Brad and Dan discuss Putin's war on Ukraine and the Christian nationalist/GOP responses at home. They focus the first segment on how the only people on the global stage defending Putin openly are Donald Trump and select politicians and leaders from the GOP. This leads to an exploration of the Christians who admit that they identify more with Putin's Christian values than Joe Biden's leadership.
Link to Brad's interview on Putin and American Christian nationalists: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/im-a-fascist/id1441649707?i=1000519920471
Video of Lauren Witzske praising Putin: https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1496937857839153168
The second segment explores the frightening anti-trans legislation at play in Texas.
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AXIS Moondy AXIS Moondy You're listening to an Irreverent Podcast.
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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.
Here today with my co-host I'm Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
It's nice to see you, Brad.
Other people can't see you, I do.
You're in California wearing like a fleece shirt and like a big knit cap and I'm in Massachusetts where we're getting 8 to 12 inches of snow today and I'm in a t-shirt.
So I don't know what world we live in.
I wanted, well, okay.
Last week I shared some opinions about French detective novels.
Today I want to share some opinions about French fashion and Northern California fashion.
So, uh, I am a middle-aged man, dad, uh, middle-aged man, Dan.
We're off.
You are also a man.
I'm just going to say like you are now a man, dad.
So well done.
Oh, some levity ahead of some very, very heavy content for today.
So I am a man dad.
Thank you.
That's on my card.
It's on my business card, Brad Onishi, Man Dad.
And that means that I'm like always the guy now in the house who's like, let's turn off all the lights.
And why is the temperature up so high?
So I often walk around with a knit cap on.
A sweater.
But I will say, Dan, that here is my riff that if no one asked for, and I have no other place to share these opinions, so I share them here, because my wife doesn't want to hear them, and nor do my friends, so all of you have to listen.
When I lived in France, it became clear to me that many of my Parisian friends wore a scarf no matter how hot it was, and they just, it didn't matter if it was 90 degrees out, wearing the scarf.
10 degrees out, wearing the scarf.
And they had an array of scarves, maybe 50 scarves, who knows, And they could tie them in the most elegant and beautiful ways.
I was like googling how to tie scarves because there was just so many different iterations.
To me, it showed that the French person, at least a lot of my French friends at least in Paris, were just comfortable wearing a scarf.
And they felt a little naked if there was no scarf around their neck.
Even if it was like, I would look at them and be like, Pierre, it's 88 degrees.
And it's like, well, you know, and then they would tie the scarf in some beautiful way.
The Northern California person, Right.
We have fog.
We have semi-cool weather.
Don't, don't tell me about winter in Vermont.
I don't want to hear about it.
I'm just saying we have cool enough weather that calls for the knit cap and I surf.
So when I go right at four in the morning and it's 39 degrees out, when I get out of the car, I'm always going to wear the knit cap.
The knit cap for me is the scarf for the French person, Dan.
I just feel naked without the knit cap.
I don't care.
I have a t-shirt and shorts on.
I'm going to wear the knit cap.
You can make fun of me.
Go ahead.
But that's where I'm at with it.
Does that make sense?
That does make sense.
I'm just going to, just for the future of the man-dad thing with the knit cap, I'm just going to point out, I won't name the company, but the company with the insurance company that warns of becoming your parents, I'm just going to say I own that.
I live it.
And when my kids see those commercials and like, you do that, Dad, I'm like, yes.
Yes, I'm middle-aged now and I do that.
So, yeah.
No, it's fine.
The knit cap thing, I get it.
I lived in Seattle for years, and you could always tell, like, the people who kind of wanted it to be Northern California because they were always wearing the knit cap, like, all the time.
Even when it was raining and, like, it was soaked through and, like, dripping down their face, they'd be like, no, I need the knit cap because I'm from San Francisco.
Yeah, that's it.
That's it right there.
All right.
A couple of things.
So one more light item, Dan, before we get into some very, very, very heavy stuff.
Last week, we talked about Presidents' Day, and I wondered if anyone did Presidents' Day barbecues.
Well, guess what?
No one does apparently, but some great listeners reached out and said they sent out a Presidents' Day card for their baby.
to uh share with friends and family about their their baby and they dress the baby up in different outfits of different presidents so i'm going to post this to our social media later but uh it's pretty pretty impressive this little baby is Lincoln and Washington and all kinds of things so Pretty cool.
So that is there.
And just shout out to y'all.
Thank you for being the best listeners ever.
Okay, Dan, we are recording a couple days after Vladimir Putin decided that he would engage Russia in an invasion of Ukraine.
And so we are now living through What is, in essence, the most egregious and serious land war in Europe since World War II.
I know that there have been other conflicts, and friends, I'm not trying to overlook other wars and other invasions, but Ukraine is the second biggest country in Europe.
It's a huge country geographically.
And Russia has essentially invaded.
Dan, I have a lot of things, and I think you do too, to relate this to American politics and American Christian nationalism.
I think we want to spend some good time here talking about the reactions of American Christian nationalists to Putin and why there's such a just enamored tone from politicians to preachers to The Charlie Kirks of the world.
But I think it's worth just saying, what are your initial thoughts, Dan, on Russia and what is happening in Ukraine?
Neither you or I are foreign policy experts, neither you or I have PhDs in Russian history or are people who've spent time doing fieldwork in Ukraine.
So we're not coming at this from that angle, but with something this heavy and this big, it just seems worth it, Dan, to say, hey, you know, what is your initial two-minute thought on this?
I think so first of all in the media age right like watching this build up and I think the publicity of it right and like the publicity of the U.S.
sharing intelligence like what would normally be classified intelligence briefings about like that this was going to happen and the timeline and things like that I think and we can talk more about this I think that was probably Biden hoping that there'd be some reality check uh To the GOP in particular, and of course that didn't happen.
So that was one piece, just the media piece.
But for me, and I apologize if people are tired of hearing this, because if you've listened to the podcast for a long time, we've talked about this before, but for me it is still this sense that at this point, to me, the Christian Nationalist response, the American Christians that support this, the Fox News people who are like, You know, hey, Putin never tried to kill any of my family, so like, why is he so bad?
Any of that is not surprising.
It's to be expected at this point.
But I still go back to what it would have been like if something like this had happened when I was in, say, high school, right?
And how different the articulation of Christian nationalism has become In America, with regards specifically to Putin and Russia.
And I think that that's really, really striking.
And I think it shows how much Christian nationalism in the US has metastasized and developed since then, right?
I say a lot, Christian nationalism is not new, right?
The view that we're a Christian nation, That the kind of real American is somebody who's straight, white, Christian, patriarchal, and on and on and on.
The country was founded on those notions.
But the form that it takes now, again, it's a striking testament to that.
The fact that it's, at this point, not surprising.
A few years ago, The support for Putin kind of caught me off guard, but by this point in time, I'm like, well, yeah, it's to be expected.
And people who are younger than me, who've grown up with this kind of Christian nationalism, or come into adulthood or political consciousness, you know, since 2000 and later, probably are like, you've got to be kidding me.
Like, you know, how could you be surprised by this?
I think it does show how much that movement has developed to metastasize, and that's what really stands out to me.
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