In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, I sit down with Texas Rep. James Lankford (R-Texas) to talk about his opposition to a bill that would force teachers in public schools to display the Ten Commandments in their classrooms.
00:01:05.000People who are like, you're in seminary, you're studying to become a minister.
00:01:09.000Why wouldn't you want the Ten Commandments in every classroom?
00:01:12.000So I recognize that it's kind of a weird position to be in.
00:01:16.000But I grew up in a tradition that cherished the separation of church and state, not just because it protects the church or protects democracy, but it is what allows this democracy to happen where we can all have different faith traditions and live together in peace.
00:01:36.000And so any attempt to erode that boundary, I feel like I have a special obligation to speak out against it.
00:01:42.000And so I told my colleagues that I thought the bill was unconstitutional.
00:01:48.000But I went one step further and I said I thought the bill was un-Christian, which again probably sounds weird to people.
00:01:54.000But in all of Jesus' teachings, he's always focused on the outsider, the outcast, the person who's left out or the person who's different.
00:02:03.000And so as a Christian, I think my concern is for the Muslim kid and the Jewish kid, the Hindu kid, the atheist kid who's sitting in the classroom, who now has a poster on the wall forced by the government that says, you know, your religion is inferior or you're not welcome here.
00:02:21.000And I just think if Jesus saw that, he would weep for those students and would demand that we love them as ourselves.
00:02:29.000And so that's why I kind of spoke out against the bill on theological grounds, not just constitutional grounds.
00:03:16.000And that sounds fine to most people until you realize there's this huge network of Christian nationalist organizations that are already preparing to flood every school with these Ten Commandments posters for all of their classrooms.
00:03:30.000So the donation thing sounds like it's kind of innocuous until you realize that the donations are already ready to go from all these outside groups.
00:03:39.000So there's going to be legal challenges, of course, but if it's not struck down in the courts, every teacher is going to have to put up the Ten Commandments in their classroom against their wills, even if they don't want to.
00:03:49.000I mean, I just, again, speaking as a Christian, if we have to force people to put up a poster, to me, that means that we have a dead religion, a religion that no longer moves people, a religion that no longer speaks to people's hearts.
00:04:04.000If we have to prove our legitimacy by micromanaging what teachers put up in their classroom, I mean, to me, that means we have a real crisis in our faith.
00:04:12.000We should be leading by example, not by mandate.
00:04:16.000How did this get proposed, and what is the support for it?
00:04:20.000Well, the support is pretty broad within the Republican caucus.
00:04:24.000Again, I serve in the state legislature.
00:04:53.000So I literally can't get anything done without working on a bipartisan basis.
00:04:58.000It's actually a blessing in this modern era where we're all tribalized and polarized that I am forced to work with people who have completely different views than I do.
00:05:10.000In D.C., from what I hear, I've only been to D.C. a few times in my life, but from what I hear, you're really kind of separated physically from your colleagues.
00:05:19.000You don't spend a lot of time talking to each other anymore.
00:05:21.000It's a lot of fundraising and events and not really a lot of relationship building.
00:05:26.000In the state capitol, you don't have the same media scrutiny, the same spotlight.
00:05:32.000So we can still get to know each other and go out to eat with each other and meet each other's families.
00:05:37.000And I actually think it's something that we could benefit from at the national level is that kind of camaraderie and professional working relationships with people across the aisle.
00:05:50.000Casey Gabbard told me she tried to do a lot of that when she was a congresswoman.
00:05:56.000And she said it was very difficult and she would get pushback from other Democrats.
00:06:00.000Yeah, the system doesn't encourage that at the national level.
00:06:04.000Here, we do not, I think in D.C., the minority party appoints the committee chairs or ranking members.
00:06:13.000Here at the state level, the Speaker of the House who is elected by Republicans and Democrats, that's the person who decides what committee you're on and what bills you can get passed.
00:06:23.000And so in some ways, that forces you to be loyal to the body rather than loyal to your party or your caucus.
00:06:30.000Again, I'm proud to be part of the Democratic caucus, but I literally can't get anything done if I don't have some kind of Republican support.
00:06:39.000And so that just, and I get a lot, you know, I'm able to pass a lot of bills as a Democrat, and it's because I have good relationships with my colleagues on the other side of the aisle.
00:06:48.000But yeah, on the Ten Commandments issue, it kind of became one of these culture war fights.
00:06:53.000And so there wasn't room to have kind of an honest conversation about what it was.
00:07:36.000I try to always take someone's argument at face value and assume best intentions.
00:07:42.000This is how I'm able to work in a place like the legislature here in Texas, because I try to listen to what someone's argument is.
00:07:48.000And if I'm being charitable, the best argument for this is that the kids are not all right.
00:07:56.000Young people are growing up without the structure of faith, whether it's the Christian faith or Islam or Judaism or Hinduism, whatever it may be.
00:08:06.000Students are just less religious than they once were.
00:08:08.000People are less religious than they once were.
00:08:12.000And so this rise in mental health issues, anxiety, depression among young people, there are folks out there, and I would even put myself in this camp, who say it's that children are growing up in an incoherent universe.
00:08:28.000There's not a tradition, a story that helps them make sense of their lives in a profound, almost cosmic way, which is necessary for human beings.
00:08:37.000I mean, no matter who you are, you need that structure and that meaning in your life.
00:08:43.000And so I recognize that as a problem, but what I firmly and passionately believe is that the government forcing teachers to put up a poster actually makes that problem worse.
00:08:55.000Because I think, and again, I was a middle school teacher before I became a politician, so I know students, they have the best BS detector around, right?
00:09:05.000They are now going to, I think this bill will create a whole new generation of atheists who think that my religion, my faith tradition, that means everything to me, is more about power than it is about love.
00:09:41.000And that this imposing this on kids in school, in non-religious schools, just seems kind of crazy.
00:09:49.000Well, and the staunchest defenders for the separation of church and state throughout American history were Protestant Christians, Baptists in particular, right?
00:09:57.000I mean, the letter Jefferson writes where he first uses that phrase, a wall of separation between church and state, was to the Danbury Baptists.
00:10:05.000Because, I mean, these Protestants were fleeing Europe as religious minorities, right?
00:10:13.000I mean, this is kind of essential to the founding of this country was religious freedom.
00:10:18.000And so those Christians understood that once the government starts preaching your religion, starts making decisions about your faith, that that doesn't lead anywhere good.
00:10:30.000And so we should be very suspicious of the state usurping the role of pastors and Sunday school teachers.
00:10:36.000I mean, if you want to deepen your faith, we have churches on every street corner.
00:10:41.000A lot of them don't have a lot of people in them, right?
00:10:43.000We've got mosques and temples and synagogues that have a ton of room in them.
00:10:47.000And so why would we have the government start to teach kids about or preach a certain religion when we have houses of worship that can do that?
00:10:56.000Yeah, I think it's also a really important point you made earlier that if you try to force kids into doing things, they don't like to do it.
00:11:03.000And especially if you try to force kids that they're secular and they come from households that maybe are atheists or agnostic, and then you have this on the wall and you impose it on them.
00:11:16.000They're going to think about it like they think about a lot of other government BS.
00:11:22.000I mean, I honestly think that Christianity has a lot to share with the world at this moment of kind of crisis everywhere.
00:11:32.000But this, again, is giving Christianity and religious people broadly a bad name.
00:11:37.000Because this is what people think about religious people, that we're more interested in imposing our faith or our values or our beliefs on others instead of living it out ourselves.
00:12:28.000I think a lot of it is well justified because organized religion has done a lot of damage to people, particularly if we're talking about this country.
00:12:41.000Now, in India, it may be a conversation about Hindu nationalism, but here the dominant religion is Christianity.
00:12:51.000And we've seen that too many churches, too many faith leaders have abused that trust.
00:12:59.000A lot of Gen Z, a lot of my fellow millennials, when they hear me talking about my faith and how it informs my public service, they're like, I've never heard of this kind of Christianity, right?
00:13:11.000Like I was told that if you wanted to be a Christian, you had to hate gay people.
00:13:16.000If you wanted to be a Christian, you had to want to control women.
00:13:19.000If you wanted to be a Christian, you had to reject science.
00:13:22.000And so when Gen Z and when millennials were faced with that choice, it was a pretty easy choice for them, right?
00:14:22.000It's part of why I made the decision to go to seminary because I was like, if I'm going to talk about my faith and my beliefs and my values in a public setting or on this podcast when millions of people are going to listen, I better know what I'm talking about.
00:14:37.000I better be thoughtful in how I approach these things because it has real power on people's lives.
00:14:43.000And so I think you've seen that from the beginning of the Christian tradition.
00:14:47.000You've seen it across traditions of those in power, whether it's people with political power, social power in terms of homosexuality or economic power using that faith to hurt and control other people.
00:15:01.000You know, let's take the issue of homosexuality in particular.
00:15:08.000One is something Jesus never talks about, even though gay people existed in the ancient world.
00:15:35.000This is going to sound weird, but he was like, think about 2,000 years from now, how difficult it'll be for people to tell the difference between a butt dial and a booty call, right?
00:15:46.000Like, those are two things that sound very similar on a piece of paper and they have very different meanings.
00:15:52.000And so, you know, so like in the Hebrew Bible, you do have this prohibition.
00:16:20.000I mean, I think in most of these violations of the law, you know, the punishment, if it's called an abomination, this punishment can sometimes be death.
00:16:30.000And this is true of eating certain foods, of planting two crops, different crops next to each other.
00:16:35.000Wearing two different types of shirts.
00:16:37.000And again, again, I'm not a rabbi, so I hesitate to be able to speak with authority on the Jewish scriptures, but this was a people who had found freedom from slavery in Egypt.
00:16:52.000And they were trying to be able to set themselves apart from that domination that they knew in Egypt.
00:16:58.000They wanted a completely new world where God was in charge, not some pharaoh, not some emperor.
00:17:04.000So this was a radical community they were trying to build.
00:17:07.000And so they put rules in place to remind themselves that while it may only take a few, you know, it may take a few weeks to get out of an empire, it takes a lifetime to get the empire out of you.
00:17:19.000So we now, 2,000, 3,000 years later in terms of the Jewish scriptures, we're now reading it with modern eyes, trying to interpret what they mean and then apply it to our modern context.
00:17:34.000Two, I think it's disrespectful to the Jewish people.
00:17:38.000Three, it's a misunderstanding of Christianity because the whole idea of Jesus' movement was that he was simplifying the law, right?
