Ali Nazar

CHRIS MICHEL:  And I’m very excited to be joined here by the American songster himself Dom Flemons. Uh, thank you so much for being here. Hello. 

DOM FLEMONS: Hey, thanks for having me, Chris. It’s a real pleasure to be with you on the air. Uh, yeah, I’m just glad to be able to celebrate the legacy of DeFord Bailey and to be here out in the Bay area. It’s just been wonderful to be here for, you know, just a day so far, but I’ve been making quite a few visits out here. 

CHRIS MICHEL: Okay. Yeah. So, um, yeah. I mean, why don’t we just get started with a little bit of introduction about the festival and what’s going on. So I mentioned a moment ago, it’s going to be three nights, Friday to Sunday over at the Freight and Salvage. How did this get started and what’s the– the– the themes around the festival? 

DOM FLEMONS: Well, you know, a couple of years ago Peter Williams the artistic director, over at the Freight and Salvage reached out to me and told me that they were interested in doing a festival dedicated to DeFord Bailey, of course for folks who aren’t aware of DeFord Bailey himself, he was a harmonica player known as the “Harmonica Wizard” and he was actually the first Black star of country music. He played harmonica instrumentals on the show that became the Grand Ole Opry. And he had such an influence on early country music, including people like Roy Cuff and Bill Monroe, that he is sort of been now galvanized as sort of a legend, but of course his, um, his path to becoming that legend was marred with a lot of, um, different issues that came along the line. And so the festival is meant to just celebrate his influence on not only country music, but blues, folk music, and sort of the broad spectrum of Americana music that nowadays we almost sort of take it for granted because in the past several years there’s just been a whole swath of new Black country and Americana artists that have made their way out into the forefront. So that’s the idea around the festival. We have a– a great all African American lineup that features uh, quite a variety of the aspects of Black country music. 

CHRIS MICHEL: Yeah. Wonderful. And– and speaking of DeFord Bailey, I– I’d heard the– the– the myth or the legend that– was he actually the first performer on the Grand Ole Opry, like, as it was named, that there was that transition from an opera show over to “Opry?”

DOM FLEMONS: Well, it– well, how it went at that time– so the radio station WSM, they were putting on a program of light classics. And one of the newer DJs who would actually come down from Chicago, um from WLS and the Chicago Barn Dance was a fellow named George D. Hay, who became known as the Solemn Old Judge. Um, he was approached by two performers, Dr. Humphrey Bate, who was another harmonica player from the Grand Ole Opry, as well as Uncle Dave Macon, the banjo player. And they had both heard DeFord Bailey play locally in the Nashville area. They told George D. Hay that they had to have DeFord on the air. And so, without having an audition, DeFord Bailey was the very first performer to open up the show. And he played a particular number called The Pan American Blues, where he mimicked the sound of the train that was, um, the Pan American is a train that’s in Nashville that was very well known at that time. And so the opera performance had featured a– actually a piece that had been composed to replicate the sound of a train as well, so it sort of dovetailed from one to the other. And right after The Pan American Blues was played, um, George D. Hay leaned in and said, “Now folks, you’ve been listening to what has been Grand Ole Opera before, but from this day forward, we’re going to now be calling the program the Grand Ole Opry.” And so the actual show was named Grand Ole Opry after DeFord Bailey, um, blew everybody’s mind. [Laughing]

CHRIS MICHEL: Wonderful. Great, speaking of blowing our minds, you’re going to play a song for us, is that right? 

DOM FLEMONS: Yeah, I’ll play a little bit for you right now. I’ll start out with a little song on the guitar. You know, one of the other aspects of this festival is that we’re celebrating the legacy of Black cowboys as well, and I’ve been deep in that work for quite a few different– quite a few years and actually over at the Berkeley Public Library, um, my wife and I– we curated a whole exhibit dedicated to Black cowboys and Black country music called Westward Bound and that’s going to be open until Saturday. And so here’s a little piece that I wrote after reading the autobiography of a Black cowboy named Nat Love. This is a piece called Steel Pony Blues. 

[Singing and playing guitar]

When you get down to Holbrook

You won’t find me there, good Lord, 

I caught the first thing smokin’ down the road somewhere

Caught the first thing smokin’ down the road somewhere

Cause I called my steel pony and boys, I’m gonna ride

Gettin’ far too old to follow this here herd, good Lord, 

I caught the first thing smokin’ down the road somewhere

Caught the first thing smokin’ down the road somewhere

‘Cause I called my steel pony and boys I’m going to ride (go on Six)

Now they call me Mr. Flemons ‘cause I’m a Pullman porter now, good Lord 

I caught the first thing smokin down the road somewhere 

Caught the first thing smokin down the road somewhere 

‘Cause I called my steel pony and boys I’m goin’ to ride 

Go ahead and take on down the trail 

[Guitar picking]

Now they call me Mr. Flemons, ‘cause I done towed that guitar down, good Lord 

I caught the first thing smokin down the road somewhere

Now when you get over there, you won’t find me

‘Cause I called my steel pony and boys I’m gonna ride

(Go ahead and get it one more time, Six, knock it out of the radio)

[More guitar picking] 

CHRIS MICHEL: [Clapping] Thank you so much. And that was, um, Dom Flemons here on KALX Berkeley. Um, and that’s a song that can be found on your album Black Cowboys. 

DOM FLEMONS: That’s correct. 

CHRIS MICHEL: Um, and do you want– maybe we can transition to that and talk a little bit about that release and the research that you did into the Black cowboys. I’m curious, like, what were some of the surprises that you found as you did your research?

DOM FLEMONS: Well, you know when I first started doing research, I was doing– I started doing it, you know, fully in earnest about 2010 was when I started doing my first research into Black cowboys, and I’m originally from Phoenix, Arizona, traveled all over and um, and I found at one point, there was a book that I came across called The Negro Cowboys, which came out in the early 1960s. And it mentioned that one in four cowboys who helped settle the West were African American cowboys, working alongside the Mexican vaqueros and the Anglo cowboys, the Native American cowboys. And, and so I was, um, I was first drawn to that part of the story. And next, I decided to see if there were any other books that talked about this particular subject. And I found that, over time, there had been quite a few books written about the Black West in one form or another. Whether it was cowboys, or settlers, um Pullman porters, um, Buffalo Soldiers, um even what they call Black Indians, which are uh, you know, African American people that are either mixed Native American and African American, or they were African American people who lived within the, um, what they called the Indian Territory at that time, which was sort of the early enclaves of Native American populations once they were, you know, moved from the South to what would become now Oklahoma and different parts of the sort of Midwest and plain regions of the United States. And so I found all these different stories and so it dawned on me that there should be an album dedicated to this particular subject. Um, there wasn’t a lot of musical information I could find. I found lyrics, but not a lot of musical information. And so I started to research, and I found different songs that told this story. I wrote a couple of them, and then I sort of created some soundscapes as well on the album. And, um, I took it right to Smithsonian Folkways, because I knew that they would know what to do with a cowboy record. And at that time, um, the National Museum of African American History and Culture had just opened up, and I knew they had an African American Legacy series on Smithsonian Folkways, and so I wanted to make the album a part of that. And so that was how the album came together. 40 page booklet, so it was quite a bit of writing and research as well, but, um it’s been amazing to see since 2018 that the idea still hits straight to the heart of American culture, and it still has even up to the current moment. 

CHRIS MICHEL: Yeah. And what sort of changes are you seeing now with acceptance and recognition of the Black American cowboy? I mean, I’m thinking obviously of, like, Beyonce’s recent release, Lil Nas X, and things like that. Are you seeing that more acceptance? 

DOM FLEMONS: Well, of course, more acceptance because once people see it, um, it’s really hard to unsee–

CHRIS MICHEL: –Right.

DOM FLEMONS: –The, um, the importance of the cultural movement that is the Black West, you know, cause one of the things that’s, um, that’s a big part of the story that I tried to convey within my album is that a lot of people not just African American people, but, but when talking about the African American experience of the West, there are a lot of people that can connect with Black cowboys and people connected to the world that emerged post slavery, um, post emancipation, um, going into the Reconstruction era and afterward. And, you know, whether you’re one– one generation removed or two generations removed from the farm, a lot of people could reflect and think about that story. So there’s a historical aspect to the story. The other half of it is that everybody loves cowboys, you know, as an American art form and an icon, the cowboy is, I mean, you know, they talk about apple pie and baseball and things like that, but the cowboy is another part of that story as well. So we’re also seeing, like, a mixture of the iconic cowboy being upended and, you know, current Black culture being brought into it. And then of course, a third part of it is the living Black cowboy culture is– is– is being, um, unearthed and looked at. And also a spotlight has been shining on it. Cause that, you know, to– to say it hasn’t been seen would, um, it would almost– me, it’d be like, I would, it’s almost like I would be admitting that it never existed if I said it was never seen, but now a spotlight is being shined upon, like, the Black rodeos, the Black cowboy associations, including the Oakland Black Cowboys who are going to be making an appearance over at the festival, um, and, and these organizations have been around because people were, um, they were you know they were empowered by the story of seeing a connection. ‘Cause you know, a lot of African American culture, um, there’s a lot of disconnection because of the long legacy of slavery. And there’s a disconnect of an ancestral home, but for modern African American people, this Black cowboy story, it– it allows a connection to people who came off of the plantation and off the farm and built a new life for themselves. And a lot of those people are the great grandparents and the grandparents of the people that are living today. And especially in California, that’s a big piece of it as well. Many people can relate to having folks that came out from Louisiana or Mississippi and the parts of the deep South and– and made their way out west, um, just a couple of generations before. And that’s something that’s very powerful for folks. And– and even with someone like Beyonce, she– she constantly references that, being from Houston, the cowboy is a big part of her upbringing, and there is a value and a– and a power to that. And so I think it’s, um, it’s something that I saw from the very beginning. And I was glad that I was able to put my album out at a time that, um with it being a part of the National Museum, it allowed for there to be a, um, legitimizing of the culture of Black cowboys and I get to be a part of the people who helped, you know, put a little milestone marker in– in– in place. 

CHRIS MICHEL: Wonderful. Um, I think you said you’d be able to do another song for us?

DOM FLEMONS: Of course! And this is one that’s a song I do in my shows that’s a dedication To DeFord Bailey and his legacy. You know, he was a harmonica player, but he also played the banjo and the guitar as well. He didn’t do that on the radio. He was only asked to do harmonica music, but his legacy goes into this– this space that, um, talks, that showcases Black string band music of the South in a– in a very big way. And, um DeFord Bailey’s, um, grandfather was a fiddler. And so DeFord adapted some of those songs into his own harmonica repertoire. And when I began to read about that, you know, we’ve actually had a really wonderful surprise in the past week and a half. My wife and I have been wrangling this together for a little bit, um, first we had, of course, the– the festival itself. But, um, David Morton, the fellow who wrote the biography on DeFord Bailey, he actually reached out and he let me know that he was coming out. And so that he’s going to be making an appearance as a– as a special honored guest. And he also got us in touch with Christine Bailey Craig, who is DeFord Bailey’s youngest daughter, who’s his only living uh child left. And she’s actually making an appearance. She just flew in earlier this afternoon. Both of them came in this afternoon. And they’re going to be appearing at the festival to honor DeFord Bailey as well. And so, we’re getting a big connection with the family. And so for me, I’ve had a chance to play on the Grand Ole Opry and open up with a harmonica instrumental like DeFord did over a hundred years ago. Actually this weekend, we’re celebrating his 125th birthday. 

CHRIS MICHEL: Whoa. 

DOM FLEMONS: And so, um, so I’ll play a little bit of this one here. This is an old fiddle tune called Brown Skin Girl. 

[Plays harmonica]

And it goes a little something like this here. This is a little bit of what DeFord became famous for was playing harmonic over the radio. 

[Plays harmonica]

CHRIS MICHEL: Wow, amazing. Dom Fleming’s channeling DeFord Bailey here on KALX. And um, yeah, and so it’s just an amazing piece there. And can you remind me again– so the origins of that piece that was originally, it was a, um, a fiddle piece originally? 

DOM FLEMONS: Yeah, that was a fiddle tune that was recorded by one of the first country music instrumentalists to make records in the early twenties, a fellow by the name of Eck Robertson, who was out of Texas. And so, um, so, for example DeFord had, like, um– there was one old fiddle tune, Cackle and Hen, that his grandfather did, and it’s a really well known fiddle number if you know old time music, but when I heard him play it, he would play [plays on the harmonica]. And I thought it was such a unique way to play a fiddle number and get all the double stops and things that I– I picked out, um, you know, it’s the full title is There’s A Brown Skin Girl Down The Road Somewhere. But, um when I thought about numbers that I wanted to present in my show, I thought that was a great piece. It’s sort of, it’s kind of a ragtime, slightly bluesy type of number. And I wanted to present– one of the things that made DeFord Bailey so popular was that he played harmonica instrumentals. You know, it just, as an instrumentalist, he was only using the harmonica as his means to communicate a broad message. And, um, one of the things that you just don’t hear a lot of solo harmonica in that particular style of, um, um, it’s first position, which is, um, without getting too technical with the radio audiences, when you blow forward into the harmonica, you’re playing the natural key. And when you’re breathing in, you’re playing the secondary key or the fifth. So I have a B flat harmonica. So I’m also, if I breathe in, I’m playing F. So most of the, the common types of, um, harmonica you may hear is usually blues harmonica or like Bob Dylan style harmonica. So that’s like– [plays harmonica] that’s kind of like the Bob Dylan style of playing and then blues is breathing in a lot of the time. So I do [plays harmonica]. And so DeFord Bailey style of harmonica was very popular in the pre- World War II era and it was more of a combination of accordion style, as well as this sort of interesting, I call it a clarinet type of style where you’re bending the reed in a specific type of way. And so that’s what I wanted to showcase in that particular song was a little bit of all of those styles of playing, including what they call double noting, which is instead of just playing [plays harmonica] one note, you hear [plays harmonica], you play two notes, but you can technically play, you could play [plays harmonica] a full chord on the harmonica. So playing it fast, you can [plays harmonica], you know, so you can, you can replicate the sound of an accordion with the little, um, bass note buttons that you play on the left hand while you’re doing the notes on the right hand. And that was one of the things I wanted to present when I was doing that particular song. And then over the years, I went all the way from playing it in just my regular gigs to eventually getting to stages like the Grand Ole Opry to where then I was able to really tell people, “Hey, this is, you know, something where I’m paying tribute to DeFord Bailey.” And that allows me to have a voice for not only myself, but for the history that goes all the way back to the very foundation and origins of this very program. And, um, it’s one of the reasons also why my old group, The Carolina Chocolate Drops, we were able to go so far as a group that was, um, the very first, um, all Black string band to perform on the program as well because I knew that DeFord Bailey was a part of that foundational aspect of the Grand Ole Opry and so that’s something that I’ve always tried to present in the shows and of course when I arrange songs that’s how I try to treat them as sort of multi-layered presentations of music, that if you were to look up the song, the people who did it, or the styles that I’m performing, you’d be able to find quite a few different interesting rabbit holes to go down, you know? 

CHRIS MICHEL: [Laughing] Wonderful. And again, so you’re going to be performing tonight as well as on Sunday. So what will your program be like? Are you going to be doing the harmonica numbers, guitar, banjo? 

