- Hey, humans.
How's it going? Susan Ruth here.
Thanks for listening to another episode
of Hey Human Podcast.
This is episode 397,
and my guest is Mikey Weinstein.
He has so many accolades and things that he is done.
I'm gonna quote directly from the website
of the company that he is the president
and founder of military religious freedom.org.
To describe him, Mikey is, quote, the undisputed leader
of the national movement to restore the obliterated wall,
separating church
and state in the most technologically lethal organization
ever created by humankind, the United States Armed Forces,
described by Harper's Magazine as the
constitutional conscience of the US military,
a man determined to force accountability.
He's an Air Force veteran, and Mikey's family has a long
and distinguished US military history,
spanning three consecutive generations of military academy
graduates in over 130 years of combined active duty
military service in every major combat engagement our
country has been in from World War I
to the current global War on Terror.
He's a registered Republican,
and as a lawyer, spent over three years working in
and for the West Wing of the Reagan administration
as legal counsel in the White House.
In his final position there,
Mikey was named the committee management officer
of the much publicized Iran Contra investigation
in his capacity as assistant general counsel
of the White House Office of Administration,
executive Office of the President of the United States.
He's the author of, with God on our Side,
one man's War against the Evangelical coup in America's
military, and also no snowflake in an avalanche,
the military Religious Freedom Foundation, its battle
to defend the Constitution.
And one family's courageous war against religious
extremism in high places.
He likes long titles too, . So that's a mouthful.
In 2012, defense News named Mikey, one
of the 100 most influential people in the US Defense
in 2014, for the sixth consecutive year,
the Military Religious Freedom Foundation
was officially nominated
for the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize.
Its seventh total nomination.
He is a force of nature, and that's an understatement.
He, he moves quickly.
He speaks quickly, and he's on a mission,
a really fascinating conversation.
Check out, Hey, human podcast for links,
and to learn more about my guests in the show,
check out Susan ruth.com to learn about me
and my other artistic endeavors.
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and subscribe to, Hey, human podcast on iTunes or Spotify,
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Thank you for listening. Be well, be kind, be love.
Here we go, everyone.
This is a trigger warning for this episode.
Violence threats and language that is not the usual
F bomb or whatnot.
It's a little bit more intense. So just FYI trigger warning.
Mikey Weinstein, welcome to Hey, human.
- Thank you. It's great to be human and hey,
- Hey, .
Shout out to, uh, Gary for introducing us.
- Yeah, very much so.
- Yeah, I appreciate that. He's awesome.
Let's jump right in.
I like to start these shows with a background of you as
to what shaped you.
Obviously, I know you went to the Air Force Academy,
but just as a child, the household that you grew up in,
how did that shape you as a person?
- You know, um, I've been watching, um, the, uh,
my youngest son, uh, got me into, uh, the NBC TV show.
This Is Us, that, that show's very much about that.
You know, I grew up in a very strong nuclear family.
Uh, my dad, uh, went to the Naval Academy
and took his commission in the Air Force
because the Air Force Academy hadn't started yet.
It technically started in 54,
and he graduated from Annapolis in 53.
So he went into the Air Force,
and, you know, my family was a military family.
My dad was, uh, was strict, but not, um, not cruel.
He was loving. My mom was very loving and, uh, you know,
but we knew early on,
we were not like most other people in the military.
We were Jewish, you know, I mean, I'm still proud
to be Jewish, very much ethnically
and culturally, I just don't buy into,
into the theology that much.
Uh, I still, you know, I'll
pray three times a day in Hebrew.
I'm not sure there's anybody up there.
But, uh, the values I got were built on, um,
despite the fact that we're all, you know, human beings
that make a, you know, a hundred mistakes a day,
maybe me more like 200 is that we're both mostly, uh,
the, the key things.
I think you could probably wrap up Susan,
the 10 Commandments into just two, which is
to help each other and love each other hard to do.
And so, uh, trying to give back to the community
and to, um, uh, when you do serve in the military,
in the nation, you are protecting the country, you know,
which is our tribe, as it were.
And, uh, these days, that's a very difficult thing
because we are an incredibly divided country.
It's divided, husband and wife, brother and sister, parents
and kids, grandparents, and grandkids.
I just had a lunch today with a, a friend, guess I can use
that term, of almost 30 years, that, uh, about 30 years, uh,
who's completely MAGA, you know, he is been that way.
It's very hard for me to even sit with him.
While it was during lunch.
We got a very hideous slur that came in saying, um,
I'm not sure if I can say, fuck you Jews
or Kikes, fuck you, kikes.
That's right. And then he's, my friend started mentioning
that, um, well, the K word to Jews can't be equated
to the n word to black people
because, you know, uh, blacks have suffered
much more than Jews have.
And besides that, uh, the word kike had been used
for many other people in prior years, which of course,
it's ridiculous to start talking about
who has suffered more here and there or whatever.
And how do you even talk to somebody like that, you know?
And it, and then, so I've, I've, I've been forced to sever,
um, based on my upbringing
and how I have view reality through the, uh, what my parents
and through, um, the experiences that I had, we all are
creatures of cumulative experience.
Um, so I have one of my classmates from the academy, uh,
that I, I've, I retained in my orbit,
who would be in the MAGA world.
And then this other person, it's very hard.
He recently lost a parent.
And so I'm trying to be kind about it,
but it was everything I could do to stay in, in that she in,
in the, uh, at the table during lunch.
