What is the point of government? Is is capitalist profit or the common good? Brad and Dan explain how these questions connect notable events from this week--from Rush Limbaugh's death, to the energy disaster in Texas, Ted Cruz's Cancun misadventure, and one small town mayor's cruel understanding of how to treat people suffering through a weather catastrophe. We finish with a favorite segment: He's No James; Madison Cawthorn.
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Hello, welcome to Straight White American Jesus, hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at University of California, Santa Barbara.
I'm Brad Onishi, faculty in 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.
It's good to see you, Brad.
You sound like almost like a professional podcaster.
You're getting so fast at the intros and all of that.
So well done.
Well played.
Thank you, Dan.
Some people have hobbies.
I just practice that over and over in the mirror.
So I think it is getting better.
It's a weird week.
You know, Dan, I was thinking about this this morning.
It's been less than a week since Trump's second impeachment trial ended.
And yet so much else has happened in terms of Texas, in terms of Ted Cruz, in terms of Rush Limbaugh, in terms of we are going to reach, I think we actually did this morning, 500,000 deaths from COVID, which is just an auspicious and tragic and completely disheartening number.
So as with every week, it is hard to do everything, but we're going to carry on with the theme today that I think is really important.
And that is, Deregulation and the point of government, which sounds not that sexy.
I get it.
But this idea of deregulation and what is the point of having a government, it's a through line between Ted Cruz, between Texas and the grid and its failure, and between the reactions that the various politicians in Texas have given to the crisis.
It also leads to the thing I want to talk about first, which is Rush Limbaugh, okay?
Rush Limbaugh died this week.
Hard to overstate Rush Limbaugh's influence in our cultural sphere and in our political sphere.
A generation of conservatives were reared and radicalized through Rush Limbaugh's talk show.
Tens of millions of people.
Here's how Bob Moser puts it at Rolling Stone, Dan.
It's hard to convey, so many media eras later, what a phenomenon the Rush Limbaugh show was.
Within a year of the C-SPAN telecast in 1990, Limbaugh was beaming out to 530 stations with 25 million listeners and hosting a 30-minute syndicated TV show produced by Roger Ailes who would go on to launch Fox News just a couple years later.
The pompous, motor-mouthed, giddily offensive Limbaugh was a national curiosity, profiled on 60 Minutes, plastered on magazine covers, topping bestseller lists with a book whose title perfectly captured his approach to news, quote-unquote, the way things ought to be.
Dan, I don't know about you, and I'll actually stop here and ask you this question, but Limbaugh was one of those guys that conservative Christians loved.
I mean, many homeschoolers just, they had it playing in the background while their parents were teaching them during the day.
For many of us, when you got in the car with your dad or someone else, this is what they had playing in the 90s, in the early 2000s.
Was that your sense?
You know, growing up as an evangelical, was Rush Limbaugh sort of everywhere for you?
It's funny, Rush Limbaugh wasn't everywhere, but where I did hear him was, and so it made a huge impact on me as a high school evangelical kid, was from a youth pastor, right?
It was a youth pastor who would listen to him.
He would talk about him.
I didn't understand much about politics, except that I knew that Bill Clinton, who was president at the time, was bad because he was a Democrat.
I was also living in Arkansas, so I could never find anybody in Arkansas who would admit to having voted for Bill Clinton, who had been the governor of Arkansas.
Even before you came to the lead-in of how conservative Christians loved him, that was my first thought.
I guess my introduction to Well, let's say popular conservative politics, right, or popular conservative media was through the church.
That's how I first, you know, came into contact with that.
If I think of more religious sides, it was focused on the family.
But in politics, it was Rush Limbaugh, and they're both of those were through the church.
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