Below is the transcript of the Fiat Lux Redux episode that originally aired on October 29th, 2024.
INTRO: [00:00:00] K A L X, Berkeley. Welcome to Fiat Lux Redux, a
collection of edited lectures and conversations that took place on the
campus of UC Berkeley. It’s culled from segments of material available
online at UC Berkeley’s many websites, podcast programs, and
streaming channels. Today’s edition of Fiat Lux Redux starts now.
Lisa Katovich: Believe it or not, there’s currently an American
movement to return to monarchy. On this important episode of Fiat Lux
Redux, Dr. Bradley Onishi explains how this movement is connected to
Project 2025 and the 2024 presidential election. Onishi is a social
commentator, scholar, and co host of the immensely popular Fiat Lux
Straight White American Jesus Podcast and the author of the 2023
book, Preparing for War, The Extremist History of White Christian
[00:01:00] Nationalism and What Comes Next. The Berkeley Lecture on
Religious Tolerance that you’re about to hear took place October 9th,
2024.
Dr. Bradley Onishi: I want to talk today about what I think are the anti
democratic aspects of Christian nationalism. Christian nationalism is the
idea that because you love God, quote unquote, you are more of an
American than other people.
And you get more of this country because of your religious identity or
your religious commitment. Why don’t we think about a round table? We
have a round table of folks from across this nation representing every
demographic, racial, ethnic, linguistic, sexual identities, gender identities,
and so on. And before that meeting starts, right, one person stands up
and says, Hey, it’s good to be here with everyone.
As we get the meeting going, I just need you to know that by dint of me
being Christian, I’m just going to get a different place at this table than
everyone else. I have a different authority, a different privilege, and just
a different status here. So as long as you understand that and you
accept it, we’re going to be okay.
We’ll be fine. Now, if you don’t, then we’ll have problems. And surely
someone raises their hand, right? The agnostic, the Hindu, the Buddhist,
the Muslim says, Why do [00:02:00] you get that place? And the answer
is, well, this is a Christian country. And it’s, it was founded that way.
Right? So surely, because of our history and because of our founding,
the present and the future should look like me, okay?
That’s an anti democratic attitude. Christian nationalism in this country is
on a spectrum. And the sociological data bears that out. There are folks
who think that Christians should be the leader of the country just
because that’s how it should be. There are folks who really would like it
for In God We Trust to remain on our money, or One Nation Under God
to remain in the pledge, or whatever.
They’re not the people that keep me up. The people that keep me up at
night are the folks who are openly willing to say, if the majority of the
folks around the roundtable are not going to recognize the rightful heir to
the American founding, then we might have to change the configuration
of the table.
What I put forth is, we’re at a state in this country. Where openly saying
that democracy is the problem and not the solution is a mainstream
attitude. And it’s one that is shared by many who identify as or are
rightfully called Christian Nationalists. Each year, news programs film
Iowans gathering to cast their votes in a ritual that [00:03:00]
emblematizes the sharing of power and cooperation demanded of those
who want to live in a democracy.
This year was different. A correspondent for The Young Turks
interviewed the man at Team Trump Iowa commit to caucus events in
Coralville, Iowa. Would you rather have Donald Trump as a dictator for
four years or re elect Joe Biden for four years? I would rather have
Donald Trump, I’d like to see them repeal the Roosevelt Law so that he
can be a president for a lot more than four years.
But we this country needs a dictator. I hate to say that but it’s the truth
now it’s easy to write off a man at a Trump rally as Someone on the
fringe but a month later another man said this welcome to the end of
democracy We’re here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the
way there in January 6, but we will we will endeavor So we’ll replace it
with this right here.
That’s right, because all glory, all glory is not to government, all glory to
God. Now, there’s no writing this guy off as a blowhard on the street.
Southern Law Poverty Center has identified him as somebody who has
worked with extreme far right [00:04:00] actors, pro authoritarian figures,
somebody who’s published work with white nationalists.
