The Making of an American Caesar (with Dr. Brad Onishi)

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2:04Let's start by three, two, one. The thinking atheist, it's not a person. It's a symbol, an idea. The population of 80th is this country is going through the roof. Rejecting faith, pursuing knowledge, challenging the sacred. If I tell the truth, it's because I tell the truth. Not because I put my hand on a book and made a wish and working together for a more rational world. Take the risk of thinking, feel so much more happiness. Truth, fusion, wisdom will come to you that way. Assume nothing. Question everything and start thinking. This is the thinking atheist podcast hosted by Seth Anders. I guess today is a research professor at the UC Berkeley Center for Religion.

3:04He's also co-host of the Straight Wide American Jesus podcast. He does a lot of speaking and writing and warning about Christian nationalism in the United States. You may have seen him in various interviews across television newscast. He's been featured as well on publications ranging from NPR to Rolling Stone to the New York Times. He's got a new book titled American Caesar. Atheocrance and Tech Lords are turning America into a monarchy doctor. Onishi, can I call you Brad? We're friends. Go ahead, Brad. Okay, all right. So, white Christian nationalism. I've seen some pushback from people who say, well, it's Christian nationalism. If you attach racism or white supremacy to it, that's not fair or it's not helpful. How do you respond, Brad? So, one of the things we've seen over the last couple of years, I wrote a book, I'm preparing for war, it came out in 2023. And this new book is my reflection on what's changed in a little bit.

4:05A lot of folks are pushing back and saying, well, look, I just love Jesus. And I just love America. Does that make me a Christian nationalist? You guys are ridiculous. And my argument would be, no, if you want to love your God and you want to love this country, that is a constitutionally protected American right. If you think because you love your God, you get more of the country, then you're a Christian nationalist. Because then you're saying the rest of us should get less than you, and that's a problem. And so, the white part comes in because as all of the social science research tells us, so much of believing that I get more of the country than everyone else is not just a matter of, I'm a Christian, but I'm a white Christian. And therefore, the two things together, I mean, I should really get more than most people, whether that's black Christians, whether that's immigrants, whether that's anyone else. And so, the racial dimension of this is important. And people can push back, they can win. But there's a lot of good data out there that shows us why it's important to use those two words together.

5:09So let's bring out the exceptions, which is what Fox News would do. In fact, on Fox News, Harris Faulkner, she is an African-American woman who essentially is on that bandwagon. You got Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. He is, he's absolutely a Christian nationalist or a proponent of it. These are people of color, Brad. How do you respond to that? You know, I'm somebody who has experience with this. So my mom's a white woman from the South from West Tennessee. My dad's a Japanese guy from Maui. And, you know, I converted to evangelical Christianity when I was 14. And I joined the church. It was 90% white. And for those of us who had, you know, different racial backgrounds, it was not that we weren't welcome. It was just that we weren't welcome to be talking and touting and celebrating our heritage at church. It just, you weren't going to do that. I wasn't going to celebrate being an Asian-American there. The few black or Latino families, they weren't going to ask, hey, could we celebrate our Keen's in Yeta?

6:10Or, you know, the idea was, is we're glad you're here. It's great. You just need to know the program. You need to know the paradigm and get in line. And then you're going to have a great experience. So when I hear those pushbacks from Fox News, it has always been possible for people of color, including myself when I was at that church, to support systems that, in essence, tell them to either be a second-class citizen or something worse. And some of those systems reward people of color for getting on with the paradigm. You can rise to a place of prominence. You can be upfront speaking, like the folks you just named are. None of that disproves the larger pattern that there is a racial dimension to white Christian nationalism. And there is, of course, a long and wide racial racist history to the United States. So we can send out anybody we'd like to talk about their individual experience or how this isn't just not happening. I'd rather follow the research. I'd rather follow the historical streams.

7:13And I'd rather take a holistic approach that gives us an actual picture of what this country looks like in religious spaces, in racial categories and more. I see a lot of it as just being transactional, right? Using a system for personal gain. It's almost like the black slavers, right? I mean, they're like, okay, fine. Well, if slavery exists and slaves are second-class or much worse, how can I manipulate the system so that I personally benefit even if it means sucking up to an oppressive system? Is that unfair? It's not. And I think this is the same question people ask about the women in the Manga movement, the women who are part of these very patriarchal churches. Well, I'm having a great time. I'm a tradwife. You're completely wrong. And I think we can go back to Phyllis Schlafly. We can go back to Connie Martian. We can go back to any number of figures who have basically said we do not want women to be equal because I want to play a certain role in a system that's rewarding me for that,

8:13regardless of the fact that other people may not want to be part of that system because it feels oppressive, it feels unequal, it feels like it doesn't recognize their entire humanity. So these kinds of systems have always rewarded the people who are willing to tout the benefits of the system for those people who get on with it, even if that system is designed not to recognize the entire humanity of everybody involved. It does blow your mind to watch the women of Turning Point USA have a big rally and essentially say, we're going to bake you a cake and inside we will put the 19th Amendment our right to vote and we will just give it away to you and cheer ourselves as we do it. What century is this, Brad? What century do we live in, right? You know, part of the reason I wrote American Caesar was, you know, I think when Trump first ran for office in 2016 and when Turning Point was really finding its legs as a kind of conservative institution, there was a sense that we wanted to go back to the 1950s. Hey, take me back to leave it to beaver.

