Brad and Dan begin by discussing the new Florida school curriculum that forces teachers to tell students that enslaved people received some benefit from their enslaved condition. Dan reports on Gov. Ron DeSantis' claim that enslaved people would have been able to develop trade skills and other "personal benefits."
In the second segment Brad outlines the controversy surrounding Jason Aldean's song "Try That in A Small Town," explaining why it's code and what the history of lynching and other violence tells us about it.
In the final segment the hosts discuss the right-wing temper tantrums in reaction to the Barbie movie.
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AXIS MUNDY AXIS MUNDY 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, here today with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
It's always nice to be with you, Brad.
You too, Dan.
Last week we ended by dreaming about becoming social media influencers who would buy Lamborghinis and Camry.
I just want to like comment on this because I haven't gotten over it.
I would get the sport model.
I just want to be clear.
So like it would have like a little spoiler.
So it'd be cool.
I just haven't gotten over this though because you went from Lamborghini, which for the record, neither of us have ever ridden in a Lamborghini or gotten close to one.
I don't, you know, for what it's worth.
But then you went to Camry, like you didn't want to go from like Lamborghini to something like, it was a real big, you know, I mean.
Yeah, I would probably, if I cared nothing about the environment and whatever else, it'd be some like giant Humvee kind of thing with like the snorkel that you can use to go across rivers when like, or go to Starbucks where everybody drives them.
Like everybody always buys the SUVs that are all like jacked up and they got that like big giant jack on the back and like they slow down for speed bumps and stuff.
Yeah, they're like, all right, let's go to Panera.
Yeah, exactly.
So, there is, I believe, an Electra Convee these days.
So, maybe that's what you want to go for.
Yeah.
That's clearly, that's the Goldilocks zone for me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
All right.
The people were wondering, you know, the thousands of emails, texts this week, wondering why Dan went from Lamborghini to Camry.
So, if you don't know what we're talking about, A, don't worry about it, or B, listen to last week's episode.
It just goes to show how easy it is to slide into either or thinking, right?
It's like one or the other with nothing in between.
So, you know, it's what we always talk against and yet here I am.
I fell into the trap.
On that note, let's get into it today.
So we got, last week was really, I think, presidential politics heavy.
A lot of Trump, a lot of DeSantis.
I mean, this week we want to jump into a bunch of cultural zeitgeist issues.
The first being a report out of Florida that there are doctors leaving the state because of certain policies.
And that follows, of course, on the heels, Dan, of something that more people will know about, which is comments from Ron DeSantis that...
Perhaps those who were enslaved learned valuable life lessons and skills that they used to later or something.
And the Florida school curriculum that is teaching students that not all aspects of enslavement were bad and etc.
I'm gonna let you jump into that in a second.
We'll talk about that.
We then need to get to something that I'm sure most of you listening are aware of by now and that is Jason Aldean's song.
Try that in a small town and just kind of Want to dig into some symbolism.
Want to dig into what small towns mean to a lot of folks and the idea of try that here and what that code sounds like and feels like for people of color and others in the in the country.
Finally want to talk about Barbie and some of the backlash and temper tantrums thrown by conservatives about Barbie and what that means and so on.
Dan, talk to us about Florida.
Once again, you're Florida man, Dan Miller, Florida man.
I hope that you get that tattoo someday.
I will design it if you'd like me to, but Dan Miller, Florida man.
Tell us about the curriculum and the doctors.
Yeah, so I guess I'm now like Dan Dan, the Florida man.
There it is.
Being named Dan, I just want to throw this out there, Dan Dan, the fill in the blank, Man, anything you can put in there I've been called.
So that'll be the new challenges for people to like come up with what I haven't like haven't had that filled in with.
We need to warn everyone.
So we usually record at like the break of dawn in the morning when it's really we're trying to wake up and drink coffee and get our minds into all this stuff.
We're recording in the evening this week and I feel like Dan we're just punchy we have all the jokes so we just need to warn everyone that this week is going to feel perhaps a little more Something than other weeks.
I don't know about you.
I've had a couple of iced coffees.
I'm feeling great.
So I just want to throw that out there.
I'm great, but it's almost 7 o'clock p.m.
my time.
Just like that's time to put the Camry away.
Start going to bed.
So I'll do the best that I can.
I'm an old man.
Get the wax down the Camry, put the cover on.
Yeah.
Put the leftovers from Denny's in the fridge.
