Marjorie Taylor Greene (9:11)

Fallout happened yesterday with his statements on the tragic murder of Rob Reiner and his wife. Back Faithful reacted big time, all over social media, people, his supporters, including myself, hearing the president, who himself, after Charlie Kerr's horrific murder, we didn't appreciate. Even if, even if you don't agree with Rob Reiner politically, there was no reason for his statement to be the statement that he made.

Robbie Jones (9:47)

Yeah, when he saysi mean, this was in the immediate aftermath of us finding.

Joy Reid (9:51)

Out about Rob Reiner. And obviously now his son has been taken into custody. You said that his murder was not about politics or political enemies. The President called him bad for our country and said he was a deranged person. As far as Trump is concerned, I.

Marjorie Taylor Greene (10:06)

Thought that statement was absolutely, completely below the office of the President of the United States. Classless. And it was just wrong. That was a. It's a tragic murder. It's a family ripped apart. And from my understanding, what I've seen on the news, it was drug abuse and mental illness. And many families across America deal with family members that are drug addicts or have mental health issues. And I think the President should have responded with compassion, passion, and talked about those issues. He didn't have to make it about politics. And I think that was. It was really below what we expect our President to talk like.

Joy Reid (10:52)

So a couple of things here. First of all, Marjorie Taylor Greene acts like that, too. It's ironic, right, that she's somebody who specialized in calling members of the squad terrorists. And she says, well, I apologize for that. She won't even answer questions about that. Now. She gets really snippy if you point out that, you know, this was kind of your bag lady. This is like the thing you used to do. But what she's doing with her $25 million in the bag from betting on the things that she was legislating on the money that she's about to walk away with, plus her full pension, by the way, I will know, by the way, that Jasmine Crockett could have done the same thing, but she's probably gonna, like, be less than her pension if she leaves the House in order to run for United States Senate. But I'm just going to leave that aside. Marjorie makes sure she getting fully vested, honey. And she's also gonna walk with that, apparently $25 million, which we will confirm once we see the final reports, her financial reports. But what Marge is doing is very clever. The people inside MAGA who are closest to the MAGA base, people like Marjorie, they see Trump up close. They know that he is faltering cognitively. They see his cankles swelling up to the size of an Elephant's feet, although. Except that he's not as delightful as an elephant. He's the opposite. They can smell his diaper full on many occasions, and having to be changed multiple times a day, they see him wandering around, seemingly unaware of where he is, at times not knowing what city he's in, sometimes rambling, answering questions with complete non sequiturs. What we've heard on this program with medical experts saying that he's definitely in cognitive decline, maybe dementia. They see that, and they see also a weak J.D. vance who cannot inherit Maga for a few reasons. Number one, he has no charisma. Number two, the couch thing, it's just weird. And number three, that brown wife, and I'm sorry, Maga, and I'm sorry, Fox, I know you're gonna get mad at me, but with that brown wife on his arm, unless he pulls the fairy tale and go run and get Charlie Kirk X or Charlie Kirk's widow, I don't see it. I just don't see maga. Given how much they hate non white people and non white immigrants, particularly how a man who's married to the daughter of non white immigrants who also is not a Christian, I don't see how he inherits maga. The son baron's too young, right, to inherit it now. And the eldest son, Don Jr. Is, you know, he seems not always in his right frame of mind. And the middle son's stupid. Nobody's gonna follow Eric Kirk. I don't think people would follow Eric Kirk to, you know, water if they were driving in the desert. Eric. I'm sorry. Eric Kirk. Eric said Eric Kirk Trump, right? I'm merging the band. Yeah. Eric Trump. I mean, come on now. Nobody's following Eric Trump, okay? He has no charisma. He's busy doing his, like, crypto, whatever he's doing. So there isn't really a natural air apparent. Right? It can't be Vivek Ramaswamy, also brown, also Hindu. So the question becomes, like, who inherits the thing? Marjorie Taylor Greene said, I'm white, I'm Southern, I'm MAGA original, I'm OG maga. I'm about to take this thing and do kinder, gentler maga. Make MAGA seem normal. I promise you. I think she's really gearing up to take that $25 million and invest like, 4,5 million of it and running for president in 2028. That's what I think. I think she's setting herself up to inherit MAGA because it's her on one side. And then Laura Loomer on the other side. And so what it's going to come down to is Miga versus Maga. Right? Laura Loomer runs the side of Maga that is hardcore pro Israel to the end. And Marjorie Taylor Greene is holding down the side of Maga that is like f Israel. We don't have to follow this little country into wars. There'll be no more wars. Real true America first side, right? They're that. They're that side. And then you've got the Laura Loomer side, which is very much aligned now, apparently, post the failure of a CBS interview that rated zero, like nobody watched the damn thing. But Erica Kirk went on there and assured Barry Weiss that no worries, Turning Point USA is 100% pro Israel. Don't worry, we're good. We're good with. With you all at cbs. We're Israel down the line. Charlie Kirk's legacies were with Israel down the line. Got you. So Miga versus Maga. And I think in that Miga versus Maga, Mars Green is setting herself up to hold down that magazine. That's just my opinion. I'm just saying it's what I'm seeing. I'm looking at it from the outside, looking at. And the reason that I think Maga is starting to realize, you know, his cheese ain't fully on the cracker, if you know what I'm saying. Right. The cracker is there, the cheese is there, but they're not necessarily coming together in a snack. In one single snack. Is that Donald Trump can't seem to do the basics of presidenting now. He just actually can't do it. There's certain things that are basic. Even if you're the worst person in the world, if you're Richard Nixon or Andrew Johnson, when a tragedy happens, when a shooting happens, when a massacre happens, when something bad happens, you're supposed to be able to express just basic compassion. He couldn't do it when it came to Rob Reiner because he's mad that Rob Reiner is a popular, beloved Hollywood star, which he will never be and wants to be. That he's beloved, that people care for him, that people of all walks of life and political stripes love Rob Reiner and love his movies. Whereas Trump could never break into Hollywood. He always wanted to be a Hollywood star. People have been breaking up his little Hollywood walk of people like, you're an idiot. Nobody. You were like, you did some cameos in movies, bro. You're not a Hollywood star. And he's so jealous. But he also, he couldn't express compassion for him because also Rob Reiner was vocally against him. Vocally, very vocal on the Russia connections, which, sorry, the, the, the, the, you know, there's been a lot of reporting on it that's accurate that Russia did help him in 2016. He also can't do it in just a basic shooting. Not even a Charlie Kirk, but that's a basic one. So Brown University had this horrific massacre. Two people killed. One young Christian woman, one young Muslim immigrant. Young man, 19, I think, 20 years old. Young people killed. Now, you would think a president could come out and just say, you know, compassionate things. He can't do that. But then when he's asked why his FBI, that's that he's placed in the charge of a podcaster named Cash Patel. Why can't they seem to solve this crime? Here's what Donald Trump had to say about that.

Cash Patel (16:55)

They're going to capture.

Joy Reid (16:56)

Has Cash Patel told you why it's.

Robbie Jones (16:57)

Been so difficult for the FBI to.

Joy Reid (16:59)

Identify who the shooter is?

Cash Patel (17:01)

Well, it's always difficult. So far, we've done a very good job of doing it with Charlie, with, you know, the various times this has happened. They've done it in pretty much record time. But you really have to ask the school a little bit more about that because, you know, this was a school problem. They had their own guards, they had their own police, they had their own everything. But you'd have to ask that question really to the school, not to the FBI. We came in after the fact, and the FBI will do a good job. But they came in after the fact.

Joy Reid (17:35)

What? The FBI. Of course the FBI came in after the fact, you idiot. The shooting happened, the FBI wouldn't have been there already. Their job is to come in after the fact. That's literally what the FBI does. They come in after the shooting and they investigate the shooting. Right? Like, that's why people call in the FBI. Dude, do you not know that that's the FBI's job? And number two, I'm sorry, it's a Brown University problem. So you mean the campus police should have solved the cr. You want the Campbell's Police to do it? Okay, he thinks the campus police. Do you understand the campus police, sometimes they aren't even armed. I'm sorry, they don't investigate crimes. They, like, break up parties that go till 2am when there's a noise complaint. Campus police are. It's not their job to solve murders and mass shootings, Donald. You see, this is why MAGA is saying oh, that dude ain't all there. Let's show a video. Let's help Donald out and let's help Castell out. The Brown University or the. The police in Providence, Rhode island, they did this. They put out a picture of the shooter, an image video of the shooter.

Robbie Jones (18:35)

Sees a video from the building where this incident took place, 184 Hope Street. It's of who we believe is the suspect leaving that area, walking on Hope street and taking a right on Waterman.

Joy Reid (18:49)

Towards the, towards the water.

Robbie Jones (18:51)

He's going to be wearing dark clothing. You're not going to be able to see his face.

Joy Reid (18:56)

Okay, so we've got the street names. There you go. Donald, you can let Cash know that we know what streets he was on, we know what he was wearing. There's even a visual of him. And if you guys could just get Cash Patel's attention to try to solve this case because he seems to be busy doing other things. Cash Patel, instead of solving this murder of two young people inside of the United States of America in a prestigious college campus, here's what Cash Patel's been up to. He's going on crazy ass Katie Miller's. That's Stephen Miller's wackadoo wife's podcast because, you know, she's a podcaster. Now here's Kay, so excited to be joined by Cash and his beautiful girlfriend Alexis. So I just want to clarify, you're not Jewish? I'm not.

Marjorie Taylor Greene (19:40)

You are not from Israel?

Robbie Jones (19:43)

No.

Joy Reid (19:43)

So how did we get to. Are you a Mossad agent?

Marjorie Taylor Greene (19:46)

You know, that's a great question.

Joy Reid (19:47)

Where's her ring? Just to clarify, how often has he traveled to See you since January 20th? Is there been one moment where you're like, you can't make this up? What the helion say is, Jason, what is happening? Is it he needs to be working to try to figure out who killed.

John O'Brien (20:14)

Two people at Brown University.

