that — walk me back if I'm overreacting. You're like, No, he just wants privates to be comfortable talking to chaplains.

Brad: Well, you spent a lot of time this week looking into this, and I guess one question I'd have for you is, what do you make of reducing the codes from — what does that mean in your mind? Because that's something that I came in today trying to figure out.

Dan: What I think — and I'm not the only one, there are lots of people that are concerned about this — the rationale that's given is that the system is too big and too unwieldy and so forth. For me, he wants to make the military more Christian, right? I think he's one of those people who's like, well, yeah, religion is good, but we've gotten carried away. You're talking about Sikhs all the time, or you're talking about, I don't know, pagans or Wiccans or whatever groups. No, no — religion is about Christianity. And why do I say that, since he didn't come out and say that explicitly? Number one, that language he used about the chaplains is just super Christian language. When he says, You have a sacred calling, so preach the truth — guess what? Preaching is not a part of all religious traditions. Not everybody in religious traditions preaches. That's a really, really Christian conception of what religion is. Be steadfast in your faith — we've talked about this before, both of us are religious studies scholars, and as all religious studies scholars know, and even though it surprises — I mean, we don't like the language of faith traditions, because the concept of faith, the category of faith, is a very Christian concept that then gets kind of exported and imposed onto other religious traditions where it just doesn't kind of fit. Shepherd the flock entrusted to you — chaplains are not pastors. They play a role, but I think every chaplain I've ever talked to would say, I'm not a pastor, I'm a chaplain. This is a different thing. My role is different. It's just so Christian, the language of that, and I would argue pretty Protestant as well. So his articulation of what chaplains do sounds really Christian. And for me, this reduction of faith coding — instead of saying, You know what, we have a diverse group of service members, and yeah, it's a clunky system, but we're going to have it because it reflects who our service members are — and if we're serious about saying that spiritual health is as important as mental or physical health, then we need as many codes as we need to be able to cover that. What he's doing is saying: if you're not the right kind of religious person, you don't have a space in the military. And we've also seen the thing where he's obviously tried to get rid of anything that's seen as DEI or "woke" within the military, but he also reduced the number of exceptions for haircut requirements, the number of exceptions for facial hair requirements. Some of those were religious exemptions that typically non-Western, non-European, non-Christian religious adherents — like perhaps Sikhs and others — would have been able to get a waiver on. He's already cracked down on that. So for me, tying in with the tattoos and everything else, Pete Hegseth wants a Christian Crusader army, and I see this as continuing to shape the military in that image.

Brad: Here's some of the language he used. He said that the military had been infected by political correctness and secular humanism, and that the chaplaincy had been watered down to be nothing more than therapists — self-focused on self-help, self-care. And I guess what I want everyone to notice here, just going off of your analysis and reading these comments, is this is the Secretary of Defense explicitly stating that unless you have a certain religion in the military, you will not be recognized. Period. And I think you just said that, but I just want everyone to sort of realize what's happening. Secular humanism might be a bad word among certain evangelicals, but humanism is a tradition. There are humanist groups all over this country. I have been part of them. I have spoken to them. There are great people who call themselves humanists, and I can tell you there are humanists in our military who are serving, who have dedicated their lives to this country's armed forces, and they are being told that the tradition they adhere to — their values, their morals, their ethics, their histories, their ideas about what it means to be a good person — are being characterized as nothing more than watered-down self-help by our Secretary of Defense. So I think that's number one: this is an unmistakable Christianizing of the military. And I want to make a second point. There's a history here. So let me just give you something that comes from the work of scholars like Duncan Williams in American Sutra, a really notable book. Japanese American soldiers fought in World War Two while their families were incarcerated back home. And if you listen to the show, you know I've talked about this. I'm Japanese American. This is all part of my family's history. I had family members who were incarcerated in camps during World War Two, and my grandfather also was a code breaker during World War Two. He was part of the armed services. Now, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team / 100th Infantry Battalion was the most decorated regiment in American history, per capita, in terms of the amount of people in that regiment, the medals and awards given to them — Purple Heart, Medal of Honor, and so on. You will not find, and I'm not exaggerating, I'm not being hyperbolic, you will not find a more decorated regiment in our armed services. However, a lot of those guys were Buddhist, and they did not have chaplains, and it was really hard for them to get somebody in their military atmosphere who shared their religious tradition to help them through the overwhelming violence, destruction, and trauma of what they were going through. They lost more men than almost any regiment in that war. So if you think this doesn't matter, and you're just like, Oh, who cares? It's like — all right. Do you care about sending our 19-year-olds to Iran on the ground or not? Do you think it's the greatest country on Earth? Do you think that, as people like to say, all gave some, some gave all? Okay. That includes people that don't look like you. It includes people that don't worship Jesus. Do they still matter? Yes or no? And I think that's what he's saying. I want to know if he thinks they matter or not.

