The Daily Beast Podcast - Team Trump Isn’t Even Trying to Keep Its Wildest Plans Secret

Episode Date: November 7, 2023

Brian Kaylor, the president and editor-in-chief of Word&Way, joins The New Abnormal to discuss new House Speaker Mike Johnson—and why he thinks the longtime religious activist should be classified as a Christian nationalist. Plus! A conversation with reporter Anat Rubin about her recent story in ProPublica about Louisiana’s Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Kedin, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. What an excellent show we have today.

Baptist minister and editor of Word and Way, Brian Kailer, is here to help us define Christian nationalism and how deep its roots run with the new speaker of the house, Magam Mike Johnson. Then we'll talk to investigative reporter Anat Rubin, who will talk about her article for ProPublica, the scandal that never happened, all about the all-white judges of the Louisiana. Indiana Appellate Court that ignored thousands of petitions filed by prisoners for over a decade in the new effort to expose them. But first, let's have some fun. So Danielle, as we sit here recording, Donald Trump has taken the stand in one of his 34 trials, I think it? Is it 34 trials? It's something like that. I don't know. I can't keep it straight anymore. But he has taken the stand in his trial here in New York that has been brought by Attorney General Letitia James. And it's not, going all that great for him. He's been feuding with the judge. Judge and Gorin has been not very happy

with the former president or his lawyers for that matter. And he's doing a lot of what Donald Trump does instead of answering questions. He's making speeches and he's saying things that possibly aren't true. I guess we'll find out if there are any perjury charges brought. But he's getting warned a lot and his attorneys are getting warned a lot. And at one point, the judge asked Trump's lawyers to just tell him, answer the questions directly. Stop making your little speeches. If he's getting a yes, no question, he's giving a little sermon. And one of Trump's attorneys, he said to the judge, you are here to hear what he has to say. And the judge didn't like that because, yeah, judges generally don't like being told what their job is. Judge Ngoran raised his voice and said, I am not here to hear what he says.

now sit down, all of which is to say, I could have put this much shorter and just said it's going as expected. Correct. Right? Like I was just, I'm like, oh, I'm like, oh, that's right. Nothing has changed from all of the admonishments, from the thousands of dollars that he has been fined by this judge and his attorneys have been fined by this judge already, that nothing has changed either of their behaviors. The fact is, we know that the Trump attorneys, all they want to do is waste So putting Donald Trump on the stand so that he can meander on like he does at one of his fucking rallies where he just trails off and we don't know where the beginning or the end is is exactly that is wasting time. I just feel like all of our time is being wasted though. Like the country's time.

Like our fucking tax dollars. Like I just feel like every moment that this is allowed to go on and this man is not given the kind of admonishments, the kind of penalties that you or I would be given. so that we could somehow restore our faith in this very privileged, broken justice system that allows Donald Trump to act in this matter? Because I just want to, let's just take a little walk with me for a moment, shall we? Let's pretend that Donald Trump wasn't orange and in fact, brown, right? Any shade of brown in the crayola box will do. And imagine him then being put on the stand and doing what the orange Donald Trump is doing right now.

and that person not being put in prison, that person not being directed to be handcuffed and taken to the bottom of the court. You can't because that would be the reality. And so I'm like, for all of the penalties, for all of the things, all the humping and anger, he can raise, the judge can raise his voice as many times as he wants. But until he actually raises his gavel and he begins to treat Donald Trump and his fucking Trump University graduate law people, the way that they should be treated, I'm not quite sure how this circus ever ends.

Yeah, it does kind of feel like it might be getting to that point. It almost feels at this point like Trump is just baiting him and daring him, you know, Judge Nguyen, to do it. I get why the judge is hesitant to do this and slow to do this. And I would assume a judge always has to think about an appeal. And also is just, you know, given who this defendant is, he's trying to be as even keeled as possible. But the fact that he's starting to yell is just to me, it's a sign that he is getting damn close to the sort of nuclear option of telling Don he's going to be spending the night

wearing clothing that matches his skin color. I noticed a thing that right before they broke for lunch, Trump pulled a document out of a pocket and said he wanted to read it. Leticia James is a lawyer, moved on to a different question so he didn't get to read it. And then Trump interrupted the lawyer saying, I want to read this document. And Ingor and said, no. And I was trying to figure out what that document might be. And I realized there's a 50-50 chance. It's an equal chance that it is a classified document that he shouldn't have or a McDonald's menu.

And in my mind, I was like, it's a menu. It's absolutely a menu. I mean, it's right before they broke for lunch. So I feel like he was already deciding how many Big Macs he wanted. Obviously, there need to be enough ketchup packets for him. And you need the spares to throw at the wall. This whole thing is, it's a shit show as anything that. Trump touches becomes everything you said is absolutely fair.

If Donald Trump or a person of color, it would never have gotten to this level. I would argue that if he were any run-of-the-mill white person. Exactly. Do you know what I'm saying? Like at this point, it is not even about which everything in America is about racism, but it's not even about that. It's like if any other person, and I honestly believe, Andy, that even if it was another wealthy or, you know, supposedly wealthy individual, there was something about Donald

Trump. Is it just the fact that he's a former twice impeached president that has been accused of sexual assault and defamation? I don't know what it is. But something about this man gives people just, they just, you know, roll out the fucking carpet for him, the roll out the red carpet and he can act in any manner that he wants. No, I think you're right. And that's why I sort of pointed out that I think, you know, a lot of this is a judge saying, look, this guy is a former president and, you know, that does count for something, I guess. And he has to, again, the judge has to think about appeals and stuff like that. So he's trying to be as even killed as possible.