Joy Reid (20:18)

What I don't understand is what does Cash Patel do all day? First of all, they claimed after suddenly, after five years of non action, that they solved the pipe bombing incident in D.C. but what they came up with was someone the family said is barely functional, right. That he essentially has to work alone in the family office where they do bail bonds. And the family says he's very autistic, but he somehow had a car and a intricate plan that for five years the FBI couldn't come up with. They came up with that, which is like, then they haven't said anything else about it. That's also not happening. And now can you Imagine J. Edgar Hoover going on, like, a funsy interview while he was FBI director. What does Cash Patel do all day? Damn thing. And he indicted some basketball players, saying they're the real Mafia. It's like, what are we doing here? He's not even doing that. Like, what. What is. What are we doing? Dude, you're on. And why is Katie Miller. Why does she do a podcast? Like, I know why I'm doing a podcast. What is she doing? She wants to be an influencer. Now she's decided she. It's not enough for her to sit back and cackle while immigrants, many of whom only a little darker than her, get tackled to the ground and dragged off to foreign countries. She wants to cackle about that while her husband does it. Defend that on cnn. Like, the Wicked Witch of the West. Not even the Wicked Witch of the West. The Wicked Witch of the West. Actually, you know, I kind of like the Wicked Witch of the west after watching what's the movie? We just went and watched it. I kind of like her now. It's not even Wicked Witch of the West. Forget that. She wants to, like, tackle about the, like, the witch Enhancer and Gretel. You remember that movie, Hustle and Gretel? Yeah, she's like the witch of Hansel and Gretel. She wants to do that, but then she also wants to, like, be an influencer. Like, what's happening? Wicked. Wicked for good. Wicked for good will make you really think the Wicked Witch of the west is so bad. So that's what's happening. That's what's happening there. So to bring me. I do all that to bring me to this Vanity Fair article, which I know all of you guys want to talk about, because this is one of the worst cases presidential cabinets in history. From top to bottom, they're either scrubs, incompetent, not qualified for their jobs, foolish, embarrassing, cruel. In the case of Stephen Miller, diabolical and very ironic. His family having been Jewish refugees, but he's giving 1930s Nazi. I don't know what his ideology is, but it definitely reads like he'd be, like, at home in Germany in the 1930s in a very ironic way. So that's the Cabinet. There they are, Vanity Fair. And here's what you never do. This is how you know that from top to bottom, they are incompetent idiots. Because I'll tell you what you don't do is give an on the record interview with a photo shoot to Vanity Fair before you even get through year one of your administration. And Susie Wiles, who is the chief of staff of the White House, did just that. And she told honey, that is the COVID where they all try to look cool. They all think they look really, really cool. So they did that cover. I want to read to you guys a little bit. This is paragraphs 4, 5, and 6. I mean, they do this interview, which to me I think is insane, that they actually did it. They should have never done it. If a decent chief of staff was in charge, they would not have done it because all they did was give away information that probably Trump didn't want given away. So here's paragraphs 4, 5, and 6. Most senior white House officials parse their words and speak only on background. But over many on the record conversations, Susie Wiles answered almost every question I put to her. And this is a gentleman. Mr. Whipple is his name. Let me get his name so I can give him credit. His name is Chris Whipple. Chris Whipple. We often spoke on Sundays after church. Wild, an Episcopalian, calls herself Catholic Light. One time we spoke while she was doing her laundry in her Washington D.C. rental. Trump, she told me, has an alcoholics personality. Personality. Vance's conversation from Never. Vance's conversion. Sorry, from Never Trumper to Maga acolyte, she said, has been sort of political. The Vice president, she added, has been a conspiracy theorist for a decade. Russell Vogt, as I mentioned earlier, architect of the notorious Project 2025 and head of the Office of Management and Budget, is a right wing, absolute zealot. This is a quote from Susie Wiles when I asked her what she thought of Elon Musk reposting a tweet about public sector workers killing millions under Hitler, Stalin and Mao. She replied, quote, I think that's when he's microdosing. She said she doesn't have firsthand knowledge that he's on ketamine. Wiles is the most powerful person in Trump's White House other than the President himself. Unlike any chief of staff before her, she's a woman. And let's do a six. This is the picture of Susie Wiles that she approved. She looked crazy as hell. Let's see the picture that Stephen Miller and apparently she had to look at this picture. They even made it black and white like he really is. From the 30s. That was approved. And they call him the zealot. The zealot Deputy Chief of staff who, by the way, reports to Susie Wiles. Let's look at the JD Vance picture. Also hilarious. They approved. Come on now. These people don't Want to win. These people don't want to win. They don't want to win. They don't want to be popular. They don't want to broaden their base beyond the cuckoos who are already in maga. Look at that picture. It looks like a close of a serial killer. A couch serial killer. Beware of your couches. She called him a conspiracy theorist. We're going to play a nine because she's right about that. By the way, Vance believes in all the conspiracies when it comes to, to things like white replacement and immigrants stealing, stealing the American dream. Here he is doing that as we've.

LifeLock Advertiser (26:07)

We're starting to get those illegal aliens out of the United States of America. Those criminals, those gang members, those people who are taking homes that ought by right go to the people in this room and your children and your grandchildren. It's simple economics. If you have fewer people, fewer legal aliens trying to buy homes, that means American citizens are going to finally be able to afford a home again. It's very, very simple economics.

Joy Reid (26:32)

It's very, very simple economics. You went to Yale, right, Bro, I went to Harvard. I'm not trying to be, you know, elitist and put Yale down, but let's do the simple economics. JD first of all, if you are an undocumented immigrant, how are you getting this house? Unless you are an undocumented immigrant who also has like $500,000 cash, you have to get a mortgage. Do you know what it requires to get a mortgage? You know what you have to give the bank to get a mortgage? Documents? You have to give them not just bank records, not just tax returns, multiple years tax returns. You have to give them a Social Security card and an id. So riddle me this genius, JD where are these undocumented immigrants getting all of these documents in order to get a mortgage? Because the fact that they're undocumented meets ipso. Facto. They don't have any of those things. They don't have a Social Security card. And you really do need that to get a mortgage. And unless these are undocumented immigrants who have $500,000 cash in the bank, those are the kind of immigrants Trump wants because he says if you pay him a million dollars, you can come in the country, so make it make sense. It's the same way that they try to say that all the undocumented people are voting. Riddle me, how are they doing that? Because in order to get your voter registration, you have to go into the DMV and they ask you for some things. They're going to ask you for some id. They're going to ask you for a Social Security card. What documents are you giving when by definition, you're undocumented? I'm going to say it into the undocumented means you don't have any documents. And without documents, you can't get a mortgage. Thank you, JD for coming to my TED Talk. And also, let's just say undocumented people were buying houses. Wouldn't that mean that home sellers were gaining money from the undocumented immigrants? Doesn't that mean they'd be boosting the economy? I mean, the only undocumented immigrants who, they're not really undocumented, Right, because they have documents, would be people on daca. And DACA people happen to have high levels of workforce participation and home ownership and business ownership. Not because they're undocumented and quote, unquote illegal. It's because they're legalized. So once daca legalized, some 700,000 people who are mostly millennials because they came here when they were like 2 years old, they've only known the United States. So they're. You want to talk about. Well, they're not really in, you know, they're not integrating into our, into our culture. Oh, no, they are totally assimilated because they grew up here. They've been here since they were like two. So they're totally Americanized. They have documents from President Obama, who gave them daca, which means that they do have a bank account, a Social Security card, meaning they're paying into Social Security, but they can't get Social Security, so. Meaning they're funding Social Security for senior citizens and they don't even get it back. So they're actually putting more into the economy than they can take out. They're paying payroll taxes to their employees. And when the home seller sells the home, that home seller puts a check in their bank. Do you understand the simple economics here, J.D. do you hear the words that are coming out of my mouth? Apparently not. But you know, J.D. vance, he believes what he's really saying is that these brown, these non white people buying homes ruins the American dream for people who look like him, but not people who look like his wife. Because people who look like his wife are the very people he's talking about. It's very ironic. Let's read a little bit more more from this article. This is from Susie Wiles again, by the way. And I learned this from the Vanity Fair article, which I am going to put in my sub stack, which I will, I promise you I would get out tonight so you guys can see it in the substack, you know. She's the daughter of Pat Summerall. You guys remember Pat Summerall. He was an NFL player who then became the commentator she used to be. Summerall, Susie Summerall, so she says. So at her father's knee. This is in the article. Susie Summerall became a football aficionado, rattling off win loss records and player stats like a miniature John Madden, an ability she said Trump shares. The president, it turns out, is a junkie of that and is a statistical savant, she said. He probably just has dementia and these are the things he loves, so he remembers them. But anyway, moving on. And I remember a lot of it. As a child, Susie also absorbed the zeitgeist of her father's 1970s Manhattan. Much of what Donald Trump remembers about the New York of the 70s I lived through with my dad, she said. So when he talks about Frank Sinatra's bodyguard, I know that name. Steve Witkoff, Trump's real estate friend turned special envoy, says Wiles and Trump are creatures of that same bygone era. That whole world of the Copacabana and Sammy Davis Jr. And all those are the things that he wants to talk about. The most valuable gift Susie got from her dad was hard earned. Summerall was an absentee father and an alcoholic, and Wiles helped her mother stage interventions to get him into treatment. Summerall was sober for 21 years before his death in 2013. Alcoholism does bad things to relationships, and so it was with my dad and me, wild said. Some clinical psychologist that knows 1 million times more than I do will dispute what I'm going to say, she said. But high functioning alcoholics or alcoholics in general, their personalities are exaggerated when they drink, and so I'm a little bit of an expert on big personalities, wiles said. She said Trump has an alcoholic's personality. He operates with a view that there's nothing he can't do. Nothing. Zero, nothing. So she calls Donald Trump an alcoholic personality like her father. She says that, and she says this is very clear to me that Donald Trump is still living in the 70s, 80s, that Frank Sinatra era, and is constantly talking about it. She's actually kind of signaling his dementia because he goes back to constantly places where in his mind he feels safe. He feels safe talking about the good days, the 70s 80s, when a man could be a man could slap a woman on the ass and he could call a woman piggy and get away with it. All those things, these tropes about Trump, it's the same way that he feels comforted by his belief that he's convinced himself that he won the 2020 election. Or when he talks about the 2016 life, these are comfort places for him. Right? She's kind of admitting that Susie Summerall got her first taste of politics and going back to the article in the late 1970s, interning as a college student in the Capitol Hill office of Jack Kemp, the New York congressman who'd been a giant with her father, New York giant. Then at 23, she landed a job in the Reagan White House as a scheduler, where she watched his chief of staff, Baker, in action. She married a GOP advanced man, Lanny Wiles, and in 1984 moved to Ponte Verde, Florida. So basically she talks about she wanted to be outside of politics, but she winds up in 1988 getting lured into politics to work for dan Quayle, George H.W. bush's running mate. The couple had two daughters, Katie and Caroline. Wiles plunged into state politics and over the next two decades became a formidable public political strategist, serving as chief of staff to the mayor of Jacksonville, Florida, running Rick Scott's gubernatorial campaign back when he was running to try to run away from his history of his company having committed Medicaid, Medicare fraud. That's me adding that and briefly running John Huntsman's campaign for president. So you can see she's a normal Normie, Jack Kemp, George W. Bush, Rick Scott type Republican. In 2015, she's invited to Trump Tower to meet with the real estate tycoon turned presidential candidate who the star of the Apprentice couldn't believe he was talking to the daughter of the great Pat Summerall. He said it a million times, wild said. I judge people by their genes. That's some 1930s stuff. Weil thought Trump was interesting and smart, and they called me one night and said, we're serious about Florida now. Would you like to co chair our leadership team? And I said, yeah, I would. I'd become disenchanted with what we now call traditional Republicans, she recalled. So she talks about the fact that she gets disenchanted with normal Republicans, like the ones she worked for, and decides to go with this guy because he's sort of a new thing for her. Wild's relationship with Trump almost ended at his Miami golf club one night in the fall of 2016. Unhappy with a poll showing him doing worse than expected in Florida, Trump berated her in front of a gaggle of cronies. It was a horrific hour. Plus at midnight, Wallace told me And I don't think I've seen him that angry since. He was ranting and raving, and I didn't know whether to argue back or whether to be stoic. What I really wanted to do was cry. Wiles steeled herself. I finally said, you know, Mr. Trump, if you want somebody to set their hair on fire and be crazy, I'm not your girl. But if you want to win this state, I am. It's your choice. Wiles walked out. Trump turned on a dime. Lo and behold, he called me every day. Wiles never looked back. Trump carried Florida the first big prize of his stunning 2016 upset over Hillary Clinton. What have we learned here? And what is the media to learn from this? When she got berated by him because she had an alcoholic father and had experience dealing with the abusive personalities of alcoholics and recognized that personality in Donald Trump, she was stoic and didn't say anything when he did to her what he does to female members of the press. But then she did something important. She turned around and walked the fuck out and basically made it clear, you're not going to talk to me that way. And he responded to strength. The reason he pursued her was two reasons. He was impressed with her father, because he's somebody that he admired in the 70s and 80s. So to him, she had the right genes. Number two, even though she's a woman, he respected her because she was strong and pushed back on him. That, by the way, is why he liked Omarosa Manigault, because she was just him but a girl. You see what I'm saying? So there is so much more tea in here. I don't have time to read it all. I'm definitely going to put it in, in. In the substack. But some of the other just truncating it, she calls musk a ketamine, using Nosferatu. She refers to him as Nosferatu and not Stephen Miller, who's much more Nosferatu. Like, to me, she says that no rational person could think the USAID process of shutting that down was a good one. Nobody. She, Ruby on the piece, comes off like a complete douchebag, just unconcerned about how many people were going to die without Pepfar. He comes across coward. He comes across. When even George W. Bush, who comes across very cowardly in the article, calls Rubio, because, remember, Rubio is literally the mentee of George W. Bush's big brother, Jeb. Rubio was like his mentee. Jeb Bush brought him along in politics. So George W. Bush calls his brother's former mentee, who basically turned on Jeb when he wanted to run for when they both want to run for president and says, you can't get rid of pepfar. This is important to me. But he says he won't go public because he's a coward, George W. Bush, but he's gonna push back behind the scenes. And Rubio says, nah, forget it, I don't care. And Rubio says it doesn't matter and he's standing by destroying it and saying they're making it better and he doesn't care. So the writer, Mr. Whipple, went and spoke with another former White House chief of staff. That person responded to what Rubio said. I find that immoral. Immoral. So they go on to talk about all the people in the Cabinet. Kash Patel, Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, John Radcliffe, the CIA director, the CIA director, and all the people, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Who were brought together in many cases by Susie Wiles. She claims that these people are great. She calls them a world class cabinet, better than anything I could have conceived of. And then the writer says Trump's cabinet members are either one of the least qualified presidential teams in history or, to hear Wiles tell it, disruptors, the only people with the balls to take on the entrenched deep state. She refers to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. As my Bobby and quirky Bobby, like this shit is just crazy. It just goes on and on and on about the ICE raids. She says if somebody is a known gang member who has a criminal past and you're sure and you can demonstrate it, it's probably fine to send them to El Salvador or whatever Wild says. But if that's a quote, but if there's a question, I think our process has to lean toward a double check. But as the USA.gov site itself notes, in some cases a non citizen is subject to expedited removal without being able to attend a hearing in an immigration court. Not long after the El Salvador deportation Fiasco In Louisiana, ICE agents arrested and deported two mothers along with their children, ages 74 and 2, to Honduras. The children were U.S. citizens, and the 4 year old was being treated for stage 4 cancer. Wiles couldn't explain it. She says it could have been an overzealous Border Patrol. I don't know. This is the woman who claims to be a woman of God. On people who are being arrested after voluntarily attending their routine immigration meeting. She says, I can't understand how you make that mistake, but somebody did. When she's asked, will the president use the military to suppress or even prevent voting during the midterms and beyond, she says, I say it's categorically false. Will not happen. It's just wrongheaded. She snapped. Do you understand where people who think that's coming from? I asked. This is a reporter, she says, I do a little bit, but not fully. I mean, I think they hate the president. They think he's too wrapped up in what happened in 2020. You think, can we just show this picture of how she must feel after this whole thing was published? She's probably like, why'd I do that interview? One other quick video before we get to it. We have a guest coming on. Jack Smith was on Capitol Hill today. He did a closed door meeting with House Judiciary Republicans. It did not go as planned. I want you guys to look at my, my future Attorney General. This is my choice for Attorney General. If Democrats ever get back at the White House. Here he is arriving on Capitol Hill. This is a. Here. Jack trying to heckle Jack Smith. That's not smart. Let me read you what his opening statement was. Reportedly, this was his opening statement because Jack Smith is Jack Smith. You saw a mean mug he walked in with. That's who he is. Our investigation, he says, developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power. Our investigation also developed powerful evidence that showed President Trump willfully retained highly classified documents after he left office in January 2021, storing them at his social club, including in a bathroom and a ballroom where events and gatherings took place. He then repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents. Do not mess with my future Attorney General of the United States. Last thing I'm going to show you before we go and take a quick ad read here. We're going to give big up our sponsors. Have y' all seen this video? This awkward video of Donald Trump from the video I showed you earlier? Let's just show it. You can, you can play it real quick there, Jason. Y' all see this? This is from the same press conference where he eventually says that the Brown University leadership was responsible. What the hell? It goes on and on and on. I'm gonna post it later. It is hilarious. He literally was super awkward. This is, it's actually one of my favorite pieces of video because I love seeing him suffer and be awkward because people are Like, I don't want to stand in that dude, his diapers full. I think he messed himself, and I don't want to stand next to him. And then after a while, he sits down and just starts, like, writing weird stuff, like he's trying to figure out how to look busy. Anyway. The Joy Reid show tonight is brought to you by MSI United States. Now, you know, it's been a tough year, y'.