Commercials about like turning into your parents.
Like that's, yeah, that's me.
All right.
So literally, literally no one is listening.
Literally people have turned this off and it's only us talking to each other right now.
Whatever.
All right, go ahead.
Go ahead.
So in Florida, People heard about this.
I want to start with some background, right?
Because a long time ago, months and months and months ago, you and I talked about laws and regulations being passed in different kinds of states and coming out of school boards and things like this that prohibited teaching about race or identity or quote-unquote controversial topics or things like that that would, and this was the language, right?
That they would make people feel discomfort, right?
That they would feel uncomfortable.
Or that they would teach people that somebody could be racist simply on the basis of their race or ethnicity or whatever.
And with those two things, those are both code for white people.
Stop talking about stuff that makes white people nervous.
Stop talking about things like institutional racism or a history of racism or whatever that can make white people feel like, you know, They're still participating in problematic structures and so forth.
I said then, I always want to say, nobody has ever claimed that people are born racist or something.
That's just another one of those views into the psyche of the right, to think that that's what's being claimed.
But these were the issues, right?
Is that you couldn't talk about things that would make people uncomfortable or produce discomfort or distress.
And everybody knew that what was being targeted were things like, as I say, diversity, movements like Black Lives Matter, and on and on and on.
And we said, and I don't think we're the only ones who said this, there were critics of this who said, yeah, what's going to happen when you can't talk about, say, the Holocaust, or you can't talk about anti-Semitism, or you can't critique Nazism or something, because somebody somewhere might be like, well, you know, I'm not sure I think that was such a bad thing.
I'm a little uncomfortable that you're talking about this.
And what was told is that, of course, it won't go in that direction.
There were even people who tried to give this, I think, what they thought was a sophisticated response.
They said, well, those are matters of settled history.
They're not controversial and so forth.
And I think you and I and a lot of people said, yeah, whatever, let's just wait and see.
All of that brings it up to some of the stuff that came out this week, A past couple of weeks.
We know that in Florida you've had these battles with the College Board about the AP course in African American Studies.
You've had a revamping of higher education to do away with teaching about all different kinds of issues that are considered quote-unquote woke.
Ron DeSantis has put forward what he calls an anti-woke curriculum and all of these kinds of things.
And so the Florida Department of Education, with DeSantis' backing, he's tried to play dumb about this since then and be like, I had nothing to do with that, where the rest of the time he's, this is DeSantis' land.
Everything that happens is, you know, at my bidding.
But they put forward new black history standards that, among other things, requires instructions for students that has to include, and I hope we're ready for it, End quote.
This, of course, led to backlash.
People defending it have said, well, we're talking about things like they knew how to farm, and maybe some of them knew how to do blacksmithing, so they had a trade because they were slaves.
Because, of course, there were no white farmers who weren't slaves.
There were no white farmers who learned blacksmithing and didn't have to be a slave to do it.
There's been obviously lots of backlash against this.
People out of Florida, representing Florida, of this mindset have tried to defend it.
And on Fox News, I think it was on Monday, the show The Five, Jessica Tarloff, who's a liberal-leaning person in this thing, she said, she was critical of this, and she questioned whether these standards could be applied to the Holocaust.
And this is what she said.
She said, I'm not Black, but I'm Jewish.
Would someone say about the Holocaust, for instance, that there were some benefits for Jews?
That while they were hanging out in concentration camps, they learned a strong work ethic?
That maybe you learned a new skill?
She throws this out there, and this is what caught my attention, because this is exactly what we said.
It's the kind of thing that sucks that you were a victim of attempted genocide.
That's too bad.
But, you know, hey, look at the bright side.
You you're a better person for it, I guess.
I mean, that's that's the kind of logic that she's saying is going to come out of this.
The host Greg Gutfeld said and responded, and this earned criticism from everybody, from like Auschwitz Foundation in Germany, to the president's spokesperson, to everybody else.
He replied, And he asked her if she had read Man's Search for Meaning, a best-selling book written by Viktor Frankl, who was imprisoned during the Holocaust and described the atrocities committed in the camps.
And what he said was, this is a quote, Frankl talks about how you had to survive in a concentration camp by having skills.
You had to be useful.
Utility.
Utility kept you alive.
So, I don't know if this needs like a warning or something, but that sounds to me way too much like Arbeit Macht Frei.
This is a little too close to like, you know, you'll be free through your hard work in the camps or whatever.