And it's just a question of whether Trump will push him so far that not even he, Trump, can get away with it. But I think you're absolutely right. I don't think there's any doubt of that. The really bad news for judging Gorin is Trump is already plotting revenge on a lot of folks if he gets reelected, if he gets elected to a second term, basically coming right out and, you know, they're coming right out and saying, although in private, that he is going to use the Justice Department to go after many people who at one point were his allies, Bill Barr,

Tai Cobb, a former attorney of his, General Millie, who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, etc. He has basically, he and not just Trump, Trump and his cronies are basically talking in private about having a plan to completely weaponize the Justice Department to go after the president's enemies. And they're doing this under the egis of a program called Project 2025, which we've talked about on this podcast a bunch of time. And I'm not a huge fan of back patting, but I do feel like we've been sort of ahead of this story in a lot of ways. I remember the first time we covered it, it was when the New York Times had an article on it. So obviously, it's not like we discovered this on our own. But the article was buried on like page A17 or something like that. And we were like,

hold on, this sounds important, and we talked about it. And since then, it's really bubbled up and become a thing. And it's a project that was started by the Heritage Foundation and now has become a thing that encompasses other Washington conservative think tanks and people in Trump's orbit. And it's a project to completely remake the federal government in Trump's image and to fire a whole bunch of people whose crime was doing their job, like in a sort of objective and bureaucratic manner the way they're supposed to and replacing them with Trump loyalists who will do his bidding and let him do whatever he wants and damn the Constitution. Yeah, I just kind of like how you said paint the Justice Department in Donald Trump's image. So big, empty, and full of shit.

Do you know, like that would be what the Justice Department would look like? Donald Trump and his cronies, they are like really bad 80s bond villains. Do you know what I'm saying? You know the ones that would tell you like, I'm going to tie you up with a rope. I'm going to throw you in the, I'm going to throw you in the ocean. I'm going to do all these things giving you the way to get out of said situation. They are telling us everything that they plan to do. Every step of the way, they are telling you what they plan to do. And you know what the media is going to do? Pretend that it's fucking shocked. when all of those things happen if in fact this son of a bitch is able to actually get reelected again. Yeah, look, this thing is so not a secret that they have a website.

It's called Project 2025.org. And they literally say what they're going to do. And they list their quote unquote advisory board. And it's over 75 organizations. Over 75 conservative organizations. They have a section called Playbook. They have a section called training. They have a section called policy.

They are not being shy about this. telling us exactly what they're going to do. Like you said, in the manner of bond villains, I mean, the thing is, so far, you know, Trump and his cronies have sort of, in the way of bond villains, have mostly not gotten away with it because they talk too much. But you can't count on that. And you certainly can't count on it if they get elected and follow through on this project to make everyone in D.C. of any note, a Trump crony. And look, they're already talking about doing things like employing the Insurrection Act on like Trump. first day in office that would allow him to deploy the military domestically. A lot of people

are calling it third world stuff. I'm not calling it third world stuff because that's actually an insult to third world countries. I mean, this is straight up fascist stuff and the kind of fascism we often see in first world countries that arises. So I think calling this third world country and banana republic stuff, I think fails to sort of take a hard look at our country, at America, and what we are in danger of becoming here. The only way that we've been able to fend off the rise of authoritarianism and fascism is because you've had people who believed

that people who wanted to run this country did so because they were truly patriots, did so and had this handshake deal that we all agreed upon a common rule, common law known as the Constitution. But eight years ago, that was completely and totally shredded. And so even if we think, even if, you know, as the poll number suggests that Donald Trump has very much a chance in hell of becoming president of the United States again, folks, you do understand that that will be the last free and fair election that we ever see in this fucking country.

Because once you give that man power not only of the nuclear codes, but of the ability to weaponize our military and the Justice Department, we are done. There is no guardrail. There is no safety net. Yeah, and look, we'll be talking about a guy who, first of all, already thinks or claims to think. I think he's dumb enough to actually believe that the election was stolen from him. Regardless, he claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. If he gets reelected in 2024, he can't run again. So you're looking at a guy with nothing to lose politically. And you're looking at a guy who has every reason to want to fuck up the democratic process

and to keep either himself in power somehow or give that power to one of his fail sons or daughter, or just keep it in the family more generally in terms of ideology and goals. We are in a really bad spot. And as you point out, like what we're seeing now and what Trump wants to do to this country is exactly what America has done to a bunch of other countries. So the big difference here is we might do it to ourselves. That's really where we stand right now. And the scary thing is, you know, a bunch of new polls came out over the weekend.

And New York Times, Sienna poll being maybe the biggest of it. And it showed that in five of six swing states, Trump is leading. Trump is leading Biden in Nevada, in Michigan, in Pennsylvania, in Georgia, and in Arizona. He's trailing by two points in Wisconsin. So that's sort of margin of error. Look, as we all know, those six states and maybe a handful of others, maybe in North Carolina and in Ohio or whatever, that's what's going to determine the election in 2024. We know that. And we're looking at Trump leading in all of them. And yes, it's a year out and a lot can happen in a year. I think it's perfectly fine to say, you know, don't hit the panic button just yet. But it might be time to raise the little glass covering on the panic button so that you can hit the panic button more quickly down the road if we have to. I'm hitting the panic button. So I'm not just raising the glass and like making sure that the, you know, the hinges on it.

We are a year out, right, to this presidential election. And I tell people all the time, I don't believe in fucking polls. I really don't. I don't give weight to polls this early. But what I will say is that even the hint that Donald Trump could be up. It's one thing. Oh, even blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, fine.

But up by five. points in the polls as this man is fending off 91 charges for indictments and counting has already been found to be liable of defamation and sexual assault and to be a fraud because even though the anger on case in New York is happening right now, we also know that the judge had already decided. This is now about how much money he will owe. But he's already decided that the man is a fucking grifter. So I'm like, how? What is being pumped in the water in these places? For folks to look around and say to themselves, you know who would be great to lead? Donald Trump, how do you think that this man even has space in his very empty mind when he's fending off all of these fucking charges

to even give a shit about America? Do you see where we are in the world right now and what is unfolding? I just don't understand what the fuck these people are thinking. Yeah, well, there's some really troubling demographic statistics in this poll as well. Voters under 30, Biden is only up one point. That should be unheard of. His lead, according to the New York Times, among Hispanic voters, is down to single digits.

