Weekly Roundup: Under-Babied and Overruled: Trump’s Golden Calf Politics

Brad Onishi: Welcome to Straight White American Jesus. I'm Brad Onishi, author of American Caesar and founder of Axis Mundi Media. Coming to you today from the Kingdom of Hawaii. Six hours time difference from my co-host.

Dan Miller: I am Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College. Brad, good to be with you.

Brad: This is a first — 1,000 episodes, Dan, but this is a first. I'm recording on Thursday night, you are recording on Friday morning, because we're six hours apart. It's midnight my time. You got up very early — we get the sexy, gravelly voice from Dan Miller. That's the treat. Thanks for getting up early to do this. Lots to talk about. All right, folks, we're going to talk about the Golden Statue, the fact that Donald Trump doesn't think about your financial situation at all, how that all plays into the pro-natalist meeting that was held at the Oval Office, and the ways that the Trump administration wants you to have more babies but does not want to help you in terms of infrastructure, child care, or providing support for working mothers — and wants to criminalize people who have abortions, and so on. We'll then get into a lawsuit being waged against Secretary Rollins and talk about a new DEI study that came out, and much more. Lots to cover. Let's go.

All right, Dan. This week a statue of Donald Trump was rolled out — a golden statue — and it was so golden and so statue-like that several pastors had to come out and say, "Yes, we love Donald Trump. This — guys, guys, guys — it's not a golden calf. No, it's not a golden — no. Teenagers, stop. It's not a golden calf. Stop." This is not the first time there's been a sort of golden calf moment with the Trump administration, but it comes on the heels of — well, actually at the same time as — Donald Trump saying this about how he feels about Americans.

Donald Trump [Clip]: The only thing that matters when I'm talking about Iran — they can't have a nuclear weapon. I don't think about Americans' financial situation. I don't think about anybody. I think about one thing: we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That's all. That's the only thing.

Brad: So we have this sentiment from the President that he does not think about you or how you're doing. All he thinks about is Iran not having a nuclear weapon, which it does not have, cannot make, has no capability to create, and is not an imminent threat to have in any way. But nonetheless, he thinks about that, and not you and how you are getting by. I'm going to stop here. Dan, we're going to get to two more clips — some diapers, and Gavin Newsom, and we're also going to get to RFK. But do you want to just jump in here about, I don't know, a Golden Calf president who doesn't care about the people — any of the above?

Dan: Yeah, so — start with the statue. Trump National Doral Miami golf course now has a giant statue of Donald Trump. I think it's 15 feet tall. They've called it "Don Colossus" — can't make that up. It's him with his fist in the air. On its pedestal, it's 22 feet tall, 15 feet by itself. It's bronze — of course, because it's Donald Trump — covered in gold leaf. Of course. There was a delay getting it in there because of some kind of disagreement between him and the sculptor. I'm sure he was trying to short him on money or something, because that's what Trump does. What brought this out was, on the heels of people — you'll remember the social media meme of Trump as Jesus, where he tried to say that he thought he was a Red Cross worker and not Jesus, and even the conservative Christians got upset about that. There's a Bible story for those who might not remember about the ancient Israelites worshiping a golden calf and God punishing them. The golden calf, of course, was an image of an ancient Near Eastern god called Baal, and they're like, it's idolatry, and here's this statue of Donald Trump. Adding to it is the fact that there was a religious dedication of the statue. I would suggest — if somebody wants to make the argument that this was not a religious statement of some kind — maybe don't have a religious dedication of a statue at a golf course. They did. Pastor Mark Burns, who's a Trump ally and a spiritual advisor, took to social media and assured everybody, as you say, that this was not a golden calf. This is what he said. He said, "Let me say this plainly — this is not a golden calf. We worship the Lord Jesus Christ, and Him alone. The statue is not about worship, it is about honor." And then he goes on to say the statue is "a celebration of life, a symbol of resilience, freedom, patriotism, strength, and the willpower to keep fighting for the future of America. It also stands as a reminder of the hand of God and His protection over President Trump's life." It's about honor and the hand of God, and Trump is God's angel, God's messenger — I don't know what — but not a golden calf. I'll throw it over to you in just a second. Just let me say this: if you need to open with the sentence "this is really not a golden calf," maybe you should rethink what you're doing. Maybe you should put the brakes on it, be like, you know, this seems like a golden calf, maybe we should do something else. But yeah, so that's just one of the bizarre Trumpy things that happens everywhere Trump is.

So Trump was in Beijing this week meeting with President Xi. The Drizzler did not get to go — Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller and others went, but it seems the

Brad: Drizzler got left behind. JD. And we might get to him in a minute, but when Trump was in China, President Xi said that he hopes that the United States and China can avoid the Thucydides situation. I'm confident that Trump had no idea what he was talking about. But basically what Xi was saying is: we have a global order in which one country is becoming dominant and another is on the decline — that is the Thucydides Trap — can these two countries avoid all-out war, unlike in the historical example? Or will it come to that? The implication there was that the United States is a country in decline. Trump then went on to post a Truth Social thing saying that Xi was clearly talking about when Biden was president, blah blah blah, because somebody clued him in on the joke that had been played on him in front of his face.

