Brad and Dan begin with insight from Prof. Jason Stanley: “History shows that propaganda can make a dominant group mad with panic and fear about the threat of a small minority subjugating them, supposedly by seizing the institutions and doing things to their children.”
They use this idea to explore the myths that are inciting panic and fear in White Americans, including White Christian nationalists, across the nation: the Big Lie, the propaganda against Critical Race Theory, the GOP's Myth of the Real American, and so on.
The conclusion: If you tell the story a certain way, it becomes history. It becomes a factual record of the past in the minds of the people who tell the story over and over again.
The danger: when history becomes open to distortion by the will to power, it opens the door for authoritarian leaders to create the story of the past--and the projection of the future--in dangerous ways.
They finish by discussing the DOJ's approach to protecting LGBTQ+ students in a recent court case.
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All right.
Test, test, test, test, test.
I think I'm looking good.
Sound-wise.
Testing.
Yep.
Me too.
All right.
Here we go.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi and our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
I'm here today with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Good to see you, Brad.
You too, Dan.
Wanted to just say some things here at the top real quick.
I've been announcing, you know, some news in my life just about leaving Skidmore and stepping away and jumping into some new things, including fatherhood.
I think one question folks have had, and I wanted to just, you know, run this by you, Dan, is, hey, Brad, why would you step away from a job at Skidmore that encourages you and allows you to do this show as part of your job?
And step into a space that is, you know, maybe going to make it more complicated.
And there's obviously like a million reasons for what's going on in my life and all the decisions I'm making.
But I did want to explain to folks that traditional academia doesn't really encourage this kind of work.
So us doing this podcast gets me no kudos, really, in the academic world, at least in terms of like how I'm viewed.
Internally, at times.
And so what I mean by that, Dan, is like, you know, in 2018, when I published a book, and I published all these articles, and had my name in the Journal of American Academy of Religion, and, you know, had a whole panel on my book at the AAR, I had somebody who had authority over my tenure say, well, hey, that stuff's good.
Now you're doing this podcast stuff.
I hope someday you'll come back and do real academic work.
Right.
And so I guess I just wanted to explain to folks that we really are hoping that we can continue to do the show like we've done it, publish episodes two and three times a week and everything else.
I actually think moving into the new phase of life that I'm moving into will make that easier if I can manage it financially and otherwise, because there was pressure to stop doing this kind of work, this public work that I love and I think you love, Dan.
And to do what some people think is real quote-unquote scholarship, and I guess I'm just not on that train.
It doesn't mean I'm not a scholar, and I'm not going to continue to do scholarly work, but it also means that this, to me, is too important not to do.
So, Dan, does that make sense to you in terms of, you know, kind of some of the tropes you've seen in academic circles?
And this is not all of academics, and I know there's a ton of you listening who are professors and are working in the academy, so I'm not trying to implicate every... I mean, this is by no means like a A broad brush.
I just want those of you who are not in academia to kind of realize people look at this kind of like a hobby rather than something that's part of our profession.
I understand what you're saying and one thing for people to know too is of course that the skills and capacities you bring are they're not from Skidmore, right?
They're what you brought to Skidmore and you are still you with those skills and capacities.
And you're right, there's different kinds of scholarship.
You know, I do this, and I've got the book coming out in August, and they're like really, really different kinds of projects, and they're weighted differently within the Academy and the broader professional world.
The only other piece I would say you kind of touched on a bit is that I think people also aren't aware, and there's no reason they would be if they're not in the Academy, Of how little time you actually spend in scholarship if you're in the academy.
Certainly I'm at what's called a teaching intensive college, right?
So my focus is almost entirely on teaching undergraduates and by the time you factor in administrative responsibilities and meetings and committees and all those other things that you talk about and class prep and a million other important things, but it feels like a million other things sometimes.
And so I think I think I don't know.
I just applaud you for, you know, taking the step that you feel like you need to take to do this.
And I know I obviously value what you're doing in this and a lot of other people do as well.
You've been a driving force behind this and this has really become your primary research and scholarship outlet.
I'm here with you to affirm that and excited that hopefully we can work it out where you can keep doing that and sort of expand it even further.
Yeah, and I appreciate it, and I know none of this means I'm leaving academia.
I'm going to be teaching at the University of San Francisco and other things, but I just did want to clarify that point, because I think there are probably some folks out there that are like, why would you leave the academy when the academy is where you can do a show like Straight White American Jesus, and in many ways it's actually kind of The opposite.
So, all right, Dan.
Enough of that chit-chat.
Let's talk about what's going on this week.
Here's what I wrote down as a kind of overriding theme for today.
Myth is the means to minority power and authoritarian rule.
So, Jason Stanley talking about Academics, Jason Stanley is a professor at Yale and an expert on fascism and authoritarianism, wrote this just a couple days ago.
History shows that propaganda can make a dominant group mad with panic and fear about the threat of a small minority subjugating them, supposedly by seizing the institutions and doing things to their children.
For example, Stanley says, the Nazis claimed Marxists and Jews were in a conspiracy to destroy Aryans.
This was implausible, as it was a small minority, so you needed nonstop, 24-7 media panic going to make people actually believe there was a conspiracy, and it threatened the dominant majority.
So we have this sort of propaganda machine that is warning people, making them panicked and fearful about the threat of a small minority subjugating them.
from ralph and a frenzied german population convinced they must act began nationwide riots against the german jewish population on crystal knocked so we have this sort of propaganda machine that is warning people making them panicked and fear fearful about the threat of a small minority subjugating them something happens and then we have this kind of uh immense reaction to it uh Let me give you another example, Dan.
After Pearl Harbor, and this is me, not Stanley, military officials, the press, and the mayor and governor of California pressured the federal government to do something about all of the Japanese people living on the West Coast, despite there being no evidence of collusion or espionage.
What happened?
Well, Executive Order 9066 sent 120,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans to camps with no trial and based on no evidence.
Some of them died in camp, and it is a trauma that continues to haunt Japanese-Americans generations later, even though most Americans never learn about Japanese internment in school.
Let me give you one more, Dan.
We've all heard the phrase, remember the Alamo, right?
As if it was a sort of a call to remember the brave sacrifice of those who are on the right side of justice.
Well, Richard Webner, writing at the Washington Post in May, wrote this, Generations of Texas schoolchildren have been taught to admire the Alamo defenders as revolutionaries slaughtered by the Mexican army in the fight for Texas independence.
But several were enslavers, including William B. Travis and Davy Crockett, an inconvenient fact in a state where textbooks have only acknowledged since 2018 that slavery was at issue in the Civil War.
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