Weekly Roundup: The Grownups in Charge? SCOTUS, Gerrymandering & White Christian Power

Brad Onishi: Welcome to Straight White American Jesus. This week we're going to jump into all of the redistricting mania that is going on around the country as a result of the recent Supreme Court decision. We'll talk about the Christian nationalist dimensions of this and how this is a long backlash march to take the country to the 1950s or the 1850s. We'll also get into the ways that the court set the table for this, and how, despite John Roberts' best efforts to defend SCOTUS as a neutral body, the logic at play here tells us a different story. Lots to cover. Let's go. Welcome to the show. My name is Brad Onishi, author of American Caesar, founder of Axis Mundi Media, was off last week. Glad to be back this week with my co-host,

Dan Miller: Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College. Always glad to be with you, Brad, even if we always get together to talk about the worst possible things. So, you know,

Brad: yes, and I want to — I don't associate those things with you, just so you know, Dan. When we're together, I don't — I don't — I don't want you to think that it's just —

Dan: I know we'll start getting the trauma responses, or we won't be able to like hang out without like breaking into a cold sweat or like feeling a sense of existential dread. It's like every time I see Brad, I'll just like want to curl up in a corner and cry.

Brad: Can men actually have a conversation if they're not on a podcast? I don't know. This is the only way men can communicate, I think. All right, y'all. So, last week I was off, but Dan talked all about the decision of the Supreme Court that basically rolled back the Voting Rights Act and brought us to a place that feels as if the Jim Crow South has been reinstated, where racism and gerrymandering along racial lines is possible. And so Dan, by way of a summary, let me read a bit from Wajahat Ali at the Left Hook. Apparently, in 2026 racism no longer exists in southern states, and the Republican leaders can be trusted to oversee free and fair elections. Right on cue, Louisiana suspended its congressional primaries ahead of early voting to redraw its map and lock out black Democratic voters. Florida followed suit with a new map to give Republicans four more seats. Five of the seven Indiana Republicans who resisted Trump's pressure to gerrymander their state were just booted out after Trump backed their opponents. On Wednesday, the FBI, which now serves as a weapon to attack Trump's enemies and protect MAGA allies, raided the office of Louise Lucas, a Virginia Democratic state lawmaker who championed the state's successful redistricting push. A few hours later, a federal judge ruled that the Justice Department does not have to return the 2020 election ballots that were taken in the FBI raid in Fulton County, Georgia. I should add that before we started recording, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that the redistricting initiative was unconstitutional, and so that is now on hold. We just want to remind everybody, and I'm just going to back up a minute. This all started when Trump asked Texas to redistrict mid-decade, and they said, "Sure, President, whatever you — sure, President King Trump, whatever you want." And then, of course, California and New York and other states responded, and now what we're seeing is simply a deeper and deeper polarization and entrenchment along party lines in our country. Florida, Louisiana, Indiana, other places — we're seeing this kind of activity. The most notable to me this week, in addition to Virginia and the FBI raid on Louise Lucas's house — a chilling raid. A lawmaker, a black woman who leads a redistricting effort, has her home invaded by the FBI. That's a scare tactic telling lawmakers not to pass legislative reform. That's a lot of things. But in addition, Memphis, Tennessee, a place I used to live, has one of the only majority-black districts, represented by a black representative. Memphis is a predominantly black city, and that district is now being carved up into three, so that those black voters' votes will, in essence, be nullified. The scenes out of the Tennessee courthouse this week were harrowing. By way of an appetizer, Dan, let me just play you a clip of Kevin Roberts, a Texan, talking about how he feels about the efforts in Virginia to make a redistricting push to benefit Democrats.

Kevin Roberts [Clip]: Whatever you think about redistricting and gerrymandering, and who's behind it, what happened in Virginia, what passed in Virginia on Tuesday night is simply unconstitutional. It's that simple. And so I do think ultimately by mid-May, common sense will reign, and we will be back to the heart of your question, to the old maps, which would be, by the way, the fairest maps of any state in the country.

Brad: If that was not bad enough, here's a clip from Micah Beckwith, the Lieutenant Governor of Indiana, talking about this as well.

Micah Beckwith [Clip]: Well, I just think that, you know, if that vote holds, and we see that Virginia does amend their constitution to go down the redistricting path, I would just say, wake up, Christians, they are coming for you, and you can't pet a demon. I mean, I know people like to say, just, you know, hey, demons, stay over there — just don't hurt us, and we won't hurt you. It doesn't work that way. Evil will find you, and until strong men stand up and do something, and fight fire with fire, then we will continue to lose ground. Our children will be warped, the curse will be over the land, as Pastor Kunneman was saying. And so I think it's time — like I hope it fails, but at the same time, I don't think it will. I think it will pass. I've kind of been saying that all along, because the Democrats, and the side of darkness — which again, Democrats aren't necessarily all dark, but they are being led by the minions and the voices of darkness — and they're going to win, they're playing to win. And so we have to wake up, and guys step up, and if we go on the battlefield, we will win. The question is, will we enter the battlefield? That's just what I don't know.

Brad: It's really hard for me to listen to these men talk about this, Dan, for a lot of reasons, but one of them is just we have reached this place — and I'm very curious what you think of this — in this country, where politics has simply been reduced to: if it's my side it's good, and if it's not, then it's not. Brian Sauvé, who's a racist Christian nationalist pastor, said this on Twitter on May 7th: "I oppose bad people gerrymandering so that more bad people can hold political power. I support good people gerrymandering so that more good people can hold political power." Do you notice, Dan, how there's nothing about democracy there — voting, majorities, representation, negotiation, dialogue — it's just will to power.

