Weekly Roundup: One God, One Country, One Leader - On Leaving the Realm of Democracy
Brad and Dan discuss the censuring of Rep. Paul Gosar for his tweet depicting him as an anime character killing Rep AOC. This leads to a bold, but evidence-based thesis: There is no good Republican party. If it ever existed in the first place, it is now gone. What has taken its place is a party founded on Trumpism, grievance, and fascist tendencies.
After providing evidence for this thesis, Brad and Dan ask two questions:
What happens in parties and states where contradicting the leader is the only reason a member is punished?
What happens when such parties/states give their authority a religious cloak?
The episode finishes with a discussion of the recent instance of Kansas City residents donning yellow stars in order to compare their situations as unvaccinated people to the Jews in Nazi Germany.
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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, and I'm joined today by my co-host.
My name is Dan Miller.
I'm Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
It's good to be with you at the end of another week full of various things to think about, Brad.
Yeah, lots of... I think there's a lot going on.
You know, it's the week before Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving is a complicated time, to say the least.
I think a lot of folks are starting to shift into that time of year where they're Some of them some of y'all out there are just super pumped about the holidays and seeing family and I know for others of you it's a it's a very complicated time and difficult.
The other thing Dan that we need to say is just as we came on today and we're about to hit record we saw that Kyle Rittenhouse had been found innocent of all charges.
So we do not have anything prepared for that.
We have not analyzed it in any depth because it just happened.
Dan, I just want to offer one thought on this and then we can talk about it in the future, of course, and I'm sure that the reverberations of the case will be rippling out today and throughout the next little bit here throughout the country.
One of the things that happened this week that I planned on wanting to talk about was that Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of a gun charge, right?
That, you know, you're not supposed to have a gun.
He's a minor.
You know, you can't have certain types of guns, et cetera, right?
There was also a curfew charge.
And it just struck me, Dan, that like, there's such a, we live in such a strange country, strange being, you know, the operative word here, that you can be a minor, You can't vote.
You can't buy cigarettes.
But if you drive across state lines, right, holding a handheld killing machine that shoots however many rounds, you know, per minute, an AR-15, that that is somehow not against the law.
Right?
That to be 17 years old and out, you know, and to drive into a situation where you are walking into what is, whatever you want to call it, what's happening that night, a riot, an uprising, etc.
There's nothing, we're saying as a society, regardless of even discussing the murder charges at the moment, That we live in a society where that's okay.
That you can be a child, drive across state lines with a handheld killing machine, show up, and sort of enter the fray of what is a very unsettled situation.
And the judge and the law say, yeah, that's good.
You can do that as a 17-year-old kid in this country.
No problem.
I think that's an indication of where this country is at when it comes to guns, handheld killing machines, and our approach to violence, especially when it is a white male involved.
Like I said, this just happened.
There's more thoughts here, but we'll have more time for those in the future as all of this unfolds.
Anything quick, Dan, before we jump into other stuff?
Just to say I want to be really clear so people know that this is it's not about like sort of evading this but this is really raw and for my my part and we you know we were talking before we we started recording just wanting needing some time to process this because you know Yeah, there were a lot of things going on there.
There were the comments that the judge made, you know, in kind of pre-trial stuff that seemed problematic to me as a non-specialist on legal things and different things like that.
But I think, I guess what I'll leave it with is that for a lot of people, no matter what the technicalities of this are, it's going to highlight that the justice system is not Oftentimes just, and needing to sit and sort of think about what that means, and where to go with that, and to think through that.
So, very raw, very intense, and again, like you say, I think it's something that we'll come back to, but for myself, I just need some time.
Well, and you know, friends, I'll just be honest, we're not a hot take show, okay?
So, we're a show that We're never going to be social media superstars because we don't do hot takes and crowd-pleasing one-liners in those ways.
And I think a lot of you will listen to us because we don't do that.
And so it's one of those unfortunate, I mean, unfortunate is the wrong word, but it's an American thing.
horror story uh and it's also the timing of it means we just can't do it today so we will uh we will keep our eye on it and we hope that y'all uh will too and take care of yourselves in the coming days.
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