DOM FLEMONS: I’ll be doing guitar numbers, harmonica numbers, banjo numbers. I’ll also be playing the rhythm bones which are like a little castanet-like instrument that I hold between the fingers. And then I’ll also be playing the quills, which are like a pan pipe and, um, you know, all presenting different types of old time music, but I’ll also be playing some of my original numbers from, from my album, Traveling Wildfire, and, um, and show some of the aspects of country music that I have been presenting over the past couple of years. Um, you know, this year I got a Grammy nomination for Traveling Wildfire and half of the record is dedicated to a traditional country song, but, um, approaching Black themes within the songs themselves. And so it– it was interesting and somewhat ironic when I saw Beyonce actually at the Grammys, you know, I was there and I saw her dressed up in her rhinestone attire and I was like, I know she’s up to something. [Chris Michel laughs.] So I was sitting there in the crowd looking at her from a distance or four or five rows away and said, you know, something’s going to go on, you know? And so the fact that she’s embraced uh, country music as an idea, you know, I don’t want to pigeonhole her ‘cause that’s also a big thing, she didn’t want to be pigeonholed into it, but that she’s embracing the idea as well as the idea of Black cowboys as well. It’s– it’s something that’s very, um, um, very reassuring to see that mainstream interest has grown ultimately from this particular idea. So I’m– I’m happy about that. And, um, we even have a copy of her album, Cowboy Carter, in the exhibit that we curated as well. This, um, showing the continuity of, um, all of these, um, different phases of country music. ‘Cause you can’t really take it as one phase, you know, DeFord Bailey represents an early part of Black country music that is, um, part of the music that fueled country, you know, um, and that includes blues, spiritual music, folk music string band music and things like that. But then there’s another aspect of it. There’s, you know, African American performers who are doing country songs. So, like, when someone does, like, a Willie Nelson number, like say, like, I don’t know if I thought of one at random, like B. B. King, you know, he used to perform the song Nightlife by Willie Nelson, but he performed it in his own B.B. King style. So there’s a whole world of that type of Black country music, which is taking country songs and, you know, changing them so that they are soul music or blues music or R&B and all those types of things. And then there’s of course people like Charlie Pride, of course, which are people that came along in the ‘70s and they were unabashedly a country and western singer that was African American and uh, Linda Martell is another person who’s gotten a lot of nice new acclaim through, um, through Beyonce and through the advocacy of people like Rissi Palmer as well um, and those– that’s another facet of the music. But then of course the hip hop, the new hip hop Western movement is a whole other thing that’s the fourth sort of round of music that has now become its own type of thing, you know, so it’s been interesting to watch that all sort of evolve as it’s gone along. But yeah, we tried to cover a little bit of everything, so again the exhibit covers books, artifacts, records, and, and photography as well, ‘cause that’s even something that’s been great, um, we’ve had the chance to do some wonderful online, um, programming leading into the, um, the festival. And I got a chance to do a conversation with a wonderful photographer, um, um, named Ron Tarver, who just produced a brand new book of cowboy, um, photographs, and he’s he’s a fellow that’s based in the Philadelphia area and for the past 25 years as he, um, has actually built his own career as a Pulitzer Prize winning photographer, he had all of these, um, Black cowboy photographs he’d amassed over his whole photography career. The opportunity came for him to publish this book, he took that opportunity. And then we have this now new publication, and that’s on display over the– at the exhibit. So we had a great chance to be able to talk about, um, talk about his journey at seeing cowboys within the urban landscape because that’s a whole other aspect, you know, there was the movie Concrete Cowboy, um with Idris Elba, talking about Philadelphia cowboys and how you’ll see African American men that are– that have stables, they have horses, and they ride around town and all that, um, and and Ron was able to capture some folks that were doing that live– live, you know, um, right in the neighborhood. And so it’s just sort of– it’s sort of an interesting, um, multi-faceted look at the subject. Because it’s not– the reason I mention it being multi-faceted, I’ve said it several times, is it’s easy to get caught up into thinking that it’s only something to be relegated to the past. But it’s something that is very present in many people’s lives. And if you look just a little bit deeper and, and, you know, turn the lens just a little bit, you’ll find that you’ve seen Black cowboys and the different waves of that idea much more than you might expect. 

CHRIS MICHEL: Okay, wonderful. Well, um, Dom Flemons, thank you so much for being here. I know you’ve got to rush down to your sound check over at the Freight and Salvage. I’m going to go ahead and I’ll play some tracks from the different artists and I’ll give an announcement of who’s there. But I just want to thank you again for coming in and playing songs and for organizing this wonderful festival. 

DOM FLEMONS: Absolutely. It was my pleasure. And I want to thank my wife, Vania Kinard, for– for being a part of it every step of the way. And for– she was the main curator on the exhibit. And then I also want to thank the folks over at the Freight and Salvage for, um you know, allowing me to be the curator, um, also to David Morton and Christine Bailey Craig for coming down and all the wonderful performers. So hopefully we’ll see people down there and, and yeah, it’s going to be a big time. 

CHRIS MICHEL: Okay, and the, um, the exhibit again is at the Downtown Berkeley Library there. So everybody head on down and check it out.

 

The following is the transcript for the above episode.

Isabelle Risha: [00:00:00] You’re listening to KALX Berkeley 90. 7 FM, University of California and community supported radio. This is Berkeley Brainwaves, a 30 minute public affairs show dedicated to sharing stories from the Cal experience. I’m Isabel.

Stella: I’m Stella.

Alejandro Leyva: And I’m Alejandro. According to a poll by Siena College, 84 percent of adults believe that there is a serious problem that some Americans don’t speak freely for fear of retaliation. Where does this concern come from?

Stella: October 2024 marks the 60th anniversary of Berkeley’s free speech movement. Sparked by the arrest of student activist, Jack Weinberg in 1964. [00:01:00] The spirit of free expression, fueled by both the Black Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam war movements, came to a head when Mario Savio gave his famous speech on Sproul Plaza.

Alejandro Leyva: 60 years later, free speech is still as contentious an issue as ever, as claims of censorship and speech crackdown have become an unavoidable point of political commentary

Stella: Today we’ll be talking to two people on opposite sides of the political spectrum, as well as the law professor here at Berkeley about an issue that unites them all. Free speech.

Alejandro Leyva: I am Alejandro Leyva here with Professor Chris Hoofnagle. Professor Hoofnagle is a law professor at UC Berkeley and is on the executive committee for the Berkeley Initiative for Free Inquiry. Thank you so much for joining me.

Chris Hoofnagle: Thank you, Alejandro. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Alejandro Leyva: So just to start, what is the Berkeley Initiative for Free Inquiry?

Chris Hoofnagle: This is a faculty initiative to protect free speech and academic freedom on the [00:02:00] University of California Berkeley campus. We have over a hundred faculty members, so we are one of the largest faculty-led organizations on campus.

Alejandro Leyva: That’s great. And where does the Berkeley Initiative for Free Inquiry believe the school’s role in free speech should be?

Chris Hoofnagle: It’s a complex issue because we’re both a public institution, so the First Amendment applies to us. But we’re also an educational institution. So free speech has a special meaning in the educational context. We’re very interested in faculty academic freedom, freedom in the classroom and freedom to host speakers and events, where maybe people disagree with the speaker and come to protest.

Alejandro Leyva: 84 percent of Americans believe that there is a serious problem that some people don’t speak freely for fear of retaliation. Does this correspond to anything that you’re seeing on campus?

Chris Hoofnagle: There’s a very interesting inversion that I’ve seen in faculty speech and that is, despite the fact that many of us have [00:03:00] tenure and we have very strong free speech rights, we often speak so carefully and with so much reserve. So there’s this interesting contour where in a faculty meeting, um, it is not a free for all. In fact, people are being very careful, very thoughtful about the arguments they make, the points they make. It’s characterized by restraint, rather than anything else.

Alejandro Leyva: Taking a step back from just the Berkeley campus and the UC system, there’s been a big issue recently with introducing politics into free speech with different groups feeling that their free speech rights are being suppressed or that they’re not being able to say what they want to be able to say.
And how do you see that happening?

Chris Hoofnagle: Well, I think it’s important to understand, to recognize that at an educational institution, we are trying to bring light to the world. We’re [00:04:00] trying to expand people’s horizons. And in that mission, we need to be ultra tolerant of speakers that come to the campus.
On one hand, any speaker should be able to give a speech on campus without being heckled. We should be able to invite anyone, and we should be able to listen to them and think about their arguments critically. On the other hand, because we are at a university, the people we invite ought to be people who agree with some basic assumptions. Basic assumptions about the goal of our activities, which is to enlighten Californians, to make the state better, to make our young people more resilient, more capable in the world.
While, on one hand, I believe that any speaker should be able to give a speech, on the other hand, I think that we need to exercise restraint in that we shouldn’t invite people who are mere provocateurs, but rather people who are here [00:05:00] because they have legitimate and earnest beliefs that they want to convince us of.

Alejandro Leyva: In your view, why do you think that the topic of free speech and the suppression of free speech has become such a polarizing topic?

Chris Hoofnagle: Traditionally, the law has recognized physical injury as harms to people that can be remedied. But many emotional injuries, many intellectual forms of upsettedness are not, often not recognized by the law as a harm.
We do not recognize mere disagreement and argument as an injury. But I think we’ve seen is a group of people arguing that in fact, when you look inside people’s brains and you look at people’s physiology, they do become upset by speech that is aggressive or hateful. I attribute a lot to what we’re seeing today to people who have decided that speech is too much of an [00:06:00] emotional harm to tolerate.
But I believe in a free society, This is one of the injuries that we have to endure in order to have freedom, in order to be able to think, to be able to question our own ideals. We have to be willing to be uncomfortable, and we have to be willing to put up with the lack of comfort that other people might experience.

Alejandro Leyva: How does the Berkeley Initiative for Free Inquiry allow this discomfort to be felt in a way that is productive to the campus environment?

Chris Hoofnagle: Our members have hosted a number of events on topics that are really politically charged and what we’ve tried to do is model responsible engagement. We should be able to host speakers from different perspectives, and we should be able to listen to them.
And we can ask critical questions, we can ask really tough questions, but we should be able to listen to all [00:07:00] sides of a debate like that. So one basic issue is modeling. I think the campus is actually doing a pretty good job with that. Another issue that we’re very concerned with is the so-called heckler’s veto.
And this is where you have a speaker who is interrupted, intensely yelled at, hissed at, and so on, to the point where they basically can’t give their talk. So this issue of heckler’s veto is very difficult because we want speakers to be able to speak. We want critics to be able to ask hard questions. But in an environment when people start hooting and whistling, you actually lose the ability to have a conversation in a lot of subtle ways.
One signal of this is when you go to an event and they don’t let people ask questions, or they collect the questions on note cards. These are all examples where the people organizing the event have basically said, you know what, we can’t, we can’t pass the microphone to anyone because they might start [00:08:00] hooting and yelling and so on.
And so we all lose. We lose collectively from that type of behavior.

Alejandro Leyva: Going back to the politicization of free speech, do you think that it is possible for all different sides of this issue to come to some sort of fundamental understanding about free speech and what it represents?

Chris Hoofnagle: I believe that we all can recognize that if we don’t have free speech, we’ll have a collective injury to our consciousness, to our ability to make sense of the world.
And all you need to do is to experience that. All you need to do is to be, to experience being silenced. And then the gears start turning. So I think we have to all look into ourselves and ask ourselves. I ask myself, who might I not really listen to? And maybe I should go listen to that person. Maybe they have a point that would broaden my perspective [00:09:00] on, on, on a topic.
We all have to challenge ourselves to be broad minded. To listen to critics.

Alejandro Leyva: Do you think that there’s been kind of a downturn in being open to hearing the other side?

Chris Hoofnagle: I, I think the, the broader problem is the intolerance sometimes one sees from some activists where if you’re not fully with them, if you’re not a 10 out of 10, you’re not part of the club. And what I would say about that is having worked on politics in a long time, you can’t win elections and you can’t win political issues if you demand that everyone be 100 percent aligned with you. You have to think about the fundamentals to build a coalition, and you have to be willing to invite people in who don’t look like you or who disagree with you on some things.
And that’s what I see missing from a lot of activist groups.

Free Speech Movement Song Carol “Hail to IBM”: Let us all with drills and homework, manufacture human minds. Make the students safe for knowledge. [00:10:00]

Isabelle Risha: That was an excerpt from an event hosted by the Berkeley Forum, where Lynne Hollander Savio, Bettina Aptheker, and Jack Rady offered a glimpse of what it was like to be a student activist at the Sproul Plaza protests 60 years ago. To gauge the current status of Berkeley’s revolutionary spirit, I spoke with David S., a representative from the Revolutionary Communist Party.
You’re listening to KALX Berkley, 90. 7 FM, University of California, and listener supported radio. And this is Berkley Brainwaves, a show dedicated to telling stories about the Cal experience. I’m your host, Isabelle Risha, and today I have David S. from RevCom with me in the studio.
Thank you so much for coming in.

David S.: Thank you for having me on.

Isabelle Risha: Yeah, no problem. Uh, so tell me a little bit about RevCom, uh, its involvement with UC Berkeley [00:11:00] and what you guys are doing, uh, in and around campus.

David S.: Yeah, so this is obviously the 60th anniversary of the free speech movement. A time where, you know, the university and the country as a whole really was rocked by this, student-led movement that started here at UC Berkeley and that had its roots here.
And Bob Avakian is actually a student from, who participated in the free speech movement at that time in 1964. He was one of the people that stepped up and became a part of the free speech movement by standing on top of the police car that arrested Jack Weinberg, that they were trying to arrest him for organizing, for civil rights on campus.
Um, and that was part of what shaped that whole battle really in the 1960s was that there was a battle for students to have the right to engage with bigger questions on the outside world, to engage with questions of the Civil Rights Movement that was happening, the Black freedom struggle, as well as the Vietnam War that was going on at that time.
So, Bob Avakian was a student that stepped forward [00:12:00] at that time. And since then, he’s really followed through on that conviction to fight against injustice. And it’s led him to the conclusion that, you know, all of the injustices that they fought against at the free speech, during the free speech movement, not only have they not been resolved, but they’ve actually gotten worse. And that ultimately what it’s going to take is a communist revolution to overthrow this whole system that’s at the foundation of all of that.

Isabelle Risha: Right. Okay. Hence the name “Revolutionary”.

David S.: RevCom. Revolutionary Communist. Yeah.

Isabelle Risha: Um, so what do you guys do here on campus now? I know you guys had your, um, anniversary event at the revolution, at Revolution Books on, um, Telegraph last week. Do you guys host similar events like that? Um, just forums where people come speak?
Uh, what was, what was that like?

David S.: Yeah. So, uh, right down the street from the Cal campus, we have Revolution Books. It’s at 2444 Durant Avenue, Telegraph and Durant. Um, great place for people to come by and check out. We had a, uh, an event commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement. [00:13:00] And, uh, it, it was, was myself that, that spoke at that as well as, uh, author and professor Waldo Martin.
He’s a professor of history here at UC Berkeley and he wrote the book, uh, “Black Against Empire”, which summed up a lot of the history of the Black Panther movement and the Free Speech movement as well. Um, but we, we commemorated the, this anniversary by getting to what were, what were the lessons and what was the spirit of the free speech movement?
And, and some of what that really embodied was, you know, this refusal to back down in the face of repression and to stand against injustice. There was a real largeness of mind and generosity of spirit that existed in the free speech movement that involved uniting people of all different types of backgrounds in that struggle against injustice.
And what we’re really fighting for today is for, for there to be that spirit today. Because, you know, frankly, this is a spirit that’s being suppressed both officially by the administration, by the university. And it’s not really something that, that is, is common in, in the culture nowadays, including in the activist circles.
There’s far too much [00:14:00] distortion of truth for political advantage. There’s far too much suppression, suppression of ideas that people disagree with. And that’s across the board. So that’s a conversation that we’re really trying to, to open up that people really need to ask deeper questions and to think critically in this time where it really matters a lot.

Isabelle Risha: Yeah, it does matter a lot. And you talked about kind of how free speech, um, looks today. And I don’t know, that’s definitely something we’re interested in at, at Berkeley Brainwaves. How, you know, maybe like social media or how that’s all progressed, because it’s a totally different world from the 60s. And, you know, when Bob Avakian stood on that, that cop car. I’m, um, do you talk about that at RevCom, kind of what that looks like with social media and, you know, what is free speech nowadays? Um, Yeah.

