Weekly Roundup: Project 2025 in Action: The Indictment of the SPLC

Brad Onishi: The Trump administration is indicting the group that historically helped to bring down the KKK. It is doing so using a framework from Project 2025, an openly Christian nationalist document. And the larger goal is to say that any group within the United States that opposes MAGA and Trump — the regime, the unbound executive — well, they will be labeled a domestic terrorist organization, and they will be punished on that basis. Welcome to Straight White American Jesus. This is the Weekly Roundup. I'm Brad Onishi, author of American Caesar, founder of Axis Mundi Media. Today here with my co-host.

Dan Miller: I'm Dan Miller, and I am Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College. Glad to be with you as always — losing my mind, as I think a lot of people are, as we look at what is going on in the world this week.

Brad: We're going to get into the indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and what that means going forward for the persecution of political and nonprofit groups that the Trump regime does not like. We'll then go to the redistricting story out of Virginia and the various dimensions of what's at play there, complete with some commentary from James Talarico, the Senate candidate in Texas. Finally, we'll get to Palantir's post on Twitter recently that really raised eyebrows for folks who are not necessarily familiar with Palantir, and what I would call a tech fascist outlook on Western Civilization. We'll touch on that, explain why those folks in the tech world are finding common cause with Christian nationalists and Christian supremacists. Lots to cover. Let's go.

Brad: This week, Dan, the Southern Poverty Law Center was indicted by Trump's DOJ, and the charges are a little confusing. I'm going to play for you a clip of Todd Blanche, who took the place of Pam Bondi at the DOJ, explaining to a reporter what these are all about.

Todd Blanche [Clip]: I'm not alleging it. The grand jury returned an indictment that says that. And so what the investigation found, according to the indictment that was returned today, is that they were paying — so Southern Poverty Law Center is raising money, asking folks to give them money to dismantle racism, and over a very long period of time, they were using some of the money they raised from donors to pay to — they call them field — you know, basically informants — for information, for access, to just pay them for certain things, to do certain things.

Brad: So what we have here, Dan, is a situation where the Southern Poverty Law Center was paying people to get them access to white supremacist organizations like the KKK, and according to Trump's DOJ, that's a crime. I've got more clips to play, but give us a summary so that there's some chance we might understand what this indictment is about, and in a minute we're going to link it to Project 2025 and Project Esther and the Christian nationalist dimensions of the whole ordeal.

Dan: Yeah. So the allegation, which comes back as an indictment — they basically alleged that the Southern Poverty Law Center, SPLC, defrauded donors by using millions of dollars to get information from paid informants inside extremist groups. I understand it's a program that no longer functions. I read that it was now defunct. I don't know sort of how long that is, and that's what we just heard Blanche talking about. Prosecutors apparently also alleged that some of that money was used by extremists to commit crimes, but they didn't provide any details about that. That's just a claim, not something that they've actually substantiated. I think that's important.

Another statement from Blanche, in line with what we saw, said that they were not dismantling these groups, that they were manufacturing the extremism that they purport to expose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred. So the idea, I think, that they're trying to pitch to everybody is that the SPLC was essentially — it's like they were donating to these organizations at the same time that they're busy supposedly highlighting the evil things that they do and so forth. So they now face charges of wire fraud, bank fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering, a whole bunch of different things.

That's the presentation. The nitty-gritty, as I understand it reading legal experts and things like that, is a little bit different. Most legal experts are pretty skeptical of this. We know — you've already alluded to this, we'll talk about it more — but conservatives, especially in the MAGA regime, have long hated the SPLC. They view them as a "woke" organization. They've labeled them as extremist. Some people have called them a terrorist organization. They really, really hate them. It's another case, clearly, of the Trump administration targeting a political foe.

Why do I say that? Here are some facts that Blanche is not going to say in his press conference. Often the SPLC says the information they would gain from these informants was passed on to law enforcement. Until recently, under this administration, there was a pretty tight relationship between the FBI, for example, and the SPLC, who would pass on information about right-wing extremist groups and white hate groups and so forth. Under the Trump regime, they've kind of broken that off, and so they've sort of created this opposition that wasn't there before.

I think the bigger thing is that legal experts have also noted that what's being described here is exactly what law enforcement agencies do all the time. They pay informants or otherwise incentivize informants within organizations to give them information, to give them access, to get them to do certain things — all the stuff that Blanche just listed in the press conference. And one legal expert said this is grandstanding on the part of the Trump administration. This is them identifying a group that they hate, that they view as opposed to conservatives. And I think you have some clips to this effect — they view this as a leftist, anti-conservative, anti-MAGA organization, so they're targeting them. And essentially, this is an abuse of the criminal law, trying to take it and apply it to this. I think most observers think this is not going to amount to anything. Getting an indictment is one thing; successfully prosecuting an organization, especially for doing exactly what law enforcement does, is another.

Brad: Sorry, go ahead.

Dan: I think that's the big takeaway here — they're targeting this organization. I have more we could say, maybe after the clips, about why we think it's targeting, and why it is that this is a weaponization, and why the right really, really opposes the SPLC and what they do so much.

Brad: Sorry, I got trigger-happy with my clip. Let me play a clip that backs up everything you just said.

[Clip]: Heard this very laughable claim from the left, where the SPLC lies politically — that white supremacy is the greatest threat to our republic. I mean, we've heard this for so long. They've been pounding this into the identity of this country to make this country feel as though it is inherently racist, that it is bad, because they want to, I think, destroy the country from within. But actually, the truth is that allegations of white supremacy, I think, are being largely manufactured to keep the people of this country quiet as their country and their culture is decimated by so many different things that we're doing in regards to the open borders in this country. And we're changing this country radically and culturally very fast, in a way that makes Americans feel uncomfortable, and then you label everybody a white supremacist if they complain about it. It's going to make people shut up and just accept something very bad happening to them.

