Weekly Roundup: Mad Mirth and the War on Christmas
Brad and Dan begin by discussing how Joe Manchin is giving everyone coal for Christmas, even though coal workers want him to vote for the Build Back Better Act. It shows that his actions are based on corporate lobbying, rather than looking out for his voters.
They then discuss Americafest--the event put on by Turning Point USA where Kyle Rittenhouse was given celebrity treatment.
The episode finishes with a look at how the war on Christmas in America was started and waged by Puritans.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center, UCSB.
Joined today by my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, associate professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Brad, it's nice to see you in this kind of almost the end of the year thing we got going.
I guess we got one more week before then, but feels like we're coming up on the end.
It does.
And yeah, it's I feel like we're both kind of on fumes here in terms of being tired but there are some things to talk about.
Might be a little bit shorter of a weekly roundup today just because we're running up against holidays and families and lots of different obligations.
I this week just quickly Dan will say to folks if you're trying to get a hold of me this week or whatever we had an unexpected thing with our house and we actually had to leave our house because of some toxic fumes that were there.
Everyone is safe and everything is good but we ended up at my mother-in-law's and so A lot of traveling, a lot of changed plans.
So, if you're trying to get a hold of me or you, you know, sent me a message or something, I'm not ignoring you.
It's just things are pretty crazy.
So, anyway.
Okay, Dan.
We are two nights from Christmas morning and that means Santa Claus is coming.
And we all know that if you're on the naughty list that you might get a lump of coal in your stocking.
And it seems as if there's no need for a Grinch this year.
The Grinch can take a year off, maybe go to Cancun with Ted Cruz or something else, because Joe Manchin has taken over that role and is totally delivering coal to everyone as a way to say he's not going to vote for a Build Back Better and so on.
However, Dan, Those who produce or at least mine the coal, uh, are not so quick to, you know, maybe help Joe Manchin deliver all of that coal to everybody, uh, in, in, uh, his role as Grinch.
So, uh, that was a long metaphor.
I did my best to finesse it.
I hope that you all appreciate how hard I tried.
I really did.
I've slept like three hours last night.
So Dan, I tried to hold that metaphor together, like just really string it out.
I'm not sure how successful I was.
It was a long way of saying, let's talk about Joe Manchin, the Grinch, Cole.
I want to then talk about The War on Christmas.
I want to talk about AmericaFest and Kyle Rittenhouse.
And that'll be our show.
So what do you got?
So first it's, I just want to let everybody know they should be around Brad Onishi when he hasn't been sniffing fumes and it's even, it's, it's even crazier.
Uh, no, it is like, so, and I feel like I'm, I'm on the, uh, the, the Joe Manchin train.
I know this is like usually your turf, right?
Uh, to, to be talking about.
Uh, but yeah, so like a lot of things.
So what, what did Manchin do?
He comes out this week and says that he cannot support, uh, the build back better bill.
That's a lot of B's.
There's no way I make it through here and don't like, Flub them at some point.
It's like the triple B bill and said, among other things, he said, you know, he said all along, if you can't go home and explain it, you can't vote for it.
And so he's going to, of course, if he doesn't vote for it, it basically tanks that.
We've talked about this, that.
The Democrats are in this role where you've got people like Sinema and Manchin who are essentially one person vetoes, right?
The interesting thing is, as you say, and you've talked a lot about how Manchin makes all this money from the coal industry, right?
And he positions himself as a champion of coal miners and the coal industry.
That makes sense, you know, it would make sense given where he's from in West Virginia, who he's representing.
But it turns out that the whole notion of, you know, if I can't go back home and explain it, I'm not going to vote for it.
It turns out he wouldn't have to explain much if he did vote for it because the largest union of coal miners in West Virginia wants him to vote for the Build Back Better bill.
Why?
And I want to talk about why.
I want to talk briefly about why this is significant for me and what it says about the GOP and the culture war and white identity and a million other things that go on in America right now.
But it's basically that there are a lot of provisions in the bill that would help coal miners.
Now everybody hear me, they wouldn't help the coal industry, right?
And Manchin has never gotten his money from coal miners, he gets his money from the coal industry.
And this is what people need to understand, is people that get their money from corporations, they get it from management, they don't get it from the workers, right?
That's where it comes from, and that's Joe Manchin.
So, for example, the bill would extend the benefits that can be, that coal miners are eligible for, for treatment for things like black lung, right?
If he doesn't vote for it, then a lot of those funds go away.
The Build Back Better programs would support the development of new industries in former coal areas, right, to help re-employ and retrain and retool unemployed coal miners, right?
That goes away if he doesn't vote for this.
The Coal Miners Union has also said that they support voting rights legislation that Manchin won't support, and we've talked about that a lot here.
And Manchin's spokesperson, the best that they can come up with is that he's always been an ardent supporter of the coal, you know, the coal miners and the union and everything else.
So if somebody says, well, wait a minute, Brad Onishi in particular has talked a lot about Manchin and his yacht and all the money that he gets from coal and how he's beholden to the coal industry.
Why is he now opposed to this stuff that would help coal miners?
It's because Joe Manchin doesn't care about coal miners, right?
He cares about the stockholders in these companies.
And guess how stockholders and companies make money?
They make money by, for example, being able to cut black lung benefits to workers, right?
They make money by being able to cut workers and not having to retrain them or or have provisions where they have to like help them learn how to do other jobs or things like that.
And so it just what it highlights is that Manchin is about the coal industry.
He's not about coal miners.
He's not about workers.
And this highlights something that goes on in the GOP now, and among conservative Democrats.
We've talked about this, that Manchin is very much a sort of Democrat in name only.
As if the Republicans talk about rhinos, the Republicans in name only.
We have a dino here.
And what does all that mean?
Well, we've seen in recent years a move of white collar, or excuse me, blue collar white Americans in particular, white American workers shifting to the GOP.
And in my view, they've been caught up in a lot of things like language of limited government, language of lower taxes, a lot of the culture war stuff about, you know, a kind of American identity.
And there is a lot of white supremacist ideology in some of those circles.
But what we see here is one of those fault lines where it becomes clear to at least some of these workers that it turns out that GOP platform and those GOP talking points, they don't actually help workers, right?
When they talk about lower taxes, they want shareholders to pay lower taxes on capital gains.
They want companies and corporations to pay lower taxes on the profits they make.
They don't mean lower taxes for just real Americans who are down in the coal mines doing the work.
When they talk about benefiting their stakeholders, or when Manchin says, if I can't go back and explain it, I can't vote for it, he means if he can't explain it to the people, the constituents that he might have on his yacht, that he might host there for a fundraiser, he doesn't mean a bunch of coal miners out in the coal fields.
So, Merry Christmas to the West Virginia coal miners from Joe Manchin, as not only do they get to mine coal, but to stick with your metaphor, he gives them a big lump in their stocking for Christmas.
But it just ties up, to me, it's just so emblematic of everything that's wrong with this kind of rightward shift among blue-collar workers.
And highlights the priorities of the GOP.
And again, I know Manchin's a registered Democrat, but we've seen for months now that he's much more in step in many ways with the GOP than he is with the Democrats.
So I'll throw it over to you and see what you thought about when you heard this.
If this was surprising to you, I doubt it.
And also, you know, if you want to tie Manchin to the Grinch some more, I think that that's a worthy endeavor in its own right.
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