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

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Speaker 4: Guest today is a research professor at the UC Berkeley Center for Religion. He's also co-host of the Straight White 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 newscasts. 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, how theocrats and tech lords are turning America into a monarchy.

Speaker 3: Dr. Speaker 4: Onishi, can I call you Brad? We're friends. Speaker 3: Okay, all right. Speaker 4: 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?

Speaker 3: So one of the things we've seen over the last couple of years, you know, I wrote a book called Preparing for War that came out in 2023. And this new book is my reflection on what's changed a little bit. A lot of folks are pushing back and saying, oh, 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. Yeah.

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 whine. But there's a lot of good data out there that shows us why it's important to use those two words together. Speaker 4: So 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's absolutely a Christian nationalist or a proponent of it. These are people of color, Brad. How do you respond to that? Speaker 3: You know, I'm... 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 I converted to evangelical Christianity when I was 14. And I joined a church that was 90% white. And for

those of us who had 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 quinceanera? Or, 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 Christian nationalism. And there is, of course, a long and wide racist history to the United States.

So we can send out anybody we'd like to talk about their individual experience or how this is just not happening. I'd rather follow the research. I'd rather follow the historical. Speaker 4: Streams. Speaker 3: And 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.

Speaker 4: 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? Speaker 3: It's not. And I think this is the same question people ask about the women in the MAGA movement, the women who are part of these very patriarchal churches. Well, I'm having a great time. I'm a trad wife. You're completely wrong. And I think we can go back to Phyllis Schlafly. We can go back to, uh, Connie Marshall.

We can go back to any number of figures who have basically said, uh, 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, regardless 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, uh, 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.

Speaker 4: 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? Speaker 3: 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. Take 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.

Speaker 4: So I was reading an article, it was in The Globalist by a guy named Josef Ernst. And he said that one of the things, one of our problems in the United States is 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, He even called the United States Constitution weak because 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.

Speaker 3: Well, you know, weak is one word we can use. I think there's also a sense of an assumption of propriety, an 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 mementos that were in the White House while Joe 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've you had at the White House here, the mementos, the other artifacts. You need to buy these like anyone else would, or we're going to just throw them in the dump. Trump 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 to 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. And with AI, with social media, it's even worse than simply the Fox News problem. So all of those together mean, yeah, We're in real trouble.

Speaker 4: 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 Thiel's an 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?

Speaker 3: 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 formed over the last five years or so 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. One are the technocrats you just mentioned. So I do spend a lot of time in the book on Peter Thiel. But

I also talk a lot about Curtis Yarvinn. the monarchist Silicon Valley provocateur, who is friends with J.D. Vance, who is one of the favorite writers and influences on the Doge team and congressional conservative staffers. Curtis Yarvin 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 Karp, 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 or more equal or more democratic, but because we can kill

more people easier. Alex Karp and Curtis Yarvin strangely have the same enemies as Doug Wilson or Pete Hegseth, J.D. 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 U.S. Constitution, people

like Zoran Mamdani or Abdul El-Sayed. What's the point? The or these folks think they're going to save Western civilization by putting an American Caesar on the throne. Democracy is the problem. Strongman is the answer.

Speaker 4: 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, Brad?

Speaker 3: It'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 in your religious upbringing, way back in my religious upbringing, I rarely heard people pray to King Jesus. I heard people pray 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 a democracy or a republic. 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 dissent. 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. He'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.

Speaker 4: 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. Well, Catherine Stewart has done a lot of investigative reporting and writing about the culture wars and the usefulness of scaring easily frightened people.

And so when you've got Muslims, practicing Muslims, who are now being elected to higher office, and I think many of them are just humanitarians 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, jihadist within our borders. You want to speak to the American perception of the Muslim and how it's being weaponized?

Speaker 3: 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. It could be mom Donnie, could be El-Sayed, could be Katie Wilson in 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. The green comes from the Palestinian flag. So the green represents Palestine, Iran, so on. The idea 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 popular word in the American electorate when it comes to politics. If you say communist Muslim, now we're really on a, this is a double scoop, right? And this goes even beyond Muslim candidates. I'll give you a great example. Lance Wallnau, the New Apostolic Reformation person, the leader who reaches millions of folks every week, recently said that James Tallarico, 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 Tallarico 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.