Todd Blanche [Clip]:Yes, and look — this is a great example of that, because you have conservatives in this country who are afraid to speak their minds, afraid that if they're nominated for a judgeship, for example, that organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center will come out attacking them simply for their beliefs. And so you have an effort — a successful effort, at times — to muzzle and to keep quiet conservatives.

Brad: Let's just stop there. Dan, you know, going off of everything you just said, there is this sense that the Southern Poverty Law Center — I was saying it backwards earlier, my dyslexia strikes again — but the Southern Poverty Law Center is somehow — let me run this by you and you tell me if this sounds right. Joyce Vance says the Justice Department wants us to believe that one of the nation's leading civil rights groups, the people who broke the Klan and continue to expose the white supremacist groups that crop up in its wake, is actually supporting racism and domestic terror. So that's number one.

Number two, the idea is that the Southern Poverty Law Center is propping up the KKK — giving the KKK money so that there is racism in the country that the Southern Poverty Law Center can say, "Hey, everybody, look — racism." And according to Todd Blanche in the clip we just saw, that means that anytime a judge or a conservative is nominated to a place of leadership, well, look out — here comes the Southern Poverty Law Center claiming racism again. And this is the idea that we have in a statement: Blanche said that the Southern Poverty Law Center is, quote, "manufacturing racism to justify its existence."

I just want to say one more thing and I'll throw it back to you: the SPLC is the group that helped break the Klan. They had people inside the Klan. They had something called the Klan Watch. They were informants, they were spies, they helped to destroy the Klan in years past. Like, this is a resource that everyone from researchers to lawyers to people bringing lawsuits to nonprofit groups rely on to expose white supremacy and racism and prejudice. They are folks who profile white supremacist pastors. They have — if you can find their profiles of people like Doug Wilson. So to me, these attacks are clearly like, we don't like the fact that you are rightly calling out people we've nominated, people who are leaders, people who are public officials, as white supremacists, as white Christian nationalists, as people who support hate speech in the form of saying that gay people should be stoned to death or something else.

I want to get to the Project 2025 dimensions. But what else do you feel like we need to get out here before we go forward?

Dan: Just a couple of things. So first of all, they say the SPLC belongs on the left, that they're politically organized on the left. Here's the thing: the reason why people on the right think that the SPLC is on the left is because the right has become more and more radical in recent years, and more and more openly embracing of white supremacism and white nationalism and so forth. So when they see the Southern Poverty Law Center come out against white supremacy, they see themselves as the targets. That's maybe the first thing to notice. And in that clip we just played, notice that there's no effort there to say that America isn't white supremacist, or that conservatives aren't white supremacist. It's sort of like, "How dare they accuse us of this."

Number two: what they're criticizing is what some people would call free speech. You nominate somebody for a position, and critics come out and say, "Hey, do you know that they said this and did this, and we don't like them for this reason and that reason." And all of a sudden they're clutching their pearls about how they're muzzling conservatives. Nope. You can say whatever you want. You can be whoever you want, and they get to say what the facts are about your life and so forth. It's called free speech. It's called fact-checking. It's called vetting. It's called any number of different things. So the people who like to decry so-called cancel culture are trying to pull the ultimate card to cancel the SPLC here.

But I think what it really shows to me is the normalization of how radicalized contemporary conservatives are — that they can't even pretend to rally around the cause of rooting out white supremacy. They have to be like, "No — white supremacy, you say? You're attacking American history." It's like they acknowledge that it's central to American history. We just don't want to talk about it anymore. I think that's really significant, because it shows how radicalized contemporary American conservatism and the MAGA movement really are.

Brad: The National Review's Dan McLaughlin described the indictment as, quote, "richly deserved humiliation and comeuppance for one of the most toxic organizations in American politics," and quote, "objectively hilarious." Once again, Dan, there's this sense that the goal is to humiliate, the goal is to attack enemies. The goal is not to root out actual crime or actual fraud or anything else. Like, the National Review is basically like, oh, this is great — look how humiliated they are. Oh, look, those smart-mouth people are getting their comeuppance. Yay. It's not about justice. It's not about rectifying the sins of our past. It's not about making sure that all Americans have better lives.

The GOP never treads in those waters. It is never about making your life better, making your kids more healthy, about giving you more opportunity, putting more money in your bank account. It's always just: we're going to steal from you while we distract you with resentment politics, grievance, revenge fantasies, and the promise to bully and humiliate anyone who's ever stood against us. So that's our political party at the moment. We've traced it for ten years, but it's fully here now.

The point I want to make just before we move on from this story is that we have talked in several episodes about how the Trump administration's efforts to attack domestic groups, nonprofits, and political organizations — to label them as Antifa, to label them as terrorist organizations, domestic terror organizations — it comes from a memorandum that was released last year, and that's NSPM-7. And Barry Trachtenberg, writing on Substack, puts it this way: the memorandum casts a wide net by identifying a wide swath of previously permitted criticisms of American policy, capitalism, Christian nationalism, and fascism as potential threats to US security. This language reveals the government's effort to construct a political category of terrorism so broad that it can encompass nearly any form of progressive or left-aligned civil society work.

This was something that came out of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and the attempt to label anybody who said anything about that as Antifa, and the whole notion that it was an organized network of domestic terrorists.