Dan: Or just even a pretense that there's a rationale or a deep principle behind this. So it's the absurdity — I'm aware everybody's aware that there have been, prior to this kind of escalation, Democratic states that gerrymander. But in general, overwhelmingly, it has been a right-wing strategy, it's been a GOP strategy. As you said, Trump sort of started this round in this gerrymandering war by very publicly and explicitly — because Trump communicates on social media, he doesn't communicate to anybody any other way. He didn't like to call the governor of Texas and say, "Hey, have you guys considered doing this?" He called for it publicly, they responded, and so you get this escalation. But there's not even a pretense — when they turn around and talk about how bad the Democrats are for doing this, and how it's a power grab, and it's anti-democratic, and whatever — that they're doing the same thing, or that it's a response to what they're doing. So any pretense that it's about anything more than, as you say, power — or just, when my side does it, it's fine — it's just all out in the open, very clearly and very plainly. And we'll circle back around to this. I think the rank racism behind a lot of these redistricting pushes now — which John Roberts in the Supreme Court did us the great favor of basically saying, go ahead, just go ahead and do that — it's just all out in the open, and pretty brutal to watch and experience.

Brad: Yeah, and I think what happened in Tennessee is the clearest example of that. I mean, there's one Democratic district in Tennessee, and that will now be gone, and you know, somebody put on social media the other day as I was scrolling and reading and digesting — the Republicans in that state are burning through so much political capital, they are making such an effort for this one district. And in some ways you can hear them saying, well, we need every district we can get so we can have a Republican majority in Congress in 2026 and 27 and 28. But it also — doesn't it feel like there's a bloodlust here? To say, yes, finally Tennessee will be a place where there is no more Democratic representation, no more representation of a majority-black city that voted in a certain way, because finally we will have our state back. Here's Andy Ogles. Two weeks ago, we played a clip from Andy Ogles where he not only talked about how he likes fondue — I've emailed the representative's office several times asking about his fondue fondness, his fondness — "fondueness" — but no response yet. I have also asked about his vile racism, but here's what he said: "For too long, Tennessee politics has been dominated by cosmopolitan communists and race hustlers imposing their corrupt will on a deeply rural and conservative state. The general assembly's constitutional redrawing of federal districts affirms a foundational truth." And he goes on to talk about how Tennessee should be a red state and a red state only. There's a lot of code words in here, Dan. "Cosmopolitan communists and race hustlers" — that sounds to me like code for black people and anyone who supports them. So I think the racism you're talking about is evident in Tennessee most clearly. I want to play a clip here from Mike Johnson, and then I want to get into the theological and spiritual dimensions of this a little bit. Here's Mike Johnson talking in 2026, explaining what we need in terms of midterms in Congress.

Mike Johnson [Clip]: They have full-on Trump derangement syndrome. Okay, and it informs how they see the world and how they react and how irresponsible they are. Now is on full display for the whole country. I hope voters remember this in the fall. You've got to keep the grownups in charge, and that's the Republicans.

Brad: Mike Johnson uses the phrase "the adults in the room," and I just want to break this down for several reasons. I just think that these four words characterize so much about American history, American religion, and the push to make sure that non-white, non-Christian, non-men don't have equal representation and power in this country. The adults in the room. Okay, one of the things that strikes me — and I'm happy to just throw it to you — is going back to the Civil War, going back to the antebellum South, going back to the justifications on theological grounds of enslavement. The idea was this: men are the adults in the room. White Christian men are the only adults in the room who can have responsibility. If you're a woman, you should not be able to vote. If you are an enslaved black person, you're part of the family — you're just part of Daddy's flock of children. You'll never be a full-grown adult. You'll always live in submission to the patriarch, and there will only ever be one adult in the room. When Mike Johnson says "the adults in the room," I want to remind everybody that's in the context of a couple of things. They just tried to pass the Save America Act, which would force women who have changed their name — because of marriage, or anything else — to jump through so many hoops in order to vote, that millions of people would essentially not be able to vote in the next election. So, the Save America Act is one. Number two, on theological grounds, there are people in Mike Johnson's universe — Pete Hegseth's denomination — that are openly calling for the repeal of the 19th Amendment, so that women cannot vote. That is in addition to everything that happened last week with the Supreme Court decision and the redistricting fights we're seeing. When he says "the adults in the room," I know what he means, Dan. He means white Christian men. We have Andy Ogles calling people "race hustlers" and "cosmopolitan communists." We have Micah Beckwith, Lieutenant Governor of Indiana — who you just heard — saying that the left is led by the minions of darkness and demons. These are folks who think that you should not have rights and representation if you're not a white Christian man. Am I overplaying that, Dan? Is my brain fried from just digesting this stuff for ten hours a day? What do you think?