Dan: Just back around — I talked about the language he used: You have a sacred calling, preach the truth, be steadfast in your faith, shepherd the flock entrusted to you. None of those are Buddhist concepts. None of those are visions of religion that encompass the whole. Now, if you grew up in church, if you're a white American who grew up going to church, or maybe your grandparents did, even if you didn't but you got dragged to it sometimes — that may be the vision of religion that you have. But to your point, Buddhism is not a fringe tradition. It's not small, it's not unknown. It's as American as anything else, because people served and died fighting, expressing that tradition. That description is not what a Buddhist monk does, it's not what a guru does, it's not what those who help guide in meditative or mindfulness practices do. And that just reflects — at best — a deafness to difference, and at worst, which I think is where Hegseth is, the active erasure of difference. I think Hegseth would love it if people left the military over this. He'd love for people to be forced out, to be like, well, there's no place for us, I'm going to leave. He'd be like, cool, great. You're right. There's no place for you. But I think it reflects exactly that point — even in the language he uses, that many Americans who maybe don't know better might say, Well, that sounds fine. That's just religion he's describing. It's not just religion he's describing. It's Christianity.

Brad: So I think one takeaway for people here is that what Pete Hegseth has done for the military is an act of the Christian nationalist vision for society that so many others want to see across American life. And so what he's doing here is Christianizing and saying, in essence, we're not going to recognize other religious traditions. This is about preaching and calling and all the words you've just used. And this in conjunction with — let's just read from the ACLU. This is from an article written a couple months ago. Among Hegseth's pronouncements was that each service will ensure that every requirement for every combat specialty, for every designated arms position, returns to the highest male standard only, because this job is life or death. Standards must be met, and not just met — at every level we should seek to exceed the standard. Push the envelope. If women can make it, excellent. If not, it is what it is. His directive puzzled military observers, because all combat occupational specialties already impose gender-neutral physical requirements — that's been the case since the early 90s. He's done a lot of things, and I don't want to just go through them all today. But he's done a lot of things like basically making it such that transgender folks cannot serve in the military. The facial hair requirements may seem small, but for Black men, for Sikh Americans, and so on, it is not a small thing. It's a big thing. What I want to say is: you can look at all the evidence and he wants a military that is male and Christian, and no one else to be recognized. And last time I said that on the show, people went for it — they were like, YouTube comments and everything else, just like, No, you're — you guys are lame, I can't believe you'd say that. But I would just say, just examine the evidence in total. If we move on from this — not move on, but just go to sort of related things — some of this came at the same time that Hegseth held a religious service at the Pentagon this week, which he's been doing. And Brian Kaylor is the one who's been covering this doggedly. So you should go follow Brian Kaylor at Word & Way and everything he does and writes. But Hegseth prayed for overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.

[Unidentified voice reads the prayer aloud:]

Grant this task force clear and righteous targets for violence. Surround them as a shield, protect the innocent and blameless in their midst. Make their arrows like those of a skilled warrior who returned not empty-handed. Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation. Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy. Preserve their lives, sharpen their resolve, and let justice be executed swiftly and without remorse, that evil may be driven back and wicked souls delivered to the eternal damnation prepared for them. For the wicked flee when no one pursues, but the righteous are as bold as a lion. We ask these things with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ, King over all kings. Amen, amen. And may the righteous be as bold as a lion. May we pray such a prayer for our men and women in harm's way right now — to think that such Americans exist on our behalf, on behalf of the American people. And that is certainly our prayer for them today.

Brad: Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation. Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy. So Dan, I know we could spend three hours on this. Last week, we talked about Pete Hegseth's pastor — wink wink — and Josh — who said something to the effect of, we hope that James Talarico is crucified, and if not, well, let God stop him by any means possible. Since then, The Daily Beast and the Huffington Post and everyone else has written about that. But we talked about it last week. This week, we have Hegseth himself praying for obliteration, for overwhelming destruction — these are some of the words used — against those who deserve no mercy. And I just want to point out that you can call this Christian, and I'm not going to say it's not Christian, because obviously he is envisioning this as a Christian prayer, and that's what he's doing. It's really hard to square this with the teachings of Jesus, as we've pointed out in previous episodes. But even more than that, I don't think on this show we want to legislate what is Christian and what's biblical — that's not for us to say. What I do want to say is this man seems to be sadistic. Like, he seems to enjoy death. That is all he talks about. We mentioned this last week — lethality. "This job is life and death." And he also said this week, we negotiate with bombs. That's a direct quote. I'll get to that in a minute. You can't negotiate with bombs — when you use violence, you're not negotiating, anyway, whatever. We'll talk about that in a second. What do you make of this praying for destruction against those who deserve no mercy? What does that say to you, in conjunction with everything else we've seen over the last few months?