'cause I just wanted to get up
and tell him to fuck off, you know?
So bottom line is we all make mistakes. We're all trying.
Uh, I, I think probably the best thing was, uh,
recently the, uh, late Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman
that ever got to the Supreme Court, and boy do we miss her.
Um, as she was, uh, among her last words to her children,
she recently just passed away very recently.
She just said, um, you know, to her, I think it was
to her son, he mentioned it, uh, uh,
and I believe in her eulogy in Phoenix, Arizona, that
she said, you know, we're basically here
to help each other along the way.
The bottom line is, none of us really know
what we're doing here, how we got here, didn't ask
to be here, where we're going afterwards.
We can have all this dogma if we want, um,
but we're free in this country
to follow anything we want to.
But we created a government
that cannot tell you which dogma to follow.
And when you use, in our case, the US Marine Corps, Navy,
army Air Force Space Force, uh, the US Coast Guard,
the US Maritime Service, Susan, uh,
any 17 national security agencies,
or even if you're a high school junior ROTC teacher,
you cannot use the awesome power heft and, um, prestige
and financial impact
or financial strength of the US government,
mostly in our case, the Department of Defense, to act
as a force multiplier to push a particular dogma on
otherwise helpless subordinates.
I always tell people that we are not
a complex meal like Chateau Brion.
We're a freaking hamburger.
You can't use your position of influence
on a subordinate in the US military mostly.
But these other places I mentioned as well, uh,
the Veterans Administration, the,
all those intelligence agencies,
and to force, uh, a subordinate to, uh, adhere
to your particular biblical worldview,
because we've never really ever had a Muslim superior do
that, or a Jewish superior.
We had one atheist superior that tried
that years ago is almost always what we would now refer to
as a fundamentalist Christian nationalist.
It's a very, very serious fight.
Uh, we are in it, uh,
we are very aggressive and we are militant.
I mean, we get accused of being
that I'd say very proudly we are,
but we're, we're fighting against the technologically most
lethal organization Susan ever created in the hi,
in the history of homo sapiens, which is the US military.
Uh, so you can't sit there
and drink your tea with your, you know, uh,
with your little, little finger sticking out
and following these Marquita Queensbury rules when you're
trying to advocate for a subordinate that, um, uh, is
otherwise going to be crushed.
And so it's, uh, that's,
- And you're talking specifically where cos
or people in position of power,
basically tell their subordinates,
if you don't follow my religious dogma,
that I believe in your life is gonna be made a living hell.
- Correct. And the religious dogma is almost in
99.9% of the cases.
It's what we refer to as Christian Dominion
or fundamentals, Christian nationalism.
Um, uh, basically it's the weaponized version
of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
We're almost at 87,000 clients.
I think we'll pass it in the next couple of days.
About 95% of them are Christians themselves.
About three fourths are Protestant.
The other one fourth are Roman Catholic.
The other 5% are Jewish, Muslim,
Hindu, you know, native American.
We've had, uh, every type of religious
or non-theistic, uh, viewpoint, you know,
obviously atheists, agnostic, secularists
and humanists, except for one,
we've never had a Scientologist yet.
- You might, you just don't know it. .
- Oh, possibly, yeah. I mean, I know they have a,
they have a large worship facility in the LA
area, maybe more than one.
- Huge, there's many.
Quickly, I just want to point out, you are the founder,
military religious freedom foundation.org
for those that wanna look it up.
And that is your life's mission.
Now, the thing to point out, I think that is important
is when one joins a world of service
to the nation, it is intended
to represent the whole of the nation.
Not just one section, one religion, one creed, one color,
one sexual orientation.
That's not how it, it's not how it was supposed to be.
And so you come in when people reach out to you
and say, this is going on in my
realm of work or military service, or whatever,
and then you come in and try and,
and help them stop it in its tracks.
Can you explain a little bit of how it works?
- Yes. Uh, anyone can go to our website@mrff.org.
Our clients come to us
because if they try to fight themselves, um, as you know,
most everybody's been to a wedding.
And when you try to stand up for your civil, uh, con,
you know, constitutionally, um, guaranteed,
and they're not privileges, you know, their,
their rights separation of church
and state in the military, it's like you turn yourself into
what we call a tarantula on a wedding cake.
And we've all been to weddings, tarantulas on a wedding.
Cakes don't last very long.
And when your military superior is proselytizing,
you normally with this rep, weaponized gospel
of Jesus Christ, get the hell outta my face.
So our maam is not an option for you. So they come to us.
We generally go two levels
above their own commander, and then we weigh in.
We've been doing this for, you know, we're in our
21st year of doing this now.
We're pretty well known. We have over
900 people that work here.
Like many civil rights organizations, many are volunteers,
like if the A CLU and all these other organizations, uh,
and of course, our paid staff.
We have a, we have MRFF representatives, some more than one,
and some bases more than one.
Uh, everywhere we have them on nuclear submarines,
on aircraft carriers, almost all.
There's a, most Los Angelinos don't even know
that you have an Air Force base, right?
They're near LAX called Los Angeles Air
Force Base. Did you know that?
- I did not. - And you live right there.
That was the, the one of my kids,
when they graduated from the Air Force Academy,
that was their, their base of initial assignment.
Um, if you, if you just go to our, we, we just had, uh,
Valentine's Day yesterday.
We just read, just had to break up.