Robbie Jones (42:35)

All.

Joy Reid (42:35)

We're almost to the end of it. Not just for politics, but also for democracy and also for so many of the things that make life better for human beings, especially women and girls. Around the world, international aid has taken, as we just noted, some serious, serious hits. Programs are disappearing, organizations shutting down, and the limited options that women had in so many countries are shrinking even more. But here's something that you don't hear enough good news about. Msi Reproductive choices is still standing. The lights are on, the doors are open, and women are still getting the care they need. MSI provides contraception, safe abortions, and essential reproductive health care, often in communities where they are the only provider. After the first Trump administration, MSI made a strategic decision. They diversified their funding so that they wouldn't be dependent on US Government aid. That was smart. But even with that planning, they still lost $15 million. So how are they still operating? Well, because of people like you. People who believe that women deserve choices, people who believe that health care is a right, not a privilege. People who understand that when women have control of their bodies, they have control of their futures. Because of donors, millions of women still have access to care and to hope. So here's where you can help keep that going. To give, just text, read Reid to 511511 or visit MSI United States.org that is M for Modern, S for Safe, I for Informed. MSI United States.org or just text my surname, Joy or Reid. Sorry, Reid. That's Reid to 511-511. Text Reid to 511-511 or go to msiunitedstates.org for just $65, you can provide contraception for 10 women for a full entire year. Let's keep those lights on and those choices alive. Text fees may apply. All right, let's go. I'm going to shimmy forward here to see because we are. We're going to come back and talk about this stuff that's going on at Harvard right now. But I want to play for you. This is C1. These are two politicians that you've probably heard of and seen James Talarico and Jasmine Crockett talking about one single guy and his name is Paxton there.

LifeLock Advertiser (44:40)

John Cornyn. Nor can Paxton deserve the honor of representing this great state in our nation's capital. Both of them, both of them are more interested in serving their billionaire donors than serving the people of Texas. Both of them have sold us out time and time again. Ken Paxton's crimes are well known. I was part of the bipartisan majority in the Texas House that impeached our corrupt attorney general. But I think John Cornyn may be even more corrupt than Ken Paxton. Because John Cornyn was the deciding vote on that big ugly bill, kicking millions of Texans off their health care, taking food out of the mouths of hungry Texas children, all to give another tax break to his donors. We oftentimes think of corruption as something that's illegal. But corruption is really just the betrayal of the public's trust. It is the abuse of your public office. By casting the deciding vote on that big, ugly bill, John Cornyn committed an act of corruption of the highest order. And it is why he has forfeited the right to represent our state in our nation's capital.

Jalanda Jones (46:14)

Ken Paxton is MAGA through and through. We're talking about someone who had been under felony indictment in the state of Texas for almost a decade. In fact, he was indicted before the felon in the White House was indicted. We're talking about someone who had been under federal investigation. We're talking about someone who was impeached by his own party and then was not convicted as his wife sat in the jury on the Senate side. And now she has said, I want to divorce you. And she's stating that it's biblical reasons. And I guess it had nothing to do with that fake Uber account that he had when he was going to see his mistress that was a part of his impeachment trial. Let me tell you, there is drama on top of drama and there definitely are no family values whatsoever to be found. And now we know that this same attorney general has decided that he wants to threaten these lawmakers cuz they are the real criminals in the state of Texas. Not the guy who should be behind bars, but the lawmakers who have decided that in a majority, minority state that they should have districts that are reflective of the people so that they can actually be in alignment with our Constitution. Because that's exactly what the 15th amendment was about.

Joy Reid (47:27)

Joining me now to talk all things Texas is friend of the show, my hair twin and my friend, Jalanda Jones, State Representative Jalanda Jones of the great state Of Texas. Hey, hair twin. Oh, you're muted. We gotta unmute you. Hold on. We gonna unmute. There we go. Boom.

Jalanda Jones (47:43)

Hey, hair twin.

Joy Reid (47:44)

How great. Wonderful. So talk to me about the great state of Texas. There are a lot of races. That is just one of the races. That's the race of the United States Senate. But there are House races, there are local races, There are the redistricted races that you previewed for us and that are now going to stand for 20, 26. Where do we stand in the great state of Texas? Start with Senate and work your way down.

Jalanda Jones (48:06)

So in the Senate, I mean, there are a number of people who file for Senate, but the two most high profile Democrats are Jasmine and James. I didn't really serve with Jasmine. We crossed each other like ships in the night. But I did serve with James. And I was a part of the Democrats who voted to impeach Paxton in the House and the Senate freed him. So I know them both. Hey, I wish I were in your city too. But in any case, that's not the point. The point is this. I think it's an interesting race. We do live in Texas. Only 11% of our population are black in Texas. So the question is, can the 11% carry jasmine across the state? Talarico got in the race super early. Jasmine waited until the last day, and he'd gotten most of the endorsements that where they were given endorsements. So we're just gonna see because I'm in Texas. And so Texas hasn't had a statewide Democrat in over 20 years. And when we live in Houston like I do and we live in Dallas, we get fooled because we see black people who look like us and we think, oh, it's black people everywhere. There are whole portions of the state that have that one black person. So that therein lies the question. And so because Taller Rico got some early endorsements, the question is, are those people going to take their endorsements back? Are they going to switch to Jasmine? I just think it's difficult. There's another race going on in the primaries. I'm running for reelection as a state representative. Thank you, Jesus. And I expect I'm gonna work hard so that I win, because I think people appreciated that I fled the state and ran from the FBI and did not go back to give them the quorum they needed to pass those racist maps. Some of my colleagues did go back, which is why they passed. And now. So then we'll get to the special election for the runoff for Texas 18.

Joy Reid (50:01)

Wait, before you get to that, you mentioned the FBI. I don't know. We were talking about Cash Patel earlier. I'm not sure he could have been able to find y'. All. And y' all were on TV. Some of you. This FBI's a mess.

Jalanda Jones (50:11)

Let me tell you something. We were on tv, okay?

Joy Reid (50:16)

We.

Jalanda Jones (50:17)

People knew where we were. Like regular people were finding us, right? We literally. We literally left three times because people was trying to make citizens arrest. So everybody found us. But Casper tell.

Joy Reid (50:27)

Yeah.

Jalanda Jones (50:28)

So what does that tell you in any case? I mean, if it weren't so serious, the shit would be funny.

Joy Reid (50:33)

It would. It really was.

Jalanda Jones (50:34)

Because he's like. He's like a straight joke.

Joy Reid (50:37)

Well, I mean, and also, you know what? He's busy doing podcasts and things with his girlfriend who wants to be a country star, and he's flying around private to go and visit her. It's a mess. But let's get back to Texas. So. Yes. So 18. We talked about this before. That race is also going to be a food fight. It is a runoff. Right? This is the runoff for 18. How's that going to shake out?