9:13Take me back to the Pax Americana. And now I think what we've arrived at is, now take me back to the 1850s, the 1650s, the 1150s. And so instead of talking about, should we have a woman president, we're talking about, should women be able to vote? That is where the movement has arrived after the last decade. So I was reading an article. It was in the globalist by a guy named Joseph Ernst. And he said that one of the things, one of our problems in the United States is that we are weak in regard to the systems that might protect us or have protected us against what is happening all around us. He said, first of all, you have to put your trust in the wisdom of the American public. Secondly, you have to put your trust in the integrity of the person who is elected to office. And because those two things are extremely weak, we have essentially, I don't know, we've always had the, the Gremlin in the machine, even called the United States Constitution weak

10:13because he thinks it needs to be updated. Do you think that we were just weak at the beginning? I mean, the system was always ripe for abuse. Well, you know, weak is one word we can use. I think there's also a sense of an assumption of, propiety and assumption of norms that the founders did not think would ever be overrun. And what we're seeing in the figure of Donald Trump, especially in the second administration, is a willingness to overrun any norm, any process, any sense of decorum. You know, one glaring example of this is a story that came out that Jill Biden had to pay full price for momentos that were in the White House while Jill Biden was president. Otherwise, the Trump people were going to throw them in the trash. So instead of saying, oh, hey Jill, former first lady, Biden here are all the things you had at the White House here, the momentos, the other artifacts. You need to buy these like anyone else would or we're going to just throw them in the dump.

11:14Trump is willing to throw the United States into the dump in order to do whatever he wants. So whether or not that means our country is weak, I don't know, I think it means the founders, unfortunately, never envisioned a monster like this, becoming the commander in chief. And we're seeing the effects of it. I mean, if we rewind a year, we get the doge, showing up at the treasury, stealing everyone's data, shutting down USAID, and basically doing so without most of the American public having any idea it was happening. I'll add one thing to that analysis though, is he mentions the person in charge and he mentions the public. I would also mention our media. We just live in a media environment where people have been living on lies from Fox News and other conservative outlets for decades. And the brain rot is real. The inability to understand what is actual compared to what is fantasy or myth or resentment, kind of dreams, it's gone.

12:14And with AI with social media, it's even worse than simply the Fox News problem. So all of those together mean yeah, more and more trouble. Well, our founding fathers probably never envisioned the oligarchy, you know, or maybe they did. I don't know, but I mean, the billionaires behind the scenes. Now, I've done a lot of speaking and you have about the common names or they, they should be common names. Leonard Leo is a fat cat, Peter Teals, and easy one. But in the book, you get into a lot of sort of puppet masters behind the scenes, major influencers that have not been spoken about all that much. You want to throw a few of those names out for us? Yeah, you know, I think one of the things that I tried to bring out in the book was that we have this weird coalition that's been that's been formed over the last five years or so because they, because of people who believe they share a common enemy. And so the puppet masters, all of a sudden seem to have resonant worldviews. And those puppet masters come from three different domains.

13:15One are the technocrats you just mentioned. So I do spend a lot of time in the book on Peter Teal. But I also talk a lot about Curtis Yarvan, the monarchist Silicon Valley provocateur who is friends with JD Vance, who is one of the favorite writers and influences on the doge team and congressional conservative staffers. Curtis Yarvan believes democracy should be done away with. He wants to live in a monarchy where a tech CEO owns the land and the people. I'm not making that up. I'm not being hyperbolic. Then we have Alex Carp, the leader of Palantir. Most people know about Palantir, but their leader is somebody who wrote a book a couple of years ago, which basically says the United States is great because we are able to commit violence in ways no other country can. We have a clash of civilizations and we're simply going to be better than everyone, not because we're more virtuous and we're equal or more democratic, but because we can kill more people easier. Alex Carp and Curtis Yarvan strangely have the same enemies as

14:19Doug Wilson or Pete Hegseth, JD Vance, Kevin Roberts. Why? Because they all believe that they're saving Western civilization from the woke mob, from Marxists who are being paid by Cuba and China and by Jihadists or Islamists who are working to overthrow the US Constitution. People like Zoran Mamdani or Abdul El Saed. What's the point? The point is we've now arrived at a place where these folks think they're going to save Western civilization by putting an American Caesar on the throne. Democracy is the problem. Strong man is the answer. I see in Christian circles, at least fundamental Christian circles, a culture primed for kings. I mean, it's a kingship model. It is a top down authoritarian model. If you look at God and then his hierarchy and it seems like the faith has really primed tens of millions of Americans to get excited about living under a kingship. Is that tied to the Bible too much of a stretch for you, Bra?

