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- [00:00]
David French
Foreign.
- [00:13]
Tim Miller
Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome back one of the faves, an opinion columnist for the New York Times. He's also co host of the legal podcast Advisory Opinions, served in the Iraq war, where he was awarded the Bronze Star. It's David French. How you doing, man?
- [00:29]
David French
Tim, so good to be with you.
- [00:32]
Tim Miller
You also have the Bulwark Bronze Star. You know, I can't give you the gold star. There's. It's a competitive category for the Bulwark.
- [00:38]
David French
Well, you know, you can't aim too high.
- [00:41]
Tim Miller
We had a little sad news last night. I want to start with, and I want to talk a little bit what happened in New York and Gaza, and then we'll kind of get into some political stuff. Four people were killed in a mass shooting in Manhattan last night, including an immigrant police officer. The gunman in the note claims to have CTE and was targeting the NFL hq. Sometimes you don't know what more you can say about these sort of things. I did feel it merited mentioning. And the CTE thing, which was kind of like a moral panic in the country 10 years ago, has sort of dissipated. And as a football fan, that I understand why. Right. You don't want to think about the moral implications about what's happening to the brain, to everybody that you're watching for entertainment. But, but, you know, not to alibi this horrible crime, obviously, but I had a friend from Colorado who was a really good football player, actually did, like, make it a training camp in the pros and dealt with CTE and has. I mean, it's really been a life ruiner for him, just to be blunt about it. So I don't know, there's something there. In addition to kind of all the other stuff we always talk about, about mental health and gun safety, et cetera. Do you have any thoughts about what we saw last night?
- [01:49]
David French
Well, I mean, just horrible. You know, it's just the kind of thing that I remember just thinking two, three days ago, Tim, that we seem to have maybe this wave of mass shootings has crested. It had seemed like, I mean, this was just my impression that we had not had as many incidents of late and was very grateful for that. And then you see this just beyond imagination. And then regardless of whatever the note says, just the, the randomness of just shooting a police officer, of just taking people out around you, and it's just pure evil. It's just absolute pure evil. And, you know, on the point you're raising about C.T.E. you know, I think that there was kind of a two stage response to that. And stage number one was, oh, no, this is terrible. CTE is horrible. We need to do what we can to make the game of football safer and we need people to know that CTE is a possibility. And then once it became known that CTE was a possibility and rules were changed in the game, I feel like there was an almost assumption of risk kind of ethos that settled onto the issue. Sort of like if you're a UFC fighter or a boxer, there's no question what the risks are. And now there's no question what the risks are if you play football. And so it feels like it's been kind of settled by an assumption of risk kind of approach to it.
- [03:16]
Tim Miller
That at some level sort of eliminates kind of the. I think there was a moment where kind of it felt like football was a little bit of a moral quandary, I guess.
- [03:24]
David French
Yeah.
- [03:24]
Tim Miller
And like, it does kind of feel like as a culture, everyone decided we're going to put that moral quandary aside for a little while.
- [03:31]
David French
Yeah, but not without. I mean, you will hear these old school football players just claim that the game has been so watered down and it has been, you know, it's not real football anymore and all of that stuff. So I do think that there were some real efforts made that have been controversial about what kind of product on the field has resulted to make this better. I feel like it is incredibly grievous that people went into football, did not know the risks, and then had some of the most risky possible kind of plays and behavior celebrated. I still remember the days of the ESPN big hits, highlights that were just like concussion theater. Right. And so I do think the game has made some real changes. I mean, people have complained about the changes that are so substantial. So I think there's been kind of a realization. Football at some point is irreducibly violent, but also to the point that you can reduce it. You should.
- [04:30]
Tim Miller
Yeah, that feels right. Okay, well, a real tragic scene there in Manhattan and just an utterly, incomprehensibly tragic scene in Gaza. You sent this tweet a couple days ago and I wanted to talk to you about it. Yes, the horror in Gaza would end if Hamas surrendered. But Israel's humanitarian obligations are no more contingent on Hamas capitulation than ours in Iraq were contingent on Al Qaeda or ISIS laying down their arms. Israel's failure to secure and provide for the Gazan population prolongs the war and leads to an endless round of unimaginable death and destruction. This wasn't just predictable. It's been predicted by many people. I wrote about this last year. Expand on that.
- [05:10]
David French
Yeah. So, Tim, this is. Hang with me for a minute because this can be a little complicated. Okay.
- [05:15]
Tim Miller
I got nowhere to be.
- [05:16]
David French
All right. So if you want to look at Israeli strategy in Gaza, it is very similar. Now, I know people who are listening, who are absolute experts on urban warfare, will say, stop right there, David. The urban fight in Gaza was a different order than anything we faced. Yes, granted, yes. I'm not talking about the military challenge itself. I'm talking about the military approach. And the military approach was very similar to the one we had early in Iraq, which was we didn't want to be running all of Iraq. We wanted to have a light footprint. We wanted Iraqi civil society to govern itself. Our theory was that the fewer Americans they saw, the better off things were. But at the same time, there was a strong terrorist force that had to be defeated. And so we adopted what you might call a counterterrorist strategy. And it was maybe a more derisive way of referring to it would be whack a mole or commuting to war was the. The term used at the time. And so if there were areas of terrorist activity, you would go out and you would bring down the hammer on them and you would leave. And you ended up doing this again and again and again and again, because each time you brought down the hammer, you would win that fight. You would destroy that terror cell. They could not stand up to us in a straight up fight. And so again and again and again, you're winning battle after battle after b. But what you're also doing is you're leaving destruction at every place where the fighting occurs. And then when they come back, you kind of make the rubble bounce on the place where the fighting occurred. Right. And so we began to realize by late 05 that this was just endless, just endless. You could do this and do this and do this, and all you're going to do, yes, you'll kill a lot of terrorists, but you will kill a lot of civilians. You will create a lot of carnage. And then that's when the famous surge happened in 06. And the surge was a big change. It was not counterterror whack a mole. It was called counterinsurgency. And the approach was you go in, you don't hit them and leave. You hit them and stay, and you don't move until you have the place under control. You have civil society coming Back, you have law and order restored, and then you go to the next place without abandoning the other. And it was called an inkblot strategy, where you slowly expanded the zone of control. Okay, that's a big intro. That's the wind. Up here is the much shorter pitch. From the beginning, a lot of folks have recognized that Israel was pursuing a counter terror strategy in Gaza. Hit, hit, hit, and then often pull back. And then you began to see. And when I wrote about this last year, you were seeing fighting occurring in the same places over and over and over again. And so the same problem.
- [08:05]
Tim Miller
There's the one story, like the classic story about the hospital. They occupy a hospital and then leave and then like a couple days later came back and occupied the same hospital again.
