Weekly Roundup: Corona Virus Conspiracies, the Constitutional Right to Discriminate, and AOC's Sermon
On the Weekly Roundup, Brad and Dan discuss the Corona virus conspiracies coming from MAGA land (2:45), AOC's sermon in Congress (9:30), the Supreme Court's hearing of Fulton vs. Philadelphia (17:00), which could give religious people the right to discriminate in a myriad of ways, "Progressive" Evangelicalism's quietism (33:15), and --BONUS: 1-minute explainer of Democratic Socialism vs. Communism vs. Capitalism (38:45) Reasons for Hope: Taco Trucks on Every Corner! We stand in solidarity with the UCSB and UCSC grad students/TAs on strike!
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AXIS MUNDY AXIS MUNDY Hello, welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, and I'm assistant or associate professor of religious studies at Skidmore College, and I'm joined by my co-host today, I'm Dan Miller.
I'm Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
It's good to see you, Brad.
It's been a couple weeks.
Yeah, you decided to go on vacation, I guess, which is, you know, your choice, so you can do whatever you want.
I hope you had a great time.
I know you went to a sunny place and I know you don't really like the sun, so how was it?
I went to Puerto Rico, it was fine.
I can handle the sun for a few hours, you know, it's okay.
No, it was good.
The family had a good time, but I'm kind of glad to be back and back into the routine.
Well, there's a lot to jump into today.
We are sort of living through the increasing onslaught of coronavirus news and there's the Democratic primaries heating up and things like that.
So let's jump into our first segment.
Our first segment is always, did you see that?
And I think you've got a pretty good story for us this week.
So what do you got?
Yeah, so I was going to say, and people might have seen this, it's not surprising, but an article that sort of I came across yesterday where there is now like a sizable portion of Trump land who sees a conspiracy in the whole coronavirus issue.
They haven't gone yet to the point of suggesting that the Democrats like, I don't know, engineered a virus or something.
But apparently one of the CDC officials who made statements about the coronavirus and maybe the U.S.
preparedness for it and so forth is the sister of Rod Rosenstein who was the Assistant Attorney General who really got on Trump's bad side with the Russian investigation and all that sort of stuff.
But the idea is that basically As everybody will know the Trump administration is kind of taking a beating right now for having downplayed the significance of this and now kind of all over the world there's there's been this this much stronger reaction.
The Trump administration has defunded a lot of federal agencies that would that are sort of geared to dealing with things like epidemic diseases and so forth.
You've had Trump with his weird thing that he said a few weeks ago how like in the spring when it gets warm it'll go away and you know even I think yesterday in an interview said that There would be a miracle.
It would go away.
So obviously they're getting a bipartisan critique for their lack of response to this.
So some in, you know, in MAGA land have said, no, no, no, this is all a Democratic conspiracy to try to, you know, just use the mainstream media and discredit Trump.
And this morning, apparently, Trump Jr.
was on Fox & Friends and said that the Democrats are hoping that this comes to America and kills millions of people because they want to unseat Trump.
So, that's mine.
Just the level of...
Conspiracism, the echo chamber effect that takes place when, and this isn't limited to just the right, but I think it is more pronounced on the right, when people only watch certain media that is geared to them to tell them what they want to hear, to deny what they don't want to hear, and so forth.
We just see that.
It's just kind of a new story and I haven't had a chance to follow, but I'm curious to see how this will play out in more explicitly religious terms if it does, if we start hearing more of that out of the evangelical community or leadership.
Yeah, I have a couple thoughts on this.
One is, I've said this before, but I really think this goes to The theme of faith, once again.
So folks might be sick of me talking about this, but you know, democracy operates on the basis of faith.
You have to trust in certain principles and trust that your leaders are pursuing those principles, right?
What the Trump administration has done over the last three years and what they're doing here with Don Jr.' 's comments is trying to erode our public square to the point that there's no faith.
So if you're Rod Rosenstein's sister, we can have no faith that you will act with justice and safety and health as your main concern.
We cannot trust that.
We are going to erode the sort of public conversation to the point where we're going to say, The CDC person is Rod Rosenstein's sister, therefore she wants Trump to fail, therefore there's a conspiracy, and this is all a big deep state morass, right?
That is really damaging.
It's just a slow drip, drip, drip of eroding faith from our public square.
And I think it's just really the playbook of an authoritarian.
Second, I did see that Rush Limbaugh was pushing this conspiracy and several others.
And you know, Dan, the thing that comes to mind here is just, it's the same thing with It's the same thing with changing demographics in the country.
There are just folks whose reaction to things seems to be, instead of me accepting a harsh reality in this world, or a different reality that I'm used to, or something that I'm comfortable with, I'm just going to invent An alternative story to explain it away.
And it's dangerous.
We're just in a place where that's dangerous when it comes to coronavirus, when it comes to climate change.
And unfortunately, it's really seeped from the fringes of our talk radio land into the core of our politics.
And I think it's just kind of problematic.
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