But what Trachtenberg points out — and what we've pointed out twice before on this show in episodes, and which somebody in our Discord community, Dawson, doggedly points out in their research — is that this memorandum about attacking Antifa and domestic groups as domestic terrorists was foreshadowed in Project Esther. Now if you don't remember Project Esther: Project Esther was the addendum to Project 2025. Project Esther is focused on anti-Semitism, and it basically says anyone who criticizes Israel should be labeled a domestic terrorist group. The approach is that any group that says they're not standing with the United States in support of Israel is anti-Semitic and they're part of a Hamas terrorist network, and therefore they should be arrested, punished, put in jail, and so on and so forth.

What has happened in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk is the framework outlined in Project Esther — which is really an addendum to Project 2025 — has been aimed at any organization that threatens the Trump regime, that criticizes MAGA and Trump on the basis of things like white supremacy, xenophobia, hate speech, Christian nationalism, et cetera.

So what I see in everything about this indictment, if we break it down to its clearest parts: the Trump administration is indicting the group that historically helped to bring down the KKK. It is doing so using a framework from Project 2025, an openly Christian nationalist document. And the larger goal is to say that any group within the United States that opposes MAGA and Trump — the regime, the unbound executive — will be labeled a domestic terrorist organization and punished on that basis.

And you're like, "Well, that seems crazy, Brad." Well, do you remember just a couple of weeks ago when Trump said that now that Iran has been dealt with, the only folks left that we need to get are the Democratic Party and the American Left — basically half the country? He said it himself.

So I don't want to miss the religious and Christian nationalist dimensions of the SPLC indictment — dyslexia again — and the ways that it follows along a playbook that was given to the Trump administration from the Heritage Foundation in and through Project 2025. Thoughts on this one, Dan.

Dan: I think all that's accurate, and the kind of expanding of these definitions of a national security concern to cover really any kind of speech, any kind of activity, any kind of thing that is critical of the administration — I think it'll be interesting watching as we go forward with this. People like to make a big deal about getting an indictment. I think anybody who knows anything about the American legal system knows that what's presented to grand juries is very limited. It's a low burden of proof. There's no cross-examination and things like that. So getting an indictment is one thing; supporting it in court is another.

And so it'll be interesting to watch this. I don't think this is going to go anywhere. I wouldn't be surprised if the government actually drops this, because I think at some point some judge somewhere is going to say: if you win on this, you might be cutting the legs out from under law enforcement. You might make it so law enforcement is not allowed to do these things. If you're really going to push this and argue it, it's only going to be a matter of time before somebody says, "Hey, you're using taxpayer dollars to support criminal organizations. How can you do that?" And they may pull the thing because they can't take that tool away from every law enforcement agency there is, who put people undercover, who participate in these organizations. Yes, there are crimes committed while they are there — they're not actively doing it, but they're pretending to be part of the organization, or getting information, all those things.

I think it'll be interesting to see how much of this is red meat for the MAGA crowd, the gloating — the "look what we did" — versus any lasting impact. One last piece of this that other people have noted: I don't think this is going to hurt the SPLC in any way. I imagine that their fundraising is going to skyrocket in the near term. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a defense fund that more than covers the cost of this. I think it's going to make them more and more visible. I think it's actually going to aid their work in the long term. I think this is going to wind up being another short-term win for the Trump administration — they can show that we're going after the enemies of MAGA, whatever — but I think long term, this is going to prove to be another really poorly calculated move on the part of the Trump administration. Strategically, I think it was a real stretch, and that's what we're going to see play out long term.

Brad: You're already seeing so many organizations come out in support of the SPLC. And I agree. One of the ways to interpret this is — as you say, getting an indictment is one thing — one of the ways I've been interpreting Trump is that he bullies, and if he wins, he wins. And if you back down, he's going to try to humiliate you and destroy you. If you don't, and it takes longer than he thought, and it's a little more complicated than he wished, and it requires strategy and implementation and nuance and a little negotiation — he just finds someone else to bully. He goes somewhere else.

We saw this with the universities he tried to bully. He tried to bully Harvard. Harvard didn't back down. He tried to bully Columbia. Columbia did — I mean, that's a really reductive telling of those histories, but there are universities that really said, "No, we're not going to back down," and the courts in the end defended them, stood up for them, and they came out okay. Others just gave in immediately. Well, there you go — you're trampled on now.

Dan: Right. You had states that did the same thing — the law firms. Everybody remembers him coming for the law firms, and the law firms that gave in to him and donated however many thousands of hours of pro bono work and all that stuff, versus the law firms that fought. And we're starting to see that pattern where those who stand up to Trump, they win in the long term. He doesn't have the staying power to stay with it. As you say, he's not playing 3D chess — he's playing checkers. When people don't just back down, we see it internationally, we see it with Iran, we see it with the trade war, we see it over and over and over again. I think that's the playbook that's emerging, and I think that's what we're going to see here. The SPLC is not going to back down. They're going to fight this. I think they're going to be successful fighting it. It's going to be another case of Trump looking like the playground bully who, when he gets punched back, just moves on to the next target. And the problem is his power is diminishing pretty regularly at this point, with humiliation after humiliation.

Brad: Just one more comment on this. I just want to remind everybody — if you think this is not the playbook, if you think any of this is exaggeration — this is an administration that wanted to charge Renee Good's wife after they shot and killed her in a car. It's an administration that called Alex Pretty a domestic terrorist. I mean, they shot citizens and then said they were the terrorists.