Dan: Yeah, he was not looking at the long sweep of American history or the 21st century. No, he's looking at everything up until the last 16 months. True. Trump posted like he's not talking about the "last 16 glorious months" — I think the word "glorious" was in there somewhere.

Brad: And I guess my point with that is just — Dan, I just take a lot of issue with President Xi saying that about this country. This country is great. We are doing really well. One example of that is we have enough money for Kid Rock to fly in to salute Black Hawk helicopters, for Kid Rock to give speeches about Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. We have a lot of money for our president to golf every week, which costs us millions and millions of dollars. And in addition, we have enough money for that president to have a 15-foot gold statue of himself at a golf club where ministers gather to dedicate it. Dan, this country is doing great. We have ministers doing religious ceremonies at Don Colossus — a 15-foot bronze statue overlooking the seventh hole of the Doral Golf Resort. If you don't think we're flourishing, if you don't think we're still primed to be a global superpower — you're just a hater. That's what I think, President Xi. I just don't think you got this one right.

So, all right. Let's play you a clip of RFK Jr. talking about birth rates and fertility. On Monday, in the Oval Office, there was a big pro-natalist announcement — some new policies related to IVF, related to the moms fund — and we'll get to the specifics in a second. But here's RFK talking about all of that.

RFK Jr. [Clip]: Proud to be part of an administration that wants to make America welcoming and friendly to motherhood again. We had two administrations that were unfriendly to motherhood, and now we've got an administration where we have a president who wants mothers who want babies to have them, and to do everything that the government can do in its power to make that easy and an agreeable process for moms.

Brad: All right, so we've got RFK talking about this. And there's a great piece at Wired by Ej Dickson who says, during this event, Trump announced a proposal for employers to offer a health care coverage option for IVF and other fertility treatments. The plan would not mandate that employers offer such coverage, but Trump said he was deeply invested in it. The context here, basically, Dan — the idea that Trump and his administration are seeing fertility rates and birth rate drops as a public health risk, a security risk, a national security problem.

Great piece on Substack by Lisa Braun Dubbels, who said, "Look, this was not a presentation about public health. This was a wellness scam setup." If you follow wellness conspiratorial spaces, this is how they work. It was a format she easily recognized. She talks about Dr. Oz and RFK, basically saying there's a villain: "one in three Americans are under-babied." Dan, we're not a nation in decline, okay? Are we a little under-babied? Maybe. But we are not a nation in decline. If you're listening, President Xi — Dr. Oz and RFK Jr., let me repeat, the men in charge of our public health, said we're just a little under-babied. They're doing great. So she says, look, this was a product reveal. Moms.gov — a one-stop shop for IVF, prenatal, and postnatal care — and Trump Rx, a program that's supposed to reduce costs on prescription drugs. The administration picks a villain — "under-babied" — that sounds enormous but requires no specific policy action: demographic collapse, civilizational threat, Social Security on the brink. The villain is enormous in scope and zero in enforcement requirement. Which is exactly the wellness industry move. "This is not the language of public health. It is the language of a wellness brand launch, and it is being spoken at the podium by the people now responsible for federal health policy."

One of the things I want to note — and I think we can contribute to this — is that this is a merger of RFK's bizarre MAHA wellness approach and worldview with Christian nationalist pro-natalist approaches outlined by outfits like the Heritage Foundation. In January, the Heritage Foundation released a document, "Saving America by Saving the Family," that outlines much of this pro-natalist approach, and I can go into the details of that in a minute. But throw it to you to jump in here on RFK and the idea that we're under-babied. He's also worried about teenage sperm counts, so again —

Dan: Because that's not creepy or weird at all. I'm just gonna —

Brad: Dan, Dan — we're not a nation in decline. Yes, a little under-babied, and yes, the men in charge of our public health are fixated on teenage sperm counts. But we're doing great. We're really, really doing fine. So — off to you, go ahead.

Dan: First, I want to congratulate Brad Onishi on saying "Thucydides" that many times. That's — I'm pretty sure we've never said Thucydides that often in an episode. So it's a first.

Brad: No — I was going to make a joke that was going to be inappropriate, and it's midnight my time, and I'm not doing it. Yeah, go ahead.

Dan: There are so many things. Even just that brief clip about prior administrations being unfriendly to motherhood — okay, what does that mean? We'll get more into that as we go along, and we'll talk about Trump on affordability. But I think talking about it as a product reveal is interesting, because what it gets at is something you and I have talked about — and other people have talked about for decades — that the Republican Party doesn't want to do anything that actually helps families or helps people to have families. Let me be clear: if insurance companies would cover IVF, I'd be all for it. That'd be awesome. But we've heard Trump recently talk about why it's impossible for the government to support child care. We've heard for decades the right attacking public education, dismantling public education as we speak — let alone instituting things like pre-K, or things that would support the rest of the family, like job training and education access. You mentioned the Heritage document about the family, and the insistence that every child deserves the right to be raised in a family with their biological parents forever — but there's nothing in there about, I don't know, the right to a family that can afford to raise children, that has economic opportunity to do so.