Dan: A couple points. One — to echo, as you say, we're not here to sort of legislate what's real Christianity or not. But I think it definitely shows who Pete Hegseth's God is. What kind of god is this? It's a God of violence, it's a God of punishment. It's clearly an American God. You know, America is the force of righteousness. And we've talked about this before — that becomes sort of tautological. In other words, whatever America does is okay because America is righteous. It's not that America does certain things because it's righteous; it's just, we are going to assume that America is righteous, so whatever we do must be good. That's a certain kind of theology all by itself — whatever God does must be good because He's God — and it's essentially mapping that onto America. But I think it's this God of War, this God of violence, a God that revels in punishment. And then about Hegseth himself — I think sadism is not a bad word for this, like he revels in violence. I'm going to also be the one who says he loves death, but he loves it from a distance. He's not the one who's going to have boots on the ground. He's not the one who's going to be flying in the planes. He's not going to be doing anything. He just gets to sit back and point what I think for him are his toy soldiers, to go do things. I promise, whatever discussions they're having about what to do in Iran and potential escalation — I think Pete Hegseth is dying for boots on the ground. He wants those Marines that are ready to be deployed. He wants the airborne forces that have been sent over there ready to deploy. He wants them deployed because he wants death and destruction and violence. He wants his Crusader army. And then you map that onto — there is, for somebody like him, no more symbolically loaded nation than Islamic Iran against which to exert a kind of Crusader war. And that's what he thinks this is. So reveling in violence — I think, honestly, he thinks of the military as just these toys that he gets to deploy. If anybody's ever known somebody who has a shop full of tools and they're always just finding stuff to do because they want to use the tools — they don't really have anything to do, they're just like, oh, I'm gonna go do — that's Hegseth. But with real lives and money and everything else. And so I think, yeah, I think it's chilling. I think it tells us who he is. It tells us who his God is. It tells us what his version of Christianity is. It tells us what his conception of peace is — it's peace through destruction. It's peace through eradicating your enemies. It's not diplomacy. It's not peace-loving. It's not approaching your enemies or building common ground. It's none of those things. It's the opposite of diplomacy.

Brad: I just — we're gonna take a break, and then we'll come back and talk about the Crusader stuff, and we can prove this to you. You all can sit there and say, Oh, is that what he really wants? We'll prove it. I just want to say that I think that Hegseth's bloodlust is representative, unfortunately, of a large portion of MAGA nation, of Christian nationalism. Dan, just hear me out, and I'm curious if you agree. My argument in American Caesar, my argument even in Preparing for War a couple years ago, is that democracy has not worked for white Christian nationalists since the 1960s, at least in their eyes. They have sort of seen the fact that if we rely on votes and majorities, we don't get what we want. And folks can be like, Well, you got George W. Bush twice, and yes, that's true. But what they would tell you is: look, everything else has gone away. Like, the country's less Christian, gay people can get married, we had a Black president, and he was communist and he was Muslim and he was woke, and we had Joe Biden and the pandemic and all of this stuff. And what I tried to argue in Preparing for War, and I argue more explicitly in American Caesar, is: you don't have the majority. So democracy becomes a problem. And if democracy is a problem, then you have to use force. We will take it. We will not vote about it. We will not negotiate about it. What that means to me with Hegseth is that Hegseth represents a group of people that is like, it is time for violence. It is time to kill and maim and bomb until people realize we're the ones who should be in charge. Period. There's no more time for talking, there's no more time for negotiating, there's no more time for voting, there's no more time for persuading. When Hegseth talks, I see this representation of folks who, for three and four decades, have just been like, yeah, it's time. Like, why did they elect Donald Trump? It's because — what did they tell you from 2016 onward? Oh, I didn't elect a pastor, a Sunday school teacher. They wanted somebody — and Samuel Perry has been the one who's really talked about this — they wanted somebody who would hurt the people they think need to get hurt. And that would make the country Christian again, godly again, great again. Hegseth, to me, is really the symbol of that. I want to hurt. Who needs to be hurt? What do you think about that?

Dan: I think what you're saying is accurate. I think we've been saying it since 2016. People can go back and listen — literally the first probably five or six episodes that we did — and I said at the time that Donald Trump was not something new. He was sort of the id of the right. The sort of raw emotional truth of what people had been feeling for a really long time. And I don't think any of that has changed. I think the leadership of the MAGA movement, including Pete Hegseth, reflect and express that movement. They express what is there. So yes, I think that for every Hegseth — and people can point and be like, well, yeah, but he's an extremist, he's an exception — I don't think he's an exception. I think he's an illustration. I think he's a dyed-in-the-wool, through-and-through Christian nationalist who just shows us what the Christian nationalists want and think. And he happens to be Secretary of Defense. But I think for every Pete Hegseth, there are probably a million Christian nationalists out there who think exactly the same things and who cheer every time he stands up and says something like this.