Dan: No, I don't think you're overdoing it. I think it's just highlighting that we could look at the "adults in the room" comment on a number of levels. The most basic is: great — how has the GOP Congress done lately in acting like the adults in the room? They can't agree with themselves and do anything when they have a majority in both houses. So there's that. But I think that's like the surface-level analysis, and what you're doing — as you do really effectively — is say, well, let's look at how this dog-whistle language has been used in the past, and let's listen to that comment in the context of what he's talking about: immediately, redistricting, defending that, the court decision, and so forth. Let's circle back to the context of when he chooses to say this. And in case somebody's saying, "Well, you're making it about race, it's not about race, you guys make everything about race" — I know you've never heard anybody say that, Brad, but I might have gotten that comment from a critic or two — so in the context of the redistricting, like you mentioned a minute ago, when the racism is laid bare, it's almost as if — wait for it — almost as if the Voting Rights Act has basically been rolled back, and all those southern states are like, "Oh, hey, we're free to create all-white districts now." So I think it's in that context: where is Mike Johnson from? Who does he represent in Congress? What state is he speaking for when he says this and celebrates the decision? And he's going all the way back — he's said it a number of times — that redistricting is about making sure that the grown-ups stay in power. Well, what have we seen? We've seen this explicit re-racializing of these states through redistricting. And I want to circle back around for a minute and tie this together, because I think it's important to think about what John Roberts said — but then you mentioned Pete Hegseth and Pete Hegseth's pastor, because it's the same logic that runs through everything in the Trump administration and the contemporary right and MAGA, and that's why we hear Mike Johnson's comment the way that we do. So here's the logic — the really, really perverse logic that we have seen play out in the last week. The Roberts Court declares that creating congressional districts on the basis of race is unconstitutional. I talked about it last time. There was a statement in there that race should not be a part of political decision-making. Period. Which then unleashes a slew of mostly southern states rushing to do what — to dismantle congressional districts on the basis of race. They're targeting the districts that are predominantly black. These are not states that have been sued. These are not states who've taken their existing maps and taken it to court and challenged it. These are states that have just been waiting for the Supreme Court to lift the requirements that the Voting Rights Act put on southern states regarding representation for voting. And as soon as that came out, they're all like, "Yep, we're going to erase all of those black majority districts." I say "all of those" — there aren't that many of them, but they matter for representation. They do that on the basis of race, which explicitly enables political decisions to be made on the basis of race, by claiming that the political decisions you didn't like, John Roberts, were made on the basis of race. You are able to weaponize anti-discrimination to license explicit and open discrimination. But here's where I think it plays out the same way that the Pete Hegseth logic has, and the other things in MAGA — and you can tell me if I'm crazy here. What have we seen, if we talk about Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon? We've seen women and people of color who are lined up for promotion have that knocked down. Why? Well, if we're only going to promote on the basis of merit — not on the basis of gender, not on the basis of racial equity — then if they're black or they're women, it must have been a DEI initiative. We're going to roll that back. But what it does, of course, is make it so that you can now refuse to promote anybody who's a woman or a person of color. Why? Because they're a woman or a person of color. We have just licensed discrimination by appealing to anti-discrimination. And that's what John Roberts has done, and that's what we've seen the southern states do. And you can just feel him last week trying to say, "Oh, this is not — we're just calling balls and strikes, we're not targeting anybody." And then literally, as soon as they did it, other states jump on board to squeeze in these gerrymandered maps ahead of the election. We'll see on some of these if they get held up in court for not following correct processes and procedures and things like that. But we've seen it play out, and that is the playbook. Because what you do is make it so that anytime there's a black majority district — oh, that must have been on the basis of race, got to get rid of it. Anytime there are women or people of color advanced in the military — same logic, it had to be because of their identity, we can roll it back. All it does is allow discrimination on the basis, supposedly, of non-discrimination. That's the perverse logic of somebody like John Roberts, but it's the logic that's celebrated by somebody like Mike Johnson saying, "Hey, this is a good thing. It helps keep the grown-ups in charge." That language of "keeping the grown-ups in the room" is not just a folksy or fun way of saying "we're the party of ideas." I think it's coded language that communicates everything. By "grown-ups," they mean the right kind of Americans, and by that they mean white Christian men — and those who support white Christian men. Anything other than that must be discriminatory. Anytime it's not white Christian men, it must have been decided on the basis of something discriminatory. So that allows them to discriminate against everyone who's not a white Christian man. That's the logic we see.

Brad: But what did Micah Beckwith say, Lieutenant Governor of Indiana? He said, "Oh, they're coming for you, Christian." And so he's talking about Virginia redistricting — as Texas is doing the same, as there was a push to do this in his own state that failed, but Trump primary'd the people who got in his way. There's this persecution complex, this victimhood complex that says, if we don't have total power, then we're being run out of our country. And what SCOTUS did is say, yeah, you're right. And what I take you to be saying, then, is that there's a license to say to anyone else — the predominantly black population in Memphis, people in the military trying to get promotions — "Oh yeah, sorry. You're not going to get that, you're not going to have your representation, your recognition, your promotion." And when you claim that you're being victimized, when you claim you're being marginalized, when you claim that you are not being afforded the rights that you are promised, we're going to call you race hustlers, cosmopolitan communists, woke anti-American, God-hating domestic terrorists. That's the tactic we're going to take. And you see that — we've talked about this for eight years, but there are weeks you just see it so clearly. All right, let's take a break, and we'll get to the long history of this — but also how, if we zoom out a little bit, there's a very clear picture here of how this whole redistricting and court decision phenomenon is one more wrinkle in the tear-down of American democracy. Be right back.

Brad: All right, Dan, so given what you just said — this rolling back of rights — I want to go into the history of this a little bit, and then I want to arrive at a place where we can talk about how everything that's happening with redistricting and gerrymandering is an assault on American institutions — in terms of voting, in terms of congressional districts — that is one more notch in the belt of making sure this is not a democracy. So that's where we're trying to head. In my forthcoming book, American Caesar, I chronicle the progression — the political progression — of Paul Weyrich. And Paul Weyrich, many of you know who that is. He's the architect of the Religious Right. He founded the Free Congress Foundation, the Council for National Policy. He is somebody that in the 1970s and 80s was kind of the central node in the nervous system of the conservative takeover of the GOP, the Christian nationalist movement to join Catholics and evangelicals against anyone else who stood opposed to their understanding of family and sexuality and gender in American history. And you might remember this very famous clip of Paul Weyrich talking about voting. Let me play that for you now.

Paul Weyrich [Clip]: How many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome — good government. They want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections, quite candidly, goes up as the voting populace goes down.

Brad: Goo-goo syndrome.

Dan: It's a technical political term, Brad.