Black voters in those six states, 22% of them are supporting Trump. That is an unheard of high number for a Republican in this era. There is so much going on where it looks like the people you could most count upon to sort of, you know, vote blue no matter who, as they like to say, not they, those people, they, people in general, people in democratic circles. Maybe they're a little tired of being taken for granted. Oh, imagine that. It still boggles my mind that any person of color could vote for

Trump. Look, I could see sitting it out if you're, if you just had it with Biden or you've had it with the Democratic Party. It boggles my mind to think that anyone under 30 or anyone of color could look at Biden and Trump and decide that Trump is a better vote for them. I don't really get that. I don't get that for anyone. I shouldn't just label that as people of color, but it's, I think, maybe even more surprising for, and not just people of color, any minority group in this country, any marginalized group in this country, how anyone from any of those groups could look at Trump and what the Republican Party has become with this Christian nationalism and think that that's a better vote. I agree. I don't understand it. It boggles my mind. But it's something.

the Democrats need to figure out. And they need to figure it out pretty damn quick because they got a year. It's not nothing, but it's not a ton of time. You know what scares the shit out of me? I will be very honest, which is imagining where we will be 12 months from now. Like, I know that you and I will be on a microphone, but I'm just like, you know, I'm just wondering in what undisclosed location will be in. I'm concerned, to say the least. Yeah. Look, another thing in this poll is this really annoys me. Sixty-two percent of voters say Biden does not have the mental sharpness to be. Oh, dear God. Okay, fine. I'm not even all that troubled with that. What I'm troubled about is that there is not that same general sense about Trump. I think the media bears a lot of blame for that. This is not even a defending Biden thing.

This is a how do you look at Donald Trump and think that he has the mental sharpness to be effective? I don't understand that at all. I just don't understand. There's a point in time in our lives where, three and four years matter. When you're a freshman in high school and there's a difference between a freshman and a senior. In college, the difference between someone entering into college, their freshman year, and somebody that has just graduated. There is that time difference, that experience difference. The difference between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in their fucking age ain't that. And I'm so confused about how this man can continue to ramble on the stand at rallies, mix up world wars, mix people, people up and like nothing gets said. Nothing is said. No attention. Like maybe he doesn't seem right.

Also, by the way, he looks like shit. Right? He doesn't look like a healthy man that's jogging, you know, through the White House in the way that Biden actually looks. Oh, God. Yeah. Look, I'm just, I'm digging through these poll results and all of these things. Trump has a 17 point advantage for people saying that he has helped them. Biden is up 18% for people saying he has hurt. hurt them. 71% say Biden is too old to be an effective president. Only 39% say that about Trump. I don't know. Danielle, look, do we live in a parallel universe? I think that we do. I think that the media, corporate media, has created a parallel universe. I do. Joe Biden, his ride in bicycles, jogging down hallways, a trim man, seemingly very healthy for his age, put him next to a man

that thinks that Big Macs are like a healthy snack. Just look at the physicality. But then you look at the fan art that these people make. This is what I'm saying, what's in the water? Because they don't even see Donald Trump the way that we see him. They see Donald Trump on the stand. They see Rambo from the 1980s. It's extraordinary.

Or Nelson Mandela, I guess. Or Nelson Mandela. You're right. He's either a martyr or like a killing machine. It's absolute insanity. And so that's why I say, like, Who are the people that are being asked to participate in these polls? Are they part of the fan art club?

Are they part of the people who literally have distorted vision and are not looking at what we're looking at? I don't know. When little-known Congressman Mike Johnson suddenly became a Speaker of the House, people started discovering that he was a very serious Southern Baptist with a long history of extremely conservative religious views. Among those who pointed this out as co-writer of an article called Christian nationalism in the Speaker's Chair, is Baptist minister and the president and editor-in-chief of the award-winning magazine and website covering Baptist, evangelicals, and others, word and way.

Brian Kailer joins me now to educate us. Brian, thanks so much for coming on. Well, thanks so much for having me. So let's start with sort of where you started with the title of your piece. Christian nationalism is a very strong term, and honestly, for a lot of folks, a very scary one. And I guess first define it for us, and then we can get into what leads you to characterize Johnson in it. Yeah, that's important. It's a term that's thrown around a lot, but isn't always well-defined or used consistently. So it's good to make sure that we have our terms set here. So Christian

nationalism is this ideology that merges, that intermingles Christianity and Americanism, the sense that to be a good American is to be a Christian, and in many ways vice versa. And so this comes with this idea that America was allegedly founded to be a Christian nation, that it should continue to be a Christian nation today in a place that privileges Christian beliefs and privileges Christians. And I should also clarify here, when we say Christian nationalism, we often mean white Christian nationalism. Right. And we mean a very small slice of Christianity. It's really conservative Christianity that would be privileged over all other religious or non-religious traditions. Okay. And we've got Mike Johnson, whom you are describing as a Christian nationalist, I think correctly.

And he is, as I said, he's a very serious Southern Baptist. As you point out on your piece, Kevin McCarthy, the previous House speaker, is also a Southern Baptist. So what makes Johnson different? Yeah, that's a great question because it shows the variety of Southern Baptist tradition as well as evangelical evangelical evangelical evangelical evangelical nationalist space. He's an activist first and foremost who is now in. public office. Kevin McCarthy is much more of an institutionalist. He's much more of a political figure. And I don't mean that any way suggested his faith isn't sincere. Sure. But he's been guided in public policy. That's been his focus as opposed to being the activist in the religious sphere that we've seen with Johnson. Gotcha. So let's get into Johnson's history. And I want to start, I'm not necessarily going chronologically here, but I think in terms maybe of importance. So let's talk about a group called the Alliance Defending Freedom, because it's with this organization that Johnson did a lot of legal work in the service of Christian nationalism. And that's a huge part of this, isn't it? It is. So, I mean, that is

much of his background is looking at his work as an attorney. And his work as an attorney for these groups that are pushing Christian nationalism. ADF is probably the most significant one, both in the amount of time that he spent with them as well as the cases that they've covered. I mean, this is an organization that was founded with the purpose of making sure that we would be a Christian nation. to keep Christian objects in the public square, fighting to implement conservative Christian beliefs on same-sex marriage and relationships, on abortion. So the fact that he was with this group for so long is a significant red flag for someone in public office when it comes to thinking about Christian nationalism. And for people who don't know, the ADF worked on just to give a stark example,