Jalanda Jones (51:00)

So, as you know, I was running from the police, and I got in that race five months and 18 days after our congressperson died. It was too much to overcome. However, I did get almost 15,000 votes, which was almost 20% of the vote. So I came in third place. So there are two people in the runoff, Christian mine and Amanda Edwards. Yesterday I endorsed in the race and I. I endorsed Amanda Edwards. And let me tell you why, okay? I endorsed Amanda because so many people who supported me literally said, you didn't make it to the runoff. So I'm not voting. I. And I said to my supporters, that's unacceptable. That's basically what happened with Trump and Kamala. People like, he ain't perfect, she ain't perfect, so I ain't voting. And look what it got us. And I had constituents of mine who were like, well, I voted for you. I really don't like either one of them. Who are you voting for? I'm a trust you. And so what I didn't want to have happen in a special election runoff was for the people who voted for me to make a wag a wild ass guess or just not vote, because not voting is unacceptable. And so here's what's interesting. For the two and a half months that I was able to run in this race, that was eight months for other people. I learned a lot about the people. You know, we went to, we were constantly going to events. We. We Saw each other's campaigns. We learned people's temperaments. And although I didn't know Christian or Amanda really before the race, because I knew he was a county attorney, I knew she was a former council member, I didn't know them, but I got to know them during our campaigns. And I can tell you, I have very strong feelings that Amanda Edwards needs to be the next congressperson for the special election for Texas 18. And that person, whoever wins, which I hope it's Amanda, will have to clash with Congressman Al Green, which everybody knows. He's the cane shaker, right? So who knows? Maybe God was saving me from that inevitable clash because of the racist, racially gerrymandered maps. But Amanda has a temperament. She, like. I. She, like, refuses to accept no for an answer. So if you're at a no, she gonna work to try to get you to a yes. She doesn't whine about things. And even when people were criticizing her and me, you know, for women, things like why she wear heels so much and stuff like that, she should do this. She just kept trudging and trudging and trudging and trudging and trudging. And.

Joy Reid (53:45)

And.

Jalanda Jones (53:46)

And obviously, I mean, Christian didn't beat her by that much, but. But math wise, enjoy. You and I both are cerebral. You know, we. We both worry about numbers, and we talked about that. That's why America learned about the racist gerrymandering. Here's the deal. In a legitimate poll, and one of these days, I'd like to do a segment with you on a legitimate poll versus an illegitimate poll. But in a legitimate poll where the underlying data was actually released, they asked my voters, who picked me, if Jolanda is not in the runoff, who are you going to vote for? And I actually. And I want to make sure I pull up. 47% of people who voted for me said that if I'm not in the race, they're voting for Amanda. That's what they said. And only 9% of them said they're voting for Christian. What that translates into. So let me just tell you, in the race, the one that just happened, I actually. So Christian got 22,022 votes. Amanda got 19,467 votes. I got 14,549 votes. If we take that legitimate poll that says Amanda gets 47, Christian gets 9, then that means the 47% for Amanda is 6800 votes. The 9% for Christian is 1300 votes, and Amanda ends up winning by 3000 votes at the end of the day. All the criticisms I heard about Amanda were misogynistic. And the truth is they were also colorism. Right. She's light skinned. I heard stuff like, oh, she's so light, she don't know she black. That's offensive. You don't pick what color you, you know, you come out right. Why she wearing heels? Why she not wearing tennis shoes if she campaigned in heels? And I, and I campaigned in tennis shoes. I mean, you know, that's stylistic. It doesn't disqualify you. And so when I, when I weighed what I saw for the two and a half months that I ran with both of them, I have very strong opinions. And so that is why I endorsed Amanda. But also the math says that Amanda's gonna win. And something else that was very interesting, during the course of the race, whenever negative news came out about Menifee, for example, the very next day, he would say he took some poll and would never release the underlying poll. He would say the poll say I'm winning, which he did. It was very predictable. Everybody who did a legitimate poll released their polls. And so yesterday, after I endorsed Amanda today, there's a poll released that says he's a double digit win. I don't believe that. Right. So I just think that you, I want somebody. Trump. You just did a whole segment on Trump looking all awkward and stuff, his diaper overflowing, and Trump gonna say something stupid to somebody. Right? And if you're, and if you're a Democrat, he gonna get in your head. And I need somebody who, no matter what they say to get in your head. You don't let it stay in your head that you fight through it and you figure out how to get up or. And recover. And I just believe of the two, I just believe that Amanda is tougher. And so again, people think that if we are smart, like women are smart, we got to look away. Well, there are some smart women who wear heels and pumps all the time. That doesn't mean they're not smart. And so I'm trusting that black woman for the runoff election in the special on January 31st. So my endorsement is only for that because I know Congressman Green.

Joy Reid (57:33)

Right.

Jalanda Jones (57:34)

And. Right.

Joy Reid (57:34)

And, and we love Green on this.

Jalanda Jones (57:37)

I mean, I know Congressman Green, he endorsed me for this race, so I'm not getting in that race. But for the, for the time left because our, our CD18 has been vacant for far too long. I pick Amanda Edwards because I think she has the temperament and the grit and she never gives up and she doesn't whine And I want. And the truth is we all know black women are the most educated. We do the best in corporate America. We know all these things, even though people don't pay attention to it. And I think that at this moment in time, Amanda is a person that we need in Texas 18. And that's why I endorsed her. Plus, the math says she's going to win.

Joy Reid (58:15)

All right, well, there we have it. State Representative Jalanda Jones giving her endorsement in the race. And this is the pre race before the. Whoever wins that race has to turn around. It's a whole mess. And face Representative Al Green, who we.

Jalanda Jones (58:29)

And I live there. Yeah, I live there. Other people that are endorsing. Right, they don't live there. And apart from that, I got almost 20% of the vote, almost 15,000 votes. So there you have it.

Joy Reid (58:42)

And there you have it. All right, my friend, State Representative Jelanda Jones, you're going to come back and we're going to do some math stuff. We'll just do some nerdy math stuff. We'll do a nerd.

Jalanda Jones (58:48)

Let's do nerd. Yeah. Ner. Nerds of the world. Black nerd women. Women of the world, unite.

Joy Reid (58:53)

It'll be a blurred segment. We're going to do. We're going to do some blurting. State Representative J. Jones, thank you very much. Appreciate you, sis. Thank you.

Jalanda Jones (59:00)

Absolutely. Thank you.

Joy Reid (59:01)

Thank you very much. All right, well, you've heard it there. The most important thing, of course, is that everybody needs to vote. And as you can see, you heard those numbers. Excuse me. We're talking about 15,000 votes. Sorry, 22,000 votes, 19,000 votes. These aren't like 100,000 votes, right? I mean, you can literally win a congressional seat with, you know, 25, 29,000 votes. And so it really does make you realize every vote really, literally counts. Coming up in our next hour, we are, I'm very excited about this. We are going to dig deep into these questions of white Christian nationalism that is coming up very, very, very soon. But before we do that, I, I want to say something very quickly. This is B2. Jason, I don't know if you can grab, go back and grab B2. There's, there's a guy called John O' Brien who I have a really great deal of respect for. He is a financial literacy expert, but he had a take on what we should be doing. And this is important in this season. I just want to play this for you real quick. I have a little comment on it. Here he is.

John O'Brien (60:03)

We just protesting some and boycotting some store. Don't just boycott them, buy them out. Find every black product on their shelf. Coordinate that. Go coordinate a three hour buyout. Buy out everything they've got. Then send a letter. We become more. We need to become more sophisticated in our approaches. Send a letter to the CEO, the chief financial officer, the chief buyer, right? And the, and the lead director on the board. We just bought out all your products that are black manufactured. Please reorder and let us know when you reorder. We'll be back. Now you got respect. Now they say, oh my God, okay, this is an emerging market. It's not black people. This is green. It's always been. Brandon has always been green.

Joy Reid (60:48)

You know, like I said, I respect Donald Bryan, but yet what? First of all, when has it ever been away to move corporate America by giving them more money? What you're basically saying there, Mr. John O', Brien, is that the way to get Target, for instance, to stop disrespecting black people is to go into Target and buy more stuff and give them more money. That's like literally the opposite of what Dr. King was saying in Memphis at the time that he died. You're saying if you give them more money, suddenly they'll respect you because you gave them more money and bought more stuff in their store. And they're going to somehow discern that because you went to the aisle and bought stuff made by black people. And they have to restock that. That's going to make them respect you. I don't. That math ain't mathing for me, sir. That math ain't mathing for me. Because if that is the case, then how come the answer to ending apartheid in South Africa was not for everyone in the world to visit South Africa and patronize black people who were selling on the streets of the townships. Why wasn't the answer to ending South African apartheid spending more money in South Africa? Why did every country except Israel and the United States divest from South Africa, stop spending money in South Africa, pull their money out of South Africa and that ended up breaking apartheid, did it not? Because by your logic, what we should have done, the world should have just spent more money in South Africa and then they would respect all of the people who were rewarding them for apartheid. You see how that doesn't work? BDS when it comes to Israel is about saying to Israel, we're not going to spend money with you because you're just going to use the money we're giving you to do more apartheid and more genocide. So no we're not going to give you any money. So if we know that a company is based in the occupied West Bank, Sodastream or other companies like that, we're just not going to buy that. And then what you learn from that is you can't get our money if you're doing things that offend us morally. So what you're saying, sir, is that we should give more money to the companies who are literally disrespecting us by saying they don't want our presence, they don't want diversity anymore, so we're going to now train them to treat us better by giving them more money. That doesn't make any sense. I just had to throw that in there. That doesn't even make any sense. Now what you could do, and I wish that what he had said, as we said, nope, that's just their marketing. Buy directly from black owned companies. Boom. That is it. The person who just put that up, buy from black owned business. The way that you can teach Target to treat you differently is to say everything that I could have bought at Target, I'm going to buy@shopredbag.com everything that I would have bought at Target, I'm going to go on blab and buy from directly from black owned businesses and I will do my diversity shopping. But you don't get to be the middleman in my diversity shopping. Target, you gets nothing. The answer that you get is nothing. You get zero. Nothing. No traffic, none of my money. Why am I giving you my money in order to pay some black retailer? Why can't I just go to them? That doesn't make any sense. Let's let you all know now. And I'm really excited about this hour. This hour of the Joy Reid show is brought to you by the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Now, I want to talk to y' all about freedom for just a moment. Not the performative kind of freedom that you see in the headlines, but the real, actual foundational freedom that's laid out in our Constitution. Because as we close out this very interesting year, interesting not necessarily in a good way. It is worth remembering that today, that this week we have just celebrated on December 15, Bill of Rights Day. And the first right listed in the Bill of Rights is the freedom of religion. And just importantly, the freedom from religion being imposed on you by the government. Now, I don't need to tell you that right now. I'm going to tell you anyway. Christian nationalism and white Christian nationalism specifically is not just knocking on the door. It is already walking the halls of power. And it's not just a threat to non believers, it's actually a threat to democracy. Period. And yes, even to Christians. Because once one warped form of your faith becomes weaponized against everyone else, it twists your faith and will eventually reverberate on you too. So it's a threat to everyone, including Christians. That's why the Freedom from Religion foundation really matters. Since 1978, FFRF has been fortifying the wall between church and state, standing up for everyone, whether they are religious or not, everyone who believes that government has no business pushing theology. And as this year ends right around winter solstice, a time for reflection and resilience, I just want you to think about what kind of country that you want to live in. Now. If you're ready to stand up for real constitutional freedom, for equality, for public schools that teach facts instead of faith, join ffrf. Support their legal work. Support their voice, Support their fight for reason. These aren't holiday stuffing stocking stuffers. They're tools for resistance. So if you would like to participate and have some of this wonderful freedom Merch, go to FFRF US Winter 25 or just text JOY to 511511 and take advantage before the year ends. If you text JOY to 511-511 or go to FFRF US Winter 25 or text JOY to 511511, you can get a cute little discount and get yourself some wonderful freedom merch. Because freedom does not defend itself, y'. All. The Constitution doesn't enforce itself, and message and data rates may apply. Okay, let me announce to you as I say that that ICE is at it again, doing their worstest. Take a look. ICE broke the this person's window to harass us. And this is all taking place while the regime is spazzing out over undocumented people. You guys have to peep this headline. ICE used undocumented Kenyan workers at the processing center where they were processing white South Africans to come into the United States. You cannot make this stuff up. ICE itself, or the United States government, I should say. Let me read this story from the BBC. Jason just put up the headline. South Africa has accused the US of using Kenyan nationals who did not have work permits at a facility processing applications by white South Africans for refugee status. Seven Kenyans were arrested after intelligence reports revealed that people had recently entered South Africa on tourist visas and had illegally taken up work at the center, according to a statement from South Africa's Department of Home Affairs. The BBC has approached the US State Department for comment. While the US is trying to reduce overall levels of migration. It says that members of South Africa's white Africana community can get asylum because they supposedly face persecution, a claim South Africa's government strongly rejects. The US has reduced its yearly intake of refugees from around the world from 125,000 to just 7,500, but says it will prioritize Afrikaners, who are mostly descendants of Dutch and French settlers. So Afrikaners can come in, non white immigrants cannot. They've expanded that to something like 49 countries. No African nation, no one from any African nation. Palestinians also manned and Palestinians being banned is very interesting, right? Very interesting. Let's look at D3. This is a story that came out last week about a very interesting crutch display that are. That is sort of popping up around the country. Jesus lies in a snowy manger outside a church near Chicago, wrapped in a silver emergency blanket, his wrists bound with zip ties.