This is also a party, and the technocrats that you know so much about, championing AI at every level — and what that's going to do to the American workforce — while also saying we need to increase the number of people in the country, we need a larger population. There are people looking down the road saying, for what? To do what? We don't have an economic model for how people survive in a country where so many jobs may be done by AI. We don't have a party that's thinking about, you know, universal income or things like this.

The point I'm trying to make is — babies. It sounds simple enough, but it spirals out into the things that all of us experience all of the time: the whole network of concerns in economics and finances that we all have to balance and in which we all exist. That's a component of having children. So yeah, you could do creepy things like talk about weird teenage sperm counts. You can talk about having babies. But there's nothing there to support them. And this is the same song in a different key that we've heard from the GOP for decades — the so-called "right to life" language, or whatever, that was always about: we care about children right up till they're born, and that's it. Then you're on your own. I think this is more of the same.

Brad: So to me this plays right into — as much as I was trying to be facetious, sarcastic there — Trump says, "I don't think about Americans' financial situation," the same week he says we need to have more babies, the same week that his public health officials are saying, "We're under-babied, we need to increase the birth rate, it's a national security risk." I don't think about how you're going to pay for your life, much less kids, but I do worry a lot about us having more kids. I don't care about your bottom line, I don't care about your flourishing, but I do want you to have more babies.

I think one thing where there's a merger between the pro-natalists on the Christian nationalist side and the MAHA wellness stuff is masculinity and patriarchy. RFK is deep into this idea of masculinity as fertility. He's a proponent of taking testosterone — hormone replacement. He's working out with no shirt on — and again, more Kid Rock. I mean, we're doing great as a country. When President Xi said we're at the Thucydides situation, does he know we have Kid Rock or not? Has he seen Kid Rock with no shirt on, working out with RFK? Because if he has, I don't think he would have said that. But whatever, President Xi — obviously you didn't do your homework ahead of that meeting.

The wellness stuff is deeply tied to the patriarchal idea that men need to be fathering as many children as possible to be real men — passing on their DNA, their genealogical tree. Elon Musk is in on this. And this is where the technocrats, the Christian nationalists, and the MAHA wellness people all sort of shake hands.

If you go through the Heritage Foundation document "Saving America by Saving the Family," they are outlining a vision — and we can go through it in detail if you want — but they really do not want no-fault divorce to be allowed any longer. They want to change rules regarding alimony and child support so that if a woman decides to leave her husband, and if that woman has stayed home as a stay-at-home mom, she would have very little recourse for financial restitution. And thus getting divorced becomes an economic impossibility, which it was for much of American history. They are trying to ban gay marriage, they are trying to ban abortion, they are trying to argue for tax credits that would reward women for basically staying home — and they would argue you should get a child care credit used for one of the parents to watch their children. Now, as a parent of two young kids, I know how much

Dan: That'll pay for it. The tax credit's going to completely cover it, Brad. No problem.

Brad: Well, and what they would argue is: we need parents at home, more parents wish they had more time to be at home. And in the 1960s and '70s, women were indoctrinated into a worldview that tried to free them from patriarchy and religion and family, and we're reversing that. The response is: no, we're just trying to create conditions where women have choices about how they will spend their professional and domestic lives, their partnerships, how and when they will do that.

The Heritage Foundation is also pushing for people to get married young and have many kids. They want there to be a reward — they argue there's a societal benefit to big families, and therefore if you have four or five children, you should get money from the government. They also argue the government should just put money in your account if you get married early, so that if you get married in your 20s, by the time you're 30 you will have accrued something like $30,000 or $35,000 from the government. But they say in the past such policies have been misguided, because they were for people who wouldn't work, people who are lazy, people who wouldn't get a job — which sounds like "welfare queen," Ronald Reagan speak for Black people and others. No, no, Dan — this would be for good, hardworking white Christian people who get married at 27 and have three kids by their 30s, and then we give them money as the government, because they deserve it. They're the ones who deserve the government money. So the Heritage Foundation's pro-natalism lines up really well with the MAHA RFK stuff and their version of pro-natalism, and you get this whole fixation on fertility, birth rates, and so on. Even though the President of the United States says explicitly he does not care about your financial situation. More thoughts on any of this?

Dan: Yeah, so I'll start with the Trump statement. John Fetterman comes out and says, "Oh, it was clipped, it was taken out of context," and JD Vance tries to do some damage control and says, "How dare you suggest that Donald Trump doesn't care about Americans?" I get it that the immediate context is he's saying, what I'm really focused on is Iran not having a nuclear weapon. But there are other ways to say that, if in fact you actually give a damn about regular Americans and their cost of living. You could say, "Of course, that's front of mind all the time, but right now this has to be a focus," or something. He was asked twice in that exchange with reporters — they kind of gave him a do-over question, like, are you sure you don't want to maybe give a nod to this, we've heard your party talking about how affordability is the big talking point, maybe you want to try again — and he just doubled down. So I think what it shows is he literally does not think about it, it just does not occur to him. He is not on board with the whole affordability issue. The idea that people who aren't billionaires, who aren't members of his cabinet, have a hard time making ends meet — that's just not where Donald Trump is.