- [08:13]
David French
Exactly, exactly. So they're in the same parts of Gaza City. In their same parts. And so I wrote a column saying, hey, Israel's making the same mistakes we made in Iraq and that this is what happens when you do. And Israel has never, for a lot of reasons wanted to do that. Big, clear, hold and build strategy where they come in, they establish control and then they move on from there. The international community would call that an occupation. It's very controversial within Israeli society. But by not doing that, Tim, what you do and still holding out this view that Hamas has to be utterly and totally and completely defeated, by not doing that, you create this situation where you're just pounding and pounding and pounding and pounding and it seems to never end. And this is the kind of result you get, this kind of massive scale humanitarian disaster.
- [09:03]
Tim Miller
Yeah. My issue on the Israel front, I've always, you know, kind of deeply torn about this, like on the one hand, obviously just such a horrific attack on October 7th. And. Yeah, and it's a lack of sustainability of being able to survive with, you know, being surrounded by, you know, essentially terror states. And so, like, understanding that war is ugly and like responding was necessary. Right. Like, I felt that way at the same time, even when it was first start, like probably around the time you wrote that column or even earlier when I'd have guests on, I would ask them, like, but what's the end game? That was like the part of it that always struck me as if you're going to have to make the case that this amount of suffering is necessary because it leads to some sustainable kind of end game and a plan, then, okay, we can discuss that, like, what is just what is right, how to prosecute a war like this. But I never felt like they ever even really offered one except for like Endless suffering. Right. And now here we are a year and a half later, and that is kind of borne out. Is that fair, do you think, or unfair?
- [10:11]
David French
I think that's very fair. You know, look, the argument about Israel has become so dumbed down that we're in this position where it feels like if you offer criticism of Israel, people are going to say you're on the side of Hamas and you're giving Hamas a lifeline. And if you, if, you know, you're saying, hey, look, Hamas, truthfully, accurately, you started this thing, you should surrender, you should release the hostages, 1 billion percent, that is the case. And that if that's not the soul talking point that you have, you know, you're somehow anti Israel. And if you're in any way granting that Hamas is pure evil and that Hamas needs to be destroyed, that somehow that's anti Palestine, it gets so. It gets so polarized and so dumb so fast. The strategy I'm talking about, about clear, hold and build, as we demonstrated before in the Middle east, is actually the way to comprehensively defeat Hamas while preserving human rights. So this is not a. This is. You know, when you talk about this clear hold and build strategy, that is not something that is coddling Hamas at all. It is something that is permanently, has the best chance to permanently remove Hamas and at the same time allows for humanitarian intervention. And why Israel has not pursued this. You know, as I said earlier, I think there was some fear from the international community that again, the word occupation, now, under the laws of war, if you do this clear hold and build, it's supposed to be temporary, not a permanent occupation. Temporary. And so the course of action that not just I've talked about, but a lot of others. General Petraeus wrote a piece not long ago echoing many of these very similar themes, was actually how you both defeat Hamas and you comply with your human rights obligations. That is the goal. The goal is to do both defeat, destroy Hamas and comply with human rights obligations.
- [12:12]
Tim Miller
My question to you then is, but, like, okay, but what now? Right? I mean, we're in a place now where it sort of feels like that strategy is. I mean, Gaza's rubble. Like Gaza is essentially rubble. There's not a lot of. You can't bring civil society back to Gaza City anytime soon, realistically. Right? And there's not schools, there's not anything. And so what now? Especially in the face of the starvation and just these horrible pictures and reports we're getting of dying children and lacking nutrition, lacking food, et cetera.
- [12:45]
David French
Yeah, I mean, this what now when we are where we are, what happens? You know, that's the question that every single day that this continues like this, it makes that already almost impossibly difficult question to answer even more difficult. I mean, and so I think. What is the what now? Well, what's the what now is you want to get back to the ceasefire table. I mean, in some ways, maybe the ship has sailed on that old, that clear hold and build strategy. Well, you need to get back to the ceasefire table. See if you can negotiate a, a release of hostages and a resumption of systematic, orderly provision of large amounts of aid. Then you have the question. Once a ceasefire has been reached, Hamas has been horribly degraded, justifiably horribly degraded, but it's still arguably maybe the strongest force within the Palestinian society. And so maybe would still be in charge of. Although there's a lot of evidence that there is more division within that Palestinian society that some of the Palestinian, like family groups are asserting some of their own control. It's starting to feel like a Mad Max type situation, Tim. I mean, and so in that circumstance, you just sort of like ending the war and then letting it all unfold may end up by just sort of inertia be the thing that happens. But that will be horrific. I mean, that will be absolutely horrific.
- [14:18]
Tim Miller
For everybody, for the remaining Palestinian people, for Israel. Yeah, well, that's a pickle.
- [14:24]
David French
No, it's horrible. It's horrible what is happening.
- [14:30]
Tim Miller
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- [16:53]
David French
The short answer is no. The long answer is it's penetrated in some parts. But those parts of evangelical Christianity were already either Trump very skeptical or Trump opponents. So, you know, if you're going to talk about sort of that larger white evangelical community in the US it might be, you know, 83, 17 Trump. And that 17% are a lot of people and they exist in the world, people like me. So, yeah, that that corner of the world is sharing stories about it, talking about it, trying to get things happening. And, you know, there have been incidents like, for example, I believe it was the Christian artist Amy Grant got on a stage at a concert and tried to call our Senator Haggerty live on stage to get him to activate. So there is real action happening within Christian circles about this. It's just not adjusting the dynamic, the underlying larger dynamic within Christian circles. And it really is for a couple of reasons. One is the Trump administration is very, very good at exploiting civic ignorance. And one of the principal ways in which people have civic ignorance is innumeracy, especially at these super Large numbers.
- [18:03]
Tim Miller
Yeah, right, right.
- [18:05]
David French
And so when the Trump administration just throws around the word billion, for example, or 10 billion or 100 billion or whatever it is, when they talk about cuts and everything, people think this is a lot of money. And they're really right. And they think, well, we have to make sacrifices to deal with our deficit. I mean, speaking of Katie Britt, I think you might have seen a clip of her recently Talking about this $7 billion rescissions package and talking about how Trump was so fiscally responsible after they just voted for this deficit busting, multi trillion dollar boondoggle. Trillion.
- [18:40]
Tim Miller
Yeah, we're add 3 trillion to the debt, but we're going to cut 100 million for UNICEF to feed the world's poorest children. It's like, what are we doing?
- [18:48]
David French
Yeah. And so, but they take advantage of the fact that these numbers get so big that people think, well, we're making a hard but necessary sacrifice. No, no, no, no, no. That's not what's happening at all. We're cutting the tiniest sliver of the budget that's harming some of the most vulnerable people in the world and then adding thousands of billions of dollars of debt for the sake of, in many cases, some of the most prosperous people in the world. And that is a horrific moral equation that is just occurring right there. And Tim, that has not sunk in, but it's also true that the evangelical church has changed a lot since the days of pepfar. A lot. This used to be something that evangelicals were incredibly proud of and saying, look, you and would often turn around to people and say, you have fundamentally misjudged us. You've accused us of being this community of haters and here we've helped create one of the most life saving programs in world history. Right. Fast forward 20 years and that same church is like PEPFAR. Why are we taking care of those people over there? And it's just a remarkable transformation.
