Brad and Dan begin by debating the fallout of the gubernatorial election in Virginia. Dan points out that historically the party in power doesn't perform well in midterm and off-year elections. This is especially true in Virginia. Brad takes a different approach by discussing the ways that the GOP has made extremism mainstream in the past and how Glenn Youngkin, who ran on a Trumpian platform without Trump as the mascot of his campaign, may be the next iteration of making racism and prejudice "respectable" in GOP spaces.
They then discuss the new data from PRRI that shows the two competing visions of the United States. According to the report, "More than two-thirds of Republicans (68%), compared to 26% of independents and 6% of Democrats, continue to believe that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. And Republicans (30%) are approximately three times as likely as Democrats (11%) to agree with the statement, “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” Agreement with this statement rises to 40% among Republicans who most trust far-right news sources and is 32% among those who most trust Fox News. One in four white evangelicals (26%) also agree that political violence may be necessary to save the country."
Finally, they go over new details from the Washington Post about the extensive alarm bells that domestic security officials triggered before J6, only to be ignored by federal agencies and the White House. It shows how far we are to knowing that Trump incited a coup while allowing him and his cohorts to go unpunished.
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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 Kapp Center, UCSB.
I'm here today with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought in the Department of Liberal Studies at Landmark College.
It's good to see you, Brad.
Dan, we're entering that time of year that I think is harder in your part of the country, which is when the time changes and it gets dark like super early.
I know for me, when I lived in the Northeast, like when it would get dark at 4.30, it was tough.
And I would be like, man, what is there to look forward to?
Winter is going to end in like nine more months.
But fortunately, Dan, I'm putting on my best advertiser voice.
I wonder if everyone notices.
I've been practicing this.
Fortunately for everybody, there is something to look forward to, which is Straight White American Jesus Seminar happening in January.
Now, I know what you're thinking.
You're like, yeah, January.
I got time.
But you don't.
Because here's why.
It starts the very first Wednesday in January, okay?
And we are in November.
And we all know December is a weird Mix of like, you know family and holidays and rampant consumerism and so on and so forth and so We have a few spots left and we want to tell you you need to jump in and get that get your spot now because January is gonna sneak up on you and You're gonna wish you'd signed up and you're gonna miss this opportunity to hang out with Dan Miller in January Does that sound right to you Dan?
It does.
We can tie into the rampant consumerism and talk about all these places that have started, like, Black Fridays in November.
And as we record this, this is one of them, as somebody who got up at 4.30 because I had to get something at Walmart today.
So everybody can, like, set their alarms for, like, super early in the morning, get up, like, score their place in the seminar and feel like they've done their piece to be, you know, a good sort of stereotypical November American.
There it is.
There it is.
All right.
So, straightwhiteamericanjesus.com.
Go to the seminar tab.
If you're not familiar in our seminars, we have four live classes.
We have videos, exclusive videos.
We have readings.
We have an office hours meeting with the professor, who is Dan Miller.
I'll be popping in and out as part of the seminar.
It's pretty cool.
And everyone who did it before was just like super stoked about it.
So, all right, Dan, we will talk about three things today.
We're going to go to Virginia, talk about this gubernatorial Race that has the Democrats all up in arms.
We're going to talk about a new report from PRRI that shows basically, in statistics, what we talk about all the time, which is two competing visions of America.
And then we'll talk about some very startling new facts and reporting about January 6th and law enforcement.
Let's start in Virginia.
This week, there's a gubernatorial election.
Glenn Younkin wins.
He is the GOP candidate.
He beats Terry McAuliffe, who's this sort of Democrat who's been a mainstay in Virginia politics for a long time, was the former governor in that state.
There's so many hot takes, Dan.
There are so many people wanting to say, no big deal, or this is definitely the nail in the Democrats' coffin.
So, I definitely have my take, and I think we're going to have a little bit of back and forth here, because there's a lot of perspectives, and I think we might have Some overlap, but we might have some difference here.
So, when you think about Virginia, and this guy Glenn Younken wins.
He's a very inexperienced politician.
He runs a campaign that is based on... One way to put it is Trumpism without Trump.
He doesn't want Trump hanging around.
He's not standing next to Trump.
He's kind of telling Trump, please don't come to my rallies.
But, a lot of his rhetoric and his positions are Trumpian.
He's very vociferous in opposing critical race theory as it's taught in schools, which it is not, but he says it is.
Anyway, there's a lot to say here.
Some folks across the country are like, this spells doom for the Democrats.
This is a bad, bad sign.
And this is a wake up call because 2022 is around the corner.
Others are saying, I'm not so sure.
Let's not overreact.
I think you might be in that latter category.
But what do you think?
I think it's really bad news for the Democrats, but I think it doesn't necessarily mean what a lot of people think it means.
And here's why.
You can Google this.
You can look it up.
You can find it.
Loses in midterm elections like like sort of all the time, like it's it's it's as close to an ironclad political law as there is.
The party that has the presidency tends to lose.
I think it's almost certain that Democrats are going to lose the House.
In 20, in 2022.
I think it was certain in like 1972 that the Democrats were going to lose the house in 2022 if they had the presidency.
Like most political scientists will say, if you know who the president is, if you know which party has the presidency, you know which party is almost certain to lose the house.
Like that, that's how that works.
And you get the, the nationalization of politics and people recognize this now that you said that notion that all politics is local.
We know now that often, like certainly at state level races, politics are actually national, right?
You have Biden, whose popularity rating has been tanking in recent months.
The economy's not bouncing back the way he would.
He's tied, for better or for worse, to his George W. Bush moment.
Everybody remembers George W. Bush with Mission Accomplished on the aircraft carrier deck and all that stuff.
That was Biden in July, kind of claiming victory over the coronavirus.
And here we are, we're still in this.
Lots of reasons for that.
Lots of fear-mongering.
Lots of politics.
I'm not denying any of that.
But all of that to say, some of the people at Vox had a really good piece where they said, if you want to look at this, you've got to look at the fact that you have a really increasingly unpopular incumbent president In an election that's tied in with a cycle, if I put this, you know, you put this in with the midterms where the incumbent party is going to lose.
Now, if you want the Democrats to be in office and you're terrified of Trump and Trumpism and Christian nationalism and all the things we talk about, it is really bad news for the Democrats.
I don't know that it's necessarily because of the kinds of reasons like James Carville throws out when he's basically like, we're not enough like Clinton and we're not moderate enough and it's all this quote unquote wokeness nonsense or whatever.
Thanks for listening to this free preview of our SWADGE episode.
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