15:22It's not. And to me, there's a phrase here that we can notice that some people might be aware of. I don't know way back, you know, and your religious upbringing, way back in my religious upbringing. I rarely heard people pray to King Jesus. I heard people's prayed to dear Lord or dear Jesus. But now when you hang out in certain Christian circles, you hear people pray to King Christ, King Jesus. And what they're doing there, if you unpack the kind of discourse underneath all of that, is saying, Jesus is the king of every nation, including this one. So you might talk about a constitution or democracy or a republic. That's, that's nice. Good for you. We're here to tell you we have a king. And we are emissaries of that king. He's not on earth. So we're going to act for him here. And he's a king who hates interlopers. He's a king who hates descent. He's a king that does not want women to vote or have any authority. He's a king who thinks Islam is a satanic death cult.

16:25He's a king who thinks we might need to use violence in order to make this country great again and save Western civilization. One of the things you also hear a lot coming from these Christian spaces is we need to learn how to hate again. If you read the Old Testament, God is a king who hates. We need to be Christians who hate. And if we do that, we'll be closer to God and we'll be closer to saving the country. So the kingship idea, the monarchy idea, and the authoritarian idea, you can get that from a certain reading of the Bible. And that is where we see many influential Christians going right now. I also argue that the Bible is a dominionist book. One of the first things he did was to create man and then give man dominion over all things. And I'm like, well, that kind of sounds like the man who has been brought to this moment of destiny. I know that you'd mentioned Muslims right now. But Catherine Stewart has done a lot of investigative reporting and writing about the culture wars and the usefulness of

17:28scaring easily frightened people. And so when you've got Muslims practicing Muslims who were now being elected to higher office, and I think many of them are just humanitarian from what I've seen. I think it's kind of exciting the things they're saying and doing. But their narrative has now become capital J G hottest within our borders. You want to speak to the American perception of the Muslim and how it's being weaponized? One of the things we're seeing that I'm not really, I'm not really noticing in a lot of legacy media is the right, the American right is peddling what I call the red green scare. And what does that mean? Well, the red part is communism. There's a there's an old school McCarthyism that's kind of being brought back a Cold War era kind of pursuit of the communist. Well, why? Well, because we're seeing DSA adjacent candidates rise to rise to influence could be Mamdani, could be El Sayed, could be

18:29Katie Wilson and Seattle, could be any number of DSA adjacent people running for mayor or Congress around the country. And then we're seeing Muslim candidates, as you just mentioned, again, Mamdani, El Sayed and others. So the idea from the right now is this, there is a conspiratorial coalition between Jihadists and communists and they're working together. It's a red green scare. And the green comes from the Palestinian flag. So the green is represents Palestine, Iran, so on. The idea is is that they're working together. And so you talk about easily scarable people. If you say Islam to most folks in this country, they get easily anxious about that. If you say communist also not a not a popular word in the American electorate when it comes to politics, if you say communist Muslim, whoo, now we're really on a this is a double scoop, right?

19:31And this goes even beyond Muslim candidates. I'll give you a great example. Lance Walnell, the new Apostolic Reformation person, the leader who reaches millions of folks every week, recently said that James Talleriko, the Christian seminarian running for Senate in Texas is linked to Al-Qaeda. So the red green scare is good enough to say that James Talleriko is a communist working with Al-Qaeda despite the fact that he carries his Bible everywhere, talks like Jimmy Carter, looks like Mr. Rogers, and has had Christians in his family going back five generations. Going back to strong man, do you think the mega admiration of a strong man explains how they're not freaking out about Putin and Kim Jong Un, et cetera? 100%. I mean, you know, going back to prepare for war on my previous book, and then really an American Caesar, it's very clear to see that we live in a time when a lot of folks have been convinced that the people, we the people are so corrupt, so

20:35sinful, so fallen that the only way for us to behave is for daddy to come home and spank the children and get the women in line so that everything in the house is in order once again. There are people who will say to you, to your face, we need a dictator to get this country back on track. We need to go back to public executions. We need to go back to hangings. We need to go back to jailing anybody who shows dissent. That is what will give us a great nation and a great civilization. So the admiration for the strong man means that there are people who think Donald Trump is weak because he won't do what Putin's done. They think Trump needs to man up and do what those guys over there are doing. There's people who are disappointed in him because he's not yet declared himself a dictator. And so yeah, 100%. This admiration for the strong man means not only a desire for that in this country, but a total admiration for Putin

