Brad and Dan begin by discussing the RNC calling J6 "legitimate political discourse." While it may seem like a blip in a busy news cycle, Dan relates it to the pearl clutching Republicans did about civility and bi-partisanship early in the Biden presidency, while Brad argues that the history books will reveal it as evidence leading to the GOP's development into full-blown fascism. This segment ends with a comparison of this language with the once-upon-a-time concern about Hillary Clinton's emails.
In the second segment Brad takes a semi-deep dive into Putin's assault on Ukraine and how it traces all the way back to the Cold War. There are clues in Putin's worldview as to why so many American Christian nationalists are enamored with him--the binary thinking, the strongman masculinity, and the nostalgia for a lost world.
The final segment is a brief exploration of the trucker convoy protests in Canada and their wider implications for the political moment.
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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 at UCSB, and I'm here today with my co-host.
My name is Dan Miller.
I'm an Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
It's good to see you, as always, Brad.
You too.
I have an infamous rant I always give Dan about February in class, where I usually say, like, every month of the year, you can find something to look forward to, right?
March is usually spring break right and You know May the is like one of the best months in terms of weather and that's usually when the semester ends and You know June July August or summer months and there's no school and you know like there's there's like ways you can just spin almost every month like in February the only thing usually is like terrible weather, especially if you're in in your region and Valentine's Day, which is so fraught with
I feel like we're in the teeth of February's malaise.
How do you feel?
I'm just wondering, did you not get the pyjamagram pajamas I sent you for Valentine's yet?
Because I feel like that'll really lift the spirits.
I like how it's a pajama gram.
I don't even know what that is.
And I don't even want to know because I just, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna look that up later and see.
No, I'm, I'm, I'm with you.
I find February and March just to be kind of a drag, uh, for lots of reasons.
So, yeah.
So it's nice to, to have the lift of seeing Brad Onishi and, uh, and getting to, uh, spew about whatever we, we spew about today.
Well, I think February is... See, the thing about February is you know it's evil.
And to me, that's what I always tell the kids.
I'm like, look, February is the worst.
So if you just prepare for it, then anything that good happens in February is like a bonus, right?
So just do it that way.
March is a false friend.
March is that, like, when you're learning a language, like French or Spanish, and you think, oh, there's a word here, like...
Library in French that must be a library and it's like actually not it's bookshop and like March is the false friend It's like it's gonna be sunny.
It's spring there will be there will be bunnies talking to you and Disney songs playing and then March is the worst and you're like what happened and so Anyway, I have a whole I have a whole rant I give it's it's it's quite fun for me other people who knows but anyway All right, Dan, we want to talk today about something that happened, like, basically as we were taping last week.
It's a week old, but it's really important.
And that is the RNC censoring Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney.
But in the process, in their memo of doing so, they said that January 6th is or was legitimate political discourse.
And there's just so much to unpack with that.
And it may seem like a A phrase in a in a memorandum or in a statement But it really to us signifies a lot about where we're at and I think it's worth looking into we can There's so many levels to that.
We'll then talk about well, then I think do some more foreign Issue foreign policy issues than we usually do and and just sort of international topics We'll have to step outside of our comfort zone a little bit down.
I feel like this is that class.
We're like In the semester where you're teaching the stuff you know the least about and you've got to You know become competent and I think for me It's just relating all that stuff back to why do the Christian nationalists so involved are so supportive of Putin and why are they all so supportive of?
The third thing we're going to talk about today and that is the trucker convoy protests in Canada.
So all that to say Explosive things to talk about.
Let me throw it to you.
We've got the RNC talking about legitimate political discourse.
Greg Sargent and Walpoe is like, you know, you don't call people who think violence such as J6 Republicans.
You call those types of people fascists.
That's a pretty strong statement, but it kind of gets to where I'm at with this.
I'll let you lead us in and unpack this whole issue.
Yeah, so just to set it up as you started to do, the Republican National Committee had a voice vote to censure Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for participating in the January 6th investigation.
It's pretty well recognized.
We've seen similar things with the GOP in Arizona, right, and places like that where somebody, you know, is considered to be too hospitable to Democrats or not pro-Trump enough or whatever.
But they were accused, and this is the part where I guess people could pick apart whether this language was even necessary, right?
You know, I guess they feel like they need some reason to say why they're censoring these people other than they're not supporting Trump.
And so what they said is that they were accused of, quote, the persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.
That was the thing.
If it had stopped with the crowd standing outside like chanting and yelling and having some speakers and whatever, I'd agree.
Yeah, that's legitimate political discourse.
