Brad and Dan do close readings of statements made by Insurrectionist Senator Josh Hawley and Representative Matt Gaetz in order to deconstruct the logic of their attacks on CRT, their resistance to facing the inconvenient truths of American history, and their rage against investigating the 1/6 Coup. Both of them use binary thinking, false dilemmas, and straw man arguments to mount attacks that amount to nothing more than what Dan calls "toddler epistemology."
They then turn to the remarks made by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley who provides a counter to the close-minded, fabricated war on CRT by stating clearly that he wants to understand white rage and why white people attempted to overthrow the US Constitution.
The last major segment examines the Christian nationalist origins of the new law in Florida, just signed by "Uncle Ron" Desantis, requiring university employees and students to register their political views with the state. It is straight out of an authoritarian regime, and backed by Christian nationalist lobbyists who want to "preserve" the Christian heritage of the country.
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What's up, y'all?
I hope you're doing good.
Just wanted to share with you one announcement at the top of our weekly roundup.
We have a new perk for patrons, and that is an extended segment of the weekly roundup every week.
And so, if you are a Swatch patron, every week we will post our extended discussion on our Patreon, and it actually will be a video feed, and so you'll get to see Dan and I Chop it up.
This week, we're talking about Ibram X. Kendi and a quote that he has about racism in the United States, and we explain how the Protestantization of American culture leads to how we understand race.
And so we're going to shed light on why it's so difficult to talk about race and racism in this country and how that relates back to an overwhelming prevalence of Protestantism and Protestant ideals and practices and so on in our culture.
And so you can look forward to that if you're a patron, and if not, head over to straightwhiteamericanjesus.com or Patreon and check out what we have to offer.
We appreciate y'all and hope you're having a good one.
Off now to the weekly roundup.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center UCSB, and I'm here today 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.
Dan's got to think about where he works.
He's in full summer mode.
He's really just buying into this whole... In a t-shirt in my home office, right?
That's right, that's right.
I'm doing alright.
I'm under the weather this week, so definitely fighting through a weird summer cold.
We can confirm though that it is a summer cold and not some breakthrough infection or something like that.
Yeah, we're pretty sure of that, so no need to worry folks.
All right, Dan.
Want to jump into some things this week.
And we decided, you know, it's sometimes tempting in the show to do too much, right?
There's so many stories.
There's so many things we could talk about.
We have 45 minutes, 50 minutes.
We could go on for three hours.
Every week.
And I know you do this in class sometimes.
I do it too.
Sometimes, you know, you have some big ideas and you have a lot of important sort of things to get through in a class and you say, hey, let's do a close reading.
And what that means is let's zero in on a particularly important passage and let that guide us through this sort of big set of ideas and principles and Histories or whatever else we're doing.
So I think we want to do that today.
We want to do what what we think of as a kind of close reading of some statements made by three different American political and military figures this week and see what those can tell us about our current political state.
We continue to live in a country where the big lie is being propagated.
And it's all planned, Dan, and we could do an hour on how the rage against critical race theory is just one more sort of midterm strategy, midterm bogeyman that the GOP and others have cooked up in order to instill fear in people to get them to vote in a certain way.
Let's talk about this.
Let's talk first about Senator Josh Hawley.
OK, so let me read you the statements from Josh Hawley this week, Dan.
He says this, I'm afraid that President Biden is nominating individuals who do not share a view of America as a good and decent place, who do not believe the history of this nation is worth celebrating, and that it's a nation founded in racism and shot through with corruption.
Young children sent off to school with eyes full of hope and hearts full of pride in their country only to be taught that white privilege defines the nation, that the Christian faith is oppressive, that the nuclear family perpetuates racism.
I have heard many say the United States is indeed built on oppression and remains a systematically racist place.
All I can say, Mr. President, is that that is not the America I see and it's not the America that I know.
All right.
So, Dan, in a close reading, we got to go sort of sentence by sentence.
OK, so I'm afraid this is Holly talking about the Biden administration, that President Biden is nominating individuals who do not share a view of America as a good and decent place, who do not believe the history of this nation is worth celebrating and that it's a nation founded in racism and shot through with corruption.
When we look at that sentence, what comes to mind for you?
Biggest thing that comes to mind, this is a theme I'm going to come back to a few times today, is this notion of sort of thought policing, right, in a certain way.
We'll talk more about this later.
We've got some stuff from our friend Ron DeSantis down in Florida to talk about.
But, you know, if people are aware with what goes on in places like China or authoritarian regimes or back in my time long, long ago in the former Soviet Union, right, when you had officers of the state whose job was literally to make sure that people were saying the right things, that they were professing the right beliefs and so forth.
That's what this is, and so it's, you know, it's this notion of predetermining what the nation can have been in its history, right?
And the verbs are all weird there, right?
Predetermining what the nation can have been, like the way that you can even...
Approach history or we've talked before about ways of remembering or things that were no longer permitted to remember It's it's it's more of that right that we have to remember our history We have to tell our story in a certain way for it to be acceptable And if the story is not acceptable ahead of time We're not going to allow anybody to tell it to explore it to look at it So I mean it really is an effort an explicit effort at this point at at you know thought police kind of actions
So he says, nominating individuals who do not share a view of America as a good and decent place and who do not believe the history of the nation is worth celebrating.
So to me, this brings up a couple of things, right?
A fancy philosophical term for this, Dan, would be a straw man.
He's setting up a caricature of the Biden nominees as so far on one side of things that they're indefensible.
Hey, you're nominating someone.
For a cabinet position or for something else.
Who thinks America is the worst place ever?
And who thinks that the history of this nation is void of anything at all worth celebrating?
So on one hand, it's a straw man.
And another hand, Dan, it's a false dilemma.
It's a false binary.
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