21:38and others around the around the world. Orban was another one, although he's been deposed. Next stop, I want to talk about the bro LaGarks big money, big schemes. We continue next. I always appreciate when thoughtful and luxurious design can help change the way a space feels. That's why I love how the 48 inch panoramic display stretches across the entire dashboard and my Lincoln Navigator SUV. It helps make it easy to stay connected while giving the cabin an open, expansive feel. Whether I'm juggling errands or just enjoying some quiet time, this feature brings a fresh perspective and helps elevate even the everyday moments. Visit Lincoln dot com to learn more. I love days like these at the pool, but my moderate to severe plaques or is this can sometimes take me out of the moment. I'm ready to make a splash with clear skin thanks to Sky Rizzy risen Kizmab Rizza Sky Rizzy is a prescription only injection

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23:39the next generation of rookies featuring the famous Wild and Out Low spattles plus your chance to get on stage and be part of the action live across North America. Get tickets Thursday September 24th at live nation dot com. Talking here with Dr. Brad O'Neishy author of the new book, American Caesar, how theocrats and tech lords are turning America into a monarchy. If we go back to the Caesars, we go back a couple of thousand years. The Caesars were worshipped as gods. Do you see that emulation today? You mentioned Caesar is it the same thing? He's gods proxy and in some ways he may be a god. So I'll give you two examples. A man named Stephen Wolf wrote a book called The Case for Christian nationalism and I profile him in the book. In that book, he says what we need in terms of governance in the United States is a Christian prince. And the Christian prince is the extension of God on Earth.

24:40In many ways, Wolf says and I'm not exaggerating here. He says the prince is a god to the people. Because what he says is an extension of divine rule and divine will. So we have there the kind of thing you're talking about, Seth, with a Caesar who is revered in a near godlike fashion. Moreover, when you look to Curtis Yarvan and the tech monarchists who are in Silicon Valley, they also look to a CEO who is the complete and totalitarian ruler of a country. Somebody who owns the land and owns the people. That's a real formulation that comes right out of his writings. Peter Teal himself says monarchy is the best form of governance because in monarchy, you have one ingenious founder who has complete control over an organization. Monarchy is, it works because the founder is almost divine. So yes, when I use the term Caesar, it's not on accident.

25:41There is a reverence that borders on worship when it comes from either Silicon Valley circles or the Christian nationalist spaces. Well, if we talk about the hey, Deja Vroom and certainly in the first and second century, we're talking about a very war-like culture. And then you add some infighting and dissent from within. And I can see real comparisons. I'm guessing you do as well. One of the things that really struck me writing this book was we've arrived at a place where Christian nationalism in my view used to be a kind of model that went like this. Americans from every state and background and identity are sitting around a roundtable. People from the Midwest and the South and the Northeast, people who are white, people who are brown, people who are black, people who are Asian. Gay, by, pan, whoever you are, atheist, humanistic, gnostic. And the Christian stands up and says, look, it's great that most of you are here.

26:41I'm always going to get an elevated place around this table because I'm a Christian and I'm a white Christian. So you just need to know that and if you accept it, we'll all get along. I think what we've arrived now is the clash of civilizations model where the tech lord and the Christian supremacist are standing up at that table and are saying, look, there's a lot of you here who are unassumable to Western civilization. You come from inferior cultures, you are not able to be a working and productive part of our society. So you need to go or we'll make you go or we'll put you in a camp or we'll kill you. The first one I outlined is not good. That Christian nationalist thinking they get more of the country than everyone else, bad. The reason I wrote American Caesar is because things have somehow gotten even more extreme to where they're saying you either need to leave this country or we will make you leave. A lot of these guys that I write about in the book, they don't see there being 10 million deportations that need to happen.

27:42They want 100 million deportations in order to make this country great again. And that to me is a huge change when we were five years ago. Purchasing the vermin, purifying our national blood. I know that the Caesars were also conquerors or a great many of the Caesars were conquerors. Hashtag, Let's annex Greenland. Let's make Canada our 51st state. Let's go in and make all of North America, the United States. This shit's coming out of the truth social account of Donald Trump because I think he thinks greatness is conquest. I think that one of the best examples is Venezuela. You know, every indication is that Marco Rubio is running Venezuela from from Washington DC. The United States through Marco Rubio controls all business, all licenses, all exports, all foreign policy, all trade going in and out of Venezuela.