And was a kind of ringleader and architect of the Pizzagate conspiracy
from about a decade ago. His name is Jack Posobiec. He’s a right wing
provocateur. He works for Turning Point USA and has about 2 million
followers on Twitter. Posobiec proclaimed his desire for the end of
democracy not from a high school gymnasium in Iowa, Iowa.
But from the stage of CPAC in February of 2024. CPAC, the
Conservative Political Action Conference, showcases the vanguard of
American conservatives at its gatherings here and abroad. Expressing a
desire to overthrow democracy is an extremist position, but it is also now
a mainstream one in the United States.
When you had Elected officials speaking at the same conference.
People like Representative Elise Stefanik, Representative Marjorie
Taylor Greene, Presidential Candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, now Vice
Presidential Candidate J. D. Vance, and Donald J. Trump. They would
have been asked, do you share these views?
Nobody asked those folks about Postal Week and none of [00:05:00]
them disavowed what he said. Now, we can point to a lot of factors that
created this situation, January 6th. The January 6th insurrection was
simply an attempt to end democracy. Those rioting might have done so
in the name of justice for a, quote, stolen election or a, quote, rigged
process or a, quote, deep state conspiracy.
But if we ask what it was meant to do, if I, as a religion scholar, do what I
do with my students on the first day of every class and say, hey, I don’t, I
don’t want to talk about religious belief. I want to talk about what religion
does for people. Well, if we talk about what January 6th did, we can
reduce it to a very simple idea.
It was an engineer to stop the democratic election of the President of the
United States of America. It was an attempt to overthrow democracy.
GOP officials, commentators, pundits, members of the conservative
influencer class have had many opportunities to disavow something that
was wrong. that was extremist and deserves to be at the fringe, but they
did not.
January 6th has become an Alamo moment for MAGA Nation and
Trump is from sea to shining sea. We’ve witnessed border convoys
caravanning to the southern border in order to prevent the country from
being quote overrun by [00:06:00] quote globalists who they claim are
conspiring to keep U. S. borders open and destroy the country.
Ashley Babbitt, the woman who lost her life that day, is now
emblematized on flags and patches and shirts across the country at
rallies and at gatherings. At one political rally, we’ve had the Pledge of
Allegiance said to an American flag that was present at J6, making it into
a kind of relic. In October 2023, Mike Johnson, a man who did
everything possible to overturn the 2020 election in the courts and is
close to those who mobilized supporters to be at the Capitol on January
6th.
was elected Speaker of the House third in line for the presidency. State
courthouses have been evacuated due to bomb threats. Judges have
been doxed. One state representative in Arizona proposed a bill that
would have declared Donald Trump the winner of the presidential
election in that state before the election took place.
Theologians, historians, think tank pundits, and philosophers have
published books and papers arguing that perhaps a post constitutional
America Whether Red Caesar or Christian Prince would be a better way
forward for the country. Pastors and [00:07:00] provocateurs have
expressed a desire for blasphemy laws and other measures that would
punish Americans for not obeying what they take to be biblical law.
These are the small fires everywhere that the unextinguished embers of
January 6th left to burn. They are reducing our democracy to ashes, and
they are doing it in order to build something else. So if the idea that this
country needs a dictator or the desire to overthrow democracy is now
mainstream, it is because of the white Christian nationalists, organizers,
pastors, fundraisers, politicians, shadow network operatives, and others
who’ve been preparing for war on their own country since the 1960s.
So, in July of this year, if CPAC was in February, in July there was
NatCon, the National Conservatism Conference, which is a right wing
organization dedicated to fostering national conservatism in the United
States and beyond. NatCon maintains that public life should be rooted in
Christianity and its moral vision, backed by the Edmund Burke
Foundation, and in recent years NatCon conferences have become a
kind of avant garde for Christian nationalists and right wing speakers
and elected officials.
to articulate their visions to quote, recover and [00:08:00] reconsolidate
the rich tradition of national conservative thought. So this year in July,
the conference was in Washington, DC. At the close of this particular
panel, the moderator, Yoram Hazony, asked these questions. When you
think of this coming state where the Christian commitments are
maximized, is there room for Jews or fellow Bible believers?