If you want to know what they're trying to do with the Southern Poverty Law Center — an organization, not an individual — it's very clear to me what they're doing. They shot an American citizen and then got on TV and said, "That's a terrorist. That's why they got shot." That's what they want to do to anyone who stands up to them. This is not the last time it's going to happen. We're going to see ICE and DHS do this in another city. We're going to see them try to do this to another university or another nonprofit. And Minnesota — the Twin Cities — stood up and said, "Keep coming and give it a shot. We're not backing down." Other states and universities have done the same, and when you do that, you realize: there's so many of us, and they are trying to fight on all of these fronts. They've got JD flying to Pakistan — oh, JD's back, never mind, he didn't go. They've got Greg Bovino fired, and now he's upset. Oh, look, Pam Bondi is gone. Oh, look, Kash Patel is in a lawsuit because they say he's drunk all the time at work. They are trying to cover too many bases. And so when you give in, you're playing right into their hands. When you don't, you realize: we have power, we have a chance here to not give into this administration. All right, let's take a break, come back, talk about the Virginia redistricting and why it matters, and then we'll go to Palantir and tech fascism. Just a great Friday. We'll be right back.

Brad: All right. Dan, redistricting passes in Virginia. This may seem like a minor story or a major story — I don't know how you feel about it. I have some thoughts about why I think it's important and what it means, but I'll let you take the first crack. What's going on with Virginia and what is the importance?

Dan: A little bit of background, and I do think it's important. Virginia voters did approve a redistricting measure that would shift up to four House districts away from the GOP in Virginia. Now, as we speak, it's on hold — a state judge blocked the certification of the results, and there's been some complications there. The Virginia Supreme Court had ruled that the state could move forward with the vote, but didn't rule on the underlying legal issues, and so we're waiting for all of that to be sorted out. I think most observers think that eventually this will go forward.

As people know, there's been this redistricting war. Red states started it. Blue states responded. All of those state-by-state actions have been challenged in court. None of them have been blocked so far. And the two that came before the Supreme Court — in Texas and California — SCOTUS declined to block either one of those. I think most people think that this will go forward.

So let's say that it stands — and this is why I think it's significant. It's the latest move in a battle that Trump started. He very publicly, openly, explicitly urged GOP-controlled states to undertake mid-decade redistricting — in other words, to not wait until the end of the decade, but to do it now, so we can have a better chance of holding the House for the midterms. I don't know if he thought the blue states wouldn't respond or exactly what happened, but everybody knows that California in particular responded, and so you've had this knock-on effect.

The long and short of it is this: because of Virginia, Trump's redistricting war appears to have backfired. Republicans now — as the count stands — will be favored in fewer House races than if the redistricting battles had never taken place. We also know that Florida is looking at this, and DeSantis says that they're going to do redistricting, but a lot of GOP operatives and politicians are really nervous about that, because there are things in the Florida constitution that make that difficult. And a lot of the GOP, at this point, are saying: we need to stop. This has backfired. This has turned into more of a liability in a midterm cycle where we were already facing significant headwinds.

If the situation with Iran wasn't going on, if the economy wasn't going the way that it was, if you didn't have the redistricting — Republicans would still be at a disadvantage, just because the party in power usually struggles in midterm elections. You add all those things on, and this has become yet another significant issue.

So I think it's really significant for a number of reasons. The GOP started it. I wish gerrymandering wasn't a thing. I think it's ridiculous. I think it's abhorrent. But the GOP has used this strategy for a long time, and in my view, Democrats finally had to respond in kind — and have. And this is another example, I think, of a policy and a plan that Trump had — trying to bully things, trying to take an election instead of having to win one — that appears right now to be backfiring. And predictably, Trump said that it was a rigged election. I don't know if anybody's even listening to that anymore. At this point, I think Trump just sounds like the boy who cried wolf. I think people just yawn and move on. Democrats have apparently come out on top in the redistricting wars.

Brad: I think this is a moment to comment on what we need from what would be an opposition party, and in many cases doesn't feel like one — especially given the leadership of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. But I think both you and I, if we sat here over a cup of tea and somebody said "gerrymandering," we would probably say, "Yeah, gerrymandering bad. Don't gerrymander. Bad. We need a system where votes count as they should. We don't need to be drawing these weird districts that look like misshapen — you know, somebody spilled water on a glass table — and oh, look, that's the House district."

Dan: Rorschach test, right? Yeah.

Brad: Yeah. Jackson Pollock, whatever. And that's bad. But Brian Beutler had a good take this week that I think makes sense to me, which is: this is one of those instances where Democrats realize that unless they do something that feels not as it should be — fighting in a way where, yes, our hands are dirty, yes, we're doing things that are not ideal for any functioning democracy — but they did them in California, we can talk about Illinois, today we're talking about Virginia, we can talk about New York. This is what we have to have in this moment.

And I think someone like AOC has voiced this really well — you can't give up this fight. You have to fight to the point that — and Brian Beutler said this — Republicans relearn the lesson of why gerrymandering is bad. Like, Republicans have played this game for how many years: we're going to play dirty, we're going to play tricky, we're going to play in ways that undermine democracy. From going back to Newt Gingrich and the new millennium, all the way to the Tea Party and the absolute blockade of Obama, to Mitch McConnell, and now the Trump administration in its second iteration — it's basically like, every time there's a chance to undermine process, undermine democracy, undermine good faith, we'll do it. But then when you do it to them, Democrats are going to be like, "Oh, I thought you guys liked democracy."

Dan: And all these — the other language that they use when Democrats do it, when they're the ones who invented the game, yeah.

Brad: So you have to destroy them on the front of electoral politics. You have to show them that, actually, why don't we just have a situation where these things are drawn fairly by an independent commission, and the party with the best ideas and the best platform will win. How about that? Here's James Talarico saying that very thing a couple of months ago on Fox News. You ready?

