Weekly Roundup: Justice for J6 and Moral Responsibility
Dan and special guest Blake begin by discussing the Babylon Bee, and the anti-censorship bill in Florida. They explore how misinformation is disseminated disguised as free speech.
The second major topic is the planned "Justice for J6" rally planned at the Capitol on September 18. This is, in their view, a ritual enactment of the myth of the Big Lie--a return to the site of violence to commemorate battle heroes and martyrs - the creation of myth in real time.
They finish by discussing moral responsibility during the COVID-19 pandemic, Nicki Minaj, the recasting of white evangelicalism, and christian identity as political conservatism. Dan leads by asking what will the effect of 2016 be on American Evangelicals?
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Hello and welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I am one of your hosts, Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
We are hosted in partnership with the Walter H. Kapp Center at UCSB.
Happy, as always, to join folks for the Weekly Roundup.
I am not joined this week by my co-host Brad Onishi, because Brad Onishi went all crazy this week and decided to become a father, so he's taking a rare Friday off.
I am joined, though, by a guest co-host for the day, a friend of the podcast, Blake Chastain.
Blake, I'll toss it over to you and let you introduce yourself.
Hi Dan, thanks for having me.
I'm glad to be on this show.
I think I've made one or two other appearances and have had both of you on the show at different times as well.
I'm the host of Exvangelical and I also produced a short run series called Powers and Principalities and I'm also part of the irreverent media group that Straight White American Jesus also publishes on.
Great, thank you so much.
And for those who haven't checked out the Exvangelical podcast, you should.
It's a great podcast.
And so we're really glad to have Blake standing in with us.
Blake, we've talked about this some.
Everybody who listens will know that the kind of game that we play on Fridays usually is what we've just called the Weekly Roundup.
We talked about it a few months ago when we started this.
I wasn't sure it was sustainable.
I was like, I don't know if we're always going to have stuff to talk about.
Unfortunately, right, the world doesn't seem to be calming down any, and so we do.
So we're going to do this the way we usually do, and I know that you've come with, you know, some news items, cultural issues that caught your attention this week.
So I'm going to throw it over to you to introduce the first one of those, and then we'll just sort of talk about that, and I've got some things that I thought were noteworthy as well, and then we'll close out with reasons for hope, as we usually do.
So tell us what caught your attention this week for our Weekly Roundup.
Sure.
Why don't we start with what I think is maybe an easier one, which is I saw, let me pull up the actual link here, but I actually saw that the Babylon Bee has filed an amicus brief in Florida in regards to their controversial social media law.
And if your listeners don't know who the Babylon Bee is, they essentially try to be like a conservative Christian version of the Onion.
But it has been sort of surprising, but also not surprising, you know how those things go, to see this sort of action take place.
The Babylon Bee has been, they intentionally try to stoke cultural warring sort of responses But they also have received things like somewhat fair profiles in the New York Times.
So they are not a force to really be overlooked.
And this is a very interesting sort of development.
And they are being represented by the First Liberty Institute, which is a conservative law firm based in Plano.
What do you think of the Babylon Bee and sort of their presence in the, you know, this sort of media atmosphere?
And what do you make of them filing a brief in support of this supposed anti-censorship social media bill in Florida?
Yeah, so the Babylon Bee, for lots of reasons, I don't spend that much time there, but the times I have, they're really funny sometimes.
For those of us who grew up in the evangelical world, they can be really funny.
You're right sometimes, though, I guess for those of us who, let me emphasize, used to be in the evangelical world, you don't find humorous maybe what they find humorous.
Um, but other times, like, I think you described it perfectly, right?
They want to be the onion of, like, you know, the conservative evangelical world, and sometimes they pull it off really, really well.
Um, so I was disappointed to see them file this amicus brief.
I guess it's not surprising, but, um...
People will have heard, you know, they'll have heard us talk about things like this before, so the things that jump out at me are the way that the GOP, you know, and our friend Uncle Ron DeSantis, as we've taken to calling him here on the show, you know, they file these things that are supposedly about free speech, but they're not, right?
They're about, like, basically Allowing disinformation to go unchallenged, right?
Whether it's debates about Facebook or other social media platforms.
So the first thing is just for people to be aware of that, right?
Free speech is one thing, but that's not really the issue.
Their issue isn't really that it's not free speech.
What they don't want is for companies to say, you know what, we're not going to let you say things that are just blatantly false or that, I don't know.
drive QAnon conspiracies, or anti-vaxxer conspiracies, or whatever.
We're not going to let you intentionally mislead people, which is an ironic position, I think, in some ways, for the Babylon Bee, a satire thing to pick up on.
Yeah, I mean, they do run another site called NotTheBee, which is really just a more straightforward conservative outlet.
Yeah.
And so that's the first thing.
The other thing is the what always I think is the hypocrisy of or maybe hypocrisy is not the right word.
Right.
The the selectivity with which political conservatives will grab on to certain traditional conservative principles.
Right.
So these are the same companies that are always saying that they're opposed to any kind of limitations on private companies.
Right.
The private companies should be able to do whatever they want.
The private companies should not be allowed Or excuse me, required to pay women the same amount.
The private companies should not be mandated to require masks.
The private company, right?
This whole notion that a private company should never have a government intrusion into what it can do.
And yet, when it comes to like social media platforms and different things like that, all of a sudden it's all about free speech and it's all about, you know, you can't censor.
And I'm like, These are private companies.
Private companies can, in fact, do different kinds of things like that.
The last point of irony I'll just throw out, and then I'll throw it back to you to hear any additional thoughts you might have, is I find it interesting, too, that there's this pretty wonky discussion, right, that people have about whether the Internet should count as a public utility, right?
Like whether in this wired world we live in, if the internet is so much of a basic means of communication and information and education, everything else, that it ought to be a kind of utility like telephone lines or gas supplies or things like that.
And the GOP typically is opposed to that, right?
They'll call it socialism and they'll say that it's, it's taking government control of private companies and so forth.
And yet the irony of it to me is that that's kind of what they're arguing here.
They're saying these are big internet platforms and they're so big and so influential that they should be subject to what they see as the same rules of free speech and different things like that as everything else.
Yeah, it's like a lot of other things that come out.
It's not really about free speech, right?
These are the same groups that want to label Black Lives Matter a terrorist group and ban them from showing up on social media platforms.
But those are the things that stand out to me, right?
It's like a Florida version of the same debates going on about Twitter or Facebook or whatever.
Other thoughts or impressions you had about this?
Or what really caught your attention about this?
Yeah, I agree.
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