Is there room for Muslims or Hindus? Ozoney was addressing two
panelists that, even a few years ago, would have seemed like an unlikely
duo to appear on stage together. One was Al Mohler, president of the
Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. The other, Doug Wilson, the
pastor, publisher, and podcaster, headquartered in Moscow, Idaho.
The person who famously once said that race relations were best in this
country during the time of slavery. This was a watershed moment. The
figurehead of the largest Protestant denomination in the country, sharing
a stage with the firebrand provocateur, and has labeled himself the
spokesperson of American Christian nationalism.
Mueller holds sway over millions as the figurehead of the Southern
Baptist Convention. Wilson reaches millions through his media empire,
his books, his podcasts, his [00:09:00] church network, and his school
network. Here’s how they responded to the query as to whether or not
religious minorities in this country would be welcome in their ideal
Christian republic.
I would say briefly that Jews in this ideal Republic that I would envision.
Jews would be more welcome than they currently are here. Yeah, I
would say enthusiastically so. And so, for instance, uh, among my tribe,
so to speak, theologically, it would be seen as a matter of absolute
divine responsibility to be fully respectful of the Jewish people, fully
protective, and, and have the Jewish people fully integrated in the entire
project.
Traditional Roman Catholics, conservative Protestants, and conservative
Jewish people who basically already live in the same world and
acknowledge that, and have a mutual dependence and appreciation. I
think when you asked the question though, you broadened it and you
said Hindus and Muslims and others.
I don’t think a nation can survive without theological commitments.
[00:10:00] That does not mean it cannot allow others to be a part of the
community and even invite others in a certain sense into the community,
but it does mean that there has to be the explicit acknowledgement that
this is a nation with specific theological accountability and theological
commitments.
Those coming should respect that, must respect that, understand that,
and, uh, the, the kind of modern secularist dream is, I believe, a
constitutional nightmare. Al Mohler just gave us an explicit answer. He
said, look, if you want to be here, everyone else, Hindus, Muslims, and
others, you need to just acknowledge.
This is a Christian country. And if you do, we’ll be fine. You’ll be fine. If
you don’t, there’ll be issues. Doug Wilson says, I agree. A couple weeks
later, Wilson went on to clarify his statements about the place that those
who are not Christian might play in his ideal republic. I just came back
from NatCon 4 in Washington, D.
C. And that was an eclectic affair because there were Catholics and
Protestants and [00:11:00] Jews. And a couple of Hindus. Someone,
there were people raising an uproar. What is, what are you doing with
Hindus at the, this political thing? And, I, I wrote, well, in the republic I
envision, Hindus would not be able to hold political office.
Are you in? And the person, oh, no, no, no, no. I want Hindus to be able
to run for political office in America. I said, okay, so you’re criticizing me
for being willing to talk to a Hindu at a conference. And you’re willing to
be governed by Hindus? This makes no sense. In the Christian
Nationalist Project, we don’t want this, uh, smudge or hodgepodge.
We want it to be explicitly Christian. We would want prayers at the, at
the political convention to be To God the Father, in the name of Jesus
Christ our Lord. That’s how we want the prayers to go. Wilson has been
a controversial figure for decades, but he’s seen a mainstream
resurgence over the last few years.
He did a sit down interview with Tucker Carlson, was praised by Charlie
[00:12:00] Kirk. He is somebody who has cultivated several folks who
are now influential in, you know, Reformed Protestant Christian
Nationalist circles. One of those is Joel Webbin. Joel Webbin is the
founder of Right Response Ministries and Covenant Bible Church in
Austin, Texas.
If Wilson reaches millions per week, Webbin reaches hundreds of
thousands. He often holds conferences and does interviews with Wilson,
the man that we just heard. The man who just shared a stage with Al
Mohler, leader of the largest Protestant denomination in the country.
When asked recently what revival in the United States would look like,
Webbin said this.
My hometown and my neighborhood, my state, is being flooded with non
citizens, and then even those who are citizens, um, first generation
immigrants who have attained citizenship, which aren’t many, but those
who have, are still worshiping false gods. They’re not American, uh, in
any sense of our heritage. And primarily, I’m talking about that being a
problem as it pertains to religion.