28:44We essentially walked into a country, an autonomous independent nation, kidnapped its leader. Took all of its oil and are basically controlling every aspect of the political economy there. The same as being threatened for Cuba, the same as being suggested for other places in the Western hemisphere. Greenland and Canada are on Trump's mind, but they're already putting into practice some of this in places that we often forget about. Now, some people say that he is used to acting unilaterally without pushback. Of course, I would argue that with the Republican majority, they're either transactionalists in vertebrates or sociopaths. We still labeled away, we've declared war without the authority to declare war, etc. But some would say that he's been used to throughout his life being able to do exactly what he wants. And that explains why he loses his mind whenever someone raises a hand of dissent.

29:44And say, no, you're not allowed to do that. He ain't used to that. He's used to being able to be the only one in the sandbox and kicking the sand totally out of it whenever he wants to. Is that accurate? It is accurate. And I think it not only explains Trump's psychology and why he is the way he is. This is not somebody who is interested in dialogue or debate. Not somebody who wants to negotiate on good terms in good faith. This is not somebody who wants to see it from your point of view and see if we can't work out a solution that helps as many people as possible. I think most people watching and listening, they know that already. I think the thing that we have to recognize is what that has done is created a culture, a political culture in this country where everyone on the American right emulates that model. So we now have a politics where one party basically says to the other, we just want to, we will burn this place to the ground rather than work with you. We do not see you as our political opponents with whom we might share some interests or some ideas or some solutions on how to make people's lives better.

30:46Instead, it's we want to act in the ways that we want to act. We want to do what we want to do. And if you get in the way, we're going to consider you an opponent to run over, not somebody to negotiate with. It's been 10 years of that. That's kind of just the normal now in the United States. And that's really something that has signifies a great loss to our country. Well, Brad, I've been saying for a while, I know you probably have as well. The media has failed us. I mean, I think it was Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan on the release of Regime Change, their new book. They were talking about how the media knew about Natalie Harp, this sort of creepy attachment, the work wife of Donald Trump. They knew about this for a long time, but it was only in the book that it really came to light. And I see the soft headlines, the sort of pillow soft headlines where they say it's things in language that I guess is designed not to get people sued. I feel like the media is complicit. They are accomplices in this crime.

31:48We don't have a media that's built for a totalitarian or an authoritarian takeover of our government. We have a media that's built for both sides that's used to having a two party system and a media that needs access in order to thrive. So if we do the wrong thing and they cut off our access in the future, then we're screwed. You see this every time, like there's some really great clips out there. I'm sure people have seen of like someone from the BBC approaching Ted Cruz, somebody who does not need access to Ted Cruz in the future. And therefore is willing to ask him open and honest questions. And you can see the kind of shock and horror on someone like Ted Cruz's face when that happens. To me, that illustrates what you're saying, Seth, which is we don't have a media that understands how to cover someone in a democracy where the freedom of the press is supposedly guaranteed, whose open and honest aim is to destroy the press and overrun democracy. They don't seem to know how to operate there and therefore the failure. If I'm on the hunt for an actual on target, no holes barred investigative interview of one of our politicians, I'm watching news outlets in Australia.

32:58Yep. Right. And they give them no quarter. They give them no breathing room. They're not unfair, but they don't roll over. And I'm like, please take notes. Why are we not doing that? A lot of it's got to be the fact that what six major corporations own 90% of the media in this country and that, you know, it's corporate media for profit. And they're worried about the FCC brand and car coming in and pulling the plug. There goes your license. I mean, it's, I don't know, there's probably a lot of gears in that machine. Well, there's a lot of gears in that machine, but there's, it just speaks to why the media environment we have is so feckless. When you have a monopoly on the media, when you do not have an independent apparatus like the BBC, there's very little chance you're going to get anything like honest and open interviews with with major politicians. I think, I think another part of this though is we just live in a culture where if you challenge that politician, they will just run to the outlet that sympathizes with them and talk to those people over there and complain about the liberal woke media who hates America and hates God and hates everybody else.

34:03And so, you know, what we see coming out of Australia or other places is a different media environment where you still have some of those channels and those alternative pathways. But in this country, you can lie through your teeth on air all day every day. There are no repercussions. And you might gain audience, you might, you might grow your audience rather than diminish it. That's been happening since Rupert Murdoch sort of figured things out 50 years ago. It's even worse now. And so, unless we can regulate media, regulate social media, regulate AI in a way that brings truth and fact back to the public square, we're going to keep getting this result. Well, I think the culture itself is very largely to blame. I think I live in a country where people can name the contestants of the bachelor and they can sing all of the lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody, which they should be able to, I think this should be some sort of a test to qualify you to live in this country. But, you know, they can't tell you they can't name one American Supreme Court justice. They don't know the three branches of government. They don't know who the speaker of the house is. They're not plugged in.