Did you see that Valentine's story that we had
to break up? Did you see it? I
- Have not seen it yet. Oh, don't
- You get our, aren't you on our list?
Don't you get our press releases?
- I get - Emails. Yeah. So we had to stop a commander, uh,
a a a group of, um, members of the military
that were basically going to have a Valentine's Day party,
uh, during the duty day in the headquarters building
of a combat unit of war fighters.
The theme was, Jesus wants you to be his Valentine.
So go to the website, see if story went pretty viral.
It's everywhere out there. And that's a good example.
We had 38 members of the military, all
of them junior enlisted.
Now, many journalists I've talked to have no idea of
what the difference is between an enlisted member
of the military and an officer.
Do you know what it is?
- In my understanding?
- In many cases, that's it.
There are a lot of enlisted folks that have been to college.
But to become an officer, basically you have
to be commissioned through West Point, Annapolis
or the Air Force Academy, ROTC,
or Officer Candidate School OCS
or Officer Training School, OT, uh, OTS.
Uh, there are some direct commissions in, in certain cases,
but, uh, you know, generally the, uh, the ranks lieutenant
through four Star General or officers.
And then you've heard of private and semen and airmen.
Um, so, you know, in this case,
we had 38 very junior enlisted folks who came
to us, most of them Christians.
Again, we were able to get it stopped very quickly.
This is blood sport. I've become a public figure,
and I didn't ask to be a public figure.
If you're a professional athlete, like, uh, a member
of my beloved Los Angeles Dodgers,
or if you're a, um, Hollywood movie star,
I'm sure being a public figure is probably really cool.
But if you do what I do, which is civil rights activism in
the US military, it's four things.
Uh, lonely, dangerous, brutal, and expensive.
- How often do you get death threats?
- I would say, uh, we get pretty grotesque threats somewhere
in the neighborhood of multiple times every day.
We're very careful with everything where we live.
We have a lot of guns.
We have two German shepherds in the
backyard that are not pets.
They're elite level, very expensive.
Uh, highly trained protection security dogs.
We have our own bodyguards.
We work closely with the local law law enforcement folks.
We have a lot of countermeasures that we have to use, use.
We've had the windows shot out of our house twice.
We've had innocent animals, uh, beheaded
and, um, um, disemboweled
and left on the front of our house.
We've had swastikas and crucifixes painted on the house.
We've had beer bottles and feces thrown at the house.
We've had tires slashed and
- All because people are upset that you're trying
to maintain the integrity
of the separation of church and state.
- Yeah, I think there's a lot of it
that my last name is not.
Um, you know, my, my name was Joe, who was a plumber
or Smith or Jones, but it's
Weinstein and I'm a lawyer, right?
So there's a tremendous amount of hatred in this country.
Uh, there's a tremendous amount
of ignorance in this country.
We're finally beginning to pay for the fact
that we stopped teaching civics in high school.
I mean, I, in 2015, I guess I was naive in thinking
that the American people would never elect someone as
cowardly, ignorant, entitled, racist, misogynistic,
homophobic, transphobic.
And did I mention coward?
I can't say that enough as Donald Trump.
And now, if you support that, you know,
which is the short term is maga, right?
Make America great again.
I, I couldn't be married to someone like that.
I don't wanna have friends like that.
I told you I have two exceptions.
- I think it's important because if change, if, if,
if we're gonna understand each other
and get along in this country, he,
it's not like he's going away, right?
I, and I don't know what the answer is for that.
And it's interesting because you are Jewish,
but I read on your bio
that you're also a registered Republican.
I'm sure people think you're a raging liberal wing nut
or whatever, ,
- Um, Pacific Palisades isn't very far from you, is it?
- It is not. - So a number of years ago, I was given, um,
a political courage award
by the Pacific Palisades Democratic Club.
Once they found out that I'd been a,
a lawyer for a Reagan in the White House.
I was a registered, uh, Republican, which is true.
I haven't been able to find one to vote for
for about 30 years, you know.
But other than that, I can't find a Republican that I, that,
you know, doesn't make me want to projectile vomit.
About two or three days after they gave me the award, uh,
made it, made the announcement,
they decided they were gonna take it back again.
And then I had some great support from prior winners of
that ambassador, Joe Wilson, who's now passed away,
Phil Donahue, Mike Farrell,
Mike's on our advisory board, and he was the one that
- Mike's been on the show. He is great.
- I love Mike. He's fantastic.
And he was actually the one that when that day recanted
and said, no, no, no, I guess you can have the award.
So they flew my wife and out there,
and Mike is the one that
actually presented me with the award.
I do disagree with you a little bit.
I don't know that civil discourse is
gonna be possible anymore.
If I need to sit down and explain,
give me, give you my views.
If I need to explain to someone, if I have
to explain why Donald Trump is a fucking piece of shit,
and I don't know what your rules are on this podcast,
but I am the way that I am, my passionate person,
highly flawed, passionate person.
I'm not wasting my time if it's so odd.
And I know that many of them are spoonfed from Fox News.
I did an interview with them the other day.
You know, all the one American, uh, now, uh, one American,
um, uh, news, um, Newsmax, Breitbart, you know, all the ones
that are out there, epic news box.
They get spoonfed by this crap.
And, uh, and you know, my old parents voted for Obama
that ended up voting for Trump again.
I mean, they, they got that a disease called Fox iis.
Um, if you know what I'm talking about.