They worship other [00:13:00] gods. They are Hindu. Uh, they are
Muslim. Uh, they are Jews. Uh, they are not Christians. So what would
revival look like in the United States? What would a Christian nation do
in order to bring itself back in alignment with God? What it would then
look like in the application of the political, it would look like millions of
people being deported.
It would look like mothers. getting death row for murdering their children.
So, for Webben, the idea of Christian revival goes hand in hand with
mass deportation and a severe punishment for those who engage in
abortion. When asked what we should do to get us back to a place of
revival, and a place where this country might be on the up and up, in
addition to ensuring women can’t vote, Webben outlines his vision
thusly.
I want Christians to have power, and with that power, I want it to be
wielded righteously. What does that mean? It means crushing our
enemies and rewarding our friends. Webbins Christian nationalism
aligns closely with Stephen Wolf’s, another Reformed figure aligned
[00:14:00] with Wilson. Doug Wilson’s Canon Press published Stephen
Wolf’s The Case for Christian Nationalism.
Which is a popular book among extremist Christian nationalists. I’ve read
the book. It draws on the concepts of Volk and homeland in order to
justify theologically the idea that Christians should love those who are
more like them. According to Woolf, it’s just that societies can only be
built by people who share the same ethnicity and religion and thus love
each other more than outsiders and foreigners.
Your kin have belonged to this people, in this land, to this nation, in this
place. And so they bind you to that people and place, creating a
common Volkgeist. Recently, he spoke of his identity as a white Anglo
Saxon Protestant. We, the white Anglo Saxon Protestants who founded,
built, and died for and led this country for most of its history, we are not
permitted in this new America to have a people or a place that is
distinctly ours.
But this is our home. This is our native land. We are Native Americans,
born of those who didn’t immigrate, [00:15:00] but who settled here. We
are the sons and daughters of the people who settled this land. To
describe America as a nation of immigrants, writes the great Harvard
political scientist Samuel Huntington, is to stretch a partial truth into a
misleading falsehood, and to ignore the central fact of America’s
beginning as a society of settlers.
Wolfe recently finished a postdoc at Princeton and wrote his enormously
popular book. He said in a recent podcast interview that it should be
permissible for Christians to deem certain groups to have positions that
are detrimental to the fundamental features of society and to rescind
their political equality.
In September of 2023, Wolfe tweeted, And thus, while intermarriage is
not itself wrong, groups have a collective duty to be separate and marry
among themselves. There have always been racists and ethno
nationalists on the American right. When Al Mohler shook hands with
Doug Wilson at NatCon in July 2024, it was a symbol of the embrace
that legacy denominations like the Southern Baptist Convention are
willing to make with extremists in order to build a [00:16:00] coalition that
will force the acknowledgement of Christian authority on all Americans in
one way or another.
However, Project 2025 is a Christian nationalism fueled by Catholic
leaders, in many cases reactionary Catholic thought. J. D. Vance, largely
seen as a choice bolstering Trump’s outsider image, a young
midwestern firebrand, he’s a first term senator from Ohio who would
bring Silicon Valley money and youthful energy to the ticket.
What has gotten largely unnoticed is that Vance is a more radical
religious politician than Mike Pence, the former vice president, even
though the latter was hailed as the Christian candidate. In 2019, Vance
was received into the Catholic Church. He grew up with exposure to
Christian churches, but by the time he entered law school, described
himself as an angry atheist.
However, on Vance’s telling, Catholicism began to appeal to him
because of its intellectual approach to faith and human life. He was also
influenced by his first encounter with PayPal founder, Peter Thiel. who
convinced him that social ladder climbing and endless pursuits of wealth
were empty in comparison to living a life of significance and meaning.
In 2021, the newly converted Vance spoke to the Napa [00:17:00]
Institute, a network of conservative Catholics who are known for defying
the Pope, largely opposed to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council,
and backed by billionaire donors like Tim Bush, who are sympathetic to
a Christian nationalist vision. In his speech, Vance griped that the
business community is actively pro abortion in this country.