the Dobbs case that overturned Roe v. Wade has a huge ADF component to it, right? Arguably, it would have happened without the Mississippi law that they helped write. And that was after his time with them, but that helps show this is the type of organization that he devoted his career before public office with serving. So in addition to ADF, where, as you say, he did a lot of work, there's also an organization called Freedom Guard that he started, correct? Yeah, that's his own kind of private law firm. And a lot of times the ADF, and he also was very briefly with First Liberty, another very similar minded organization, a lot of times their attorneys kind of have their own firms and they're affiliated with ADF. and they might come work alongside on a specific case. And so not always are ADF-affiliated attorneys only with ADF for the whole time. And so he's got his own firm where he's focusing. And again, when you look at the list of clients that he's working with at Freedom Guard,

it's a group that tells you exactly what his legal focus was. He says he represented the Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America, National Day of Prayer Task Force, and answers in Genesis, which has the Ark Encounter Amusement Park in Kentucky, to say that the world is only 6,000 years old and that dinosaurs therefore lived alongside humans. It's Flintstones stuff. I mean, it is, only, you know, with more prayer and less humor. Right.

That's gotten some more attention than anything else because it does seem so bizarre and out there. The big thing about this in terms of the legal aspects were that he worked with this answers in Genesis to try to have state tax money used to develop this arc encounter. That's correct. But I also think it's important to focus that, I mean, because, you know, attorneys don't always necessarily agree with their clients. But with Johnson, we know from the record that it's not just that he was fighting to get public taxpayer funds for this organization and their arc encounter. But he has a long-term relationship supporting answers in Genesis that continues to this day. He's written for them. He has spoken in the past and an answers in Genesis event. He and his wife are scheduled to speak at one of their events coming up in April. So he is very much, he's had Ken Ham, who leads answers in Genesis. He's interviewed him on various programs. So he's very much a supporter of their ideology, not just assisting them as an attorney. Yeah, absolutely. The reason I bring up the money aspect, the tax money in particular, is that as you point out in the article, another thing that Johnson is kind of big on is he wants churches to be able to use tax deductible money to support political candidates. That's correct. He's been a strong push against the so-called Johnson Amendment, which ironically named in this case because it's not related to him. It's named after Lyndon Johnson, even though

that's not the language the IRS used. They call it the political campaign activity ban, which actually impacts all 501C3 tax-exempt nonprofit organizations, which basically has the simple premise that if you're getting tax-exempt funds, then you shouldn't be able to use that money to interfere and engage in partisan campaigns, that partisan campaign money should be taxed money. So this has been a long push. Actually, ADF that Johnson worked for that we were just talking about a moment ago. They have really led the effort against the political campaign activity ban for better than 15 years. And then now they have some allies in Congress and for a while in the White House with Donald Trump that want to get rid of this IRS rule. And Johnson has been one of the key allies in pushing this,

which would make, I mean, we have a lot of partisan campaigning in houses of worship already, and we have a lot of dark money and super PACs and all of this kind of. But this would be a whole another ballgame to allow partisan money to be funneled into tax-exempt houses of worship where the donors wouldn't be disclosed. And we would see this money going into our political campaigns. It would be a game changer, kind of like Citizens United was. And just a few years ago, Johnson introduced, I guess it was the Free Speech Fairness Act in order to sort of push this forward. Yes, that's correct. Or will innately named there. I mean, pastors already have free speech. They can say whatever they want from the poll. But churches actually can decide that they want to endorse candidates. They just can't do it while keeping a tax-exempt status. They get to decide what they would like to be, whether they want to be a nonprofit tax-exempt or if they want to be engaged in partisan politics. We already have that free speech right. So what is the conservative Baptist network and what is Johnson's involvement in it?

Yeah, so the Southern Baptist Convention throughout the 80s into the early 90s took a significant rightward turn, became much more conservative theologically, became much more engaged in supporting Republican politics. And that's been significant because it's the nation's largest Protestant denomination. And yet, despite all of this, there is a group that over the last two years wants the Southern Baptist Convention to be even more fundamentalist, even more engaged in GOP politics. It's very much a Trumpian wing. There's a lot of Trumpian media figures that have been throwing their weight behind the Conservative Abbas Network. Charlie Kirk has spoken at one of their events. Eric Batakas, Jenna Ellis, a number of others have supported their work and have written and spoken affirming the conservative Baptist Network. So this was one of the things that one of the first things that I started digging into Johnson and then started realizing, once I scratched the surface, just all of his Christian nationalism ties that show up elsewhere, was trying to figure his church ties because he was for a number of years a member at the church that the leader of the Conservative Baptist Network pastors.

Now, he seems to have left that church in the last couple of years, although it seems to be more for family reasons with his kids and so forth, because he's still been very supportive of the Concerted Baptist Network and even cut a video for one of their events back in 2020 and spoke at an event. And so he's supporting this effort that wants to take the nation's largest Protestant denomination and have it fight. even harder against so-called critical race theory, have it shut down any efforts to deal with clergy sexual abuse, and have it more engaged in supporting partisan politics for the Republican Party. As you said, he's cut videos for CBN. My understanding is the, I don't know, was it the founder, Brad Jerkovich, is he the one that is now? There's some panky-panky going on there. Jerkivik's got his own problems in his local church. Some people think he's been misusing, using funds and so forth. Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler are kind of the key archivocations

of the earlier rightward shift of the SBC. Both of them have had clergy sex abuse scandals related with them, Patterson, for basically turning a blind eye. Paul Presler has been accused by multiple men in court filings of unwanted sexual advances and even rape. And so all of them are tied to these efforts that Johnson has been involved in, both with CBN, as well as Johnson briefly led a law school that never actually opened that was to be named for Paul Presler, who has been accused of rape and unwanted sexual advances.