35:10And I think the oligarchs and the authoritarians count on that. Keep them amused. Keep them entertained. Keep them distracted. And we're going to go over here and do wall of whatever we want to do in the back rooms. Right. And when they do plug in, you know, they plug into to media that's based on pathos rather than logos. They plug into media that is designed to get them in furious, full of hate, rage, anger. Right. So the algorithm is designed to to plug you into the political, you know, culture by way of outrage, by way of anger, by way of hatred. So when I see folks who are plugged in, a lot of times they don't know the three branches of government, a lot of times they don't know any of the amendments to our constitution, but they know that they really hate those people over there because they're destroying the country and blah, blah, blah, blah. So that also to me is a is a big part of the puzzle. Outrage is the currency of the internet for sure. Right.

36:11I want to come back to the book, American Caesar. I hate these barber Walters questions, but there are sometimes useful Brad surprises. Like you and I've spoken the language of Christian nationalism for a long, long time we both come out of a faith culture. We've seen it from the inside out. But occasionally it's like when I learned that Peter teal was having all of these weird, I don't know, smoking room conventions about how to run everything. And I was like, no, really? And I had an aha moment. Give me a few of the aha moments as you researched and wrote the book. Well, the first one was was a hunch I had going into the book that that really panned out, which was there are so many ways that the the Doug Wilson trained 38 year old pastor who lives in West Texas or, you know, Northern Idaho does not match up with a Silicon Valley technocrat like Peter teal. I used to live in Silicon Valley.

37:17I can tell you that the culture there is not one that is usually resonant with the kind of rural church that that Doug Wilson started 40 years ago or the small town culture that that prevails in much of the country. So what surprised me was that there is indeed a deep resonance between their political worldviews right now. And somehow we've arrived at a place where that incredibly conservative Calvinist pastor in West Texas sees Elon Musk as more of his ally and more akin to his political friend. Then he does James Taylor Rico because James Taylor Rico is a Christian carries his Bible everywhere. And yet he's the wrong kind of Christian, the wrong kind of American. So we now have this place where that West Texas pastor sees Elon Musk, a man who's nearly a trillion air, who's had babies with how many different women at this point puts no effort into being a father who's at all present to any of those children's lives.

38:23A man who never talks about God or Christ is somehow closer to that small West Texas pastor than James Taylor Rico, the fifth generation Presbyterian who's going to seminary in order to get his ordination. That's weird. That's a weird thing when I was in church, you know, 25 years ago, 20 years ago, we thought technology was going to lead to the end times. I don't know if you had any of this right. We thought like the antichrist was going to come and put a mark on our barcode on our wrist and scan it at some point and 666 was going to be built into it. Technology was like the work of the devil. And now the technocrats and many of the Christian supremacists are like, yeah, we're on the same team. Let's go dominate the world and kind of end the liberal order. That sounds like a good plan. And when we get there, we'll fight out who gets actually sit on the throne. But for now, we're comrades. Now they did the same thing to Joe Biden, right? Joe Biden is an agent of the evil one. And I'm like, the guy took his presidential oath on 125 year old five inch thick family Bible. Guys go, he goes to mass like twice a day. Yeah, someone explain this to me, but hey, it's a false faith. You know, be either hot or cold. But if you are lukewarm, I will spew you out of my mouth. So if the fundees look at Taloriko, etc.

39:43They say, well, that's not true Christian, Hannity. And he's in league with Lucifer. You know, I really noticed this. I begin the the intro of the book with this weird conference that happened in San Francisco in 2024, right before the election. And it's this tech conference. It's paid for by Peter teal and Curtis, Yarvan and others like that. And I, you know, I used to sell kind of value. This is a people are wearing dockers and vests kind of situation. A ton of nerds, engineers, you know, techy types, no style, no sense of of anything beyond, you know, coding and apps and the like. And they had a special guest, right? They're like, hey, you guys wait until the second day. We're going to unveil the special guest. And everyone's like, well, who's that? You know, who is it? Is it Elon? Is it, you know, is it Taylor Swift? What's going on? Who could be the special guest? Kevin Roberts, right? Kevin Roberts is like the leader of the Heritage Foundation, the guy that basically oversaw project 2025. He's like, he calls himself a cowboy Catholic.

40:50And so on stage is this like Gen Z podcaster named Dorkish Patel. And he's talking to Kevin Roberts, this guy who's like in his 50s and bald and looks like a Texas football coach. He's wearing like, you know, big, big cowboy boots. And it's this really odd pairing. And you're watching the video and you're like, this is awkward as hell. Why are these? It's like when you set people up on a blind date and on paper, they look great. And then they get to the date and they're like, nope, this somebody's like, I got to go to the bathroom. And then they leave, you know, they never come back. Why was Kevin Roberts and Silicon Valley? It's because of that coalition I just talked about. Well, we have the same enemy. We may not agree on AI. We may not agree on IVF Elon Musk has like 20 children with six different women. Not great if I'm Kevin Roberts. But you guys hate Muslims as much as me. You guys really like not not into gay people. Yeah, me too. You think the woke virus is like destroying the Western civilization. Let's team up. Catholics, technocrats. We can do this together. So that's that's when it all clicked for me when I when I started to see those kinds of things happening all over the place.