00:17:47.000He simplified it into two commandments, love God and love neighbor.
00:17:50.000Those are the only two commandments that we Christians should keep our focus on.
00:17:55.000And Jesus regularly got into conflicts with the religious authorities, right?
00:17:59.000Jesus is always getting in trouble with the church of his time because he is rejecting legalism and embracing the spirit of the law, which is loving your neighbor as yourself.
00:18:10.000And so in our modern context, that should mean loving our gay neighbors as ourselves.
00:18:17.000And so to me, you know, when I'm looking at the teachings of Jesus, I think it's very clear how we should treat those who are different, those who are left out, those who are on the edges.
00:18:28.000And I think trying to take the Hebrew tradition and interpret it for our own political benefit really does a lot of violence to that scripture.
00:18:38.000I mean, the word homosexuality wasn't even invented until the 19th century.
00:18:42.000So if you see the word homosexuality in your Bible, that's an interpretation.
00:18:45.000That's a translation and using a word that didn't even come around until thousands of years later.
00:18:52.000Well, what do you think it meant in the Old Testament, though?
00:18:55.000If you're looking at a literal translation of it, a man lying with another man is an abomination.
00:19:01.000What do you think they were trying to accomplish?
00:19:23.000You obviously had a patriarchal structure in the ancient world where it wasn't just about your commitment to your Wife, it really was about how land and wealth will be passed on to children.
00:19:37.000And so all those things were important to protect that family structure.
00:19:42.000So some of these ancient commandments, which again, I don't claim to know what the original meaning was, may have been put in place for some of those reasons.
00:19:52.000But again, if this was something that really was central to Jesus' ministry, I would think he would have said something about it, right?
00:20:02.000We have four gospels with tons of teachings from Jesus, and none of them are about this.
00:20:08.000So it just, I get suspicious when anybody, whether it's a televangelist or a politician, tells me that something is central to my faith when Jesus never talks about it.
00:20:18.000To me, that should, I think, ring alarm bells as to what is the agenda here.
00:20:27.000And I think if we're looking at the last 40, 50 years, the religious right has made a concerted effort to make homosexuality and abortion the two biggest issues for Christians.
00:20:39.000And, you know, the Southern Baptist Convention was pro-choice until the late 1970s.
00:20:46.000So this idea that to be a Christian means you have to be anti-gay and anti-abortion, there really is no historical, theological, biblical basis for that opinion.
00:20:55.000Well, when was abortion even invented?
00:20:58.000Well, there were certainly abortions in the ancient world.
00:21:02.000Well, there's some, there's, and again, I haven't stated this enough to say this definitively, but there are interpretations of certain passages from the Torah where some folks will even say that there is some subtle instructions for how to perform an abortion in the ancient world, certain things to drink, things like that.
00:21:23.000The point is that this idea that there is a set Christian orthodoxy on the issue of abortion is just not rooted in scripture.
00:21:32.000We can have an honest debate about it.
00:21:34.000If Pope Francis were to come back and sit at this table and tell me, James, I'm pro-life and anti-abortion.
00:21:43.000I am here to listen and respect that opinion.
00:21:46.000I have dear friends who are anti-abortion.
00:21:50.000All I'm asking is that for Christians who are pro-choice and who respect the bodily autonomy of women, that we be given the space to make our theological argument.
00:22:00.000Because I think there is a lot of biblical evidence to support that opinion.
00:22:05.000What do you think is the biblical evidence to support the opinion of being pro-abortion?
00:22:09.000So one, you know, in Genesis, God creates life by breathing life into the first human being, which we later call Adam, that life starts when you take your first breath.
00:22:22.000And that is actually the mainline position in Judaism, is that that's when life starts.
00:22:32.000Then if you think about it from a Christian perspective, what something interesting that Jesus does throughout his ministry is he is breaking first century norms about women, talking with women, learning from women, having women lieutenants in his movement.
00:22:48.000And this was something that was kind of unheard of in the first century.
00:22:52.000The longest conversation Jesus has with anybody in the whole Bible is with the Samaritan woman at the well.
00:22:59.000And so this affirmation of women as full and equal people is a huge part of the Jesus movement, especially the early church.
00:23:07.000And then the last, I think, story I would go to is the story of Mary.
00:23:12.000Mary is probably my favorite figure in the Bible, the mother of Jesus.
00:23:18.000And, you know, she's an oppressed peasant, teenage girl, living in poverty under an oppressive empire as a Jew.
00:23:28.000And she has a vision from God that she's going to give birth to a baby who's going to bring the powerful down from their thrones, going to scatter the proud, who's going to send the rich away empty.
00:23:40.000I mean, this revolutionary song that she sings, it's called the Magnificat.
00:23:45.000It's actually been banned by certain authoritarian regimes because it is so radical.
00:23:51.000But I say all this in terms of, in context of abortion, because before God comes over Mary and we have the incarnation, God asks for Mary's consent, which is remarkable.
00:24:07.000I mean, go back and read this in Luke.
00:24:10.000I mean, the angel comes down and asks Mary if this is something she wants to do.
00:24:16.000And she says, if it is God's will, let it be done.
00:24:40.000And to me, that is absolutely consistent with the ministry and life and death of Jesus.
00:24:46.000And so that's how I come down on that side of the issue.
00:24:49.000Again, I'm very open for my fellow Christians to disagree with that.
00:24:53.000And they may have scriptural passages they point to to be anti-abortion.
00:24:59.000And I think that's a debate that we should feel comfortable having.
00:25:02.000All I'm saying is that it shouldn't be assumed that just because you're a Christian, you are anti-gay or anti-abortion, because there are so many Christians out there who don't subscribe to either of those policy positions.
00:25:16.000So there's a lot of nuance if you're talking about abortion, right?
00:25:21.000Because you're not just talking about a woman's right to choose, but you're also talking about rape and incest.
00:25:48.000Because the polling indicates that the vast majority of Texans, the vast majority of Americans support exceptions for rape, incest, or threats to the mother's health.
00:25:58.000Now, I've had arguments with People that don't support that, though, which is interesting.
00:26:32.000But the question is, is a fetus or is an embryo a person with full legal rights that trump the rights of a woman?
00:26:40.000Or a girl, as you mentioned, because if you're a 16-year-old girl who's been raped, does that embryo or that fetus, does it have, does its rights trump the rights of that girl?
00:26:56.000And to me, that exposes kind of the lack of support for fetal personhood.
00:27:01.000Again, we can have conversations about limits to abortion, all those things.
00:27:05.000But I do think it's clear that most Americans believe that a woman or a girl should have the autonomy to make those decisions about their own body.
00:27:15.000I think most Americans probably would agree with that, but I think also most Americans are very uncomfortable with the concept of late-term abortions.
00:28:00.000Wade, there was a legal framework for states to be able to make decisions about how you regulate abortion.
00:28:06.000And so if a state decides that they wanted to ban elective late-term abortions, if those things happen, then that was completely fine within the framework of Roe versus Wade.
00:28:17.000But we're not having that conversation, right?
00:28:19.000We're having a conversation about a total extreme ban on abortion here in Texas.
00:28:25.000The thing about Roe versus Wade, though, was Roe versus Wade, the issue was that it was a federal thing and that it was supposed to be up to the states to make their own decisions, right?
00:28:36.000So how did it get passed in Texas that it was, I think it's six weeks, right?
00:29:57.000And even if there was no evidence, like say if a woman travels to see her in-laws or her parents or something like that and then has a miscarriage, that to me was very creepy.
00:30:11.000If this woman had traveled somewhere where abortion is legal and then lost her baby, they would then be accused.
00:30:18.000Even if they had not had an abortion, they would be questioned.
00:30:22.000And that, to me, is incredibly insensitive, especially when you take into consideration that some of these women might not have had abortions at all.
00:30:30.000They might have just lost the baby, which happens quite often where there are miscarriages.
00:30:35.000Aaron Powell, Jr.: It's interesting you bring up miscarriages because if I'm, again, trying to take people at their word, trying to assume the best intentions and hear a good faith argument on the other side of this, if my concern is with the life of an embryo or the life of a fetus, the greatest threat to that life is a miscarriage.
00:30:57.000I mean, if your concern is how many embryos or fetuses we're losing, the number that we lose to miscarriage versus the number we lose to abortion, I mean, it's dwarfed.
00:31:09.000And so I'm always interested why the pro-life movement is not more interested in figuring out how we prevent more miscarriages.
00:31:17.000Because again, if your concern is that embryonic life seems like finding ways to prevent miscarriage, which we have best practices that can do it, right?
00:31:26.000Making sure people are covered by health insurance once their pregnancy starts.
00:31:31.000I mean, that is a huge opportunity to prevent miscarriages.
00:31:36.000You're not going to prevent all of them, but there are things we could do to stop it.
00:31:40.000And so the fact that all the attention is on abortion rather than on some of these other things that maybe we could all agree on, to me, again, it makes me suspicious about the true motives of some of these politicians and some of these activists who are pushing some of these bans.
00:31:57.000Because it doesn't seem like it's about children.
00:31:59.000It doesn't seem like it's about mothers and women and girls.
00:32:05.000And I think that's what we see across this Christian nationalist movement is controlling what you do with your own body, controlling what you read, controlling what you learn, controlling where you travel.
00:32:17.000I mean, this is religion at its worst, is trying to control people and what they do.
00:32:22.000How do you define Christian nationalism?
00:32:25.000So I think there's lots of different ways you could describe it.
00:32:28.000The way I define it is a little broader.
00:32:31.000I say Christian nationalism is the worship of power, whether it's social power, economic power, political power, in the name of Christ.
00:32:41.000And I think it's relevant to describe it this way because it's something we've struggled with within the Christian church from the very beginning.
00:32:48.000So the first followers of Jesus didn't even call themselves Christians.
00:32:51.000They called themselves the way because their crucified teacher had taught them a different way of being human, a different way of relating to other people, of understanding your relationship to neighbor and to God.
00:33:08.000They became these peculiar people is how the Bible describes it, because they didn't participate in the economy, the military, the culture.
00:33:19.000They were persecuted because they turned the world upside down.
00:33:22.000Again, that's how it's described in Acts.
00:33:25.000But 300 years after that, after the Roman Empire crucified Jesus, Emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of that very same empire, the same empire that crucified Jesus.
00:33:39.000So this is 300 years later, and now Christianity is the official sponsor of the empire, of Western civilization.
