Faith, followers, and the files: Jay Michaelson and the Epstein Cover-up

REV. PAUL BRANDEIS RAUSHENBUSH:

Rabbi Dr. Jay Michelson is a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and a field scholar at the Emory Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality.

He is the author of ten books and a journalist whose work appears on CNNm in Rolling Stone, and in his weekly Substack newsletter, which I highly recommend, Both/And with Jay Michelson.

For twenty years Jay's work has been focused on the intersection of politics and religion, and he worked as a religious LGBTQ activist for ten years. He holds a PhD from Hebrew University, a JD From Yale Law School, and has a non-denominational Rabbinic ordination.

Rabbi Dr. Jay, welcome back to The State of Belief.

JAY MICHAELSON:

Thanks, Rev. Paul.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

I'm always like, that is a good resume!

JAY MICHAELSON:

Oh, and it's got that breathless cadence of your introduction. It really adds to the content.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Yes, exactly. So. I wanted this week to talk about something that I didn't think I was going to want to talk about, but then I started wanting to talk about it, which is everything that's going on with the Epstein files and this administration, and what appears to be a massive effort at distraction and cover up that now includes some legal maneuverings that I suspect you have been following. So let's just start from what we understand to be the facts of this case, and then go to this current moment of what clearly is becoming a perceived - and maybe real – crisis for this administration.

JAY MICHAELSON:

Sure. I actually, with your permission, even want to take a half step earlier before going into the facts of the case, starting with your ambivalence, which I think most progressives probably share, which is, like, why are we talking about this? And you know, where we can go down the litany of things which I think are probably higher up on our own consciences and things that we feel are more politically urgent. But I want to suggest that we should be talking about this for a couple of reasons.

First, I think a lot of progressives really made a mistake in 2024. And not just the campaign, the Harris campaign, but just progressives in general. We talked about what we want to talk about and what we think is important - not what vast swaths of the American mainstream think is important. We talked about economic issues now and then; but over and over again, you and I talked a lot about Trump's threats to democracy.

Well, good for us. We were right - but it doesn't profit us to be Cassandra. Now we're living with Trump's threats to democracy being very real and actualized because our side couldn't prevail in that election.

I think had there been a little more listening to what voters were really caring about and not dismissing their economic concerns, but really trying to get to the core of it. Our first answer was sometimes, well, of course, Trump's not going to help with any of that, you idiot. That's also not helpful. I think it's easy to Monday morning morning quarterback any election, but I think we could learn from that experience that it's worth paying attention to the issues that half the country, at least, it wants to pay attention to. And this is now one of those issues. So that's the first reason. But it's not just politically expedient.

So obviously, there are more important things, although at the core of the Epstein Saga are some pretty heinous crimes. Still, on an order of magnitude basis, there may be more important things; but this does represent a fundamental breach of trust that not just the MAGA faithful, but a lot of others placed in Donald Trump. Obviously, we might say misplaced.

But that's a big deal, and that is an issue that spiritual progressives should care about: about issues of trust, of honesty, of transparency. And when there's a challenge, whenever the conspiracy theorist comes into power, because then there's no conspiracy, and then they become the conspiracy. And that's exactly what's happened here. And I'll confess to being - not quite an Epstein truther, but an Epstein doubter, I guess, about how he died and who was involved in that. And certainly my own conspiracy theorizing has taken a big leap forward in the last two weeks, based on some of the twists and turns of the way the story has happened.

But you know, I think that fundamental question about trust: is Donald Trump in your corner or not? Is he a con man or not? Is he really going to overturn some of the fundamentals of what the deep State stands for or not - and you know, I think we can pair the Epstein saga as it is now with the budget, where a lot of folks who were paying attention on the right side of the political spectrum saw that Trump sold them out, that this was a tax break for billionaires at the expense of people getting Medicaid. And you know, there might be some racist tropes that the Medicaid recipients are people of color in urban areas. As you know, that's not true.There are a lot of White folks in rural areas who also depend on Medicaid and other forms of government assistance. And this really hurts a lot of people.