- [19:59]
Tim Miller
Yeah, I would, you would wonder. I guess it's just probably such a drop in the bucket and compared to the whole community. But to your point, like not only was there a lot of pride there, there's a decent amount of like USAID workers and NGO workers who are evangelic, like, who are from evangelical, like, you know, either personally decided to go or went as part of a church or went as part of a, you know, grant. So you would think some of them would come back and go back into their communities and be like, guys, what are we doing? But I guess just that's not enough.
- [20:30]
David French
Well, we're at a point, honestly, Tim, just to be brutally honest about that, is if you do that, if you go back to your community and say, what. What are we doing here? The response of the community will be, what happened to you?
- [20:42]
Tim Miller
Right.
- [20:42]
David French
You know, the response of the community will be, you know, the trans issue or something like that.
- [20:47]
Tim Miller
And so we have to let people starve because there were two. There were two trans girls in the shot put competition. You at the local high school meet, you know, it's like, what are we. What. What are we doing?
- [21:00]
David French
Yet we have this gallows humor about it. But there's. That is what I constantly hear. I constantly hear any criticism of Trump and the Trump administration, no matter how valid, rebutted, rebutted by somebody in evangelical world saying, you know, what about the trans? What about women in sports? And as if that is on the hierarchy, beats everything else that is happening. Our international alliances.
- [21:27]
Tim Miller
Getting fourth versus fifth place in a swim meet, that is extremely important. That's an important part of a young woman's development. She unfairly got fifth place instead of fourth place. That is a real moral injury. Dead children in Africa, not so much.
- [21:41]
David French
I have written. I do not think that people.
- [21:44]
Tim Miller
I don't either. I don't either, by the way. But like, also, who cares? Yeah.
- [21:47]
David French
I mean, we're talking about relative.
- [21:49]
Tim Miller
It's like sports are unfair.
- [21:51]
David French
We're talking about relative importance of issues here. Right. And when you're dealing with that mass scale human suffering. I mean, mass scale human suffering. And you're rebutting that by that issue. That's what I have a problem with.
- [22:08]
Tim Miller
All right. I just want to kind of put a quarter in the machine and hear any hot takes you have about the Epstein saga. I don't even really know where to go. I've noticed. I looked at your archive and couldn't be the Bulwark podcast, because I'm going to be centering the Epstein saga until we figure out who killed him. And I've been discussing it every day, but no columns from you on it, so. Yeah, yeah, you did one that I missed. Okay, my bad.
- [22:33]
David French
Yeah, there was one right at the onset of this, Tim. Like, right.
- [22:37]
Tim Miller
It was when I was on vacation. I get a pass for this. You wrote one right at the very beginning. I missed the first couple days. And don't worry, I've made up for it in the ensuing weeks since I've returned. But I apologize. Let me know what the take was.
- [22:52]
David French
It was basically kind of explaining to people what was going to be coming which was, don't expect this to go away anytime soon.
- [22:59]
Tim Miller
Yeah.
- [23:00]
David French
Because for a lot of us, I think the Epstein story, while there were unanswered questions when Maxwell was prosecuted and convicted after he committed suicide, the story in our view, in most Americans view, had kind of largely receded. The principal bad guys had been caught. Yes, there were unanswered questions that I think people wanted answers to, but the legal process was still playing itself out with Maxwell. But there was this whole subset of America for whom this was a driving core issue. In other words, not just. I think that Epstein is. And Maxwell are horrible people who left a trail of destruction in their wake about whom we need more information. That's my camp. This story is the story that is the key that is going to unlock the global pedophile conspiracy. This is what I called thinking man's QAnon. Because unlike QAnon, which is based on nothing, at least there was an Epstein. He was a horrific maniac criminal.
- [24:01]
Tim Miller
And there were a lot of elites that were super well connected.
- [24:06]
David French
Right. And so this was the big key. And I don't think a lot of people out in the larger world realize how many people, and again, I'm going to say this out loud and people will laugh, but how many people were supporting Donald Trump for the principal reason that they believed that he was going to expose the global pedophile ring? And that if you think that, then to what links would you go to put that man back in the Oval Office? To what links would you go to try to keep that man in the Oval Office? How much would you hate your political opponents if you believed that they were concealing this giant pedophile ring? And so for a lot of people, this was the thing, this was the issue that kept them so tight with Trump. And that's why you began to see right from the beginning, some of these MAGA influencers breaking for the first time.
- [24:58]
Tim Miller
How many people do we think that is? Donald Trump got 77 million votes. How many of those people do we think were under the impression that he was going to expose the global pedophile.
- [25:06]
David French
Rate in the millions? In the millions.
- [25:08]
Tim Miller
Seven million people.
- [25:09]
David French
Yeah, but low. A very low percentage of that 77 million, but a very high punching, way above their weight in right wing media and online and in organizing and in volunteering. So that's why you'd have this phenomenon because of, for the first time ever, Trump says something on truth social and he gets ratioed by his own people on truth social media.
- [25:34]
Tim Miller
Yeah. Right.
- [25:34]
David French
So the very people who would believe that again, a very small percentage of an overall whole, but disproportionately likely to be untrue social. Disproportionately likely to be trolling you and me on. On X. Yeah. You know, and so.
- [25:48]
Tim Miller
Or contacting their congressperson or showing up to random events.
- [25:53]
David French
Bingo.
- [25:54]
Tim Miller
So, yeah.
- [25:54]
David French
Yeah. So it's going to feel much bigger than it is, just in the vibe sense, because. And. But guess what? If there is an online administration that has ever existed in the history of the universe, it is this one.
- [26:06]
Tim Miller
Yeah. Right.
- [26:08]
David French
And they respond to that online anger.
- [26:11]
Tim Miller
So what now? I guess putting your legal advisory opinions hat on. Like what? What? Like, what did you think about what Blanche did? Like, what do you expect is coming from the doj? I mean, this DOJ is not really. Probably very predictable, but how do you assess the kind of Blanche Maxwell stuff?