James Talarico [Clip]: Change the rules for the second half so they can win the game? All of us would be throwing food at the TV if that happened. We should not accept cheating in our politics. We don't accept cheating in our relationships. We shouldn't accept cheating in our elections.

Fox News Host [Clip]: You've done the same thing as us, and we're going to, by the way, if you do it, we're going to ratchet it up even more—

James Talarico [Clip]: My party has never gerrymandered in the middle of the decade at the request of the President of the United States. Nor would we. The only way this is going to happen in blue states is if Texas executes this power grab. You mentioned Massachusetts — do you know the party of the governor that signed that map into law? He was a Republican. It was a Republican governor that signed that map into law. So I just want to be clear with our facts and not muddy the waters. All of us — whether we're Democrats, independents, or Republicans — we should stand up to politicians who don't want to face accountability at the ballot box. That's exactly what's happening here. And I ask you: if Republican policies are popular, why do they need to redraw these maps? Why can't they just run on their policies?

Fox News Host [Clip]:  I'm getting wrapped on time. I'm enjoying this conversation. I want to let it go on and—

Dan: Yeah, he's enjoying the conversation. You can see how much he's enjoying the conversation.

Brad: If Republicans are so popular, why don't they just run in a race that is fair? You know what, I've got it in my earpiece here — we wait a minute, we've got a new winner: Best in Show.

Dan: Yeah, we're gonna have to go to that clip now — like you're on a date that's not going well. You're like, "Oh, just gotta — it's on silent, I just got a call, I'm gonna go take this."

Brad: I have to go to the bathroom — yep — and just start sprinting.

Dan: Crawl out the window.

Brad: I always told my students — I was like, let's go over the three different words: imminent, eminent, and immanent. And we would go over it. I'd be like, "Eminent" — hella powerful. "Imminent" — hella soon. "Immanent" — hella close. That's how I did the three. And then I was like, look — if you go on a date with somebody and it's like the third date and you think you like them, you need to ask them a sentence that puts them in a situation where they need to use the word "imminent" correctly. And if they get it wrong, you just say, "Excuse me, I have to go to the bathroom, I have explosive diarrhea," and then you just never come back. That's how you know that's not your life partner.

Dan: You do that with lots of things — like "tenant" and "tenet," and, you know, all different kinds of words. Yeah, yeah. There we go.

Brad: All right. None of you paid for this, but I'm giving it to you anyway.

Dan: I'm just going to put it out there — our next live thing could be a dating advice show, because clearly we're the two experts on these things.

Brad: Yes, this is really going to take us viral. Netflix will call with a deal soon if we start giving out dating advice. Back to Talarico, Dan. He basically says: look, you are now complaining that we're doing the thing you're doing, and you're just hurt because you lost. And he basically says, we should not accept cheating in any way. And I think what the Virginia thing shows is something you've already said — Trump's losing something he thought was a slam dunk. He's like, "Oh, we got extra seats in Texas, tell Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick to get on it. Democrats aren't going to do a damn thing. This is a way for me to get ahead." What happens? California, Virginia, New York — they're all like, "No, we're not having that." And now it's sort of: what's the recourse? What are they going to do?

And if you listen to redistricting experts and people on the ground who do have voter data, they're like, there's going to be districts that were like Trump plus eleven that are reshuffled into Trump plus three. And Trump plus three is not safe, even in places like Nebraska or Georgia or wherever. So if you do this in Florida, if you do this in Texas, you may not come out with the outcome you're thinking. Further thoughts on Virginia redistricting, and then we can go to Palantir and tech fascism.

Dan: I will, just as a general rule, point out as well — I think this is also, you know, this is dirty, this is not ideal, this is not what anybody thinks a functioning democracy should be. But there have been red states that refused to do this. There have been blue states that refused to do this. And so there have been states who, at the urging of Trump, stood up to him and said no. And there have been blue states where they said, "We're not going to do this." So I think it was necessary, but I also — as contradictory as that may seem — I view it as a sign of hope that you also have states that chose not to go down that path. That gives me some hope for the future, that this doesn't have to be the only way that American democracy works.

Brad: All right. Before we go to tech fascism, let's just combine our first two segments together into a nice little bow. In the first part of this episode, we talked about the Southern Poverty Law Center and the claim by Todd Blanche that they are manufacturing racism in order to exist. Okay. Racism is a black flag operation. I'm just gonna start a nonprofit, get in there with some friends, put it on the board, figure out how to manufacture racism, and then rake in the dollars. Okay, that's number one.

Number two is something that goes along with the gerrymandering situation, which is that when you gerrymander, you get weaker candidates winning because they don't have to face a fair fight. So someone like Mike Johnson — if you look at the history of Mike Johnson in Congress or in his state legislature in Louisiana — there was an election or two where he ran unopposed. Oftentimes you're going to see people like Marjorie Taylor Greene get into Congress because her district is drawn in a certain way. There's no good Democratic candidate. Some of this is on the Democratic Party needing to run more candidates and good candidates everywhere — but that's for another day.

But you will get people in Congress like Andy Ogles, who talks like this. And I just — this is for you, Todd Blanche, if you think that the Southern Poverty Law Center needs to manufacture the racism, this one's for you. Let's tee it up. You ready?

Andy Ogles [Clip]: We're not a melting pot. This is not some giant fondue pot. I like fondue, right? But that's not what America is.

Brad: "I like fondue." Good one. I'd put that on a shirt. Oh, "I like fondue." Andy Ogles. All right. Good one, Andy. Do you know how many times Andy has had fondue, do you think, Dan?

Dan: Tally mark whatever number of times you've ever had it, yeah.

Brad: Yeah. Okay.