So I think these two issues pair together, and they go to how Trump's own base perceives his betrayal.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

The framing is important, and also to recognize: it does matter. This is really important. And in part it's important because you can see how hard they're trying to not have it be important. And you know, Nancy Pelosi was like, we need to talk about kitchen table issues. And I'm like, well, yeah, but…

JAY MICHAELSON:

This is a kitchen table. I mean, I understand kitchen table might be... This is maybe a dining table issue, right? This is what people talk about. This is what we used to call water cooler issues back when we had offices that had water coolers in them.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Well, so I think maybe we can just start… I have to say, here's my weirdness about it and my confession about it: I always just assumed that Donald Trump was in the Epstein files. Like, that was never in doubt to me. I was just like, well, obviously he is. And that's what's the disconnect for me, is that, you know, obviously he's in it. I don't know if that's slanderous at this point, but it just feels like everything else he's done, all these egregious attacks on women, the way he showed up in these Miss Teen America or whatever pageant… How could he not be there?

JAY MICHAELSON:

Yeah, there's a mountain of circumstantial evidence. The airplane fights. You know, that, you know we both like young women, or something like that.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Yeah. So I mean, when all the Epstein stuff was going on, whenever it was really going on, I was like, of course, Trump's a part of it. And so that's the reason, like, a little bit for me, it's just like, Oh, we're talking about this now?

JAY MICHAELSON:

Right. No, I agree. I mean, I think what is different now is that Trump has decided to do a 180 on whether the files exist and whether it's important or not. And for several years he's played a pretty daring game, because, I agree, I mean, obviously, if there is a client list - which there probably is not - surely he's on it, right?

You know, he's been playing this game of alleging a deep state cover up. And he can't say that that's still happening. He's thrown out everyone qualified from the FBI and the DOJ, and it's filled with loyalists in every direction, whether it's Pam Bondi, Dan Bongino, Kash Patel. These are not deep state folks. And now he just did a 180. There's a thing, it's not the crime, it's the cover up. I think that is largely true in this case, because the cover up comes after years of egging people on to demand what's in those files.

And you know, this is the age of social media. I've personally seen a dozen Instagram reels and Tiktoks of Pam Bondi saying, We've got to release the tapes; of JD Vance saying, we've got to release the files; and Trump himself. So that's why we're talking about it now. I think there was still a feeling like, okay, pretty soon, now, we're going to get those files.

One of his failed attempts at misdirection was the MLK files, which are actually pretty interesting and maybe State of Belief might actually be interesting. I mean, that actually, that's a really good distraction for us, because there's really a lot in there that's quite troubling from the government surveillance point of view. So we got that. But we didn't get this. I think that's why we're talking about it now: this is the clearest betrayal of - and these guys believed this conspiracy theory.

And you know, turning to the facts for a minute, it's really not clear what are the Epstein files. We don't. There are dossiers and files that have been kept on him as part of the criminal prosecution. Apparently some of those were just still sitting in the Southern District. They hadn't been turned over to the Feds. Did he videotape people's encounters with…? No, probably not. There's not going to be, I wouldn't guess, I wouldn't think a smoking gun that's so bad that this actually puts someone in danger of prosecution. But then, again, if there weren't something bad in there, why not release the files? So the more he refuses to release them, the more reasonable people - which means even us - the more reasonable people start to think there maybe is something in there.

You can never really guess the mind of Trump. We don't know why he took those classified files and hid them in his bathroom, either, so we don't really know why he does what he does. But it ispossible that just having his name appear somewhere in flight logs would have been seen as too damning. But it is the one thing that I would not predict, is whether he gets out of this or not. It's really hard to ever say. I mean, I can't. You know everybody thought on January 6th  2021 that this guy's career was cooked; and Mitch McConnell, who could have led a bipartisan effort to convict him in the impeachment trial, the second impeachment trial, said, there's no point in doing this. He's over. He's never coming back, so I never count the Donald out.