- [26:28]
David French
I think it's performative, mainly. I think it's performative. So, again, we talked earlier about cultivating ignorance where people confuse billions and trillions. They don't know the magnitude of the difference. And so they can be cowed or conned, I'm sorry. Into thinking that the Trump administration is responsible fiscally. There's even more civic ignorance about the inner workings of the Department of Justice. And what was happening in the Biden years is a lot of people like Cash Patel, Dan Bongino, JD Vance, others were exploiting the civic ignorance to generate a sense that the FBI was sitting on this giant pile of evidence that it could at any time release to the public, but was not doing it because it was protecting, again, you know, the global pedophile ring. All of this is cultivating that most angry, most activist part of the base. But that's not the way the law works at all. I mean, you have grand jury secrecy rules. Grand jury secrecy can be penetrated only for very limited circumstances, and dispelling conspiracy theories is not one of those circumstances. You have evidence under seal because of Maxwell's ongoing litigation. You have an enormous amount of child sexual abuse material in those files that could never be released. Which is why when I put all that out there, that's why I say what I would like to see is the maximum disclosure that is reasonable and lawful. There's a lot of reasons why you don't just dump a criminal file into the public. And so all of these Trumpist folks were advocating for something that they could not deliver on and knew it and knew it.
- [28:14]
Tim Miller
Well, I mean, Cash and Bongino knew it. They're pretty stupid. That's possible. They didn't know.
- [28:20]
David French
I mean, this is such basic stuff.
- [28:22]
Tim Miller
I don't know that Dan Bongino knew. I just. I'll fall on the side of Dan Bongino really thought that he was going to be able to expose the secret pedophile ring once he got in there and looked at the documents. I'm at least open to that possibility.
- [28:37]
David French
Yeah, Pam Bondi knew.
- [28:39]
Tim Miller
I mean, yeah, sure, Pam Bondi certainly knew.
- [28:41]
David French
And so when you look back in hindsight, you could see that they knew they were in a pickle and they were just doing everything they could to kick the can down the road. And so they have this Epstein release, volume one, where all these MAGA influencers went to the White House and just were utterly beclowned by the administration. Just beclowned. And then, you know, we're like, thank you, sir. May I have another? As long as they thought another release was coming. Right. And then that was a bogus release. Then Bondi says in response to a question on Fox about the list, you know, it's on my desk. And then for whatever reason, they decide they've got to rip the band aid off and they do it in the dumbest way possible with a conclusory unsigned memorandum. Nobody had the guts to put their name to it. And big shock. This subset of MAGA that has been eating, breathing, drinking, sleeping this for years wasn't going to be satisfied. And the way I put it to people is this is the first time that Trump. It's not the first time Trump has lied to his base. He's lied to his base ever since he came down the escalator a lot. Yeah, this is the first lie. And Tim, tell me if you can think of another about a matter. This was the first lie that didn't reinforce their priors. This was the first lie that they didn't want to hear. The other lies. Yeah, there's nothing to see. No interactions with Russia at all in my campaign or.
- [30:09]
Tim Miller
Yeah, the only other thing I could think of is a truth that they didn't want to hear about the vaccines. It's like really the only other comparable thing. Maybe, but that was not. But that.
- [30:16]
David French
Good point. They didn't want. There was a truth they didn't want to hear and there's a lie they didn't want to hear.
- [30:21]
Tim Miller
Yeah, yeah, just talk about this. It, like, sparks a thought. I'm curious because sometimes, you know, I need to check my Trump derangement syndrome a little bit and balance it against somebody who has just one tick less derangement than me. In your case, you also have it, but, you know, just a milder case, particularly in the area of DOJ stuff like, you know, you were a critic at times of the Holder doj, and the way that. Which, you know, DOJ has been politicized under other administrations. Like, how do you just assess, like, this doj? Because to me, it just looks like a total category difference. Like, unbelievable. Like just law, completely lawless and totally political all the way down. Is that fair, do you think, or.
- [31:02]
David French
Yeah, I do think that's fair. Look, I spent years critiquing elements of the DOJ years. There's a long record, for example, of some botched prosecutions from the doj. Let's use an analogy, Tim. This was like you walk into a house. It's a beautiful house. It's got a lot of great things about it. It's got a lot of great features. But the bedroom needs renovating, right? Or there's some rotting timbers under the kitchen that need replacing. Like, that's the kind of. And so people will sit there outside the building, and they'll say, there's rotting timbers. You need to renovate. And then DOJ doesn't necessarily really do those things. It doesn't reform itself. And they're the rotting timbers, and then there's the bedroom. And somebody comes up and says, and this is an analogy that works for all of our institutions, by the way, right now, that are under assault. Somebody comes up and says, hey, I see you're upset at that house right there, that it has a rotting timber and it has a bedroom that needs renovation. I see you're upset about that. I'm going to. I'm going to take care of that. And the other side says, no, no, no, this is fine. Or is interpreted as saying, no, no, no, this is fine. And so a critical mass of people go with the guy who looks at the house and says, I'll do something about that. What does he do? He just bulldozes it, Right? He just knocks it all down. That's sort of the analogy here. So, yeah, you're right. The prior doj, there were some problems there. Absolutely. There were problems with the DOJ within the Russia investigation. Nobody should think that the DOJ behaved pristinely and perfectly during the Russia investigation, for example. But there's a giant difference between the scale. It's not just a degree in scale, it's a difference in kind. And what is happening now.
- [32:54]
Tim Miller
Talk about the Russian investigation. So that's their big distraction now. You know, I don't that dog isn't really hunting, but they're, they're trying to talk about how we're going to reinvestigate the Russia hoax. I was. If you really want to get your blood pressure up and bore yourself today, I was on with eli Lake like three years ago and we did like 90 minutes on the Russian administration on the Russian investigation. Yeah. And it was, it was like, you know, we're deep, we're deep in the weeds, we're deep in the sauce. So you got to be, you know, you know, you got to be really up for it, but people can go listen to that. And I was, I just thought essentially every critique was like, over baked. I mean, like, there were things that, you know, in the Flynn investigation and then some of these things that they did that like, seems, seem like they were out of what was, you know, within the norm. But I, I feel like every critique of the Russia investigation, like, looks at a micro fact about what happened and want you to analyze that without remembering the macro fact that like, Russia was attacking our election. There were creepy connections between Trump and Russia. Nobody really knew exactly what it was. And simultaneously the DOJ was like knee camping Hillary's campaign, not Trump's campaign. So if it was an effort to, like, if it was a deep state effort to stop Donald Trump, it was, you know, the most incompetent deep state effort in the, in the history. And that's what actually be a bigger concern for me is that like, our intelligence agencies are that incompetent. So anyway, how do you react to that? And what do you think about this kind of effort to try to dredge all that shit back up?
- [34:24]
David French
Yeah, well, first, it's the most obvious squirrel moment in recent history. Let's just get this out there. At the same time, whenever you have a president of the United States saying that another, a former president should be arrested for treason, you should pay attention to that because, Tim, aren't we long past the notion that you, you have to take Trump seriously but not literally?
- [34:46]
Tim Miller
No, I think so.