Andy Ogles [Clip]: And so — understand what he was trying to say, but the delivery, I think, and ultimately his misunderstanding of who we are as a people — if you want to be an American, you've got to earn it. You've got to be part of our culture. You've got to own and be a part of our heritage. You have to want to build this country in the same way our Founding Fathers did. And so if you're building temples or mosques and you're undermining Christianity, you're not assimilating.

Brad: I'm getting it in my earpiece — Todd Blanche called in. He's saying Andy Ogles might be being paid by the Southern Poverty Law Center. That's the only way he could be that racist. I'm getting it in my earpiece: "Andy Ogles paid $500,000 last year by various nonprofits, hoping that as a congressman he would peddle racism so that they could rake in the money." Yep. Okay. There it is. Reactions to Andy Ogles, Dan, in light of the SPLC indictment or the gerrymandering thing and people like him getting into Congress?

Dan: Just going to say: the mainstreaming of the radicalization. And I am not the person — I think everybody who follows what we do, or reads what I write, or has ever heard me talk — I'm not going to be like, "Oh, American conservatives were never racist before." Yes, of course they were. Race has always been a constituent part of the political life of this country. But there was a time when those were the quiet parts. Those were the times when you had the dog whistles, and you pretended not to say that, and you used carefully coded language and so on.

And it's just a prime example of the mainstreaming of it. It's basically like: yeah, if you want to be an American, you don't just get to be an American. You've got to earn it. You've got to be Christian, and you've got to be white. And that's what it means. Otherwise, we're just a messy fondue pot and you can't have that. That's the mainstreaming of the radical positions. That is why, when something like the Southern Poverty Law Center comes out and says "hey, white supremacy" — that's why actual candidates and Congress members on the right see themselves in that statement. It illustrates it perfectly. And the idea that this is all made up by the SPLC is completely laughable and ludicrous.

Brad: First of all, Andy Ogles — you like fondue? Well, I say to you: fondUE, Andy Ogles. Okay, that's number one.

Dan: The T-shirt ideas just roll off the show.

Brad: All right. The second thing is: just when racists like him talk about "you've got to be part of our culture" — it's like, all right, Andy, whose culture is that? Because you don't talk like me, and I don't talk like you. This country is 250 years old. You've been talking about Founding Fathers, man — there's been a lot of people coming and going since then. What does "our culture" mean? You don't get to define our culture. It's not your country. It's our country. There's 340 million of us. And yeah, there's a Mayflower Society and a Mayflower Compact, and that's great. But there's also so many people that have been in what is this country for so long — people who were enslaved, Africans, a third of whom were Muslim; the people that built the railroads, a lot of whom were Chinese and Japanese and Buddhist; there have been Jewish folks, Italian folks, South Asian folks. You don't get to just say, "Well, you've got to be part of our culture." What does that even mean, dude?

Because I bet we don't eat the same food at night. You seem to be eating a lot of fondue. I'm staying away from dairy. Okay, Andy. But this idea that there's one monoculture is such a wet dream of the American right, and it's why they don't like it when the Southern Poverty Law Center is on the attack and exposing them. I'll shut up. I just wanted to play this clip so that anybody who thinks about the "manufacturing" idea — and the fact that there's a need for leftist nonprofit groups to add kindling to the racist fires in this country — they're doing just fine on their own without it.

Dan: I will also point out — Ogles does not appear to have been muzzled. Remember that claim, the SPLC muzzling conservatives? He seems to open his mouth and have plenty of stuff spill out. He doesn't seem to be muzzled by the all-powerful leftists at the SPLC the way that is being alleged by Todd Blanche.

Brad: Let me see who he's talking to in this clip. Oh, it's Benny Johnson. Remember Benny Johnson? He spoke at Charlie Kirk's memorial. So every time they tell you about Antifa and a growing network of people who are trying to silence everyone and do domestic terrorism — the guy who spoke at Charlie Kirk's memorial just interviewed the representative who said that unless you're a Christian, and if you're building a mosque or a temple, you can't be American and you're not assimilating. So keep that in mind about what they really want and who they really are. Be right back.

Brad: Okay, Dan, let's talk about Palantir. Palantir raised some eyebrows last week because they posted a kind of 22-point summary of the book The Technological Republic by Alex Karp, the CEO, and his co-writer Nicholas Zamiska, who Karp has said openly — Karp has said in interviews that he's like, "90% of the book came from me. Zamiska just kind of made it — he wrote it down, he smoothed out some of the sentences." So if you ever write a book together, Dan, I hope we go in interviews and you're like, "You know, 90% of this was me. Onishi was in there, kind of messing around with some syntax, but it was really me who had the genius to put this together."

Dan: It's an interesting collaboration, right?

Brad: If you're not familiar, Palantir is the surveillance company with hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts with the military and the US government. It was founded by Peter Thiel, among others, and he chose his law school friend Alex Karp to be its CEO. Alex Karp likes to play the milquetoast centrist Democrat — at least, he used to, back in the Biden era and before. He often played the part of somebody who — his mother's Black, his father is Jewish — "I came from a communist household. Lefty politics through and through."

Dan: A regular fondue party.

Brad: Yeah, I love that. You know, "We had fondue a lot at home, all kinds of European—" Okay. And so he often said that he donated to the Biden campaign in 2020 and he was the antithesis of Peter Thiel. But to me — and the reason I'm so fired up about this is I write about this at length in American Caesar, my new book, I had to read so much of his writing and his words and his interviews — so there's a 22-point summary of The Technological Republic on Twitter, and I'm going to give you three points, Dan, and we can discuss. Okay.

Point 20: "The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elites' intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim."