And then there's the other strand of this, which I think is worth stating explicitly again: the replacement theory behind it. This was an extremist white supremacist discourse until fairly recently, when it became just a mainstream conservative and GOP talking point — that this country's on the verge of collapse because we just don't have enough white people having babies, they're being replaced by others. They got what they wanted in the immigration crackdown to try to keep non-white people not just from coming in but to remove the ones who are here — denaturalizing people, all of those kinds of things. But this notion that when they talk about pro-natalism, they're talking about white people, and they're talking about white Christians.

And that Heritage piece, I think, is notable because what it's about — and what you're getting at — is it's about creating a situation of feminine dependence on men. That's how you embody the masculinity. You make it so that women would not have any other option. So let's incentivize staying at home, raising kids. This is a good feminine virtue and all of this. But we're also going to ensure thereby that you're trapped in that — that it's not something you chose, that you don't have to have a partner who makes you want to do that, who's the kind of person you want to do that with. You're trapped financially. You would have no other option.

I talk about this a lot, but I'm going to bring it up again: they always go, "Oh, the 60s and 70s, women were taught an ideology." Well, you know what also happened in the '80s? You had the emergence of neoliberal economics and Reaganomics and the fact that it is impossible for most families to survive on a single income. Yeah, the magic wand they always wave about tax cuts or tax incentives — as you said, anybody who has had to look at the cost of child care, it's like, are you kidding me? Great, cool, give me a couple grand in a tax incentive. That'll cover like a month for a kid, maybe. You want to talk about accounts with $30,000 in them over years? Great. There's my child care costs for a year. Nobody's going to make staying at home and driving kids to soccer practice or after-school programs work — they have to go out and work to try to survive.

So I think that's the other piece I come around to all the time: the GOP created the economic situation that is causing the trouble for families that they highlight, but they never, ever, ever want to talk about that or how they would have to fix it. So it's about creating a dependence of women on men so that they will be trapped and locked into marriages and child-raising, so that we can have a good white country and outbreed, frankly, the non-whites. That's what they want.

Brad: Let's keep talking about that. We'll take a break and be right back.

Brad: All right, Dan. So I agree with everything you said. I'm wondering if you wouldn't mind expanding for a minute on the way you see — the 60s and 70s are one thing, but once you get the Reagan revolution, how do tax cuts for the rich, cutting programs, and so on lead us to the kind of place where it really is hard to have a family and bring kids into the world?

I'll just quote you something from the Wired piece by E.J. Dickson that I referenced earlier: "It's telling, though not surprising, that in discussions about boosting the American birth rate, Trump administration officials are not focusing on the actual reasons women may be having fewer children. Extensive research shows that the skyrocketing costs of housing and health care, as well as the absence of policies such as universal child care or mandated paid family leave for private employees, are far more powerful contributing factors than, say, pesticides or teenage sperm count." And while increasing fertility treatment access is undoubtedly a good thing, because Trump's proposal does not mandate employers offer IVF coverage, it prompts questions about who exactly such legislation benefits.

I think that's really apt, in the sense that none of this is actually getting at what would help people want to bring kids into the world. It's trying to impose on them the moral framework of the nuclear family, impose on them the gendered framework of women staying at home, impose on them the idea that men need to be the sole breadwinners, impose on people the patriarchal notion of men building a genealogical DNA empire — and saying that is what will get people to have kids, not all these other things. Any other thoughts? Maybe expand on what you said about the '80s, and why that created the situation where it's hard to bring kids into the world in this country.

Dan: Yeah, so what people call Reaganomics — I use the fancier term neoliberal economics, or people have used the term trickle-down economics — was just an economic model coming out of Chicago, from people like Milton Friedman, that Ronald Reagan championed, as did Margaret Thatcher in the UK. She was a fan of this as well. The idea was — you hear it all the time — that if you shrink government, meaning stop providing benefits to American people, essentially do away with the social safety net: don't offer government services, privatize everything, everything should be run through private companies, run through the market, the market will make everything good. And tax cuts, especially for wealthier people. This was also called supply-side economics — the idea that wealthy people are the ones who actually build the economy, so if you give them tax cuts, they will build their businesses, expand jobs, and that wealth will trickle down to everybody else.

The long and short of it is, it hasn't worked. Tax cuts have not produced the utopian society they said they would. Doing away with government-funded anything for people and privatizing it all hasn't worked. As it turns out, private companies are in it for profit — not because they want to serve others. So you have skyrocketing costs in things like private health care, as opposed to a universal health care system that wouldn't be profit-driven. You can still pay doctors. People say you couldn't — of course you could. But it wouldn't be built on profit.