David S.: Yeah, definitely. I mean, the lessons of the free speech movement have a lot to do with the struggle against injustice today and the struggle for a better world today. And, you know, Again, one of the things that really characterized the free speech movement was [00:15:00] this open contestation of ideas over the way forward, you know, over what’s right and what’s wrong and how do we actually struggle to, to end injustice.
They asked big questions and they were willing to think critically. And that is something that, you know, we’re, we’re really trying to fight for in, in today’s world. That you know, people need to ask deep questions about what is the source of the injustices. You know, I mean, there’s a lot of people nowadays that are protesting against what’s happening in Palestine right now, which is it’s a U.S. backed genocide against the Palestinian people, and they’re encountering some very real opposition from the administration right now.
Um, and at UC Berkeley and at universities throughout the country, restrictions on freedom of speech, restrictions on the right to protest and assembly. Now, there’s a question of what are we going to do to stand up against that? Are we going to accept those restrictions? or are those restrictions going to be challenged?
And then even deeper than that, What is the source of all of this suffering that people in the 1960s were fighting against and that we continue to fight against now? It’s a capitalist, [00:16:00] imperialist system, and we need to ask the question, are there alternatives to that? And Bob Avakian is presenting an alternative, for a new socialist society that actually incorporates the principles of the free speech movement.
But then goes much further in terms of giving people the means to to dissent, to protest, to debate over the way forward, grounded on that struggle against injustice. So really, what we’re trying to do is is keep alive that spirit of the free speech movement, but learn some of the lessons from that.

Isabelle Risha: And you, you identify that a lot. What, what are, would you say, are those key lessons in the free speech movement that RevCom wants to take away and disseminate?

David S.: Yeah, so, I mean, these, these are lessons that weren’t written in stone, you know, they didn’t have like a list of the principles of the Free Speech Movement, they kind of have to be extracted and understood correctly.
And that’s something that Bob Avakian, as a veteran of that movement, he took a lot of time and emphasis to be able to sum up those lessons. And they, essentially, they boil down to three points. The first one is the, [00:17:00] the largeness of mind and generosity of spirit that really unites, broadly, unites everyone who could be united against injustice.
And the second one is, is critical thinking and, and the open contestation of ideas. That, that is a really important principle. And the third one is not backing down in the face of repression and not backing down in the face of, you know, hypocritical moves to basically divide and conquer things, you know, to split apart the movement against injustice.
So those are really some of the key principles that can be extracted from the free speech movement. And then what Bob Avakian did is he took things even further. He said, look, the, we can actually incorporate these principles to run all of society, not just for a political movement, but a whole new constitution, a socialist constitution, a new socialist constitution that incorporates the principles of the Free Speech Movement, but then takes it even further in terms of giving people not just, you know, not just the right to dissent and protest, but encouragement for that, funding for, for [00:18:00] opposition.
That’s something that, you know, Bob Avakian has led, not just in, you know, we’re not just saying that this is better than capitalism. Bob Avakian is also making a distinction and a rupture from previous socialist societies as well. The communists have also been guilty of distorting the truth for political advantage and suppression of speech.
That’s, that’s a fact, and that, that’s a true, uh, uh, a hard fact that Bob Avakian has, has confronted. It’s an uneasy truth for, for communists and for revolutionaries to look at that, but it’s a reality and it’s a truth. And it’s a problem that, that has been solved with this new communism with a whole new framework for being able to, you know, appreciate truth coming from all different angles, including from, from people who vehemently disagree with you.

Isabelle Risha: Right, so truth is really at the heart of that movement.

David S.: Yes.

Stella: You’re listening to KALX Berkley. I’m your host, Stella. And with me, I have John Paul from Turning Point.

John Paul: Thank you for having me on the show.

Stella: So, what I understand is that Turning Point USA is a [00:19:00] group, it’s a politically conservative organization. The activist chapter is at high schools and colleges, Cal included, which among other pursuits intends to empower students to get involved in the fight for free markets and limited government.

John Paul: Yes, I would say that’s pretty accurate.

Stella: How would you say free speech fits into the ideologies or values that y’all have at TPUSA, or just that you have generally as a conservative on campus.

John Paul: I would say free speech, um, is very synonymous with those values, especially of limited government and anti-regulation against free speech.
Um, I mean, when you start regulating free speech, you have, these sort of two issues. Which is one, what is, you know, like hate speech or what is like wrong political speech. These are some debates I’ve had in the past, and that’s usually like reasons for why a government may want to regulate free speech would be because of like, you know, hate speech or, um, just incorrect speech.
But then you have the issue of what is false political speech and who defines it. [00:20:00] And that’s why, you know, we continue to have and foster civil discourse within our meetings. And that’s, you know, one of our main values, once again, um, is how to just have these sort of conversations. And you can’t, you can’t even begin to think, um, if you don’t have free speech.

Stella: Totally. And so could you maybe explain to me why, as Turning Point, y’all came to the conclusion that, you know, less government regulation is the way to go when considering false information getting spread and also the potential for hate speech to be something that happens?

John Paul: Yeah, I mean, of course, like to tackle issues of hate speech and the way that, you know, like the main concept of freedom of speech is that if someone says something that’s, that’s wrong, that’s evil, the people around you have, should have an understanding that that is, that thing is wrong and evil.
And if enough people come out and say that, you know, it’s wrong to wear a confederate flag on your, on your sweater. Then, you know, that, the person who wears the confederate flag on, on his sweater, he’s going to look [00:21:00] like an absolute idiot, to be, just to be frank.
People are not going to think highly of him. Like, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t be like, I’m not going to make a law to stop you from wearing a confederate flag on your sweater. But I think that’s a terrible, terrible thing, and I think you’re completely stupid for doing that. And that’s, that’s, I think, is, maintains the responsibility of free speech, which is one of the core tenets of free speech, actually.
Is that you’re free to say these things, but you’re also deeply responsible for the things you say.

Stella: Yeah, I see. That makes sense. And that’s sort of why I wanted to come in here and ask, because I know, what I, what I understand about Turning Point is it’s very focused on restrictions to the free speech of maybe conservative activists, for example.
And I was wondering if you, you know, in light of the Free Speech Movement 60th anniversary and, you know, the movement back then was characterized by like a struggle to end injustices around the world. I was wondering, like, what sort of injustices does Turning Point protest in the name of free speech?

John Paul: I think some of the [00:22:00] biggest, um, issues that we’re facing right now, especially just in general and politically, would be cancel culture, or specifically censorship on social media and online.
Like, I mean, we’ve, in the 2020 election, we’ve had, you know, the, the Hunter Biden story was heavily censored online, so these are things that are having major impacts politically speaking. Um, and also, like, stories shouldn’t just be censored. And there’s just been a complete dominance of, you know, a certain political ideology that’s been across, um, all the social media platforms that runs the social media platforms.
And there’s been various conservatives, particularly who have been cancelled for, in my opinion, in my view, very mundane things. Not all of them have been for mundane things, but Jordan Peterson got cancelled on Twitter for deadnaming someone. There’s also like, Babylon Bee has been cancelled on Twitter before, um, even though all they do is create satirical skits.
[00:23:00] And, you know, Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into X now and now Jordan Peterson and Babylon Bee and these other people who have been cancelled are free on the platform now. And we’re kind of seeing how that’s affecting, you know just the spread of information.

Stella: So when I think of the First Amendment like for free speech, you know, and I think of maybe however long ago they made it. Um, the idea was that you could go into the town square and get on your soapbox and, you know, protest the institution or the government or say anything you want and you’re not going to get arrested or anything for it, right?
They’re not going to, you know, utilize any sort of punishment or state. The state is not going to act in any way because you’re doing that and they think that like you should be allowed to say what you want. But my question for you is, you know, Twitter was a private platform. Like someone made it up.
Someone, someone was like, I’m gonna start a company where we all on our phones get to like, you know, say stuff to each other. And then that person, you know, [00:24:00] who created that company, or rather the company, um, like what, what about that company’s, I don’t know, freedom to regulate the way in which they want to?
Like I, I totally understand what you mean about someone who wears the confederate flag on their shirt, you know, and people are all going to just bully you because why are you doing that? And, and kind of. My understanding is that the same sort of things happen when you go on Twitter and maybe you just say something that’s just unpopular, and, you know, you just, you’re sort of losing in the marketplace of ideas.
And, you know, you might even lose with whoever the CEO of Twitter is at the moment, um, and they want to ban you off the platform because, you know, it’s just a platform, but that doesn’t mean, you know, Jordan Peterson can go stand on a soapbox, you know, in the town square. So I’m, I’m just sort of wondering how substantive of an injustice can this really be when it sounds almost just that people are losing in the marketplace of ideas.
No one sort of wants to hear what they have to say because they don’t, it doesn’t resonate with them.

John Paul: Yeah, so I completely understand that point. Um, however, I think there’s a few main issues. [00:25:00] And I think you’re right in saying that, yeah, you could be unpopular in the marketplace of ideas, but that shouldn’t be, that, that shouldn’t allow you to be completely banned and removed from distributing those ideas to begin with. And you, you mentioned Twitter as being a private organization, um, the, the issue is, is that when you have a large amount of social media platforms all run by the same people with the same political ideologies, um, and these are platforms that spread a large amount of information to a large amount of people, when you completely remove a certain perspective, then that’s, that’s unconstitutional censorship in my view.

Stella: Yeah, that makes sense. And I, I think I do agree with you in that, you know, we have these social media conglomerates, um, that control so much of what we, uh, what we consume and what sort of news we are learning and how we are learning that news, um, about the world and culture and just other people.
And that is definitely something that I think needs to be remedied in so many ways. [00:26:00] I, I had a question sort of off that for you. It seems like, sort of, both your group and maybe the people who criticize or, like, protest, um, you know, your, like, the group that you have, it seems as though both sides think that they are fighting the establishment.
So my question is, how do you respond necessarily to criticism saying that, you know, it’s not that conservative voices are not, it’s not that conservative voices are being silenced necessarily? Um, but that actually, you know, you’ve been able to be forthright with your ideas and views that you’ve had people come and, like, speak at Berkeley, for example.
And that, um, like, leftism is the counterculture to the conservative mainstream.

John Paul: Um, I personally, I’m, I’m not sure if you’ve seen the clip, but I was tabling and we were, um, directly attacked and targeted by some person who was angered by what we were saying. Um, there was, you know, tomato juice being thrown everywhere [00:27:00] at us.
Um, and, you know, that, I don’t think anyone’s defending that really, realistically. So, but it’s like, you know, the culture exists, there’s a culture of, especially at the Berkeley campus, you know, if you talk to conservatives on campus, there’s, they’re, they’re scared to talk about their beliefs openly, or for other people to know they’re conservatives. But if you’re a liberal on campus, realistically, you’re not scared at all. And that’s something that I think Turning Point is actually trying to fight against is the polarization of the political climate.
We want to be able, like our founding fathers did, to have civil discourse and to have discussions and to have debates without getting violent.

Stella: So my last question I wanted to ask you is what you necessarily think, you know, the future of free speech on campus, in Berkeley, in the world, you know, in America is, um, and also maybe what, what you hope it will be.

John Paul: I’m [00:28:00] very optimistic about the future. Um, I think most people maintain these values of free speech at Berkeley and in the country in general as well, but at Berkeley, the campus of free speech. Um, so I think all we need to do is just maintain the values we have today and it will stand strong and forthrightly until, you know, the end of time or whatever. Um, however long that may be.
So I think these, you know, free speech will persist and, you know, one thing I want, I would like to mention is when I was tabling that day, um, you know, our sign set changed in my mind. So the, the purpose of it was for people to come up and sort of debate us on the topic. The majority, the vast majority of the conversations I had, were very civil, and we’re non hostile, and I’ve met people who genuinely just wanted to hear our perspectives, and genuinely wanted to, to, to learn, and were genuinely curious.
And I [00:29:00] think, you know, it would be a mistake to say that the majority of the people on Berkeley are like the person who attacked us. Um, the majority of the people, uh, on Berkeley completely condemn that action. Um, and the majority of people on Berkeley are curious. I mean, to be at a university in general, you must be a fairly curious minded person to begin with.

Stella: So did, was your mind changed?

John Paul: No, definitely not.

Stella: That was John Paul of the Berkeley chapter of Turning Point USA. And before that, you heard Isabel speak with a representative from the Revolutionary Communist Party and Alejandro chat with a UC Berkeley law professor about free speech.

Isabelle Risha: This has been Berkeley Brainwaves and happy 60th anniversary to the free speech movement.

Alejandro Leyva: If you like that, Be sure to go to KALX dot Berkeley dot EDU and check out KALXtra to stream this and other episodes. Thanks for [00:30:00] listening.

 

Below is the transcript for this Fiat Lux Redux episode, which is an edit of a Barbara Weinstock Lecture on the Morals of Trade that happened on October 1, 2024 on the UC Berkeley campus. You can watch the un-edited lecture here.

INTRO: [00:00:00] Welcome to Fiat Lux Redux, a collection of edited lectures and conversations that took place on the campus of UC Berkeley. It’s culled from segments of material available online at UC Berkeley’s many websites, podcast programs and streaming channels. Today’s edition of Fiat Lux Redux starts now.

Lisa Katovich: On today’s episode of Fiat Lux Redux, Bill McKibben, professor and author of over a dozen books on the environment, founder of 350. org and Third Act. Both climate action nonprofits and contributing writer to the New Yorker presents the Barbara Weinstock lecture on the morals of trade, where he examines how the deadly trade in oil and gas has become an enormous threat to the ongoing climate crisis. The lecture took place on October 1st, 2024 in the West Pauley [00:01:00] Ballroom on the UC Berkeley campus. 

Bill McKibben: I’ve thought long and hard about this. talk today and taken very seriously the charge to think about the morals of trait and I’m gonna make an argument and it’s a big argument. I think that it’s time for us to end the trade in oil and gas around this world, but particularly and first in this country.

Oil and gas are the largest exports out of this country in dollar value. This is a big case to be making and I will do my best to make it with some precision. I’m going to begin by outlining what strike me as three constraints on our action, followed by one large opportunity. So the first constraint is simply that the climate crisis we now face is exceptionally severe.

It’s the biggest problem that humans have ever faced. I’ve obviously been tracking this for a long time, since I wrote the first book about [00:02:00] what we now call the climate crisis, what we then called the greenhouse effect, back in 1989, when I was in my 20s. The temperature has been rising steadily and dangerously since then, but beginning last year, it took a very sudden and steep spike upwards.

Beginning in about January of 2023, I started getting calls from oceanographer friends around the world. who were encouraging me in the strongest terms to go look at the emerging data sets about what was happening to the temperature of the oceans. It seemed to be going up very dramatically. And by May of 2023, we were recording the hottest ocean temperatures that we’ve ever recorded on this planet.

Buoys off the Florida Keys found sea temperatures day after day after day in excess of 101 degrees Fahrenheit. The scientists told us that these were the hottest temperatures, the hottest days we’d ever recorded on planet Earth. And so they were saying with confidence [00:03:00] that we were seeing the highest temperatures we’ve recorded on this planet in at least 125, 000 years.

And since June of last year, every month has broken the record for the hottest July, August, September, February that there’s been. We set new all time temperature records around the solstice this summer. We’re seeing the rapid melt of the ice caps at both the top and the bottom of the planet. The great glaciers of the Antarctic are being undercut by warm water in the Southern Ocean.

The great ocean currents in the Atlantic, which are beginning to flicker As freshwater pours off a melting Greenland into the North Atlantic, a mega drought in the Amazon is causing fire, not just in the usual places where people are trying to burn down the forest to prospect or raise cattle. But in the pristine interiors of the Amazon, because the rainforest is just literally catching on fire, we seem to be [00:04:00] very near the tipping point that people have long warned about in the Amazon, when that magnificent water transport system that the rainforest represents begins to break down.

There’s only so many really large physical features on planet Earth. Really, every one of them is in now violent and chaotic flux. California is now fire season year round. Last year in Canada, the fires in the northern forest turned that country of 30 million into the fifth biggest carbon emitter on planet Earth, right next to China, India, the U.