Jalanda Jones (68:51)

Mary stands nearby in a gas mask.

Joy Reid (68:53)

Blanked by figures dressed as eyesight officers. We are here today because of our nativity scene. What would it be like if Jesus were born today in Chicagoland? And that's why our baby Jesus has on zip ties. Similar reimagined nativity scenes have appeared near immigration detention centers and as far away as Massachusetts, where a Christ child was replaced with a sign reading quote, ICE was here. Supporters say the displays reflect the fear many congregations live with daily. The scenes have drawn both praise and outrage. I think either they don't fully understand the message, or maybe they find it really challenging to their conscience. I hope that everyone who's upset to see a doll with a zip tie.

Marjorie Taylor Greene (69:30)

On its hands, they're even more upset.

Joy Reid (69:32)

To see that happening to the real children of God living in the world today. I have no doubt in my mind that ICE and the people who support MAGA and ICE would literally deport Baby Jesus because he's a brown Palestinian refugee. And they hate that, and they hate it a lot. And this country is now run by their ideology, which is housed in something called Project 2025 and which comprises directly white Christian nationalism. So coming up on this show every third Wednesday of the month, we are going to push back on the people who would deport Jesus, that would deport baby Jesus, historical Jesus, since we're sponsored by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Even if you just believe in historical Jesus, the idea that a refugee from Palestine would ever be allowed to be in this country, that is throwing pregnant women on the ground and dragging them across the ICE just for performative cruelty, that is MAGA and then they go to church on Sunday and sing Our God is an awesome God because they're complete hypocrites. They are white Christian nationalists and the Christian has an asterisk on it. So here, this is going to be my partner in this project which we're going to do every third Wednesday of every month until we beat back Project 2025. And we will beat it back is Robert Robbie Jones, the founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, their chief demographer and my friend Robby. Thanks for being here.

Robbie Jones (70:59)

Oh, so glad to be here. Wish you could be under better circumstances, but this is important work.

Joy Reid (71:04)

It's important work. And look, it's like if it's bad news, we unfortunately have to talk about it, right? And, and I wish that we could just sit around and just drink hot cocoa and talk about the holiday season just one time. But we're going to hope that that happens. We're going to believe on God that it's going to happen eventually. But let's talk about these people because you have done the data that really does back up with data my claim that people who believe most strongly in Maga and in Donald Trump and who are white Christians, they really would deport Jesus. Right. Does your data back up my claim?

Robbie Jones (71:39)

You know, I, I wrote a piece, I was glad you showed the manger scenes. I mean, I wrote a piece this week on, on my subsec newsletter. You know, why Too long. That that was just ice and empty mangers, you know. And what I was looking at there is, is absolutely the data that, that shows this link between white Christian nationalism, all kinds of anti immigrant attitude, denials of structural racism, you know, and just denials of history in general. And I'll say this too, that you know, we have the data on this, but we also should just remember that this idea is very, very old in the country. In fact, it came to this, these lands with Europeans, Christians, when they landed on these shores. And so if we want to unpack it, I think first just remember it's just this concept really. It's simply put that these lands were intended to be a kind of divinely ordained promised land for European Christians. That's the claim. Now when you say it like that, it sounds sort of audacious, you know, but it's not. You scratch the surface and it's right there. I mean, you gave the story about the Afrikaners. I mean, that's the story there too, right? I mean, these are Dutch, European Christians that came into, in this case like African lands, right. And were the oppressors there. And it's notable that like one of the groups pushing back on that actually is. Is a Christian group too, the Episcopal Church pushing back on that. On that as well. So there are some forces doing it.

Jalanda Jones (73:06)

But.

Robbie Jones (73:06)

But this idea that these lands were intended by God to be only for, of and by white Christians, that's the Christian nationalist claim. And what we find in the country is that it's about 3 in 10Americans that share that view. Right. So we have a lot of political science data measuring this that looks at things like agreement with questions like the US should be based on Christian values, our US Law should be based on Christian values, the US should declare itself a Christian nation. And we have five different questions that we use. It turns out if you agree with all five of those questions, about 3 in 10Americans do. But that means about twice as many Americans disagree with that worldview. And so that's the world we find ourselves in. Yes, we're polarized, but we're not evenly polarized here. It's just that that one group has seized the levers of power because there's two groups that are a majority supporting that worldview. One of them are Republicans and the other one are white evangelical Protestants who. Two thirds of that group support that worldview.

Joy Reid (74:09)

And by the way, that notion that God has promised this one specific ethnic ethno religious group the land, that's also the basis for the ultra right in Israel, if we're being honest. Right. The refugees from Europe who came over there also believe that God said we could have this. And therefore the people who were there, the Palestinians don't belong here. We belong here. They need to leave. And that even sort of sets aside the Jewish people who were already there who never said that they just lived with the Palestinians and they were okay. And all of a sudden these new people came and said, no, no, no, no, those people got to go. God said we could have this. It's that way everywhere. Everywhere that Europeans have gone around the world. They said it in South America, they said it in the Caribbean, and they definitely said it in South Africa and the United States. And that white Christian nationalism is even what's used by Bibi Netanyahu to prop up his regime. He doesn't speak about the Torah, he speaks about the Bible and he speaks in white Christian nationalist terms in order to get the Ted Cruz's in this country to support him. So I just wanted to throw that in because this is like an international project.

Robbie Jones (75:17)

No, I think that's right. It's A very, like a very old story, a very old trope. And, and you know, in the U.S. i mean, it's very interesting that, I mean, the very idea of manifest destiny, for example. Right. I mean, that idea. So if you think about manifest, what does that mean? Well, it just means it's plain. Right. And destiny means it's divine providence. Like so the plain divine providence evident to everyone, evidently, right, is that, yeah, European Christians were here to claim this land and that land and those lands all over the colonial project. And it is the very thing that sets up, you know, the, the justification for Native American genocide, the justification for the African slave trade. It's all wrapped up in this story and it is still with us today. This, we are still fighting this, this story as we have been from the founding of the country.

Joy Reid (76:06)

And, and what percentage? Because there is a, as you said, it's a relatively small group of people who believe that if you believe the whole blue plate special, that means you believe that black people, Asian Americans, even indigenous people are only here by the grace of white Christians, that white Christians are on top. And everyone else who's here is here with their permission. And the moment they withdraw their permission, you have to leave. Which is why these so called Christians enjoy watching the cruelty of deportations. They want to see these people suffer because they believe they've defied white Christians by coming here without their permission. Right. They don't care how much you hurt them. What percentage of people are down with that?

Robbie Jones (76:47)

Yeah, I mean, so, you know, when we look at the, the vast majority of Americans still, you know, favor humane, pragmatic approaches. Right. So, for example, even with immigration becoming the kind of, you know, political, you know, kind of hammer on the right, we still have more than 6 in 10Americans supporting a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who are here, even here illegally, that most Americans say, like, don't, aren't for deportation. They're actually for a kind of orderly process. Provided they meet certain requirements, we should provide a way for them to become citizens. And that, that has been extraordinarily stable over the last couple of decades. We've been asking this, this question. We have 6 in 10Americans supporting DACA, right, for children who are born, who were brought here as children to provide them a way to become citizens in the country. So the vast majority of the country again, is not down with this anti immigrant mass deportation scheme. Again, the problem is that Trump and the MAGA movement have captured, and this is why we talk about this as white Christian nationalism, because they have Captured particularly white Christians here. And there's a chasm between white Christians and, and non white Christians on this. I mean, this ought to be a scandal in the Christian church. Right? The color line and as Du Bois, you know, put it, in the Christian church is as strong as ever. And you see it really on maga, you see it on immigration issues all up and down the line where it's white evangelicals are the group that are, you know, 8 and 10 for Trump. But we got to remember that even white non evangelical Protestants and white Catholics voted 6 in 10 for Trump and have been fairly steady in their support for him even over all of this and hold fairly anti immigrant attitudes.

Joy Reid (78:43)

So when you're looking at the numbers now, as opposed to, let's say in January or even last November at the election, has there been any movement among these various groups? Meaning, let's do three groups, White Christians, black Christians and Latino Christians.

Robbie Jones (79:00)

Yeah, well, there have been movement. I mean, I guess the good news is there has been movement almost in every demographic in a discipline. Trump's disapproval numbers have been cratering. And so we were in the field at the 100 day mark. So at the election, then at the 100 day mark and then again this fall. And what we found is that really across the board, and particularly if you ask about immigration, which was his strongest polling point going into the election, that's where we've seen across the country more than 5 percentage points disapproval drop even from the election point and from the 100 day mark. And what we really noticed is among Latinos, a 9 point drop among Latinos. And we look, it really is about these harsh immigration, mass deportation efforts. So there has been some movement among white Christians, but they're still with him. So it's dropped over the year. They're still with him. But if you look at African American Christians, Latino Protestants, even Latino Catholics, they are all opposing these, these immigration, these immigration tactics.

Joy Reid (80:06)

If you go now just to white Christians, what is it that they want? Like what, what are you able to discern from all of the data that you guys pulled together? What kind of country do they want? Do they want a country that's all white or do they want a country with all that, that's more like white South Africa, all white, but with a non white servant class?

Robbie Jones (80:23)

Yeah, well, you look, it's notable. You know, you could tell what the Trump administration wants. I mean, I do think the, the Africana example is about as blunt as it gets. You know, when you reduce all refugee asylum cases to 7,500 cases. I mean, that's a fraction of what we have typically historically allowed in the country. And then you, like, give it only to white Africaners. I mean, you are really sending, I mean, talk about kind of shining the bat signal, you know, up of kind of saying like, this is what we're, this is what we're for. This is what we're about. I mean.