And we're old enough to remember when he went bankrupt a couple of times, I think, in the nineties. And we're like, all right, Donald Trump - he's cooked. He's over, you know. Everyone knows he's a con artist now. Then came The Apprentice. So I don't know if it's enough, but he's certainly in a corner.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

We don't know whether it's enough, but I do think it would be helpful to have a smarty pants like you to give a little bit of what has been happening, as far as you know. Just in this week, there have been kind of legal things that have been happening that indicate something. And I think many of us don't really understand what it means to do this and that, and with this person doing it rather than that person do it. And I'm one of those people, but it does feel like there have been efforts - you know, for a second it was like, well, we're going to open the grand jury files. But then that wasn't happening. So can you just give us a little bit of what has legally been happening, what the maneuvers that have been happening, and where Pam Bondi is in all of this? And who are the other actors? Can you break it down.

JAY MICHAELSON:

So the most recent turn, I would say, in the saga is an attempt to get a judge to unseal the grand jury transcripts from one of the - I think it's the Epstein trial or the Maxwell trial. It's from the criminal trials, and this is a way to kind of have your cake and eat it too.

So Pam Bondi has now said, there's no such thing as the Epstein files. That's probably a lie. But this might be a way for her to say, for them to put out into the public some information, while it not being Epstein files, because it's the grand jury transcript. So far that effort has not been successful, because the judge said, you can't just unseal grand jury findings any time you want. There's specific exceptions to the rules that keep grand jury transcripts and materials secret. If there's an ongoing prosecution that is one of the rules you can unseal. But you can't just say unseal the document.

So far, the government's not been successful. I see it as a kind of tactical move. It is a legal move, but it's really a tactical move to somehow get something out there while not being caught in the lie. Maybe she'll say next week, Oh, gosh! I forgot they were over here in this closet that I lost the files, and then she'll release some files. But I don't really know.

It's also possible that this evidence has been destroyed. I mean, I don't know if these are physical materials, if they're digital materials. Either way, it's quite possible they were just destroyed, and there really is now nothing to release. 

So again, this is a way of kind of getting something out there without it being the main thing. So it could be that they exist, and that they're extremely incriminating; could be that they just don't exist. It could be that they used to exist, but were destroyed. And in any case, this was a kind of a legal maneuver to satisfy this political end.

Same with Mike Johnson closing the US House of Representatives to avoid any kind of investigation, which might also - a Congressional investigation might also require those materials to be unsealed. So that's sort of the legal wrangling.

Trump's phrase - I never noticed it in the first term, but you know there are now supercuts of his favorite phrase, In about two weeks. That reflects a judgment on his part that nobody has the attention span of more than two weeks. “We're going to give you that health plan in about two weeks. We're going to give you the budget in two weeks. The peace deal in Russia and Ukraine in about two weeks.” He knows the media cycle very well - better than either of us do - and he knows that two weeks is an eternity, and he can come up with some other stuff.

It does scare me to think about how big the distractions might get. Could there be some, like, war? Could there be some horrible crackdown? I would say that if Trump were to institute something like martial law, maybe we would stop talking about the Epstein files. And so it gives me pause to consider how far he might go. But it seems the real question is about two weeks.

Now we have probably about eight weeks, at least, until Congress is back in session - or seven weeks - and so, will media attention continue? So far, MAGA hasn't let up. It's weird that we're relying on them, but you know, they're pissed. I mean, the news, as we're recording this today, is the Q-Anon Shaman called Donald Trump a piece of s**t. So if you've lost the Q-Anon Shaman, you've lost a lot of the…

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

I did not see that.

JAY MICHAELSON:

I thought you might not have. I wanted to give you the the scoop here.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Wow! Well, thank you very much.

JAY MICHAELSON:

Yeah, Jacob, what's his name? Chamblay or something, I forgot his last name, exactly.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Oh, this is the guy who was in…

JAY MICHAELSON:

With the horns, the Q shaman…

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Okay. Okay, okay. I thought the Q-Anon person themselves.

JAY MICHAELSON:

Oh, no, no, Q-Anon has been quiet for a while, but no, the Q shaman from January 6th has has disavowed Trump.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

And after all Donald did for him.

JAY MICHAELSON:

Right. Well, he was pardoned.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Of course.

JAY MICHAELSON:

So much for the loyalty and buying these people's loyalty and silence. Not to get off track, but there's now some secondary evidence suggesting that there are J6 rioters now working for ICE, which is interesting to contemplate.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Been hearing that, too. You know, what about Maxine… What is her name? Ghislaine?