- [34:48]
David French
He wants to be taken literally and seriously. Everybody knows this now, right? So you have to deal with it. And look, I'm with you on this. This is the tactic. And once you see this pattern, you can't unsee it. And the Russian investigation is how the Trump world cemented a pattern or a standard operating procedure for responding to controversy. And that is take the biggest version of it, the most aggressive version of the conspiracy. In this case, it was the contents of that ridiculous Steele dossier. And Say that's the controversy. If Trump isn't guilty of this, then move along. Nothing to see here.
- [35:32]
Tim Miller
If they didn't pee on a bed that Obama slept in in Russia because he hated Barack, then the whole thing is fake. Yeah.
- [35:40]
David French
And so they set that up. That is the controversy. And, you know, there were some people, Trump critics, who were like, yeah, he did that stuff. Yeah, he. Absolutely. So they could pinpoint to people who are saying Trump is absolutely a Russian agent. And they said, that's the controversy. Meanwhile, the most of the rest of us, Tim, are like, you know what I want, I want to know what happened. I want to know what kind of contacts there were. Were their contacts, what is happening? And so for us in that community, that's like, I just want to know what's happening by the end of all of the investigations. And the Senate Intelligence investigation, I think is the best one. And this is one with a majority Republican Senate committee at this time, including.
- [36:22]
Tim Miller
The current Secretary of State.
- [36:24]
David French
I defy a person to read that and say, no, there was nothing wrong with the Trump campaign. I mean, come on, some of the stuff in there, I mean, Paul Manafort having contacts with the person providing confidential information with the person that Senate intel identified as a Russian agent. I mean, you know, Donald Jr. Enthusiastically taking a meeting with a Russian to allegedly receive information that was being provided to him as part of a plan by the Russian government. He's like, yeah, let's do this. Now. The meeting did not provide what he wanted, but he's. He said yes to all of that.
- [37:03]
Tim Miller
There's just Roger stone talking to WikiLeaks and Assange, and I just, you know, I mean, over and over.
- [37:09]
David French
Yeah. And so just. I defy anyone to look at that and go, oh, hoax, hoax, hoax, hoax. No, there was serious problems here, and that required investigation. But what maga's done is they've repeated hoax, hoax, hoax. They've repeated that the Steele dossier was debunked again and again and again. And they've implanted in a lot of people this idea that, well, look, Trump was unfairly attacked from the beginning. And so that creates a presumption of every new attack is another Russia hoax. And he's very effective about doing this. Remember the Russia hoax, the perfect call. He goes through all of that onto.
- [37:48]
Tim Miller
The actual policy of what's going on with Russia. I'm curious your thoughts on a couple things. Trump does seem to be kind of changing a little bit his tune on Russia, Ukraine, and there have been some actions to that effect. I Think he said the other day that he's, Putin's gone down from 50 days to 10 or 12 days. So two weeks, Putin's got two more weeks. But meanwhile, inside the administration, it's very mixed. You have these sort of one time hawks. Then you also have a character, Darren Beatty, our friend Jay Nordlinger wrote a good piece about recently that people should read, who seems to be gathering more power within the administration, just got promoted one time, tweeted that he thinks that's like Putin, you know, greater than sign NATO. So that's a prominent person in our administration right now. What do you kind of just make of their, of the policy that you've been seeing on, on the actual Russia situation, not the fake hoax.
- [38:42]
David French
You know, I'll say this, I will say we're in a better place than we were when he took office. Yep, when he took office, it looked like we were.
- [38:50]
Tim Miller
Ukraine is in a much worse place than when he took office.
- [38:53]
David French
Ukraine's in a worse place.
- [38:53]
Tim Miller
Administration's in a better place. Place. Yeah.
- [38:55]
David French
Yes, Ukraine's in a worse place. The administration's in a better place. But Ukraine's in a worse place in large part because the place the administration has been in for these several months he takes office, it looks, it looks to all the world like he's essentially switching sides in the war, that he has some, a couple of aid brief aid cutoffs. It's just chaotic. And he slowly seems to be at least moving away from the idea that there's no good guy or bad guy here or that Putin is somebody he can work with. But all of this change is happening, Tim, in the most erratic and dumbest way possible because it's all based on his personal impulses and kind of sort of how he feels, whether Vladimir Putin's respecting him or not and who's giving.
- [39:41]
Tim Miller
Him his due, it's about his feelings.
- [39:43]
David French
And so Zelensky, he gets on Trump's bad side because Trump feels like he's disrespecting him. And then Putin gets on Trump's bad side because he feels like Putin's disrespecting him. I mean, this is not the way to run a foreign policy. None of our allies can rely on it, including Ukraine. It is better than switching sides, but it is not a comprehensive strategy to fight and to help an ally fight and win a war. And so, you know, that's what I keep saying to people who say, hey, David, look, aren't you glad that he's moving in your direction? And I'm thinking, is He. Or is it just a mood swing? Is that what's happening? And so, yeah, the administration's in a better place than it was in late January. Ukraine's in a worse place. And I don't know that Ukraine or anyone can count on us going forward.
- [40:32]
Tim Miller
How do you assess who is winning the internal battle on foreign policy? Because on the one hand, to your point, I get this conversation, too, from people who are the handful of Republicans in good standing who still talk to me, who are like, hey, look, you know, it does seem like the Rubio, whatever you want to call it, like, wing is winning out. Like, he's been. Look what happened in Iran. Look at how he's changing his tune in Ukraine. And I see that. And there's a legitimate argument for that. If you're, like, just looking at what are Trump's actions, right? Like discrete actions in foreign policy. On the other hand, like, you see the Beatty promotion, you know, you listen to the discourse in MAGA world, and it kind of feels like the momentum is actually on the other side. Like, Trump's actions have been a little more hawkish than maybe you might have expected, but within kind of MAGA world, you know, you're seeing more momentum towards Tucker, you know, and that sort of stuff. Do you agree with that assessment, or am I being too pessimistic?
- [41:28]
David French
I think it's complicated. I'm not sure that I agree. Let me. Let me put it this way. I think there are two things happening. One is there is an internal battle in the administration, and the other one is reality tends to intervene more on the side of Rubio. And so when reality intervenes on the side of Rubio, then all of a sudden, that creates problems for Trump. And internally, that. That is the North Star. If there's problems for Trump, he will shift and adjust. And reality creates problems for Trump that shift him towards Rubio. So a perfect example of this would be the unilateral aid cutoff that all the available reporting indicates that Hegseth and others cut off a shipment of aid to Ukraine. And this happens under Trump's nose, apparently doesn't know about it, again, according to the reporting. And then while there's an aid cutoff, so while there's this unilateral rogue aid cutoff, Vladimir Putin just starts pounding the crap out of Ukraine. And you see these images of flames just rising into the horizon from Kyiv, and they're hitting apartment buildings and they're hunting civilians in Kharkiv. And. And so all of this reality is unfolding right at the moment that we did what? Withheld air defenses. Air defenses, Tim. That's not something that can hit Moscow. That's something that's protecting apartment buildings in Kiev. So all of a sudden Trump has a political problem on his hands and he solves it in the most Trumpian way possible. Making a short term, very short term adjustment to placate immediate critics while still keeping the festering problem inside his administration of Pete Hegseth. Because Pete Hegseth is great at owning the media on television. So that that's where we.