Speaker 4: Going back to Strongman, do you think the MAGA admiration of a strongman explains how they're not freaking out about Putin and Kim Jong-un, etc. Speaker 3: 100%. I mean, you know, going back to Preparing for War, my previous book, And then really in 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 sinful, 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 strongman means that there are people who think Donald Trump is weak because he won't do what Putin's done. They think Trump is 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

strongman means not only a desire for that in this country, but a total admiration for Putin and others around the world. Orban was another one, although he's been deposed. Speaker 4: Next up, I want to talk about the broligarchs, big money, big schemes. We continue next. Talking here with Dr. Brad Onishi, 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? I mean, you mentioned Caesar. Is it the same thing? He's God's proxy, and in some ways he may be a God.

Speaker 3: So I'll give you two examples. A man named Stephen Wolfe 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. In many ways, Wolfe 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 Yarvin and the tech monarchists who are in Silicon Valley, they also look to a CEO who is the complete and totalitarian ruler of 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 Thiel 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 works because the founder is almost divine. So yes, when I use the term Caesar, It's not on accident. There is a reverence that borders on worship when it comes from either Silicon

Valley circles or the Christian nationalist spaces. Speaker 4: Well, if we talk about the heyday of Rome, 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. Speaker 3: 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 round table, right? 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, bi, pan, whoever you are, atheist, humanist, agnostic. And the Christian stands up and says, look, it's great that most of you are here. I'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 where 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 unassimilable 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. You know, 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. They want

100 million deportations in order to make this country great again. And that to me is a huge change from where we were five years ago. Speaker 4: Purging the vermin, right? 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. Speaker 3: I think that one of the best examples is Venezuela. Every indication is that Marco Rubio is running Venezuela from Washington, D.C.

The United States, through Marco Rubio, controls all business, all licenses, all exports, all foreign policy, all trade going in and out of Venezuela. We 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 is being threatened for Cuba. The same is 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.

Speaker 4: Now, some people say that he is used to acting unilaterally without pushback. And, of course, I would argue that, well, with the Republican majority, they're either transactionalists, invertebrates, or sociopaths. You know, he's 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.

And 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? Speaker 3: 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 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. Instead, 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 signifies a great loss to our country. Speaker 4: Well, Brad, I've been saying for a while, I know you probably have as well, the media has failed us, right?

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, these sort of pillow soft headlines where they say 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. Speaker 3: We 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. There's some really great clips out there I'm sure people have seen of 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.

Speaker 4: 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. Speaker 1: Yep. Speaker 3: Right. Speaker 4: 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, Brandon Carr, 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. Speaker 3: Well, there's a lot of gears in that machine, but 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 major politicians. 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. And so 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 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.

Speaker 4: 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 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. And 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 all of whatever we want to do in the back rooms, right?

Speaker 3: And when they do plug in, they plug into media that's based on pathos rather than logos. They plug into media that is designed to get them furious, full of hate, rage, anger, right? So the algorithm is designed to plug you into the political 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, blah. So that also to me is a big part of the puzzle.

Speaker 4: Outrage is the currency of the internet for sure. Speaker 3: That's right. Speaker 4: I want to come back to the book, American Caesars. I hate these Barbara Walters questions, but they're sometimes useful, Brad. Surprises. Like, you and I have spoken the language of Christian nationalism for a long, long time. We've 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 Thiel 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.

Speaker 3: Well, the first one was a hunch I had going into the book that really panned out, which was there are so many ways that 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 Thiel. I used to live in Silicon Valley. And I can tell you that the culture there is not

one that is usually resonant with the kind of rural church that Doug Wilson started 40 years ago, or the small town culture 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 than he does James Tallarico. Because James Tallarico 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 trillionaire, 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. A man who never talks about God or Christ is somehow closer to that small West Texas pastor than than James Tallarico, 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, a 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 find out who gets to actually sit on the throne. But for now, we're comrades. Speaker 4: 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 a 125-year-old, five-inch-thick family Bible.

Speaker 3: Guys, he goes to mass like twice a day. Speaker 4: Yeah. Someone explained this to me, but hey, it's a false faith. You know, be ye either hot or cold, but if you are lukewarm, I will spew you out of my mouth. So if the fundies look at Tallarico, et cetera, they say, well, that's not true Christianity. Then he's in league with Lucifer.

