A White Christian Nationalist Coup Long in the Making - with Dr. Kelly J. Baker
Dr. Kelly J. Baker, author of Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930, stops by to discuss how the January 6 insurrection was long in the making. Using the 1920s Klan as a historical precedent, she and Brad discuss White supremacy in American culture and politics, the longstanding entanglement of White Protestantism and White nationalism, the Confederate legacy, the class dimensions of both the Klan and the coup, and what we can expect in the near future.
Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus episodes, ad-free listening, access to the entire 500-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
Order Brad's new book: https://www.amazon.com/Preparing-War-Extremist-Christian-Nationalism/dp/1506482163
SWAJ Apparel is here! https://straight-white-american-jesus.creator-spring.com/listing/not-today-uncle-ron
To Donate:
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/BradleyOnishi
Venmo: @straightwhitejc
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
- Axis Mundi. - Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and my guest today is Dr. Kelly J. Baker.
Dr. Baker has an amazing bio, or an amazing set of accomplishments, and I want to just highlight a couple of those.
Kelly is the editor of Women in Higher Education, which is a feminist newsletter, also the editor of the National Teaching and Learning Forum, He has written all over the place, from the New York Times to The Atlantic, The Rumpus, Religion and Politics, Christian Century, Washington Post, and many other places, and is the author of a book that we are going to talk about today, which is Gospel According to the Klan, the KKK's Appeal to Protestant America.
Also the author of Grace Period, A Memoir in Pieces, the award-winning Sexism Ed, Essays on Gender and Labor in Academia, The Zombies Are Coming, The Realities of the Zombie Apocalypse in American Culture, At which we might talk about a little bit today.
And Final Girl and other essays on grief, trauma, and mental illness.
So, Dr. Baker, thank you for being here once again.
This is your second time on the show and I'm really grateful you came back.
Thank you for having me.
I'm hyped.
We are talking about an auspicious topic, of course.
We're speaking days after the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol, and I'm so glad that we are able to sort of have this conversation for a number of reasons.
One of them is this, though.
Last time you were here, we talked about the KKK and Christianity and so on and so forth, and I described myself as a Kelly Baker fanboy, which is true, And will always be true because I love your work and you are one of those people that I want to emulate.
You've written incredible academic work.
You write for a public audience, and you're a great essayist.
Today I want to describe you, though, I think, as the OG of our generation when it comes to studying white supremacy, Christian nationalism, and American politics.
There's a lot of us, and a lot of amazing folks, scholars and journalists, who are studying these things right now.
In the Trump era, I've dug back to the 60s and done a whole series but, you know, 15 years ago you started down this trail and you started with the KKK of the 1920s.
Academia wasn't ready for it, the media wasn't ready for it, and in typical Kelly Baker fashion you were like, I'm gonna do it anyway, because it's important.
And you did.
And now, here we are.
And the other day, someone was tweeting, who could have seen a January 6th insurrection coming?
And you were kind of like, hand raised emoji, like, I could.
So, let me just start with this.
Why was this totally predictable, from your perspective?
Yeah!
I think I have complicated feelings about the like, raise your hand and I noticed it partially because it feels like that's an implicit.
I told you so like no one paid attention and now I'm doing this and I don't want it to be read that way.
First off, but I think it was easy to see because we already saw That Trump's violent rhetoric had consequences even in 2016 before he became the presumptive nominee, right?
It was clear from his rhetoric that it was white supremacist, that he was signaling the white nationalist, it was racist, sexist, xenophobic, and it wasn't like mild dog whistle, right?
I mean, it was pretty in-your-face in a lot of different ways.
And he was drawing from rhetoric that has long been used by white supremacist movements.
So for me, it was one of those things where I would, like, listen to his speeches or read the transcripts, generally read the transcripts, and I was like, oh, whoa, this is like I'm reading 1920s Klan speeches, right, or 1920s Klan articles, because the way he talked about the nation, right, and the assumed collapse because of, you know, the enfranchisement of various peoples to have equal rights, these sorts of things, and this kind of nostalgia for an American past, right, where white people were in power.
It very much jived with my work on the 1920s Klan.
It just looked the same.
And so, one of the things, too, that comes with studying white supremacist movements is you realize that violent rhetoric often leads to violent action, right?
Like, these two are tied together.
So, part of my frustration, I think, still, is that you even find some people, not so much after the insurrection or coup or how we want to describe this, But you do still find people being like, it's just words.
Like, we didn't mean it like that, you know.
So that we can't kind of hold people accountable, right?
So we can't hold Trump or Ted Cruz or some of these other people, right, who have very clearly been participating in this, accountable because how did they know their words would land this way?
I'm just not here for it.
And we know that these things work together.
So I watched on the 6th in horror because it was just kind of mind-boggling to see this happen real time.
At the same time that I was like sipping my coffee and I'm like, well, This is kind of the logical conclusion of where we had been going at least since early 2016, you know.
And there were tons of folks that did this, right?
There were, you know, LGBTQ black activists online who were like, we need to be paying attention very clearly to what he's doing.
And, you know, those of us who are scholars or activists got a lot of, you were overreacting, right?
Like, Kelly, you're being hysterical.
And I was like, no, dude, I'm not hysterical.
Like, it's based in historical research, right?
This is not me just being like, oh, by the way, this is me saying I've spent years studying white supremacists.
And there's a pattern here.
And we have examples, right?
As recent as the 90s of armed battles between law enforcement, right?
And militia movements and patriots and these sorts of things.
So I feel like it was there.
It was just maybe people didn't want to face it in some sort of way.
Thanks for listening to this free preview of our SWADGE episode.
In order to get access to the full episode and so much more, become a Straight White American Jesus Premium Subscriber by clicking the link in the show notes.
It'll take you like two clicks, I promise.
In addition to getting access to this episode, you'll have access to the entire SWADGE archive, over 550 episodes.
You'll also get an extra episode every month, ad-free listening, Discord access, and so much more.
All that for less than six bucks a month, and it helps us keep our flag up and continue to safeguard democracy from religious nationalism, extremism, and rising authoritarianism.