00:33:46.000Do you think Constantine was a Christian, like legitimately, or do you think that he was using it?
00:33:52.000It's always hard to tell with politicians, and I say this as a politician myself.
00:33:58.000Well, he was baptized, I don't know the year, but he was baptized after he had this vision before a decisive battle when he saw the cross and decided that his soldiers would put the cross as part of their emblem.
00:34:17.000Which, you know, who knows if it was because of his vision or not.
00:34:20.000But it started a trend, which we've struggled with for literally more than 1,500 years of powerful people, emperors, billionaires, dictators, megachurch pastors using religion to protect their own wealth and power.
00:34:42.000And to me, Christian nationalism is just the latest iteration of that, whether it's the Ten Commandments bill, whether it's the bill, I don't know if you read about this, a bill that we passed that allows schools to replace school counselors with untrained, unsupervised religious chaplains.
00:35:00.000Sometimes people who go online and become a chaplain within five minutes.
00:35:04.000That to me, again, is an example of Christian nationalism.
00:35:08.000It's using the state, it's using political power to elevate one religious tradition over all the others.
00:35:15.000It's using governmental power to dominate our neighbors instead of loving them as ourselves, which is exactly what we're called to do as Christians.
00:35:23.000And then, of course, most recently we saw this bill that defunded public schools here in Texas to subsidize private Christian schools.
00:35:33.000And to me, again, that is a bill that's right in the middle of this Christian nationalist movement to erode the separation of church and state and force a certain interpretation of Christianity on everybody against their wills.
00:35:47.000Yeah, there's this narrative that this is a Christian nation.
00:35:55.000And I think they call upon that when they're making these decisions and talking about it in this very particular way.
00:36:04.000Yeah, and I think no one would disagree that Christianity was influential in the founding of this country and is still influential.
00:36:15.000I mean, it's suffused throughout our culture, our politics.
00:36:20.000It is a central part of who we are as a nation.
00:36:23.000But I think it's really important to clarify that we were not founded as a Christian nation.
00:36:28.000We were founded as a nation where you are free to be a Christian, or a Jew or a Muslim or a Sikh or a Buddhist or an atheist.
00:36:35.000I mean, that's the promise of America, is that we are this multicultural melting pot where no one is told how to pray and no religion is elevated over the others.
00:36:47.000It's also important to point out that it wasn't in the Pledge of Allegiance until communism was an issue in this country.
00:36:52.000Yeah, and to be fair, the Declaration of Independence does mention a creator.
00:36:58.000And now it doesn't necessarily mention the Christian God, but it does mention a creator.
00:37:02.000I think probably in a deliberate attempt to be less sectarian and more open.
00:37:10.000I mean, a lot of our founders, if we're being honest, some of them weren't religious at all, Thomas Paine.
00:37:16.000And then a lot of them weren't really what we would consider Christians today.
00:37:20.000A lot of them were deists, where they saw God as this impersonal clockmaker who created the universe and stepped away.
00:38:14.000I don't mean to cast aspersions on that view, but it's very different than a lot of Christians today who have a personal relationship with God and feel God's intervention in our lives and in our world.
00:38:27.000And so those are very different kinds of religious.
00:38:31.000And so for Christian nationalists today to say that our founders were these evangelical Protestant Christians is just not quite historically accurate.
00:39:34.000It's like we need someone who interprets faith in a way that is beneficial for all and not personally beneficial or beneficial to their ideology or the narrative that they're trying to push, right?
00:39:49.000Well, and I honestly think, if I'm being my most hopeful self, that Gen Z and millennials, young people are going to be the ones to lead us out of this.
00:41:07.000That's Good Friday, where Jesus, because he confronts the powerful, is executed on a cross, a humiliating death along with other criminals.
00:41:20.000And then the last step is resurrection, that something new and beautiful rises from those ashes.
00:41:29.000So those three things, incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, that's the pattern of the universe.
00:41:34.000Again, just take religion out of it for a second.
00:41:36.000Let's just think like a physicist or a biologist.
00:41:55.000Hindus would say reincarnation, right?
00:41:58.000This pattern of reality is something that's recognized across traditions.
00:42:04.000I say all this in response to your question because all of us in our faith start off with order, disorder, and then reorder, if we get to that last step.
00:42:17.000All of us kind of inherited a faith from our parents.
00:42:51.000You need that crucifixion to break apart what was there before.
00:42:56.000That third step of resurrection, reincarnation, rebirth, reorder, however you want to describe it, to me, it feels like that's what we're on the precipice of.
00:43:06.000And it does feel like young people in particular are the ones that are asking these questions, because young people have always, on every major issue, have usually been the ones who have been able to kind of think outside the box and see things anew.
00:43:18.000But it does feel like they are waking up to how broken organized religion is and they are starting to yearn for something bigger and something better and something that's more true and more honest.
00:43:32.000I hear from people all day long, yes, on TikTok, but also in real life where they're just like, I want a relationship with God and I'm just not sure how to find that.
00:43:44.000I mean, I think that's, maybe it was the pandemic, but there is something brewing out there where people, they're hungry for something bigger and deeper.
00:43:55.000So again, that's me on my hopeful days.
00:43:57.000I've also had my days where I'm more cynical.
00:44:21.000It was a lot of really vicious fights on the House floor, a lot of really terrible bills.
00:44:27.000The abortion ban, which we just talked about, was passed in my second term.
00:44:32.000And I just kind of, I honestly lost faith in the impact I was making and maybe even in democracy as a whole, whether this thing was even going to work.
00:44:43.000This idea that we were all going to try to solve our conflicts nonviolently and peacefully through a political process.
00:44:52.000I don't know, all of that kind of, I started to doubt in a profound way the work I was doing.
00:44:59.000And throughout my life, whenever I've felt that doubt, I've always fallen back on faith.
00:45:03.000Faith is the thing that is kind of the foundation for me.
00:45:07.000And so in that second term, I had thought about quitting altogether.
00:45:11.000I thought about resigning my seed and just going off to do other things that maybe would be more fruitful.
00:45:16.000But through a lot of praying and a lot of soul searching and a lot of meditation, I made a slightly different choice, which was to go to seminary and go back to school and go through the process of becoming a minister.
00:45:28.000My granddad was a Baptist Minister in South Texas.
00:45:32.000And so it was a part of my part of my upbringing.
00:45:35.000And I had really not thought about doing it myself, but I think I had just loving thy neighbor is really hard sometimes.
00:45:47.000And the work I do in the legislature is my attempt to love my neighbor through the bills I pass, through the work that I do on prescription drugs, on childcare, on public schools, on justice reform.
00:46:00.000But I was losing faith on whether I was actually doing what I came here to do.
00:46:05.000And so I made that decision to go to seminary to follow Jesus' first commandment, which is to love God.
00:46:10.000Those are the two commandments he gave us, love God and love neighbor.
00:46:14.000And as a seminarian and a lawmaker, I'm kind of, I'm starting to figure out how these two commands, how they relate to each other, how they sustain each other.
00:46:24.000You need that inner life, which I feel like I'm cultivating at seminary.
00:46:29.000And then you also need this outer life of how does that impact your relationships and the work you do out in the world.
00:46:34.000And you really can't have one without the other, because if you do the second one, the work out in the world, you can burn out so easily, which I think I was about to burn out in that second term.
00:46:46.000You can burn out if it's not sustained by that love of God.
00:46:50.000And again, I don't mean God as that word is charged for a lot of people.
00:46:53.000I don't mean like a sectarian religious orthodoxy definition.
00:46:57.000I just mean that ground of your being, whatever that is.
00:47:00.000Anyway, I don't know if it answers your original question.
00:47:24.000Toward the end of that legislative session, my Republican colleagues brought a, again, this is the way I would describe it, a voter suppression bill, making it more difficult to vote in the state of Texas.
00:47:37.000Again, Texas is probably the hardest place to vote in the country, just in terms of the paperwork, the requirements, the hoops you got to jump through.
00:49:17.000And Ken Paxton, you know, decides to, he's our attorney general here in Texas, decides to spend millions of dollars trying to find voter fraud, right, to try to prove that this is a widespread problem.
00:49:32.000And, you know, if he comes up with anything, it's usually like one or two cases of some mom who made a mistake on her form.
00:49:38.000I mean, the Secretary of State here in Texas, a Republican, said that our elections are safe and secure.
00:49:44.000So I'm all for making sure that our elections have integrity.
00:49:47.000I think you have to have that in democracy.
00:49:50.000My concern, though, is when some of these bills are adding unnecessary regulations on top of that just to make it harder for some folks to be able to vote rather than make everyone have the same opportunity to vote.
00:50:02.000Who do you think they're trying to make it harder for?
00:50:32.000Every time you get a new job, get a new apartment, if you go to a college or university, then you are moving and your voter registration has essentially been erased until you redo it.
00:50:42.000And young people are more likely to vote progressive and liberal.
00:50:46.000I mean, I don't even know if that's true anymore because a lot of young people voted for President Trump in the last election.
00:50:53.000I think that's because a lot of young people felt very disenfranchised by some of the laws that were being passed by the previous administration and some of the actions they were taking to suppress freedom of speech.
00:51:04.000My point is, when Republicans in my workplace try to disenfranchise certain groups, I think it's almost they should give themselves more credit and believe in their ability to actually win over those groups, right?
00:51:38.000A lot of the reason why people were voting for Trump was a rejection of the previous administration and the idea that this is a continuance, that the Kamala Harris administration would be a continuance of the previous administration.
00:51:50.000But again, I'm arguing for my Republican colleagues here.
00:51:54.000I do think there is something that Donald Trump tapped into, I think that other Republicans Could tap into.
00:52:01.000And again, this is weird because I'm a Democrat making an argument for Republicans.
00:52:04.000The reason I'm doing this is I think when politicians feel that they can win over voters, we all compete to win over those voters, and that leads to better public policy.
00:52:15.000If you write off voters, then that leads to extremism in your policymaking because you're only focused on pleasing your people.
00:52:21.000Well, that was an issue with young men.
00:53:13.000Every human being, you need the desire to work, to produce, to contribute.
00:53:18.000I think that is a natural human urge that's like built into us.
00:53:21.000That is true, but I also think there's a lot of people out there that feel completely disenfranchised, and the idea of working sounds abhorrent to them.
00:53:29.000The idea of giving your life every day to something that you hate to do.
00:53:34.000And if there's enough money out there where that's not necessary, they would rather do that.