S., because so much carbon was pouring out of those conflagrations. Doppler radar indicates that it dropped as much as four feet of rain on top of the mountains on the Blue Ridge just north of Asheville. Places where people had lived for many generations essentially no longer exist. Increasingly it comes down in deluge and flood.

If you think this is bad in this country, and it is, [00:05:00] it is far worse in other parts of the world that lack any of the resilience that money provides to bail them out. At least 148 people are dead in Nepal. Some of the truly remarkable flooding we’ve ever seen. They had the biggest rainstorms they’ve ever recorded in the north of Africa.

The rain in Libya was enough to wash out two dams and then that river tore into a coastal city where it swept 10, 000 people out to sea where they drowned in an hour. It’s a good place to just remind ourselves of the ethical implications here. The entire continent of Africa has put just 3 percent of all the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Essentially, it’s a rounding error in the calculations. The 3 percent of human beings, who call themselves Americans, have put 25 percent of all the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. No one, not China, will ever catch us in the historical record. And it’s all still up there in the atmosphere, trapping heat.

Everything that I’ve described so far has [00:06:00] happened with a little bit less than 1. 5 degrees Celsius of extra heat trapped near the planet. But we’re on a path to raise that temperature about three degrees Celsius unless we dramatically get off this path and very soon. The level of chaos that it produces, let’s lay aside for the minute basic questions like agriculture and water supply.

Just concentrate on one thing, the UN estimates that that would be enough to produce between one and three billion climate refugees. Something like one person in four on this planet having to get up and leave their home. Try to imagine what kind of world we live on then. So, that is the first constraint under which we labor.

The second constraint is that we have very little time in which to solve it. We are used to thinking of political problems as lasting forever. That we just argue them over and over again and make incremental progress back and forth and that’s just how it works. Climate change [00:07:00] isn’t like that. Past certain tipping points, there is no going back.

Nobody has a scheme for how you freeze the Arctic back up again once you’ve melted it. So that constraint of time, that limit, makes this Very different from other issues that we’re used to dealing with the best estimate that we have of this time frame comes from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s climate scientists who, in a 2021 paper, published Evaluating the Paris Climate Accords concluded that if we had any hope of staying on that pathway that we set in Paris just eight years ago, that we would need to reduce emissions in half on this planet by 2030.

2030 by my watch is five years and four months away. That’s the constraint of time that we face. And the third constraint is that we understand very clearly. the overwhelmingly dominant [00:08:00] cause of the crisis that we face. And that cause is the combustion of coal and gas and oil. It accounts for well more than 80 percent of the emissions that we find in the atmosphere.

A deeply ingrained habit in our economy. Our habit of burning things stretches back at least 700, 000 years. That’s how long ago the archaeologists find the earliest campfire rings that they can carbon date. And really that’s how they tell there were humans around. Burning stuff has been a useful thing.

for our species. We learned to cook food that gave us the big brain. We were able to move north and south from the equator. The anthropologists even believe that many of the social bonds that mark our species probably come from those millennia of standing around the campfire at night. And when we learn to control the combustion of coal and gas and oil in what we call the Industrial Revolution, that produced modernity.

It produced [00:09:00] everything that we know around us. So combustion has been An absolute hallmark, maybe the absolute hallmark of our species. But combustion is now causing us way more trouble than we could ever have imagined. Not just the destruction of the planet’s climate system, and with it all the other physical systems on the surface of this planet, but even as that happens, Nine million people a year die on this planet.

That’s about one death in five from breathing the combustion byproducts of fossil fuel. If you’ve been to Delhi or Shanghai in recent years, this won’t surprise you, but it happens here too. There are hundreds of thousands of cases of childhood asthma and many deaths in America every year due to breathing those particulates that happen inevitably as you burn fossil fuel.

And we know who gets to live next to the refinery and next to the highway. It’s the people. It’s the other reason that this is the [00:10:00] paramount justice issue of our time. So far, the attempts to do carbon capture at fossil fuel plants have been ludicrously expensive and completely ineffective. They do not represent a serious attempt to do anything other than separate the taxpayer from their money in an effort to allow the oil industry and the gas and coal industry to pretend that they are doing something.

about the climate crisis. So those are three constraints. So those constraints are crucial, but without the opportunity that I’m going to describe, they probably wouldn’t be enough to get us to take action because fossil fuel has been absolutely essential to the conduct of the world as we know it. And it seems to me highly unlikely.

That in the next five years, human beings en masse will decide to change their lifestyles in ways that dramatically shift the amount of energy that we [00:11:00] use. But the opportunity, and the very good news is, that there is another possible exit from this dilemma. And it’s been provided to us over the last few years by the hard work of engineers around this world, many of them here in the Golden State.

And that is the very, very rapid decline in the price of renewable energy. Price of energy from the sun and from the wind and the batteries to store that energy have all fallen on the order of 90 percent over the last decade. Cheaper than coal and gas and oil to produce energy. We now live on a planet where the cheapest way to produce power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun.

That is a truly important moment in human history. The second cheapest is to take advantage of the fact that the sun differentially heats the earth, producing the winds that turn those turbines both onshore and off. There [00:12:00] is no technical or financial obstacle to very quickly weaning ourselves off of fossil fuel.

For the last hundred days, almost every day, California has produced more than 100 percent of the electricity it produces for long stretches of the day from renewable energy. At night, the biggest source of supply to the grid is often now batteries. Batteries that did not exist on that grid three years ago.

California this year has used 29 percent less natural gas to generate electricity than it did last year. That’s the most impressive thing. number like that we’ve had around the world to date. This, after all, is the fifth largest economy in the world, and arguably the most modern, and it’s using a third less fossil fuel to produce electricity this year than last.

That is a big enough number to [00:13:00] To start taking a bite out of that three degrees Celsius. If we were able to quickly apply it elsewhere, the country of Pakistan has suffered more climate damage than any country on earth. The two most epic floods since Noah in the last decade, Pakistan earlier this year, people began to note.

That demand on the national electric grid was down about 10%, which does not happen in this world. Demand for electricity goes up, not down, unless there’s a very steep recession or something like COVID. And Pakistan was not in a recession, and so people couldn’t figure out what was going on. With the help of Google Earth, over the last few months, people have figured it out.

Because if you go look at the images from Lahore or Karachi or Islamabad, you see a dramatic increase in the number of solar panels on roofs. Chinese solar panels are now so cheap that people were just buying them and putting them on the top of their store, [00:14:00] their mall, their phone. factory their home, the equivalent in the last six months of 30 percent of their national electric grid in solar panels.

That’s an extraordinary feat, and it’s apparently being echoed across large parts of Africa. Understanding that opportunity is important. We still refer to sun and wind as alternative energy. It is the Costco of energy. All right. It is the cheap stuff available in bulk, ready to go. 80 percent of human beings live in countries.

that are net importers of fossil fuel. That import of fossil fuel is by far the biggest obstacle to a favorable balance of trade. Often a crisis as they struggle to continue to keep their countries operating. It would be a gift of historic proportion to remove that burden from those places. It [00:15:00] requires coming up with lots of capital in order to build those panels and wind turbines.

But, the advantage is enormous. The rapid conversion to renewable energy would save the earth tens of trillions of dollars over the next few decades, not taking into account, in any way, The slowdown in the highly expensive destruction of the planet that we currently enjoy counting only the sheer cost of having to pay for fossil fuel.

You have to, among other things, mine some stuff in order to make it happen. And we need to do that mining of lithium and cobalt and everything else as responsibly and humanely as we can. And we should be capable of doing that. The total mining materials cost for batteries between now and 2050 would be less than the amount of coal we mined last year.

If you mine some lithium, you put it in a battery, and there it [00:16:00] happily sits for the next 25 years doing its job. And if you need to, you then send it off to the new plant on the California Nevada border. and recover 98 percent of the lithium and the cobalt and the copper and whatever else. This should be fairly quickly a kind of steady state circular economy if we could get it going.

I’ve outlined for you the most devilish problem that we’ve ever faced, and I’ve outlined a plausible solution to it that we can begin to see taking shape. But that again has to take shape with incredible speed to have any chance of doing the thing we needed to do. The question that naturally arises then is why are we not making this transition as fast as possible?

And the answer, of course, is that there are some people who want us not to make this transition. And those are the people who own the reserves of coal and gas and oil that would become essentially valueless in [00:17:00] that scheme. Just in this country, there are several tens of trillions of dollars worth of fossil fuel reserves.

That’s several tens of trillions of reasons for a very small number of people to fight to keep us from making this change. The fossil fuel industry has been a bad actor and a intellectually dishonest one from the beginning. We now know from whistleblowers and archives that the fossil fuel industry was studying climate change at least as diligently as I was.

Exxon was the biggest company in the world. They had a huge staff of scientists. Their product was carbon. Of course they were going to understand it. And they did. And we found the documents that the scientists gave their executives that predicted with stunning accuracy, what the temperature would be in 2020.

They were spot on. Executives at places like Exxon began building their drilling rigs higher in the 1980s in order to compensate for the rise in sea level that they knew was in [00:18:00] the offing. They started mapping out precisely which portions of the Arctic they wanted to lease once they’d melted it. They didn’t tell the rest of us, though.

They kept us locked for 30 years in a completely sterile debate about whether or not global warming was real or not. And it became the most consequential lie in human history because it cost us the thing we needed most dearly, which was time. That’s why we have five years and four months to solve this, not 35 years to solve this, and why we may not be able to solve it.

This brings us back to this question of trade. Since that’s what this Weinstock lecture is about. And to my argument, that one component of phasing out the use of these commodities, coal, gas, and oil, is to end their export to the rest of the world immediately. Which sounds like a very, very extreme position to take, but in fact has plenty of precedent in American history.

The oil crisis of the [00:19:00] 1970s, the problem was, and it was a real problem that we had to wait in long lines to get gasoline for our cars. That emergency was enough to persuade our Congress and our administration to ban the export of oil abroad beginning in 1973. And that ban lasted until 2015, when in one of the great ironies of American history, the fossil fuel industry used the moment when all the world’s environmentalists were gathered in Paris for the final negotiations of the Paris Climate Treaty to quickly pass through Congress and end to that oil and gas export ban.

Almost no one paid attention to it because as I say, every environmentalist was busy in Paris trying to wrap up that deal. So we resumed export of these commodities only in 2016, but in the time that passed, we have turned this into an [00:20:00] enormous, enormous industry. America is now the leading exporter of natural gas on the entire planet.

More than Qatar, more than the Saudis, more than Iran, more than anybody. In the last ten years, that trade has exploded, and that has been very bad news. First, for local communities on the ground, almost all of them communities of color and poor communities, who have the misfortune to live next to these truly enormous and truly disgusting facilities that have been built.

One of the most famous CP1 in the Louisiana parishes has been an almost constant violation about things like flaring and emitting for the last months. It’s literally hellish to live next to these places. That export of LNG is a real problem also for Americans who remain connected to the gas grid and who can’t afford to pay the elevated prices [00:21:00] that come when you’re exporting this commodity abroad, which is one of the reasons why there’s been substantial opposition to that export from those parts of the country, particularly the northeast that are still heavily dependent.

On natural gas, but most of all, of course, the problem that this LNG export presents is to the global environment, to the climate crisis. And this takes a little bit of explaining here, a little bit of physics. For a long time, people assumed that the export of gas was actually an environmental good. All things considered.

And the reason was that we hoped and thought that it might be substituting for coal in other places, as indeed it has to some extent in this country. And that that was better. And the reason we thought it was better was because when you burn gas in a power plant, you produce about half as much carbon dioxide per BTU as you do when you burn coal.

So it felt like that was a good [00:22:00] thing. About 15 years ago. A small group of scientists began to suspect that there was a real problem here. And the real problem is called methane, though natural gas, which is mostly methane is cleaner when you burn it. If it is released. Unburnt to the atmosphere, it’s much, much more effective at trapping heat than CO2.

Something like 80 times more effective at trapping heat. Which means, all of you who can do the math, that as little as 2 percent or so leak rate is enough to make this worse than coal. Now, the fossil fuel industry did not like this research as it began to emerge. I started writing about it, some of the first articles about it in the New York Review books, almost 15 years ago.

And the most important player was a methane scientist at Cornell University named Robert Howarth. And they ridiculed him in ways that I’ve rarely seen any scientist attacked. [00:23:00] Many of whom liked natural gas and the export of it because they saw it as a strategic advantage in many ways to the U. S. A way to gain balance of payments money and strategic power in the rest of the world.

But study after study, now hundreds of them over the intervening decade, has found, unfortunately, that Howarth was right and that huge amounts of methane were leaking in every part of this process. When we flew satellite drones over fracking fields, we were finding leak rates of seven or eight percent, that there were There were enormous leakages at every step of the operation, particularly when we took this stuff, super chilled it, compressed it, put it on boats, sailed it across the ocean to Asia and took it back out again and pumped it through pipelines.

The leakage rates made it clear in Howard’s writing and now many others that the export of natural gas was producing more greenhouse gas emissions than the export of [00:24:00] coal was. That in essence, America had over a decade built up a huge coal like export fleet. And the numbers are astonishing because of the scale of this.

If the industry built out all the LNG export terminals that they have applied to build out, then within a very few years. American LNG exports would be producing more greenhouse gases than everything that happens in the European Union. Every car and home and factory from Athens to Helsinki would be doing less climate damage than LNG exports from the Gulf of Mexico in the U.

1. That’s why, last year, a bunch of us, local environmental justice groups, and Third Act, kind of in the lead, led this campaign to get the Department of Energy to put a pause on the permitting of new LNG export facilities. Not to stop the [00:25:00] export, merely to pause the granting of permits for new terminals.

We were already, remember, the largest exporter in the world. That became a very difficult fight. In and of itself, but we were able to win it in January of this year when the department of energy announced that they would be doing an extensive review to take this newest science and the newest economics about the cost to Americans into account, that was a huge victory.

They did not react well. Many of you may recall that story in the Washington Post a few months ago when Donald Trump was meeting with oil Executives and telling them that if they could cough up a billion dollars for his campaign, he would do anything they wanted Well, it was clear from the notes of that meeting that the thing they wanted by far above all was an end to this ban on New approvals for LNG export terminals.

It’s going to be a very hard fight to keep this from resuming. The industry used the invasion of Ukraine to [00:26:00] justify this big increase in exports. But in fact, if it was ever valid, it is certainly valid no longer. Europe is awash in natural gas, and every single analyst says that demand In Europe is now shrinking dramatically because like California for its own reasons, Europe used the invasion of Ukraine to go on the renewable energy course in a serious way.

This is gas destined for Asia and it’s very much equivalent to to what the tobacco industry did after America got serious about trying to prevent the sale of cigarettes here. What they did was go try to sell cigarettes to people in China. And that’s exactly what’s happening here. A last ditch effort to lock in Asian economies, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, to using American natural gas, if they can get them to build the power plants and the import terminals and things, then they’ve got them hooked for another 30 or 40 [00:27:00] years.

And of course, that’s a problem for those places, but it’s a problem for everyone. The secondhand smoke that comes from burning natural gas mixes into the global atmosphere. in a matter of four or five days and raises the temperature everywhere around the planet. One of the things you should be concluding here is that natural gas is a dangerous thing.

Both the moral, since that’s the title of this lecture, and the practical seem to me to point us in the same direction, towards the obvious conclusion that it would be a highly sensible policy. To, as soon as possible, in the course of the next few years, cease the exportation of gas and oil around the world, and to leave that gas and oil in the ground, where it safely can be stored away without doing damage.

To replace it with the energy that comes to us from the sun. If we [00:28:00] did that, it would obviously have enormous impact on trade. We’ve always assumed that more trade is good, but I think that that’s at this point in human history, not clear at all. And I want to leave you with one vision in your head related to trade.