Brad: I don't want everyone to vote. The more people who vote, the less chance we have of winning — he said it out loud. This is the man who basically masterminded the Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Tim LaHaye. This is the guy that spearheaded the movement to get rid of Jimmy Carter, the Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher, and put in the Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan. This is the guy that sees Christian American orthodoxy as the nuclear family, heterosexuality, child-bearing women, women in the home. The person who, when Martin Luther King Jr. died, a Catholic priest joined an ecumenical service, and he tried to get that priest defrocked because of his participation in an ecumenical ceremony in the wake of Martin Luther King Junior's death. Okay, so that's who we're talking about here. But the thing I want to point out for everybody is this: the man who said out loud "I don't want everyone to vote" was a man who believed there was a moral majority in the country in the 70s and 80s. He was like, all we have to do is wake up all those voters, we've got to wake up that moral majority — so that if they all vote, if they all mobilize, we'll win. And you know, Dan, by 1999, he no longer believed that. Let me quote you a letter from 1999: "I no longer believe that there is a moral majority. I do not believe that a majority of Americans actually share our values. I believe we've probably lost the culture war. This is why even when we win in politics, our victories fail to translate into the kind of policies we believe are important." The guy that said just wake up the Moral Majority and we'll win — because most of America is a white Christian land-owning gentry that wants these retrograde values surrounding sex, gender, family, race, white supremacy — by the turn of the millennium, he was like, "Nah, we're not the majority, and it's never going to happen. So, you know what we need to do? We need to create separate institutions that will basically allow for us to attack from a different angle." Here's a direct quote: "The Constitution has not only failed, it was bound to fail. The architects of our constitutional order built a house in which secular liberalism could live, and given the dominant urges of the age, would live. The time has come to leave that house and head for home." He's not calling here, Dan, for like, let's get out the vote, let's make sure our voice is heard. You know what he's calling for? He's like, you know what's really bad — the Constitution just allowed for things like secular liberalism, which is based on the free choice of individuals, and it turns out most individuals don't agree with us. So instead of getting different ideas, we need to not allow individuals to have choice or representation when it comes to our government. We need to get rid of all that. He helped with a manifesto two years later that was written by Eric Heubeck at the Free Congress Foundation, which Weyrich founded, and the plan in this manifesto is to, quote, "attack the very legitimacy of the left, to be intimidating, and to impose a cost on those who oppose them publicly." I don't know, Dan — does that sound like maybe raiding the home of a Virginia lawmaker who's a black woman with the FBI? That might be it. The methods would be, quote, "guerrilla tactics used to undermine the legitimacy of the dominant regime." It's an us-versus-them, insider-versus-outsider mentality. If you polarize people — and this is actually his colleague Connie Marshner saying this — if you polarize, people either agree with you or they don't. Polarization is an essential political tool. This is what Anne Nelson calls a "virtual war on American culture and governance, shocking in its ruthlessness and anti-democratic spirit." And you're like, "Brad, thanks for writing a book. Who the hell cares, man? What are you doing here?" And my response is: most Christian nationalists, when they're polled over the last couple years, have said they want to go back to the 1950s. And that is before the end of Jim Crow. It's before women's liberation movements, queer liberation movements, it's before the Loving case. And I always say this whenever I give talks or lectures or seminars: it's before the Voting Rights Act, it's before what happened in the mid-1960s with the Civil Rights Movement and Lyndon Johnson and the Voting Rights Act and all kinds of other reforms surrounding voting, immigration, and so on — that made this country more like a democracy than it had ever been. My point is this: Christian nationalists like Beckwith from Indiana, Christian nationalists like Kevin Roberts — when they talk this way, they're talking in the heart of a tradition that has been trying to roll back voting rights since voting rights were expanded in the mid-1960s. They have been on a march to overturn Roe v. Wade, but they've been on the same parallel track to repeal voting rights, because they don't think anyone else but them are the adults in the room. I want to come back to the adults comment, but any other thoughts?

Dan: I just want to pick up the continuity element of this, because somebody could look at it like, okay, Paul Weyrich — we know who that is, this is an old-school figure, important, yeah, we get it, but it's 2026, it's not 1999, it's not 2000. But we've talked about this: recently, the number of people on the right with the sort of "common good" model of government — the idea that the role of government is not to represent the will of the people, not to be of the people, by the people, for the people — but to have essentially elites in charge who can dictate to everybody else what is right and wrong and what the common good is. And it comes primarily through a kind of radical Catholic strand, a certain kind of Augustinian strand in contemporary Christian nationalism. People like JD Vance is probably the biggest name political figure attached to it. You could rattle off 57 other names of people who are sort of feeding that.

Brad: You're never gonna guess what religion Paul Weyrich was. You're never gonna guess. Catholic. He was Catholic.

Dan: Buddhist. Okay, yeah, I was gonna get Buddhist, but you know —

Brad: He hated — and look, yeah, this is not — I am not indicting the Catholic Church. What I'm saying is Paul Weyrich was a Catholic who hated Vatican Two with every fiber in his being. I'm sorry to interrupt.

Dan: Yeah, yeah, so the point is that if people are like, "Well, that's Paul Weyrich, that's like way back when" — it's like, no, we've heard the same thing. And so another theme that we've been saying for eight years: I remember saying this in one of our very, very first episodes — like maybe one or two episodes in — when I said that what is emerging, contemporary Christian nationalism as we refer to it now (the language was still sort of evolving then), it's nothing new. It's sort of more open, it's less hidden, but it's still there. And that common good model — who are the elites, Brad? They're the grown-ups in the room, that's what it's talking about. The grown-ups in the room put the right people in charge — not chosen by a majority, not representative of a majority — just put the right people in charge who believe the right things and know how to run the country the way an authoritarian father would run the family, just making sure that everybody's doing what they're supposed to do and everybody defers to him. That's the model of governance, and it's explicit in people from Weyrich all the way up. And it has been at least since you get the demographic shifts in the US, where conservative Christians are not a majority and where they did lose the culture — where a majority of Americans support things that they didn't used to. And then they realized: well, we're never going to win people over with ideas. So you have a GOP now that doesn't even pretend to be the party of ideas anymore. They're just the party of "we're going to be a ruling minority." Explicitly. That's their aim.