00:55:59.000But what are the actions that could be taken in order to give people a path to a career rather than a job?
00:56:05.000So let's just talk about, I think we're all either thrilled or terrified of this AI future.
00:56:15.000And who knows what it's going to look like?
00:56:17.000It's probably not going to be apocalypse and probably not going to be utopia.
00:56:20.000It'll probably be something in the middle.
00:56:22.000But it is going to change how we understand work.
00:56:28.000It's going to change how we understand our jobs and our careers.
00:56:31.000It's going to eliminate a lot of jobs, I would imagine.
00:56:34.000And so this is now going to be a spiritual question about what does it mean to be a human being?
00:56:39.000It's one that we are not equipped to answer right now because in a lot of ways we have thrown out the baby with the bathwater.
00:56:46.000And because of the problems with organized religion that we talked about earlier, we've just jettisoned the whole thing.
00:56:51.000So we're no longer having conversations about what it means to be a human being.
00:56:54.000But to get to your question about what specifically this could look like, you know, I'm intrigued by some of the pilot programs on universal basic income and what they've provided.
00:57:05.000But I think what's missing in this idea is how do you provide people the support to go off and realize whatever dream has been festering in their brain for a long time?
00:57:17.000Almost like entrepreneurial grants, right?
00:57:20.000Of where we invest in someone's next big idea for an industry, for art, whether it is community work or nonprofit work or solving a community problem.
00:57:32.000My point is, my life shows me that people are just, they have this creativity and this imagination that we are not tapping into.
00:57:43.000And it is, and so much of that is trapped in people who are either in these meaningless jobs or either gone to inadequate schools and therefore don't even get into a job where they could express themselves and give this gift.
00:58:00.000But I do know that it's out there and that if we tap into it, it could be a game changer.
00:58:04.000So I don't know what this looks like, but it does seem like the disruption that's coming could be an opportunity.
00:58:10.000Again, back to out of crucifixion comes resurrection.
00:58:17.000I think it's also very dependent upon the individual.
00:58:20.000And I think the best thing we can give them is inspiration.
00:58:24.000And oftentimes the best thing you can give them is an example of someone who also did it.
00:58:30.000And so there's a lot of people that feel completely disenfranchised by the system that's currently in place now that I think is going to be upended by AI.
00:58:39.000So there is an opportunity for them to do something completely different.
00:58:42.000And the positive aspect of universal basic income is that, first of all, I think we could both agree that if an enormous amount of jobs just go away, that probably is the only way to sustain society.
00:58:56.000You can't just have people go poor and go hungry when we have unfathomable wealth that's being created by these same systems.
00:59:05.000So universal basic income, on one hand, has a lot of hope because there is this potential that you now no longer – And that this is what most people are doing with most people in this country right now are working check to check.
00:59:31.000They're living paycheck to paycheck and they're essentially getting by.
00:59:36.000And any catastrophe, medical or otherwise, will eliminate all savings instantaneously and they're doomed.
00:59:44.000And so what they're doing is just working, giving most of their life just to sustain whatever state they're in currently.
00:59:54.000And that's very frustrating for people because they don't think they ever get ahead and they don't think they have any potential to get ahead.
01:00:02.000So if something comes along that takes care of that aspect of life, so if universal basic income can provide you with food and shelter, now you no longer have to think about food, you no longer have to think about shelter.
01:00:17.000The problem is, for a lot of people, there are so many distractions that are unproductive, like social media, like video games, like many things that people participate in all day long.
01:00:30.000And then you add in a factor of drug addiction and partying and a lot of other fruitless things that people participate in.
01:00:40.000If you only were living for the first 35 years of your life just to deal with food and shelter, and now food and shelter is provided for you.
01:00:54.000Now at 35, you have to sort of reformulate your view of the world and find meaning and find something.
01:01:01.000And maybe you're an atheist, so you don't find meaning in religion and you don't have any desire to find meaning in religion.
01:01:11.000And how do you, I think there's going to be an upheaval, the likes of which we have never seen before.
01:01:17.000And there's going to be a lot of chaos.
01:01:19.000And it's going to be very, very uncomfortable for a lot of people.
01:01:22.000I think we're going to deal with unprecedented levels of addiction, whether it is with drugs or with fill in the blank, whether gambling, whatever things that people get addicted to, because I think people are going to look for thrills.
01:01:35.000They're going to look for something that entices them, that gives them some excitement, because they're just getting a check every month.
01:01:43.000Unfortunately, just the way humans are wired, that's not good for us.
01:02:19.000And most of them wind up penniless within a short period of time.
01:02:22.000I think it's like, how many years is it where most lottery winners wind up broke?
01:02:27.000I think it's like less than 20 years, even when they have enormous amounts of money.
01:02:31.000So like the only thing that you can do for those people is to somehow or another inspire them to live in a different way.
01:02:42.000And I don't think that's a function of the government.
01:02:45.000I think it's a function of individuals and of inspirational people that can provide some sort of an example that differs from what they're surrounded by.
01:02:55.000And so if we approach this when it happens, which I agree it's about to happen and I don't think any of us are ready for it, if we approach it as a technological problem or even an economic problem, I think we're missing the full picture here because I do agree with you that it is primarily, first and foremost, a spiritual problem.
01:03:14.000And what I do know about human beings is that all of us ask these questions.
01:03:58.000Because right now, especially on my side of the aisle, where religion has declined among certain populations, there's this tendency of like, well, I'm not religious, I'm spiritual, which I'm very open to people who say that, and I understand where they're coming from.
01:04:15.000But you want to be careful that it is not private spirituality only, meaning that it's only something that you own, that only impacts you and has no connection to other people.
01:04:28.000I do think we've got to be a part of communities where we ask and struggle with these questions together.
01:04:34.000It can look like a church or a mosque or a synagogue.
01:04:37.000It could also be a book club, to be honest, right?
01:04:42.000Like this space in a lot of ways for the whole country has become a place where people are having these bigger conversations that aren't just about your job, aren't just about the current events of the day, but something deeper.
01:04:56.000And I think we're going to need that now more than ever.
01:05:06.000And, you know, and the people that do reject the concept of religion finding an in-person community that doesn't turn into a cult, which is also a problem because generally these in-person communities are led by charismatic people who tend to want all the glory for themselves and tend to want to be praised and tend to want, yeah, you know, it gets real weird sexually.
01:05:33.000It gets real weird with control and then they impose rules on the group.
01:05:40.000There's not a good example of a new religion or a new cult that's been formed.
01:05:44.000They're like, oh, those guys really nailed it.
01:05:47.000You got a benevolent leader who really just cares about everybody else and wants the best for everyone.
01:05:52.000And I think, weirdly enough, podcasts do fit into that space for whatever strange reason.
01:06:02.000If you can find someone who really does profess these thoughts that generally you want good for other people and you genuinely want the world to be a better place and you genuinely don't want all this for yourself.
01:06:20.000You genuinely want people to do better and that you enjoy it and you take real joy in watching people succeed and get their life together and find purpose.
01:06:37.000And most people also feel suppressed and they feel dismissed most of their lives and they feel suppressed by larger organizations or more powerful people, more powerful groups.
01:06:52.000So when they do get into a position where they have power of their own, they want to exert that power on others because this is a pattern that they've grown up with, unfortunately.
01:07:04.000Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Well, and everyone contains multitudes.
01:07:25.000And it's why I feel so lucky that I was brought up in a faith tradition that really emphasized my own experience as a validator for faith.
01:07:35.000Because what you just described of a pastor or a clergy consolidating power is something we see all too often in organized religion.
01:07:44.000And so if you don't empower your congregation or someone who is seeking answers to check everything based on their experience and use that as a measure for what's true and what's good, then you make people dependent on that one guy, which is way too much power for one person.
01:08:42.000And then again, you find yourself 35, 36.
01:08:46.000I don't know why I'm coming up with that number, but this is like a point of no return where, you know, if you haven't had a family by that point and you haven't had real love and relationships by that point, now your body's starting to get tired.
01:09:00.000So now you don't have the energy that you had when you were 20.
01:09:03.000When you were 20, where you could get four hours of sleep and just still show up and go do things.
01:09:07.000And you had the courage to say, you know what, I'm going to quit this thing that I'm doing and I'm going to go pursue some completely different thing because I think I can do it because I'm young and brash.
01:09:18.000And when you get older and then you're, you know, you do have a bunch of bills.
01:09:21.000And then one of the things that I like that you talked about was that if we were really a Christian nation, we would forgive student loan debt.
01:09:31.000And I do not like that we are predatory towards young people and condemn them to loans that are unforgivable regardless of any other kind of bankruptcy, which is really kind of sick.
01:09:46.000The idea that we have put education that may or may not be even helpful for you in the future and may just be complete nonsense.
01:09:58.000Like say, you know, you spent hundreds of thousands of dollars getting some degree in the humanities, getting some degree in gender studies, some just a nonsensical degree that you're never going to get a job from.
01:10:13.000And now you're condemned to not just pay that initial debt, but with interest forever.
01:10:20.000There's people right now that are on Social Security that are getting their Social Security docked.
01:10:26.000They get chunks of it taken out to pay for their student loan debt that they will never pay off.
01:10:31.000They will go to the grave in debt for predatory loans that they took out when they were so young, their frontal cortex wasn't even fully developed yet.
01:10:42.000They didn't have any idea what they were doing.
01:10:44.000They were being coerced by a bunch of people that told them this is the only way that you have to do this, otherwise you're going to be a loser.
01:11:27.000It's a sickness in our civilization that We have allowed these financial institutions to prey upon the youngest and most vulnerable people with inescapable loans that they will carry with them often for decades and decades.
01:11:58.000You know, developing foreign nations and influencing elections and regime change.
01:12:06.000And we're so resistant to giving people the freedom to have education as a thing that doesn't burden you with financial ties that you can't escape.
01:12:20.000The idea that you can't escape it even with bankruptcy is so sick.
01:12:33.000So you're allowing people to profit off vulnerable young kids to the tune that we're, you know, the interest compiles every year and you're stuck with it forever.
01:12:55.000You get less people that are financially crippled by student loans.
01:13:00.000You get less people that grow up in a neighborhood where there's no hope.
01:13:04.000We find neighborhoods that have no hope and that are riddled with drug addiction and crime and gang violence and we just leave them alone and we just say that's their problem.
01:13:17.000If we really want to think of ourselves, the United States of America, as a community, which is I, that's how I like to look at it.