41:53Coming up next, we're going to get into project 20, 25 hang on. I always appreciate when thoughtful and luxurious design can help change the way a space feels. That's why I love how the 48 inch panoramic display stretches across the entire dashboard and my Lincoln navigator SUV. It helps make it easy to stay connected while giving the cabin an open expansive feel. Whether I'm juggling errands or just enjoying some quiet time, this feature brings us a fresh perspective and helps elevate even the everyday moments. Visit Lincoln dot com to learn more. I love days like these of the pool, but my moderate to severe plaques rice is can sometimes take me out of the moment. I'm ready to make a splash with clear skin thanks to skyrizzy, risen, kismab rizza skyrizzy is a prescription only injection for adults who are candidates for systemic or phototherapy. At four months, most people saw 90% clear.

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43:58Get tickets Thursday September 24th at live nation dot com. Continuing my conversation with Dr. Brad O'Neighy author of the new book American Caesar how theocrats and tech lords are turning America into a monarchy. How much of project 2025 has happened right now. I mean I don't need a statistic but give me a ballpark. Project 2025 is the most influential policy document for Trump's second term period if you are ever confused about what they're doing or where an idea came from. There's a very good chance you can come through the 900 pages of project 2025 and find some sort of explanation as to why they are doing what they're doing. One example I'll give is there's a kind of proposal on the table to to give basically government subsidies or kickbacks to families that have two married parents and one of the parents stays home so if dad goes to work and mom stays home we will ask the government pay mom right.

45:13And so there's a lot to talk about there I know every parent in this country needs more help I have a five year old and a three year old so I know what it's like to navigate all that. But that comes right from project 2025's idea that we should basically incentivize straight hetero family straight reproductive families to grow a number across the United States if you get married as a man to a woman a woman to a man and you have children. We will give you money as the government that's your that's your incentive go do it. That's what we're seeing play out with maha and rfk and and and what's on the table right now that's a project 2025 Catholic fever dream. And so if you're ever wondering where the ideas come from you can always bet that you can find it in project 2025 somewhere. You feel like there's that's a movement to try to breed white Christian nationalists back into a cultural majority like let's just go out you got to have babies babies babies and then we got to make onward Christian soldiers to take back the culture.

46:20Where where do the technocrats and the Christian supremacists agree they agree that they're being replaced. Like there's a reason Elon Musk is having you know 18 children and there's a reason that you're seeing so many Christians adopt great replacement theory. Oh there they're out reading us they're replacing us so you know what we need to do stop women from voting give them money for staying home give them even more money if they have five and six kids because that is our way to repopulate a country that's been taken over by interlopers Asian people Latino people black people. Muslim immigrants and so on this is our chance it's about demographics and so yeah 100% this mantling reproductive rights doesn't exactly hurt that cause either right yeah 100% yeah before I lose you here Brad one last sort of elevator speech for the book water people in for and what's in it. You know I think a lot of folks rightly so are are enjoying a guilder ends the nerd Reich and I think that book is really pulling the the curtain back on tech fascism.

47:29My book does a lot of that you know we're looking at a lot of the same people I'm also bringing in 20 years of studying Christian nationalists and my own experience in the church and a Christian nationalist church. And so I'm basically providing a view into how that tech fascism and that Christian supremacy are coalescing into a movement that is really threatening what we call American democracy and portending a future that is based on authoritarianism and autocracy more than anything else and so you can find books that do one or the other my pitches that this one does both and and unlocks some some puzzle pieces for people and Dakota rings that. Folks probably probably can't see otherwise without putting all those things in the same spot Brad this is your wheelhouse i mean you can't read minds neither can I but I mean if we look at the oligarchy or the tech bros is that really a desire for a fascist state or is it just sort of this weird culty libertarianism where they think well the elite deserved to be able to go out and improve the world without any guard rails and if a strong.

48:38Man allows that to happen that i'm willing to make that transaction but they are not necessarily craving a fascist state does that question make sense do you see where i'm going with that breath yeah I do and I you know I do think it's important to kind of separate what we might call fascism which really is a kind of energizing movement it fascism really tries to energize you know the populace toward a kind of. Angle excuse me an angle of final solution. You know a totalitarian state whether that's a monarchy or something else it doesn't always have that element i think a lot of the tech people have a couple of things that that lead them to favor a monarchy an autocracy and something like it and that is this. They believe in a natural. Darwinian order where there are people who are superior to others and they count themselves as part of that superior class one percent of the people the population five percent you know if you talk to tech people they're obsessed with like IQ scores and.