His solution would be to take active measures against businesses that
use their First Amendment rights to express pro-choice positions. When
he converted JD Vance signaled what kind of Catholic communities he
was gonna participate in and and those that would shape him. One of
those was the Napa Institute, which takes place every summer, just
about 45 minutes from here.
The Napa Institute really is the brainchild of conservative billionaire, Tim
Bush and other billionaires in the United States, along with conservative
bishops who see things like. A radical anti abortion agenda, the end of
contraception, outlawing pornography. They are also vehemently against
things that would work to protect us from climate change.
And they have an idea that the government should use its coercive
power to tax and target in order [00:18:00] to legislate morality. The idea
is that the government can be weaponized in order to shape the public
square according to a certain religious vision. This is not a small
government conservatism, and Vance does not represent that lineage in
any sense.
Here he is speaking to Charlie Kirk, the enormously influential leader of
TPUSA. Let’s tax the things that are bad. and not tax the things that are
good. If you’re making 100, 000, 400, 000 a year, and you’ve got three
kids, you should pay a different lower tax rate than if you’re making the
same amount of money, and you don’t have any kids.
What’s really important for me in this clip is what he says at the
beginning. We should tax the things we think are good, right? And we
should use the tax system and other government powers to basically, as
a weapon, to target things we think are bad. It’s a moral weapon that we
can use as the government, right, to shape morality in the country.
So who are the Catholic intellectuals influencing Vance? Well, one of
them is Patrick Deneen, the Notre Dame philosopher, author of Regime
Change. Also the author of Why [00:19:00] Liberalism Failed. Deneen
called for something more radical than January 6th. A complete toppling
of the current American order. I don’t want to violently overthrow the
government, he said.
I want something far more revolutionary. Dineen proposes an
aristopopulism in which the virtuous elite provide order and structure to
public life in order to ensure the flourishing of ordinary citizens who
cannot provide it for themselves. The benevolent oligarchs are thus
tasked with keeping the common good intact, so the Huy Puloy can enjoy
the good life, even if they don’t know or believe or experience it as such.
He opposes gay marriage, wants stricter laws on divorce, denounces
CRT, and mocks health care for trans people as absurd. He lauds
authoritarian Viktor Orban’s Hungary as a place where the state actively
cultivates political and moral order. This conservatism is generally
patriotic and supportive of distinct national identities and cultures,
rejecting the ethos of cosmopolitism.
So, if you take what you think you know about American conservatism
from, from Buckley and Goldwater and Reagan all the way to Mike
Pence, Mike Pence was a vestige of that Reaganite image [00:20:00] of
American conservatism. Openly, small government, low taxes, low
regulation. That’s the kind of tried and true formula.
The best governments, no government at all. And God bless America.
They tried to kill Mike Pence on January 6th, if you don’t remember, and
then they chose J. D. Vance as the next vice presidential candidate. And
in my view, the best way to, to understand that pick is to choose a
common good conservative who openly says, it’s not that small
government is the answer.
It’s that when we look around that round table of Americans, we’re not
the majority, and they’re not going to listen. And they’re children.
Degenerates, as Webham said. So unless we get them in order, and we
use the government as a weapon to do so, We’re never going to win
again, we’re never going to be in power again.
We can’t have Mike Pence or Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz, we can’t have
Mike Huckabee or any other Ronald Reagan or George H. W. Bush
wannabe out here saying that the government should be shrunk so that
we can have better lives. We’ve let the children run amok. The
businesses are pro choice. All of the Hindus and Muslims, all of the
agnostics and atheists, they are clamoring [00:21:00] for power and
representation.
We need a government that will put them in order. We need a
government that will hurt those who need to be hurt so we can have the
country we want. Vance also has strong bond with Kevin Roberts, the
head of the Heritage Foundation, and a fellow reactionary Catholic with
close ties to Opus Dei. The Heritage Foundation was founded in 1973 by
Paul Weyrich, architect of the religious right.