Brad: All right, let's take a break right back. All right, Dan, here's Brian Kaylor writing on March 22, at Public Witness — Pete Hegseth's Bible, like his body, is stamped with two Crusader tattoos. So a lot of us have talked about this. I went on PBS and talked about this before Trump was inaugurated the second time. But he has Deus vult — the words Deus vult — on his body. He also has the Jerusalem cross. What Brian is reporting for the first time is that he also has a Bible with those symbols on it. So the Bible he was sworn in on has Deus vult and the Jerusalem cross on it. You can see this in the pictures that Brian has over at Public Witness. The Jerusalem cross, also known as the five-fold cross, served as an emblem of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which was a medieval Crusader state. So Dan, you know, it's like — you've been saying "Crusader army." We've been talking about how he wanted a Christian army that would fight against the Muslims, and only men would be allowed — it's kind of like this medieval vision. But how would we even know he's into that? Dan, it's kind of hard to know what a man's thinking, but I don't know — he put the symbols on his body, and then he was like, yeah, I need that on my Bible too. The phrase Deus vult is Latin for "God wills." It's also associated with the Crusades, supposedly uttered by Pope Urban II in 1095 — it was a chant for Crusaders. This seems like evidence for your thesis. And these symbols are also favored among white nationalists, especially the Jerusalem cross. So there's the crossover appeal, Dan. You get the Crusader callback from medieval Christendom, and you also win over the white nationalists. Brian is reporting this — no one else is reporting it. But it's just further evidence of everything we've talked about today. Dan, this man had to go that far. Do you remember being a young evangelical and being at church, and like, one of the coolest things was if you could get a new Bible with your name on it? You'd leave your Bible in church or in the chapel at camp, and someone's like, Hey, I found your Bible, dude, and it's because your name was on it. Yeah, that was fun. Personalized Bible. Well, Petey here has that — it just happens to be white nationalist and Crusader symbols on the front. So if you think that praying for obliteration and destruction of those who do not deserve mercy is an accident, it seems like it is not. Final comments on this, and then take us into the tax stuff.

Dan: The only comment I have is — I am old enough to remember, in the aftermath of 9/11, when George W. Bush was sort of mobilizing things and so forth, people might remember that the word "Crusade" was used, and it caused this huge firestorm. The notion was walked back, and the idea was, this is not a religious war of Christian America against the Islamic world or whatever. I bring that up because when I say "Crusader," I use it advisedly. It's because of this — as you're saying, it's not a guess, it's not an attribution, it's not just an epithet to level, it's not name-calling to try to discredit somebody who just thinks something different than me. It's a technical application of a term. The guy views himself as a Christian Crusader, and he views America's army as a Christian Crusader army. And I think that's explicit, and it's there. And I think this shows it clearly. And I want folks to stick with because it's going to feel like a weird shift — because we're just talking about Hegseth and all of this stuff — and then I came across an article this week, and I don't know, it struck me strangely. I'm interested in your thoughts. But it was an article that had nothing to do with Pete Hegseth, had nothing to do with Iran. But it was about red states — states controlled by Republicans. And it was reported by Natalie Furtick at Politico. The article was "Trump cuts exacerbate budget fights in red states." Folks want to look that up. And basically it was about GOP-led states that are facing budget shortfalls because of Trump's "one big, beautiful bill," as all of the provisions of that sort of come into place. And people probably know that lots of states link their own tax policies and spending policies to federal policy. So when federal policy changes, their state policies change and so on. And she reported that it was costing some states as much as $450 million in added costs and lost tax revenue, and forcing states to reduce budgets and cut services. And the trick about this was, as I read this — and as you would expect, it was widely recognized as painful and hazardous for residents by GOP legislators in these states, by governors — that this was causing real pain and problems for their constituents and their states. They also recognized that the promised larger tax refunds don't kind of cover that gap. And that's been the logic: one big, beautiful bill, people will get bigger tax refunds and everything will be better. And so it doesn't matter that they don't have these things. People have noted, number one, those tax refunds for most people are not going to cover what they might be losing in other services. But just from a sort of strategic perspective — and I've made this point on this show, and political strategists are starting to make it — a tax refund is nice in April, but people aren't going to feel that in September or October when midterms come around. So if you're in the GOP, they're starting to have worries of like, well, okay, maybe they're going to get an extra grand or twelve hundred bucks or whatever in their tax refund. But what's that going to feel like in October? It's going to be a distant memory, and it's not going to change the fact that, like, they lost their SNAP benefits or their Medicaid eligibility or whatever else. Okay. But here's the trick — the red states keep sticking with the cuts. If somebody looks at this — wow, all of this is so bad, and you recognize this, and you keep talking about this electoral disaster you're coming up to and everything — why do it? You're not required to adopt federal tax cuts into state budgets. There's no federal obligation to do that. You can select what to adopt. And some red states have made carve-outs — for example, a lot of them are not making tips tax-free or overtime; that's one provision some red states aren't adopting. Lots of blue states are just not taking any of these things on board. And Trump has railed against this. So the thing that struck me as I read this article: why do the red states stick with this? Why do this? Like, you see that it's painful. You yourself — red state legislator, red state budget officer, red state governor — you're saying, we don't like this, this is hard, these are hard cuts, this is going to hurt real Americans. So why do it? And then I came across this statement, and it struck me. This is from Idaho state Senator Jim Guthrie. He said: The right answer for a conservative is, yeah, I love tax cuts, I always vote for tax cuts, whatever, that's all great, but still there's got to be some balance to it. But it's that language of like, the right answer is tax cuts, always vote for the tax cuts.