So the long and short of it is, economists will say that what we call real wages — you adjust for inflation — have stagnated or declined since the '70s, meaning you, Brad, and me, and everybody else, we make less than our parents did, and that's just accelerating. So you have skyrocketing costs, you have flat wages, and this has been due to economic developments championed by the Republican Party from Reagan forward, which are just now orthodoxy. That's why you don't have Trump or anybody else on the right looking at the actual causes, because they can't fix affordability — that would mean the government doing something, and they've painted themselves into a corner where the government's not supposed to do anything except incentivize private businesses, which means take your tax money and my tax money and hand it to private businesses, give them the tax cuts, which they then just pocket. They don't put it back into their business, they don't feed it back into the system, and we've seen this spiraling system for decades.

That's part of why we are where we are, and nobody can afford to live and have kids. For a lot of people, it's not weird to ask, "Why don't you have kids?" — like, who the hell can afford to have a kid? We can barely get by with the two of us, or the one child we have, not the 2.1 or whatever it takes to replace the population.

Brad: Yeah. I think, in addition to the neoliberal policies you talked about, on the other side of this vision — the Heritage Foundation vision, the reactionary Catholic vision, the Christian nationalist vision, the pro-natalist vision — is criminalizing women for wanting to have an abortion.

Dan: Yes.

Brad: We live in a country where hundreds of women have been prosecuted and have had legal charges pursued against them for things related to abortion. We live in a world where zero men have been held accountable for their involvement with Epstein — at least in this country. Why would I want to bring children into that world? So I think if you are taking me to a place where you want to roll back women's rights to vote, you're going to try to get me in jail for having a miscarriage and claim that I was willfully terminating a pregnancy — that sounds like a world that I really don't want to have kids in.

For some people, understandably, this is also a movement. JD Vance himself has said, and Kevin Roberts — the leader of the Heritage Foundation — is on this train too. I've read a lot of Kevin Roberts' work in writing American Caesar, and they're both pretty much like: you should get more of a vote if you have kids, and if you don't have kids as a woman, well, you're not really doing your job. This kind of moral imposition — I don't think that's the kind of world many young women are looking at and saying, yeah, sounds great, let's have four or five children.

A couple more comments on this. Anytime Uncle Ron tells you we don't have any more room in this country, we're full — ask him why the president and the richest man in the world and all of their Christian nationalist, neo-natalist friends are telling everyone to have five and six children. Either we're full or we're not. Or maybe, just maybe, it's not that we're full — it's that you want this country to be full of a certain kind of people, and the others who don't fit your vision of America are the ones you want violently taken out of it, based on pure hatred and prejudice, rather than on the idea that we just don't have enough room.

And yet the Heritage Foundation is like, hey, if you get married in your 20s and have three kids, the government will just give you money. One of the ways I look at that policy, Dan, is almost like — they're not fixing the conditions that make having kids hard. It's almost like, you know how they just talked about paying off corporations and giving them the tax cut? It's almost like: hey, if you're a young family that's willing to find your partner at age 25 — which most people don't do today, and inevitably some people are going to settle — we want a society where people meet their partner at 24 or 25, have kids, and by the time they're 30, we'll give them some money because they deserve it. That's not fixing the problem. That's just putting money in individual bank accounts. That's not going to do much in terms of fixing a systemic problem: we don't have enough housing, we don't have enough health care, we don't have universal health care, we don't have enough child care. Not going to fix any of that. Period. But they don't want that.

Can I read you one infuriating aspect of the Heritage Foundation thing? So, granted, they want to put money in people's accounts for having kids, they want to give women who have four and five and six kids money for doing so, and yet they say this: "In many respects, a strong family dependent on God and one another is itself a declaration of independence. It advances the cause of liberty by minimizing the need for government in daily life." So — government support is only good if it's given to the right people, and yet somehow, by me having five kids and the government giving me $30,000, I'm free from government in daily life. That somehow makes sense. I don't know, Dan — does that make sense to you? What's the contradiction here?

Dan: It doesn't make any sense, and I think part of the reason is it's just an article of faith, an ideological and theological statement of belief that has nothing behind it. I'd love to sit and be like, "Cool — how exactly?" I mean, if somebody's got a house with five kids, cool. But like, and to be clear, if that's what somebody wants to do and they're in a position to do it, good, more power to them. I would ask, like — how does that make you more independent? It doesn't even make sense; there's not even a clear logic there. It's almost like they're envisioning — and maybe they are — some vision of, I don't know, maybe the most recent version would be like the Waltons or something, where you've got the little family business and all the kids are working there, or the family farm, where I don't know, maybe having all those hands working means you're not hiring somebody else. Like, what are we doing? You're having a whole brood of humans in your house, and somehow that does away with — I don't know — all the realities of life. Most people are looking at me like, wow, okay, so now I've got to get health care for six or seven people instead of two, and I can't even find doctors who are taking patients in the next six months. And oh, wow, okay, cool. Braces? Braces blew my mind, Brad.

Brad: The hospitals closed in my county. There are no more hospitals.