JAY MICHAELSON:

Ghislaine Maxwell, yeah.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Yeah, Ghislaine Maxwell, how do you understand the effort to… I mean, who has control over her fate, and who might be able to - and I know we're getting into conspiracy theories here, but, you know, who might be able to influence what she's going to say if she does go public in order to get pardoned by Trump?

JAY MICHAELSON:

Yeah, I mean, it's not a conspiracy theory when the meetings are acknowledged. It's been reported. I guess it is a conspiracy in some way, but we're not saying that you have to do your research. You can just Google it and credible reports from all kinds of journalists will come up. I think it might be a question of what's her price, and I guess that's where we get into the conspiratorial side. Do we think that these meetings are really to see if she has any relevant information, or, to offer her freedom plus who knows what else in exchange for a kind of NDA? Who knows? I mean, she would know. She was the handler for Jeffrey Epstein, and she facilitated a lot of these illegal, criminal acts with underage women. And yeah, who knows what she knows?

It's interesting that in such a relatively short period of time, really just the last 6 to 9 months, Trump has so consolidated his hold on the party that it's hard to locate any other power centers. You could imagine in a normal party situation there'd be one circle around the President. But then there'd be others who are over here who are a little ambitious on their own, and who might have interests, and it is…

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Well, that's what I don't understand. Why are no other Republicans who might be trying to actually win in 2028 beginning to break away? Or are they too afraid of the MAGA base that they feel like they…

JAY MICHAELSON:

I think they're reading the tea leaves. I mean, I think it'll be interesting if some of the renegade Republicans who have broken with Trump already, or who have said they're not seeking reelectio,n kind of take this up. But those haven't tended to be the most conservative. Ironically, it's the most conservative, the closest to the MAGA base, who are the most outraged by this. I don't know. I mean, if you have made your career being part of MAGA and having that base, I think you might want to read the tea leaves, or at least wait another month. I mean, let's see if this just goes away, and we all stop talking about it, and we move on to the next thing, and like he always does, Trump always gets away.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

I am curious about, you know, you putting on your rabbi cap, or whatever rabbi paraphernalia you want, and talking about, it's just been interesting. It hasn't been a place where a lot of religious leadership has weighed in. Obviously, there's the huge, just fundamental outrage of the attack on girls, and how terrible it all is. But we already, in some ways, for those of us who might speak out, we kind of already know that, and knew that. And so I guess it's just so weird. I'm just trying to figure out: I have not heard all the religious leadership just say, go all in on Epstein and Trump, maybe because it feels so obvious.

JAY MICHAELSON:

It's been a right wing obsession for almost a decade at this point. And it's not the kind of politics we generally do on the religious progressive side. We don't really go in for the conspiracy-mongering, even if at its core there is a real crime that is serious. It's just not the, you know, like, oh, let's see the scandal sheet, and the latest. I think people are more focused on what we consider to be substantive issues. You know ICE, creeping authoritarianism, name your Trump horror, And that, I think, reflects a certain maturity of of conscience and of civic responsibility, to focus on the important stuff and not focus on the distractions.

But I am making a case both for, I would say expediency, but also on principle, that this is an issue that we have to take up. And you don't get to pick what the issues, what the moments are that necessarily catalyze public opinion. I'll take a kind of dramatic example, you know, in the Vietnam war. There's a horrible picture of the young girl running from Napalm. Okay? And you know, no one chose that as the moment at which the inhumanity of the Vietnam war was going to be discussed, and someone could say, Okay, well, this was one girl, but what about this? What about the My Lai massacre? What about this other thing that's much worse? What about that? But that's not how politics works. And this is the occasion that has brought up these fundamental issues of of Trump not being true to his base, which I think is a pretty core point.

And again, we can just drive ourselves crazy talking about it. I'll say more about that in a second, I want to make sure to reference When Prophecy Fails and talk about that book, but it also is actually about sexual violence and the predation of women. This isn't entirely on point, but I just saw a really trenchant quote from Alan Cummings, the actor, queer entertainer, who said, “Why would a rapist”- This is about the transgender myth, that trans women are actually sexual predators in disguise, he said, “Why would a rapist go to the trouble of pretending to be transgender when our society treats rapists so much better than transgender people?”