Currently, about 40 percent of all the ship traffic on planet Earth is just carrying coal and oil and gas back and forth across the oceans to be burnt. That is not necessary. The sun rises in the east every morning and sets in the west every evening, having taken a transit across the planet, delivering energy gracefully and benignly.

We do not need that great fleet of ships sailing and to dock them would be a hardship in certain ways to a small number of people, but an extraordinary gift to the planet at large and especially to its future. So there I end, thank you very much.[00:29:00] 

Lisa Katovich: You’ve been listening to professor and author Bill McKibben and the Weinstock Lecture on the Deadly Trade in Oil and Gas. This lecture was sponsored by the UC Berkeley Energy and Resources Group and Environmental Sciences Policy and Management, and co sponsored by Bay Area Environmental Groups, 350. org, and Third Act. You can listen to the entire lecture and discussion on YouTube. This program was edited by Lisa Katovich. 

OUTRO: You’ve been listening to Fiat Lux Redux, a public affairs show at KALX that features edited lectures and conversations that took place on the campus of UC Berkeley. The source material is culled from things available online at UC Berkeley’s many websites, podcast programs, and streaming channels, often in a longer form.

Our theme music is from New Monsoon. This is KALX, Berkeley.

 

The following is the transcript for KALX’s Tohar Zamir’s (a.k.a. Mr. Green Genes) interview with Nardwuar, The Human Serviette.

TOHAR ZAMIR:  What’s your stage, uh, keyboard that you like to use in our bar? 

NARDWUAR: Well, actually I use the Ace Tone Top 5 and I use the one that was given even Mike from Olive Lawn, that Trent of The Mummies had. Trent has tons of keyboards and I guess at that time they were disbanded so Mike got that keyboard to me, so I use that, but I have a couple, like, for parts, so if– if– you know, there’s something breaks, I can, like, get another one, but generally I have, like, an Ace Tone Top Five that I use, Vox Continental, Vox Super Continental. I have a Briscoe as well, and a Farfisa Mini Compact, which is the organ that Trent of The Mummy uses. And again, Russell Kwan is a DJ for Nardwuar’s Video Vault happening at the Great American Musical Hall.

TOHAR ZAMIR: You know I can’t wait. Great American Music Hall, that’s November 13th? Correct?  I’m–

NARDWUAR: Wednesday night!

TOHAR ZAMIR: Wednesday night. I’m so excited. Can you give us a little feel for what it’s going to be like? What’s the performance going to feel like?  

NARDWUAR: Well, there will be no organs on stage. [Laughing] It’s a baboo– well, I guess we– be some organs, but I’m going to play a selection of my favorite videos talk, and there’ll be a question and answer as well, but it won’t just be, like, me playing like my favorite YouTube videos, like “Sky the Rapper will not replace videos.” No, I’ll talk and do analysis and also people can ask questions and I’ll show little tidbits that you may have missed.

TOHAR ZAMIR: Nardwuar the Human Serviette, I have a question for you. Does social media make it really easy for you to search information on your interviewees? Does it change the game from when you started, when you had to get things more word of mouth? Or is it just another part of, like, a larger tool set? Does it not change your general, uh, practice?

NARDWUAR: Well, what’s pretty– I’ve been lucky. Like you’re a part of KA–

TOHAR ZAMIR: [Finishing] – LX  In Berkeley, and I am part of CI– 

NARDWUAR: [Finishing] –TR  in Vancouver, Canada. And when I first joined CITR Radio, I was just happy to hang out, eat my lunch. And when I ate my lunch, I ventured into the listening room where we’d listen to, like, new music, like, new music would come in and you could listen to the new music. In the listening room they had a clippings file. So for instance, if you’re listening to the new release by the Pandora’s or The Cramps or Public Enemy, you could pull out the clippings file and somebody from CITR, a volunteer, clipped out all the articles in those bands and put it in different folders. So when I did an interview, say, with The Cramps, I could, like, pull out the clippings file and look at all the clippings. And they would do amazing clippings, like the local reviews, some English reviews, all the reviews from, like, Sounds Magazine in the USA. Like, it was really extensive. So I relied on the clippings file for years. Sadly, the clippings file was thrown out at CITR probably about 10 or 15 years ago, but it was an amazing place to start. You know, “Oh, I’m talking to a metal band. Oh, maybe I’ll ask the metal band– metal band guy at CITR does a metal show some questions about the metal band. Oh, I’m talking to a folk band. Maybe I’ll ask the guy who does the folk show and the DJs are more than happy to give me tidbits on all these different sort of, like, musicians. So it’s a clippings file and asking, you know, the people that did the DJing, and now with social media, like, DJs put their playlists online so you can find out a lot. You can even listen to their shows live on air. It’s amazing. And also like the clippings files, now they have migrated, somebody has scanned in related articles on the internet. They’re harder to find, maybe they’re in different locations, as opposed to like one location. So, it’s always been there, if you can find it. I guess the internet has made it easier to find that stuff. But, there is always, I’ve been lucky enough to have all the stuff to rely on. 

TOHAR ZAMIR: I have to know, when you select interviewees, do you, ahead of time, make sure that you’re selecting people that have this depth of information available? Or do you follow the heart first, and you say, I want to talk to this person, now let’s figure out what it takes to actually get this insane research on them?  

NARDWUAR: Well, usually, for interviews, like, whoever comes through Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, so that’s my reasoning for that. But I have a lot of confidence, I had a lot of confidence in, like, CITR, clippings files so we can find information on ‘em. And also if they come all the way to Vancouver, they most likely have some sort of background, even, like, a band that’s new or something, they’re still touring to leave their town, especially a few years ago. Now, a lot of times bands are like, “Oh my God, our first gig was like last week.” Like, your first gig was last week? I think perhaps the first band I found out that, um, had kind of like, uh, did stuff in that way was when I interviewed, um, Panic! At The Disco. I think it was– they were playing with The Dresden Dolls in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and they were playing The Croatian Cultural Center, and that was like a thousand seat venue. and they sold it out immediately, as soon as they came to town. I was used to, like, in my band, The Evaporators or other bands, like, going to town, going back to town, building up your audience. Here they were coming to town. And I said to them, like, you know, “How did this happen?” Or it was like, “Well, we waited till we had this many friends on Myspace before we did a gig.” And I was like, “That is stupid. So you waited till you had friends till you did a gig? Why did–” And then I thought about it– that is genius! Like, they waited till they had a fan base and then they did a gig rather than, like, Nardwuar and The Evaporators trying to build up the fan base one by one.

TOHAR ZAMIR: So [unintelligible] The Evaporators–

NARDWUAR: You know, that is a way for the social media has really helped people, they can get their music out there and people can know, like, here’s a band, their first gig in Vancouver is sold out! 

TOHAR ZAMIR: You know, you talk a lot about college radio, about CITR and obviously your relationship with CITR goes back years and years and it’s a huge part, as I can see, of who you are. But can you speak to how college radio changed the way you perceive and interact with music? Because you once said in an interview 10 years ago, when you do a radio show once a week every Friday, you can’t really discriminate. What does that mean to you?  

NARDWUAR: Well, you have to find a guest every week. It’s like, and you were mentioning, like, how do you pick your– your guests? If you pick out a known band, an unknown band, or if somebody comes to town, they don’t have information, do you still– do you still pick them? It’s like, you– you’re doing a show, you gotta get somebody for doing an interview show. Yes, I do an interview show. When I first did my show at CITR, it was, like, really short, like play a song, play another song, but it was too much for me. So I was like, play a song, interview somebody, and play another song. So that’s what I meant by that.  

TOHAR ZAMIR: Do you have a particularly memorable location that you’ve conducted an interview before? 

NARDWUAR: Well lately I’ve been lucky enough to do them – and you mentioned kind of Paul McCartney before – at Neptune Records and Neptune Records in Vancouver has a whole bunch of vinyl, Rob from Neptune finds a whole bunch of cool, like, records, like, I will say to him, like, “Oh well Paul McCartney likes Buddy Holly. Do you have Buddy Holly on 78?” and he will produce that 78. Or Rob will have a rare Beatles poster in his collection. So that is a great place for doing interviews at Neptune Records in Vancouver because he lets me, Rob and Ben – shout out to Rob and Ben – lets me do interviews in Neptune Records, but I’ve also done many interviews at CITR radio. And I will talk to anybody, anywhere, basically. I think that’s kind of the difference, like, when a lot of people in established media, or people that have regular sort of podcasts, etc., it’s, like, “Oh, come to my podcast, and we’ll talk for like, two hours,” or whatever.  And that is great, but unfortunately it’s kind of like, I don’t have that luxury. It’s like, you know, “Lady Gaga will see you in 10 minutes, and she’ll see you for 10 minutes and you have to come to her.” So I don’t have the luxury of the guests coming to me. So it’s kind of like a punk rock attack – just go there, ask the questions, get the hell out. So I’m happy that the interview happened, but when people will come to me and spend more time, yes, I love to do it at Neptune in Vancouver.

TOHAR ZAMIR: And then from the opposite perspective, what’s it like to be interviewed, Nardwuar?  

NARDWUAR: I’m just honored that you, Tohar, and KA–

TOHAR ZAMIR: [Finishing, giggling]  –LX  

NARDWUAR: –even cares! It’s, like, amazing! I love that! It’s like– you know, having done interviews myself, I’m like, “You want to talk to me?!” I love that. It’s– it’s so exciting. I’m honored. When I do an interview, it’s the interviewer– uh– it’s their job to make the interviewee exciting, you know, to bring out that flavor. And when I get interviewed, it’s up to me as the interviewee to make the interview exciting. So it’s up to me. 

TOHAR ZAMIR: So the interview is a performance. 

NARDWUAR: –to get the information out there, I would say it’s a performance. It’s a sort of memory of college radio and you doing your show. Now, a lot of people will email, but when I did my show many years ago, the phone would ring and somebody would say, “This interview is boring!” And you’d be like, “Oh yeah.” Or you’d put that on air and they’d say, like, “I hate you, I hate you.” And, like, “You’re talking to the band?” “Yes. I hate the band. They’re boring.” Like, you know, like, or,  “I hate you. This is a boring interview.” You know, like– oh– so I am constantly still to this day when I’m doing interviews or getting interviewed, I’m, like, thinking, “Somebody is listening in and somebody may be like, ‘This is boring!’” So you try to make it exciting for the listener or think about that one listener, what they would like to hear or what they would like to find out from.

TOHAR ZAMIR: Then is there something constructive about hate mail, or hate calls that you would get, because I would get them too as a DJ. For every great letter I get, or every great phone call, there’s that one who calls and says, This sucks, turn it off! Does that teach you anything?  

NARDWUAR: Well, Tohar, I think it’s totally amazing that people make the effort to phone in to say, “You suck!” Your enemies let you rot in hell! Your friends tell you what’s wrong. So I am so thankful when people phone in. So be thankful that people are phoning in. Also at CITR, man– every time somebody’s phones in, it means like 50 people are listening. So like, yeah, I got at least one listener there. So it’s good. Now, if they say some terrible, like, horrible stuff to you, maybe you should report them to the police. You know, they’re maybe not your friend, but generally it’s good to get feedback. You know, how can I improve myself? Um, other people have said to me, “Well, you could blank blank and die.” I was like, okay, thank you very much, and Doot Doola Doot Doo–

TOHAR ZAMIR: [finishing] –Doot Doo!

NARDWUAR: Doot doot, and that was the end of the conversation. So–

TOHAR ZAMIR: I can’t believe I just got “Doot Doola Doot Doo”! 

NARDWUAR: That’s– you’re still listening. You’re still listening to KA–

TOHAR ZAMIR: –LX. 

NARDWUAR: And I’m Nardwuar, The Human Serviette, with– [pauses purposefully]

TOHAR ZAMIR: Mr. Green Genes, DJ name, but real name, Tohar. We’re past that now. 

NARDWUAR: Oh, Mr.Green Genes, okay!

TOHAR ZAMIR: Yes. Nardwuar, I have to know, does guitar get the girls?  

NARDWUAR: Well, I do play, uh, I can play guitar, Human Fly, by the song The Cramps. I can play that on guitar, because that’s easy to play. And your question there could be an allusion to my interview with Timothy Leary. Do you remember that one?

TOHAR ZAMIR: I can’t say whether that was intentional, but I would love it if you would continue to talk about it–

NARDWUAR: Well thank you for going deep into the Dark Archives, because I think I asked that question to Timothy Leary, speaking of Berkeley, so people can check that out. And then he said something like, um, I forget exactly what he said, but I just remember he said something, and then he went, “Doot Doola Doot Doo.”

TOHAR ZAMIR: Doot Doo!

NARDWUAR: Exactly. Yeah. So yeah, that was– that was a question that Timothy Leary– then when he came to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, he came to like, um, the sub building in Vancouver, the university, cause he wanted to, like, eat hamburgers with the students. And he did, like, a show called How To Operate Your Brain and AMS– um, the AMS Concerts said, hey, we’re going to have Timothy Leary in here, um, and I was like, “Can I come in and interview?” So we did the interview. But when people watch the interview– the first path to the interview was like before the show, the last time was after the show, see, so it was interesting, but he stuck around until the very end. So, but that’s what I really appreciate– like, you know, people remember, Oh, “Nardwuar, Timothy Leary is coming. You got to talk to him.” Like, I rely– everything I’ve done has been said or done before. I rely on people and, as I mentioned the clippings file, to get information out, it’s not that hard to find information, it’s just– spend some time. And also, I can’t find that, like, Timothy Leary is coming to Vancouver, I need somebody to tell me. I don’t have everything, like, on speed dial, I don’t know what’s up, I’m just there to, like, inspire people, like, if the hardware can do it, anybody can. And that’s how, also, actually, I was just gonna say, I found out about KA–

TOHAR ZAMIR: [Finishing] –LX

NARDWUAR: [Finishing] –Berkeley, because the Mr. T Experience referenced that radio station lots when I interviewed them in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. So I guess you’d find it out from different friends– different people– for The Mummies, um, so I saw them listed in that Rocket Magazine from Seattle, Washington, and then they came to Vancouver with The Mono Men. And then my friend’s band, The Smugglers, played with them at The Town Pump, but it was a drinking gig, so I was not interested in playing that, because I believe that we should only play all ages gigs. So, I didn’t play that, but my friend’s band, The Smugglers, played with The Mummies, and then The Smugglers met The Mummies, and actually believe, it or not, Beez from The Smugglers end up filling in for Maz on bass on one of The Mummies’ last tours in Europe in 1997. So I guess with– through The Smugglers and then The Mummies disbanded  and then got back together, and then how I end up getting The Mummies’ organ was Dave Carswell, who also played in The Evaporators, played in The Smugglers, and The Smugglers got to know Olivelawn, and oh, Rest In Peace, through–  and then that’s the connection for the keyboard. So it wasn’t me exactly, it was other people that I knew, knew them.  

TOHAR ZAMIR: What gig do you regret not going to, if you have any regrets? 

NARDWUAR: Well, one of the gigs that you mentioned, uh, that I– so I mentioned, like, going home, I remember like, it was, like, Friday night. I did my show 3:30 to 5 p.m. on CITR radio.  And CITR, um, at the time, and still, you know, we like to be professional, like, thank you again, shout out to KALX, and specifically– who set up this interview? 

TOHAR ZAMIR: Uh, Max, or EchoPlex, our interview coordinator. 