Yeah, that was the next thing I was going to ask you about, because that's a weird little story about this Presler School of Law, which, like you said, never actually opened. Yeah, this is one of those things. I mean, I've been writing, covering Baptist Life and Brody Evangelical Life for years. And so I remember when all the Presler Law School stuff happened more than a decade ago. And then as I'm, you know, working on this piece about Johnson with Jeremy, I realize, wait a minute, Mike Johnson was also at the Presler Law School. I mean, he just kept popping up, ADF, Pressler Law School. It felt like like a Forrest Gump of, Christian nationalism. He's just, he's just been there all along. All of these stories that I've

written about before had not, you know, named him. He's showing up in all of them. And it's a crazy story, you know, one to name the school after figure, while the allegations weren't widely publicly known at the time. I mean, I had heard rumors long before that point about Pressler. You got to think people on the ground probably had heard significant rumors about him as well, but even just the school. They had accreditation problems. There were trustee fights and faculty and lots of allegations and lawsuits that went on for several years. The Louisiana College case is a long, complicated mess. And there's Johnson right there in the middle of this effort to create a bastion of, you know, conservative activist law school that, again, never actually opened,

despite the school spending more than $5 million trying to create it. Right. I guess the best way to put this maybe, and tell me if I'm wrong. It's not a stretch to say that Mike Johnson believes a lot of things because in his opinion, the Bible says so. He also believes that this should be the basis of American law. And this is sort of a good way maybe to define a Christian nationalist. Yeah, that's right. I think that's what's really important in his new role, as he's both since being elected a speaker and before, he's very clear that he thinks this is a Christian nation. We're supposed to be that way, that our laws should reflect that, that elected officials are only there because God put them there, right, to serve and do God's will. And so that's what's really important,

I think, in all of this, there's a lot of these little stories, the Prusler story, the Ark, theme park, whatever. All those are sometimes funny and interesting. But the real danger here is his vision of what America should be. And it's an inherently undemocratic, small D, undemocratic vision, because in a pluralistic society to decide that only one sliver of one faith gets to make all the rules and gets extra rights and privileges, that's a significant problem. And worse, it's based on false and sometimes made up history to try to justify this political philosophy. Yeah. And, you know, obviously there's been a lot of talk already about his stances on things like abortion and LGBT rights, which his stance on those being, as far as I can tell to pretty much he would like to legislate those people out of existence. I mean, this goes deeper than that. It goes to birth control. It goes to possibly things even like mixed marriages, right? I mean, all of this could be on the line here because birth control and

interracial marriages and, you know, these are some of the earlier court decisions that help set the groundwork for Roe v. Wade and other decisions that they're targeting. And so if you look at a lot of the people that Johnson has associated and worked with over the years, the people that he continues to praise today as mentors, as allies. Some of them have been saying this out loud, have been targeting some of those very things. And so I think we should be concerned that that is the type of country Johnson would want to see. Is it fair to say that he is possibly the most powerful Christian nationalist in at least a modern history of America? I think that's a fair assessment, particularly to the level. Right. So Christian nationalism, scholars that do a lot of work on

this, we'll talk about it being a continuum. So, you know, it's not that you're either a Christian nationalist or you're not. You have some people might score somewhat high on the Christian nationalism scale. And then other people are, you know, more off the charts. And Johnson seems to be to the far end of one side of the continuum Christian national. So while we've had significant, powerful figures that have pushed some aspects of Christian nationalism, I mean, certainly we saw that with Trump, though, a lot of that wasn't the sincere belief level that we seem to have at Johnson. I think as far as having someone who's so devoted to this cause, two heartbeats away from the presidency. I mean, yeah, in our modern era, this is unprecedented. I mean, I suppose

maybe Mike Pence might be another example. Would you consider him a Christian nationalist? Yeah, I think that's very fair to call Mike Pence. He very much espouses Christian nationalism. I think that he is, like Johnson said, that we are a Christian nation and, you know, wants to legislate that today. So that would probably be, you know, the strongest competitor. You know, George W. Bush had some of it, but I don't think it was as strong as we would see with Pence or Johnson. I think a key difference with Pence and Johnson is, you know, Pence did become more of an institutionalist. I mean, we saw that on January 6th. And Johnson has this, he has this record of activism through these legal organizations we've talked about. He has this record of activism and denominational fights and denominational life that we haven't seen.

So he seems to be much more religiously minded in his motivations in office than we would see with even Pence. Yeah, no, I think that's fair. Before I let you go, I have to ask you about this. On Sunday, Rolling Stone wrote up a 22 video that a Twitter user named, I think, receipt mavened dug up. And the video was Johnson explaining that he uses a piece of software called Covenant Eyes that scans your phone, computer, etc., to see if you've been looking at porn and other naughty sites. And he said that he and his 17-year-old son are what they call accountability partners, meaning the software sends a report to each of them about. the other. And my question is, and I sincerely mean this with absolutely no snark, is this a normal sort of not at all uncommon type of thing in conservative religious circles, or is this a red flag? This is much more normal. Yeah, I think it seems to outsiders. It seems very unusual. That's what I suspected. I grew up in a Southern Baptist church. I went to a Southern Baptist College. I'm very familiar with this concept. The technology has changed and improved, but the basic idea, I mean, I know not necessarily that platform, but I know of platforms like that.

To me, the only thing that was a little problematic issue that I think would be unusual for the subculture was pairing up with his minor son. So normally it would be more of like when I was in college, it was the idea of like find a friend that would be your accountability partner. You might see like a deacon to a deacon, you know, like more of an adult adult and a teenager teenager, you know, pairing. That minor pairing, I think, is probably a little bit more outside of the intention of this philosophy. But the headlines have made this like this is, you know, really big, really weird. And again, I'm like, that's not that unusual. The real issue is let's look at what he wants to do in legislating for our country. Like, that's the part that we should really be

concerned about. No, for sure. And look, I'm an East Coast godless heathen. But I do have that lot of religious friends. I have a one of my dearest friends is a divinity school graduate. it. And I sort of had this suspicion as I was reading this that, I bet this isn't all that uncommon. It's just that people like me tend to look at this and laugh. But I bet this is a lot more common than I think. And I'm glad that was bored out. Yeah, that's right. I think it just again, this is just to have someone as Speaker of the House. Like, you know, it's common in the evangelical culture that's, you know, close to a quarter of the U.S. population. But we just haven't had someone in this whole high profile opposition before. Brian Keller, thank you so much.

for joining us. I learned a lot listening to you. And I've become a big fan of word and way recently, so I encourage our listeners to check it out. There's some really, really interesting writing there. Brian, thanks again. Well, thank you. I appreciate it. Folks, I am very happy to welcome to the new abnormal investigative reporter whose beat is criminal justice, Annot Rubin, who just wrote a piece in ProPublica entitled The Scandal That Never happened. The all-white judges of Louisiana's Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal systematically ignored thousands of claims from prisoners, most of them black, who said they had been wrongfully convicted. Efforts to expose the decade-long injustice went unheard. Annot, let's start from the very beginning.