He introduced us to Jerry Falwell and, Tim LaHaye and Pat Robertson
as the kind of moral majority, the religious right that we envision of
Reagan’s 80s, those who helped defeat Jimmy Carter in 1980. What we
don’t often understand about Paul Weyrich, the man who started the
Heritage Foundation along with several colleagues, is that he too was an
anti Vatican II reactionary Catholic.
That he too believed that because his church had pulled out of the
business of building Christendom, um, in Vatican II that he would have
to do it as a layman himself with help by imposing it through American
politics. Paul Weyrich was a radical religious actor with a revolutionary
vision for American government.
Kevin Roberts [00:22:00] stands in his lineage as the leader of the
Heritage Foundation. He’s a man who once called himself a cowboy
Catholic. He wrote a book, uh, Dawn’s Early Light, Burning Down
Washington to Save America. They had to change the title because it
got so much bad press. They have not released the book yet because it
was shedding so much bad light on the Vance Trump ticket.
In the book, Roberts says that contraception is linked to the breakdown
of civilization. And it just so happens that J. D. Vance wrote the foreword
to this book. The Heritage Foundation is, of course, the publisher of
Project 2025. Roberts thinks government should be the change he
wants to see in the world.
The new conservative movement as he terms it. We’ll use the federal
government as a bludgeon against any and all of its cultural and
economic foes, while the small minded government folk are derided
throughout as wax museum conservatives. What can big government do
for you? Chief Lee Roberts wants it to enforce a new America.
A faith, family, community, and work. What he calls the permanent
things. In 2022, Vance spoke at a conference at Franciscan University
with intellectual luminaries of common good conservatism. On one
panel, [00:23:00] theologian Chad Pecknold of the Catholic University of
America argued that the way towards civic happiness is a public
orientation to God through the restoration of Sabbath laws, religious
national holidays, and public liturgies.
Vance wrote something I think is very resonant in First Things. We have
to recognize that America is not just a principle. It is a group of people.
It’s a history. It’s a culture. And yeah, part of that story is that people can
come and assimilate. But if your attitude is that the only thing you need
to become an American is to believe that with a little bit of hormonal
therapy a man can become a woman, then you’re making it so that
massive numbers of your own country either need to be reeducated or
need to be cast out of the political community.
Vance said something similar when he accepted the nomination at the
RNC this summer, linking the United States to land, to homeland, to
saying that the idea that the United States is an experiment or an idea. is
false. That it’s about what Stephen Wolf might call kin, or Volk, or
homeland. On a 2021 appearance on the Jack Murphy podcast, Vance
reiterated a position from the reactionary monarchist, Curtis Yarvin.
I think Trump is gonna [00:24:00] run again in 2024, said Vance. I think
that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice, fire
every single mid level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the
administrative state, replace them with our people. When the courts stop
you, stand before the country and say the Chief Justice has made his
ruling.
Now let him enforce it. So essentially, he’s saying, look, the executive
branch should do what they want. When the judicial branch tries to
check or balance that power, the president should say to Chief Justice
Roberts or anyone else on the court, where is your army? Where is your
police force? Where are your, those who will enforce this ruling?
Because I know where mine is. This idea, I should say, came directly
from Curtis Yarvin. Curtis Yarvin is a self proclaimed monarchist. He’s
considered the philosopher of the Peter Thiel entourage. The thinker.
The one with all of the ideas. The house philosopher. And someone who
has remarked that the end of democracy would be joyous.
He wants an American king to rule a post constitutional America. J. D.
Vance’s worldview is a Christian nationalism that imposes [00:25:00]
Christian conceptions of gender, sexuality, family structure,
multiculturalism, immigration policy, education, and reproductive rights
on all people. It is a call for Christendom more than a Christian country.
I think if you’ve paid attention to American politics, going back to
Buckley, all the way to Goldwater, all the way Nixon, Reagan, whoever.
You’re used to hearing that this is a Christian nation. For me, Vance is
not a Midwestern young pick meant to spruce up the Trump ticket. For
me, Vance is something beyond the call for a Christian nation.