Brad: Okay, I want to throw two analytical things at you, Dan.

Dan: You're just gonna beat the analysis out of me. Go to it.

Brad: Oh my — all right, different kind of show. We're now available on OnlyFans. Please check us out. Straight White American Jesus — that's a new channel. We're not doing great. Very few people have signed up, but if you'd like to support us there, please go ahead, check it out. One is this: you just talked about a ruling minority. So let's talk about redistricting and everything that's happened — let's bring it all into the present. Weyrich wanted — if you read my book, if you read Chelsea Ebin's amazing book — you will see that that is what Paul Weyrich wanted, in essence. And it's just clear from the historical record: they want a hierarchy based on race and gender and religion, and they want a minority to have the power. They do not want a democracy. And you're like, "No," and I'm like, "Yes — you just heard the man say, 'I don't want everyone to vote.'" It's clear from the historical record. You're going to have to buy my book when it's out. All right, when you see the redistricting thing happening here, Dan, across the country — from Texas to Louisiana to Virginia to California to New York — here's the basic outcome of that. It's the destruction of American democracy, because we said it way back when, when Trump asked Texas to do this — this is not good. You cannot have people who think their vote matters, who think they are franchised, who think they are citizens with a voice, if the chessboard is completely redrawn such that there's very little power in mobilizing people to vote, to organize, to make their voices heard. And the ripple effect is that what happened with Texas and Trump's blatant power grab is a response — and I think the right response — by Democrats: we can't just let you take Congress, we can't just let you cheat us out of any say, so we're going to redraw maps in these states where we have the power. Do I think they should have made that move? I do. What's the end result, however? This is not democracy. This is not representation. This is not any kind of way to have a situation where people believe they actually have some kind of voice. And secondly, it entrenches polarization. I think it's 56 or 58% of Black Americans who live in the American South, and there is now no district that represents majority Black voters the way that the Memphis district did. They were all wiped out. How do you tell people that they are empowered citizens living in a democracy when the maps can be redrawn to negate their voice? This is not how you have any kind of real "we the people." So that's the ripple effect. Now, I would remind people — and I'm sure everyone listening knows this already — Democrats tried to put forth legislation so that an independent commission would prevent gerrymandering from happening. Democrats were all in favor, and zero Republicans would vote for it. So the end result here needs to be to get to a place where gerrymandering is not possible. In the meantime, we're just watching an institution of American democracy crumble before our eyes. Do you see it that way?

Dan: Yeah, I do, because we keep saying the same thing: it's not intended to be democratic in the sense of majoritarian. And I want to circle back and be a nerd for a minute, because you know it's what I do, and talk about an idea. I'm going to bring in Uncle Ron. We haven't talked about Uncle Ron in a while. I feel like Uncle Ron is probably feeling left out. Somebody's sitting around talking to Uncle Ron and says, "Well, you hate democracy, you think a minority should rule the country?" He's gonna say, "No, I don't. What are you talking about? I'm defending democracy." And people ask me, "How can it possibly be that the people who are doing what you say they're doing are eroding the foundations of democracy?" — and there are people like the Paul Weyrichs of the world, and the Johnsons of the world, people like that, who I think know full well that is what they are doing, that's what they want, that's what they're aiming for. But there are a lot of Uncle Rons in the world who listen to the rhetoric and say, "Hey, we're defending the Constitution, we're defending democracy. I don't know what you're talking about. Those cosmopolitan Marxists, they're the ones who don't believe in democracy." And the reason I think they can do that is what I call minority majoritarianism. What does that mean? It means that when you have a mindset that says: everybody who lives in the US — they're not all real Americans. Being a citizen doesn't make you a real American. That real felt sense. All those Black people in those cities — yes, they're technically Americans, they have citizenship, but they're not real Americans, they're not really Americans. All those people living in the cities, those urban elites — they're not really Americans. That's what we heard, that valorization of Tennessee as a rural state. People who live in the country, they're the real Americans. The red Americans are the real Americans. Everybody else isn't. So, yes, it's a numerical minority of the people in this country, but they view themselves as a majority because they're the voice of real America. They'll be like, "Well, yeah, I mean, you put all those people in a room and they vote, they'll do that, but you count the votes of the real Americans in that room, a majority will go for this." So that's where you get the logic again — it's perverse, and it's not cogent, but that's where you get the felt sense for millions of Americans who act this way, that they are somehow defending democracy, when any analysis would say: you're not. You're undermining it. You're eroding it. You're actively trying to do away with it. But that's the logic: not everybody who gets to vote is a real American, and that's precisely why they shouldn't be allowed to vote. Let's only let the real Americans vote — and then, because all the real Americans are MAGA red Americans, then a majority of them will go for something. And see, that's what we mean — it's democracy, the majority voted for it. I think that's the really, really perverse, twisted logic that generates this sort of double discourse, where the elites will say the quiet part out loud and say, "We don't want everybody to vote," but the Uncle Rons in the world will believe they're defending democracy, even as they disenfranchise and work to disenfranchise millions of Americans.