- [43:14]
Tim Miller
The most important job for the Secretary of Defense.
- [43:16]
David French
Exactly. So that's where we are on foreign policy.
- [43:21]
Tim Miller
While we are assessing each party's internal political problems that they're navigating. I want to turn to the Democrats for a second. There's a pretty alarming poll, I think, for the Democrats in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend. I'm trying not to react to individual polls, really. This year I've been making a rule to myself like I'm not doing YouTube videos on one poll because it's like partially. It's like, who cares? I mean, unless you're Abigail Spanberger in Virginia, we're a long way away from the midterms that we're in an insane news environment. It's impossible to project what will be the key issues next Labor Day, et cetera. That said, just like about the core of the Democratic brand, they're as unpopular as They've been since 1990 in this poll, even if that's off a little bit directionally, this is atrocious. And we have this ongoing conversation on the POD about does this emanate from issues and real policy positions they've taken? Does it emanate from just vibes? Does it emanate from political strategy? Where do you fall on that? Because I think that sometimes the self assessment of the Democrats is very focused on like PR and a little less focused on underlying stuff. I don't know. What do you think?
- [44:33]
David French
You know, I think you almost always will not have a monocausal explanation for a complex event. And so you have a long term trend line for the Democrats. And I'm exactly with you, Tim. Any one poll, just wait and see. But we've had a long term trend line for the Democrats and I think it's a combination of several things coming together at once and kind of culminating at once. Here's one. There's a lot of frustration with blue city and blue state governance. The cities in the red states are blue cities in red states. But if you go to red states, you often see these growing, vibrant cities where it seems like services work, where you're not seeing as much disorder in the streets. Everything seems to be just working better. And then you go to some places out west in the east and it's almost impossible to build houses or to create anything new. And there's just miles and acres of red tape. You have cities groaning under the weight of pension debt. There's just a lot of things that don't feel like they're working okay. Then you have, rather than sort of like digging in and dealing with those things, it appears that party elites are often focused on really, you know, what's that phrase, luxury beliefs, Sort of the, you know, the inverse of the problem on the right, where they're going to ignore enormous suffering overseas, dissolution of alliances, economic strain because of, say, trans people in sports. There's a reverse of that as well, where unless you are absolutely with somebody on the left on every last issue, and I mean every last issue, you're a horrible human being. It's not just that you're wrong, you're horrible. And so you'll be excluded from the coalition because of these very fringe issues that don't impact large numbers of people. And so I saw a really interesting chart online that showed that the ideological diversity of the Republican Party is now much greater than the Democratic Party. And if you're in a two party system, your coalition, you need to have a coalition so big that it's hard to keep together, right?
- [46:46]
Tim Miller
Yeah.
- [46:46]
David French
And so what that means is you're not in a position of just cutting people out for all of these various purity tests. And so all of these things are coming together.
- [46:55]
Tim Miller
It's just a really quick good example of this because I think people will reject this point. They'll be like, what are you talking about? I mean, you have, in this election year, in 2025, you've got Zoran Mamdani running in New York, and then across the river you got Mikey Sherrill running in New Jersey. They couldn't be more different. And like that's actually not really true on social and cultural issues. Right. Like the Democrats have sort of lost like most of their politicians that have like now Roy Cooper just got back in yesterday, so maybe he's one example. But many of their politicians who, who, who are heterodox on social and cultural issues. Like if you asked Mikey, Sheryl and Zoran to like do a checklist of social issues, I think that they basically agree the words Zoran would use would Be different and more annoying. Absolutely. Voting record would be like, pretty similar, I think.
- [47:44]
David French
Yeah. Because on the social, cultural issues on the left, it was a sense that if you're not with us, you're a bad human being, you're just a bad person. And we don't want bad people in the coalition. And it used to be on the right. It used to be on the right that the thought was, if you're not with us on all the social and cultural issues, you're a bad person. Now it's if you're not with Donald Trump, you're a bad person. But you can believe anything else you want to believe.
- [48:12]
Tim Miller
Yeah.
- [48:12]
David French
And now that's going to make this MAGA coalition very unstable when Donald Trump has gone from the scene. But you have these very.
- [48:21]
Tim Miller
Unfortunately, he's going to outlive you, David. Oh, man. Don't say that. Sorry to say that. Sorry to tell you.
- [48:27]
David French
Don't say that. But so you have this world in which you can be pro vaccine, anti vaccine, pro Ukraine, anti Ukraine, you can be pro choice, you can be pro life. And if anyone doubts that he watered down the pro life platform in the Republican platform more than any president in almost 40 years and didn't lose an iota of pro life support, I mean, it's. You can't even measure on the electron microscope how much pro life support he lost. And so you have one place, big tent, as long as you have a red hat, another place, hey, we welcome everyone. But you got. Look at the list on the door there. Check them all. And that's going to create a dynamic where the Team Red's going to have an advantage in that.
- [49:13]
Tim Miller
You had two columns recently. I just sort of want to let you cook on both of them because they're a little bit off of the regular news cycle. First was we had some. I don't know if closure is the right word in the Breonna Taylor case. And you were talking about the perversion of justice inside the doj, and I haven't had a chance to get to that on the show. So why don't you. For folks who are just totally unfamiliar with what the latest is on that, why don't you talk about the column a little bit?