NARDWUAR: Max. Shout out to Max for setting this up. Like, Max realizes when you set up an interview, it’s gotta happen. Like, if you don’t– if it doesn’t happen, it’s unprofessional, like, you were there, Tohar, thank you again, so much, for being there, for me, Nardwuar The Human Serviette, I really appre– again, you’re listening to–

TOHAR ZAMIR: KA–

NARDWUAR: [Finishing] –LX. So thank you for wanting to interview me. But a lot of times it’s– let’s say I, like, Zoomed you and you weren’t there and it kind of wait– wait– a lot of times, you know, the interviewer waits hours for the people to phone in, waits hours and hours and hours, but I can expect– but for the band, usually they phone the station and the DJ is there. Well, I’d finished my show at CITR, I did my show between 3:30 and 4 PM– was only half an hour at that time. At 4PM The Noise Show is on, which is– we call it “noise,” back East they call it “radio art,” but basically it’s like a guy vacuuming the studio, which is amazing. And I’ve learned so much about noise and noise music. One time I walked into the studio and believe it or not, The Noise Show guy had a mic up to his heart and I was like, “What the hell!”  He’s like, “Shut up, I’m broadcasting my heartbeat.” So that’s what’s so great about CITR. It’s like you learn something every time you walk in the door of different types of people. So I was doing my show 3:30 to 4 and The Noise Show was between 4 and 5. And Linda, who was the Max of CITR– she was actually, you know, the station manager, she wasn’t actually the music director, but still she was a station manager. So somebody phoned and they said, “Uh, I’m here to reach so- and- so, um, you know, I want to do the interview, like, I’m here to do the interview. I’m a band. I’m ready to do the interview. And then Linda looked for a person to do the interview, the actual person, and the person wasn’t there. So it’s unprofessional to let the person just, like, oh, uh, “Sorry, there’s no interview.” So, she put them on hold, and she called me over, and she said, “Hey, um, Nardwuar, would you like to talk to so-and-so?” And then I was like, “But my show is finished, it’s 4pm, it’s like The Noise Show is on.” She’s like, “We gotta be professional. We got to do this interview.” I was like, “Well, I don’t– well, okay, I’ll do it.” So I went to The Noise Show and I said, “Could I please have a bit of your show?” He’s like, “Okay, sure.” So, you know, like he fades out the vacuuming noises. And I came in with Kris Novoselic of Nirvana in 1991. And so I did the interview with him. He was playing in Vancouver at The Town Pump with The Bombshells and I forget the other band, but I think they might have been headlined in The Town Pump in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. I did the interview, and then I finished the interview, and then I went home, and I wish I went to that gig.

TOHAR ZAMIR: But what a story, still. 

NARDWUAR: But people can hear that interview on YouTube. It is on YouTube – audio only, but they can hear it. So just an aside there, it’s like, okay, Nardwuar, how come you weren’t going to interview them in the first place? I’m stupid! It takes me years and years. To figure out what’s happening, like, I love The Cramps, Nadwuar The Human Serviette, but somebody said, “Hey, do you want to talk to Bjork from The Sugar Cubes? She’s coming to Vancouver.” It’s like, screw The Sugar Cubes. It’s like, I like The Cramps! Like, I don’t like The Sugar Cubes. Like, maybe I’ll do a– no, forget it. And now I’m thinking back, what an idiot I was! I should have talked to Bjork and The Cramps but I was like so stuck in my ways. And the great thing you can learn about all these bands by tuning into CITR radio. And if I’m not up on the entire band, then, um– I’ve been listening to CITR a lot, it’s like, I was one time listening to um, CITR radio and I heard that band, um, they did the song, um, [Pizza Hut and] Combination Taco Bell and and this guy was playing this and I found out what band that was. I think they’re called Das Racist, Combination [Pizza Hut and] Taco Bell.l It’s an amazing song and then I was, like, phoning the DJ and the DJ said well, “This is Das Racist, you’ve got to interview them.” So I interviewed them and their manager also managed Tyler the Creator, and he set up my Tyler the Creator interview. 

TOHAR ZAMIR: –So I have a question–

NARDWUAR: –So it’s kind of wild that, like, by listening to CITR, that connected me to Tyler the Creator. And also for Nirvana, I know the exact place I heard Smells Like Teen Spirit in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, on Beach Avenue. It was played on Paul T. Brooks’ show on CITR radio, and I heard it when I was driving to CITR radio. But I would have not heard that song had I not been listening to CITR. True, Nirvana had put out lots of records and had worked at Scratch Records in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. And a lot of people had come in and bought Bleach, but Bleach seemed to be a lot different than, um, Nevermind, so I kind of thought I knew everything. So when I heard it, I was like, is this really the same band? So it’s very– so everything goes back to, like, knowing that. So again, I don’t really know anything. I didn’t know people that know something, I don’t know anything, I don’t know people that know something.

TOHAR ZAMIR: Nardwuar, you have been nothing but the consummate gentleman during this interview. It is, with no hyperbole, perhaps the greatest I’ve had the grace of recording for KALX Berkeley. I have to know, tell us one last time about your gig. Tell us what’s going to happen and why we all need to be there urgently!

NARDWUAR: Well, I wouldn’t say urgently. Come there if you want to get inspired. Like, hey, if that guy can do it, anybody can. But basically me, Nardwuar the Human Serviette from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, I’m going to play a selection of my favorite interviews, talk about those interviews and also do a question and answer and provide insight and little known tidbits, or maybe known tidbits, or 80 percent known tidbits into what’s going on. So that’s going to be happening at The Great American Music Hall on Wednesday November the 13th in San–

TOHAR ZAMIR: [Finishing] –Francisco–

NARDWUAR: –and you’re listening to KA–

TOHAR ZAMIR: [Finishing] –LX

NARDWUAR: [Finishing] –Radio Berkeley!

Below is the transcript of this original KALX Artist Interview of Brijean members Brijean Murphy and Doug Stuart, performed by KALX DJ Excuse My French.

TRANSCRIPT:

Excuse My French: [00:00:00] Thank you very much, Brijean and Doug, to answer the call of KALX interviews.

Brijean Murphy: Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Excuse My French: I’m gonna have to ask you a bunch of questions. I’m sorry in advance.

Brijean Murphy: Great. No worries.

Excuse My French: All right, let’s get straight to it. So, how did you guys meet?

Doug Stuart: Um, we met at a show we were both playing in different bands at the time. Um, and it was a show in Davis, California at, uh, Sophia’s Thai restaurant. And that was 2013?

Brijean Murphy: Mm hmm.

Doug Stuart: Yeah, so just, just playing in bands, different bands, and on the same bill.

Brijean Murphy: Yeah, in the Bay Area.

Excuse My French: Yeah, because you’re local, you’re from Oakland, right?

Brijean Murphy: Well, Doug’s originally from Chicago, I’m originally from Los Angeles, but, um, we lived in the Bay Area for 10 years each [00:01:00] more or less And still have a lot of good friends there and work out of studios there sometimes But yeah, and I went to UC Berkeley and that’s kind of what brought me up there and Doug came out for music.

Excuse My French: Oh Doug. How do you like the Bay Area?

Doug Stuart: I loved it. Yeah, yeah, I found that there was just a lot of different types of music happening in the Bay and a lot of crossover and a lot of, uh, collaboration and melding of styles, which has always interested me.

Excuse My French: And you Brijean, what did you study at UC Berkeley?

Brijean Murphy: Um, I studied Peace and Conflict Studies with an emphasis in Water Resource Conflict. And, um, I joined some bands, I lived in the co ops, and, um, yeah, eventually just kind of, um, leaned into music more than non profit [00:02:00] work, and, um, eventually began my career, um, in music.

Excuse My French: Oh, wow, great. Uh, by the way, I know it’s a bit late. A little bit bold of me to do that, but if you ever want to, uh, perform on KALX Live! on Saturday, uh, one Saturday, you’re more than welcome.

Brijean Murphy: Nice, thank you so much.

Excuse My French: You came up with another album, your fourth album, Macro. Uh, do you mind walking us through the, uh, genesis of this new project?

Brijean Murphy: Yeah, sure.

Doug Stuart: Um, yeah, we, we were both, um, doing a lot of different work. At the time, uh, with other bands and different production things, um, but were excited to work on a new record and because we had kind of diverging schedules again after the pandemic, we had to block out some time to be together and to work on it and we put some time aside.

Brijean Murphy: A few months.

Doug Stuart: A few months.

Brijean Murphy: Yeah, five months.

Doug Stuart: Yeah, we necessarily have [00:03:00] a, uh, super explicit sound that we wanted to achieve, but we knew we wanted to stretch and we had a lot of different influences that we, again, weren’t trying to necessarily do one thing, but we just knew that we wanted to try some different sounds that we hadn’t explored yet.
Um, so we kind of, uh, hit the ground running and just, uh, tried to write as much as we could and without any restrictions or limitations on what that was going to sound like. That was kind of the beginning of the process.

Brijean Murphy: Yeah. And then, um, once we really had songs formed for the most part, we hired some friends and different musicians, to come and play on the record.
Um, lap steel, uh, live strings, um, percussion, drums, many, [00:04:00] three different drummers. And so that felt like a nice way to, um, bring in community and some really amazing players, um, to lend their skills to the album. And, um, yeah.

Excuse My French: Yeah. I read somewhere that you had a lot of collaborators, uh, in the making on this album.

Brijean Murphy: Yeah, a lot more than before, definitely, because Angelo, the, the previous album was just Doug and I, um, the one Feelings, uh, the one before that was recorded a lot in Berkeley and Oakland starting with jam sessions with friends. So it was nice to reach back out in a different way and not start with jams with friends and really kind of incubate our own expression within a, um, kind of capsule and then purposefully link with certain musicians, um, and friends and that, that just felt nice and [00:05:00] new and, and different for us.

Excuse My French: Good. Uh, what were some highlights, uh, during that creative journey in the making of Macro?

Doug Stuart: I think anytime we got to bring someone in, uh, it felt like, um, just like, uh, how did you say it before? A cherry on top. We’d have like a song that was felt pretty much done, but we knew we wanted to put something extra into it. And I can remember one of those sessions was with, uh, Logan Hone, who plays flute on Euphoric Avenue and, um, Laura and on one of the interludes called After Life, uh, but particularly with Euphoric Avenue, it was close to finished and we had him play on that and it, um, it was just exciting to, to hear how it opened up with his [00:06:00] contribution, um, and with some guidance, but with also a lot of trust and whatever he was hearing. Um, and then another one of those moments was, uh, with uh, Steph Yu, the violinist who plays on, um, Get Lost and on Euphoric Avenue. We had arranged the strings and had programmed like a, a sampled version of them. But hearing Steph play the parts in our living room and just capturing the expression that only someone playing an instrument could really have, as opposed to a kind of neat and tidy sampled version that we had mocked up. It just, it just felt like, uh, it was breathing a whole new life into the song, but it was really exciting.

Excuse My French: And among you two, [00:07:00] uh, Brijean and Doug, uh, how is the creation process? Do you partake equally in the making of the tracks?

Doug Stuart: Yeah, I’d say it’s very conversational. Um, we both kind of have our strengths in different places. Um, Brijean plays a lot of percussion instruments really fluently and for most of her life and, um, is more the lyricist and obviously the singer. Um, but, and I, I play a lot of keyboards and do production and bass, but, uh, within those realms, we both contribute a lot to each other’s strengths and, and we’re both often excited to hear each other’s ideas. Um, because they come from a different place, maybe not knowing the instrument as well or not knowing. I don’t know. It’s, [00:08:00] it, it always feels open and collaborative and conversational, um, in a way that in my experience is, is very rare and is, uh, yeah, exciting and complimentary.

Excuse My French: What are your favorite musical gears?

Brijean Murphy: Oh. That’s another Doug question, for sure.

Doug Stuart: Why don’t you start?

Brijean Murphy: Okay. Well, I really liked in this album, we played around, we got out of the studio, writing a few songs, which was very new for us. We just had a guitar, um, for the beginning of, of a couple tunes. And that felt so nice and so different, um, for us in the writing process to use that tool, which is just a guitar and voice and, um, put ourselves in a new space. Um, so that, I would say on this album, that kind of like, [00:09:00] physical tool, instrument, and conceptual, um, kind of tool was my favorite.

Doug Stuart: Yeah, that was refreshing for us. A lot of, a lot of times, uh, on our previous records, a lot of the writing is done, um, in the studio with the computer very much being a part of the process, uh, whether it’s like sampling something that we play together or, um, just like using the computer, like the, um, the DAW, like Logic as a, as a way to kind of structure a song where we’re not necessarily playing it together in the room, um, as its, uh, inception.
So it felt. Like Brijean was saying, it felt really refreshing to just [00:10:00] take ourselves out of that space and just have a piano and voice or acoustic guitar and voice and, and write in kind of a more traditional songwriting approach. Um.

Brijean Murphy: Do you have a favorite piece of gear? I feel like.

Doug Stuart: Well.

Brijean Murphy: For the, for the…

Doug Stuart: For the, yeah.

Brijean Murphy: For the heads.

Doug Stuart: I mean, um, the OP1 is kind of always a, a go to for me when we’re stuck, because it’s just so versatile. It, like, can do drum sequencing, or, uh, synth sounds, or, um, it can be its own four track tape recorder, and, yeah, it just feels like it’s a, it’s a really versatile tool.

Brijean Murphy: And portable.

Doug Stuart: And super portable, which is also nice. We got an Omnicore before we started making this album that made an appearance on several of the songs. Um, that was [00:11:00] fun. Um, I guess, uh, the OTO Bim Bom, I think it’s called, was a delay that made a lot of appearances on this record. Yeah, those are a few of the highlights.

Excuse My French: Yeah, I think we satisfy all the gearheads listening right now.

Doug Stuart: Yeah, yeah, thanks for letting me nerd out. (laughter)

Excuse My French: I have to, it’s part of music. If you didn’t have any of the technology or the techniques nowadays for music, we would be too analog. The digital era has tied up pretty well.

Doug Stuart: Yeah, absolutely. I think we both, um, really gravitate towards a sound that has, incorporates both elements. Um, cause we both come from a background of like, just playing instruments with…

Brijean Murphy: Acoustic instruments.

Doug Stuart: Yeah, with, with people and, but we both love electronic music, so [00:12:00] any kind of way we can combine those processes or, or find ways to like interplay between the, the analog and digital world is, is pretty exciting for us.

Excuse My French: That’s what I like about your music is that at most of the time digitally made music when it’s 100 percent it has a little bit of a crisp but cold feel or vibe to it, but you always keep it warm and bouncy.

Doug Stuart: Ahhh, thank you. (laughter)

Excuse My French: So I like that, which makes me ask you for my next question. What are your influences to both of you, whether it be musical or non musical?

Brijean Murphy: Um, sure. I think, um, I’m most inspired by human connection and relationships to people who inspire me through [00:13:00] the way they process the world. Um, and through that, it’s, it’s worlds within worlds. And, um, And I think that, that would be my answer.

Excuse My French: It’s a good one.

Brijean Murphy: Yeah.

Doug Stuart: Yeah, I think, I find a lot of inspiration, um, just in, like whatever I’m listening to at the moment. Um, I’ve always kind of like, played the imitation game in a way where, it’s a fun exercise for me to try to imitate something because it inevitably never comes out sounding like the thing that you’re the source that you’re inspired by but trying to like pick apart and grab one [00:14:00] technical thing whether it’s a chord progression or a, like the skeleton of a beat or anything like that and use that as kind of like a, a launch for writing something kind of like sampling without actually sampling like just figuring out what the nuts and bolts of the musical thing that you’re enjoying, um, is, has always been inspiring to me.
And I mean, I think some of the things I was listening to when we first started writing were like ESG and, uh, I was revisiting the Stereolab album, Dots and Loops. And, um, those are a couple of things that come to mind when at least the first when we first started writing.

Excuse My French: Oh, right. Thank you, uh, Brijean. Thank you, Doug. [00:15:00] Uh, I have one little question about the artwork on the cover of Macro. I wanted to know if you use some, uh, some graphic AIs or it’s just like an artist who drew the whole thing.

