Weekly Roundup: Go East to Get a Pardon, Young Man.
Brad and Dan begin this weekly roundup with takeaways from the J6 hearings. They focus on the ways the committee demonstrated how Trump and Eastman both knew the theory was illegal, but pushed it anyway. The question: Will it make a difference?
Dan then provides a helpful explainer on the difference between a nation and a state in response to a new statement on Conservative nationalism signed by a bunch of MAGA superstars like Charlie Kirk and conservative thinkers like Rod Dreher. He and Brad decode the words "assimilation" and show how nationalism is incompatible with democracy. This leads to a demonstration of how Christian nationalist rhetoric is leading to violence against the LGBT+ community.
In the final segment they dissect Lauren Boebert's AR-15 christology and the grave consequences it holds. Boebert claims that if Jesus had an AR-15 he wouldn't have been killed by the state. This brings dragging into light the incoherency of Christian nationalism in the face of a religious tradition centered on a crucified God.
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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, after a week break, with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Thanks for holding down the fort, as you always do, last week.
I was camping with the kids, so that was good.
Always good to, you know, be outside after a long semester and just living through the timeline we lived through.
So glad you all got away.
Hope it was fun.
I feel like, Dan, what happens on Fridays is I, like, have digested a week's worth of news and I'm so anxious to, like, get to it that I...
I don't do all the stuff that you're supposed to do, apparently, as a podcaster and somebody who does things.
So you and I, if we were going to be businessmen, would have been businessmen or business people, I should say, a long time ago.
So I told myself I would stop and make the announcements we need to make.
And some of them are pretty exciting.
So you might have heard me say this briefly, but it's time to just really pump it up.
We have our very first piece of Swag merch, and that is a design that says not today and Satan has crossed out and it says Uncle Ron.
So we're not calling Uncle Ron Satan.
We're just saying not today and not today.
The person that is not going to do it is Uncle Ron.
And so we'll put that in the show notes.
But hey, if you're not a Patreon person and you still want to support us, or if you want to just join the kind of crew of people who are trying to respond to Uncle Ron in the best way, we got shirts, we got long sleeves, we've got mugs, we've got stickers.
So check it out.
It helps us here at the show.
You get a pretty cool piece of merch out of it.
And I don't know, Dan, I think the design is pretty cool.
I don't know.
I mean, I'm a 41-year-old dad.
So take everybody listening, take that with a grain of salt.
But I think it's pretty cool.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
I've got a middle schooler with a birthday coming up, and I'm sure that she's going to appreciate receiving nothing but coffee mugs.
Oh, yeah.
So I think I think it'll be great.
No, seriously, I think I think it's cool.
I think it looks good.
Yeah.
And we'd love to love to hear from people with thoughts and ideas.
And yeah.
So check it out.
My nieces just total, I mean, stickers they're going to get.
Yeah.
Mugs.
It's great.
All right.
So that's one announcement.
Another is just want to say thank you to all our patrons.
We're, we're just not the kind of show that we're just so focused on issues and content and like.
The country and democracy.
We couldn't do it without our patrons, and I feel like I don't find ways to thank you enough.
I just want to say we are here and able to do this because of you.
With that said, if you can and have any thoughts about joining our Patreon, that would be great.
You get access to the Orange Wave, which is out now.
You get an ad-free experience and a newsletter and some other stuff.
So check that out.
You can join for as little as $2 a month.
It just helps us do this show three times and sometimes four times a week.
And so we would love it if you could If you could help us with that.
That's at StraightWhiteAmericanJesus.com.
If you want just to listen with no ads and not have to join Patreon because you're a curmudgeon who hates joining things, a la Dan Miller, then you should just click on the show notes and you can get an ad-free experience going that way.
Orange Wave!
Ten part docuseries that I made is out now.
It's in our show notes.
And I have interviews with all the greatest people on this topic, including Kristen Dumais and Gerardo Marti and Randall Balmer and amazing folks like that.
Chrissy Stroop, Scott Okamoto.
And if you want a History of the Religious Right, that's basically a college class in podcast form, and it's focused on my home region of Southern California, then check that out.
All right, Dan, there's the announcements.
We did it.
I feel like the teacher who always wants to get to the stuff in class but never announces all the important information and everyone never knows about it.
That's basically my MO as a professor.
Everyone's always like, when's the thing due?
Isn't there a holiday?
Are we even supposed to be here today?
And I'm like, what?
I was just reading stuff all week.
I don't even know what y'all are talking about.
Okay.
Yesterday, Dan, we had the latest J6 hearing.
It was focused basically on the vice president.
And if there was a main character yesterday, it was the Mike Pence entourage.
It was Pence, but it was also his counsel, his lawyers, his advisors, Mark Short, Mr. Jacob.
And then there was a retired federal judge, Judge Ludic, Who was a mentor to Ted Cruz, apparently a highly, highly respected conservative judge.
This is not a liberal.
This is not a Merrick Garland centrist.
And he had some damning words for for Trump and for Eastman.
So if you made me sort of like.
Illustrate this from yesterday with a comic book cover.
I would put it as Pence versus Trump with John Eastman as Trump's kind of evil sidekick.
I'll just give you some basic facts in and then I'll throw it to you.
So January 4.
John Eastman.
And if y'all don't know who John Eastman is, you haven't been keeping up on that, he's the lawyer from the very conservative Claremont Institute who basically came up with the six or seven point plan to overturn the election.
He is the one who kind of masterminded the idea, along with others.
There were other people, but he's really emerged as the kind of who's consolidated all this, to basically say that the vice president, if he doubts the legitimacy of electors from certain states, could not count those electors or could send the certification process back to the states so that they could recertify.
So he's basically the one who kind of came up with this plan and put it in the ear of Trump.
So he is peddling this plan in the months after the election.
Trump's lawyers.
We saw all of this, Dan, in these hearings.
Trump's lawyers, Trump's counsel, Bill Barr, all of them are kind of like, this is not legal.
It's not legal.
And then when it's presented to the vice president, Pence and his people, they're like, it's not legal.
This is not you can't do this.
This is, you know, as one as one's judge put it, it's basically a coup in search of a of a legal theory.
So, nonetheless, after being told by so many folks, including Trump's own lawyers, Pence's lawyers, Pence's counsel, apparently Dan Quayle was called, and so on, John Eastman admits on January 4th to President Trump that Vice President Pence rejecting the electoral votes on the 6th would violate the law.
So Eastman's basically saying, I am doubting the legality of my own theory.
That night, Trump goes to Georgia and delivers a speech telling Pence that he should do it anyway, okay?
And by the way, this nice summary is coming from the work of Aaron Ruppar, who's a great journalist and somebody you should check out and support if you can.
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