So, no, I don't, I'm, I'm not able
to stomach being around people like that.
This is a real life thing when you threaten to kill me
or rape my wife, or kill my kids and grandkids
and our staffers, or you wanna send
bombs to us or the other stuff.
No, that's serious stuff. That's why.
- Well, I'm talking about sitting down with you, talking
with somebody who has a different
political discourse than you.
I'm not talking about that. That's a whole other level.
- I know, I, I know what you're saying,
but see, I disagree with, with one
of the words you just said in that
statement, I have a different view.
I don't view it as political. It's existential now.
Just like that's become a cool word. Hey.
And, and, you know, finally, Biden's getting around
to saying that it's an existential threat.
Whereas Adam Kinser also a Republican who voted
to impeach Trump and was on the, uh, you know,
was on the committee for, um, uh, reviewing everything
that happened on January 6th,
and then got, you know, then either left
or he wasn't gonna be like Liz Cheney,
he wasn't going to be voted back in again.
He said, look, this is about democracy. Yeah. And that's it.
Every other issue is secondary.
So either you support democracy or you don't. Yeah.
So I, when people say, and I don't mean this derogatorily
or I don't mean to sound, uh, haughty about this
or, um, pejorative or pedantic, uh, but it's not politics.
We're using the liter, the Literative p
here, pedantic, right.
Pedagogy and, uh, everything else.
- There's definitely a disconnect between folks who
are supportive of Trump
and those who call themselves Patriots.
Because I've never seen someone who is
so disrespectful and in disregard of a nation of peoples.
- I agree. But see, it's, like I said, it's not political.
Uh, he's now saying, if you don't give us the money,
NATO Putin, you can do whatever you want.
- Oh, I saw that. That's insane. It's insane.
- I mean, so this is not about No, I, I,
I think he's probably mentally ill.
I, I, I mean, I take this very seriously.
So I'm incredibly disappointed in so many Americans,
and even our own process.
I mean, I love Michelle Obama,
but when she said, when they go low, we go high.
No, Michelle, when they go low, we get, we have to go just
as low to fight him or even lower if we need to.
I mean, we literally, our way of,
there's a real good chance Trump will be
elected back in again.
And even it is like, it's like our processes can't do
anything because I've been in these rooms
with lots of progressive folks.
Organizations, when they get in a room together, they want
to grab a pencil or a pen and peck each other's eyes out.
I've been in those rooms. You get the conservatives in a
room together, and they often work hand in
glove just perfectly fine.
They know how to fight and how to fight dirty.
And on the other side, all I see is weakness, uh,
uh, a lethargy.
- I agree with you on that completely.
- I give credit. I mean, but the fact that Fox called us,
they were enraged about that vol Valentine's Day thing,
but where was
A-B-C-B-S-N-B-C-M-S-N-B-C-N-P-R, we've done all of them.
But it's, it is very hard to get that,
that mainstream media sitting back
and, uh, uh, again, I'm, I'm all for capitalism,
but I'm not for predatory capitalism.
And it seems to be, how do I make money?
It the same thing with Trump, you know, again,
I think he's probably mentally ill,
but to sit there and say, you know, you know,
- I think he owed some very scary
people a whole lot of money too. And I think
- Yes, exactly.
Very likely. But we won't know for sure.
But I'm just saying that if he gets back in again, you know,
there's already this plan, I forget the exact name, has,
has the year 25 in it.
- Oh, the 2025 project. Yeah.
And he al he also said blatantly to his,
to his constituents, that he will
enable a dictatorship once that's his, that's
what he wants, day one.
- Of course, he will, this time they've learned better.
They're going to clean out all the career civil servants,
they'll take care of everybody in the military.
You will not be in any position of power
unless you are prepared to support this agenda.
- It's North Korea, basically,
- I think.
Right, right. Well, I think the main, yeah, exactly.
The main reason he he needs to win is to stay out of jail.
- Of course. - I mean,
I'm surprised that he was even indicted.
I can't actually imagine him actually being, uh,
convicted and going to prison.
Uh, I hope I'm wrong about that.
But, um, I do this for a living,
and it's a very hard living.
Um, it's very much like kissing a buzz saw
or climbing an ice mountain naked every day.
Um, you know, when you decide
that you're gonna go up against, um, the US military
in particular, uh,
and our military is festooned with Christian nationalism.
It just is, uh, the one movie I would advise all of you
to try to go see is praying for Armageddon.
We are in that one. It's a documentary.
They're trying to get their
distribution deal together right now.
But you can look at the trailer praying for Armageddon,
which it talks about the same people we're fighting, praying
so hard for the end of the world. They, they've had enough.
- Yeah, they are, - Let's bring Jesus back.
And now they're promised a a 400 mile long river,
a 200 mile long river, four
and a half feet deep with nothing
but the blood of those, that their version
of weaponized Jesus carrying an AR 15
has slaughtered at the battle of Armageddon.
So, well, the
- Irony, of course, is that if Jesus were to come back,
he would embody all the things
that they're rallying against,
- I guess, you know, uh, the problem is, is that, um,
if you look at certain parts of the New Testament, I mean,
John 8 44 is thrown at me a lot where Jesus says,
the Jews are the, uh, the, the offspring of the devil.
There are murders and liars from the, the beginning.
Of course, even in that book of John, he's referring
to the Sadducees of the, um, the Jews that are in power,
supposedly there, but they cherry pick this stuff.