Dan: And again — what the Trump administration does, what the Republicans do: they keep saying, "Well, we're putting money into these things," except they're the ones who cut the money out of these things to start with, and then they put a much smaller amount back in. So the Trump administration will talk about the fund for rural hospitals — you're the ones who caused all the rural hospitals to close down. And then you take a small fraction of that and say, "Look how much money we're putting into rural health care." Yeah. So the hospital closes down. How am I going to pay for braces? They don't like public education, so now we've got these quasi-public charter schools or private schools, and I've got to pay out of pocket for all kinds of stuff because the school doesn't pay for anything anymore. I'm constantly having to pay out of pocket. How much does a car cost? How much does gas cost? And college — I'm looking at college with my kid and I'm like, god, I'm going to be really straight: I'm glad I'm not looking at doing this five times. Just on and on and on.

So when somebody just states as a fact, as a kind of mantra, that this is about freedom and independence — you're like, what in the world are you talking about? To say nothing of one other thing worth noting: I think the other reality is that having kids is hard psychologically, mentally, emotionally, and that's something women in particular are not supposed to have felt. They're supposed to love motherhood. Motherhood is supposed to be great, supposed to be awesome. Things like postpartum depression, or just the daily grind of childcare — socially at large, it's still not easy for women to say things like that. And certainly on the right, it's a forbidden topic. So to say nothing of the emotional and mental health side of having lots and lots of kids — that's an issue the right won't even acknowledge is real. We could literally do this all day, responding to this mantra that magically it makes you free and independent to have five kids.

Brad: Yeah, I agree. All right, let's take a break. We'll be right back to talk about what's happening with Brooke Rollins and a lawsuit being brought against the Secretary of Agriculture. Be right back.

Dan: All right. Dan, tell us about the lawsuit and what's happened.

Yeah, so agricultural employees are suing Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins. They're suing her on the grounds — the assertion is — that she has sent what the lawsuit's language calls "increasingly proselytizing emails" to staff. And they're suing on the grounds that she has violated their First Amendment rights. This was specifically in response to an Easter message that she sent in April to the 100,000 employees of the agency, alleging that it "sought to impose her brand of Christianity" on employees. The suit seeks to ban Rollins from further religious — this is a quote from Ethan Roberts, one of the plaintiffs: "We work for the federal government, not a church. I just want to go to work and make my country better. I shouldn't have to suffer through sermons and other religious messages forced upon me by the head of a federal agency. When the secretary sends an email, I have to read it, and when those emails are telling me what to believe, they make me feel unwelcome in an agency that I've dedicated 10 years to."

Another quote: "The denominational favoritism conveyed in Secretary Rollins' communications indoctrinates USDA employees and has caused them to feel coerced, unwelcome, excluded, and like outsiders to the agency. Crucially, Secretary Rollins has sent no messages even acknowledging, let alone celebrating or sermonizing, other religions' holidays."

The Easter message itself — the language was talking about praising "our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ" and commemorating his sacrifice. What really struck the employees, I think, was the "our" language. They highlighted the "we" language, the "our" language, as if they were included in this religion. I think the coercive element is the point — the secretary of the department is the one sending this out.

So I think it's notable for a number of reasons. One, it seems to me like a clear violation of the First Amendment, the Establishment Clause — you create a context in which a government agent is advocating on behalf of a particular religious tradition. The coercive element, as that employee said, "I have to read those emails, I have to hear that language." I applaud the agriculture employees for doing this, but they fear reprisal, and I think they should. This is an administration that I think actively targets anybody who questions the kind of religiosity of this.

I also think this is one of those cases that — I fear — should it continue to move forward, I think it'll be upheld in lower courts, and I think it'll make it to a Supreme Court that has raised the bar so high on what would have to qualify as an establishment of religion. I can hear it now — an Alito or Roberts or Clarence Thomas saying, well, you know, the email doesn't actually say you have to be a Christian. She's just stating her beliefs. And when she says "ours" and "we," it's an invitation, not a coercion. Or something ridiculous like that. And so I fear that in the country we live in at present, if you're a Christian nationalist putting forward your views and making your employees listen to it — it's going to be ruled that it would be a violation of her First Amendment rights for her not to be able to do this, even if it's in official communications. We've seen that logic play out. We've seen it in the Pentagon with Hegseth having his quote-unquote "voluntary sermons" and all those kinds of things. So I think it's a really noteworthy story. I applaud those members of that agency. I fear there will be reprisals. And at the end of the day, I really don't know what it would take for the supermajority conservatives on the Supreme Court to actually determine that something that is Christian is an imposition of religion. I don't know how explicit that would have to be to clear the bar they've now created.

Brad: For me, these cases are really a chance to once again return to the rudimentary mechanics of Christian nationalism. We hear this word all the time now — you and I talk about it all the time, it's in the public discourse. But what does it do?

Here's what it does. A month ago, we talked about the President of the United States getting into a one-sided public war of words with the Pope. We have a President willing to criticize the Pope, a Vice President willing to criticize the Pope, willing to say he needs to stick to theology, stick to morality, stick to the church, and let us do the government. Okay. Does that mean then, government, you are going to stick to government and you are not going to do morality and theology? Oh, no, it doesn't. It means that the government will do both. We will do the theology and the government. We will do the governing and the policy, the law, and the religion. You will do one, and if your version of religion — Pope — gets in conflict with ours, then you're the wrong one.