01:13:25.000I like to think of us as a big community.
01:13:28.000I don't like to think of us as right versus left and blue and red and all this nonsense.
01:13:33.000It's a bunch of people that agree we're all the same.
01:13:36.000So if we are a community, how are we allowing these places to create these disenfranchised people generation after generation and do nothing about it?
01:13:48.000And those kids were doing exactly what we told them to do.
01:13:56.000Again, I think we've overcorrected, or now we tell every kid to go to college, which does a lot of damage too, because a lot of kids, one, don't want to go to college.
01:14:05.000Two, their gifts and their skills aren't going to be fully developed at a four-year university.
01:14:11.000Also, we're dismissing the value of trades.
01:14:26.000I mean, the guys I went to high school with that have a boat out at Lake Travis are not the ones who went to a four-year university like I did.
01:14:32.000Well, they certainly didn't study, you know, get your head out of the books.
01:14:37.000The nonsensical stuff that doesn't get you anywhere.
01:14:40.000But, you know, so I mentioned to you before I was a politician, I was a public school teacher, which is kind of an unusual route to serve me.
01:14:49.000I taught sixth grade language arts at Rhodes Middle School.
01:14:52.000Oh, so that's something that's valuable.
01:14:55.000I often say teaching middle school is the best preparation for politics.
01:15:00.000It's a lot more like middle school than people think.
01:15:03.000The egos, the drama, just all of it is.
01:15:08.000Isn't it crazy how no one gets past that?
01:15:23.000There's no way you can do this kind of difficult work without an ego that, you know, to be able to say, I want to make decisions for 200,000 constituents.
01:16:07.000Well, and that he said he was a transitional figure.
01:16:11.000I mean, he, I don't know how explicit he was, but he certainly made it sound like he was stepping in so that he could usher in a new generation.
01:16:19.000And that never happened because when you get into these offices, and I, again, I'm just a little state rep at a low level, but even I know like people call you representative.
01:16:29.000Your mail, your mail says the honorable.
01:17:33.000Yeah, but I don't dismiss the possibility that you could be an elder statesman and be like very wise and kind and benevolent and doing a really good job.
01:17:42.000But to me, it suggests that you think there's no one younger with more energy who could do this better.
01:18:31.000Or, I mean, I just saw the story about this congressman right before the Big Beautiful Bill passed, and he sold all his stock in a company that does Medicaid reimbursements.
01:19:22.000Well, so I was a teacher on the west side of San Antonio, which is a, for those your listeners who are in San Antonio, the west side is this, it's this beautiful historic neighborhood, Mexican-American neighborhood.
01:19:34.000It's also one of the poorest zip codes in the whole state of Texas.
01:19:37.000So every day I saw my students struggling to overcome poverty and these systems that were designed to hold them back.
01:19:47.000And the school I was at was underfunded.
01:19:49.000I mean, Title I school, I taught 45 kids in one classroom, and the classroom was not that much bigger than the studio.
01:20:15.000What happens in schools, especially schools in high-poverty neighborhoods where things are really hard, you know, the administration of the school will oftentimes give the kids who need the most help, the kids who have the most troubles to the first-year teachers, right?
01:20:28.000So I remember my first year of teaching, my principal told me that I was going to get this kid named Justin, who had gotten kicked out of his elementary school the year before because he had brought a knife to school and threatened to stab his fifth grade teacher.
01:20:43.000So I was, again, first-year teacher, kind of freaked out, right?
01:21:08.000He's very popular with the girls in the class, a lot of personality.
01:21:13.000And I started to invite him to our little lunch group because I had kids who came and ate in my classroom during lunch.
01:21:19.000And we started to kind of build a rapport.
01:21:23.000And he didn't have a lot of male teachers.
01:21:26.000So I think that was helpful to see a guy as a teacher and be able to build a relationship with him.
01:21:32.000Anyway, right before winter break that year, he was the last day of school, he brought me this wrapped gift.
01:21:40.000The wrapping was all jankity, but I opened it up and it was this little cup with a snowflake on it that he had bought at the Dollar Tree for his teacher.
01:21:48.000Again, this is a kid who was going to stab his fifth grade teacher.
01:21:51.000A few months later, he's bringing a snowflake cup to his sixth grade teacher.
01:21:55.000And I was feeling like I was on top of the world as a teacher.
01:21:57.000I was like, who's going to make the movie?
01:22:27.000Like he literally was just carried out of the school.
01:22:29.000I found out that he had started a fight in his third grade class and that was his last strike.
01:22:35.000And it was the last time I ever saw Justin.
01:22:39.000I did some digging to figure out what had happened.
01:22:41.000Turns out in the previous semester, Justin had been seeing a therapist that was provided by the school district.
01:22:48.000And it was this lady that he really was hitting it off with and getting along with.
01:22:52.000And they were going through all his issues because Justin had been abandoned by his mother at a very early age, which that'll screw anybody up, right?
01:23:00.000Justin had experienced violence, had experienced all this trauma.
01:23:05.000And so for the first time, there was a professional who was helping him work his way through it.
01:23:10.000And there was a teacher who liked him and who believed in him.
01:23:12.000And that was all it took for Justin to see all these improvements.
01:23:16.000And I found out that after winter break, that because of budget cuts from the legislature, the district had eliminated the therapist.
01:23:24.000So this lifeline suddenly went away for Justin.
01:23:28.000So literally everybody had abandoned Justin, including his own mother.
01:23:31.000And now the adults that he was trying to trust again were abandoning him.
01:23:36.000And so that was the kind of radicalizing experience for me because these people at the state capitol had cut $5 billion from our schools.
01:23:46.000Who knows what the justifications were?
01:23:48.000But I saw firsthand how that screwed up a kid's life.
01:23:52.000I saw the damage that did to real flesh and blood human beings.
01:23:57.000And so I promised myself right then that if I ever got a little bit of power or a little bit of influence, that I would do everything I could with every fiber of my being to stop that from happening again.
01:24:07.000So literally, Justin and my students are the ones I think about when I'm at the Capitol.
01:24:12.000They are the criteria that I use to evaluate public policy, not if it's a Democratic bill or Republican bill, not if it's going to get me ex-lobbyist support.
01:24:21.000It is, will this help my students or will it hurt my students?
01:25:02.000We need people that have legitimate personal real-life experience with other people that are benefiting from certain social programs and certain things that should not be cut.
01:25:13.000I think there's too many wealthy people that are just very disengaged with everyone else.
01:26:30.000It's more comfortable if you've got the money.
01:26:32.000But the idea that you're going to preach to everybody else how to live their lives, like you're so disconnected from most people.
01:26:39.000Well, I would say that I am probably the poorest member of the Texas legislature.
01:26:44.000And I'm not poor, but relatively speaking, most of the people I serve with either very successful lawyers who own their own law practice, doctors and surgeons who operate their own medical practice, or it's trust fund babies.
01:27:52.000So the only people who end up serve, and again, I understand why paying politicians no one wants to do, right?
01:27:58.000Like I understand that I'm not a sympathetic character here, but when you don't.
01:28:02.000Well, but when you, the problem is when you don't pay a politician, especially a state legislator who's making most of the big decisions about that affect your life, it's really not people in Congress.
01:28:33.000I mean, one of the wealthiest families in New York.
01:28:36.000Bobby Kennedy was a trust fund baby and still sympathized with working people.
01:28:40.000So I don't think that you have to be born poor to be able to do that.
01:28:45.000I do think it provides a helpful perspective.
01:28:49.000I was born to a single mom, and that experience has helped inform how I view things.
01:28:55.000So a lot of my colleagues, I would say, just have no experience.
01:28:59.000So for instance, there was a bill that we passed, unfortunately, that would make it easier for landlords to evict people.
01:29:05.000And we were trying to work with the author of that bill to add some exceptions for, you know, if you just miss a bill because you're late, you shouldn't get evicted, right?
01:29:14.000Like we were trying to build that out.
01:29:16.000And the author just kind of had no conception with how you could miss a bill, right?
01:29:22.000Like it just, because when you're that, when you have people who do that, right?
01:29:25.000Like he was like, he was like, his accountant does all that.
01:29:27.000I'm like, but when you're a working person, you're balancing raising kids, working multiple jobs, right?
01:29:32.000Maybe trying to exercise when you can.
01:29:34.000Like when you're doing all that, and God forbid you have a medical problem, like, yes, some stuff falls through the cracks.
01:30:29.000I'm like, this person is kind and funny and good-hearted and treats his wife well and treats his kids well, treats his neighbors, his immediate neighbors.
01:30:38.000So my challenge is always like, how do I try to expand that circle a little bit more to where they care just as much about a neighbor who lives in a completely different city than the one who's right next door to them in Highland Park or River Oaks or one of these nice neighborhoods, right?
01:30:55.000That to me is the challenge is seeing everyone as your neighbor, not just the people who live right next to you.
01:31:01.000And that's the central teaching of my faith and in most of the great faith traditions.
01:31:06.000I mean, sometimes we try to pretend that there's all these diverse religions and who knows who's right.
01:31:13.000In reality, there is giant ethical overlap between the major world religions.
01:31:19.000There is literally not a faith tradition that tells you when someone gets sick, see how much money you can make off of them.
01:31:28.000You know, there's no one that's, you know, love your neighbors only when they agree with you.
01:31:32.000Like it's just those, that's not what any of the faith traditions teach.
01:31:36.000Like there is this consensus, this ethical consensus.
01:31:40.000And the reason I think we try to pretend that all these religions are so different is because we are threatened by that moral consensus of how you should treat one another, how we should treat the least among us.
01:31:51.000And that's a threat to the people who are in power, the people who run the status quo right now.
01:32:02.000That's part of the problem is that the people that are in power want to stay in power.
01:32:05.000And the best way to stay in power is to enrich the other people around you that are like you and create laws and create a structure that allows you to maintain ridiculous wealth and suppress competition.
01:32:22.000And divide everyone to keep them distracted.
01:32:28.000The more I've done this, I've done this for four terms now.
01:32:33.000I think of politics now less as left versus right and much more as top versus bottom.
01:32:40.000Because I just see how we are all pitted against each other.
01:32:44.000And I mean literally, these social media platforms, they only get clicks when there's conflict.
01:32:51.000They don't get clicks when we're having a conversation, when we're understanding each other.
01:32:55.000When we're coming to some kind of understanding of mutual agreement, that doesn't get anybody any profit.