How did you get hip to what was happening with Louisiana's Fifth Circuit Court and then begin your investigation? Yeah, thank you for having me. I first heard about this from a source who said that there was a former federal law clerk who was serving time in a Louisiana prison at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola and who was working on a petition trying to get the U.S. Supreme Court to pay attention to and to weigh in on this thing that these judges in Louisiana had done. And I very quickly made contact with this clerk. and he sent me the petition that he was working on. And it was shocking. The judges in Louisiana Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal,

which was one of five appellate courts in the state of Louisiana, had for 13 years just not read a single petition from a prisoner representing themselves. So they call them pro se prisoners. And that's prisoners who can't afford an attorney. The Sixth Amendment grants everybody in the U.S., the right to an attorney while they're being prosecuted. And in most states, you can also have an attorney for one initial appeal. Everything after that is called the post-condiction process and more than 80% of prisoners are on their own for that part. And so they have no choice but to write their own petitions and to try to get the courts to pay attention. And many of them are making claims about being unjustly prosecuted. And here was this appellate court responsible for hearing challenges from four parishes in Louisiana. That's what Louisiana calls it, a county. a parish. And they just decided in 1994 that they would no longer meet them. This is their job,

right? This is a part of their job and their responsibility as judges. It's a central part of their job and responsibility. So let's go into it's a central part of their job and responsibility. I'm a podcaster. If I decided that, you know what, I'm no longer going to do interviews. I'm just not going to do them. Like I don't think that I would be a podcaster. for very long. So I'm curious as to how something so in your face about their job and their essential to their position goes unnoticed for over a decade. Well, I think that is part of what really drew me to this story is that the fact that nobody noticed and lots of people in the courthouse knew what was happening. The judges had made this decision in secret in 1994,

But in order to keep processing these petitions, they tasked some high-level employees with reading them and ruling on them. And when I say ruling, I mean mostly denying all of them, except for some technical grants here and there. So they got this high-level employee to make a list. He made a list of 15 rulings, 14 of them were denials. And he would just, you know, glance them over. And then he would tell his secretary, you know, we're doing a number. number seven on this one. And the ruling was about two sentences. It was always really vague, vague enough to fit a wide range of claims. So there were people involved in processing these and people who participated in this illegal practice. And I think that is part of what drew me to this story,

is the lack of outrage and the fact that nobody thought throughout this process that this was insane. I felt was indicative of a much larger problem that goes far beyond this one appellate court in Louisiana and is really about how we treat people who have been convicted in this country. And the going thinking at this court seemed to be that once you were convicted of a crime, you were guilty. And this, despite the fact that Louisiana is perennially the exonerations capital of the United States per capita. And certainly, the incarceration capital of the United States. But, you know, all of us have watched in these last decades, thousands of exonerations that have shown us very clearly that state courts routinely

make horrendous mistakes. And so to think that we then give prisoners no avenue through which to call attention to those mistakes is terrifying. It's terrifying. And that, I think, is what was most shocking about this, was the lack of shock, the lack of outrage. which seems to tell me, you know, it seemed to me that that was saying that we have a much bigger problem than this one sort of rogue court. Tell us about now one of the people that you lift up in your piece, which is Nathan Brown. Can you give us the primer on Nathan Brown's case and why that caught your attention in the way that it did? Nathan Brown was arrested. I believe it was in 1997, maybe a couple years before, but he was arrested.

on the night that a woman in the apartment complex where he lived with his mother was assaulted. She had been assaulted in the courtyard. She was a white woman in her 40s. When the police arrived, she described her assailant as a young black man. And the security guard suggested to the sheriff's deputies in Jefferson Parish in Louisiana that they go and question Nathan Brown, who was one of the few black tenants in the complex. Nathan Brown was in his pajamas when they knocked on the door. He was rocking his baby daughter to sleep.

And they brought him outside. They put him in handcuffs. They took him to a squad car at the back of the complex where the victim was waiting. And they shined the light on him. And they asked her to identify him. When she couldn't identify him, they allowed her to get, they told him to turn around and they allowed her to get really close to him and to smell him because she had told the sheriff's deputies that her assailant had a really strong, foul body odor.

Nathan Brown smelled like soap. That's something she later testified at trial. And that convinced her that it was him. She reasoned that he must have taken a shower or a bath to hide the smell and it must be him. That was just the first outrageous thing in Nathan Brown's case. You know, after one day trial, he was convicted of attempted aggravated rape. His defense attorney failed to do all sorts of things like introduce evidence that he didn't have any bruises on his body, even though she had told the investigators that she had fended off her attacker with her high-heeled shoe and that she just hit him repeatedly until he fled on his bicycle. His defense attorney did not call into question huge discrepancies in the witness's testimony and didn't ask for DNA evidence, which Nathan Brown said later in a petition would have proven his innocence. The way I came to Nathan Brown's story is at some point, word of what the judges had done made its way to the prisoners in at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola. And they started to organize a movement, they called it,

and to get everyone who had petitioned the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal during these relevant years that the judges were not reading the petitions, to get them to file a petition to the state Supreme Court saying, hey, we deserve a new hearing on these claims. We never got a hearing on these claims. Rather than grant them that, the Louisiana Supreme Court said, no, no, we don't want to, you know, we shouldn't saddle other judges with this extra work and it's not fair to ask taxpayers to pay a couple hundred thousand dollars

to process these. We're going to send them back to the Fifth Circuit. The judges there are going to reconsider these claims as though they had considered them a first time and decide whether the rulings had been legally correct, correct on the merits. And so the Fifth Circuit judges, not the same ones whose names appeared on the fake petitions, but another handful of judges reviewed the claims and found that they had done nothing wrong the first time around, even though nobody had read them. One of the petitioners whose cases got sent back to the Fifth Circuit was Nathan Brown. And so at some point, I started to look at the list of these petitioners and to compare them to the list of exonerations in Louisiana. Because I really wanted to show that many of these claims have merit.