Dan: What struck me about this is you get this dynamic where, for people on the right and the GOP, tax cuts are not policy. They're not a tool in a toolkit that we look at and find to be effective and so we're going to use them. They're an article of faith. And that's exactly how they operate. That's what we hear there. We're going to hurt people. We know it might cost us the election. We legitimately feel bad about this. But hey, you know what? We're conservatives, and so tax cuts are an article of faith. We don't have a choice. The answer is always yes — even when they're self-evidently negative in what they do, they're raising deficits, they're hurting real people. And then there was a budget chair — I'm sorry, I lost my place in my notes. Missouri GOP House Budget Chair said: We're faced with hard decisions. But it is what it is. What struck me about this, and let me try to land this plane and throw it over to you, is this logic of, well, you know, we're just stuck with it. It is what it is. It's the way it is. We have tax cuts. What you gonna do? The trick is that they chose this. It's an easy fix. Just don't link your state budgets to federal tax policy. That's all you have to do. And what struck me about this — when I say it's an article of faith, I mean that very seriously. If we think about this religiously — you and I were talking before the show, and you've spent a lot of time in these conversations, I've spent time in these conversations, a lot of people listening have spent time in these conversations — when one of the reasons why some of us don't believe in maybe the evangelical God that we used to is somebody's like, yeah, God's in control of everything. There's the article of faith. God is in control. You're like, oh, wow, okay. But like, the earthquakes, the tsunamis, the natural disasters — like that seems really bad. You're saying God is — well, yep, that's God. It's hard to understand, may be painful and awful, but that's God. Okay, like, childhood diseases, leukemia, childhood poverty — those are God too? Yep, that's God. Oh, terrible people who benefit — the Hitlers of the world, the Stalins, the awful people who slaughter millions — yep, that's God's will. What's never considered there — when you get a certain articulation of faith — is maybe we need to rethink the question. Or maybe we need to say, wow, okay, maybe we need a better answer than "God's in control of everything." But faith militates against it. When you get a kind of faith that denies reality and cannot be moved and holds on to the truth of something — this is the same logic we see in the GOP. And that's what struck me when they say, you know, well, what are you going to do? It is what it is. Ah, shucks. We're sure sorry to hurt all those people, and this is really bad, and we're losing millions of dollars in our state budget. But, you know, hey — tax cuts. It's an article of faith. So this is what struck me when people ask me sometimes, how does a religious way of thinking — a religious cognitive style, certain ways of approaching the world — impact both what we think of as religion and what we think of as politics? When people say, why would they do this? They think that it's bad. They think it's bad for the election. They think it's bad policy. But they're still choosing to do it. They said the quiet part out loud. The answer is: tax cuts — automatically, always. It is what it is. And so I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on that.