Speaker 3: You know, I really noticed this. I begin 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 Thiel and Curtis Yarvin and others like that. And I used to Silicon Valley. This is a people are wearing Dockers and vests kind of situation. A ton of nerds, engineers, techie types,

no style, no sense of anything beyond 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? Who is it? Is it Elon? Is it Taylor Swift? What's going on? Who could be the special guest?

It was Kevin Roberts. Kevin Roberts is like the leader of the Heritage Foundation, the guy that basically oversaw Project 2025. He calls himself a cowboy Catholic. And so on stage is this like Gen Z podcaster named Dworkish 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, somebody's like, I got to go to the bathroom. And then they leave.

You know, they never come back. Why was Kevin Roberts in 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 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 when it all clicked for me when I started to see those kinds of things happening all over the place. Speaker 4: Coming up next, we're going to get into Project 2025.

Hang on. Continuing my conversation with Dr. Brad Onishi, 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.

Speaker 3: 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 comb 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 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, as the government, pay mom, right?

And 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 reproductive families to grow in 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 incentive. Go do it. That's what we're seeing play out with Maha and RFK and what's on the table right now.

That's a Project 2025 Catholic fever dream. If you're ever wondering, where the ideas come from, you can always bet that you can find it in Project 2025 somewhere. Speaker 4: You feel like 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?

Speaker 3: 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 18 children. And there's a reason that you're seeing so many Christians adopt great replacement theory. Oh, they're outbreeding 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%. Speaker 4: Dismantling reproductive rights doesn't exactly hurt that cause either, right?

Speaker 3: Yeah, 100%, yeah. Speaker 4: Before I lose you here, Brad, one last sort of elevator speech for the book. What are people in for? And what's in it? Speaker 3: You know, I think a lot of folks, rightly so, are enjoying Gil Duran's The Nerd Reich. And I think that book is really pulling the the curtain back on tech fascism. My 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 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 pitch

is that this one does both and unlocks some puzzle pieces for people and decoder rings that folks probably can't see otherwise without putting all those things in the same spot. Speaker 4: Well, 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 deserve to be able to go out and improve the world without any guardrails. And if a strong man allows that to happen, then 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, Brett?

Speaker 3: Yeah, I do. And I do think it's important to kind of separate what we might call fascism, which really is a kind of energizing movement. Fascism really tries to energize the populace toward a kind of end goal, excuse me, an end goal, a final solution. 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 lead them to favor a monarchy, an autocracy, 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. 1% of the population, 5%.

If you talk to tech people, they're obsessed with IQ scores and this 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 a supreme leader where they will clearly be part of that 5% who 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 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 approach. It's also one that's really favorable to eugenics. We just talked about birth rates and replacement theory. 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 not be promised this American dream or this egalitarian way of life. And so that's where I think the tech people are coming at it more than anything. Speaker 4: I will say I was guilty of this, and the perception is still prevalent in my circle here in MAGA, Oklahoma.

is that if they're billionaires, it must mean they're smarter than the rest of us. If they made that much money and they are that powerful, they must have the brainpower. They must have ideas that we could never have. And maybe we should let them go and see what they create next, right?

Speaker 3: 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. Speaker 4: Over and over again. I used to think he was Tony Stark, Brad. And then he spoke, and then I was like, oh, wait a minute. So, I mean, he's got to be smart about something, but holy shit, Brad.

I mean, the guy has just got some wackadoodle ideas. Speaker 3: We're all smart at something. We're all good at things. We all have the thing that we're really good at. Like, I have a five-year-old daughter, and there are things she's not as good at. as like other five-year-olds, right? There's times when we're doing things with other kids where she feels like, oh, I'm not sure I can draw as well as that kid. And then 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,

I will put her up against 99% 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 figured out how to pay people through PayPal, because they 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? Speaker 4: Schooling, education.

Speaker 3: The idea that because you are good here as a tech entrepreneur means you have a kind of omniscient 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. Speaker 4: Brad Onishi, author of the new book, American Caesar, 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. Speaker 3: It's a pleasure, Seth. Thanks for inviting me. It's really great to be here.

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