Um, it's not as though this is a real chill little, um, um,
you know, a pacifistic Buddha.
I mean, Jesus did say, I didn't, don't make the mistake
of thinking I came here to bring peace.
I didn't. I came here to bring the sword.
And the bottom line is, if you don't bend your knee
and kiss his ring, you're gonna be screwed up in this life.
And then after you're dead, you'll burn,
burn eternally in the fires of hell.
And you can't even look forward to going into shock, uh,
and not feeling the flames anymore.
I mean, I've had this explained to me many, many times,
you know, usually on a daily basis.
So most of our staff, about 84% of our staff are Christians.
Some of our best supporters are evangelical Christians
who are, um, on our staff.
They donate their clients of ours.
But of course, the difference between being a,
the difference between a fundamentalist Christian
and an evangelical is that it's just like if you,
I presume you probably have a driver's license.
You are not free to drive anytime, anywhere.
You cannot drive if you're stoned or drunk,
or you're too tired or you're on prescription medicine.
Uh, and so our whole thing is simply focused not on whether
Jesus or Buddha or Yahweh or Vishnu
or Spider-Man is the correct God.
It's simply, we look at three things, the time, the place,
and the manner Susan, in which a member
of the military feels they have the right
to deploy their faith or non-faith tradition.
As I said, 99.9% of the time,
it's a fundamentalist Christian trying to follow the,
so-called Great Commission referenced at least twice in the
New Testament, mark 1615
and Matthew 28 19, which is one
of the last things Jesus is supposed to have said to us
disciples, which is go and make disciples of all nations
if they try to use their military rank.
You know, if you're, again,
if you're even being gently proselytized, remember
that is not like working at IBM or Taco Bell.
That's your civilian boss.
And you can tell them to, you know,
to go fuck off in the military.
That's a felony to do that.
In the military, it's a felony to have sexual intercourse
with someone other than your spouse.
Adultery destroys unit cohesion,
good order morale and discipline.
Susan. Uh, if, if you're ordered to go
to the base dentist at 4:00 PM to get a teeth cleaning
and you don't show up, that can be a felony.
It's a very d And the US Supreme Court has made it clear
that when the First Amendment, when in relation
to the military, is very different than what you get
as a filmmaker, a journalist,
or what I get as a civil rights advocate, you know,
they want us to have the full panoply of, of, of rights
for us under the First Amendment, not in the military.
The military, if you say
or do something, uh,
the idea is we wanna maximize the lethality of our military
to ensure that we can protect the full panoply
of constitutional rights for everybody else.
How do you do that? You maximize good order morale, um, uh,
discipline and unit cohesion, mission accomplishment,
and the health and the safety of the troops.
So we don't care about any religious philosophy.
What we care about is when you think you have the right, uh,
you know, the time, place and manner to deploy.
That is our focus.
But with my last name being obviously Jewish surname,
and with me being an attorney, my, my family,
and like I said, I'm a registered
Republican 'cause it drives 'em crazy.
Uh, I just, again, haven't been able to support
that in about three decades.
And, uh, three
of my kids are academy graduates from the Air Force Academy.
I went to the Air Force Academy.
Uh, my brother-in-Law went to the Air Force Academy.
My father was an honor graduate, sorry,
distinguished graduate from the Naval Academy.
So we have over 165 years accumulated
of combat experience in, in my family,
in pretty much every major combat engagement the country's
been in from really going back to the, you know,
to the Civil War, to where we currently are.
So, uh, we were, we're, we were kind of in the, the right
position, um, the right time,
place, and manner to fight this.
- When did you see it begin? When did the tide turn?
- February 4th, 2004, Hollywood, Mel Gibson, the passion
of the Christ came out.
Did you ever see that movie?
- I didn't wanna see it.
- Well, we had to see it.
That movie was pushed down the throats
of the cadets at the Air Force Academy, where I had three
of my kids at the time, by their officer.
And cadet chain of command was unbelievable.
I, I looked at the movie, it was like a Jesus snuff film.
We don't even refer to it by Mel Gibson's name,
uh, the Passion of the Christ.
We call it the Jesus Chainsaw Massacre,
or Freddie versus Jesus.
But if you'd seen it, and when I realized my kids were being
forced, and the other cadets,
you know, I realized, okay, stop.
You know, in real life, you know, in, in a movie like,
you know, like the short one that you just did, I presume
music, you know, if once something big happens,
you hear the drums, the trumpets, the the harps, whatever,
uh, but in real life, you don't have a soundtrack.
So sometimes when these big moments come,
and that was Lexington in Concord for us, when I, when I saw
what my alma mater was doing and pushing this, uh,
this movie on these, uh, these, these kids
and the staff, faculty, staff
and cadets, I stopped what I was doing.
We started the fight, we pulled on the thread,
and we began to realize that the
whole sweater was coming off.
22 months later, we actually formed the, uh,
the Military Religious Freedom Foundation
in December of 2005.
Uh, we went to all the other organizations.
You can't get the A CLU to answer the phone.
It's hard to get anybody else's attention.
Jewish war veterans at the time, did nothing.
The Anti Defamation League didn't next to nothing.
So my wife and I finally realized,
do we have to form something?
It's not easy to form a civil rights
organization whole cloth.
And I mean, uh, I had not really received death threats
before, or threats, you know, against, uh, my wife
and children, grandchildren, my parents, um, our staff.
