Brad and Dan discuss the vehement support for the Iraq War and the invasion of Afghanistan during the Bush years and comment briefly on the ills of American Empire.
They then discuss the dangers and implications of the alliance between anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers with the Proud Boys and how cultural melding leads to strange--and in this case, scary--bedfellows.
This leads to a reflection on the Christian nationalism of the Capitol Bomber. He blames immigrants for his family's ills. He spout conspiracies. He says he is acting for God and Country. He repeats lies about the election. He was radicalized.
The episode finishes with reflection on the dynamic between blue cities and red state governments and what this portends for the future of the country.
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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 today I am back with my co-host.
How you doing, Dan?
Good, glad to be back.
I am Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College, for those who might not know that by memory at this point.
Yeah, but Brad, thanks for carrying the load last week.
I was on a trip, visited my brothers.
It's the first time both of my brothers and I have been in the same, like, space together at all the same time in 10 years, so it was a really nice trip.
That's great.
Wow, that's really cool.
As somebody, we both have two brothers, and so as somebody who's in a similar situation, I know how nice it is to see folks and to be in the same place.
It's tough.
All right, we're going to talk about, talked a little bit about this last week, going to talk some more about the Proud Boys, but going to link it more to anti-vax movements this week.
Going to talk about Capitol Bomber from yesterday and the relationship there with Christian nationalism and radicalization.
And just want to talk about masks and kind of what's happening in different parts of the country in terms of blue and red states and municipalities and how this is really dividing us.
Again, these are some of the things we talked about last week, but I think we'll open them up and with Dan back, we'll have some different perspectives.
I want to start, though, Dan, just briefly on Afghanistan.
I feel like we've really gone back and forth on whether or not to do extended material on this.
Neither of us are experts on Afghanistan or what's happening in the Middle East writ large.
However, the thing that I do think is pertinent and we do have some lived experience with and maybe some knowledge about is just how evangelicals and evangelical leaders and evangelical politicians in general viewed the kind of move into Afghanistan and then Iraq in the early aughts.
You know, I will just share that from my perspective there was resounding support for the war in Iraq.
You know, on the part of George W. Bush and his administration, there was also a need, a seen need to kind of go into Afghanistan and to do, you know, what we did.
And I'm wondering if you had a similar kind of experience in your communities.
You know, I did.
I was, as people might know from if they've listened to some of our Origin Story podcasts, I just made it sound like superheroes, so you're welcome, everybody.
But I was a Southern Baptist pastor at the time when that invasion took place, and the SBC, the Southern Baptist Convention, was one of the only major denominations in the U.S.
to put out statements like in favor of The the policies that were going on in the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, more so Iraq.
Afghanistan was less controversial because that's right where the Taliban was.
That's where the attacks that were launched against the U.S., all of that sort of stuff.
And the Iraq thing was sort of drummed up later.
But anyway, but yes, I remember I remember hearing that most.
Progressive denominations.
We talked about the mainline or the liberal traditions were opposed to this because they were opposed to kind of a militaristic foreign policy.
But within the evangelical world, it was very different.
I guess what I would say is this.
I mean, it's a mess and it's been a mess for, you know, a long, long time.
And people like to talk about the cost and so-called blood and treasure.
And it's been really high in both.
And no matter kind of how you calculate it, there don't seem to be lots of positives that have come from it.
What I would say is this is what it shows is there there is no messianic foreign policy like that's how I would describe that evangelical embrace at the time.
It was wrapped up sometimes in weird apocalyptic themes and you know the proximity to Israel and different things like that things we've talked about before.
But it was often couched not just as a question of so-called nation building, not like a strictly political or foreign relations kind of question, but very much of this kind of apocalyptic messianic fervor.
And I think if it shows nothing else, it shows that that's just not how real politics and real foreign policy works.
This wasn't a win.
And I don't know if it could have been one.
I don't know if it could have been avoided.
I don't know if it was.
I'm not in a position to say that we should not have done anything in Afghanistan.
I'm with you.
I just.
I think I was in such a different place then and it's so long ago and so complex that I don't know what all the options really, really were.
But it does show that, you know, when we're in the world of politics, we're in worldly politics and it includes blood and guts and there are no clear moral lines.
And I think everything about that is on display here.
Whether we're talking about the initial decision to go in, whether we're talking about whether the Biden administration should or shouldn't have known, Uh, and seeing that this was going to collapse so fast, whether we're talking about the GOP suddenly acting like they haven't been calling for this for years, just lots and lots of levels.
