Weekly Roundup: A New Jim Crow or Reconstruction 3.0?
Brad makes a big announcement regarding the show and a new direction in his professional life . . . with Dan on vacation he then discusses the long list of cases wherein Trump and Trump allies signal their desire to overthrow the democratic process in order to stage a coup. From General Flynn welcoming a Myanmar-style coup to Paul Gosar conspiring with the Proud Boys to Louie Gohmert speaking at a QAnon conference to an Oregon Rep letting militia in the side door to attack the state legislature. This anticipation of restorative violence is complemented by the methodical approach to curtailing voting rights across the country. This leads to a question: Will this era see the institution of a New Jim Crow or a New Reconstruction?
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB, and I'm coming to you today alone.
My co-host Dan Miller is out today on a much-earned day off, and so it might be a little bit of a shorter weekly roundup than normal, but Got a lot to talk about.
Before we do that, I have some housekeeping to do for our show.
I have kind of a set of big announcements, and I just want to share those with you.
So, as those of you who listen to the show know, I have been on faculty at Skidmore College for the last five years.
Recently, I made the decision to leave my position there.
I am on a one-year leave of absence because that's what I chose, but All signs point to me basically leaving my position at Skidmore, and there's a number of reasons for that.
As with any job, there are sometimes things that push you out the door, but there's also things that pull you out of the door.
And for me, one of them is basically very happy my wife is expecting our first child, which is really amazing and we're super excited about.
And her career is also just sort of blossoming out here in California.
And we have prioritized my career for a long time.
And we just both agree that it's time to kind of prioritize hers.
And so if you're going to be a cis heterosexual dude in this economy, in this time, and call yourself something along the lines of a feminist, or call yourself a feminist, then you have to walk the walk.
And so In many ways I'm trying to do that and I'm trying to make it possible for our family to kind of operate in a way that we we hope will be optimal.
Having some flexibility to stay at home with our our little one when they arrive.
Allowing my partner to not have to sort of worry about curtailing her work life or relocating that work life again or anything along those lines.
One of the other reasons that I made this decision is just over the last three years I've I've enjoyed more than anything doing this show and doing all of the public scholarship that I've done.
So not only getting to do this show every week, multiple times per week, but writing for outlets that are reaching public audiences, sharing what insight I can muster with the general public.
And that's really what I want to dedicate this next chapter of my life to.
And so stepping away from Skidmore will allow me more time to do that.
Now, the catch with that is it means trying to continue to do the work of this show in a new set of circumstances.
And some of those circumstances are financial.
I have taken on a number of new ventures.
I'm going to be teaching part-time at the University of San Francisco coming up this fall, which I'm very excited about.
I'm also getting ready, doing some training and going through some courses in order to work.
With the great folks, including my friend and colleague Laura Anderson at the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery, and I'm really excited about that too.
So I have a number of things going on, a number of things in the hopper, but I would be lying if I didn't say that I'm trying my best to organize my work life and my professional life to give me the flexibility to continue to do this show three times a week.
So that leads, as you all can imagine, to my next ask, and that's this.
We are completely redoing our Patreon, and if you head over there today, find just a kind of revamped, completely revamped set of categories and look for our Patreon, and so let me go through that with you.
If you are willing to pledge $2 a month, You'll receive our monthly newsletter.
If you're willing to pledge $10 a month, not only will you receive the newsletter, but also two exclusive monthly videos.
If you can go all the way up to $25 a month, you'll be part of a Discord server that is for members only, where we'll discuss things related to the show and all the episodes each week.
If you're willing to go up from there, we have a bunch of perks, including monthly Zoom meetings with me.
In the future, one of the things that we'll be launching this fall will be courses, Straight White American Jesus classes and seminars, and so if you go up to $50 a month or $100 a month, you will receive one class per year free, or two classes per year free, and so on and so forth.
What I'm saying here, friends, is I love this show.
I think that you all know how much I just am passionate about this, and I want to keep doing it.
And I want to keep doing it as I've been doing it, and that is to say three times a week with amazing guests, great interviews, weekly roundups, and more.
So, if you can, and if you're a fan of this show, and it's part of what you can do, I would ask that you would think about going over to Patreon, Straight White American Jesus, and seeing if you can become part of our Patreon family, and just help us to keep going with this show in the way that it has been.
We get so many emails from folks.
We get so many messages.
It's hard to keep up and especially during the school year.
But I can tell you, and I've said this many times, they are what help us keep going and why we do this.
And so we appreciate all of you.
We're so grateful to hear your stories.
We're so grateful to hear how the show has helped you.
And we hope to continue to do that.
All right, let's transition.
Time for the Weekly Roundup.
And as I said, Dan's not here today, so it's just me.
And I want to talk about some things that have happened this week that all have a similar theme.
Let me start with something that might surprise you, and that is a report we got this week that The Trump administration secretly seized phone records of New York Times reporters.
So the Biden Justice Department has sort of been disclosing these revelations.
The same were done, so not only New York Times, but Washington Post and CNN.
So this is really not made a big splash in the media environment, but I just want to stop and think about what's happening here.
The Trump Justice Department was seizing phone records of reporters.
Now, this follows on the heels of reporters being arrested and sometimes violently accosted during protests.
And it, of course, follows on all of the Trump years where he called the press the enemy of the people.
When I was growing up, one of the first things I learned in social studies class was that freedom of the press was really essential for democracy because without freedom of the press, we wouldn't know what our government was up to.
And we wouldn't have the ability to keep them accountable, to keep those in power accountable.
Okay.
And we were taught, you know, back in the day, when I was, you know, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 years old, at the end of the 80s and beginning of the 90s, that in places like Soviet Russia, there was no press freedom, because they didn't have democracy, that those two went together.
I just think it's worth stopping and noticing that this happened, and that we continue to get these reports that the Trump Justice Department was seizing phone records from the New York Times, I know some of you are going to point out that Obama or others might have done similar things, and we can go down that road.
but the enemy of the people.
I know some of you are gonna point out that Obama or others might've done similar things and we can go down that road.
And happy to talk about that.
But none of them did that in an environment where they were rallying people at boisterous gatherings, sometimes violent gatherings, by saying that the press was the enemy of the people, by saying that they were fake news, by saying that they had no legitimacy, okay?
So to me, those contexts are different.
And they created a very toxic environment because we now know that so many Americans don't trust journalistic reports because the leaders that they admire have told them not to.
All right, so that's point number one.
Point number two is the fact that we are about one year away from Trump's Bible photo op, one of the most famous incidents of his presidency, in a long line of incidents.
And so, you know, one year and three days ago, Trump stood in front of St.
John's Church in Lafayette Square and held up a Bible.
Well, he did that after tear gas, you know, ordering the tear gassing of peaceful protesters and using military figures as his brigade as he strolled through the square to the church.
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