Joy Reid (80:54)

Oh, no, Donald Trump also said he'd like some Swedes.

Robbie Jones (80:57)

Oh, of course, yes. Right, right, right. Yeah. Let me not, let me not be too, you know, restrictive about it. But yeah, no, it's, but it's just so plain and so clear. You know what, what that's about. But I think, you know, what we find is that Christian nationalists and white evangelicals are those who adhere to this worldview. And white evangelicals in particular are really the only groups that say, yeah, actually they'll just come out and tell us in public opinion polls, we don't really want to live in a pluralistic country. We want to live in a Christian nation, even when we give them a choice. Now, there is a gap there between white evangelicals and white Catholics and white non evangelical process there where actually white Catholics and white non evangelicals get off the train there and they say, no, no, we don't actually want everyone in the country to be a Christian. But white evangelicals are like, yep, we'd prefer to live in an all Christian country that's kind of where they are.

Joy Reid (81:50)

All Christian or all white Christian. Do they want non white Christians?

Robbie Jones (81:53)

Well, we asked it separately. They're more willing to sort of say on the survey, yeah, we want all Christian. Yeah, thing. But they're more likely than others to say they'd prefer to live in a racially homogeneous country as well.

Joy Reid (82:05)

And, and so what's so interesting about that, whenever I hear that kind of sentiment, I always say to them, but those countries exist and you could move to them. They're all over Europe. Like, if you want to live in an all white and almost all white Christian country, you could move to Ireland, which is very Catholic and very white. You could move to, I mean, they're pro Palestinians may not be comfortable there. You move to Russia, which is overwhelmingly white and now is openly Christian since Vladimir Putin has put Christianity, right wing Christianity back on the table. Why don't they just move to Ukraine or, you know, Ukraine's at war right now. But you know, there are white countries they can move to. It's interesting to me to have colonized a country that you then want to clear of the Existing people that were already there and the people you brought here.

Robbie Jones (82:47)

Yeah, well, you know, if you look at the. The Department of Homeland Security feed over on X. Twitter, formerly Twitter, I would recommend everyone do this because it's actually quite horrifying what's going on at the Department of Homeland Security's Twitter feed. But one thing that I find just so, without any sense of irony or paradox, they will use the word Native American on the site to refer to white people on our government's Department of Homeland Security site that we want only Native Americans in this country. And I'm sure, you know, the American Indian Congress is going all right, well, yeah, maybe so.

Joy Reid (83:23)

I'm sure they do, too. They're like, all of you, go home, get on a. And go to Europe. Like, they're. I mean, the fact. The fact that they've reimagined themselves, and I've seen. I've seen interviews and videos of this, of them. They've reimagined themselves, themselves as the natives. They actually just forgotten that the indigenous existed at all because they. Their ancestors killed most of them and. Or threw them onto reservations. And they honestly believe that that was the righteous case. I think about Senator Schmidt of Missouri, who gave this really horrifying speech in which he dismissed the importance. He didn't even mention the African enslaved people, but he dismissed even the indigenous people as somehow standing in the way of the good, righteous pilgrims taking the land God promised them. And so that is. I mean, and again, I do take it back to the way you have. A lot of Zionists believe that they don't see the Palestinians as worthy of being on the land at all. And I think in the same way, there is sort of a Christian Zionism that says even the people who were here when we got here, they have no right to this land, only we do. And so it's a strange way to think about a country you move to or that in some cases, like Trump, y' all just got here. The Trumps just got here in the late 19th.

Robbie Jones (84:35)

Yeah. And historically, you know that again, I mentioned Manifest Destiny earlier on, but that idea, what you see historically, go back and look at, like, even in sermons and in speeches from the House and Senate floor that we're talking about Manifest Destiny, there was always these two terms that got lumped together, and it was God and civilization, and it was only referred to white settler colonists. Right. That that's what they were bringing to these empty or untamed lands. Right. And so that was the vision. I mean, it was just out there and there's this famous painting by William Gast that shows the, the white, a white woman who's the spirit of Columbia, right? The feminine, feminine kind of almost holy spirit version of Christopher Columbus personified, floating over North America from east to west. She's about over Missouri where the painting stops her. And she's got a telegraph wire in one arm and a school book in the other. And in front of her are Native Americans kind of cowering and running away, thinning herds of buffalo with buffalo skeletons on the thing. And in her wake is coming the railroads and, and white people plowing and fencing the land. Right? And this was a very famous, you know, painting in the mid-1800s that was kind of embodying this very thing you're talking about. It was right out there. And you know, and still in our capital rotunda, there are four paintings that are essentially Christian nationalist paintings in our capital rotunda. Rotunda telling the story of like the Baptism of Pocahontas, for example, is one of the paintings there in the capital of the Rotana de Soto discovering the Mississippi. Except for he's pulling into a Native American village on his big white horse and they are erecting about a 20 foot cross in the middle of the Native American village in this painting that sits in our Capitol rotunda today. So it's such a deep part of our mythology, right? And it's, and you know, Trump is sort of taking materials that are ready at hand, really, and re implementing them, you know, at the, in, in our day. And it's really going to be up to us, like you said, to like, name it and say, like, no, we, we were kind of down that road before and we decided that was not the road we needed to be on. Right. And you're not going to take us back over there.

Joy Reid (87:00)

Is, is this kind of thinking responsive to economic reality? Are the, you know, we're, we're heading toward prop. Maybe a deep recession, maybe a depression because the tariffs, etc. People are really hurting, including a lot of rural white people. A lot of white people losing jobs. More 1.1 million plus jobs already lost this year. Not all of them black women. Is, is this kind of thinking responsive to the economy or is it just purely racial and religious?

Robbie Jones (87:28)

You know, we, we actually spent a lot of time thinking about this because there were all these debates about, well, you know, when Trump was first elected. Oh, it's all about economic anxiety, right. Arts, cultural anxiety. And you know, when we actually analyze the data, it turns out that it is both, particularly among white working Class, folks. But here's the thing. If you were going to make a cocktail, a little recipe for Trump's support, and kind of make it out of economic anxiety and cultural anxiety, it would be at least two parts cultural anxiety and one part economic anxiety. The engine of this really is what we've been talking about. That's where all the resentment comes from. It's where all the entitlement comes from. It's where all the chosenness come, the kind of divine entitlement comes from, is from that cultural piece. And now I think that the pain, the economic pain is real. But, you know, it's. It is this kind of cultural piece that I think has got the real.

Joy Reid (88:23)

The real power, you know, And I'm glad that you said that, because I think one of the things that happens. We were just talking with Yolanda Jones about Texas, and I think when people think about how do you win a race in a place like Texas that's very evangelical and that's got lots of white Christians in it, people think, well, when the economy starts to fall apart, those voters are going to be obtainable for us. And I hear a lot of Democratic strategists say that. And I think to myself, I think the only way y' all are going to win is if you find more black people and get them to vote, or you can find some AAPI folks and make sure that they haven't been acclimatized and pulled over into conservatism. And then try to see if you can get some Latinas and a few Latinos, because a lot of them have also been pulled into this evangelical, you know, culture war. You really just have to find more people, because it doesn't seem to me that this is changeable.

Robbie Jones (89:13)

Yeah, I mean, when we look at, again, this kind of the hold that Christian nationalism has on white Christians and particularly white evangelicals, is quite strong. We actually did a state level analysis where we just use one variable, support for Christian nationalism on one axis and support for Trump on the other. And we did a little scatter plot, and we did it one dot per state. And so, you know, if you remember taking your Statistics 101 class and you were looking at a scatter plot, what you do is it. It kind of puts little dots all over the thing, and you look to see how they cluster into shapes. And you could use this plot as a textbook example of a linear relationship. Right. So the higher residents of the state scored on the Christian nationalism scale, the more likely they were to vote for Trump. I mean, it is Nearly linear across the board. And if you, if you, and that's everyone. But if you reduce it to white residents of that state, it gets even tighter. There's almost no noise in that, in that kind of scatter plot. It's just kind of a 45 degree angle. And so it's got such a hold there. But I agree with you that where you would really want to look. And it's worth remembering too that like part of the reason it has this hold is because there has been this, I think and why this kind of idea of defend the homeland, our homeland's been taking away from us, has purchase is because the number of white Christians in the country has indeed been shrinking over time as a proportion of the population. So that's true in Texas. It's true in virtually every state in the country, not just on the coast. It's true even in the heartland. And so part of that kind of white Christian freakout moment that we're seeing is part, is partly about that. But I think Latina and Latina voters and Latino voters are really important here because they actually haven't been, they're not so attached to one political party or the other. And that's why we saw a bigger swing in this last election toward Trump. Right. And that was largely about for the Latinos. It really was more about economic stuff in the last segment. But I think that's where there's a lot of room to play among Latino, Latino voters in the country because they're not all in for one for one for one party. And so I think finding more voters there, particularly in a place like Texas, you know, and across the kind of border states, really important for the, for the coming years.

Joy Reid (91:37)

I'm going to do two pieces, one up just with the Latino voters for a minute. And I'm talking Latinos, let's put Latinas aside because they tend to vote more like black women, not quite as intensely. So it's more like 6 and 10 as opposed to 9 and 10 or 8 and 10. But Latino voters, they flip. But if you just look at interviews with Latino voters, it seemed to be three things. And you can tell me if the data at PR I backs this up. It was, it was economics, which was a big piece of that vote, but it was also cultural culture war stuff where they were pulled in by some of the culture war, you know, anti blackness, that kind of thing as well. And I think there was an evangelical part of it. Like there is an evangelical component to some of the Latino vote that seems to me to track white Christian nationalism. Is that true?

Robbie Jones (92:27)

No, that's right on. And I think this has really been under noted and are ignored really by many analysts that the divide in the Latino community between Latino Protestants and Latino Catholics and I should add there's a third group that often gets ignored, Latino religiously unaffiliated voters as well is huge. So for example, historically we have seen very consistently Latino Protestants have voted for Trump, pretty consistently. About 6 in 10 voted for Trump. But this because they're mostly evangelical. Right. And that's really worth remembering. And so they have pulled the sort of, not only the evangelical theology, but the evangelical politics have come along for the ride. So they're kind of, you know, cousins with that theology. And that has had a real pull on them. They're still outnumbered by Latino Catholics, but they are growing. And Latino Catholics are shrinking in the country. So that proportion is getting a little bit bigger. But Latino unaffiliated are also growing, growing and that's the group. So like Catholics are shrinking and it is, they're kind of going toward unaffiliated and Protestants, but the unaffiliated are actually more Democratic constituencies. So it's still this kind of interesting thing where kind of two to one lean Democrat, but it is along religious lines. And I think we really got to understand that the Catholic side of things does have a broader emphasis. So it emphasizes the social teachings of the Catholic Church, social justice, those kinds of things that don't really have a lot of traction on the evangelical. There's not a lot of theological hooks or footholds you can get inside the Protestant community because evangelicals highly individualistic, whereas the Catholic social teaching tradition I think has a lot more to offer on that front.

Joy Reid (94:16)

Yeah, absolutely. And we didn't even get into the anti blackness and some Latinos finding out for the first time when I showed up that they are not white. There's a lot of, a lot of Cubans in Venezuela.

Robbie Jones (94:26)

Well, here's the thing. In our surveys it's worth noting that, that, that about 2/3 or more than 2/3 of Latinos actually identify racially as white.

Joy Reid (94:35)

Yeah.

Robbie Jones (94:35)

In our, in our surveys I, I.