But, uh, I'm with you that if we put it within the context of evangelicalism and the Christian nationalism of 20 years ago, um, there was full, full-throated support and endorsement for this.
There was.
And to me, this is one of the situations where there's no good guys.
There's no people who we should have listened to that actually had the answer.
Once this started 20 years ago, it turned into a morass that was always going to end badly and proceeded badly, I will say.
And so what I'm not going to do is defend Joe Biden and his administration.
The images coming from Afghanistan on the ground over the last 10 days have just been It's been awful to watch.
There's a lot of debate about trying to understand how the Biden administration didn't see this coming in terms of the Taliban taking over so quickly.
I will remind everybody that this is again a sort of an American Empire problem.
So there was a George W. Bush problem.
Barack Obama never figured it out.
And then Donald Trump, April of this year, said he believes the U.S.
should leave Afghanistan earlier than Biden.
And he says, I made early withdrawal possible by already pulling much of our billions of dollars in equipment out and, more importantly, reducing our military presence.
To less than 2,000 troops.
So, you know, Trump was on that sort of train for a long time.
He said before that, that, you know, he got the process going and all the troops are coming home.
They couldn't stop the process.
20 years, one year is enough.
They, meaning Biden, couldn't stop the process.
They wanted to, but they couldn't stop the process.
So that's Trump this summer, right?
So, you know, if anybody tries to tell you that this was Biden and he was the only one, you know, looking to do this, obviously there's just clear receipts about people having the opinion that we should leave Afghanistan.
Let me give you Josh Hawley, Dan.
He said, April 13th of this year, President Biden should withdraw troops in Afghanistan by May 1, as the Trump administration planned.
What did he say, you know, a couple days ago?
This is the worst foreign policy debacle since Vietnam due to Joe Biden.
So you can kind of see here, right, the doublespeak and everybody trying to sort of capitalize on this.
And I guess for me, it's I'm not going to defend Joe Biden, but I'm also going to point out the fact that everyone from Josh Hawley to Trump, going back to Obama and Bush, were engaged in a foreign policy effort that was truly just a lose-lose situation for everybody all around.
And so Yeah.
All right, Dan.
I think we'll leave it there and move into something else that is something that's happening on the home front, and that is the ongoing alliance between the Proud Boys and the anti-vax movement.
I talked about the Proud Boys last week when it came to Sean Foyt and his worship rallies, and in many ways his anti-COVID vaccine mandate regulation rallies.
This has continued.
The Proud Boys have really sort of seemed to find a niche in the anti-vax movements.
So, writing at Politico, Amanda Marcotte says, After the January 6th insurrection at the U.S.
Capitol, domestic terrorism experts were worried about the potential for more violence, and for good reason.
Donald Trump and his allies were continuing to not just push the big lie, but float prophetic claims about a miraculous Trump reinstatement.
In August.
But as the summer wears on, it seems that at least some of the violent fascist anger that Trump has been stoking for years is now being aimed in a new direction.
People who are trying to limit the spread of COVID-19.
The anti-vaccine movement appears to be getting increasingly nasty and violent.
Worse yet, the same groups of people, specifically the Proud Boys, a right-wing group who fueled the violence in DC, are now turning their attention toward undermining any effort to mitigate people's risk of getting Sick.
I'll point out, Dan, just some other info, and then I'll throw it to you.
This is from Kelly Weil at the Daily Beast.
So, we just talked about California.
This is happening in California, for those of you who don't know.
The LA Times has been covering this for weeks now.
There have been numerous rallies where the Proud Boys and anti-vax people have gotten violent, somebody was stabbed, and so on and so forth.
In Florida, schools have also seen an influx in outsiders crashing their meetings on masking.
Last month, a group of men with Proud Boy uniforms and anti-masking signs attended a Palm Beach County, Florida school board meeting.
Members of the group sat inside the meeting and stood on a street corner with a banner bedecked in the Proud Boys logo and the slogan, Unmask the Children.
That same month, Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio attended a school board meeting in Florida's Miami-Dade County.
He told newscasters that members of his group are there to speak against masks, vaccine requirements, and critical race theory.
Up in New Hampshire, there have been uniformed Proud Boys who have held signs condemning things like critical race theory, while another man who was not a local parent spoke against masks until meeting moderators turned off his microphone.
I could go on.
There's a lot more examples of this.
So, New Hampshire, Florida, California.
What we're seeing, Dan, are Proud Boys and anti-vaxxers basically joining forces.
I'll throw it to you.
What do you see is happening in this whole phenomenon?
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