Vance is somebody who stands with people behind him, like Yarvin, like
Thiel, like post liberal philosophers, like revolutionary Catholics. Like
Kevin Roberts, who would say we need a radical transformation of how
this country is governed in order for it to be in any way flourishing. We
don’t need a Christian nation in name.
We don’t need a people who claim to be Christian. We need
Christendom. We need the enforcement of Christian order on the United
States. This is not conservatism in the image of Ring. And it’s big
government conservatism as the only way to reorder the country as
[00:26:00] the city of God. When Vance was welcomed into the church,
He chose St.
Augustine as his patron saint. When asked about why, he mentioned
that he had flipped through Augustine’s City of God several times over
the last 15 years, which probably wouldn’t pass the test, sorry, uh, if he
was writing a paper for, for some of your classes. He also mentioned
that the City of God has had a dramatic effect on his understanding of
policy and government.
Vance is not alone, and what I’ll close with is that Project 2025, if you are
familiar with it. If you spend any time reading it, if you spend any time
studying what it proposes, it proposes a radical expansion of the
executive branch of the United States. It proposes an executive branch
that cannot really de facto be checked by the judicial or legislative
branches.
It proposes a federal workforce at the whim of the president, loyalist or
be gone. It proposes we turn the Department of Health and Human
Services into the Department of Life or the Ministry of Life. It proposes to
legislate that the only kind of [00:27:00] legal family one can have that is
recognized by the government is a cis man married to a cis woman,
presumably reproductive.
Project 2025 is the vision for an executive that, in my view, is more akin
to a monarch or an autocrat or a king. This is the means. to the
Christendom that the folks I’ve been talking about today can reach their
goal. They’ve stacked a court, could spend another hour, I won’t, I
promise, talking about Leonard Leo and the ways that we’ve arrived at
the Supreme Court that we have, could talk about the ways that the
state legislatures, the Solicitor Generals, and all the soft tissue of the
American body politic are being attacked by this group of folks.
J. D. Vance is willing to go further than his predecessor Mike Pence. He
has said openly, I would not have certified the election on January 6th,
2021. But I also think that people like Kevin Roberts, leader of the
Heritage Foundation, post liberal philosophers, and Silicon Valley
magnates, think he is their, their ticket to an American monarch.
Two weeks ago, there was a conference in the city, across the bay,
called Reboot 2024, organized by [00:28:00] tributaries in the Teal
universe. And it was meant to be one of those conferences that really
promotes, uh, The overwhelming benefits that tech will play for humans
going forward. The ways that tech will make our lives better.
There was, however, a surprising number of panels and talks on, like,
family and naturalism. And it caught a lot of folks off guard. This is the
fleece wearing, khaki wearing tech group that we’re used to seeing in
this region going to what they thought was another conference about
how tech can be better. is going to lead us to utopia.
But there was a promised special guest, a surprise. It’s Kevin Roberts.
So here’s Kevin Roberts showing up in San Francisco, what
conservative Christians like him think of as hell on earth, sitting with a
group very unlikely to be his audience. It’s Silicon Valley tech folks
explaining how the government should do everything possible to
promote more babies, more families, more marriages, and a certain kind
of governance.
It was met with mixed results. So to me, that’s a pretty good example of
the kind of movements that are finding a new alliance and what they
take to be a [00:29:00] move toward American monarchy. I’ll stop there.
Thank you very much.
Lisa Katovich: You’ve been listening to Dr. Bradley Onishi and the
Berkeley Lecture on Religious Tolerance. Generously sponsored by
Endowed Fund for the Study of Religious Tolerance, Berkeley Center for
the Study of Religion, Center for Race and Gender, Institute for the
Study of Societal Issues, Social Science Matrix and the Center for Right
Wing Studies.
This program was edited by Lisa Katovich.
OUTRO: You’ve been listening to Fiat Lux Redux, a public affairs show
at KALX that features edited lectures and conversations that took place
on the campus of UC Berkeley. The source material is culled from things
available online at UC Berkeley’s many websites, podcast programs,
and streaming channels, often in a longer form.
Our theme music is from New Monsoon. This is KALX, Berkeley.
