Brad and Dan talk about the false equivalence the GOP tried to draw this week between Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ilhan Omar. This takes place in the context of a discussion about the generational legacy Trump holds over the Republican party, which is now dominated by extremists, conspiracy theorists, and Christian nationalists. Dan breaks down why it's a big deal that Trump didn't attend the National Prayer Breakfast and what it says about how Christian nationalism is not about personal religious practice, but is instead about social identity. Brad finds hope in Biden's speech at the State Department and the beginning stages of bringing our international relations and diplomacy back to a normal level. The show finishes with a segment of Tubby's Flubbies.
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Hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at the University of California Santa Barbara.
I'm Brad Onishi, Faculty of Religion 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.
Brad, it's good to see you.
I just want to say a special thank you to our audience, Dan.
Last week we had a very nerdy episode with a lot of like religious studies theory and other wonky stuff and We apologized on air as we were doing it because we knew how dorky it was, but you know what is so amazing about our audience is they are, that is what they're into.
16 year old me who was like reading a Thomas Aquinas book at church camp while everyone else is playing capture the flag would have never known that someday amazing folks would email me and hit me on Twitter about thanks for that very nerdy episode that you and Dan did.
So, uh, that's pretty cool.
And, uh, Dan, you can feel validated as somebody who does nothing but, uh, read, um, Political theory, play video games, and follow Supreme Court cases.
You should feel very good about yourself.
If I could just find a way to do all three at the same time, it's better.
Like if they have a video game where you have to use political theory to like, I don't know, break into the Supreme Court or something.
Yeah.
No, not break into the Supreme Court.
Somehow preside.
Dan, Dan, too soon.
Not break in.
Okay.
We have to somehow I was gonna say that the difference is that I know the difference between the fantasy of a video game and like, you know, actually storming the Capitol or SCOTUS or anything else.
So yeah, let me be clear that that was a joke and I have no plans.
In case that weird TV van that's been sitting outside for the last week pointed at my house isn't really a TV van, I have no plans to launch any sort of insurrection against any branch of the government.
Thank you.
Thank you for cleaning that up.
And all right, let's jump in.
So we've got a bunch of things to talk about.
And I think that one of the ways that we agreed would be good to sort of characterize what happened this week, especially in the Republican Party, is that we just spent a lot of time last week, Dan, talking about how We need to get to a place where we've accepted that the Republican Party is a party of the fringe and the extreme and the conspiracy.
That's not because we're liberals who want to smear them and blah blah blah.
It's because when you look at what's happening, You look at the faces of this party.
You look at how they are treating important issues.
This is still the party of Trump, and as the party of Trump, it's still the party of conspiracy theory, lies, and not governing, but sort of just live streaming, you know, government in ways that doesn't actually help anything, but is really great for clicks.
So, Dan, talk to us.
Let's do this.
The GOP is the party of Trump.
And we're going to get to all the receipts on that end.
But as such, it seems that Fox doesn't really know what to do, because they were the sort of channel of Trump, and now with him out of office, they're a little bit out to sea.
You want to walk us through what's kind of going on at America's least favorite news network?
Yeah, so, and this relates to this theme, right, Party of Trump, that Fox News kind of over the past several years did away with any pretense of the so-called fair and balanced and so forth and just became essentially the propaganda machine of MAGA World.
And the ratings reflected that the ratings were through the roof and so forth.
Of course, that's all Trump cares about.
If you're a if you're a TV executive, that's all you care about, right?
Because that's that's why it exists.
But there was news out that Fox News as of now is sort of like the last of the big three on the sort of cable news stuff behind CNN and MSNBC, which if you're if you're a Fox World person, those are like It's like being third in place behind Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.
It's like really, really bad.
What's the point of that?
Other than like schadenfreude for those of us who don't like Fox News, it's telling that with Trump losing the election, And not being sworn in.
We talked about the people with QAnon and not sure what to do and the sort of disillusionment and realizing that, you know, Biden was in fact sworn in.
We've talked about people leaving the GOP and moderate voters and suburban voters and different things like that.
They're not watching Fox anymore.
So it's interesting to see what's going to happen with that.
But the telling point is they have no vision of who they are apart from Trump, right?
They are the channel of the GOP and the GOP is the party of Trump.
And they're facing the same kinds of issues that the GOP is with the reckoning.
There's a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit that was just leveled against Fox News by the company, um, excuse me, Smartmatic, which is... Did you practice that before this or no?
No, no, I didn't.
which is one of the voting machine ones, but it's a lawsuit against Fox News, against specifically Lou Dobbs, Janine Pirro, Rudy Giuliani for defamation.
And I'm not a legal expert, you're not a legal expert, but I've read legal experts talking about this.
And they say it has real teeth, that these were easily debunked falsehoods that were peddled, that they were clearly done with animosity aimed at this company.
And so it raises this question of where does the GOP go?
Where does Fox go without this?
Will Fox continue to double down as the GOP has?
And the last point I'm going to make about this, this sort of wraps these things together, is there was another interesting piece of news.
That the Trump campaign's lead pollster, a guy named Tony Fabrizio, released a postmortem following the 2020 election.
This is in December, right?
So we're now in February.
This is before January 6th.
This is before January 20th.
A postmortem that Did not find that there was rampant voter fraud that did not find that Trump had had the election stolen from him.
It found that he lost the election primarily because Trump was perceived as untrustworthy by a majority of voters that his COVID-19 response was bungled and people didn't trust him on it.
And I was reading this on Politico, I believe this was their language, that the party was hemorrhaging white voters.
They lost senior voters.
I don't mean that they lost the majority of them, but I mean compared to percentages they'd held before.
We've talked about the suburbs a lot.
What does that tell us?
It tells us that Trump and the GOP know what's actually going on.
Fox News knows what's actually going on.
But they continued with this storyline.
Fox continued with this storyline.
So all of this just leads into this notion that you still have this conflict going on of where does the GOP go?
Where does conservative media go?
You've got a few voices in there that think it should go in a more moderate direction, a more mainstream direction.
I think the evidence is that they are going to continue to lean on that more radical fringe.
And I think that's what we see.
And so I think it bears watching to see how Fox navigates this, what they do with this lawsuit pending against them.
It's radio silence from the Trump campaign or any conservative media about this postmortem.
Any other president, we talked about this last time, I'll bring it up today, I promise.
Trump had a pretty historically noteworthy failure in his reelection, and there has been not a whisper of that in most circles of the GOP.
So all of it, what does it tell us?
It tells us it's still a party of Trump.
Fox has no identity apart from Trump, and I'm betting money that they'll double down on that and try to sort of rejuvenate that.
I've got lots more to say that I could go on forever, but I'll throw it over to you for thoughts on this, as well as some of the other developments this week that really, really show that the GOP continues to be the party of Trump.
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