And I thought that the easiest way to show that would be by focusing on someone who was exonerated by DNA. And so Nathan Brown was one of these claimants and his case got sent back to the Fifth Circuit and the judges there looked at what they had done the first time or not done the first time. And they said, nope, his claims that his defense attorney was ineffective. Those are wrong because, you know, his failure to impeach a witness, his failure to introduce certain evidence, his failure to ask for a DNA test, all of that could be considered within the scope of trial strategy. So writ denied. We made no mistake. We stand with the earlier rulings of this court. And a few years later, Nathan Brown got the Innocence Project to take his case and he was exonerated.

Mm-mm-mm. Oh, and not. So that was a case that was really important to us to highlight from the beginning and to sort of follow it through because it really shows you what's at stake. This is a thing that I feel like we have learned over the course of the last several years in America. As we've watched Donald Trump and his multiple cases, and we've watched the fact that a Supreme Court justice is essentially akin to a king, that these judges can do whatever the hell they want, that they write their own wrongs or not, they decide whether they recuse themselves or not, and they have these lifetime appointments. Here you have these people that for 13 years did not do their job. What happens to them? Tell us what happens to these judges? You had mentioned earlier, we called the story the scandal that never happened. And the reason for that is that every time someone had sort of tried to blow the lid off of this,

it just got silenced again. So these are state court judges, which means to your earlier point, they don't get lifetime appointments. However, the federal judges who oversee, you know, who are supposed to be able to step in and correct state court mistakes do get lifetime appointments. And part of the problem here and part of the reason that this petition that ultimately went to the U.S. Supreme Court and was rejected was not granted a hearing, part of the reason for that rejection is a law called EDPA. It's the anti-terrorism and effective death penalty act. And it was enacted during the Clinton administration as part of a slew of these so-called tough-on-crime bills. It doesn't get as much attention as his 1994 bill that created all the sentence enhancements and really contributed to mass incarceration in a pretty big way. But this is the, EDPA is the law that threw away the key after we locked people up. And what it does is it prevents federal judges from being able to step in when state courts make mistakes in criminal cases.

The way that the law has been interpreted by an increasingly conservative Supreme Court over the years is that almost no mistake is too grave for a federal judge to be allowed to step in and overturn a conviction. And so when these state judges make these huge mistakes, they can no longer get overturned by a federal court. There is no one who's going to undo their work like there used to be. And so they've grown increasingly brazen since EDPO was enacted. I guess the short answer to your question is nothing. Nothing happens to these judges because I'll backtrack a little on the story. The way that this first was exposed is that a high level court employee, the very man who was tasked with making this list of rulings and denying all the claims, he committed suicide.

I mean, in the like you can't, and I say you can't write this, you did, but like your piece reads like a Grisham novel. Do you know what I'm saying? Like in terms of the characters and what the people and what has happened. Please tell folks what happened in this situation with Gerald Peterson in 2007. So in 2007, this staff director named Gerald Peterson took his own life inside the Fifth Circuit courthouse. And he went to great lengths to make sure that the contents of a suicide note would make it to the public. He sent one of those notes to the Norlands Times Picayune, which was the biggest paper in the state at the time. And another one to the Louisiana Judiciary Commission, which is a panel responsible for investigating judicial wrongdoing. The police

report that we got as part of this reporting is written by the police officer who shows up just minutes after the suicide. And he's trying to sort of suss out why this guy would want to take his own life in the office. And he eventually gets to the chief judge, a man named Edward Dufran. Do France has to him, you know, he had personal problems. You know, he's being kind of evasive. He said they had a meeting with him a few days before, but he won't give him straight answers. He says he wants to go back and look again for a suicide note. He thinks it's strange that there was no suicide note. And the judge offers to look with him the second time and doesn't tell him that he's already read the suicide note, which was delivered to his chambers earlier that morning from Peterson's secretary. And in that suicide note, Gerald Peterson lays bare this entire system. And he's, and he's, he says, you know, he was being fired for something unrelated to this. But essentially, he says, you know, who are you to talk to me about the way I do my work? Who are you to tell me that I've done something wrong when you've been doing this for 13 years? And he lays out the whole system and he sends a copy of his letter to the paper and a copy to the Judicial Commission. A few days later,

you know, the paper dealt a little piece about this guy who killed himself in the courtroom. No mention of the suicide note that he had sent to the paper. In fact, they wouldn't mention it for about 14 months. And the Judiciary Commission launches an investigation, but it stays secret as Judiciary Commission investigations do in Louisiana unless they end in discipline. You know, this one focused on the chief judge and was apparently dropped when he died, except he died three and a half years later. So nothing came of it. And it just died. And the only person left who knew what was happening was this defense attorney whom Gerald Peterson had confided in long before he had died. to whom he had given proof of what the judges had done. And she sort of was really nervous to do

anything about it. And eventually she took the documents he gave her and she drove them into the Louisiana state penitentiary in Angola. And then again, there was this big, you know, the prisoners tried to organize a movement. They go to the state Supreme Court. This defense attorney convinces the Times Picayune more than a year later to finally write about what was, you know, what Gerald Peterson had tried to expose. And then again, it dies down. The state Supreme Court says, yeah, we'll let the Fifth Circuit judges fix this. It's one of the stories that people have tried to expose again and again, and somehow it's silenced every time. I think that that's part of what attracted me to it. You know, this idea that these men and women who were petitioning the courts for so many

years who were working so hard on, you know, trying to write their petitions in a language that they did not learn and trying to get someone to listen to their pleas that they mattered so little that this just never exploded. Well, Annot, I will say, one, your writing is superb. Thank you. I applaud you for unearthing this again. For I don't even know, you know, what number time this is at this point. But I really want everyone listening, because this is how stories don't die,

is that you share them over and over and over again. So folks, go to ProPublica and read and share. share the scandal that never happened, put it on every social media platform because this is a travesty and this is just indicative of Jim Crow policies, of an abuse of power and how broken our judicial system is. And it only gets fixed when there is light that is shown on it. So Anna, thank you so much for making the time to join the new abnormal. Really, really, really, really appreciate you and the work that you're doing. Thank you so much. This has really been a pleasure. I really appreciate you calling attention to the piece.