And, uh, uh, you don't just suddenly go to school.
Here's how you start a civil rights organization.
So for 22 months, we were in this
before we realized we needed our own thing.
We started with five cadets at
the Air Force Academy who are clients.
And like I said, now, in a day
or two, we'll go past 87,000, uh, most of them Christians.
And so, uh, being told that you are not Christian enough.
And so, uh, we have, um, well, uh, over 1100
lgbtqia plus clients.
We represent a little more than 18% of all Muslim
Muslims in the US military that we're aware of.
And, um, misogyny.
And certainly we've helped many, um, pregnant women
that want to abortion.
We've, we've helped them because all of
that is tied into the mothership of fundamentals.
Christianity, the hate, so much hatred, as I said
before, homophobia, transphobia, uh,
antisemitism is Islamophobia,
real hatred of the Constitution.
Everything that, uh, that people like Trump
and those who support him think it's great,
because, you know, if you support him, you get lots
of dollars contributed to your campaigns,
and you get votes if you go against them,
you may not get that.
So it's, um, tremendous sense of despair and sadness.
Looking at my good part of America, plenty.
There are plenty of others that say,
this is, no, no, we have to fight.
But how do you, how do you fight against it?
And, um, I'd love to be able to have civil discourse
and sit down and talk about it.
But I think that that ship has, um, sailed
and, um, we're facing, uh,
the most consequential election
easily in the history of our country.
This is beyond, I agree, beyond the Civil War.
If he gets back, I, I don't,
I guess I would pose this question to you
and the li listeners of your podcast, Susan,
I don't know which will be the bigger bloodbath if he gets
back in again, or if he doesn't.
'cause he is not gonna sit there and say,
the election's fair, unless he wins it.
You think he is gonna sit there and say, I won.
But it was terribly unfair. But there is a bloodbath coming.
And so I don't know exactly the magnitude.
I know perhaps you've even spoken to fellow Americans,
friends, family that say, if he gets in, we're moving.
Okay, where are you gonna go?
Where do you get away from the tentacles of America?
You know, where, where do you think you're gonna run to?
I'm not going anywhere. And we're, we're gonna, you know,
we will fly this airplane into a mountaintop if we have
to fight again, when you get, we probably get
between a dozen to 18 fairly
grotesque threats on a daily basis.
But we've had, um, police on the job
that made the threats on their,
you know, on their computers.
Uh, I was, I, um, certainly pre covid, in particularly a lot
of public speaking, I gave a speech at a large Christian
university in Colorado.
Not the Air Force Academy, but
that would qualify these days.
But a, a public, uh, Christian university in Colorado.
Our, uh, security team went up a week
before, as they normally do,
and, uh, briefed, uh, the, uh,
security people at this college.
And then about 18 hours later, I got a threat from one
of the security people at that college.
A threat that came in. Yes, that's right.
The college refused to fire him, uh,
but just said he wouldn't be working security detail.
Of course, we had to come up with a whole different,
different way of moving.
And of course, uh,
I normally don't speak without wearing kefler
or bulletproof vests
and stuff, so I'm not gonna make it easy.
But you have to train, uh,
with concealed carry weapons, which we all carry.
You sit a certain way in a restaurant, in a movie theater.
I mean, you try to do the best you can.
I, I, I think about it a lot
because, um, uh, as Winston Churchill said,
there's nothing more exhilarating in human experience than
to have someone shoot at you and miss, you know,
but I'm not so sure they're gonna miss.
And so, uh, like I said, that we're not complex.
It's pretty easy to, to see what we're doing.
And, uh, in this America, I mean, I,
I remember when we had the, the simple issue
of just hating George W. Bush for his policies.
And then Obama came in and we, you know,
and we thought things would be better.
They weren't, I mean, clearly he was better,
but that didn't trickle down through the bureaucracy.
And, uh, with Trump, it went on steroids.
And if he gets back in again, which is certainly possible,
I don't know, like I said, column A blood bath
or column B blood bath, he gets in blood bath.
He doesn't get in blood bath.
- I'm frustrated that the Democrats haven't given
us a better candidate.
- You know, I don't know
that anyone else could have beaten Trump in, uh,
you know, uh, four years ago.
Um, so what are they supposed to do?
Uh, put somebody else in there.
Um, I, my fear is that if they did, I mean, who,
who would be the better candidate?
I'm would, I mean, I, I'm not, I'm not happy with Biden's,
uh, unequivocal support of Benjamin Netanyahu
and Israel Slaughter of the Gaza. Oh,
- Yeah, me neither.
Yeah. The fact that the loss of life,
even any loss of life grotesque.
But this is beyond the pale.
- It is. And to sit there and say that every, um,
Gazen is a, is a member of Hamas. 'cause they,
- It's ridiculous.
- Six over, over half the population's under the age of 14.
But, you know, there are over 28,000 dead Gaza, uh,
Palestinians in, in the, in Gaza.
And of course, the, uh, uh, the people that
unequivocally support national say, well,
that's coming from the Hamas Health Aid.
Well, where are your numbers coming from?
You're 1200 or whatever. And I have family that lived there.
My kids went there for, for birthright.
I've never been, I'm, I have no interest in
going to Israel, an American.
And remember during Trump's reign,
yet another settlement in the West Bank was named
after Trump, which he loves.
I would've loved to see Bernie Sanders in,
or Elizabeth Warren.