Now, Karp has made an alliance with what I would call Western Christian supremacists. I talk about civilizational populism a lot on this show. Karp is a Western civilizational populist. He's arguing that the West is superior to all other cultures. And what he says in The Technological Republic is that we need to bring back religious orthodoxies, and we need to get rid of things like pluralism. So when he says here that "the pervasive intolerance of religious belief must be resisted" — that works one way. We need to bring back Christian civilizational rhetoric, the kind of rhetoric that JD Vance has always given us. Andy Ogles is out here saying things that I think Karp was like, "Sure, he can talk." Doug Wilson. Everyone needs to go back to hearth and home, get back to the place where there's a Little House on the Prairie, women in long dresses, men telling everyone what to do. But if you have a mosque or a temple, as Andy Ogles just said, well, you might be out of luck, because that's not Western.

So the intolerance of religious belief goes one way. I can show you from Karp's writing how he does this. Karp is somebody who — if you read The Technological Republic from beginning to end — quotes Roger Kimball, the right-wing critic and author who encourages Americans to "take heart in the nobility of their way of life." Karp calls the American left in this book a "caged animal unable to offer an affirmative vision of a virtuous or moral life." He quotes, among other people, Allan Bloom and Samuel Huntington. Jack McCordick summarized the thoughts here as: if there's a single pattern of thought that defines The Technological Republic, it is that of a wavering liberal "hair-splitting his way towards civilizational chauvinism." To me, Dan, that's where all this is coming from. Thoughts on point 20?

Dan: I think you've picked up on it. It's maybe one of those points that is so obvious that sometimes you're like, "Do I bother making it?" But then it keeps coming out. Religion never means religion for these people. It never means religion. It is a specific articulation of Christianity. And if you are not that, you are part of that religiously intolerant mass of people. And I think that's the real key, because people fall for that language: "Well, yeah, I believe in religious freedom, and people should be able to practice their religion, and religion is really important to lots of Americans." All of which is true and real. But that's not what they're saying. It's always coded language. The religious freedom rhetoric and just the language of "religion" — they don't mean religion. They mean their form of Christianity, and everything else is a foreign import that needs to be driven out. And as I say, for those who are kind of aware of this, it can feel so obvious that we stop pointing it out. But I think we can't afford to stop pointing it out, because it still becomes a part of the rhetoric that draws in so many people.

Brad: "The pervasive intolerance of religious belief must be resisted." Thank you, Alex Karp, for standing up for the Pope against the president's attacks. We salute you. Point 21 — this is where it gets super fascist, Dan:

"Some cultures have produced vital advances. Others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures — and indeed subcultures — have produced wonders. Others have proven middling and worse: regressive and harmful."

So there you go. One of the things that I think this does — and I've said this before — there is a clash of civilizations idea here that says the goal is not for us to live together. The goal is not for us to understand each other or make our cultures richer by interaction with other cultures and folks from other traditions. The idea is not that we might come to a sense of peaceful, diplomatic coexistence, pluralism, and a world order based on peace and democracy rather than domination and will. No — that's what they want. The idea here is that we have a better civilization, mainly because of Silicon Valley. And because we have a better civilization, we need to say that, and we need to go dominate others who are less than us militarily in foreign policy. And we need to recognize people in our own space in the United States who are from inferior cultures, and we need to root them out. Does everybody remember what Andy Ogles just said, the congressman? Okay.

What the book claims really makes America great is not our system of government or our ideals and values, but the software industry and our ability to bring violence and death to our enemies. That is what you get when you read The Technological Republic. Thoughts on this, Dan?

Dan: I don't think this is a term that anybody else has used — I just now thought of it — but it's almost like a form of cultural eugenics. This notion shifts to a civilizational register. It's the same discourse of eugenics, it's the same discourse of racism, it's the same discourse of earlier visions of social Darwinism — but now it's been sanitized. It works like this: "Oh no, no, we're not saying anything about races. Are you talking about races? I didn't say anything about races. I said cultures, civilizations — these civilizational units." But that's how it works. You target people in American society who are viewed as being from a, quote, inferior culture. It's just the same game that powerful Westerners have been playing for a very long time — social Darwinism, eugenics, racism — with this slapped-on veneer.

And the other piece about this, which the Ogles piece illustrates, is that those cultures they imagine don't exist. There aren't these stark demarcating lines between different cultures. These are fuzzy constructs, and it depends on how you look at them and where you look at them and what time period you're talking about. It's why people struggle: "Okay, what is this 'American culture'?" — everything you just ran through a few minutes ago. When is that? Where is that? Who is that? Who defines that? The reason we can't answer those questions is because they're all just inventions designed to make sure that those in power remain in power. And there's a reason that the tech fascists always place the tech fascist at the top of that social hierarchy — because they want the power and they want to hold on to it.

Brad: Something I said last week on my solo episode was that these people want to tell a myth of Western civilization that is based in a myth. And therefore, when actual institutions or figures who are part of Western civilization get in their way — like the Pope — they're like, "Oh no, no, not that guy." What I said in my episode from earlier this week was: you have this weird thing where they're like, "We're defending Western civilization against the Pope." And you're like—

Dan: Beautiful.

Brad: Is the Pope not one of those pillars—

Dan: Of quote-unquote Western civilization, Western Christendom, the legacy of Rome, all of that stuff that they hearken back to all the time. You're like, "Yeah, but not the Pope." Wow. That's a weird exception.

Brad: But whether it's Andy Ogles, or Alex Karp, or JD Vance — they don't actually want the institutions or people on the ground. They don't want the flesh and blood. They don't want the reality. They want a myth.