It's like, if you think of how our society has protected sexual predators from the president on down… I won't make a rape allegation, but I'm just…

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

And I'll say, just referencing Kristin du Mez’s work, about how conservative Christian groups have covered up predatory actions by pastors and things like that without repercussion. And you know there's a religious element to that that we all very well know.

JAY MICHAELSON:

Well, we can surface that. I mean, I think we should be surfacing that. And you know, we make jokes in the gay community a lot about the homophobic pastors who then get busted with male sex workers or whatever. But this is serious, right? I mean, this is about projection. It's seeing the challenging parts of one's own shadow that you haven't integrated, that you haven't found a way to work with in an appropriate and ethical way, and projecting what you see to be the worst of those, or the most sinful or the most violent of those tendencies onto this other. And so sometimes the other is a transgender woman, and sometimes the other is the elite circle of elite pedophiles.

But I don't think this moment is big enough to be a reckoning with that. That seems to be as old as the Bible and othering people, and projecting qualities, negative qualities onto them. But it is also that. It is also that moment, and I think, again, one reason that we're reticent to talk about it is that the exploitation of women has been so weaponized, not just in the case of transgender people, but also in the case of sex trafficking.

And I scare quoted that, for people who are listening, because there's real sex trafficking, which obviously is horrifying. And then there's an entire huge right wing myth, including some pretty decent selling movies, that sex trafficking is a massive… Millions of children are being trafficked, which is absolutely impossible and mind-boggling and false. And it's this terrifying narrative. And that, of course, feeds into the dominant Q-Anon narrative that there is this sort of elite network of pedophiles that's running all of the systems of government, politics, media, etc.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

And that’s where you get that attack on that pizza shop, and they were lik,e Hillary Clinton has this pedophilia ring, and there's so much insanity. But then there's the reality, which actually involves their favorite guy. And that's what I think in all the messiness of this comes up why this is so massive and convoluted. But clearly, something is erupting, and they wouldn't be trying so hard to distract if something really scary to Trump wasn't going on.

JAY MICHAELSON:

Right. Well, at this point, they've lied so many times, it's hard to see where they go from here. So first they lied about the existence of all these files which name names, and you know, you expected to see Bill Clinton's name on a list, a client list or whatever. Maybe that was true. It doesn't seem like it was. There's no evidence that that kind of thing exists.

Then they lied and said it didn't exist. But I mentioned this…  One of my books is about a false Messiah in the 18th century, and so to do the research around that book, I took a deep dive into cults, Messianic movements, and secular as well as religious - Trump's movement is both secular and religious. And you know what often happens in cases of disappointed prophecy – so, the end of the world is predicted in 1848 or 1973 for the Jehovah's Witnesses, or the aliens coming for the Heaven's Gate cult, or all of these kinds of…

So a scholar named Leon Festinger wrote a book, almost 50 years ago now, called When Prophecy Fails. And he studied some of the UFO cults - we don't really use “cult” anymore, that word, but whatever, I'm going to use it to study what happens. And generally, what happens is a lot of the outer layer of support disappears; but usually the inner layer doubles down and they end up saying, well, actually, the redemption would have happened had we just been better. We weren't pure enough. We had to do this other thing, or the world wasn't ready. In the case that I studied, there was a mass Messianic movement in Judaism in the 17th century, and turned out the Messiah converted to Islam rather than take the throne of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. And so most of the people who were following him left. But the core said, No, no, he's still the Messiah. They then converted to Islam outwardly while retaining their Messianic faith inwardly. And it happened with Om Shinrikyo in Japan, it happens again and again and again. It's interesting to see if that will happen here.

What's different here is that it's actually been some of the truest believers, from QAnon Shaman down, who are turning first. And it's actually the people who have joined on the Trump train for more expediency reasons who are saying, oh, there's nothing to see here. There's nothing to see here. We're not going to keep going. You know, the lesson of When Prophecy Fails - and for a book that was written, actually, 70 years ago, It's held up remarkably well. There are corrections around the scholarship here and there, but the core thesis has held on really well.