Brad: So this is dogma, I think, is what you're saying. Tax cuts are dogma. And as Jim Guthrie says, the right answer is we always vote for tax cuts, and that's it. There's no consideration there. When you give up critical thinking — when you give up any ability to question something — you've entered dogma or doctrine. You have not entered into something that is a political ideology or a political foundation that, at times, might need to bend or be flexible, or need to be reconsidered and so on. If you're unwilling to reconsider something basically because it's an article of faith, then the religious comparison makes sense to me. This is something, Dan, that I've been thinking about a lot, and I think we'll connect with stuff that folks are thinking about in terms of Iran, in terms of this country, in terms of the Trump administration. And that's this — here's the holdover from the Republican Party from, call it Reagan till now. You can go back further, but just give me Reagan. Okay. The 1980s until now. Dan, taxes are bad. We always vote for tax cuts. When Jim Guthrie or anyone else says, we always vote for tax cuts, that is Reagan orthodoxy. Okay. And what that does is, in some sense, it makes the government smaller. That's what they want to do — just in very basic terms, less taxes means the government can do less things. Less things for healthcare, less things for roads, for infrastructure, for — I don't know — making sure we have enough air traffic controllers so planes don't crash at LaGuardia Airport and people lose their lives. That seems important. Make sure we have enough money for schools and for everything else. Okay, great. So less taxes means less government means less government services, less ability to take care of kids and older folks and everyone else in our communities. But nonetheless, they will tell you, well, that's better. It's better for you to have more money in your pocket than to pay taxes to the bad, big, bad government. Okay. The interesting — and "interesting" is a very benign word here — thing about Trumpian orthodoxy is that it has abandoned everything about Reagan orthodoxy in this sense: for the new idea about conservatives, government is not the problem. It is the answer. You need more government to fix all of the wayward children and the unruly women who need a spanking by daddy so that they will get back in line. So you need more government. You need the government to regulate more things. You need the government to make it such that you have to obey. Okay, the government is going to be menacing your life, your bedroom, your love life, your sex life, everything about your religious life — it has to be regulated by the government, otherwise people get out of line. But this leads to this weird paradox where the government is getting smaller. So Dan, not only is it that we don't want to collect tax money — I think a lot of people are like, should I pay my taxes this year? Because it doesn't seem like a good deal. I'm not sure what I'm paying for anymore. How many folks have been laid off? 300,000 federal workers laid off. How many government services have been cut? How many people have lost health care? The government's getting smaller. The government is losing its ability to do things that it did for its citizens in this country. And yet, the government is also getting bigger. It's getting bigger because the government is taking more liberties with what it can do in your life. Donald Trump and the very few people he has in charge are like, we can do whatever we want. We can — we have full lateral control. And what this leads to, Dan, is something like an autocracy or a monarchy, where the government's really small in terms of the number of people employed by it, working for it, serving in it — if you're not a Christian, get out of the military, if you're transgender, we may not want you here — but it's also promising that it has control over more of your life. And the only way that they can deliver on this model of government is force and coercion and authoritarianism, because they don't have a government that functions.

Brad: And they also have whittled down the workforce to the point where they only have like — well, it's either do this, or we'll just come get you. We'll jail you. We'll detain you. We'll charge you. We'll sue you. I mean, how many people — they're trying to sue Letitia James again. Yeah, that's all that is left, Dan. And so the ability to actually serve the citizens is gone. And I'll shut up here — they don't want to serve you. They don't care about you. There are increasing signs that there's insider trading going on with the Iran announcements Trump is making, which we haven't even talked about today. They're stealing from you. I'm not a Democratic campaign ad person. I kind of wish I was, because here's the ad I would make: they're stealing from you. They're stealing your way of life. They're stealing your health. They're stealing your food, they're stealing your money, and they're giving it to themselves. Period. They're putting your life in danger. They're putting the world in danger. They are attacking other countries, destroying the global economy, making it such that there's an 8% increase on postal services from the USPS as we speak, making it such that your gas is a dollar or two more every time, making it such that your life is worse. They are stealing from you, and they don't care about anything but themselves. That's clear. And then we'll go to CPAC. So maybe one more —

Dan: One point to reiterate, and we've talked about it before — if you want to see the priorities of the government, look not just at what they say they're going to do, but at where the priorities are. So we have a government, as you say, that's shrinking in the sense of trying to serve the population. We don't want to try to help people get health care. We don't want to try to help people who can't find a job. We don't want to — any number of things. But we want lots of money for Iran. The same government that's busy saying we don't have money for anything, we need to shrink — is pestering Congress saying we need more money for the Iran conflict. The same Pete Hegseth — and we circle back around — warmonger Pete Hegseth, and Trump, who has always loved playing with the military and wants his parades. And I think this is all just like a big parade to him. I think all he wants to hear in the daily briefings is how much damage was done and how they have air superiority. You have Trump — the word "superiority," as soon as you say it, he's like, I'm on for that. They want money for that. They want Congress to act for that. They're asking for funds — not to provide health care, not to give SNAP benefits, not to help people in need, not to help the people who voted for them and put them into office, but to kill people across the world in a war that the US started without any clear provocation from Iran. So I think that's the point when we talk about the priorities. But coming back specifically to the article of faith — or dogma, as you say — of the tax cuts. I say this to students too: anytime somebody has the same answer to every problem — doesn't matter what the problem is, doesn't matter what the social issue is, you know ahead of time what their answer is going to be, and it is always the same answer — that's a marker of dogma. That's a marker that somebody is just asserting something as a matter of radical ideology or dogma, and not, hey, we're looking for solutions, or here's an idea that might work, or this worked over here so maybe it'll work over here, or maybe it won't but maybe we should try. It's not anything based on empirical evidence. It's not anything based on discussion. It's not anything based on collaboration or deliberation. It's not anything that recognizes that we are all fallible, and what might seem like good ideas to us, maybe they won't work, maybe somebody else will have a better one. Anytime you have a political party like the GOP where the two answers that are always right for them are deregulation and tax cuts — how do we fix the environment? Deregulation and tax cuts, it'll just magically be fixed. How do we fix the economy? Deregulation and tax cuts. How do we eradicate poverty? Deregulation and tax cuts. What do we do about all the uninsured in America? Deregulation and tax cuts. That's dogma. And it's a deep-seated style of thinking that absolutely dominates across the board in MAGA world and the structures built around it.