Brijean Murphy: No, thanks for asking. The album cover features a bunch of different photographs of us in bleachers, dressed up as different, um, identities. And, um, it was photographed in Portland at Swanson Studio. Um, and it was, um, the wardrobe was by Anna Greer and, and um, it was directed and, um, created by Fisk Projects. Fisk is in Portland also, they do a lot of album covers. And Bijan, who heads Fisk, is a friend. Um, and so we worked a lot [00:16:00] conceptually with how we wanted to express this idea of Macro and express this idea of the exploration of self and, um, and kind of flipped the lens from, um, kind of viewer to audience, um, or, uh, performer to audience rather. And, um, yeah, so it was not AI. It was a bunch of different artists coming together and um, creating it.

Doug Stuart: Yeah, practical realization.

Excuse My French: All right, so one more question. Uh, do you have any cute anecdote to share with our listeners? Like a tour anecdote or album recording anecdote?

Brijean Murphy: I I love it. (laughter) [00:17:00] All I can think of are cliches.

Doug Stuart: Um, recording, cute recording anecdote.

Brijean Murphy: We’ll have fun. Number one rule is have fun. That’s that was written on our wall while we were recording.

Doug Stuart: Yeah, that’s a pretty good one. We hit a point maybe like a month and a half into the process of writing where we were pretty much writing every day and maybe losing touch with reality a little bit and in an instant, maybe, realized that we weren’t having fun.
And, and I remember saying to Brijean, maybe you could make us a sign, to like have in the studio, to remind ourselves to have fun. And in my mind it was gonna be like, just like a small, like nameplate size sign that I could put [00:18:00] on the desk where, where we work from. And then I left the room for something and came back and it was like a three foot by three foot poster board size sign with massive letters that said have fun on it. (laughter)

Brijean Murphy: It said rule number one.

Doug Stuart: Rule number one, have fun. And I laughed really hard and we put it up on the wall and it lived there for the next seven months until the album was done.

Brijean Murphy: It’s a good reminder.

Doug Stuart: It was a great reminder.

Brijean Murphy: It’s easy to get down. It’s easy to get lost in, in the shuffle. Um. In the human experience and it’s important to feel it all and feel the blues and feel all that but there’s a lot of unnecessary…

Doug Stuart: Self torture when you’re an artist.

Brijean Murphy: Or when anybody probably.

Doug Stuart: Yeah.

Brijean Murphy: You know, but um, anyway. Yeah.

Excuse My French: All right. So you will be at The Independent [00:19:00] in San Francisco on

Friday, August the 2nd, 9 PM.

Brijean Murphy: Yes.

Doug Stuart: Yeah. And something to add to that is it’s Brijean’s birthday.

Excuse My French: Oh, happy birthday in advance.

Doug Stuart: This will be a very special one for us to be playing in the Bay. And, uh, celebrating Brijean’s birthday.

Excuse My French: Wow, that makes you a Leo.

Brijean Murphy: It is, it does.

Excuse My French: Yeah, I have to say this is the best zodiac sign ever.

Brijean Murphy: (laughter) And are you a Leo, or do you just love Leos?

Excuse My French: I’m August 19th.

Brijean Murphy: Okay, great. Great. Love it.

Excuse My French: So I’m not biased at all.

Brijean Murphy: That’s awesome.

Excuse My French: All right. What shall we expect on stage at the Independent? Is it going to be just the two of you or do you have artists who will join you?

Brijean Murphy: Yeah, it will be just the two of us. And [00:20:00] opening will be an artist called Colloboh and his work is amazing. He’s touring with us. Um, does beautiful modular synth, um, compositions, um, ambient that flows into dance. It’s like…

Excuse My French: oh.

Brijean Murphy: Yeah.

Doug Stuart: Yeah we’re both big fans and honored to, to have him on the tour with us.

Brijean Murphy: Yeah.

Excuse My French: All right, so it will be a perfect evening.

Brijean Murphy: Yep. (laughter)

Doug Stuart: Yeah.

Excuse My French: I hope they bring flowers and a cake at least on stage for you, Brijean.

Brijean Murphy: Okay, I love, I love it. Good, good. Noted to, to Doug sitting here.

Excuse My French: Okay, wink wink, nudge nudge, you know what I mean.

Brijean Murphy: Exactly, exactly. (laughter) Thank you. (laughter)

Excuse My French: Well, thank you very much, Brijean, and thank you, Doug, for, uh, uh, answering my stupid questions.

Brijean Murphy: It was great. Such a pleasure.

Excuse My French: Good luck on your tour. Have lots of fun, because that’s your rule number one.

Brijean Murphy: Yes, exactly. Thank you. We needed that reminder.

Doug Stuart: [00:21:00] Yes.

Excuse My French: And I hope to see you soon. Thank you. Bye bye.

Brijean Murphy: Okay, thanks.

Doug Stuart: Thank you so much.

Below is the transcript of the Fiat Lux Redux episode that originally aired on October 29th, 2024.

INTRO: [00:00:00] K A L X, Berkeley. Welcome to Fiat Lux Redux, a
collection of edited lectures and conversations that took place on the
campus of UC Berkeley. It’s culled from segments of material available
online at UC Berkeley’s many websites, podcast programs, and
streaming channels. Today’s edition of Fiat Lux Redux starts now.
Lisa Katovich: Believe it or not, there’s currently an American
movement to return to monarchy. On this important episode of Fiat Lux
Redux, Dr. Bradley Onishi explains how this movement is connected to
Project 2025 and the 2024 presidential election. Onishi is a social
commentator, scholar, and co host of the immensely popular Fiat Lux
Straight White American Jesus Podcast and the author of the 2023
book, Preparing for War, The Extremist History of White Christian
[00:01:00] Nationalism and What Comes Next. The Berkeley Lecture on
Religious Tolerance that you’re about to hear took place October 9th,
2024.
Dr. Bradley Onishi: I want to talk today about what I think are the anti
democratic aspects of Christian nationalism. Christian nationalism is the
idea that because you love God, quote unquote, you are more of an
American than other people.
And you get more of this country because of your religious identity or
your religious commitment. Why don’t we think about a round table? We
have a round table of folks from across this nation representing every
demographic, racial, ethnic, linguistic, sexual identities, gender identities,
and so on. And before that meeting starts, right, one person stands up
and says, Hey, it’s good to be here with everyone.
As we get the meeting going, I just need you to know that by dint of me
being Christian, I’m just going to get a different place at this table than
everyone else. I have a different authority, a different privilege, and just
a different status here. So as long as you understand that and you
accept it, we’re going to be okay.

We’ll be fine. Now, if you don’t, then we’ll have problems. And surely
someone raises their hand, right? The agnostic, the Hindu, the Buddhist,
the Muslim says, Why do [00:02:00] you get that place? And the answer
is, well, this is a Christian country. And it’s, it was founded that way.
Right? So surely, because of our history and because of our founding,
the present and the future should look like me, okay?
That’s an anti democratic attitude. Christian nationalism in this country is
on a spectrum. And the sociological data bears that out. There are folks
who think that Christians should be the leader of the country just
because that’s how it should be. There are folks who really would like it
for In God We Trust to remain on our money, or One Nation Under God
to remain in the pledge, or whatever.
They’re not the people that keep me up. The people that keep me up at
night are the folks who are openly willing to say, if the majority of the
folks around the roundtable are not going to recognize the rightful heir to
the American founding, then we might have to change the configuration
of the table.
What I put forth is, we’re at a state in this country. Where openly saying
that democracy is the problem and not the solution is a mainstream
attitude. And it’s one that is shared by many who identify as or are
rightfully called Christian Nationalists. Each year, news programs film
Iowans gathering to cast their votes in a ritual that [00:03:00]
emblematizes the sharing of power and cooperation demanded of those
who want to live in a democracy.
This year was different. A correspondent for The Young Turks
interviewed the man at Team Trump Iowa commit to caucus events in
Coralville, Iowa. Would you rather have Donald Trump as a dictator for
four years or re elect Joe Biden for four years? I would rather have
Donald Trump, I’d like to see them repeal the Roosevelt Law so that he
can be a president for a lot more than four years.
But we this country needs a dictator. I hate to say that but it’s the truth
now it’s easy to write off a man at a Trump rally as Someone on the
fringe but a month later another man said this welcome to the end of
democracy We’re here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the
way there in January 6, but we will we will endeavor So we’ll replace it
with this right here.

That’s right, because all glory, all glory is not to government, all glory to
God. Now, there’s no writing this guy off as a blowhard on the street.
Southern Law Poverty Center has identified him as somebody who has
worked with extreme far right [00:04:00] actors, pro authoritarian figures,
somebody who’s published work with white nationalists.
And was a kind of ringleader and architect of the Pizzagate conspiracy
from about a decade ago. His name is Jack Posobiec. He’s a right wing
provocateur. He works for Turning Point USA and has about 2 million
followers on Twitter. Posobiec proclaimed his desire for the end of
democracy not from a high school gymnasium in Iowa, Iowa.
But from the stage of CPAC in February of 2024. CPAC, the
Conservative Political Action Conference, showcases the vanguard of
American conservatives at its gatherings here and abroad. Expressing a
desire to overthrow democracy is an extremist position, but it is also now
a mainstream one in the United States.
When you had Elected officials speaking at the same conference.
People like Representative Elise Stefanik, Representative Marjorie
Taylor Greene, Presidential Candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, now Vice
Presidential Candidate J. D. Vance, and Donald J. Trump. They would
have been asked, do you share these views?
Nobody asked those folks about Postal Week and none of [00:05:00]
them disavowed what he said. Now, we can point to a lot of factors that
created this situation, January 6th. The January 6th insurrection was
simply an attempt to end democracy. Those rioting might have done so
in the name of justice for a, quote, stolen election or a, quote, rigged
process or a, quote, deep state conspiracy.
But if we ask what it was meant to do, if I, as a religion scholar, do what I
do with my students on the first day of every class and say, hey, I don’t, I
don’t want to talk about religious belief. I want to talk about what religion
does for people. Well, if we talk about what January 6th did, we can
reduce it to a very simple idea.
It was an engineer to stop the democratic election of the President of the
United States of America. It was an attempt to overthrow democracy.
GOP officials, commentators, pundits, members of the conservative
influencer class have had many opportunities to disavow something that

was wrong. that was extremist and deserves to be at the fringe, but they
did not.
January 6th has become an Alamo moment for MAGA Nation and
Trump is from sea to shining sea. We’ve witnessed border convoys
caravanning to the southern border in order to prevent the country from
being quote overrun by [00:06:00] quote globalists who they claim are
conspiring to keep U. S. borders open and destroy the country.
Ashley Babbitt, the woman who lost her life that day, is now
emblematized on flags and patches and shirts across the country at
rallies and at gatherings. At one political rally, we’ve had the Pledge of
Allegiance said to an American flag that was present at J6, making it into
a kind of relic. In October 2023, Mike Johnson, a man who did
everything possible to overturn the 2020 election in the courts and is
close to those who mobilized supporters to be at the Capitol on January
6th.
was elected Speaker of the House third in line for the presidency. State
courthouses have been evacuated due to bomb threats. Judges have
been doxed. One state representative in Arizona proposed a bill that
would have declared Donald Trump the winner of the presidential
election in that state before the election took place.
Theologians, historians, think tank pundits, and philosophers have
published books and papers arguing that perhaps a post constitutional
America Whether Red Caesar or Christian Prince would be a better way
forward for the country. Pastors and [00:07:00] provocateurs have
expressed a desire for blasphemy laws and other measures that would
punish Americans for not obeying what they take to be biblical law.
These are the small fires everywhere that the unextinguished embers of
January 6th left to burn. They are reducing our democracy to ashes, and
they are doing it in order to build something else. So if the idea that this
country needs a dictator or the desire to overthrow democracy is now
mainstream, it is because of the white Christian nationalists, organizers,
pastors, fundraisers, politicians, shadow network operatives, and others
who’ve been preparing for war on their own country since the 1960s.
So, in July of this year, if CPAC was in February, in July there was
NatCon, the National Conservatism Conference, which is a right wing
organization dedicated to fostering national conservatism in the United

States and beyond. NatCon maintains that public life should be rooted in
Christianity and its moral vision, backed by the Edmund Burke
Foundation, and in recent years NatCon conferences have become a
kind of avant garde for Christian nationalists and right wing speakers
and elected officials.
to articulate their visions to quote, recover and [00:08:00] reconsolidate
the rich tradition of national conservative thought. So this year in July,
the conference was in Washington, DC. At the close of this particular
panel, the moderator, Yoram Hazony, asked these questions. When you
think of this coming state where the Christian commitments are
maximized, is there room for Jews or fellow Bible believers?
Is there room for Muslims or Hindus? Ozoney was addressing two
panelists that, even a few years ago, would have seemed like an unlikely
duo to appear on stage together. One was Al Mohler, president of the
Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. The other, Doug Wilson, the
pastor, publisher, and podcaster, headquartered in Moscow, Idaho.
The person who famously once said that race relations were best in this
country during the time of slavery. This was a watershed moment. The
figurehead of the largest Protestant denomination in the country, sharing
a stage with the firebrand provocateur, and has labeled himself the
spokesperson of American Christian nationalism.
Mueller holds sway over millions as the figurehead of the Southern
Baptist Convention. Wilson reaches millions through his media empire,
his books, his podcasts, his [00:09:00] church network, and his school
network. Here’s how they responded to the query as to whether or not
religious minorities in this country would be welcome in their ideal
Christian republic.
I would say briefly that Jews in this ideal Republic that I would envision.
Jews would be more welcome than they currently are here. Yeah, I
would say enthusiastically so. And so, for instance, uh, among my tribe,
so to speak, theologically, it would be seen as a matter of absolute
divine responsibility to be fully respectful of the Jewish people, fully
protective, and, and have the Jewish people fully integrated in the entire
project.
Traditional Roman Catholics, conservative Protestants, and conservative
Jewish people who basically already live in the same world and

acknowledge that, and have a mutual dependence and appreciation. I
think when you asked the question though, you broadened it and you
said Hindus and Muslims and others.
I don’t think a nation can survive without theological commitments.
[00:10:00] That does not mean it cannot allow others to be a part of the
community and even invite others in a certain sense into the community,
but it does mean that there has to be the explicit acknowledgement that
this is a nation with specific theological accountability and theological
commitments.
Those coming should respect that, must respect that, understand that,
and, uh, the, the kind of modern secularist dream is, I believe, a
constitutional nightmare. Al Mohler just gave us an explicit answer. He
said, look, if you want to be here, everyone else, Hindus, Muslims, and
others, you need to just acknowledge.
This is a Christian country. And if you do, we’ll be fine. You’ll be fine. If
you don’t, there’ll be issues. Doug Wilson says, I agree. A couple weeks
later, Wilson went on to clarify his statements about the place that those
who are not Christian might play in his ideal republic. I just came back
from NatCon 4 in Washington, D.
C. And that was an eclectic affair because there were Catholics and
Protestants and [00:11:00] Jews. And a couple of Hindus. Someone,
there were people raising an uproar. What is, what are you doing with
Hindus at the, this political thing? And, I, I wrote, well, in the republic I
envision, Hindus would not be able to hold political office.
Are you in? And the person, oh, no, no, no, no. I want Hindus to be able
to run for political office in America. I said, okay, so you’re criticizing me
for being willing to talk to a Hindu at a conference. And you’re willing to
be governed by Hindus? This makes no sense. In the Christian
Nationalist Project, we don’t want this, uh, smudge or hodgepodge.
We want it to be explicitly Christian. We would want prayers at the, at
the political convention to be To God the Father, in the name of Jesus
Christ our Lord. That’s how we want the prayers to go. Wilson has been
a controversial figure for decades, but he’s seen a mainstream
resurgence over the last few years.

