Brad and Dan begin by discussing three trials happening right now: the Charlottesville Unite the Right Trial, the Kenosha Shooter Trial, and the Murder of Amaud Arbery. They analyze the racial, legal, and historical dynamics of each, pointing to the failure of our legal system to reckon with the baked-in White supremacy of our system.
They then dissect the revelations about January 6th planning meetings and Trump's War Room. This leads to a discussion of myth making in real time and how everyone from Marjorie Taylor Green to Tucker Carlson is spinning dangerous narratives about the Insurrection.
The episode finishes with reflection on a recent piece in the NYT on how Republican and Evangelical are becoming synonyms, and what this means for our political landscape.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi.
I am faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kaps 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.
I know that you've gotten approximately two hours of sleep in the last week with a newborn.
So I appreciate your time, and we're really glad that you're still capable of language at this point.
So well done.
Capable is probably in square quotes.
See, there it is.
Square quotes.
There it is.
Point made, Dan Miller.
We need the sound effect of the snare drum and cymbal.
Like, there it was.
If we had a producer, if anyone out there wants to be the person who can help us, because right now, you know, this is a self-produced show that is all us.
Anyway.
Just as long as we remember that produced is in square quotes.
Yeah, there it is.
Square quotes.
Maybe that's a new company we can invent.
Square quotes.
I don't know what that even means.
All right, Dan, before we get going, we got to say it, we have a seminar coming up in January.
Now, it is going to be November soon, so we still got a couple months, but about half the slots are full, and so people are jumping in.
The seminar is called Pure America, Religion, Race, Nation.
All the details are at StraightWhiteAmericanJesus.com.
We've done this once.
It went amazing.
Dan Miller, you led the seminar, had great conversations with everyone involved.
And I would just say, if you're interested, sign up now.
If you want to reach out and have any questions, please do so.
But Dan, any other just, you know, quick plugs for the seminar and you'll be the one leading it.
Just that it really was.
It was a great first seminar.
I really look forward to the second one.
Um, the more people and voices that we have in there, the better.
And, uh, just as you said, if, if people, uh, want to reach out to me, it's, uh, I'm just Daniel Miller at landmark.edu.
Um, I'm happy to, to, to talk with you about what it might be, what you can expect.
Uh, people want to get a headstart on the readings.
I'll be, I'll be sending those out, but if people are interested in that ahead of time, I'm happy to provide those.
So yeah, happy to hear from anybody and really, really looking forward to it.
All right, so for today we have kind of three and a half stories that we want to get into.
I want to talk about some of the court cases that are happening right now that include Kyle Rittenhouse, that include the fallout from Charlottesville, and The murder of Ahmaud Arbery.
Sorry everyone, back to the language issue.
Second thing we want to talk about is just everything we learned this week about January 6th in terms of members of Congress meeting with rally organizers and planners ahead of time.
The war room at the Willard Hotel that the Trump team had, and the various ways that people on the right are either justifying or trying to erase what happened on January 6th, including Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
We also want to talk about a new piece at the New York Times by Ryan Burge, who's been on the show before, and somebody that is a fellow scholar of religion, who's talking about the sort of reshaping, but also the kind of Reforming of evangelicalism in surprising ways, in ways that don't include Christians.
It's a very kind of interesting piece, so we'll get there too.
And at the end we're going to get to Joe Manchin, and usually I'm on the Joe Manchin train, but Dan, I know you want to talk about Joe Manchin and the billionaire tax, so we'll make sure and carve out space for that too.
All right, first thing today though.
We have three cases happening that are incredibly important and are related to incidents that caught national attention over the last couple years.
Heather Heyer was was murdered during the rally slash riot that happened there.
We have Kyle Rittenhouse, who in Kenosha, Wisconsin, killed two men and is now on trial in Madison.
And we have the two men, father and son, who killed Ahmaud Arbery when he was jogging in their neighborhood.
There's a nice piece at Slate, Dan, and I'll just set up this and throw it to you.
There's a piece at Slate by Dahlia Lithwick and Nicole Lewis, and they talk about these three cases, and the way they frame it is they all highlight the limits of our legal system, and specifically the limits of our legal system to deal with racism.
And the way they sort of analyze this is that the court system is quote-unquote supposed to be neutral, right?
It's supposed to present an objective space.
What, you know, Dan, if we were doing nerdy academic stuff, the Habermasian context for neutral and free space, right?
That everybody can sort of be judged in a way that is objective and without bias, right?
But in doing so, the court is erasing and not allowing to enter into its discourse the history or context of white supremacy and racism and growing radicalization in this country.
Right.
And so what they say is, in popular media, each case, each of these three cases I've talked about, is framed as a litmus test for racial justice or so-called racial relations in America.
But inside the courtrooms, just acknowledging the existence of historic structural racism, Forms the basis for striking jurors.
So one of the things that Lithwick and Lewis talk about is that there was a juror who was talking about racism and the way that people of color and specifically black people are treated in this country.
And they were sort of considered to be unfit to be a juror because they were biased, right?
There's another person who thinks that—it's a white person—who thinks that Black Lives Matter is a sham and Black Lives Matter is some sort of nefarious group and blah, blah, blah.
And that person is allowed to serve, right?
Last comment, Dan, I'll throw it to you.
And I know this is something you want to talk about.
One of the things that made headlines this week is that in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, the people who were murdered, the judge says, are not allowed to be referred to as victims.
Now, they can be referred to as looters or as rioters, but not victims.
And, you know, as Lithwick and Lewis note in the piece, the judge says that the word victim is loaded.
So if we allow the word victim, that's loaded.
We can't have that in the courtroom.
That wouldn't be objective.
That wouldn't be fair.
But you're going to tell me that the word looter or rioter is not also loaded?
That's one question.
Two, and Lithwick and Lewis asked this in the article, if they're not the victims, the people who literally had their lives ended by a handheld killing machine, Who are the victims here?
Is Kyle Rittenhouse the victim?
Kyle Rittenhouse, the one who the police thanked for being there moments before he killed two people?
Is the white kid who killed people with an AR-15 the victim here?
Because that is one way you might see what's happening in the trial as it has unfolded so far.
All right, Dan, off to you.
What do you think about Rittenhouse and these trials in general?
What it makes me think about, I mean, first of all, people should go check out the Slate article.
It's a, it's a, it's a great read and raises a lot of good points.
The first thing I think about, and when I was thinking about these is, is whose fragility matters?
Like that's, that's what it kind of comes down to, right?
Like, so if there's a black person, person of color, somebody else, uh, who says that, you know, people of color in this country are not treated equally or discriminated against and the white supremacy is real or something like that.
As you say, they're unfit, they're biased, whatever, but if a white person is, you know, fragile enough that they're scared by Black Lives Matter and the presence of that, then that's okay and that's sort of honored, right?
With the Rittenhouse example, like, I get, I think, legally, why a judge would say, you can't use the word victim, right?
That's precisely what's in question here.
Are they victims of this person's violence and it could prejudice a jury or something like that.
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