Um, I could live with, I could, at this point,
I could literally live with Liz
Cheney being president as a Republican.
I would sleep at night with Mitt Romney.
I would sleep at night. I hate Chris Christie.
He's a sick offense, et cetera.
Um, I can't stand Nikki Haley.
She's, they all got on board the first time.
'cause it would help them out. There are some Republicans
and you know, Adam Kininger, as I said,
I could sleep at night.
Uh, but, um, and I was in the Reagan
White House for over three years.
I mean, I was there. I was one of his lawyers.
And, uh, um, I was the committee management officer
for the Iran Contra investigation.
I, I get it. I understand it.
I can, I feel confident in saying that
if Reagan were alive today, he, he would be in a state
of shock by Trump and the others that are there.
There are many things he did that I couldn't stand.
I was not a fan, but he was my client.
But we're in a, uh,
completely different parallax universe now.
And it's, it's hard to believe that this is happening.
But, but it is.
And the, the, the, the forces of rationality, Susan
and morality, uh, seem to
bever moving very slow
and unable to coalesce, to fight back.
- Well, and I feel like his followers give him a pass
for literally anything.
But at the same time, they're screaming about any other
American doing far less damage, , or,
- Oh, I mean, even this whole thing with Fanny Wall
of Willis right now, I mean, I, yeah,
I wish he hadn't had this relationship with,
but it's, it's, it's a peppercorn compared to the fact
that this guy Trump called into the Secretary of State
and said, find me just under 12,000 votes.
I mean, come on. I mean, and but,
but Trump himself said several years ago,
he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, not, you know, not.
Yeah, apparently. So
- That's the problem when the cult
of personality rules the land,
- Right?
Putin is, is smart. I can't stand him, but he's smart.
Um, uh, AYA Khomeini, the head
of Iran is smart, can't stand him.
Kim Jong is smart. Can't stand him either.
Uh, Xin Jinping, the head
of China is smart, can't stand him.
Trump not smart. Cowardly been given everything.
I think he's been, whatever frequency he's been generating
since he was about a year and a half
or two, that's the same frequency he's always had.
But it resonates with those that, that show it a,
a very deep seated level of hatred, bigotry,
and prejudice against women.
Um, I honestly, I have a close friend of mine here.
He's all actually on my board who said, Mikey,
we're in the fix we're in now.
Because there was irrational hatred of a woman running
for President Hillary
and irrational hatred of a black man
who was president for eight years.
Obama irrational hatred of a woman running for president.
Um, and, uh, we have a tremendous, it's not just the incel,
you know, look at a woman, and I look at Taylor Swift,
who's you obviously, you know,
she's up on the progressive side very much so.
She supported, um, Biden, uh, back in when he,
when he ran in 2020.
But she's a woman, you know, she's been very successful.
She has well earned power. She didn't inherit anything.
And that is terrifying, not just to Republican men,
but to certainly women as well.
Uh, but I, I, I did, I think it's the irrational hatred
of Hillary Clinton and the irrational hatred
of a black man being president.
And it shows us to be, uh, in, in, in,
in a magnitude far more than we'd ever seen a country
that is racist, hateful, and bigoted.
Now, I'm not, is everyone in the country like that?
No, of course not. I mean, Biden did win.
Uh, is he, was he my first selection?
Was he my fourth or fifth? No,
but he's, he's the guy we got, you know,
and in a perfect world, you know, I mean,
we can't bring JFK back again.
Um, you know, I, and look
- Bobby, I would've preferred - Bobby.
Oh yeah. Bobby would be, or, or, you know, Jimmy Carter.
You know, these are all people that I thought were great,
or I've often said
that if you were walking down a dark city alley at two in
the morning, and you were stopped by, um, a gang of, uh,
well, you know, gangsters.
And they said, okay, Susan
or Mikey, we're gonna give you two choices.
You're in the wrong place at the wrong time.
There are no cops here. We're gonna do you see this orange
sharpie, we're gonna mark this on your left hand so hard.
It'll take you 20 minutes in the shower to get that off.
Or if you don't want that,
we're gonna stick this knife in your eye.
So which would you like to have done to you?
And then we'll let, you can go home.
You're always gonna say, get that Sharpie out.
I'll have to take that shower, but I'll try to get
that orange stuff off my hand.
So that's the difference between what,
who the Democrats have and Trump.
I mean, I, you know, I, do you understand what I'm saying?
How hard is, how hard is this to make the decision?
How difficult is it to say, you know? Okay.
And so to sit there,
and I was even disappointed with John Stewart the other
night, try, I, I don't wanna see any, you know, look,
I'm on this, I'm the guest on
today, so I'm giving you my views.
I don't wanna see any equating of badness
between Biden who's supposed to be a senile,
but he's also running a giant prime family.
And Trump, who's the most disgusting, um, uh, piece
of filth I've ever seen as a, as a human being.
How hard is this to figure out?
Well, apparently it's pretty hard.
- I think we're, we are in the fight of our life,
for sure. We
- Are.
We very much are. Yes. And, um, I had a question for you.
You're the host. I, I love the name of this podcast.
Where did you come up with a human?
- Uh, I was in Nashville
and a shooting occurred, another shooting,
and within a couple months, the San Bernardino shooting
and pulse nightclub shooting happened.
And you remember I was at the bottom
of my faith in humanity,
and I was crying on the phone with my dad.
And I said, I just don't, I don't,
I think we've gone too far.