- [49:37]
David French
Yeah, yeah. I wanted to highlight that case in the Times because it was a lot more significant than the news attention it was getting. And in this case, this involved one of the officers who was present at the Breonna Taylor raid that resulted in her death. And for those who've forgotten this terrible, terrible event in 2020, a woman was awakened in the middle of the night with her boyfriend. Not awakened, she was watching a movie in the middle of the night with her boyfriend. Here's pounding, pounding, pounding on the door. Boyfriend goes to open the door. This is his story. The door comes open, people, shadowy figures come in. He fires a shot at them. There's a fusillade of shots that come back. His girlfriend, Breonna Taylor, is killed. She was unarmed. The police were executing a search warrant. There were no drugs or anything in the house. They weren't even doing a search warrant for her. They were looking for another person, a person she used to have a relationship with, but no longer. And it was just horrible. And on the one hand, there were two parts of this one, the police who returned fire at the boyfriend. They said they identified themselves as police. Other witnesses said they did not. But either way, when the boyfriend fired at them, they had a right to fire back. You know, if you're a police officer and someone fires a shot at you, you can fire back. So they fired the killing shots against Breonna Taylor. But that shooting was justified. Horrible, tragic, but justified legally. But there was a third guy, another officer outside the apartment who just started firing rounds, unaimed rounds into the apartment, fired 10 shots, didn't just go into Breonna Taylor's apartment, went into another apartment where there was a baby. Thankfully, didn't hit anybody. But a jury found that this wild firing was a violation of Breonna Taylor's civil rights. In comes the Trump administration. It is dead set on sort of undoing police, the, you know, the George Floyd era police reforms. And one of the things that it is obviously not wanting to pursue is aggressively pursue, are prosecutions of rogue police. So they enter into this case and ask for a. The Civil Rights division. Tim enters into this case and asks for a one day sentence, a one day sentence for this officer. And so the point that I was making is this is in many ways civil rights division. Civil Rights division, yeah, that's the Orwellian, a one day sentence for an officer who wildly fired in an incident that cost an unarmed black woman, innocent, unarmed black woman, her life. Okay? And so the point that I was making is this is different from the kinds of perversions of justice we'd seen in other cases where Trump was benefiting personal friends or loyalists and taking on personal enemies or people he deemed to be personal enemies. This is more categorical. It is, we're intervening on behalf of this class of person, which is an exact perversion of the purpose of the Civil Rights division, which is to protect classes of individuals from state harm. Protecting innocent individuals from state harm. They are trying to protect a guilty state actor who harmed an individual. You talk about flipping everything on its head. And thankfully, however, the Trump appointed judge, federal judge in the case of sentenced him to, I believe it was three years in prison, not one day, which is, I think, a fitting punishment. He didn't kill Breonna Taylor, but it's a fitting punishment for the civil rights violation.
- [53:00]
Tim Miller
All right, we're gonna give people a little dessert, and then we'll get out of here. And that is your. That's your story about the Gaines family. I gotta tell you, I don't really follow this couple. Yeah, this. The Christian influencer couple and their story. Chip Gaines. Chip and Joanna. Is that their name?
- [53:15]
David French
Chip and Joanna?
- [53:16]
Tim Miller
Yeah. That's not kind of the kind of reality TV I'm engaging in more of a. You know, that's. You know, I'm more of like a RuPaul's Drag Race kind of person. But I was reading a column, and apparently this couple was on a show where, like, they. It's one of these shows where you, you know, pretend like you're, you know, living in the olden times. You get rid of all your devices and stuff, try to live without technology. And they're one of the couples, and another one of the couples is a gay couple. And the existence of these gay people creates a massive backlash for the gains among their evangelical base. And there's a little bit of a leopard's eating faces moment for them, but I don't know. Why don't you weigh in on that?
- [53:54]
David French
Yeah. This story is like. How shall we put it, Tim Rich with hypocrisy.
- [54:00]
Tim Miller
Okay.
- [54:00]
David French
Okay. So Chip and Joanna Gaines are actually hosts of reality shows. So they're the hosts.
- [54:07]
Tim Miller
Okay.
- [54:07]
David French
And they were the host of a very popular show called Fixer Upper back in the 2000 and tens. And Buzzfeed in 2016 wrote an article basically trying to, you know, in sort of classic 20 teens, cancel culture era, saying, Chip and Joanna Gaines go to a church whose pastor teaches traditional views of marriage and wrote a whole new story about Chip and Joanna Gaines going to this church. And the intention here was really obvious to sort of create a public pile on of Chip and Joanna Gaines. And so Christians rallied to their defense. Like, come on, are you saying that people go to traditional church? They can't host an interior design show? I mean, is this what we've come to here? And one of the parts of resentment was resenting the fact that people were presuming that because Chip and Joanna Gaines went to this church that they would discriminate against gay people. Right. How dare you presume that they will do a harmful thing? There's no evidence. This is important in the story. There was no evidence that Chip and Joanna Gaines had ever mistreated anybody. Nobody had complained of their mistreatment. Nobody had complained. This was. It looked like one of these old school search and destroy kind of articles. And so Fast forward to 2025. Chip and Joanna Gaines host a reality TV show where you give up all your tech and you go back and you try to live.
- [55:29]
Tim Miller
Oh, got it. I misunderstood that. So they're the hosts of the tech. Of the giving up their tech. They're the host show. All right, got it.
- [55:34]
David French
Yeah, yeah. And you go back to, like 1880, and you try to live like you would have lived in 1880. Fun premise. Well, one of the couples in the show is a gay couple. And so evangelicals then responded and united in mass to say, see, we told you, just because Chip and Joanna Gaines go to a traditional Christian church doesn't mean they're going to discriminate against gay people in their workplace. See, what a heartwarming story. It's heartwarming. That's not what happened, Tim. That is not what happened.
- [56:08]
Tim Miller
No.
- [56:08]
David French
All of a sudden, a new mob arises against Chip and Joanna, basically saying, you should have excluded, discriminated against that couple in a show that, by the way, was not a Christian ministry show. This was a HBO show. It was in. In cooperation with hbo. And they said, well, you should have excluded. Discriminated against this couple on the basis of their sexual orientation and the fact that you didn't.
- [56:34]
Tim Miller
Because are they sinners? The. They're sinister. I don't know. Like, did they brag about grabbing women by the. Grabbing people by the genitals? Or did they take somebody into it?
- [56:44]
David French
Or did they allegedly write a birthday note to Jeffrey Epstein?
- [56:49]
Tim Miller
Jeffrey Epstein. Any of that sort of stuff.
- [56:51]
David French
Definitely. Former friend of Jeffrey Epstein. And so instead they just pile on them. You should have excluded them. The fact that you didn't exclude them. People were calling for their church to discipline them, that they needed to be called out for capitulating to the culture. And I wrote a column that said, what are we doing here? Because, look, if you're going to ask that people not discriminate against you on the basis of your religious beliefs in this secular commercial marketplace, shouldn't you extend the same courtesy to People who disagree with you. You know, if somebody strongly disagrees with the traditional, you know, small orthodox Christian sexual moral ethic, and you say we should have a right to work with you and to partner with you in business, shouldn't you extend the same courtesy to others? And if you're not going to. Doesn't this kind of culture just become a zero sum game of every interest group fighting to see who gets to dominate? And we just can't have that. And so I wrote a piece about that, and that triggered an extra backlash, too.
- [57:59]
Tim Miller
Oh, no way there wasn't a huge response from the evangelical community people. The scales fell from their ey. No, Tim. I think you're right, David.
- [58:08]
David French
It's further evidence of my apostasy and heresy, Tim. That's what it is.