The suggestion of that book is that nothing will shake the faith of the truest of the true believers, and that they will find a way to explain whatever's happening. And TBD, right? It's an interesting moment to speculate as to whether that will happen here as it has in… And look, the founding story of Christianity is arguably when prophecy fails. Christ came. The redemption did not come in the way that had been prophesied, and when, after he died or didn't die - I'll leave that, we can have that conversation some other time, Reverend, the faith changed. It changed the formula. It's like, well, he had to die in order to to die for our sins.

So how this dynamic might unfold in the case of Trump, who obviously we've talked about on the program before, fills a sort of Messianic role. There is a legislator, I forget which state - Oklahoma, I think - who literally said unironically, that we should refer to Trump as “Daddy Trump.” And there was a gay member of that same state legislature who said, I don't know if you want to know about that in my community. So we don't have to go far to look for the projection of the father figure and the abusive father figure.

And I just read an interesting take that no one can truly love Trump without also hating Trump, just as you can't love the abusive father without also partly hating the abusive father, because that is who he is. He is that figure projected, the daddy of the movement. And I don't know. I think it's an interesting time to be recording this episode, because at this moment, someone goes back and listens to this moment from late July 2025. I don't think it's possible to predict which way this story goes.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

If we're able to talk about history in the future, this will be an interesting historic moment, in some ways, just to watch an administration throw so many things at the public at one time, and truly try to see what sticks. It's so frenetic. And really, really terrible, terrible things.

So as you're watching the Epstein files, and I really do think this damages him somehow going forward. I don't know that it's going to damage him so much. He's never going to step down. It would have to be forced out, and I don't know that that there will ever be a political will to do that at this point. But let's widen the aperture, shall we? And talk about how do we understand this moment 6 months into Trump's return, and what he's been able to do, and where we are as a nation.

JAY MICHAELSON:

For me, I have two points I wanted to hit on that. I guess the first one's a little shorter, but more devastating. So I am not one of those who jumps on criticism of the quote mainstream media all the time. I think that's a little overdone, and I think it's lazy. I am surprised and disappointed that the daily horrors coming from ICE are not always headline news in the mainstream media outlets. I'm still getting them. But I'm getting them from… Now I've become a kind of, I'm definitely not a Gen. Z, but I'm getting my news like one.

And I'm experiencing some of that mistrust of mainstream media that a lot of folks on right, left and center have, because it does feel to me as though this kind of Gestapo-like police state that is happening right in front of our eyes, and that is about to grow fourfold next year with the increase in budget, is absolutely horrifying.

There were ICE agents at a baseball practice in New York City the other day, and they were interrogating 11-year-olds and 14-year-olds, a report today, and that the coach had to stop them and risk his own life and freedom to do so. There's a report today in the Washington Post, or what's left of the Washington Post, that ICE has a plan to tag 180,000 legal immigrants with ankle bracelets to track their movements. Those are people who are here legally. Obviously Alligator Alcatraz, and the cruelty and dehumanization of immigrants, and what that really represents about… Anyway, I could go on. I'm disappointed and a little outraged that this is not more visible.

I think the second thing I just wanted to say, like, how has he been able to do this? There's a tendency - this is obviously not Trump, and I wish this fact could be internalized by normal American voters, the kind who don't listen to podcasts like this one - when we vote for a president, we're voting for thousands of people. We're voting for a whole apparatus. And, as we said again, being Cassandra doesn't really console very much. But, as we said a year ago, the far right conservative infrastructure prepared for this administration the way they did not prepare for the first administration. And so you know what we're seeing now in terms of like the ravaging of the Government.

This is more Russell Vaught than it is Donald Trump. We're seeing the kind of advent of post-liberalism and anti-democratic thinkers in the inner circle of the White House. One of those thinkers, Yoram Hazony, just gave a speech glowing about how many close friends he has working in the White House to kind of destroy a lot of the Democratic protections that he thinks we shouldn't have.

So there's kind of a, I guess the word coming to mind is “army.” There's an army of these folks who are doing this work, and whereas I think the Epstein story is really about Donald Trump, personally, what's really happened over the last 6 months has been a remarkably competent effort by extreme right wing forces, including better-known people like Stephen Miller, for example, to transform the federal government in not an old school, Ronald Reagan, small government way, but a new authoritarian big state led by a strong executive kind of way.

