Weekly Roundup: COVID, Conspiracies, and Anti-Vaxxers
Brad and Dan begin by discussing what's behind the anti-vax attitudes of many Americans, especially White Christians. After reviewing the staggering and heartbreaking numbers, they draw on scholarship related to wraparound media and conspiracy theories to examine what resisting vaccines does for people--especially as it relates to themes of power, belonging, and authority.
They then discuss the 1/6 Select Committee debacle and how the GOP can't decide if we need to investigate or not, why it's not okay to allow Jim Jordan to investigate himself, and the potential fracturing in the Republican caucus in the wake of recent events.
Brad and Dan finish by discussing the decision in Texas to stop requiring teachers to teach that the KKK was morally wrong, stop teaching about MLK Jr. life and legacy, and many other issues, because they are not supposed to give "deference" to one perspective. For two lifelong educators, this is reprehensible and undermines the very nature of teaching and pedagogy.
On the extended segment they discuss the sex abuse scandal at Liberty University and why White Evangelical spaces are unsafe for young women, girls, and members of the LGTBQ+ community.
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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.
I'm here today 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.
Good to see you too, Dan, and we have some updates about our seminar.
So, as we announced last week, we are doing our first ever Straight White American Jesus seminar, and I know some of you are like, what does that mean?
So, basically, it's this.
In September, Dan Miller is going to be teaching What is basically like a college-level seminar, and it's open to all of you.
What's included in this seminar are four live sessions, and they're going to be two hours each.
So they're going to be on Wednesday nights in September, two hours in a live session with Dan and the other participants in the course.
It also includes five exclusive course videos that participants will be asked to watch before the class each week, and readings from both Dan and I on the select topic.
I'll be making appearances in some of the videos and other materials, but Dan will be really leading up the seminar, and it is limited to 12 people.
Dan, I'm pretty excited about this, not only because it's our first seminar, but because I know you're an amazing teacher and whoever signs up is going to have a great experience.
I think we've both been really excited about this for a long time.
We talked about this last week, but there are people who wanted to do sort of a deeper dive, something a little bit more formal than what we can do in the podcast.
We say it's like a college class without all the bad stuff.
I don't have to grade anything.
That's what we don't like.
Nobody has to do any homework.
Nobody's there because their advisor said that they have to take it.
It's just people who want to take it.
So I'm really looking forward to it.
I'm really looking forward to the other piece of this is that The participants also, part of this is what we're calling office hours, where each individual will get to just meet with me if they want for half an hour.
And that's a chance to just clarify things or ask about other material or whatever.
So we're really excited about it.
Put a lot of work into it.
I'm really excited and hope that people will join us for that.
So the class is called Pure America, Religion, Race, Nation, and we're going to be looking at how white Christian nationalism tries to create a quote-unquote pure America.
It tries to purify the national body, and we're going to link this to things like xenophobia and racism.
We'll also link it to purity culture.
So it's a wide-ranging course.
It hits on all the classic things from our show.
And you can find the info at StraightWhiteAmericanJesus.com under the Seminars tab.
So, check it out today.
As we said, space is limited, so you'll want to grab yours as soon as you can.
All right, Dan, let's talk about the Weekly Roundup.
We want to talk about three main things this week, I think, and that is vaccines and conspiracy theories.
We want to talk about the 1-6 Commission and what McCarthy and Pelosi and all the players are up to there.
And then talk a little bit further about what's happening in Texas with the school curricula and just how it kind of maps on to some things that have been going on with critical race theory and other fights about history and the American past.
So, let's talk about vaccines and conspiracies.
A lot going on in terms of people resisting the vaccine.
A lot of talk about people dying from not being vaccinated.
You want to take us through some of this information and some of what's happened over the last couple of weeks?
Yeah, so one of the data points that to me is really, really striking, and it's both super encouraging and super demoralizing, right, at the same time, is that Now, the groups like the CDC and other organizations will say that 99.5% of people dying from COVID in the U.S.
right now are unvaccinated, right?
People look at news articles or just headlines, they will see over and over and over, they'll hear Fauci and others say that we're now coming to a point of sort of like two Americas when it comes to COVID, the vaccinated and the unvaccinated.
And two, pandemics.
You've got places like I live in the state of Massachusetts.
Our numbers are going up.
They're still modest compared to a lot of places, but hospitalizations aren't rising radically.
Deaths are not rising radically because something like two-thirds of our population is fully vaccinated, right?
So we're beginning to see this and we're starting to hear, Brad, as you know, like I find these stories like heartbreaking of
People in some of these states and it came out this week that 40% of COVID cases currently in the US are coming from three states And those are Florida, Texas and Missouri and you can add other states in there like Arkansas and Louisiana That have low vaccination rates They're starting to see spikes or hospitals are starting to fill up and we're hearing stories of people right before they're intubated asking for the vaccine when they can't get it and it wouldn't do anything for them if they could and
We are hearing stories of people who are literally on their deathbed at saying that they wish they had had the vaccine and so forth.
We're starting to see a little bit of a move in some of those places that have been resistant to the vaccines.
And when we talk about these states, it's not coincidental that all the disinformation and everything else and the red state identity, all of that stuff is part of this.
And so it's just it's the reason I say it's hopeful is if you get the shots you get the Johnson & Johnson or you get the two doses of the others it's like 99.5% chance that even if you get COVID it's minor it's a head cold it's a mild flu that's that's what it's like it's it's it's everything that deniers wanted to say it was a year ago.
But if you don't, it can still kill you.
And we know about the Delta variant and how much more how much more that's been spreading.
I heard a radio interview today with an epidemiologist who says that this is the most transmissible respiratory disease that she has ever encountered in 20 years of researching.
Right.
And so the question that it raises is like, why is this still happening?
Why, given the facts behind this, is there still so much resistance?
And there are lots and lots of reasons for this, but one that fits under that broad category of disinformation is still the kind of crazy conspiracism that drives this.
And I know you've been So I feel like you're the conspiracy host, right?
You're always the ones like up on the conspiracies.
So walk us through some of that of like the sort of the latest and greatest of the conspiratorial thinking about, you know, what why the vaccines are bad and why we shouldn't be having them and why none of this is real and what is still continuing to drive this so that this what is now in the US a completely preventable disease is not in fact being prevented.
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