In the week before the election, Brad and Dan begin with another chapter of Falwell's Follies. Dan then explains why the polls are similar, but different from 2016 and how Trump's surrender to COVID has hurt his reelection chances. Brad expands on his explanation of why the Supreme Court should be expanded by providing numbers on how many unfit and inexperienced judges--including ACB--Trump and McConnell have pushed through, explaining how the Senate process has been tainted, and reminding everyone that Trump lost by 3 million votes.
From there, they spend time on a host of Christian nationalism stories--from Patriot churches, to GOP officials riding around with Bibles and guns to protest COVID safety measures, and finally the immoral Trumpism of theologian Wayne Grudem.
The episode finishes with analysis of Paula White's editorial in Christianity Today and how it symbolizes Evangelicals' ongoing commitment to Christian nationalism and the Trump presidency.
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Axis Mundy Hello, my name is Brad Onishi, Associate Professor, Religious Studies, Skidmore College.
This is Straight White American Jesus, hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and I am here today with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, Associate Professor in the Department of Liberal Studies in Landmark College in Vermont.
It's the week before the election and Dan has forgot where he works apparently.
I've forgotten everything.
Then would you redo that?
I think maybe we should redo that.
That was rough.
You left it on the field.
You gave a public lecture this week.
You left it all on the field and now your brain is like, I'm good for a good month now.
I'm out, right?
Anyway, Dan, can you believe it?
We are four days from Election Day.
A lot of feelings.
What's going through your mind and body?
It's the same concern probably lots of people have of like, you know, being glad to have this be done.
I've told people in the other articles about this, right, of like the mental health of having to not follow the news sometimes.
And you and I have been, like, I feel like focused all the time on things like Christian nationalism and the COVID crisis and the election for like months and months.
And, you know, it's sort of exhausting as you're ready to be passed, but I think everybody's afraid.
Everybody's The numbers all look good, but everybody's haunted by 2016, right?
And what that looked like.
And I know that's one of the first things we want to sort of talk about is, you know, can we trust those numbers?
Can we move with those?
That's something that we'll be getting to.
But before we get into that, just a bit of levity, right?
We keep...
We keep counting our friend Jerry Falwell out.
And just a brief note, right?
He's still with us.
So what's our friend Jerry and Jerry's Follies, Falwell's Follies, doing this week?
Yeah, this is where I put on my radio voice and we do our segment.
Welcome to Falwell's Follies!
And yeah, so he has apparently launched a lawsuit against Liberty University.
So Blake Chastain said on Twitter today that he did not have them on his bingo card.
Jerry Falwell Jr.
by the end of 2020 suing Liberty University for defamation.
And basically Falwell is saying that Liberty was part of the group who defamed his name by spreading information and what he takes to be lies about the Shall we say unorthodox affair among him, his wife, the pool boy, and himself.
He's also claiming the Lincoln Project got involved and that they're really here behind the scenes and and doing things up and also Giancarlo Granda who is the is the famous Cool boy.
So anyway, Dan, Falwell's back.
I don't want to spend a lot of time on this, but who knew that by the time we got to almost November of 2020, he would be out at Liberty suing them and his fall would be pretty much complete.
I mean, I don't know if this is rock bottom, but it's got to be getting pretty close.
All right.
You want to move on or do you have thoughts for us on Falwell's follies?
I always have thoughts about it.
But I don't think any of them are worth sharing, so we can move on.
So I'll just dive in, right?
You asked a minute ago about how we're all feeling.
I clearly have scrambled eggs in my head at this point.
One of the questions that comes up, right, if people follow the polls, or maybe you don't, and, you know, you're just kind of counting on somebody else to occasionally check in, the polls, if this, if 2016 hadn't happened, if the 2016 election hadn't happened, and there was an article about this, I think in Politico recently, that said, you know, if you didn't have 2016 and the miss in a lot of predictions, not nationally, we all know by now that the national polls are pretty accurate, but there was a miss in a number of states,
No, as I understand even a lot of those are within the margin of error right you know they weren't they weren't radically wildly off.
Just to remind everybody that Trump is in office because of about 77,000 voters right like a number of people would fit in a football stadium, and this archaic anti democratic system we have with with the Electoral College so.
The question that comes up is like, why doesn't anybody trust the numbers now?
It's because of 2016 and everybody's afraid and I've had people asking me and I've had people asking you and I spend time looking online of, you know, can we trust these numbers?
And I want to start by saying that, you know, I'm not a pollster.
I'm not a statistician.
You're not a pollster.
You're not a statistician.
We lean on what we think is the expertise of others.
But people have, you know, asked me how I feel about the polls.
let's say that everything I've read from people who should know, right?
And people who I don't think are just trying to grind a political ax is that despite the appearances, really the only similarity between 2016 and 2020 leading up to the election is that the polls showed Trump behind and they show him behind now.
And so everybody's worried, you know, he came from behind last time.
He will this time.
But there are a number of things that make it different.
Number one, Trump's numbers are worse, much worse than they were last time.
Biden's lead is much more robust and substantive.
If people went back and looked at week to week numbers in 2016, they were kind of all over the place.
Trump would sort of be ahead, then Clinton would be ahead, and even at this point, if people remember this, Comey had announced that he was reopening the investigation into Hillary's emails, Clinton's emails, and you had Hillary's approval ratings trending down and Trump's trending up, and it was kind of this race.
It's like, will the election happen Before those lines converge and clearly it didn't.
You have warning signals coming from places like Michigan where people were saying she should have come here.
She hasn't come here.
It's not as safe as she thinks.
You had a real lack of enthusiasm.
You have what were called net negativity views.
In other words, people look at a candidate and they look at how many people view them positively.
How many people view them negatively, and then the difference between those numbers.
And if somebody has a net positive, it means more people view them positively than negatively.
Trump and Clinton were both net negatives.
Biden is a net positive.
Clinton never got, nobody, Trump rather, never got about 50% in approval.
He never has his entire presidency.
If this doesn't happen between now and Tuesday and he loses, he will be the only president, I think, Thanks for listening to this free preview of our Swadge episode.
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