We've never had that before - maybe a little bit with FDR. Did we ever have this strong of an executive? And you do see that a lot of Americans are willing to put up with it, and the issues that they seem to care about the most. They do still care about the economy. Trump is doing very badly, polling very badly on the economy. He's also polling badly on immigration. People do think he's gone too far, arresting the people who are cutting their lawns and renovating their houses and picking their produce, and who are here in some kind of a legal process and are honest people trying to make a living. So the numbers are encouraging.

I guess I'll be a little self-serving: the Substack piece I'm putting out tomorrow is extreme pessimism about the fairness of the 2026 election, based on efforts that are already underway to make it very, very difficult for Democrats to win anywhere competitive. But it might be an avoidance mechanism on my part, that I'm thinking about November 2026 instead of August 2025. But I am focused there right now.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

You have to be, because they're focused on it. I mean, they're completely focused on it, because they recognize that they're unpopular. And so they're trying to figure it out. I mean, Texas is just one of the most blatant examples of, trying to get five more districts, and essentially disenfranchising an entire population of Texans.

JAY MICHAELSON:

Well, and what happens? Just imagine, I mean, Jackson Heights, Queens is quiet right now. Immigrant neighborhoods all around the country are quiet. You know there are places where day workers used to congregate to get work are now empty and devoid of people, because they're right to be frightened. And these aren't cowardly people or fearful people. They're just responding to the fact that ICE is randomly arresting anyone Brown anywhere, even if they're a citizen and have their papers, and then detaining people at airports as well. I'm actually reluctant to fly overseas right now and then come back, just because who knows what what lists any journalist is on? I think you should be, too.

So imagine that happens in November of 2026, and there's ICE patrols anywhere near polling places. Would you risk your life and your freedom and being with your family just to cast a vote in some election? Just imagine how many districts that impacts. And they don't have to be at the polling place; they could just be in the neighborhood. They could just spend a few days in November generally in the area of the polling places, and let it be known that they're doing patrols there - and that scares off uncounted legal American citizens who are trying to vote.

Because being an American citizen, if you're Brown, is not a defense from being picked up by ICE and then at least detained for several days in inhumane conditions. And that's if you're lucky. You can be a marine and do it. That's happened. There's all kinds of ways to find yourself suddenly on the wrong end of this authoritarian police force, and I'll repeat, which will be 4 times as large next year as it is now.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Because I always, unfortunately, have to ask you: we're watching two different sagas, but very similar in some ways, you know, what's happened to Harvard and to Columbia - how this attack on high higher education, what it looks like, and  some of the rationale which includes, well, we're defending the Jews. And Jews are mostly saying, don't pin this on us. But how do you understand this moment for higher education, as someone who recognizes how important it is for democracy, and the role it's played in developing a democracy and developing an infrastructure for well-being, for for the people. And yet that is completely a target.

JAY MICHAELSON:

We can put in the show notes a longish article I just did for the Forward newspaper on, we should, at least within the American Jewish community, we should recognize that we've been played. There are numerous other reasons that Republicans have stated for going after higher education, and it's clear that antisemitism is a pretext - that it is nothing more than that. And it's really despicable that the engine for the Jewish American dream in the 20th Century, which was access to higher education, that is being shredded in the 21st, again, with this fake rationale of defending the Jews.

I want to say, knowing some of the people involved in both the Harvard and Columbia negotiations, it's very easy to sit in judgment of institutions capitulating to the government. Columbia, as we're recording this, Columbia's settlement came out today, it's pretty fierce and in a bad way. It is very depressing to read. And yet, at the same time, this is a potential existential risk for these institutions and for thousands and thousands of people whose jobs and livelihoods depend on these already promised government research grants. I am friends, personally, with several scientists at institutions who have had their grants canceled in the middle of their work, and suddenly, there's no money. And these people have families. They also have ongoing studies. And a lot of times, with physical science, they're in the middle of their work, and their funding is pulled. So I'm not defending Columbia's deal. I'm just saying, it's easy for us to judge when we don't have that much at stake.

