Straight White American Jesus - Weekly Roundup: Abandon the Snowflakes
Aired: 2021-02-19
Duration: 05:06


=== Rush Limbaugh's Impact (05:06) ===

[00:00:00]  AXIS MUNDY
[00:00:28]  Hello, welcome to Straight White American Jesus, hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at University of California, Santa Barbara.
[00:00:34]  I'm Brad Onishi, faculty in religion at Skidmore College, and I'm here with my co-host.
[00:00:39]  I'm Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
[00:00:43]  It's good to see you, Brad.
[00:00:45]  You sound like almost like a professional podcaster.
[00:00:48]  You're getting so fast at the intros and all of that.
[00:00:50]  So well done.
[00:00:51]  Well played.
[00:00:52]  Thank you, Dan.
[00:00:53]  Some people have hobbies.
[00:00:55]  I just practice that over and over in the mirror.
[00:00:57]  So I think it is getting better.
[00:00:59]  It's a weird week.
[00:01:00]  You know, Dan, I was thinking about this this morning.
[00:01:01]  It's been less than a week since Trump's second impeachment trial ended.
[00:01:05]  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.
[00:01:23]  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.
[00:01:30]  And that is, Deregulation and the point of government, which sounds not that sexy.
[00:01:35]  I get it.
[00:01:36]  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.
[00:01:55]  It also leads to the thing I want to talk about first, which is Rush Limbaugh, okay?
[00:01:59]  Rush Limbaugh died this week.
[00:02:01]  Hard to overstate Rush Limbaugh's influence in our cultural sphere and in our political sphere.
[00:02:06]  A generation of conservatives were reared and radicalized through Rush Limbaugh's talk show.
[00:02:12]  Tens of millions of people.
[00:02:13]  Here's how Bob Moser puts it at Rolling Stone, Dan.
[00:02:16]  It's hard to convey, so many media eras later, what a phenomenon the Rush Limbaugh show was.
[00:02:22]  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.
[00:02:39]  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.
[00:02:55]  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.
[00:03:03]  I mean, many homeschoolers just, they had it playing in the background while their parents were teaching them during the day.
[00:03:09]  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.
[00:03:18]  Was that your sense?
[00:03:19]  You know, growing up as an evangelical, was Rush Limbaugh sort of everywhere for you?
[00:03:23]  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?
[00:03:34]  It was a youth pastor who would listen to him.
[00:03:36]  He would talk about him.
[00:03:39]  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.
[00:03:46]  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.
[00:03:57]  Even before you came to the lead-in of how conservative Christians loved him, that was my first thought.
[00:04:02]  I guess my introduction to Well, let's say popular conservative politics, right, or popular conservative media was through the church.
[00:04:14]  That's how I first, you know, came into contact with that.
[00:04:16]  If I think of more religious sides, it was focused on the family.
[00:04:20]  But in politics, it was Rush Limbaugh, and they're both of those were through the church.
[00:04:24]  Thanks for listening to this free preview of our Swadge episode.
[00:04:28]  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.
[00:04:37]  It'll take you like two clicks, I promise.
[00:04:39]  In addition to getting access to this episode, you'll have access to the entire Swadge archive, over 550 episodes.
[00:04:47]  You'll also get an extra episode every month, ad-free listening, Discord access, and so much more.
[00:04:53]  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.
[00:05:05]  Check it out.
[00:05:06]  It's not hard.