Weekly Roundup: I'm Pro Secret Abortion But Anti-Flute, OK?
Brad and Dan begin by discussing the revelations about Herschel Walker, GOP candidate for US Senate in Georgia, paying for an abortion for an ex-girlfriend. What interests them is how this event (like others) reveals the power-at-all-costs worldview of the GOP and the Christian nationalists at the heart of the party. Such events also show how any criticism of GOP Christians is perceived as persecution - as if they are targets of spiritual warfare, rather than public figures being asked about incoherencies between their actions and policy positions.
In the next segment Brad zeroes in on the reactions the American Right had to Lizzo playing James Madison's flute. His analysis focuses on the theme of racial retribution and a reduction of the world to an us-vs-them mentality.
In the final segment the hosts discuss the similarities among Brazil's Bolsonaro, Russia's Vladimir Putin, and the newly elected Giorgia Meloni in Italy. While they may not be political allies formally, they use similar strategies to foment fear and anxiety in their supporters.
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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.
And I'm here today, although not in the same room, I am here today with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Nice to see you, Brad.
Yeah, last week we were actually in the same physical space for the first time in years.
I don't even know how long, but you know, now we're back to our respective opposite coasts and you're recording from a closet again.
And yeah, so everything's back to normal as it should be.
There you go.
Well, the good news is we'll be back together in like five and a half weeks when we go to Denver.
And we'll be in Denver for our big Straight White American Jesus Live event.
And if you haven't got your tickets yet, make sure to do that.
We have an amazing lineup.
If you haven't heard, we are talking about American democracy, Christian nationalism, and the 2022 midterms.
And we're being joined by an amazing group, Sam Perry, Phil Gorski, Catherine Stewart, Robert Jones, Larisha Hawkins, Jacqueline Hidalgo, Kyati Joshi, myself and Dan, plus Sarah Mosliner, who many of you know already.
So you don't want to miss it, and you can join us virtually, you can join us in person, and we're going to announce the winner at the end of this episode of a virtual ticket.
Someone who sent in a great question, but I want to announce another giveaway, and that's to say we have somebody who very generously donated An in-person ticket.
And so if you would like to attend in-person, we're going to invite you this week to email us at straightwhiteamericanjesus at gmail.com with a question and put in the subject line in-person ticket giveaway.
And we're going to pick one of those and announce it next week.
We're also going to put this on Instagram and our other social media and ask you to share the post.
And so you can either email us or look for that social post.
But anyway, Dan, we get closer every week.
I get more excited every week.
And I just, I'm, I'm really looking forward to Denver.
Yeah, so am I. And you know, obviously, it won't surprise people to say here in a few minutes, we'll be talking about stuff relevant to the midterms and how the midterms look and to have this event following immediately on the heels of the midterms to have these people together to be able to reflect on, on that and to bring their different perspectives on Christian nationalism and religion and politics in the US and the different sort of ways that they view those.
I mean, you know, We want to get into the disciplines.
We have journalists and social scientists and more philosophical types and others who probably all know each other's work, but they're also not used to being in the same room and getting to just talk about this.
I'm really excited for the conversations that we'll have following the midterms about what this means for the future of American democracy and Christian nationalism and the topics that unfortunately we have to spend so much time thinking about.
Yeah, it's going to be great.
And I really do think what's shaping up is a kind of really fun weekend with people like Cortland Coffey and Megan from the Thereafter podcast coming and some other folks that you might recognize.
So we'll definitely have a very serious and heavy event like we do here at Straight White American Jesus, but I think there'll be a lot of time too to hang out afterward, grab a beer, chat informally.
So if you're in and around Denver, if you can drive in for a night, come on down.
We're going to be hanging in person.
And if not, join us virtually.
All right, Dan, here we go.
A lot to talk about.
We have not done this for two weeks because last week was a kind of swadge info session and primer.
So there's so much to talk about.
It's one of those weeks where I think we could probably pick about 12 stories.
As it stands, we're going to talk about Hershel Walker and the GOP and abortion.
We're going to talk about Dr. Oz.
We're going to talk about Lizzo playing a flute and some of the reactions to that.
Also get into what happened in Italy with the election of Maloney and far-right coalition of leaders and how that relates to Putin who gave a very somewhat I would just say bizarre kind of holy war speech the other day in Red Square and we'll talk about how all those are related.
I want to just talk real quick though Dan about something Just for one minute and that is the fact that Hurricane Ian just devastated Florida and specifically the Fort Myers area.
Thinking about all of you who are there, I have family who live there.
My wife's family is from the Northeast and many of them are in Fort Myers and that's a place they go often and so it's a place that many people in my orbit know and love.
We could spend an hour, Dan, on how climate change is real and how we're living through it.
And it's really, we're in an era where this kind of unprecedented disaster will keep happening.
Thanks for listening to this free preview of our SWADGE episode.
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