Joy Reid (94:37)

Have a, I have a theory that when it gets right down to brass tacks and white Americans are about to go into the literal minority, they'll just start calling Latinos white like they did with Italians, so that they will never be a minority authority. I think that is.

Robbie Jones (94:50)

Yeah, that's right. Yep.

Joy Reid (94:52)

They've done it before. I want to ask you now specifically about the Christian part of it. Because one of the things that I think as we get closer to the Christmas season, which is also Saturnalia, for those of you who are of the pagan persuasion, it was literally the Catholic Church just adopted Saturnalia, y'. All, I'm sorry to break the ice, break it to you, that they just adopted Saturnalia and said it's Christmas and said Jesus was born then when he was really born in spring, because story Jesus, because it was convenient to get a lot of pagans to sign up. Just, just saying to throw cold water on your, on your, on your sort of mythology. But the ideas of Jesus seem to have really fallen out of favor with white conservative Christians that they really seem to despise everything that's in the red letters in the Bible. The idea of caring for the poor, they hate it. The idea of kindness and empathy toward immigrants, they hate it. Just the idea of empathy, they've started dangerous because it opens the door to being too empathetic toward gay people and trans people. Like there is a, there is a hatred specifically of Jesus's teachings that I wonder if you've studied significantly at prri.

Robbie Jones (96:00)

Well, you know, yeah, we, we, I would say. I'll give you one example from this week. So speaking of Christian nationalism, Franklin Graham was invited to the Pentagon's Christmas worship service. By the way, it was a specifically Christian Christmas and it was cable Christmas, you know, not hot, not holidays, Christian worship service. At the official event at the Pentagon, Franklin Graham has, and they've been doing this every month, by the way, since, since the spring at the Pentagon under Hegseth's leadership. But he was invited in and here we are, we're at Advent right where we are. If you're a Christian, you are imagining the coming of Jesus into the world, right in these humble circumstances. And again, like you said, a brown skinned Jesus coming into the world, a Jewish brown skinned Jesus coming into the world. And what Franklin Graham has to say at the Advent service is right along these lines. So here he is, spirit of Advent. And he says, well, we've all heard that God is a God of love. But he then goes on to say, but God is also a God who hates and he is a God of war. This is Franklin Graham at the Pentagon this week during Christmas. And he goes on to give this example of the Amalekites from, from the Old. Now for those of you in the Old Testament, this is a genocide in, in the Old Testament. And it's like not only kill every man, woman and child, but every cattle, every, you know, every head of Sheep, like every living thing in sight, should be masquered.

Joy Reid (97:38)

Netanyahu, by the way, quoted this.

Robbie Jones (97:40)

Yes, he did.

Joy Reid (97:40)

Explanation of what to do in Gaza, but please proceed.

Robbie Jones (97:43)

No, that's, that's exactly right. It showed up in BB speech as well. And it was not lost on his audience, like both Jewish and Christian audiences when he, when he said that. But here's Franklin Graham echoing that and giving this during Advent, right? This is the thing that he wants to say. And, and who's he talking to? He's talking to the Pentagon, right? So he's saying God is a God of hate. God is a God of war. And let's not forget that the, that Pete Hegseth has got Christian nationalist symbols tattooed on his body, right, with the words God wills it on his arm with a sword, which was the, the, the motto of the Crusaders is they were slaughtering Muslims during the, during the Crusade. So that's the context that we, that we've got in here. So, I mean, it's just stunning to me that, that the grip that this has. And now I've forgotten the original question you asked because I went on this.

Joy Reid (98:35)

Little digression here, but why these people hate Jesus.

Robbie Jones (98:39)

Jesus, right. So, yeah, so here we are, right? Jesus. It is, it is remarkable, but it's, it really is this kind of division that you see sometimes. And not to get too theological, but I do think people forget about the historical Jesus, right? The humility, the, the humble circumstances, the poverty, the immigration, all of it, right? And, and they go to, you'll hear a lot about. In evangelical circles, it's not Christ the baby Jesus lying in a manger. It's Christ the King, right? And it's about power and it's about violence and it's about war. And even during Christmas, you know, this is, this is the message that we're hearing.

Joy Reid (99:19)

And this shows that they don't know anything about the historic or the biblical Jesus because one of the reasons he was rejected in favor by, when Pontius Pilate gave people the choice is because he was not willing to make war against the Romans, against. He was not willing to be a soldier against Rome. He was a man of peace. And he let down the people in that audience. And they said they'll take the violent Barabbas over him because they wanted the violent guy. The audience was not feeling him because he was not violent.

Robbie Jones (99:46)

And even his own followers, that story where Peter pulled out a sword and was gonna. And hacked off the ear of a Roman soldier and of course wasn't aiming for his ear. He was aiming for the middle of his head and just happened to catch his ear. And Jesus heals the soldier and tells him to put the sword away. Right, that's, that's the Jesus of the New Testament.

Joy Reid (100:08)

They don't like him. It's kind of remarkable.

Robbie Jones (100:11)

Well, he's not that useful if you're a Christian nationalist. Right, exactly.

Joy Reid (100:16)

So, so as you've studied this, Robby, have you kind of come to a conclusion of if this is so unshakable among this group of people who maybe represent what like 15, 20% of the adult population, is that about.

Robbie Jones (100:29)

Yeah, 30. Well, the people who are both full on in, you know, agree strongly. Everything is 10% of the country. And there's another 20% that are sympathetic, that agree, but not, not strongly. So three in ten at most. One in ten, that's like hardcore.

Joy Reid (100:45)

Yeah. So if it's a little less than a third of the adult population and 2/3, it sounds like more than one third. But we still are being ruled now by this. I mean, Project 2025 is the law of the land. The last estimate I saw is that it's about 60% fully implemented. We haven't gotten a national abortion ban yet, but they're working on it. They haven't done everything in it, but they're getting there. How do we push back? What is your recommendation? Just as a social scientist.

Robbie Jones (101:14)

Yeah, you know, I, I still think of like, yeah, from the social science. I mean we, we know that like at least in other countries, this, you know, the study's not perfect, but we do see that like public protests that reach at least 3 1/2% of the population actually showing up and protesting like that's, that's a big deal. Right. We haven't quite gotten there in the country yet. The no Kings protests were big, but not quite that big. And so, I mean, reaching that level, that's one thing to do. But I also think that, you know, we, I, like many people have been reading a lot of German and Eastern European resistance stories. Right. And, and a lot of those are about everyday people who said no. Right. In their own communities. And so like I, I think that's what we have to all be willing to do to say what kind of country do we want to live in? And we have to live out that country at the local level. So we got to speak up at the local level, get involved at the local level. It's going to have to be a bottom up. And at the end of the day there are more people who want to live in a religiously pluralistic country, in a racially pluralistic country, one that has basic protections and freedoms and equality and all of those things There are by 2 to 1, right? There's, there's more of us than there are of those who want to take this down, this road to authority authoritarianism and white supremacy and Christian dominionism. Like, that's not the road most of us want to go down. But we are at this moment where they have the people who want that have seized the levers of power, and we're no one but us is going to be able to step up and stop it, right? So we're going to have to find our feet. And I think, you know, now in 2026 is going to be absolutely critical, both because we're going to be in the middle of the year. We're going to be telling the story of who we are at the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. And so there's going to be an opportunity, right, for us to say, like, oh, no, this is the story of what that document means. Because there's going to be another narrative coming out of the White House, and it's not going to be one about equality and freedom. It's going to be one about Christian nationalism and entitlement and chosenness. And then there'll be, of course, the midterm elections where we all have a chance to stand up and vote.

Joy Reid (103:27)

We hope. We hope. Yeah.

Robbie Jones (103:29)

Well, in fact, we're going to have to make sure that we have that right to vote ahead of time.

Joy Reid (103:33)

That's right, indeed. Robert. Robbie Jones, tell us where we can find your work.

Robbie Jones (103:39)

Great. Well, you can join me on Substack. I write a substack called whitetoolong.net right there weekly. And you can find all the data we're Talking about@prri.org that's public religion Research. We're a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization.

Joy Reid (103:56)

So we are going to post this segment, which we are going to do. Robbie and I are going to come together the third Wednesday of every month. We're in this, y', all, for the long haul because the next midterm is critical. It's critical to whether we can get our country back. And what we want is not a country on a partisan basis to get it back from one political party, but to get it back from an ideology that is sadistic in the sense that it wants to suppress everyone else under it and under it. And we're not going to allow that. ROBBIE Jones, I appreciate you, my friend. Thank you. Stepping up. Thank you, man. Appreciate you. All right. And we will talk to you again next month. Happy Christmas. Thank you. Thank you very much. And look, we're not afraid to say Merry Christmas on here. We're not afraid to say happy. The Brits say Happy Christmas. So I have a British in law, so I tend to say Happy Christmas, but Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, happy Hanukkah, happy Kwanzaa. We, we win it all because we are not partisan in our religiosity. And those who are not religious also have a right to. And Christmas, by the way, not really. Not really a religious holiday anymore. Not really. Not at all. Let me play you guys something that I went on a wormhole this week. We appreciate Robby. And by the way, I'm going to clip this piece on white Christian nationalism. We're going to put it in its own clip, which you'll be able to share on this YouTube channel as well as on substacks. I'm going to make sure we do that. So you guys can take this on its own if you want to share that with a friend, particularly somebody that might be being tempted by this white Christian nationalist ideology because it's dangerous, y'. All. Because what it wants is for just about everyone to be subordinated. Weirdly enough, under the super rich. It doesn't believe you should be subordinated under Christ the King. They want you subordinated under the billionaires and they're the king. And under Trump the King. And don't get it twisted, this is not to make life better for normal people. It's to make a lot of a small number of very rich white men very, very wealthy and everyone else, including non rich white men, very, very poor. It is not. It is not intended to make the world a better place like Jesus wanted to do. It's intended to make a small number of people elite and everyone else underneath them. So that's the reason that we care a lot about that. Before we get to our final bit. Well, actually, let me just play this real quick. Quick. This is a George Carlin clip that I find particularly interesting. This is E1. If you could play it, Jason, not.

Cash Patel (106:13)

Even trying to conceal it anymore. The owners of the country have they bought their elect, got their election. They said, we're going to get this election. We put you people in that court for a reason.

Joy Reid (106:24)

Back to earth for you now.

Cash Patel (106:26)

Yeah, forget all that stupid. They're out in the open.

Joy Reid (106:32)

They're open.

Cash Patel (106:32)

No, they're openly driving the bus. And we're all in the back.

Joy Reid (106:35)

There is no.

Robbie Jones (106:36)

There is no national conspiracy to buy elections and control America.

Cash Patel (106:41)

Now.

Joy Reid (106:42)

Talk about back to earth.

Cash Patel (106:44)

You don't need a formal conspiracy, right? When interests converge, these people went to the same universities and fraternities. They're on the same directors, they're in the same country clubs. They have, like, interest. They don't need to call a meeting. They know what's good for them and they're getting it. And there used to be seven oil companies. There are now three. It will soon be two. The things that matter in this country have been reduced in choice. There are two political parties. There are a handful of insurance companies. There are about six or seven information. But if you want a bagel, there are 23 flavors. Because you have the illusion. You have the illusion of choice, right? You don't get the real important choice. There's no freedom of choice.