01:33:02.000And so the Rupert Murdochs of the world, the cable news networks, the social media platforms, the Zuckerbergs and Musks, I mean, these platforms are literally tearing us apart by design.
01:33:15.000And I just, I think there has to be something better than that.
01:33:19.000Well, I didn't even know if it's by design, but that's the way that it's the most profitable.
01:33:23.000And I think like algorithms, like people always like to want to point towards algorithms as being by design.
01:33:30.000But they only work because they work, right?
01:33:33.000They only work because people do engage with the things that piss them off the most.
01:33:38.000That's if we're measuring engagement as the sole good.
01:34:44.000The problem is people are interested in things that piss them off.
01:34:48.000And I think a lot of that also is a distraction from your own issues in life is that you look towards external things that maybe don't even really affect you, but provide you with a source of you can pay attention to them and get invested in them and get angry and ignore maybe the shortcomings of your lack of discipline and your lack of focus and the things that are really holding you back in life.
01:35:14.000You know, you can get distracted by some other stuff.
01:35:17.000You can get distracted by some things.
01:35:18.000It may be legitimate issues, maybe real, but how much do they affect you in day-to-day life?
01:35:36.000I mean, it does feel like everything is making us feel terrible, whether it's the news we're watching, the TV, the social media algorithms.
01:38:27.000So if I tell them I'm not doing it and I tell them why I'm not doing it, and it's clear.
01:38:35.000It's clear by what I pay attention to.
01:38:38.000It's clear by what I focus on that I'm not caught up in that the way a lot of people are.
01:38:43.000And then I'm open to a bunch of different perspectives and ideas and I welcome them because I really want to know how people think about them.
01:38:50.000As long as they're genuine, real thinkers, as long as they have good faith arguments and discussions about things.
01:38:58.000There's a lot of people out there, particularly in mainstream media, in corporate media, that just by nature of the format of those things, they're grifters.
01:39:09.000They latch on to whether it's a right-wing perspective or a left-wing perspective.
01:39:14.000And they're the champion of that perspective, and they argue with it, and they don't see humans.
01:39:56.000But, you know, you have to engage in some sort of a discipline to appreciate that, to appreciate the difference between someone who's really had a singular focus in their life of excellence and trying to figure out a way to be really good at something and then watching them compete with other people that have had a similar thing and try to figure out what separates the champions from other people and what are the characteristics,
01:40:25.000what are those things, and how do those apply to everyday life?
01:40:31.000When I was a kid in martial arts, one of the things that my instructor told me at a very young age is that martial arts is a vehicle for developing your human potential, that you're engaging in this very, very difficult thing to learn about yourself.
01:40:44.000And that you could apply these lessons to everything in life.
01:40:47.000And there's too many people that don't get that lesson.
01:40:51.000They don't understand that you can figure this thing out.
01:40:57.000And your path is going to be different than my path.
01:41:00.000It's going to be different from everybody's path.
01:41:02.000But there's certain principles that you can apply to whatever your individual path are.
01:41:07.000And you can learn about the value of discipline and of personal autonomy and understanding and personal accountability and figure out how to get better.
01:41:18.000You're going to have failures and they're going to feel awful.
01:41:21.000They're going to feel terrible, but they're very valuable.
01:41:23.000And you can't shy away from them because that's where you really learn how to get better.
01:41:28.000And then your feelings of success, don't dwell on those either because it's not about that.
01:41:39.000And it's really about learning how to live and learning how to exist in a harmonious way with not just other people, but also with yourself.
01:41:51.000And you have to have respect for yourself.
01:41:52.000And the only way you develop respect for yourself is you have to know what you've done.
01:41:56.000You have to know that you've worked really hard, that you've overcome things and known that you've had these little mental battles where you've had these little bad ways of thinking that you've turned around and you realize like, oh, yeah, that's possible.
01:43:19.000And I think the thing that's encouraging about both this podcast, but also the format in general, is that it is long form.
01:43:27.000And so it forces you to pay attention in a different kind of way, right?
01:43:32.000Your attention on TikTok or Instagram or some of these other platforms, it is so superficial and shallow.
01:43:40.000And that attention, I think, is abused on those platforms.
01:43:43.000And I think I've talked to people in my own life who feel like the more time they spend on those platforms, the less you're able to pay attention to something in your daily life.
01:43:53.000But the fact what you mentioned about martial arts is this focus, right?
01:43:59.000I mean, you can't do anything great in your life without that focus.
01:44:02.000It's all, I mean, I'm going to sound like a Buddhist, but the ability to kind of control your own mind and focus that mind and that spirit on something right in front of you on the here and now, I mean, that is the key to all success.
01:44:15.000And whether you're doing a podcast, whether you're doing sports or politics or, but it feels like there's a whole generation of kids who are growing up who aren't getting that training for their attention.
01:44:28.000And it's just getting abused and shot and scabbed.
01:44:31.000The only way for them to get that is to see an example of someone who's doing it.
01:44:37.000This is where sports come in, where I think really excellent sports figures that excel, that they do something that the other people that are their peers can't do.
01:44:49.000And then you can learn, like, what is he doing?
01:44:51.000What is LeBron James doing that's different?
01:45:50.000And authenticity is the thing that's missing from television news.
01:45:57.000It's missing from anything that's corporate controlled because you wouldn't allow it to be so scattered and so chaotic and so kind of dangerous because if you're banking all your money on something succeeding, you would want to narrate it.
01:46:54.000But it was also because it got so big before anybody came calling that I had already figured out the right way to do it is just to do it my way.
01:47:03.000And my way is to have genuine curiosity, to be a real human being, and just to talk to people.
01:47:10.000Well, and you're, I mean, I've just noticed just in this conversation we've had that you have a gift for listening.
01:47:16.000And I think this is something these platforms or most of our cable news or most of our media environment doesn't value anymore is actual listening and learning, right?
01:47:28.000It is now all about what you say, what your opinions are, rather than actually creating a connection with another person.
01:48:56.000And how can I give them this ability to express themselves as clearly as possible?
01:49:04.000Like where I'm not getting in the way of it and I'm just trying to help them get it out as clearly as possible, whether I agree or disagree.
01:49:12.000I want to know like why do they think the way they think?
01:49:17.000And I want to know if you're a real thinker or if you're just a grifter.
01:49:21.000What's really fascinating to me is watching these people that were exiled from mainstream media because obviously the ratings have crashed and their credibility has plummeted.
01:49:31.000So then they try to pivot and become podcasters.
01:49:34.000But they're still like Elon Musk said this so good, so well about Don Lemon.
01:49:41.000He's like, he's trying to do CNN outside of CNN.
01:49:50.000The podcast world is, it is certainly some bullshit.
01:49:53.000But for the most part, what attracts people is if they know that this is really how you think.
01:50:01.000And I know this is resonating with a lot of people out there that you're forced to go to a job where you pretend to be a certain person all day.
01:50:10.000And if you step outside of those lines, you're going to risk career opportunities.
01:50:33.000And then they hear people talk and they go, okay, this is not the only way.
01:50:37.000There's other ways to think and there's other ways to live your life.
01:50:40.000Trevor Burrus: Well, and the fact that you have people from such different perspectives on, I think, I just don't, I don't think we have very many platforms like that anymore.
01:50:52.000And to me, that is probably the best thing about working in the legislature.
01:50:57.000I think I told you this, of being forced to get outside of my bubble.
01:51:02.000Because of course, I live in a bubble like everybody else does, right?
01:51:05.000My information feed is curated like everybody else is.
01:51:11.000And I try to break out of that whenever I can.
01:51:15.000But my job forces me to break out of that because I have to sit down with very far-right Republicans, very far-left Democrats, and hammer out solutions to problems.
01:51:26.000I mean, that's what I do all day at the Capitol.
01:51:28.000Or when things are going well, that's what I'm doing.
01:51:30.000But, you know, I think about there was a colleague.
01:51:34.000I hope he doesn't mind me mentioning him on here.
01:51:36.000His name is James Frank out of Wichita Falls, very, very conservative Republican.
01:51:42.000And he and I met when I got elected and we bonded over the stupidest thing, which is that we both have the same first name.
01:51:48.000Like that's when you meet someone, like that's sometimes you go off of like the most superficial basis to create a friendship.
01:52:03.000It was a stupid basis for a friendship, but it was a basis.
01:52:07.000And from there, he started to like come back to where I sat on the floor.
01:52:10.000And like when things were slow, he would just come kind of sit and shoot the shit.
01:52:15.000And he would say, like, he would, he would reveal some of the interesting, non-orthodox views that he has about politics, which then gave me an opening to kind of express some of my dissatisfactions with this political system and both parties and the way it forces us into tribes, all that stuff.
01:52:34.000Anyway, all those conversations really created an actual friendship, and I consider James an actual friend.
01:52:40.000And then what got interesting is how we took that friendship into public policy.
01:52:46.000Because I think it was two sessions ago, James had a bill that all the Democrats hated, including me.
01:53:09.000Well, my concern was that the public education system is not a buffet table, right?
01:53:14.000Where you can just come and say, I want to do the sports, but I don't want to participate in the actual school or the academics, the life of the school.
01:53:23.000I didn't want it to become this fragmented thing that everyone could just pick apart and just do the fun stuff.
01:53:30.000James sat down with me, which right there, a Republican coming to a Democrat and like actually having a private conversation about a bill, that doesn't happen enough.
01:54:03.000And immediately I was kind of first embarrassed and ashamed, right?
01:54:06.000That's our natural reaction when we're wrong.
01:54:09.000But I was like, James, he's absolutely right.
01:54:11.000Like these kids didn't decide to be homeschooled.
01:54:15.000This may be their only opportunity to interact with kids their own age in a public school setting.
01:54:21.000This, you know, the opportunity to do UIL football or choir or theater or debate, like this could be a door that opens for these kids.
01:54:30.000So anyway, I ended up crossing party lines to support that bill.
01:54:34.000And I got a bunch of blowback from my folks.
01:54:37.000But I felt like this trust that I had with James, someone who was on completely polar opposite side of me, moved me in a way that I actually changed my opinion on that.
01:55:02.000We passed that bill a couple of years ago, and I got to talk with some of the homeschool kids that are participating, and it has been a game changer for them.
01:55:14.000Because then the public school is able to show off the UIL how much fun it is and then the kids sometimes enroll.
01:55:20.000The point is, like I was open to changing my own mind, and that goes both ways.
01:55:26.000The next session, I had filed this bill.