Brad: This goes hand in hand with the creedal nation idea that so many Christian nationalists, Christian supremacists, JD Vance himself, say should not be. And what I mean by that is — you know what they're going to say. JD Vance, CJ Engel, Christian Reconstructionists, radical Catholics — they're going to say, "Look, you're not a real American if you just attest to some propositions or ideas." A real American is — well, my fifth-generation granddaddy's over there, buried in this cemetery in Kentucky. Legacy Americans. Heritage Americans. "Okay, you just got here, you don't have any skin in the game. My people came on the Mayflower." That's what they're doing — they're saying exactly what you're saying, Dan. And the way they justify it is: "Yeah, you might be a naturalized citizen. Yeah, you can vote — you just held up your hand and put your hand over your heart and swore an allegiance, when you crossed your fingers behind your back. No, I don't think so, pal. You're not a real American." And that's the way they'll do it. And I completely agree. Let's play one more clip before we move on, from a specific exchange between two of the Supreme Court justices on the redistricting and gerrymandering issue. Let's just listen to Mike Johnson talk about something a year ago, Dan — this is May 2025. What did he say then?

Mike Johnson [Clip]: Now we have President Trump back. He has a great team in place. He has willing partners in the House and Senate, unified government. The adults are back in the room, okay, and we are going to turn this economy around. We need a little runway to do it. I keep using this metaphor of an aircraft carrier. You know, it took decades to get into the mess that we're in. You don't turn an aircraft carrier on a dime, but you need miles of open ocean to do it. But we have begun that turn.

Brad: Yes, "the adults in the room" — we have the adults back in the room who are going to rescue the American economy. We've got the best guys in charge now. Trump's back in office. He's put Kash Patel at the head of the FBI. He put Sean Duffy in charge of transportation. We've got a World Wrestling icon in the McMahon family ahead of — we're doing great. So, a year later, Mike — how are we doing with the adults in the room? Kash Patel is making FBI agents take polygraph tests, which — I'm not sure polygraph tests are better than Ouija boards, but he is handing out bourbon, so I mean there's that. And the FBI is training with MMA fighters, and Kash has limited-edition Kash Patel MMA FBI sneakers he wears. So that sounds like adult decisions to me. Okay, you know, we put the equivalent of a Tesla Cybertruck in charge of the FBI, and that's what you get when you put a Cybertruck in charge of the FBI. What are gas prices like, Mike? Economy? Our borrowing? Our debt is 100% of the budget — how's that going? We spent 25 billion and counting on a war for no reason. And why are we fighting that war? What do we want to get out of it? I don't know. Let's ask one of these adults you just talked about — Marco Rubio — who, Dan, I'm not going to play the clips, I'm tempted to, but when he was at the podium the other day, he said the Iranians should "check themselves before they wreck themselves." He also said their leadership is "insane in the brain." Dan, I'm an older millennial. I don't know how you classify Gen X / millennial, but he is trolling people. Those are 1990s rap lyrics. "Check yourself before you wreck yourself" — that's Ice Cube. "Insane in the membrane" — Cypress Hill. Is anyone with me? Am I the only one? The Secretary of State is quoting 30-year-old rap lyrics to talk about American foreign policy. But at least he can explain our goals in Iran clearly. Here they are. Marco, take it away.

Marco Rubio [Clip]: As President Trump has said, and the facts clearly bear out, the United States of America holds all the cards. There is no scenario here in which, if they decide to join a ladder of escalation, they wind up getting the last say. But our preference is for these straits to be opened to the way they're supposed to be open, back to the way it was. Anyone can use it. No mines in the water, nobody paying tolls. That's what we have to get back to, and that's the goal here.

Brad: We have lost dozens of American lives, bombed girls' schools, and put the global economy in a chokehold. Why? So we could get things back to where they were — with the Strait of Hormuz open. What — that's a victory, Dan? That was worth it? It was worth death, destruction, burning through money, burning through goodwill with all of our allies, just so we could get back to where we were before Trump started this. It's really great to have these adults in the room. It just feels so good to have men who know what they're doing in charge of the rest of us, telling us how we should live our lives.

Dan: They really do seem like they're up for the challenge. Do you agree? Yeah, I just want to, like — broadly speaking, you look at the top of the party. Is there any place in the world, any context at any point in his life, when Donald Trump walked into a room and everyone's like, "Oh good, the grown-ups are here now. Everything's okay"? Never. Never happened. And the other day, when Melania Trump referred to Donald Trump's empathy — she was at this thing speaking and talked about how empathetic he is — like everybody starts laughing, like nobody was sure whether or not it was a joke, or they just thought it was ridiculous, or they didn't know how to react. That's the guy we're talking about. That's like the top of the stack. And then it just goes all the way down. You've got yeah, quoting 90s rap lyrics from one administration official. We already had another one repeating Pulp Fiction prayers. So, yeah, you're right. And as a Gen Xer, I guess I feel right at home. Maybe there's a place in MAGA for me after all, if we're going to quote everything from the 90s. But it's absurd. Just look at how dysfunctional the government is. They haven't legislated really anything since Trump came into office. They said "the one big beautiful bill" and that's it. They've just abdicated to Trump. They can't — remember the whole thing from the winter, like, "we're going to have the government shutdown because of ICE and the Department of Homeland Security and all of that." And Democrats are like, "You know what, let's separate the two — we'll fund the rest of the Department of Homeland Security and make ICE separate." And what did the Republicans say? "Nope. Can't do it. Won't do it." Until eventually the Senate Republicans are like, "Okay, I guess we'll do it — send it over to the House." What does the House say? "We're not going to do it. This is terrible. This is awful." They're fighting each other, they're all in the same party, they're all the grown-ups in the room, they're busy throwing cake at each other. And what did the House end up doing? They eventually wound up in the same spot that the "kids in the room" — the unreasonable Democrats — had offered them back in, what was it, February or whenever that was. Yeah, it's — whether we're talking about race or gerrymandering or just day-to-day governance, that's their best pitch: that they are the people who know what's going on.

