Brad and Dan begin by discussing the final J6 hearing. Brad focuses on the new information that the Secret Service had tips about potential violence on J6 as early as December. They then discuss the released footage of Pelosi, Schumer, et al trying to get military and law enforcement help as the Capitol was under siege.
In the second segment Dan breaks down the verdict in the Alex Jones case. He zeroes in on how the GOP has reacted to the news by playing the victim - as if Alex Jones did nothing wrong and should not be held to account.
In the final segment, Brad discusses Kanye West's anti-Semitism and how it reveals a larger issue in this country: the casual acceptance of everyday anti-Semitism - as well as Christian nationalist's infatuation with Israel, but little regard for Jewish people.
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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 with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Nice to see you, Brad, as always.
Good to see you too, Dan.
I think we're both at that point of the semester.
I always tell my students this is the hard time because we have Thanksgiving break in fall, and so that does not provide a rational break.
So instead of like getting a break at the end of October, which would make total sense, we get at the end of November.
So there's this huge stretch of time, like, and this is where people start getting sick and colds and not wanting to come to class and professors are trying to keep up on grading and failing and blah, blah, blah.
However, professors like us are looking forward to November because we have a live event and y'all have heard about it by now.
So I'm not going to go over all the details.
We have a live event November 18.
Join us in Denver.
I want to answer one question that a bunch of people have asked, which is if you sign up for the live stream, Will you be able to watch it later if you have a conflict or maybe you need to like watch an hour and then go take your kid to, you know, practice or get to family dinner or something?
And the answer is yes.
So if you sign up, we will make sure you can watch the live stream anytime you want and we'll make that available to you.
Second, Dan, we have a brand new sponsor for the event.
Baptist Joint Committee.
So, if you all remember, Amanda Tyler, who is the leader of that organization, came on the show a couple months ago.
Amanda worked with Andrew Seidel to do a report on January 6th, and Amanda and the Baptist Joint Committee lead up an initiative called Christians Against Christian Nationalism.
So, as you can imagine, they're a perfect partner for our event, and we just want to say thanks to the Baptist Joint Committee.
We're super thankful for your support, and we look forward to working with you.
I just want to throw out there, this is, you know, because I'm the, what, the sort of de facto former SBC, Southern Baptist Convention person.
Nothing but love for the Baptist Joint Committee.
Won't go all into it, people won't believe this, but once upon a time, Baptists were really, really staunch defenders of separation of church and state.
They're part of the reason why it's in the Constitution.
And years ago when there were still like battles in the SPC about whether they were going to be moderate or just firmly conservative and so forth, the Baptist Joint Committee kind of held that traditional line of separation of church and state and anti-Christian nationalism and all of that was basically forced out of the Southern Baptist Convention and has been a voice Sort of for that within the kind of, you know, kind of progressive Baptist circles for a long time.
So really, really excited about that and just nothing but a lot of respect and love for the work of the Baptist Joint Committee.
Yeah, no, could not be more excited that they're gonna be sponsoring and helping us to sponsor and make happen this event.
So, alright, Dan, let's get into it.
Yesterday afternoon, there was the last January 6th Select Committee hearing.
It ended with the thing that I think everyone is talking about, which is the committee voting to subpoena Donald Trump.
We can talk about that if you'd like, Dan, and I'm happy to get into it.
My very short and My trite conclusion is that it was good to do because of history and because of principle, and I'm glad they did it.
There's no chance in hell that Donald Trump's ever going to sit down and testify or say anything.
So, happy to talk more about that here in a minute.
What I really do want to talk about, though, is just sort of some of the new things that came out.
If nothing else, these committee hearings have just been great reminders in a time when we're all so distracted by everyday news because of the ways that we consume news now.
These things really do put January 6th and the treachery that happened there back into focus, and I think that happened yesterday, at least for me.
One of the things we learned is that The Secret Service knew more about potential threats ahead of time than was previously understood.
The Washington Post has a nice beast, but so does every other outlet.
And they talk about how they received tips.
They received intel that there were going to be people who were armed and people who were willing to be violent.
As early as December 26th, Secret Service officials were sharing tipsters warnings and had intel that extremist groups had plans to come to the Capitol and were willing to be violent.
The written record says they think they will have a large enough group to march into D.C.
armed and will outnumber the police so they can't be stopped.
Their plan is to literally kill people.
So, Dan, I think this brings up a couple things for me.
One of them is we already knew that there was a grand failure on the part of law enforcement to prepare for January 6th.
If we go all the way back, You know to some of the previous hearings and some of the previous things we learned there.
There's a great report out.
Well, there's there's all kinds of stuff that they can't has come out of the hearings.
But one of the things is and this is actually from Washington Post even before the hearing started is just how law enforcement didn't act on tips didn't act on Intel that they had and so If we go back to the Washington Post from actually almost just about a year ago, it says alerts were raised by local officials, FBI informants, social media companies, former national security officials, researchers, lawmakers, and tipsters, and on and on and on.
WAPO did an investigation with 230 people and thousands of pages of court documents, audio, video, photographs.
And they found that across security institutions in the United States, there was just a grand failure despite having warning that people really were planning this and that there was a president.
Who was encouraging them to come and encouraging them to raise hell and all that kind of stuff.
I think the thing that stuck out here, Dan, and this might seem like minutiae, but it kind of scared me enough to talk about, which is that the Secret Service knew all of this ahead of time.
If there was a kind of circulating set of intel about what was going to happen on J6, and if on J6, they looked out into the crowd, and we have these records now too.
Cassidy Hutchinson talked about it in her testimony.
That they were talking about how people were armed, they were texting each other, that there were folks that might have multiple weapons and that there could be the potential for gunfire.
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