I don't think we can come back.
And it's devastating what has happened to us as a species.
- I agree with you. I, I, if I may ask, what brought you
to such, um, the na of your
sense of things being okay?
I mean, how did you hit rock bottom?
What, what had caused that? Just saying the cumulative
effect of the
- Cumulative effect.
And it was just one shooting after another.
And the, the fact that people, instead of dealing
with their own problems decide to take it out on others, uh,
we all know now that the pulse shooting occurred when a
person who had self deep self-loathing
for homosexual tendencies didn't know how to deal with that.
And so he is taking it out on everybody at that nightclub.
- Do you have siblings - Too? Too much older brothers.
- Ah, okay. Yeah. Do they feel very similar to you
about the way things are going down?
- I think that my brother, well,
my eldest brother suffered a pretty severe stroke.
I don't know that he thinks a lot about a lot of things,
but, uh, but I'd certainly, my, the middle child is,
I mean, his daughter is trans, so right there,
you've already got a different fight on your hands
for just hoping to keep her alive.
- No, I mean, it's, it's, we have a number of, you know, of,
uh, parents of trans children and trans clients ourselves.
And, um, we did our research on the podcast,
or I wouldn't be giving this much time to it.
I mean, there's, you know, there's, there's only what's
86,000 seconds in a day,
and they're all very valuable to all of us. And so, um,
- I appreciate that.
- No, I, I, that's why we, I wanted
to make time to be able to do this.
And, uh, we, you know, particularly I look back at a number
of my classmates from the Air Force County
can't even speak to them anymore.
Not all of 'em. Some
of them are supporters and donors and whatever.
But if we go to these events where we're all together,
the last one was a disaster for the, uh,
air Force Navy football game.
We got together in a, one of our classmates owns a, um, a,
a bar in, you know, in Tampa.
We all gathered there. And that turned out to be a disaster.
And, uh, so, um, I can't even go to the, um,
reunions anymore without bringing a PHAs of bodyguards.
It's just too expensive, you
know, why would I mess with that?
So, um, on on the bright side, he hasn't been reelected yet.
Um, we need people, my own son is a member of the House
of Representatives in Ohio.
He's a state rep, uh, three term,
but he's running for the Senate there now.
Good. And he feels the same way.
You and I feel about, you know, the country
and the, and the important things.
And, um, even the idea of gun control.
I mean, we have a lot of guns in our house.
We have to qualify every two years.
Uh, we go through a very careful background check.
I mean, there are just some rational
and reasonable measures we can take.
Um, you know, most Americans, it seems, um, uh,
don't have a lot of knowledge about our constitution.
They don't understand. I mean,
Israel doesn't even have a constitution.
At least we have one, like,
I guess fish in an aquarium, Susan.
They never see the water, you know?
So you just live in this country.
Hey, I, you know, I'm oblivious,
but I get all these, I have this great life going on here.
And, uh, and then the idea that we're being flooded
by an army of immigrants,
like zombies coming across the border,
complete utter bullshit as well.
- It is that are bullshit.
I mean, I, my friends, I have friends
who are literally at the border, border patrol people.
And it's a really interesting, damned if you do,
damned if you don't, because I see Fox News gets pissed when
they say A million dollars worth
of Fentanyl ceased, da da da.
Look at what's happening. It's like, wait a minute, wait,
do you want it to be stopped?
Or do you not want it to be stopped?
You better make up your mind because Right, right.
Those, those are two totally different things, .
- Well, it isn't that we need to fix immigration.
We have to. We have to. We've had
to make it better for generations.
Certainly there is no army of people
that are coming across the border with,
uh, teeth in their mouth.
They're gonna take our jobs
and stab our, you know, to take over our homes,
kill our pet, eat our pets, and all the other stuff.
Yeah. It's been manufactured.
And the fact that, uh, a monster like Mike Johnson
as the house speaker is gonna hold up aid to Ukraine,
you know, um, aid to Israel, Taiwan.
Right. I've been delighted to be on here. It's an honor.
I hope you're, uh, what is the name of your short film?
- It's called The First, - Did you go to film school
or how did you learn how to do that?
- I didn't. I was, I'm a professional songwriter
and every song you write is like a mini movie.
And I, I've always been into film.
I love going to the movies. I love reading screenplays,
and I thought, this is
what I wanna do next. So I started doing it.
- Are you, are you totally solo?
Do you have, are you rep by any of the agencies out there?
- No, I'm not rep yet.
- Not yet. Well, I hope that works out.
Uh, I'd love to see it. Thank, I'd love to see it.
I'd love to know, uh, is there any sort of a trailer
for the first yet or anything like that?
- It's too short to have a trailer.
I will definitely put it out on the festival circuit,
but I'll be, I'm happy to send you, uh,
a copy when it's, when it's ready.
- Please do So I'd love to see it.
- And if you come to Los Angeles, please let me know.
I'd love to buy you a cup of Joe.
- I will, uh, I will make, make sure of that.
'cause I mean, that's one place where, you know,
we have our media and web folks.
We, we, we are rep in, in Hollywood
and uh, we have folks there we
need to go see and stuff like that.
And a lot, a lot of a big client base.
- I really appreciate your time. I know how valuable it is.
Thank you. Uh,
I think the work you're doing is incredibly important.
Thanks Susan. Thank you for listening, everyone.
I appreciate it. Be well.
- Thanks, Susan. You.