Brad: Yeah, I mean, I won't play the clip, but Mike Johnson announces the deal that you just talked about. He's like, "Never forget — House Republicans deliver for the American people," and then he turns and runs faster than Josh Hawley on January 6th. Like, he almost pulls a muscle — he's like, "Oh yeah, we deliver," and people are screaming questions, and he like tears — he almost tears his Achilles, high-tailing it out of there so he doesn't actually have to answer anything about that. All right, let me give you one more analytical point before we go to Alito, and that's this: something hit me this morning, and it's so simple, but I think it's actually clarifying. Thomas Zimmer, writing this week at his Substack, had a really good overview of the history of voting rights going back to Reconstruction, asking basically: can we have a country that was once built on racial and gender hierarchies turn into a multiracial pluralistic democracy? Can you do that? And what Zimmer argues is that during Reconstruction after the Civil War — and he's not alone in this, Eric Foner and many other Reconstruction historians have made the same point — there was a revolutionary turn in the country that really did restructure American society. You could make the same argument for the 1960s. And what Zimmer talks about — and many other people have before — is that anytime you get that kind of restructuring, you're going to get a backlash of the same magnitude. And what hit me this morning was that whether it's white rage, whether it's backlash, whether it's "whitelash" — however you want to talk about it — the more power you have in the restructuring of society, the farther they want to push society backward. Let me try to explain that. If you pass reforms that radically change who is represented, who has a voice in the country, you are pushing the country forward, you're springing it forward. So I want you to imagine a spring, just pushing into the future — whether that was the 1860s after the war, or the 1960s civil rights movement, Lyndon Johnson, immigration reform, the Loving case, and so on. The 1960s sprung the United States into the future that we have now. We have a situation where white Christians are no longer a majority of the country, where some states are pushing minority-majority now, where we have more mixed-race people than we ever have, more non-religious people than we ever have, and so on. The farther that reforms like that spring you into the future, the farther they want to go back. And the argument I've been making recently is: in the first Trump term, they wanted to go back to the 1950s. As soon as Trump got reelected — if you go back to those episodes, I was saying — they want to repeal the 20th century, they want to go back to the 1850s, before the Civil War. And people like Pete Hegseth and some of the radical Catholics — they want to go back to the 1150s. They're just like, "No, no — give us medieval Christendom." What do you think of that thesis? And then we'll take a break. The further you spring the country forward, the farther in time they want to go backward, and that is what we're seeing now. Don't let women vote. Let's go back to Jim Crow. Let's go back to the antebellum South.

Dan: Yeah, I think it's just a further and further move to the right, which — if your vision of the American golden age is always the past, right, and that's how conservatism works — the future, such as it is, that we want to move to is always a repetition of the past. So at this point, it's like a lot of radical movements — they sort of eat themselves, they metastasize. You have to become more and more extreme in your sense of: how far back do we have to go? It's not enough to go to the 50s, you've got to go further and further back. The idea of your commitment is: how radical are you in your vision of when the American golden age was? Even to the point of somebody like Hegseth or the radical Catholics — like, what wasn't really an American golden age, it was a Western golden age, which was like medieval Christendom. And what we need is an American Christendom, a new medievalism in the 21st century. And so I think that's the logic of an accelerated notion of becoming more and more extreme as a sign of virtue. It's like a form of virtue signaling, and the way that you do that on the right now is by hearkening further and further and further back in time. And the reason you can push it back is because it's imaginary and never existed — there never was a golden age, but because of that, you just keep pushing it further and further back. And that becomes the sign of your commitment, of how serious you are about a "real America" and so forth. I think if you bring those two things together, you'd really have something about the dynamics and the rhetoric and the discourse of the contemporary MAGA movement, especially among its leadership.

Brad: But what did Paul Weyrich say in the quote I cited? He's like, "The Constitution failed and it was bound to." He's like, the Constitution — got to go back before that if we want the real good stuff, you know. "Constitution too liberal. We were never going to have the Christian nation we needed." And let's go back a little before that. Maybe Massachusetts Bay Colony is —

Dan: Exactly what I was about to say.

Brad: Theocratic totalitarianism — that sounds good. Let's burn some Quakers and witches. That's probably when we were doing well.

All right, tell us what happened in a specific exchange between some SCOTUS colleagues. Yeah, so unsurprisingly, everybody can see these decisions of the Supreme Court and recognize that they're highly partisan. The conservative court, one analysis says, goes along with the GOP about 75% of the time, and so forth. And so the Voting Rights Act decision was disappointing, but for many, not surprising. But the conservatives on the court weren't finished there. There has been a pretty longstanding principle in American jurisprudence — often coming down at the hands of the Supreme Court, trickling down to lower courts — that if you're making these big, momentous decisions, you do so, or implement them, in a way that doesn't directly influence elections and electoral politics. Why? So that it doesn't look partisan. There are lots of technicalities to this, but the long and short of it is the Supreme Court — which means the conservative majority — allowed the Louisiana ruling to go into effect immediately, meaning: we're going to allow you to redo the maps before the 2026 election. This is why, as you're highlighting, you've got people hitting pause on elections that have already sort of started, you've got all the other states kicking in, all this immediacy. So there was a fiery exchange in dissenting and concurring opinions between Ketanji Brown Jackson and the conservatives on the court — especially Alito. Samuel Alito was the one really voicing this.

Brad: Definitely one of the grown-ups.

Dan: Yeah, definitely a grown-up in the room. Like, I would just — as an aside — I would love to hang out with Samuel Alito watching, like, I don't know, a baseball game, and just say something he disagrees with, just to watch how incensed he gets. He is such a self-important — he's just like, "How dare you question me?" You'd be like, "Yeah, I don't know, man — I think maybe the Broncos might go all the way." He'd be like, "How dare you question me?"

Brad: I'm gonna be like, "No — I actually think Pepsi is better than Coke. I prefer Pepsi."