49:46This kind of stuff right because they believe they have a natural superiority to like 95% of the people on earth. And so if they are naturally superior what they envision is a kind of tech oligarchy with the supreme leader where they will clearly be part of that five percent to have some kind of position where they're able to. Contribute to decision making live a life of autonomy while others are literally. Corporation slaves owned by the company that is in charge of the patch of land on which they live. So do they want fascism in the form of a kind of energetic nationalism that moves them towards a final solution i would say a lot of them know but what i would i think they do want. Is an authoritarian autocracy that guarantees them an elite place and allows them to subjugate 95% of the population underneath them because they believe in this natural superiority it's a Darwinian.

50:47Approach it's also one that's really favorable to eugenics we just talked about birth rates and and replacement there's this sense of like we need to breed the right kind of people and those who are less. Need to be relegated to the kinds of work they're good for and and not be promised this American dream or this egalitarian. You know way of life and so. That's where i think the tech people are coming at it more than anything i will say i was guilty of this and the perception is. Still prevalent in my circle here in maga oklahoma is that if there billionaires it must mean they're smarter than the rest of us there's if they made that much money and they are that powerful they must have the brain power they must have ideas that we could never have. And maybe we should let them go and see what they create next right so yes i think that assumption prevails i think that assumption is what allows you to watch Elon Musk make an idiot of himself over and over and over again. I mean i just think he was Tony Stark Brad you know and then then he spoke and then i was like oh wait a minute you know so i mean he's got to be smart about something but holy shit Brad i mean the guy just got some whack of due to ideas you know well we're all smart at something we're all good at things you know we all we all have.

52:09The thing that we're really good at like i have a five year old daughter. And you know there are things she's not as good at as like other five year olds right there's there's times when we're doing things with other kids where she feels like i'm not sure i can draw as well as that kid or i can and i take her to the playground and i tell you she is like in the top 1% of the monkey bars for a five year old girl she she i will put her up against 90 99% of of kids in her age bracket and even kids older than her. It just means she has a thing she's really good at everybody has stuff and i think the assumption we make with these technocrats. Is that because they figured out an app because they figure out how to pay people through paypal because they you know did something over here we should let them govern us and make decisions for us. That have ripple effects throughout every dimension of human life whether that's family whether that's culture whether that's local decisions about. Data centers or water right or energy or fires or you name it right schooling education.

53:14The idea that because you are good here as a tech entrepreneur means you have a kind of. On mission understanding of how humans should live is one of the worst ideas in our culture and it's leading to terrible outcomes all over the place radon is she author of the new book american c's or how theocrats and tech lords are turning America into a monarchy so you did years. Of research and writing and now the work. Probably gets even more intense as you're trying to get the word out i know you've been on the circuit thanks for squeezing me into your busy schedule man it's been a pleasure. It's a pleasure so thanks thanks for inviting me it's really great to be here. Follow the thinking atheist on facebook and twitter for a complete archive of podcasts and videos products like mugs and t-shirts featuring the thinking atheist logo links to atheist pages and resources and details on upcoming free thought events and conventions log on to our website the thinking atheist dot com. I always appreciate when thoughtful and luxurious design can help change the way a space feels.

54:19That's why I love how the 48 inch panoramic display stretches across the entire dashboard and my Lincoln navigator SUV. It helps make it easy to stay connected while giving the cabin an open expansive feel whether i'm juggling errands or just enjoying some quiet time this feature brings a fresh perspective and helps elevate even the everyday moments visit linkin dot com to learn more. I love days like these at the pool but my moderate to severe plaques or is this can sometimes take me out of the moment i'm ready to make a splash with clear skin thanks to sky rizzie risen kism ab rizzie sky rizzie is a prescription only injection for adults who are candidates for systemic or phototherapy at four months most people saw 90% clear skin when measured from head to toe and many were even 100% plaque free people also saw significant improvement in psoriasis symptoms of pain redness itching and burning.

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56:19I love days like these at the pool but my moderate to severe plaques or is this can sometimes take me out of the moment i'm ready to make a splash with clear skin thanks to sky rizzie risen kism ab rizzie sky rizzie is a prescription only injection for adults who are candidates for systemic or phototherapy at four months most people saw 90% clear skin when measured from head to toe and many were even 100% plaque free people also saw significant improvement in psoriasis symptoms of pain redness and stinging and burning parties pharmacy relationships and removed doubtful sometimesallow and also showing bacteria happening difficulty pressure there is still many anticreas actually not much more relief in your whatsapp pan Bee on homeless so that is one thing but now to try to discard viral 큍�ombuses vlogin just one to not have cancer i imagine it would have been exactly this poderia Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albert Sins, Vans and Pavilion.

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