And I support it when people with my politics do that, and I would in principle support it when people with somebody else's politics do that, right?
But what it ignores, of course, is that they stormed the Capitol building.
It was the deadliest attack on the Capitol in 200 years.
Nine people died in connection to it.
150 police officers were injured.
The explicit aim was to try to block the peaceful transfer of power in the U.S.
And just on and on, like everybody knows this by this point in time.
What I thought was interesting, let me just highlight some things that I think are notable about this, right?
And it's going to get into that issue of like, why does this matter?
Because some of these things look like just kind of standard partisan hypocrisy, and there's a layer of that.
But there's also a more significant layer that I think gets to that notion of whether or not this is an expression of fascism or something else or something deeper or more significant.
The first thing to note that I think is significant in 2022 coming into midterms and so forth is the kind of conflicted GOP response to this, right?
Like, so that's the GOP National Committee.
The GOP in Washington has been kind of quiet about this, right?
Like lots of House GOP members didn't really chime in or didn't say much.
There were lots that spoke in support of this.
There were some that spoke in opposition, but mostly they were kind of quiet.
There were some critics.
Mitt Romney was really critical of this and said that they shouldn't have censured Cheney and Kinzinger and so forth.
McConnell, Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader, created a bit of a firestorm when he criticized the events As a quote violent insurrection and like just you know lots of people were opposed to him He said it was violent and so forth, but why do I think this is significant?
I think it's significant because number one it shows the possibility of divisions within the GOP about the ongoing notions of the big lie and stealing the election and one six and leaving aside anything about Biden or the Democrats or how they're doing and The incumbent party usually loses in Congress in midterm elections, and so anything that creates that division I think is worth watching and paying attention to.
It also highlights how populism and nationalism will eat themselves, right?
Because what you're starting to see, right, you get all of this in populism and nationalism and the Trump camp and all of this, the anti-establishment Anti-this, anti-whatever.
Well, the problem with quote-unquote anti-establishment movements is, if they're successful, they become the establishment, right?
And we're starting to see this gap between the National Committee, which has to look at the GOP everywhere, and trying to, you know, run late races in different states, and all of this.
So it tends to be much more overtly pro-Trump, because on the popular level, that's how they're going to win votes.
And the GOP in D.C.
who are now the establishment.
And I'm curious to see moving forward how much any of those GOP figures in D.C.
are able to push back on this, right?
Or will it turn into something?
And this is what I think everybody's afraid of with Trump in the GOP, right?
Is that Trump will do that.
Trump will feed the GOP to itself and start attacking congressional Republicans.
Thereby potentially weakening their chances, all in the name of Trump.
Anyway, I think that this is a dynamic that's often present in any kind of populist or nationalist movement, or we see in religious circles in fundamentalist movements, right?
Anytime you have this sense of a pure, authentic core to the movement that necessarily becomes watered down once you gain power, movements just sort of eat themselves.
That's one that I thought is interesting and worth watching.
The other one is this, which is the hypocrisy things, right?
Remember, and you and I have talked about it on here, right?
All the calls the GOP had for civility.
Every time somebody in the Democrats was considered not to be civil enough, they would just be up in arms.
Or think how they responded when Nancy Pelosi tore the copy of Trump's State of the Union speech in half, and it was just clutching of pearls everywhere among the GOP.
Look at how, you know, uncivil these people are.
Remember when they wanted to pass laws and prosecute people peacefully protesting against Trump when he was elected, right?
Nobody stormed the Capitol.
Nobody tried to stop the transfer of power.
You just had all of this kind of stuff, and now there's this complete double standard.
People can say, well, yeah, we know this game, right?
It's just standard political hypocrisy.
But the piece, and this is what brings us to that fascism question, is it just standard hypocrisy?
Maybe.
But does it also highlight, again, that if you're a populist nationalist, like the Christian nationalists are, like people in the GOP are now, and we've talked about this, if you are absolutely certain that your view is right, and that it has to be defended at all costs, Then this probably is legitimate political discourse, right?
Nothing can be illegitimate if your starting presumption is that what you want should be put in place and or maintained at all costs necessary.
And if that means overturning an election, Then that's fine.
And so that's the sort of scarier moment that I think is highlighted in that WAPO opinion piece, and there were others as well, is the fear that maybe there are a lot in the GOP who honestly do believe this is legitimate political discourse, right?
That this is no different from voting or peacefully protesting or whatever.
So those were some of my thoughts about this, or the concerns about, you know, what does this really mean?
Potential foment of division within the GOP and those dynamics of populism and nationalism.
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