01:55:28.000Sometimes I file a bill that I know is not going to pass in a Republican legislature, but I file it anyway so that I can at least start a conversation, right?
01:55:36.000I passed a bill that was actually a Bernie Sanders idea.
01:55:41.000It was to import cheaper prescription drugs from Canada directly to Texas because Canadians pay half of what we pay for the same prescription drugs.
01:55:51.000And I didn't think it was going to go anywhere.
01:55:52.000And all of a sudden, James calls me and it's like, I just read your bill.
01:57:10.000She drove me to the hotel where she worked downtown.
01:57:13.000The manager let us stay in one of the rooms for a few weeks until we found a little apartment in East Austin.
01:57:21.000And mom, you know, she took on double duty at the hotel.
01:57:25.000She like fought for me at every instance, even when it was her own physical safety was at risk.
01:57:32.000And back then, this was early 90s, you know, she could look over at the Texas Capitol and she saw Texas Democrats like Ann Richards, Bob Bullock, people who fought for the little guy, for working people, people who were forgotten and left behind.
01:57:48.000That was the classic Democratic Party.
01:57:52.000And so I remember when I was, I guess I was maybe kindergarten and someone in school, they were talking about political parties, and I asked my mom what we were, and she was like, we're Democrats because Democrats fight for the people.
01:58:05.000And my mom is still a Democrat today, but like, I don't know how much our party is still true to that, but I do know that that's our historical legacy is the party that fights for the little guy.
01:58:19.000And I think we're at our best when we do that today.
01:58:22.000We're at our worst when we stray from that.
01:58:26.000So I still believe the Democratic Party can get back to those roots.
01:58:30.000I hope last year was a wake-up call, especially to the National Democratic Party, about what needs to change and how we need to be different if we're going to build a big coalition to take on the issues that we care about.
01:58:43.000But that's why I'm a Democrat and why I hope the party can get back to those roots.
01:58:49.000What are your aspirations politically outside of what you're doing right now?
01:58:54.000So, you know, I told you I went to seminary.
01:58:58.000I have about a year left of coursework.
01:59:00.000I'm going slow since I'm doing all this other stuff.
01:59:04.000My goal is to go full-time into the ministry whenever I'm done with seminary and I get ordained.
01:59:10.000You basically kind of like passing the bar after you go to law school.
01:59:13.000Like you go through seminary and you've got to get ordained, which is a whole different process.
01:59:17.000But I basically, I want to become a minister full-time and I would love, my pastor is probably listening to this podcast, whenever he's ready to hang it up and retire, I would love to take over and lead my home church.
01:59:31.000So I say all that because I don't want to do politics forever.
02:00:16.000And I do, I mean, the fact that I went from serving 150 students at Rhodes Middle School in room 112 to now serving 5.5 million Texas public school students as part of the public education committee in the Texas House.
02:00:30.000So like that's, you know, I passed a bill to allow incarcerated minors to get a high school diploma while they're in prison.
02:00:36.000And then I got invited out to speak at their first graduation ceremony in the prison.
02:00:41.000And I saw these kids who made horrific mistakes, but I saw them with their parents with a cap and gown.
02:00:49.000And suddenly their whole conception about who they were changed in an instant because of the bill that I passed.
02:01:59.000But that's something, that is what it is.
02:02:02.000Well, because I think the most revolutionary teaching in my religion is the teaching to love your enemy.
02:02:08.000I mean, it's crazy from two perspectives.
02:02:10.000One, it's Jesus is acknowledging that we're going to have enemies.
02:02:13.000Because you could see a world where he's just like, don't have enemies, right?
02:02:17.000But if you're going to do difficult work, if you're going to speak your mind, if you're going to stand up to entrenched power, you're going to get some opponents, right?
02:02:25.000But then the revolutionary part is that you are called to love your opponents and your enemies just as you love yourself.
02:02:34.000Imagine, I mean, I try and fail every day to do that in the legislature, to see my opponents as children of God, to see Donald Trump as a child of God.
02:02:45.000I'm probably going to get a primary challenge right there for saying that.
02:04:56.000He actually brought his wife and his kids, adorable kids.
02:04:59.000He talked about how he was a gun enthusiast and he was also a certified NRA safety officer.
02:05:07.000And so the more we talked, we actually got down to how we both really value safety in this conversation and how he was talking about how gun owners in many ways are the biggest advocates for safety.
02:05:17.000And then we found some consensus on background checks, stuff like that.
02:05:21.000But it turned from this dunking in comments on social media to when we were face to face, human to human.
02:05:56.000And person to person, which is the only way human beings are really supposed to talk.
02:06:00.000And that's one of the beautiful things.
02:06:03.000That's also one of the reasons why it's been so easy for me to disengage with social media, because I engage with social conversation, like real social conversations.
02:06:13.000So it's like, you know, social media to me is not attractive.
02:06:17.000I get plenty of interaction with human beings, even human beings with completely different perspectives than I do.
02:07:10.000Well, and this certainly exists on both sides of the aisle, but I think in recent years, this cancel culture on my side of the aisle has just become kind of the default spirituality on the left.
02:07:24.000And it is so toxic because nothing is more antithetical in my faith than canceling another human being.
02:07:32.000If we are all endowed with this sacred image, if we are all holy, then we are all of infinite worth and we are all entitled to unconditional love.
02:07:43.000Like that is, as a progressive, as a Democrat, like that is central to how I understand the world.
02:07:47.000That's why I fight for universal health care and against big money.
02:07:50.000It's because I believe each person is sacred.
02:07:53.000So then in a conversation where someone happens to not agree with you on a policy, even an important policy, the fact that you would write them off as irredeemable, as trash, I just can't imagine anything more diametrically opposed to my values, my faith, but also to, I would think, the values of the Democratic Party.
02:08:15.000I mean, the way you win in a democracy is you persuade people, you win the argument.
02:08:20.000But to say, you know, you are now a bad person, you're a villain.
02:08:26.000I mean, it's making everyone two-dimensional.
02:08:27.000It's also a byproduct of social media because there's this frustration that you're not face-to-face with that person.
02:08:40.000And, you know, Mark Andreessen had this very interesting way of describing what's going on with people that it's akin to cult-like rituals, is that you demand complete, total compliance.
02:08:55.000When that person does not comply, you cast them out of, you get them out of the social group.
02:09:02.000You eliminate them, which is what cults do.
02:09:32.000They find we have, for whatever reason, we have a default setting in our mind and the way we interact with reality that is very religious, whether we like it or not.
02:09:47.000I mean, that is inherent in our species.
02:09:50.000I mean, we are a moral believing species.
02:09:53.000That's what separates us from all the other animals is that we can think abstractly, think about the future and the past, Tell stories and then ask questions about what this all means.
02:10:02.000Why are we all here on this floating rock out in the middle of the vast infinite universe?
02:10:07.000And the least connected, most lost people I know are atheists, and that is really weird to me.
02:11:06.000I mean, now we're conducting an experiment on humanity in real time of what happens when you take this believing species and rob it of any community to make sense of the world.
02:11:18.000I mean, now that's why you're, I honestly believe that's why we see higher rates of anxiety and depression, especially among young people, is because they're growing up in an incoherent universe.
02:11:28.000And accentuated by social media for sure, this over-processed information.
02:11:34.000I think there's a perspective that people have that their way is the way that they have to defend and that other ways are the wrong way.
02:11:44.000And I think there's a spectrum when it comes to everything.
02:11:48.000And religion, like if you're looking at someone who's a right-wing person, who's a conservative person, conservative Christian, who's a Republican, they look at the left like Antifa.
02:12:10.000And I think someone who's agnostic or atheist, they look at like the Joel Olsteins.
02:12:16.000They look at these mega church pastors.
02:12:18.000They look at these hypocrites that drive Rolls-Royce's and fly in private jets and make millions and millions of dollars off of their followers as the worst aspects of Christianity.
02:12:27.000You know, because that is the worst aspects of Christianity in a lot of ways.
02:12:31.000It's the bastardization of the teachings, taking advantage of people that want to believe and using it for their own personal gain.
02:12:43.000And so they think of those people as hypocrites and they think of all these people as the worst aspects of society because they're looking at the worst aspects of this one group that's comprised of a billion people, which is kind of crazy, but that's what we do.
02:13:00.000I mean, a big criticism I have of my own side is that, you know, I mentioned earlier this pattern of order, disorder, reorder as the pattern of the universe that these religions are talking about.
02:13:12.000And we all, you know, were born into certain stories, whether it's religion, patriotism, masculinity.
02:13:21.000These are stories that we're born into.
02:13:23.000And we grow up and we start to question these stories, which is natural.
02:13:27.000I feel like my side is stuck on that second step.
02:13:31.000We haven't made it to that third step, that reordering, that resurrection, reincarnation, where we're taking these things and we are understanding them anew.
02:13:40.000Because religion can be toxic, but it is not inherently toxic.
02:13:45.000Patriotism can be toxic, but it is not inherently toxic.
02:13:49.000Masculinity can be toxic, but it is not inherently toxic.
02:13:53.000Like understanding that these are things that we can reclaim and be proud of, I think is something that hasn't quite seeped in on my side.
02:14:02.000So we end up just rejecting all of it.
02:14:08.000And I just don't think those things are true.
02:14:11.000So I do think our challenge on my side of the aisle is how do you get to that third step of feeling disillusioned, but then using that to rise and create something new and reclaim.
02:14:23.000Yes, politics is corrupt, but it doesn't have to be.
02:15:06.000I do think we're missing that moral clarity in our political conversation that really can only come from faith leaders.
02:15:12.000I think the cynical perspective is that at the highest levels, it's all being controlled by money, and that's not going to change.
02:15:19.000The people that were very hopeful for change when Trump got into office, one of the things that everyone was promised was you're going to find out the Epstein client list and you're going to find out who killed JFK and what the UFOs are all about.
02:15:33.000You haven't heard a fucking beep about any of that shit.
02:15:59.000And it's like, okay, well, that's why people are cynical.
02:16:02.000People are cynical because you had all this hope for change, and then you realize like, oh, the same people that are pulling the strings are still pulling the strings.
02:16:12.000Well, and it doesn't help when there are videos of the president hanging around with everybody else, including Nobel Prize-winning scientists.
02:16:23.000Yeah, I mean, whatever that compromise organization was, whatever that thing was that they were running, whatever this game was, I'm sure they're running another version of it right now where they provide experiences to people that have a very difficult time getting out there and having their fun, you know, and then they compromise them.