And so I recognize what a difficult situation these institutions are in, and I could contrast it with the craven bulls**t going on at CBS hiring, of all people, Paramount, CBS’ guidance is going to hire Bari Weiss to be an ombudsman of the news. That is absolutely despicable. Talk about a con artist, somebody who's lied about her supposed liberalism for her entire career, whose quote, unquote “news” site publishes wildly inaccurate conspiracy theories and totally un-sourcechecked reporting. This is the person who's going to decide whether CBS news - CBS news is going to be the new Fox News, right?

And of course the firing of Stephen Colbert, which seems almost certainly connected. And now we know there were even meetings with Trump officials, administration officials, before the firing happened. So I would contrast these two things, one, really just trying to make a lot of money by selling out big media to the government; another really trying to save some of these critical institutions.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Yeah, you know, I'm getting a lot of my thoughts around Columbia because Brad, my husband, went to Columbia - both undergraduate and Phd. And I think he has a sense of betrayal from what he understood to be Columbia to be as an institution. And I think what you're saying makes all kinds of sense. It's such a crisis. And here we are. But we still are able and must speak out.

The other thing that both you and I have true is that we are gay, and we have children, and it's a real scary time in that regard. And the question of traveling with kids and the crazies out there… And so I'm just curious - I'm not asking you to talk about your children, but you know the reference point for like, what do we do? How do we…

JAY MICHAELSON:

Well, I can use my couple of minutes to say we don't do an Andrew Sullivan. So in case anyone was curious, if by selling out the trans people gay people would save ourselves. Bisexual people just got erased from the Stonewall Monument, just like trans people were erased previously. This week in Florida a Florida US Attorney sent notice to a restaurant that held a Pride event and asked for customer lists of everyone

who had dinner at the restaurant during the Pride event, saying it violated Florida's anti-drag law by having sexualized drag performances in a place where minors might have been present. So they're absolutely coming for us. These are, you know, maybe smaller issues than our marriage unrecognition.

And the other things that I think we should be thinking about, it's a moment where, as I did in my Substack, I don't find a lot of consolation in the political realm. I'm finding consolation only by zooming way back to our religious traditions, to contemplative traditions, and knowing that this is not the first time that people have lived through very difficult times. It's just like Gandalf said to Frodo: We wish that we weren't born into times like these, but we were, and that's what our responsibility is. It's dictated by that. And I don't have the happy ending, because I'm so skeptical of the 2026 election.

I want to hasten to say the election will happen. There will be a 2026, and a 2028 election. But there was a 1936 election in Nazi Germany - just the Nazis won 98% of the vote. So just because there's going to be an election doesn't mean there's going to be change. And I don't have a lot of optimism in the political sphere. And I'm gaining spiritual resilience from, I guess I would say, zooming back to a bigger perspective.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Rabbi Dr. Jay Michelson is a writer, journalist, and meditation teacher. Jay is visiting professor at Harvard Law School, and is the author of 10 books, including his newest, The Secret That is Not a Secret: Ten Heretical Tales. His Substack newsletter is Both/And with Jay Michelson.

Jay, you're a big bummer, but I really appreciate having you back with us.

JAY MICHAELSON:

There's a crack in everything, man, that's where the light gets in.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

I don't mean it. I I don't mean it.

JAY MICHAELSON:

No, I'm I'm copping to the bummer.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

But you know what it is, listening and hearing, and feeling less alone, and recognizing that there are people, and we're not insane for thinking what we're thinking.

There is a value in that and a power in that. And so I thank you very much for joining us on The State of Belief.

JAY MICHAELSON:

Thanks, Paul, can I? I wanted to give the last word, not to myself, but to one of the 1 million great quotes by Joanna Macy, who left us earlier this week. And this, I want to end with this, Joanna Macy, wonderful Buddhist teacher, environmentalist, bringing together ecological responsibility, poetry, contemplative practice, she said: “This is a dark time filled with suffering and uncertainty. Like living cells in a larger body, it is natural that we feel the trauma of our world. So don't be afraid of the anguish you feel, or the anger or fear, because these responses arise from the depth of your caring and the truth of your interconnectedness with all beings.”