- [58:12]
Tim Miller
Okay, we'll end with some. I thought we were gonna end with candy, but that makes me wonder about the extent of your apostasy. So we'll end with this. It seems to me I did an interview yesterday with Metro Weekly, which is the gay alternative magazine in dc, and this question often comes up in LGBT circles, which is like, how worried should we be about backsliding in various places about rights, protection? And I'm kind of in the middle on that. I think the trans military ban, like, if you're an immigrant that's lgbt, that they're like. I think they're groups that should be quite concerned. I'm not like, that concerned about gay marriage being repealed by the Roberts Court or anything, but I just. As a general cultural thing, this story, like, to me says I kind of feel like we pass, like, peak acceptance a little bit and that we're going through a period of backsliding. We're like, just like, this is just. This does kind of feel like, would this have really happened in 2016? Like, if Chip and Joanna Gaines had a gay couple on their show, would there have been backlash? Like, probably in some, like, niche circle that I don't follow, but, like a mass, like, negative response to people just for, like, having on a show gay people, like, just for, like, the existence of gay people. To me, that feels like that is moving to a worse place than we were 10 years ago.
- [59:25]
David French
I actually think you're right about that, Tim. I do. And this very weird thing has happened in a lot of Christian circles right now, and I'm going to say it to you, and it's not going to make sense to you, but it is happening. As they embrace Donald Trump tighter, the church is also becoming more fundamentalist now. That would seem to make no sense at all. I mean, the more closely you're embracing somebody who is one of the most prolific liars, a person who's been found responsible for sexual abuse by a jury, the tape, the Epstein. I mean, we could just do this all day long, ripping apart pepfar. You know, you can just do this all day long. It's almost as if at the same time, there is this sense that, okay, well, we've given up on this issue, this issue, this issue, this issue, but we're not going to move an inch or we're going to recover ground on the LGBT issue. And it doesn't make any sense, right? You compromise, you compromise, you compromise, you compromise. And then it's almost as if they say, well, the last thing, you won't see us budge an inch on this.
- [60:37]
Tim Miller
It does make sense to me, actually. People want to feel like they have the moral high ground. In this case, they're like, if they, at some level, subconsciously know they're giving up the moral high ground in one space, the idea of trying to cling to it in another space, I don't know. To me, it's. Psychologically, that phenomenon makes sense a little bit.
- [60:56]
David French
You know, psychologically, it makes sense, absolutely. Because nobody ever wants to think they're Team Bad Guy, you know? Well, I do think that some people, they reach a state of moral devolution, and we've seen some.
- [61:08]
Tim Miller
Stephen Miller seems to like being the bad guy to me, but most people.
- [61:11]
David French
And we've seen that in some of these Twitter conversations where people love it, but most people don't want to be the bad guy. They're not like Team Lesser Evil. Team Lesser Evil. So they want to be good, so they're going to look and what is it? And. And I had a lot of pushback to my column, and one of the questions I asked is, okay, wait a minute. Is your position that. Because you would say Muslim disagrees with evangelical Christian theology, would you have no Muslim couples? Jews disagree. Would you have no Jewish couples? Atheists definitely disagree. Would you have no. Like, what's the limiting principle here? Is it that if you are seen as not complying with orthodox Christianity, you. We can't platform you. Well, then you're wiping out everybody but your own tribe, you know? Or is it that you somehow see the LGBT issue as the super sin of all super sins and that all other people and, you know, when I was growing up, I used to very much resist the idea, Tim, that Christians treated LGBT people as sort of extra sinful. Right. Compared to other sins. I now see that that is the dominant message of the church, which is, yeah, Playboy guy. I mean, literally, he was on the COVID of Playboy, right? Yes. Great, great. Chip and Joanna Gaines, Evangelicals, host a show where a gay couple is also on the show. Well, now you've gone and done it. I mean, what are we doing here? And how can a community that sees that not feel as if they're particularly and uniquely loathed or despised? And that's grievous. I think that's grievous, yeah.
- [62:59]
Tim Miller
To me, the example of the super sin was always in any of these cases. I was on the side of. I never was a fan of the bake me the damn cake part of a gay culture. If somebody doesn't want to bake me a cake, that's fine. But from a legal standpoint, to me, that's just my opinion. But from, like, a moral standpoint, I'm always like, you never do hear stories about a cake baker not wanting to make bake a cake for a third straight wedding, you know, or a cake baker that doesn't want to bake a cake for someone because they knew that they had sex out of wedlock before. And I was like, it seems like if we're going to be consistent about this, it shouldn't just be the gays that aren't getting the cake, you know? And I think that is evidence that it's. That it's at least viewed as a. And treated like it's a super sin and a group that should be targeted above other sinners.
- [63:46]
David French
I mean, it's so hard to argue with that. I mean, it really is. And especially when you see, you know, the Bible talks a lot about a lot of other sins, and you see a lot of MAGA Christians just committing them openly, brazenly, you know, cruelty, dishonesty, greed, all of these things. And as it seems to, like, well, cruelty is fine as long as you're cruel to the right people. Dishonesty is fine so long as it accomplishes the right objectives. I mean, this seems to be the message that's being completely delivered by political Christianity right now. And then they feel great about themselves because, you know, they've not moved an inch, or maybe they've retrenched and moved back on LGBT issues. And again, this creates a very reasonable perception that what you're not dealing with is love and genuine concern about sin and separation from God, but what you're dealing with is instead actual malice and, you know, an actual hatred, and that that is when you see how much and how much venom exists on that issue, it gets very hard to to come to any other conclusion.
- [65:03]
Tim Miller
David French we always go long, so it's your fault. It's kind of my fault, but it's your fault. You know, I just want more. I just want more.
- [65:09]
David French
I'm a gas bag.
- [65:11]
Tim Miller
Thank you so much, everybody. Go check out his work in the New York Times and the advisory opinions podcast for Legal Dork stuff and we'll be talking to you here soon.
- [65:19]
David French
Thanks so much, Tim.
- [65:20]
Tim Miller
Everybody else will be back here tomorrow. We'll see you all then.
- [65:22]
C
Peace the devil's tapping on shoulders he's trying to get to know you the right time to fight soldier I'm losing saints in my soldiers it's all Lottie dottie till you looking at the body smiles I'll never see again Never be a we again Cleaning out your closet the one you kept your demons in Hard for me to breathe again Imma blame your head not your heart Till we meet again easily I could have been one of them Locked up and never get to see the sun again Burning bill buildings I kept running in via law Every time I flew a hunted in co defendant cave in and lawyers couldn't save them all for the level 580 then a mixed bitch having your baby I done dodge Trey's crazy man I think about the shit daily when the crew breaks apart who takes the charge you face the cards I lace the squad went from mason jars to cryptars Escape the odds by the.
- [66:22]
David French
Grace of God I've seen killers and.
- [66:25]
Tim Miller
Kingpin sing behind the wall.
- [66:29]
David French
I watch many men die Cause no one would make the call I see entire empires.
- [66:38]
Tim Miller
Crumble and fall Yes I seen it all they missed this wall yeah by.
- [66:47]
David French
The grace of God.
- [66:52]
Tim Miller
The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.