Joy Reid (107:24)

Now that is a classic clip from 2001 from the Bill Maher's former show, Politically Incorrect, the first iteration of his show. Remember, he got fired from ABC. That show was on ABC. He got fired because he said the 911 hijackers were not the cowards because they stayed in the planes. And then they fired him for that. The guy, the black guy who is arguing with the great George Carlin, who's been doing this since the 70s, like one of the greatest comedians ever, one of the best truth tellers ever. His name is Horace Cooper. A lot of people have been asking me because I posted on my social. Who is that brother? His name is Horace Cooper. He's a senior fellow at the national center for Public Policy Research. He's a commentator. He's also a professor of Constitutional law at the George Mason University School in Virginia and a senior. And he used to be senior House counsel to U.S. house Majority Leader Dick Armey. He's a black conservative. Very interesting, but he's right. The. The appearance of choice is. Is. It can be seen like an illusion. This is a good moment to let you all know that our upcoming moment of joy is being brought to you by our friends at Cards Against Humanity. If left untreated, this could lead to stealing an election. Polyamory. It seems like we're telling you that this show was being brought to you by Deez Nuts and Polyamory. Yes, Cards Against Humanity, the company that bought land on the US Mexico border in order to stop Trump's wall, then sued elon Musk for $15 million for trespassing on said land and use the profits from red states to fund Abortion access and also paid people you know to give a shit about the 2024 election. Cards against Humanity is the only company stupid enough to stand up to Donald Trump or one of the only companies. They do not profit from their political stunts. So if you would like them to be able to afford good lawyers, do consider buying one of their fabulous new games for the holiday season. They make amazing gifts like Cards Against Humanity Tales, which is a book of fill in the blank stories for horrible people. Also, shit list, a new way to play the game where you get to write the answers. There's also Party Mouth, a new party game about shouting obscenities as a coping mechanism for the hellscape that we live in now. You are listening to the Joy Reid show. So the folks at Cards Against Humanity assume that you are smart enough to figure out how to buy their products. So Cards Against Humanity officially apologizes for interrupting this podcast with their bullshit. Thank you very much. And they are now the sponsor of our amazing moment of Joy. And before I get to that, I have to say this, I still have to say this. Yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna hold off on our moment of joy for just a hot minute. But they, but we, they are bringing you our moment of joy. Actually, you know what, we'll play the moment of joy and then I'll say some other stuff. Let's. Should we do the moment joy first? What do you think, Jason? Moment of joy. My comments first. Let's get your comments first. Let's get my comments first. I'm gonna hold off. I'm gonna make you guys wait for the moment of joy because I want to get back to where we started from the beginning because it does relate to my moment of joy. We started this show talking about who is beloved in America, right? And we ended the show talking about white Christian nationalism and the fact that this religion, this religious movement that's taken over the United States has formulated itself based on 2000 year old religion Christianity. But they've warped it in a way that they take Jesus out of it. They make him a villain of empathy. They, in a sense, erase Jesus from the entire story. Right? They can't deal with the fact that he is a Palestinian Jewish refugee. They can't. They have to put that aside. They have to put aside that his earthly mother was the object of scorn for seeming to be a fallen woman, a woman who didn't do the right thing. That Mary Magdalene, the other Mary in his life, is somebody who was smeared by the Catholic Church as if she was a prostitute when she certainly was not, and had her own gospel that was left out of the Bible. There's a Gospel of Mary that was left out. They have to ignore all of those things. I mean, don't even get me started on the Ethiopian Bible that they, you know, got like 80 other books and then they decided not to put those in. That's 80 books instead of the ones in the Bible. They have to put all of that aside and ignore the historical fact of a Palestinian Jesus, a brown refugee. They have to set all that aside. And also somebody whose radical teaching was the radical teaching of not just love towards your fellow Jewish man or woman, but also love toward those who were not of the religion, those who were. There was no Christians, right? He wasn't. He didn't call himself a Christian. They were like he was for loving everybody, for loving people who would have been considered apostates and outside the faith and carrying this vision of universal love throughout the world. He was hated for that, stoned for it, and also killed specifically because he would not be a warrior king against the Roman Empire. It's the reason that Rome mocked him by putting a crown of thorns on his head, right? The historical Jesus we're talking about, this is like an irreligious conversation just about the historical. If you believe the historical facts that are in the Bible, the historical story in the Bible, it would be that he's being crucified allegedly for sort of kind of lionizing himself as the son of God, when supposedly the Roman Empire, the Roman Emperor, is the person that God ordained, not this guy, right? And so for that, he's being put on a cross, the crucifixion being the Roman sort of standard way that they executed people. And he put this crown of thorns on his head to mock him as the king of the Jews. That's the idea, right? But this was a punishment. This was a state punishment of somebody who in their mind, violated state law. So according to what Maga believes, because they are statists, they would have sided with Rome. Like, I think we have to be very, very clear that if we just take the religion out of it and do the fact of who these Maga people are and the fact of who historical Jesus was, they would have been on the side of Rome. They would have been on the side of the Roman Emperor, not on the side of Jesus. Because Jesus was somebody who's preaching something that they hate even now. They hate the idea of love for the immigrant. They hate the idea of love for the poor. They believe the Poor have committed some moral lapse and that they are poor by their own fault, and that one should not force the rest of us to be charitable toward them by taxing people and that taxation is theft, and therefore the state being, you know, forcing each and every citizen to help the poor, that's sinful to them. They do not believe that there should be any requirement for helping the poor. So they. They say they believe in Jesus, but they don't want his belief to be required, at least the part of his belief that's about helping people or being kind toward immoral. They don't want any of that. They don't want. And they've also decided that empathy itself is dangerous. And they keep on saying Christ the King, but they don't really believe that, because everything about Jesus, the Christ, the person that came to be called the Christ, they hate that guy. He's too empathetic, he's too kind. Rob Reiner did indeed make an excellent documentary about Christian nationalism. It's one of the reasons Trump hates him so much. Absolutely. And so what we've got is this crazy religion where the people who are the most Christlike, whether they're Christian or not, are the most hated by Maga. And along in that mess of lionizing, it's almost BAAL worship. Right. If you go back to the Old Testament, one of the reasons you had monotheism and Moses is that the people were worshiping multiple gods. They could see the sun, so they said, I'm gonna worship the sun. I can see that. I see the moon. I'm worshipping the moon. I can see it. I know it goes up and down every day. I see it moving every day. I can see it. I can actually experience it. Or I need a God. I can see. And so they were erecting, you know, golden calves because they're like, I need a God. I can look at. I can see that God. I see it in front of me. It's a golden calf. That's the God I'm going to worship. And you have Moses saying, moses and Aaron saying, you can't do that. You need to worship the one true God. Right. You even have. That's the story of Abraham, that Abraham comes from this monotheistic world in Iran. That's where he came from, Iran, the land of Ur. And he comes across into the land of Canaan. He's an immigrant to Canaan. He doesn't mix with the Canaanites, so he's still from Iran, doesn't mix with the Canaanites because he's ordered not to. And he has these multiple children. Ishmael, who's the father of Islam, Isaac, who's the father of Judaism and ultimately Christianity. So he's an immigrant. Right. So everything about what they supposedly believe is about immigrants and immigration and a region that has nothing to do with Europe. Yet they have taken all of that, wiped it away, replaced it with this white, European, angry, mean Jesus who they imagine would hate immigrants, hate the poor, and support mass deportation, mass detention and sending 4 year old cancer victims out of the country by force like they think. That's right. Persia, right. That is literally where the land of Ur is. It's Persia. It's Iran, Iraq, somewhere over there. So this is where we come to with the death of Rob Reiner, because Rob Reiner was not Christian, he's Jewish. But he ironically enough, embodies so much more of what Jesus's teachings were than Donald Trump has ever and could ever. Because Carl, because Rob Reiner actually believed in helping the poor, as did George Carlin. He said one of the reasons differences between Democrats and Republicans, the Democrats and progressives actually care about the poor and conservatives and Republicans don't. So these men actually believed in Jesus's teachings, even if they were not themselves technically Christians. So you have Rob Reiner, who's actually the son of a famous man like Trump. He inherits money from his father. He inherits position from his father. Like Trump, he makes, he stars in a show that's about a family in Queens with a racist dad. He's famous before Trump, he becomes famous, even though again, his dad was already famous. He inherits all of that. And yet even at his peak of fame and fortune, this is a guy who embodied goodness and openness and empathy, even toward his very violent, dangerous son. And so I want to play you the way a legacy looks when it's, when it's a legacy of truth and goodness and kindness and something more like a Jesus like legacy. Right? A legacy that says, I actually give a crap about poor people and immigrants and the needy. And that is what Rob Reiner actually believed in. And so there's this amazing scene which takes place like less than a week. I think it's like three days before his father, the very famous Carl Reiner, famous comedian, passes away. They recreate a key scene in my favorite Rob Reiner produced and directed movie, the Princess Bride. They reproduced this scene. And the movie the Princess Bride is based on a book that is about a father reading his favorite book to his son. That's what the book is About. So our moment of joy is that scene that they filmed not long before Carl Reiner passed away. And here it is, our moment of joy.

Cash Patel (118:38)

Now I think you ought to go to sleep. Okay?

Joy Reid (118:42)

Okay.

Robbie Jones (118:43)

Okay.

Joy Reid (118:44)

All right. So long.

Cash Patel (118:49)

Grandpa, can you come over tomorrow and read it again? As you wish.

Joy Reid (119:01)

As you wish is. It is sort of the key line from A Princess Bride. That is just such a beautiful memory that to be honest, you cannot imagine the current leader of this country ever having with his dad. And that's actually sad. And you almost have to pity a person who didn't have that warmth, clearly with his own father and does not have that warmth not only toward his children, but toward his country. How sad is that? How pathetic is that? That somebody can exist with so much privilege and have no gratitude, exist with so much opportunity and have no grace to have so much wealth and have no gifts to give anyone other than spite and scorn and cruelty and sorry, but Maga, the whole movement, it takes from its leader. It is what its leader is. It's cruel, it's harsh, it's mean. There's no kindness in it. There's nothing good in it. There's nothing enviable about it. There's nothing you want about it. You don't want to be in it. It's just mean and hard and small. So our moment of joy is a reminder that people who come into the world with privilege can actually still be good, can actually still be decent. And it can actually give something good into the world. So God rest all of the Reiners, Carl, Rob and Michelle. And thank you. And just to let you all know that on Friday we've got something really special. I do believe. Should I tell people we are bringing back our friend Lunel? We're excited about that. I know the chat really loved her. So we're gonna bring her back. I believe she's gonna be here Friday and we're gonna do something fun for the holiday season. And we're getting ready because we're gonna be taking a break next week. Week. Next week. I'm just warning you guys now that we are going to be taking a little bit of a break so that our little team, our small but mighty team, can have a holiday. When you say little break, just be sure the entire week, next week as Christmas week. We're off. We're off Christmas week. We're going to give ourselves a little bit of a holiday and let you guys have a holiday. You have to miss us a little bit. We have to make you miss us a little bit. So when you come back, we'll be ready to get spicy and fun with you guys. So we love you guys. Thank you for tuning in. And we will see you Friday, same bet time, same bet channel, 6pm ET on the Joy Reid Show. Thanks for tuning in. Hey, by the way, last thing, if you guys are buying merch, don't forget we've got a, a couple little pictures. But you guys are putting your merch pictures on the on the buy on the shopping website. Please put your merch pictures on your social and tag me or tag Joy re show. So this trailer I'm on screen. It's on screen. So tag us and then put that hashtag wearing joy so we can find find it. Our team will find your photos, find your pics because on Friday we are going to show all of our cute little team TJR as people on the screen. So we want you guys to be famous and get your cute little mugs out there. So make sure you send us your pics in your merch wearing your merch. Put wearing Joy in the hashtag and we'll show you guys. All right, thank you very much. Have a great night and we'll see you on the next the Joy Beach Show. Bye. Bye. Okay, it.