He did a sit down interview with Tucker Carlson, was praised by Charlie
[00:12:00] Kirk. He is somebody who has cultivated several folks who
are now influential in, you know, Reformed Protestant Christian
Nationalist circles. One of those is Joel Webbin. Joel Webbin is the
founder of Right Response Ministries and Covenant Bible Church in
Austin, Texas.
If Wilson reaches millions per week, Webbin reaches hundreds of
thousands. He often holds conferences and does interviews with Wilson,
the man that we just heard. The man who just shared a stage with Al
Mohler, leader of the largest Protestant denomination in the country.
When asked recently what revival in the United States would look like,
Webbin said this.
My hometown and my neighborhood, my state, is being flooded with non
citizens, and then even those who are citizens, um, first generation
immigrants who have attained citizenship, which aren’t many, but those
who have, are still worshiping false gods. They’re not American, uh, in
any sense of our heritage. And primarily, I’m talking about that being a
problem as it pertains to religion.
They worship other [00:13:00] gods. They are Hindu. Uh, they are
Muslim. Uh, they are Jews. Uh, they are not Christians. So what would
revival look like in the United States? What would a Christian nation do
in order to bring itself back in alignment with God? What it would then
look like in the application of the political, it would look like millions of
people being deported.
It would look like mothers. getting death row for murdering their children.
So, for Webben, the idea of Christian revival goes hand in hand with
mass deportation and a severe punishment for those who engage in
abortion. When asked what we should do to get us back to a place of
revival, and a place where this country might be on the up and up, in
addition to ensuring women can’t vote, Webben outlines his vision
thusly.
I want Christians to have power, and with that power, I want it to be
wielded righteously. What does that mean? It means crushing our
enemies and rewarding our friends. Webbins Christian nationalism
aligns closely with Stephen Wolf’s, another Reformed figure aligned
[00:14:00] with Wilson. Doug Wilson’s Canon Press published Stephen
Wolf’s The Case for Christian Nationalism.

Which is a popular book among extremist Christian nationalists. I’ve read
the book. It draws on the concepts of Volk and homeland in order to
justify theologically the idea that Christians should love those who are
more like them. According to Woolf, it’s just that societies can only be
built by people who share the same ethnicity and religion and thus love
each other more than outsiders and foreigners.
Your kin have belonged to this people, in this land, to this nation, in this
place. And so they bind you to that people and place, creating a
common Volkgeist. Recently, he spoke of his identity as a white Anglo
Saxon Protestant. We, the white Anglo Saxon Protestants who founded,
built, and died for and led this country for most of its history, we are not
permitted in this new America to have a people or a place that is
distinctly ours.
But this is our home. This is our native land. We are Native Americans,
born of those who didn’t immigrate, [00:15:00] but who settled here. We
are the sons and daughters of the people who settled this land. To
describe America as a nation of immigrants, writes the great Harvard
political scientist Samuel Huntington, is to stretch a partial truth into a
misleading falsehood, and to ignore the central fact of America’s
beginning as a society of settlers.
Wolfe recently finished a postdoc at Princeton and wrote his enormously
popular book. He said in a recent podcast interview that it should be
permissible for Christians to deem certain groups to have positions that
are detrimental to the fundamental features of society and to rescind
their political equality.
In September of 2023, Wolfe tweeted, And thus, while intermarriage is
not itself wrong, groups have a collective duty to be separate and marry
among themselves. There have always been racists and ethno
nationalists on the American right. When Al Mohler shook hands with
Doug Wilson at NatCon in July 2024, it was a symbol of the embrace
that legacy denominations like the Southern Baptist Convention are
willing to make with extremists in order to build a [00:16:00] coalition that
will force the acknowledgement of Christian authority on all Americans in
one way or another.
However, Project 2025 is a Christian nationalism fueled by Catholic
leaders, in many cases reactionary Catholic thought. J. D. Vance, largely
seen as a choice bolstering Trump’s outsider image, a young

midwestern firebrand, he’s a first term senator from Ohio who would
bring Silicon Valley money and youthful energy to the ticket.
What has gotten largely unnoticed is that Vance is a more radical
religious politician than Mike Pence, the former vice president, even
though the latter was hailed as the Christian candidate. In 2019, Vance
was received into the Catholic Church. He grew up with exposure to
Christian churches, but by the time he entered law school, described
himself as an angry atheist.
However, on Vance’s telling, Catholicism began to appeal to him
because of its intellectual approach to faith and human life. He was also
influenced by his first encounter with PayPal founder, Peter Thiel. who
convinced him that social ladder climbing and endless pursuits of wealth
were empty in comparison to living a life of significance and meaning.
In 2021, the newly converted Vance spoke to the Napa [00:17:00]
Institute, a network of conservative Catholics who are known for defying
the Pope, largely opposed to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council,
and backed by billionaire donors like Tim Bush, who are sympathetic to
a Christian nationalist vision. In his speech, Vance griped that the
business community is actively pro abortion in this country.
His solution would be to take active measures against businesses that
use their First Amendment rights to express pro-choice positions. When
he converted JD Vance signaled what kind of Catholic communities he
was gonna participate in and and those that would shape him. One of
those was the Napa Institute, which takes place every summer, just
about 45 minutes from here.
The Napa Institute really is the brainchild of conservative billionaire, Tim
Bush and other billionaires in the United States, along with conservative
bishops who see things like. A radical anti abortion agenda, the end of
contraception, outlawing pornography. They are also vehemently against
things that would work to protect us from climate change.
And they have an idea that the government should use its coercive
power to tax and target in order [00:18:00] to legislate morality. The idea
is that the government can be weaponized in order to shape the public
square according to a certain religious vision. This is not a small
government conservatism, and Vance does not represent that lineage in
any sense.

Here he is speaking to Charlie Kirk, the enormously influential leader of
TPUSA. Let’s tax the things that are bad. and not tax the things that are
good. If you’re making 100, 000, 400, 000 a year, and you’ve got three
kids, you should pay a different lower tax rate than if you’re making the
same amount of money, and you don’t have any kids.
What’s really important for me in this clip is what he says at the
beginning. We should tax the things we think are good, right? And we
should use the tax system and other government powers to basically, as
a weapon, to target things we think are bad. It’s a moral weapon that we
can use as the government, right, to shape morality in the country.
So who are the Catholic intellectuals influencing Vance? Well, one of
them is Patrick Deneen, the Notre Dame philosopher, author of Regime
Change. Also the author of Why [00:19:00] Liberalism Failed. Deneen
called for something more radical than January 6th. A complete toppling
of the current American order. I don’t want to violently overthrow the
government, he said.
I want something far more revolutionary. Dineen proposes an
aristopopulism in which the virtuous elite provide order and structure to
public life in order to ensure the flourishing of ordinary citizens who
cannot provide it for themselves. The benevolent oligarchs are thus
tasked with keeping the common good intact, so the Huy Puloy can enjoy
the good life, even if they don’t know or believe or experience it as such.
He opposes gay marriage, wants stricter laws on divorce, denounces
CRT, and mocks health care for trans people as absurd. He lauds
authoritarian Viktor Orban’s Hungary as a place where the state actively
cultivates political and moral order. This conservatism is generally
patriotic and supportive of distinct national identities and cultures,
rejecting the ethos of cosmopolitism.
So, if you take what you think you know about American conservatism
from, from Buckley and Goldwater and Reagan all the way to Mike
Pence, Mike Pence was a vestige of that Reaganite image [00:20:00] of
American conservatism. Openly, small government, low taxes, low
regulation. That’s the kind of tried and true formula.
The best governments, no government at all. And God bless America.
They tried to kill Mike Pence on January 6th, if you don’t remember, and
then they chose J. D. Vance as the next vice presidential candidate. And

in my view, the best way to, to understand that pick is to choose a
common good conservative who openly says, it’s not that small
government is the answer.
It’s that when we look around that round table of Americans, we’re not
the majority, and they’re not going to listen. And they’re children.
Degenerates, as Webham said. So unless we get them in order, and we
use the government as a weapon to do so, We’re never going to win
again, we’re never going to be in power again.
We can’t have Mike Pence or Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz, we can’t have
Mike Huckabee or any other Ronald Reagan or George H. W. Bush
wannabe out here saying that the government should be shrunk so that
we can have better lives. We’ve let the children run amok. The
businesses are pro choice. All of the Hindus and Muslims, all of the
agnostics and atheists, they are clamoring [00:21:00] for power and
representation.
We need a government that will put them in order. We need a
government that will hurt those who need to be hurt so we can have the
country we want. Vance also has strong bond with Kevin Roberts, the
head of the Heritage Foundation, and a fellow reactionary Catholic with
close ties to Opus Dei. The Heritage Foundation was founded in 1973 by
Paul Weyrich, architect of the religious right.
He introduced us to Jerry Falwell and, Tim LaHaye and Pat Robertson
as the kind of moral majority, the religious right that we envision of
Reagan’s 80s, those who helped defeat Jimmy Carter in 1980. What we
don’t often understand about Paul Weyrich, the man who started the
Heritage Foundation along with several colleagues, is that he too was an
anti Vatican II reactionary Catholic.
That he too believed that because his church had pulled out of the
business of building Christendom, um, in Vatican II that he would have
to do it as a layman himself with help by imposing it through American
politics. Paul Weyrich was a radical religious actor with a revolutionary
vision for American government.
Kevin Roberts [00:22:00] stands in his lineage as the leader of the
Heritage Foundation. He’s a man who once called himself a cowboy
Catholic. He wrote a book, uh, Dawn’s Early Light, Burning Down
Washington to Save America. They had to change the title because it

got so much bad press. They have not released the book yet because it
was shedding so much bad light on the Vance Trump ticket.
In the book, Roberts says that contraception is linked to the breakdown
of civilization. And it just so happens that J. D. Vance wrote the foreword
to this book. The Heritage Foundation is, of course, the publisher of
Project 2025. Roberts thinks government should be the change he
wants to see in the world.
The new conservative movement as he terms it. We’ll use the federal
government as a bludgeon against any and all of its cultural and
economic foes, while the small minded government folk are derided
throughout as wax museum conservatives. What can big government do
for you? Chief Lee Roberts wants it to enforce a new America.
A faith, family, community, and work. What he calls the permanent
things. In 2022, Vance spoke at a conference at Franciscan University
with intellectual luminaries of common good conservatism. On one
panel, [00:23:00] theologian Chad Pecknold of the Catholic University of
America argued that the way towards civic happiness is a public
orientation to God through the restoration of Sabbath laws, religious
national holidays, and public liturgies.
Vance wrote something I think is very resonant in First Things. We have
to recognize that America is not just a principle. It is a group of people.
It’s a history. It’s a culture. And yeah, part of that story is that people can
come and assimilate. But if your attitude is that the only thing you need
to become an American is to believe that with a little bit of hormonal
therapy a man can become a woman, then you’re making it so that
massive numbers of your own country either need to be reeducated or
need to be cast out of the political community.
Vance said something similar when he accepted the nomination at the
RNC this summer, linking the United States to land, to homeland, to
saying that the idea that the United States is an experiment or an idea. is
false. That it’s about what Stephen Wolf might call kin, or Volk, or
homeland. On a 2021 appearance on the Jack Murphy podcast, Vance
reiterated a position from the reactionary monarchist, Curtis Yarvin.
I think Trump is gonna [00:24:00] run again in 2024, said Vance. I think
that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice, fire
every single mid level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the

administrative state, replace them with our people. When the courts stop
you, stand before the country and say the Chief Justice has made his
ruling.
Now let him enforce it. So essentially, he’s saying, look, the executive
branch should do what they want. When the judicial branch tries to
check or balance that power, the president should say to Chief Justice
Roberts or anyone else on the court, where is your army? Where is your
police force? Where are your, those who will enforce this ruling?
Because I know where mine is. This idea, I should say, came directly
from Curtis Yarvin. Curtis Yarvin is a self proclaimed monarchist. He’s
considered the philosopher of the Peter Thiel entourage. The thinker.
The one with all of the ideas. The house philosopher. And someone who
has remarked that the end of democracy would be joyous.
He wants an American king to rule a post constitutional America. J. D.
Vance’s worldview is a Christian nationalism that imposes [00:25:00]
Christian conceptions of gender, sexuality, family structure,
multiculturalism, immigration policy, education, and reproductive rights
on all people. It is a call for Christendom more than a Christian country.
I think if you’ve paid attention to American politics, going back to
Buckley, all the way to Goldwater, all the way Nixon, Reagan, whoever.
You’re used to hearing that this is a Christian nation. For me, Vance is
not a Midwestern young pick meant to spruce up the Trump ticket. For
me, Vance is something beyond the call for a Christian nation.
Vance is somebody who stands with people behind him, like Yarvin, like
Thiel, like post liberal philosophers, like revolutionary Catholics. Like
Kevin Roberts, who would say we need a radical transformation of how
this country is governed in order for it to be in any way flourishing. We
don’t need a Christian nation in name.
We don’t need a people who claim to be Christian. We need
Christendom. We need the enforcement of Christian order on the United
States. This is not conservatism in the image of Ring. And it’s big
government conservatism as the only way to reorder the country as
[00:26:00] the city of God. When Vance was welcomed into the church,
He chose St.

Augustine as his patron saint. When asked about why, he mentioned
that he had flipped through Augustine’s City of God several times over
the last 15 years, which probably wouldn’t pass the test, sorry, uh, if he
was writing a paper for, for some of your classes. He also mentioned
that the City of God has had a dramatic effect on his understanding of
policy and government.
Vance is not alone, and what I’ll close with is that Project 2025, if you are
familiar with it. If you spend any time reading it, if you spend any time
studying what it proposes, it proposes a radical expansion of the
executive branch of the United States. It proposes an executive branch
that cannot really de facto be checked by the judicial or legislative
branches.
It proposes a federal workforce at the whim of the president, loyalist or
be gone. It proposes we turn the Department of Health and Human
Services into the Department of Life or the Ministry of Life. It proposes to
legislate that the only kind of [00:27:00] legal family one can have that is
recognized by the government is a cis man married to a cis woman,
presumably reproductive.
Project 2025 is the vision for an executive that, in my view, is more akin
to a monarch or an autocrat or a king. This is the means. to the
Christendom that the folks I’ve been talking about today can reach their
goal. They’ve stacked a court, could spend another hour, I won’t, I
promise, talking about Leonard Leo and the ways that we’ve arrived at
the Supreme Court that we have, could talk about the ways that the
state legislatures, the Solicitor Generals, and all the soft tissue of the
American body politic are being attacked by this group of folks.
J. D. Vance is willing to go further than his predecessor Mike Pence. He
has said openly, I would not have certified the election on January 6th,
2021. But I also think that people like Kevin Roberts, leader of the
Heritage Foundation, post liberal philosophers, and Silicon Valley
magnates, think he is their, their ticket to an American monarch.
Two weeks ago, there was a conference in the city, across the bay,
called Reboot 2024, organized by [00:28:00] tributaries in the Teal
universe. And it was meant to be one of those conferences that really
promotes, uh, The overwhelming benefits that tech will play for humans
going forward. The ways that tech will make our lives better.

There was, however, a surprising number of panels and talks on, like,
family and naturalism. And it caught a lot of folks off guard. This is the
fleece wearing, khaki wearing tech group that we’re used to seeing in
this region going to what they thought was another conference about
how tech can be better. is going to lead us to utopia.
But there was a promised special guest, a surprise. It’s Kevin Roberts.
So here’s Kevin Roberts showing up in San Francisco, what
conservative Christians like him think of as hell on earth, sitting with a
group very unlikely to be his audience. It’s Silicon Valley tech folks
explaining how the government should do everything possible to
promote more babies, more families, more marriages, and a certain kind
of governance.
It was met with mixed results. So to me, that’s a pretty good example of
the kind of movements that are finding a new alliance and what they
take to be a [00:29:00] move toward American monarchy. I’ll stop there.
Thank you very much.
Lisa Katovich: You’ve been listening to Dr. Bradley Onishi and the
Berkeley Lecture on Religious Tolerance. Generously sponsored by
Endowed Fund for the Study of Religious Tolerance, Berkeley Center for
the Study of Religion, Center for Race and Gender, Institute for the
Study of Societal Issues, Social Science Matrix and the Center for Right
Wing Studies.
This program was edited by Lisa Katovich.
OUTRO: You’ve been listening to Fiat Lux Redux, a public affairs show
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