Dan: You know what I miss? I think New Coke was the way to go. I think the big mistake in America was getting rid of that. And he would just — yeah. Anyway —

Brad: I could really go for a Zima. You want one, Sam? I'm gonna get the elderberry flavor. You want an elderberry Zima? Okay, no, no, no. All right.

Dan: You might be looking at this wrong, Sam. And just watch how he implodes. So — Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson basically accused the conservative court of abandoning its principles with the aim of influencing the November election. And in the world of very polite disagreement and discourse on the Supreme Court, this was pretty fiery stuff. She stated that the developments since the decision quote "have a strong political undercurrent." She basically said to the conservatives: you are trying to influence the November election, and we all see you doing it. Alito responded, calling the point she raised "baseless and insulting." Brad, your insulting and baseless views about Zima — same kind of thing — baseless and insulting. And then in a concurring opinion joined by, who else, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, he called the charge that "our decision represents an unprincipled use of power" — he called it "groundless and utterly irresponsible." And then he poses this question, and I think this is really significant the way that he poses it as a rhetorical question, but you're kind of actually hitting on the real thing here, Sam. He said, "What principle has the court violated? The principle that we should never take any action that might unjustifiably be criticized as partisan." End quote. The point is, he recognizes and is hypersensitive to these charges of partisanship, primarily because the objective evidence shows that Samuel Alito is a tremendous political partisan. Everybody sees it. He got called out for it, and I think the defensiveness and the way that he reacted doesn't mask anything the way he might think it does. It just makes it clear that Samuel Alito and the conservatives know that they are partisan actors. They resent the fact that people identify this, and it was just very much on full display in the exchange about the Supreme Court decision and its implementation.

Brad: Well, as you said, his pal Clarence Thomas agreed with him on this. And let me just — I'm just looking some things up here, Dan, that I remembered from the past. Oh, yes. For over two decades, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has accepted undisclosed luxury trips — including private jet travel, yacht cruises, and resort stays — from billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow. There's also an instance where allegedly his kids' private school was paid for by Republican mega-donors, and so on. So I'll throw that out there — I'm not sure if it seems relevant to you, but this charge of partisanship. I also remember Sam Alito — and Mrs. Alito, who he blamed for the whole incident — flying the Appeal to Heaven flag and other flags associated with the American right, the Republican Party, and Christian nationalism, and so on. So I don't think he's really the best guy to try to wiggle out of the partisanship charge. And you know, all joking aside, Neil Gorsuch recently gave an interview, and he — look, I'm no fan of Neil Gorsuch, don't email me — but he's much better at trying to articulate how he and the court can be nonpartisan. Do I buy it? No. But Alito and Thomas have no leg to stand on whatsoever. There's just no way for them to get out of this.

Dan: I think it says a lot when Gorsuch is like their best spokesperson for this, because John Roberts just keeps coming out and being like, "We're not partisan. I don't know why people think we're partisan." It's like he's talking in the mirror trying to convince himself that the court isn't partisan. He wants it to not be, or something — as he, who has aimed to undermine the Voting Rights Act since he was in the Reagan White House, is now the one saying it's not partisan. "I don't know what you're talking about." He just asserts it as fact. Alito just gets offended anytime anybody tells him the truth. Gorsuch, at least, can try to put some numbers to it — he's like, "We agree 40% of the time," which also means they disagree 60% of the time, but whatever. I think it says something when he's the most convincing spokesperson they have for trying to make the argument that the conservative wing of the court is not just openly partisan at this point.

Brad: I agree. The court has to be expanded. And just to close this out for today: the reforms, when it comes to gerrymandering, when it comes to voting, when it comes to the Supreme Court — they have to be as decisive as the blows to democracy have been. Reconstruction was incomplete, and it was ultimately defeated by reactionary, redemptionist forces. We can't let that happen again. And we have to dream of a different country if we're going to get anywhere. What's your reason for hope?

Dan: Yeah, just to add to that real quickly — I think even more than expanding the court would be term-limiting judges. I think that would be a huge thing. I'm not gonna lie, it's a hard week to find hope, but a story that I did find: the ongoing story of Mark Kelly — Senator Mark Kelly, former astronaut, former Navy officer — the Pentagon under Pete Hegseth coming after him to try to punish him for that video that he and others made, just stating the fact that military personnel don't have to follow illegal orders. This has made it to an appeals court, which seemed highly skeptical of the Pentagon's claims, and I took hope that Mark Kelly is coming out on the winning side of this. It's exposing Pete Hegseth and the Pentagon for what they are, but it's also creating, I think, a figure in the Democratic Party that is perhaps somebody the party can begin to rally and build around, and I think we need that.

Brad: Couple of reasons for hope on my end come from our Discord: one is that there's a billionaire tax making its way in California, which would be, I think, a really good thing. Trump's tariffs were ruled illegal again, which is a good thing. And Media Matters, which was under investigation by the FTC for calling out anti-Semitism and hate speech, has secured a complete and total victory in their lawsuit. And finally, Infowars was officially taken over by The Onion this week, which is pretty cool — and I've gotta applaud The Onion for that move. All right, y'all — sign up for our newsletter. It comes out every Sunday. And look for a new chapter in the life of our show. We're working on some big changes and renovations, hopefully going to put those in place over the next couple of months. More live streams, more live shows, doing the weekly roundup live, and some new voices to the mix in our other days of the week that we publish. We'll have more soon. This Sunday, I have an interview with Robert Downen, who broke the story about the SBC abuse crisis, and he has a brand new piece about Paul Pressler — the architect of the SBC conservative takeover — and his decades of abuse of young men, and how he was a protected part of the Religious Right. Good friend of Paul Weyrich, and so on. We'll be back next week with It's in the Code, the Weekly Roundup, and much more. Stay tuned. Otherwise, thanks for being here. Have a great weekend. We'll catch you next time.

Dan: Thanks, Brad.