Brad and Dan discuss the vagaries of the new semester and the apocalyptic challenges posed by Zoom and Outlook. They then dissect the events in Kenosha, WI during the last week--from the shooting of Jacob Blake, the vigilantism of Kyle Rittenhouse, and the various political and social responses. From there they transition to the RNC’s themes of fear, alienation, and Christian nationalism--including a “fascism draped in the flag” final night at the White House. They conclude with an examination of evangelical and conservative approaches to masculinity and sexuality through Falwell’s follies, Eric Metaxas, and other sex scandals
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- Axis Mundi. - Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Ornishi, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Skidmore College, and here with my co-host, I'm Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Brad, it's good to see you.
It's another slow, trivial news week with nothing to report and nothing going on in our personal lives impinging on reality or anything else.
So, I hope you're well.
Yeah, no, I've been napping.
Just been, you know, really stressed about, man, we don't have enough material to do here.
And just, yeah, it's been tough.
No, the semester started.
Both of us are teaching.
Both of us are stressed.
And then beyond personal things, just the fire hose of news this week is astounding.
And Dan, I know you've been trying your best this week to adjust to online teaching and getting kids to taekwondo and all that.
My partner and I actually evacuated our house in San Jose because of the fire, so we were not in the mandatory zone, but it was just a lot, and so both of us have had a pretty busy week.
Here we are, we're recording later than usual.
We're actually recording at cocktail hour rather than at coffee hour, so if you feel us getting punchy out there and you're listening and you feel as if we're losing it a little bit, it's just because We're now moving into Friday evening rather than Friday morning.
Or if you don't already play like some sort of straight white American Jesus drinking game, you know, it's past five o'clock when we're recording, so whenever you're listening to this, it counts.
It's fine.
Just take up your drink.
And go to it.
A hint is that the Falwells will be back, but we'll get to that.
Well, let's, yeah, I mean, you know, one thing I've learned over the last month, Dan, is that if you and I wanted something to happen, we should just get on this show for three weeks and be like, well, that's coming to an end.
Okay.
And then that thing will exist forever more in your timeline and include ever more sordid details about sex lives and voyeurism and other things.
So we will get there.
Let's start in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Early this week, a man named Jacob Blake was shot in the back seven times.
African-American man.
He was helping to break up a fight.
Police were called.
He, under sort of complex circumstances apparently, You know, did not want to talk to the police.
He was not under arrest, etc, etc.
Anyway, he shot seven times in the back.
This, of course, leads to protests.
It leads to an uprising.
When someone is shot in the back, when an African-American man especially is shot in the back, there's going to be protest.
At the protest, a couple days later, a boy who's been named, so I'm going to name him because he's been named throughout the media world, so I'm not sort of, this is not something that's not being done and is not ubiquitous at this point.
So this person, Kyle Rittenhouse, who's a 17-year-old person from Antioch, Illinois, was in Kenosha, and Kenosha is about halfway friends between Chicago and Milwaukee, so if you need to picture it.
He was there with a group of armed counter-protesters, And after, you know, a lot of interaction with these protesters, he shot and killed two of them fatally, okay?
He was carrying an AR-15.
He was seen afterward flagging down policemen to tell them what he had done.
He was then let go and went home and slept in his own bed.
Dan, I'll throw this to you in a minute.
I want to just read something from Jamal Bowie, who's over at the New York Times, an incredibly insightful voice on these matters.
And he says this, the most revealing thing to happen in conservative politics this week did not involve the Republican National Convention, at least not directly.
Instead, it took place in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in the aftermath of a shooting Tuesday night that killed two people and wounded a third.
The suspected shooter, Kyle Rittenhouse, from Antioch, Illinois, was with a group of armed counter-protesters.
After several days of riding, sparked by the shooting of Jacob Blake, a black man who appears to have been paralyzed after police shot him seven times in the back, so-called militia groups arrived on the scene to defend businesses and other properties from protesters.
Rittenhouse was with one of these groups when, according to visual analysis by the New York Times, he was seen running away from several people.
Bowie goes on to say Dan that what happened here was ominous because in the wake of this There has been robust defenses of Rittenhouse on the part of not just fringe figures, but media media luminaries and and others with huge platforms like Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson And I know you'll get into that here Bowie says this
I said at the start that these events lack a direct link to the Republican National Convention, the headline event for conservative politics this week.
They do, however, have an indirect link.
The night before the killings in Kenosha, Mark and Patricia McCloskey delivered a primetime address from their St.
Louis home.
as part of the convention's opening program.
The McCloskeys aren't politicians or activists.
They're trial lawyers, famous for just one reason, brandishing firearms, an AR-15, and a pistol at passing Black Lives Matter protesters.
Their celebrity in conservative circles has everything to do with their threat of violence against people the president has denounced as a threat to the country itself.
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