So when Brooke Rollins is sending these emails out, she is the government saying: you need to come into alignment, employees, with our version of Christianity. And if you do, you will be rewarded — not only spiritually, but no doubt, Dan, if you are a Christian person in this department, you are going to have an easier time when it comes to relating to your boss and the people who are in charge. If you are a person who wears a hijab because you're Muslim, or somebody who has an atheist sticker on their laptop, or somebody who is an open humanist, or Hindu, or Buddhist, or Wiccan — it's going to be very hard to get in the good graces of a boss who is openly proselytizing by way of government messaging channels.

Again, for everybody who hears "Christian nationalism" all the time and is not even sure what it does and what the problem is — the problem is that the government now has the power and authority of religion, and it's telling religious bodies: you stick to theology and morality and don't get involved in politics. We will do politics, but we will also do religion. We will do both. And if your religion — whether you're the Pope, or an atheist in Seattle, or a humanist in New York City, or a secular Jew in Austin, or a Hindu in Fremont, or a Buddhist in Maine — if your religion doesn't line up with the government's version, then you're not a real American, and we might have a problem. So whether it's the Pope or anyone else, your religion needs to line up with the government version of it. That's exemplified in the kinds of emails people are getting from Brooke Rollins. It's just one example of many in this administration, from the Pentagon on down. Those are my immediate thoughts. What else do you see going on here?

Dan: I think part of what you're picking up on — I had the opportunity this semester in a class I was teaching to refresh on some of the developments in the interpretation of the First Amendment and religious freedom and SCOTUS. One of the patterns you'd seen in an earlier time was a sensitivity to exactly what you're describing — those informal dimensions of a workplace or an educational space. When people would talk about a word like "coercion," it would be the kid who feels weird having to pledge allegiance to a flag with "one nation under God" if he and his family don't believe in God, or maybe they're Jehovah's Witnesses and they're not supposed to make declarations of a pledge to any authority other than God. The sense that you get those forms of coercion that aren't formal, aren't written out anywhere. Am I welcome in the break room to have my coffee or eat my lunch if everybody else there is — I don't know — having a prayer meeting? And especially when it is people who are not acting as private individuals in that context — they are acting as agents of the federal government. That's what the secretary is doing. This isn't just, I don't know, the dude who works down the hall who's a nice guy and always wants to tell you about the sermon last Sunday. This is your boss. And not just your boss — somebody who represents the federal government. But it creates all of those informal mechanisms. Do I fit in? Am I welcome? I was passed over for that promotion — do I really know that was because of job performance, or is it because they go to the same church, or they've attended all the Hegseth sermons, or they went to the secretary's Easter service? In a bygone era, the court was sensitive to things like that, and so they would say, okay, if we're going to talk about the government "establishing" a religion, we're going to pay attention to those mechanisms that create a coercive work environment or education environment, and we're going to try to be sensitive to that.

This court doesn't buy into that. What they do is play their game of being literal and say, well, they didn't literally establish a religion. It doesn't say you have to be a Christian to work for the Agriculture Department or something like that. So, you know, if you feel coerced, that's bad, but that's a you problem — it's not an us problem. And so the bar has been raised to where, unless you were to say, "We won't hire anybody who's not Christian" in an explicit policy memo, they can say, well, they haven't established anything. They're just stating their religious views. Doesn't matter that Rollins is an agent of the federal government whenever she says anything else in official emails and documents — but when it's about religion, suddenly it's magically just her. It's not coercive. She's not the voice of the government. So you've had a real shift in how the First Amendment is interpreted and applied, and I think these are the concrete impacts that it has on people.

Brad: And I also think it's notable that this is the administration that has created the anti-Christian bias task force.

Dan: Yeah.

Brad: So on one hand they are out there policing any restriction or what they take to be any bias against Christianity, and then when somebody says, "Well, I feel like I'm being biased by Christianity" — it's like, no, that's not possible, that categorically could never even happen. Yes, she is proselytizing via email and basically creating a class system where if you're a Christian you're a different animal within the department. But as you just said, Dan — no, no, no. According to the court and their interpretation, no — this is just a private individual expressing their religious liberty. Yeah, but we're also, on the other side, going to make sure that there's no anti-Christian bias being expressed. So there's no way for Christianity to bias against people, but we are certainly on the lookout for any bias against Christians. And that is Christian nationalism.

Dan: And of course filing a lawsuit against the federal government saying that they're violating religious freedom is anti-Christian bias, right? It circles back around to them feeling targeted.

Brad: There it is.

Dan: You know.

Brad: Call the task force. Call the task force. Yeah, let them know about this.