Brad: But when you deregulate the economy but you regulate social life and morality, what you're saying is — oh, deregulate the economy so the few can control the economy. So if you deregulate economically, the few rise to the top. This is how you get oligarchy. But then when you regulate socially and morally, the oligarchy — the few — then tell everyone else what is good, what is right, what is moral, what is virtuous. And all of a sudden you have the Secretary of Defense saying, oh, unless you're this religion, you can't be a chaplain in this military — because you're just a therapist and a secular humanist, and that's a bad word. So I just want everyone to see what's at play here. When they say deregulate — which they've been saying since Reagan — it's like: get rid of regulations on us. But then we are going to regulate moral and cultural and religious life on you. Women, you may not be able to vote. You cannot get health care. If you're a trans person, you cannot get reproductive care if you're somebody who wants or needs that. You cannot get basic health care because we just can't afford it. Sorry. Oh, yeah, we do need $100 billion for the war, but yes, we cannot afford health care for you. On and on and on and on — things we've been talking about. All right, let's take a break. We'll come back and finish this and talk about taxes. Be right back.

Brad: Very briefly — Dan, Donald Trump skipped CPAC this year. CPAC is happening, and this may not seem like a big deal, and we're not going to spend a ton of time on it. But just real quick, this is notable because he's basically been a CPAC regular for like a decade. And CPAC is usually a place for the hardcore MAGA folks to gather, to wear all of the kitschy Trumpian American-flagy and weird gear that they've had ready to get out of the closet. And it really usually becomes kind of a who's-who of MAGA and a kind of annual party. And Trump is skipping it. And there's all this footage of people at CPAC — people who are attending CPAC — basically saying, Yeah, I don't agree with Iran, I don't know why we're doing that, or the Republicans are going to get destroyed in the midterms because of Iran and other things. And there's every indication that Trump skipped CPAC because he doesn't want to get heckled over Iran. Could be other things, but it is notable that he's not there. We're almost out of time. We can go to reasons for hope here in a second. But I just wanted to raise this and some of the clips from people that have been saying this stuff, because I do think that this — again, we've been debating on this show, is there a split in MAGA over Iran? Well, you have MAGA people at CPAC — they were willing to spend money and travel to Dallas to attend CPAC — saying openly, oh, yeah, Iran's a problem for us. So again, I know we can go to some of that data. Some folks like — they say there's no split, data says so, and it's like, okay, yeah, I hear you. But how does this change every week? What's happening on the ground? What are feelings at places like core MAGA gathering traditions? What is the mood there? And I think every piece of reporting I've seen from CPAC this year is like: yeah, the mood's a little off, not as many people as I thought would be here, Trump did not come, yeah, I'm worried about Iran, it's not a good thing. I mean, one woman said, yeah, he should send Barron — Barron should probably go if they're going to send boots on the ground. Like, there are people at CPAC worried about Iran. So I'm not sure I buy the idea that, oh, the numbers say there's no issue about Iran for MAGA. I just, I'm just not sure I buy it. But what do you think?

Dan: A couple thoughts. I know that we have to keep it quick here. But one is, you know, the question of that data — every social scientist knows that you sometimes get people who tell you what they think you want to hear, or what they want to be true, when surveyed. So I suspect that one thing that might happen is you get people that, when they're asked, say, I support MAGA, I support Trump, absolutely — they're not going to come out and say, I've got concerns about this, when they're talking to somebody, especially if they see them as part of some liberal elite doing surveys. It's sort of like — I don't know if you and your partner are arguing about something, but your kid does something, you put up the united front, and like, even if maybe you don't, you're not maybe on the same page about exactly what to do about it, but you're going to put forward that united front. I suspect there is some bias in some of that polling data that is showing more unity — or a kind of ideal of unity — among some MAGA people than what they're actually feeling as this goes on. I could be wrong, but I suspect that could be a thing. And just briefly, the other thing about CPAC — I think another reason, or another thing that is revealed about Trump not going, is this: Trump's done. Trump is in this for Trump. He's always been in this for Trump. The language of a third presidential term, all that stuff, has largely disappeared. Nobody's been kind of talking about or floating that the way that they were even a couple years ago. I'm not saying the danger is gone, but even he's not talking that way. He's not trying to build a lasting coalition. He's not trying to build lasting institutions. He's not even trying to build the Republican Party to go past him. He's done. He got what he wanted out of this. And CPAC's not useful to him anymore. I think he doesn't want to go and have to face real questions. But I also think for him, he's got nothing to gain from it anymore. He is the transactional person that he is, and CPAC was good to him for 10 years. It was necessary. Now it's not. So I think that's another dynamic that's at play here.

