Weekly Roundup: Pledge Allegiance to the January 6th Insurrection Flag
Brad and Dan begin by discussing a rally for VA gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin where supporters pledged allegiance to a flag carried at the January 6th Insurrection. To top it off, Steve Bannon--who is ignoring a subpoena to testify about January 6th--appeared at the rally to support Youngkin's campaign.
They then discuss an ongoing debate in a school district near Forth Worth Texas, where libraries have been closed surrounding the need to teach "multiple perspectives" on the Holocaust. This is a direct result of new laws in Texas passed by Gov. Abbott last month.
The episode finishes with a discussion of the politicization of SCOTUS in the wake of a speech given by Samuel Alito at Notre Dame a few weeks ago.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi.
I'm faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
I'm joined today by my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
It's always nice to see you, Brad.
Yeah, good to see you.
We're heading into that sort of part of the fall, the autumn, where, you know, your part of the country is really reveling in autumn colors.
And here in California, we're praying for rain of any kind.
And students are kind of getting a little tired and a little, you know, into the teeth of the semester.
Maybe your kids are in school and people are feeling that too.
Anyway, all right today Dan we're gonna talk about We're gonna check in on MAGA Nation and it's probably worse than you all think So we'll tell you about that.
I'm gonna talk about more school district stuff and some attempted Weirdness about how people are teaching the Holocaust and books and all kinds of things and then we'll talk about the Supreme Court and the politicization of that and and Justice Alito's defensiveness, all related to many issues surrounding issues in our public square at the moment.
So, Dan, I'll let you lead it off.
You know, our good friend Steve Bannon was subpoenaed to talk to the January 6th Select Committee, and lo and behold, what happened?
Yeah, so Bannon, that people will love, a person we all deeply love and admire and cherish, Bannon.
And I think it's worth pointing out that Bannon, who long ago made a big deal about how, you know, he was a kind of economic nationalist, had nothing to do with race, had nothing to do with with identity politics and so forth.
I want people to just sort of stick that in their pocket for a minute because we're going to pull it back out in a few minutes.
But yeah, he was subpoenaed by the House Select Committee and is resisting that and has made clear he has no intention of appearing to testify.
And so they've threatened to actually hold him in contempt of Congress, which, you know, I guess for some of us probably doesn't sound like that big a deal, but it's sort of a relatively big, you know, sort of rhetorical stick to swing.
I'm glad that they're doing that.
I'm glad that they subpoenaed him.
I'm glad that they're not.
This is predictable, but I think legitimate that the Biden administration declined to protect all these people on the grounds of executive privilege and so forth.
The interesting thing, though, is that there's a line of thinking that says that this is, despite the fact that I think it's something that has to happen, that MAGA Nation will like this for a couple reasons.
One, They will do what, and people have watched Trump, and they've watched the Trumpites, the Trumpers for years.
They know that they do this.
They take whatever it is that they do, and then they accuse somebody of doing it, right?
So they will accuse the House Select Committee of politicizing this process of, you know, We'll just wait for the word witch hunt to appear and to be trotted back out.
And so there's concern that this will energize the Trump base, and it might well do so.
The other thing, this is the more concerning thing for me, is I've read things that are like, so what does Congress actually do, right?
If somebody decides not to appear, like, great, we hold you in contempt, but what does it actually do?
And there's some lack of clarity about that, especially for me as a layperson.
But my bigger concern about this is one of the things that Trump laid really bare in four years as president and his time before and since is how much of our democratic system is set up on intangible norms and shared values and custom and habit.
And not sort of legal protections and so forth.
And there are those who think that what this will do is just turn into yet another way to kind of shred the authority of any kind of oversight, of congressional oversight.
That if Bannon just sticks to it and says, I'm absolutely not going to appear before a congressional subcommittee.
I'm not going to take the fifth.
I'm not going to do any of the things I could do to appear there and protect myself.
That it will just sort of further highlight that and further erode the trust in those institutions.
So I think that that's a serious concern.
What's more significant though, I think, is the Bannon MAGA Lovefest that has developed over time and this is why it'll turn into a rallying cry.
So I want to throw it back to you because you've got some of this because our friend Bannon hasn't just been hidden away like, you know, quietly having his attorneys send missives to Congress.
He is, you know, hip deep in wading through MAGA muck and loving every minute of it.
So fill us in on that because it's going to take us back to Our favorite topic, right?
January 6th.
Well, and all of this relates to January 6th because, right, he's being subpoenaed by the J6 Select Committee, the January 6th Select Committee, okay?
And so according to many reports, Bannon is the one who was in the ear of Trump, who was really riling him up to sort of rely on this mix of a legal strategy that he was getting from lawyers from the Claremont Institute and other places and the mob.
I mean, Bannon is really the one who was trying to put in Trump's ear that if you had the power of the mob, that there would be a way to use that to put pressure on Congress and Pence and others to overthrow the election.
Let me stop for a minute, Dan, because what I want to get to is Bannon appeared the other night at a rally for a gubernatorial candidate in Virginia, and that rally is going to become even more infamous in a minute when we explain what happened there.
Before we do, I just want to stop and say, what is executive privilege?
Because you're going to hear that, and Uncle Ron may throw that out to you at the barbecue this weekend, okay?
So, I'm looking at a doc from Cornell Law School, the Legal Information Institute there, and it says, "...executive privilege is the power of the president and other officials in the executive branch to withhold certain forms of confidential communication from the courts and the legislative branch." Okay, so certain forms of confidential communication can be held back.
The argument that somebody could make is that there are times when the president's communications should not be public, and they should not even be shared with the legislative branch, people in Congress, people in the Senate, blah blah blah.
Okay?
There is, though, Dan, room for debate.
It's not just a unilateral legal category, right?
Does everybody remember that Office episode where, like, Michael Scott stood up and yelled, I am bankrupt, okay?
And, like, Oscar, the accountant, had to say, Michael, you can't just stand up and declare, I am bankrupt.
Like, you have to go through the legal, like, process and fill out the paperwork.
You don't just yell, I am bankrupt.
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