Dan: A final point about this that just brings it into such relief: they contacted the USDA spokesperson for a response to the article, and this is what the official USDA response was: "While we do not comment on pending litigation" — which is the part you'd expect — "we will keep the plaintiffs in our prayers during this process." You know? You're just like — do we need any more evidence of a kind of de facto Christian agency shaped by the Trump administration and the people he appoints? They'll happily fire them, they'll happily target them for being anti-Christian. I can't imagine that for some of them the workplace is a very hospitable place right now. But they'll keep them in their prayers. Hopes and prayers, as the right likes to offer in times of distress and trouble.

Brad: All right, we've got like two minutes. If you want to take us through the DEI study that was just done, that would be amazing. And then give us your reason for hope.

Dan: Yeah, so the long and short of it was — there was a study taken by an organization called Catalyst and the NYU School of Law that told us something I think will not be shocking to anybody: that a lot of companies, agencies, and basically groups with government contracts that have been involved in DEI rollbacks did it because of pressure from Trump. So if you thought that when they say, "We're just doing this because we don't want to violate federal law," or "we think this is more fair," or whatever — it turns out that's not it. It confirmed what I think everybody has known intuitively: that they did it in response to pressure from Donald Trump. So for those who think the Trump administration targeting DEI initiatives doesn't have a concrete effect — the upside of this is we now confirm what most of us felt: that it does. A last point about this: they found that companies that did not have federal contracts actually increased DEI initiatives and have increased those initiatives since Trump came into office. Those that make money from the federal government have decreased them, and it has been because of Donald Trump. So those are the real effects of the anti-DEI, anti-woke initiatives.

Brad: Just to bring back everything we've talked about here — I did an interview a couple weeks ago with Dr. Tiffany Townsend about DEI, and I think folks should listen to that. DEI is really something that was set up to allow people to bring their entire selves to work, to recognize that we have to be intentional in the way we hire. It is not about lowering standards. It is not about saying different groups get different tests or different criteria by which they're hired and evaluated. It's not about giving anyone a less rigorous work environment because of their race or their gender. It is about recognizing the intentionality of creating work environments that are representative of American society in ways that underscore the stunning diversity of our population. And saying that if you — anyway, I could go on and on about DEI.

I think one of the things DEI highlights for me is that the government is always going to be able to tip the scales in some way. The government is the body that has the right to violence, the right to taxation, the right to law. And so what the government does through policy and action is always going to tip the scale somehow. DEI was meant to say: the scales have been tipped historically one way, certain people have been given stuff, certain people have been left out categorically. We need to recognize that.

It just seems, though, that all the family stuff — from Dr. Oz, RFK, the Heritage Foundation — it's just DEI for the people they think are being marginalized and replaced. And that is those white families that should have four and five babies. I say "DEI" there not to say we shouldn't be intentional about how we hire — I'm saying the government is being intentional about who it's rewarding: certain people who fit a certain bill, and that mainly means white, Christian, young people who are willing to get married in their 20s and have more kids than the national average. Three, four, five, six children. Well, that's a form of DEI. It's just saying that the diversity and equity need to be given to this group — this white Christian group that most of us recognize as having been privileged and having been given advantages for most of our country's history.

Anyway, I just wanted to make that point. I'll give you my reason for hope quickly today. The Supreme Court did not weigh in on the abortion pill issue, and that means it essentially upheld a lower court's ruling, and the abortion pill will not be banned nationwide. People will continue to have access to it. That seems like a good thing to me. That was my reason for hope, Brad.

Dan: So — thanks for stealing it.

Brad: Thanks for —

Dan: I will say, I do take hope — like talking about this suit against the USDA. There are still Americans in these agencies who are standing up and demanding their rights and recognizing that they have legal protections as well. I take hope that the people are not just leaving the agencies, they are not just acquiescing — they are continuing to — I won't even use the language of "resistance" — they're just asserting that they're Americans too, and that they have the same rights as everybody else. I think that is very hopeful.

Brad: Well, that's a form of resistance, it seems like.

Dan: Unfortunately, yeah.

Brad: Not everyone gets a gold statue. Not everybody gets a golden — not calf, okay? Not everyone gets a — all right. President Xi, we're doing great. Thanks for tuning in tonight, and for everyone else who tuned in — we are grateful for you too. Subscribe to our newsletter, please. Go check out what we've got going on on our website. We have a whole bunch of great ways to connect. I'll send out our newsletter every Sunday. We'll be back next week — I'll be reflecting on the Christian Nationalist Fest that's been happening this weekend in DC, so I'll give you some thoughts about that. We'll have "It's in the Code," the weekly roundup, and once again, in a couple of weeks, we'll be inviting you to help us with the next chapter of Straight White American Jesus and Axis Mundi Media and other stuff. Some big things to come from us.

But for now, we'll say thanks for being here. I am in Hawaii, Dan, for research. Being in Hawaii is always great, but this is not a family trip — it's not a vacation, it's a work trip. But I know what everyone's thinking: work trips to Hawaii are not the same as work trips to other places. So I have had a good time, I am enjoying myself, but I am working hard too. This is not just — I'm staying up till like one in the morning to record, so there you go. We're dedicated. We gotta do the work, and so here we are. People, we love you. Thanks for being here. We'll catch you next time.

Dan: Thanks, Brad. Bye.