Dan: Yep.

Brad: They want a story. They want an epic. They want a grand narrative, and then they want to convince you that that's what's real. There's a piece from the French thinker Arnaud Bertrand. I just said that terribly, excuse me, as much as I love French. What does he say here? He says: "So many catastrophes and so much human suffering in history trace back not to the fact of plural civilizations, but to one of them deciding it could no longer tolerate the others. The problem, in other words, has almost always been exactly the worldview Palantir is now selling. Their manifesto isn't warning against the cause of some of the worst periods in history — it's arguing for reviving them." And that's how I see it too. They want to revive: the strongest, most aggressive wins — that's the only way we can exist. Okay. All right.

Last point, Dan, and then we'll go. Point 22: "We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We in America, and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national culture in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?"

So we have to resist pluralism in the name of America and the West. Reactions, Dan?

Dan: This is like — it's the faux philosophy. It's like when they cite Augustine and want to be like, "We're intellectuals. Look, we can say Augustine." Inclusion into what? Okay, there doesn't have to be an "into anything." What if our identity was the fact that we are an inclusive society? What if we had notions of identity not in some fixed, eternal, immutable cultural vision, but that we're — I don't know — organic, and we grow and we develop, like all organic things do?

The point is: it's a fundamental failure of imagination, this notion that culture has to be fixed, has to be immutable, has to be one thing. "We have inclusion, but inclusion into what?" — what the hell does that even mean? And for reasons that get really complex and nerdy — and it's why I don't do metaphysics, and three people listening will understand what that means — I get really nervous when people start telling me that social development has to be developing into a fixed thing. So whoever gets to define what that is? That's the person who terrifies me. That's the group I don't trust. That's the group I don't believe. That's the group that says "this is what it has to be," and I want to know everything about who they are and what they believe and why they have the vision they do — versus one that just says: hey, societies change. That's the only constant thing about them. They're changing and evolving and developing, and that is what makes them the unique societies they are — the way that that happens.

Brad: I love this idea that the failure of imagination is driving this. Because one of the things you realize as somebody who read so many tech manifestos to write American Caesar is that there is no interest, in those guys — Curtis Yarvin, Alex Karp, et cetera — in the beauty, the texture of actual culture. It's always online, it's always an avatar, it's never actual participation.

And Dan, I have lived all over this country. I've lived in Memphis, Tennessee; upstate New York; Southern California; now in the Pacific Northwest. And one of the things you realize is there are cultures, subcultures, local cultures all over the place. So this idea that "we don't have anything to be included into anymore, it's all been evaporated" — it's not that. You just don't have any imagination, and you don't have any actual participation in actual human community and culture. That's the problem.

Dan: And sticking with this: it's ironic that these are the people who envision themselves as the creators, the inventors, the creative minds, coming up with novel things. And when it comes to this, it's just so boring. It is so stale. It is terrifying, yes, but it is just fundamentally flat. It's like seeing a 2D image when you could be in an immersive VR world or something — that narrow.

Brad: Or the real world. Could go outside.

Dan: Well, it's the people who are at, I don't know, their kid's recital or whatever, and all you see is a bunch of phones. Like, it's kind of happening there, but nobody's watching it — they're all just staring at the phone.

Brad: That's why I always record fireworks celebrations, Dan. When I go to a fireworks celebration, I record it because I want to look at that on my phone later — when I'm waiting at the bus stop, I want to be like, "Wow, look at these fireworks I went to. That was a fun night. That was a good night. I'm glad I recorded this. This was a good use of my time."

Brad: What's your reason for hope?

Dan: My reason for hope — and I'm a little disappointed that this didn't show up more — but on Saturday, a federal judge overturned the Trump administration's ban on gender-affirming care for children. Ruled basically that RFK's and the government's move to withhold federal Medicaid and Medicare funding was illegal and violated the law, and specifically the part of the Medicaid law that states that the federal government cannot exercise any supervision or control over the practice of medicine or the manner in which medical services are provided. Twenty-two states had sued the administration, and an injunction was ruled. I took tremendous, tremendous hope from that.

Brad: The Intercept reports — April 22, Liliana Segura — the short and ridiculous trial of a protester arrested in an inflatable penis costume is now over. An Alabama cop confronted the protester at a "No Kings" rally, and the judge was not convinced. The person in the costume, Renee Gamble, is not a young kid. This is a Gen X or Boomer. And that is American. You want to talk about a culture, Alex Karp, Andy Ogles? You know what's American? Protest and free speech. And if you want to dress up as a penis — I'm not sure I want to be there, but I do want it to be legal.

Dan: Like, it's not a choice I might make, but I think people should be able to make that choice.

Brad: Some of you don't need to dress up. I'm just going to leave it there. Okay, thanks for listening today, y'all.

Dan: I'm just going to lie — the person you're seeing when you say that — I don't know, I don't know how to take that. So fine, whatever.

Brad: All right, y'all — go sign up for our newsletter. Go to axismundi.us and check out everything we're doing. We've got Dan's office hours coming up, we've got a bonus episode we're going to do here in the next couple of weeks, and we've got a lot coming — and some announcements about doing this show live a couple of times a week that we're hoping to get off the ground in the next month or so. So look out for that. Otherwise, we'll be back next week with the Sunday Interview, some great content on Monday, It's in the Code — the final It's in the Code on Josh Hawley's book, I believe — and the Weekly Roundup.

Dan: Is it the final one? I don't think so. It's the final one for that chapter. I think I've got one more chapter. We're almost done. We're almost through Hawley. We're almost there.

Brad: The definitive guide to that book. All right, y'all — thanks for being here. We'll catch you next time.