Dan talks about his house, or at least television, being struck by lightning. He and Brad then discuss Trump's messaging failures, Biden's candidacy as an appetizing saltine cracker, the scary situation in Portland, a baseball player who can't kneel for Black lives "because he's a Christian," the dangerous push to open schools no matter what, and AOC's absolute fire on the House floor.
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I am associate professor of religious studies at Skidmore College, and I'm here with my co-host, I'm Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Well, Dan, I had a couple of stories that I was thinking about telling today, but none of them can even come close to matching what happened at your house this week, so you want to let us know why you haven't really been watching TV over the last couple days?
Yeah, so some people may know a few months ago we spent some money and had like a bunch of big trees taken down on our property.
Because in October a giant tree almost landed on our house when it broke and you know so we do that so the other day I thought I had complete vindication in this there's this big thunderstorm rolling through I'm in the kitchen with my kids and all of a sudden there's people might have experienced this where there's the lightning strike that happens just like right where you are like we see the flash We hear this noise.
The whole house shakes.
The thunder hits at the same time.
I'm like, oh my gosh, what was that?
So I was looking around.
I was looking out the windows to see if any trees got hit or anything.
And a few minutes later, I get a text from my neighbor.
And it turns out the lightning had, in fact, struck one of their big giant trees, the same size as all the trees I had removed from our property.
And so they were fine.
It didn't catch on fire.
It didn't split or anything like that.
There was no imminent danger.
So I was feeling pretty good about that and feeling pretty proactive and went back in the living room and found out that the lightning had the last laugh and apparently still managed to fry my TV and my Xbox.
All of our power lines here are underground.
It's the vagaries of this, I guess.
My Wi-Fi router works.
The sound bar on my TV works, but the TV and Xbox are gone, which I have to say, in a time of pandemic, stay at home with your kids for four months.
The TV feels like a sort of an essential piece of equipment around the house.
We're trying to deal with that, but yeah.
TV is your only child care help at this point.
We're a full-on 50s household now, where babysitting consists of finding a kid in front of the TV for 8 hours and just leaving them alone.
Not really, for anybody who's freaking out.
Screen time is more rampant than it should be.
1950s.
Yeah, 1950s.
Here's your cigarettes, kid.
Go watch TV.
All right.
Well, lots to talk about today and some levity to start here just because every week is full of difficult news and crisis and all kinds of stuff.
So, Dan, let's start with Just some election numbers and thoughts.
Friends, we're going to get into a lot of issues from what's happening in Portland to AOC to things related to Black Lives Matter, but we wanted to start today by framing our discussion with some thoughts on the election and Biden and Trump and what's happening there.
So Dan, what do you got?
Yeah, so some things that I was thinking about.
I came across several places that have just these kind of clearinghouse things, sort of like we're doing at the end of the week, right?
Looking at all this.
Sort of just drawing together themes from the week.
One of them that really struck me, it was a discussion of how the GOP right now is really having trouble finding a consistent message.
They're not sure if they need to be pointing to law and order as Trump is trying to do, and that'll bring us to Oregon a little bit later on.
Uh, if they should be, um, you know, going after quote-unquote sleepy Joe Biden, um, in some critiques that don't seem to be really, uh, working.
Or if they should still be trying to talk about the economy.
But what struck me was, uh, the logic that some of them have of still wanting to play the economy card.
And, of course, people can look around and say, well, yeah, but since COVID happened, the economy's bad.
Like, it's not good.
We're clearly not having the V-shaped, uh, sort of bounce back that they thought we might have.
But I came across some statements from from GOP operatives and some Congressional GOP people saying, you know, we believe, you know, Americans need to remember what it was like in February.
They need to remember what it was like before COVID came.
They need to remember because that's where Donald Trump will take us again.
And what just really struck me, and this is a thing that has been going on for decades, but Trump has ridden it to power, is the inherently kind of nostalgic nature of of American conservatism, and maybe conservatism as such, the logic of conservatism is that society can kind of only get worse, right?
That there is some golden age in the past, maybe it was last week, maybe it was in February, probably in the American imaginary it's some kind of immediate post-World War II, leave it to Beaver, imagined society, and I want to emphasize that that's an imaginary society that didn't exist.
But this kind of notion, and it just struck me that that's where the GOP is now.
They can only look backward, and they can only try to frighten people into supporting them, that if we move forward in different directions, it can only be bad.
And AOC, we mentioned her earlier, and she is nothing if not excellent at pithy statements and sort of boiling things down to ways that are really good.
For social media, she said this, she was asked to, you know, her response and some of the GOP messaging.
And this is what she said about Democrats.
She said, our general election message is we will not set the country on fire.
And Trump is setting the country on fire.
And then a little bit more substantively, she said, the most galvanizing message Republicans have had is racism, xenophobia, and misogyny.
And she's right.
The sad thing is that has been a galvanizing message.
But a lot of people, when they look in the back, you know, back in the history of the U.S., that's what they see.
They don't just see a time when things were great for white people because, you know, black people didn't live in suburbs and things.
They see the racism that underlies that and the misogyny and the xenophobia.
So it was just this thing that they got me thinking about.
People would be thinking about this and looking as you look at political messaging, as you look at the message of Trump, make America great again.
He was casting it all in the background.
The question is whether it's working right now.
And it appears that it's not.
It appears that There are more Americans, maybe than ever, looking at American history and saying, yeah, we see that it was racist and we want to challenge that.
You have the Congressional Senate, or sorry, the Congressional Senate, the GOP Senate, putting forward their relief package and the military packages that are going to call for changing the names of military bases named after Confederates.
That's in direct opposition to Trump.
It just got me to thinking about that.
People talk about negative political messaging, but it's interesting to look at what kind of negative.
This is the GOP playbook, and they're still leaning on it now of saying, well, let's just pretend nothing's happened since February.
Let's not look at what the reaction has been.
Imagine what your life was like in February, and it fits this larger pattern.
So those are sort of my ruminations, sort of big picture on what I think is actually a consistent piece of GOP messaging, which is Things were better at some time in the past when primarily like straight white Christian guys ran everything and we could say what we want to women and not get in trouble for it and black people and other people of color stayed in place and they knew what their place was and they quit agitating in the streets and that's what we want to get to.
That's our vision of America and I think that's very much on display right now.
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