Absolutely. Andy Levy. Danielle, kick us off. Who's your fuck that guy? Oh, my God. Well, this one, I mean, look, this man is going to be in the Hall of Fame. He's only been on the job for what, a week or two. He's at least been the fuck that guy twice already.

Mike Johnson, speaker of the house. And you'll say, Danielle, but what is he done now? What hasn't this motherfucker done? Is the better question? because he's spent a lot of time since he's become speaker scrubbing his social media accounts so that we don't realize what a crazy human being has been elected two heartbeats away from the White House. But this one, this new thing, it's not the conversion therapy. It's not the look in the Bible and get an idea of what my perspective is on life. It's even better. So apparently,

according to reports, a clip has resurfaced and you would say, oh, is it from 2000? Is it from, you know, some far off place like the 90s? No, no, Andy, it isn't. It's a clip from last year, from 2022. When he has admitted that he and his son, his 17-year-old son, oh, God. Monitor each other's porn intake. Monitor each other's porn intake.

Here's an idea if you want to monitor your porn intake. Don't watch porn. I don't think you need an app for it. I don't think that you need an accountability partner. And I certainly don't fucking think that your accountability partner should be your teenage son. But what do I know? I'm just some weirdo, queer, black, and lesbian, you know? What do I know?

Because according to him, I'm the one that has the problem. This man is so fucking beyond creep fest. So beyond it. And I'm like, did no one? Did no one think to fucking vet this man? No one at all, really just a quick, quick Google search before all the Republicans decided that this was their guy. Every time I think that things can't get worse, Andy, every fucking time. It's like, hold my beer or hold my porn.

So for that reason, Mike Johnson, you fucking creep. Not because you watch porn. I'm not porn shaming. but because of just how creepy of a fucking human being you are, you are my fuck that guy. By far the creepiest part of this is that it's his 17-year-old son that's his accountability partner. By the way, I'm assuming this is his white son.

I don't really know. Who knows? Who knows? The black son is only 11 years younger than him, keep in mind. Right. So the black son is older than the white son. Yes. Yeah.

Okay, that's what I thought, yeah. Which since he's 40 would make it a little. little bit more appropriate. Yes, it would, actually. Yeah, actually it would. The person who dug up this video, their Twitter name is receipt maven, made a really good point and said a U.S. Congressman is allowing a third-party tech company to scan all of his electronic devices daily and then uploading reports to his son about what he's watching or not watching. This is a security problem. Unless Johnson has a completely separate group of computers and phones that he doesn't have this software installed on. This is an absolute security issue. And someone needs to do something

about this because the Speaker of the House should not be having all of his internet usage and emails and whatever scanned by any company. Remember when we cared about servers? I know. Right, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. What a fucking joke. Beyond the creep factor, this is, I think this sounds to me like a national security issue. So fuck that guy. Mm-mm-mm. Okay, Andy. It's the beginning of a great week. It's my birthday week, so make this good. I'm sure clips will be great later this week, too. My fuck-that guy is not your birthday present, Daniel. Thank you. Because it's not fun in the least. A mayor in a small town in Alabama killed himself on Friday. Why did he do this? He was the mayor of a small town called Smith Station. He was also the pastor at the First Baptist. church in Phoenix City. All of last week, his private life was kind of blown up by this conservative blog called 1819 News, which I'm assuming is where they want the country to go back

to. I'm assuming that's why it's going that way. And basically he was outed as someone who had sort of a secret life under the pseudonym Brittany Blair Summerlin. And he posted pictures of himself wearing dresses and wearing women's clothing in general and basically calling himself a transgender curvy girl. This came out and this 1819 news, I think published, it was either four or five different articles on this as if it was the most important thing in the world. And at first, Copeland sort of defended himself. He said, look, this is a hobby I use for getting rid of stress. He asked 1819 news not to out him. They did it anyway. And, you know, he said, yes, I have taken pictures with my wife and the privacy of our home in an attempt of humor because

I know I'm not a handsome man nor a beautiful woman either. On Friday, some of the deputies in the town I guess were called to do a wellness check on him. And he was in his car and he stepped out of his car and shot himself in front of them. And the whole thing is just unbelievably sad and disgusting and just an obvious example of how certain people in this country want us all to have to live. And beyond that, I don't have much to say. It's just, it's so gross and disgusting. And, you know, I wasn't sure if I wanted to do it for fuck that guy. But Danielle, as you pointed out, before we started recording it's important.

And I actually tweeted about it to the other day. And I don't tend to tweet that much these days. It is important. You're right. And I know that. And people need to know that this kind of shit is going on throughout the country. So to all of you at 1819 news, fuck those guys. Yeah.

You're disgusting. and why this is important is because there are real world, real life penalties for what these anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-queer people are trying to do, right? When you create an environment that is so unsafe for people to show up as who they are, you provide no choice and no pathway for them except to take their own lives. And we know because if you look at the statistics, of people in the LGBTQ community and their rates of suicide are a hell of a lot higher than the national average. And there is a reason for that. So inclusion, care, empathy, respect, these things that should not be taken for granted, these things that have completely been put in the sewer

because of this right-wing, white supremacist, anti-LGBQ party, these are the results of that. And it's horrific. So for that reason, all of those people that were involved in this quote unquote story should go to hell. So fuck those guys. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of the new abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going. This podcast is a Daily Beast production with production by Jesse Cannon and Seamus Calder.

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