Brad: All right, let's go to reasons for hope. What do you got?

Dan: I have Democrat Emily Gregory in Florida, who flipped a Florida state house seat. This was notable — made a lot of news, I think, symbolically and realistically. It was a red district in a red state. Trump won the district by 11 points. It's his district — it's the district where Mar-a-Lago is. And this, for a lot of people, felt symbolic and really hopeful about the potential significance of what could happen in the midterms. And also, we've talked for months and months now about the string of wins by Democrats in special elections. But this one, I think, really stung the GOP because of the symbolism of it being Trump's district. And he mailed in his vote — as he also tells everybody not to do mail-in voting.

Brad: Just throw that out there. It's hard — it's hard to, you know — it's hard as an American, I can tell you, to find time to vote when you golf like twice a week. Just hard to find.

Dan: Yeah, like, when are you not at Mar-a-Lago to go vote? He's like, I'm the president, it was too hard to get down there. I'm like, you're down there every weekend golfing. Come on.

Brad: Well, golfing, but Dan, have you ever golfed? I mean, 18 holes is like a four-hour commitment. I mean, come on, give the guy a break. You know, voting is important, but a man needs his time. He needs to be out there with Brett Favre and whatever other washed-up athlete he can find to golf. So, you know, give him a break. Taking a minute to go vote — that's a lot. We didn't talk about this today. I wish we had, and I'm going to try to find ways to talk about this in the coming week. But there are some really important lawsuits that were decided this week against Meta and Google, basically about addiction to social media. And this is big to me. I'm not going to lie — and again, I'm going to try to find ways to talk about this here. But this was a glimmer of hope for me against big tech and against the coming AI monsters and all of that. You can read about this, but Meta lost, Google lost in some of these lawsuits. And one of these was brought by a young person who was like, You created something that is addictive. And I really am going to dig into this on the show over the next six months. But I'm really interested in the fact that we can do everything we can to make this society better, and I think we're all focused on MAGA and we're all focused on Trump and all that, and that makes sense. But I'm increasingly convinced, Dan, that we're just not going to get anywhere until we regulate social media and we regulate AI. And some of that is like — 15-year-olds, and you're like, oh yeah, these kids walking around with phones in their hand, yeah. But have you visited your mom and your grandma recently? Because they have been addled by the algorithm. And so that's the thing. All right, we'll get into that, I promise. Next week we have our special bonus episode — we're going to be recording on March 31, 7:15pm Eastern. If you're a subscriber, please check it out and come hang out with us. We're going to be talking about Into the Manosphere, the new documentary on Netflix. So want to see you, want to answer questions, want to hang out. If you're a subscriber, please mark it on your calendar and come say hi. If you're not a subscriber, today's a great chance to do that — $3.65 a month. We just can't do this show without you. If you're somebody who enjoys what we do, if you enjoy the fact that we're here three and four times a week, the fact that we are doing everything we can to cover a bunch of stuff that others don't, or that we get to first before the Huffington Post and Daily Beast talk about it — please consider subscribing or sending us some love on PayPal or Venmo at StraightWhiteJC. You can donate. You can look in our show notes, you can look at our website. We really appreciate everybody who's done that. And want to say thank you, Kyle — I want to say thank you to you personally, and say: I see you, and I'm just so grateful for you. Other than that, Dan has office hours next week too, so if you're a subscriber, that's there. And where can you learn about that? You're like, man, a lot of stuff going on, Brad. I'm like, yeah, because we have a newsletter you should subscribe to. So go do that. We send that out every Sunday. We're on Substack, sending out stuff all week. If you have a reader in your life who doesn't do podcasts, send them to our Substack. If you have a YouTube person, send them to our YouTube. We love you all. Thanks for being here. Hope to see a bunch of you next week. And we're back next week with great content about refugee resettlement, and a new series we have — It's in the Code, the weekly roundup, and the Sunday interview is coming with Jay Stringer on his new book, Desire. And it's a chance for me, Dan, to not talk about Christian nationalism, but to talk about the meaning of life — which, when you're sitting in a hotel room at 4:49am, seems important. All right, y'all, catch you next time. Thanks, Brad.