02:16:47.000I mean, I think this is a time-honored tactic of control.
02:16:56.000Look, if you have so much interest in getting to the bottom of this, like universally on both sides of the aisle, and yet nothing gets done, that tends to give people this fear that cynicism is the correct perspective.
02:17:18.000And I want to validate that, that there is reason and good reasons to be disillusioned.
02:17:25.000I guess all I'm pushing back on is that second step of it's always going to be this way.
02:18:24.000But I mean, if there's any hope I can give people, it's that the people in power, including the billionaire mega donors who basically run this whole thing, and I can get more into that if you want.
02:18:34.000But they are very afraid of the power that the people have.
02:19:42.000But they told the former Republican speaker of the Texas House, a guy named Joe Strauss from San Antonio, that he didn't have a right to be speaker because he's Jewish.
02:20:37.000And they give to politicians, but it's actually much bigger than that because they have this sprawling network of think tanks, advocacy organizations, media outlets, the Daily Wire, right, funded by them.
02:20:50.000So like they are they are creating an empire to control every aspect of the state.
02:21:01.000I mean, I don't mean to sound alarmist, but that is, that's what's happening.
02:21:04.000And again, your listeners should do their own research on this to learn about it.
02:21:08.000but there's been a lot of stories about these two billionaires and their control over state government.
02:21:11.000And I say this because And Ben Shapiro is very Jewish.
02:21:19.000Well, and these two billionaires hosted a meeting with Nick Fuentes, who is a Holocaust denier, and got a lot of pushback.
02:21:47.000Billionaire Petroleum Industry Brothers.
02:21:49.000And again, I think the important part about these two guys that's maybe more important than the oil and gas stuff is that they have this extreme religious worldview, and they have the money to be able to actually implement that worldview on 30 million people in the state of Texas.
02:22:04.000And now they're trying to go national by trying to win a U.S. Senate seat.
02:22:10.000So, I mean, if your listeners haven't heard of Tim Dunn and Ferris Wilkes, they need to.
02:22:14.000One, because not only do they make policy increasingly for 30 million Texans, but now they're trying to go national.
02:22:20.000And a lot of their views and a lot of their politics are going to become nationalized.
02:22:24.000I interrupted you when you were talking about Nick Fuentes.
02:22:28.000My point was that Dunn and Wilkes, and I've probably become the most outspoken critic of these guys because I do think people need to know their names, right?
02:22:39.000You open up your social media feed, you listen to the news, and you hear about Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick or even James Tallarico, but you don't actually hear about the two guys who run the whole thing.
02:22:50.000But my point is that they spend so much of their energy and their money and their time trying to create wedges between people.
02:22:59.000So let's just Take schools, for instance.
02:23:02.000The centerpiece of their agenda was this school voucher bill, which you probably heard about, which is basically taking money that would go to neighborhood public schools and sending that money to religious private schools.
02:23:15.000Those who are around Dun and Wilkes say that their ultimate vision is to replace public schooling with religious schooling for everyone.
02:23:26.000And so, but they know that Texans love their public schools, right?
02:23:30.000Like, I mean, public education is enshrined in our state's constitution.
02:23:34.000Friday night lights, in a lot of these small towns, the school is not just an academic institution.
02:23:39.000It is the community hub that brings people together.
02:23:43.000So if Dun and Wilkes want to get rid of public education, which I think they do, and I think the journalism bears this out, they've got to drive a wedge between people in their public school community.
02:23:54.000And so they deliberately fund a lot of the book stuff, a lot of the cultural stuff, the craziness at school boards.
02:24:04.000A lot of that is kind of funded and organized through the Dun and Wilkes Empire.
02:24:08.000Of course, you know, people should go to the school board if they have an authentic problem with the school district, which that happens a lot.
02:24:15.000But when you actually look into where, when you follow the money about who's getting the people to show up, who is distributing the information, who is riling people up about some of this stuff and undermining trust in public education, it's often done in Wilkes.
02:24:31.000And it is in pursuit of this policy goal, which is to defund and close neighborhood schools.
02:24:37.000We've already seen schools close all over the state of Texas because they're being systematically underfunded.
02:24:50.000But when you look at where the money is coming from and the fact that it is intentionally drawing a wedge or putting a wedge between people and undermining trust in education so that they can privatize it and profit off of it, I think that whole story needs to be recognized so people can understand how the left versus right stuff is actually not as important as the top versus bottom stuff.
02:25:12.000That these billionaires are going to, we're not going to have public schools.
02:25:16.000There's no way I'd be on Joe Rogan right now if I hadn't had Texas public schools because my mom didn't go to college.
02:25:22.000The only way I got to college is because of public schools, free, high-quality public schools, period.
02:25:28.000And I think there's a lot of people who would say the same thing.
02:25:36.000Because what they're worried about is, and I'll take the voucher fight in particular.
02:25:40.000We almost beat this voucher bill because it was a coalition of Democrats in urban and suburban areas and then rural small town Republicans coming together because we all benefit from public schools, right?
02:25:54.000We set aside our party differences, even some of our ideological differences, and we said, we all need well-funded public schools that can actually give our kids the opportunities they deserve.
02:26:06.000That coalition was not only a threat to Greg Abbott or Dan Patrick, it was a threat to Dunn and Wilkes.
02:26:13.000Because if we recognize that we have far more in common than the stuff that divides us, then that's a threat to their power.
02:26:30.000It is good strategic advice because when we're united, when we're together, then we make it a lot harder for those two guys to come in and dismantle these ladders of opportunity that we have.
02:26:44.000And we have fewer and fewer ladders of opportunity.
02:26:47.000So I think this is a prime example of what I mean when I say a lot of the divisions, a lot of the platforms that are dividing us that are run by billionaires, all of that is intentional so that we are fighting each other instead of asking hard questions about the wealthy special interests and what their agenda is.
02:27:04.000That is just the phenomenon that I have seen in my four terms.
02:27:08.000And I don't know if everyone is fully awake to that, that we're getting played.
02:27:59.000I even put a video on TikTok explaining Dun and Wilkes.
02:28:03.000And it was like the TikTok was getting a lot of engagement, then it stopped all of a sudden.
02:28:09.000And I think it was because the algorithm or the, I don't know how it works, but the platform itself had decided to stop the video from spreading.
02:28:27.000But until you educate yourself, until you do dig a little deeper, until you recognize the way this system is operating, you're not going to have the tools and the knowledge you need to upend that system, which it can absolutely be upended.
02:28:41.000We almost beat their voucher bill because we had that coalition of across the aisle and scattering the tribal dynamics of our politics.
02:28:51.000So ultimately, we didn't win, kind of came down to a photo finish.
02:28:55.000But it did to me provide a template for what happens if we actually loved our enemies, if we rebuilt these relationships.
02:29:02.000Like, who could we take on if we did it together?
02:29:04.000Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and progressives?
02:29:31.000You know, I think if I'm taking the journalism that's been done on Dunham Wilkes, I think their ultimate goal is a theocracy.
02:29:40.000And again, this is very personal given how important my faith is to me, but I'm a Christian, and I think there is no more dangerous form of government than theocracy.
02:29:50.000Because the only thing worse than a tyrant is a tyrant who thinks they're on a mission from God.
02:29:54.000We haven't had any good examples of that in the past.
02:29:57.000This is not one that you go, well, that one worked out.
02:30:14.000But I've just seen people like Dunn and Wilkes just take us in this far-right culture war direction at the expense of actual problems we need to solve.
02:30:23.000One of the bills that didn't pass last legislative session was a bill that would have provided funding for flood mitigation and emergency systems to get the word out when there's a flood.
02:30:36.000And we literally just saw the consequence of not passing that bill over the weekend.
02:30:53.000He's from far north Panhandle, where they saw historic wildfires last year.
02:31:00.000So he put this bill that would have addressed wildflowers, wildfires, also flooding, and would have, I think, saved some of the lives in the Hill Country over the weekend during those catastrophic floods.
02:31:12.000That bill passed the state house, the lower chamber that I'm in, on a bipartisan basis, overwhelmingly.
02:31:17.000Democrats and Republicans said, this is good policy.
02:31:21.000Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor who controls the state senate, which is the upper chamber, he held that bill hostage so that he could get his THC ban through.
02:31:33.000And again, I know this may be confusing people outside of Texas.
02:31:39.000It's a product that's providing people a lot of relief.
02:31:42.000Dan Patrick decided to put this bill forward that would ban all THC products in the state of Texas, basically close hundreds of businesses across the state, lay off thousands of people.
02:32:11.000My point is they use their influence to take a competitor out of the market.
02:32:16.000By the way, a competitor that is research suggests is safer and less addictive than alcohol.
02:32:24.000Again, I'm not disparaging alcohol, but it has a lot of negative side effects and a lot of negative and is very addictive.
02:32:31.000I have members of my family who struggle with addiction and struggle with alcoholism.
02:32:35.000THC can be, under the right circumstances, an alternative.
02:32:40.000I mean, there are seniors who use it for chronic pain.
02:32:43.000There are veterans who use it for PTSD.
02:32:45.000There are just Texans with anxiety who use it to chill out at the end of a long, stressful day.
02:32:50.000And so the fact that the lieutenant governor, one, would do the bidding of one industry over the other, two, would hold up literally a life-saving bill that could have possibly saved lives over the weekend in those floods just to cater to wealthy special interests, to me is just an encapsulation of everything that's wrong with politics.
02:35:07.000I think it's a bill regulating where dildos can be in like a store.
02:35:12.000Anyway, like I just, I didn't, I have not, I've heard a lot of things from my constituents, healthcare, crime, you know, education.
02:35:21.000I've literally never had a constituent reach out about dildos.
02:35:24.000But my colleagues feel the need to need to pass bills about this stuff.
02:35:28.000So I end up being in a weird position where I'm having to talk about some of these issues, like this issue of pornography, which has been used to do book banning.
02:35:39.000And it's an interesting discussion that we should get into.
02:35:42.000But the idea that teenagers are going to the school library for their pornography, again, just kind of, you know, it's common sense that I feel like sometimes we're just completely lacking in in places like the Capitol.
02:35:57.000Well, listen, James, I really appreciate you Coming on here because you're providing a perspective that I think is very difficult to acquire.
02:36:05.000I don't think most people have any idea how the system actually works.
02:36:09.000And the fact that you're willing to do this and to speak so frankly and so well about this and really explain it to us in a way that's digestible.