This has brought all the denunciations and others.
The Auschwitz Memorial said in a statement, and I feel like this was worth saying, they said, being skilled or useful did not spare Jewish people from the horrors of the gas chambers, right?
Why do we bring all this up?
I bring it up because it's exactly what we said would happen.
And what it is, I think, and I'm interested in your thoughts on this here in a couple minutes, is it wasn't all bad kind of historiography.
It's the version of history that's the, well, yeah, but not all white people.
Or the responses to the MeToo movement, well, yeah, but not all men, or not all straight, like that defensive kind of response.
And here is the, well, it wasn't all bad.
You shouldn't talk about Nazism and the Holocaust and these things as if they were all bad.
You shouldn't talk about antebellum slavery in America as if it was just a straightforwardly negative thing.
Here's the thing, being resilient, Being able to survive, being stronger or more capable doesn't validate suffering, right?
That's something that happens in spite of suffering, not because of it, right?
People going through, remember, I had grandparents who lived through the Great Depression.
They weren't better for living through the Great Depression, right?
They might have been stronger, they might have been more resilient, it didn't make them better.
Victims of assault or abuse may be more resilient.
They may come out and talk about being stronger.
It doesn't mean that it was good that they went through this.
It doesn't mean that it wasn't all bad.
And it's the same thing with slavery.
It's the same thing with the Holocaust.
It's the same thing with all of these.
So that's the first part for me that really stands out is this notion that, well, it wasn't all that bad.
But the other deeper issue that I see, and I'm interested in your thoughts on this as well, is a deep sort of There's a cultural Christian trope here that validates suffering, that valorizes suffering, that even says suffering is good for you.
The Christian tradition obviously has a deep strain of sanctifying suffering, right?
Jesus is the suffering servant, the one who suffered for your sins.
I've talked about some of this.
It's in the Code Series.
I think that's another piece of this.
Once you start looking at suffering as necessary for somebody's purification, for their strengthening, for their benefit, we're taking down a road where no matter how horrific something is, hey, you know what?
There could be some good sides to it.
In fact, it might be the case that the worse the suffering is.
The more upside there is, that you'll emerge from it stronger, or I guess, you know, with some good skills, or whatever else.
So that was the sort of story.
I'm interested in your thoughts on that, and especially those kind of latter points that really stand out to me as the really abhorrent pieces of this.
Yeah, I mean, three thoughts and I think a prologue.
The prologue is, obviously, there are folks who have endured trauma and that trauma has set their life on a path that is filled with pain and filled with a lot of wounds.
And sometimes, when you read the accounts of folks who have endured trauma, whether Any kind.
They talk about how it's formed their character and they wouldn't be who they are now.
Dan, I can say that.
I wouldn't be here with you unless I had become an evangelical.
Now, does that mean that I'm going to get on here and talk?
Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that even if one develops virtues such as resilience or persistence or courage in the face of inhumane conditions, there is no reason to somehow try to justify the inhumane conditions, right?
Human beings are amazing.
Human beings will find courage and persistence and creativity and resilience in all kinds of contexts, but that doesn't mean I have to then be like, that justifies the Immeasurable inhumanity of Nazi Germany, of Auschwitz, of the Middle Passage, of the genocide or attempted genocide of indigenous people here in North America, so on and so forth.
So that's the prologue.
One of the words you used, or excuse me, you didn't use it, you quoted it from the Florida teaching standards was personal benefit.
Personal is the word that sticks out to me.
It's amazing how this is being spun because the idea behind being enslaved, if you are an enslaved person, is that you are not a person.
You are property.
There is no person.
There is no personal.
There's no personal benefit.
The idea is you are property owned by someone else.
So there is no teaching folks like, oh, Dan, my first job ever was at McDonald's.
And I remember people in my life telling me, this will teach you hard work and this and that.
And the time I was 16 and I didn't really want to hear that.
There's, I don't know, I guess I could sit, have a nice tea and maybe talk about how working at McDonald's taught me some of those things.
I don't know.
I haven't thought about that a long time.
That is a fundamentally, qualitatively, overwhelmingly, 100% different situation.
Then learning how to be a blacksmith or farming skills when you are an enslaved person who is considered property, when your humanity has been stripped in every dimension and in every way.
If you don't do that, you have no purpose and you will be, you'll be sold or you'll be killed or you'll be worked to death or, or whatever.
I mean, that's the flip side of this.
It's a survival mechanism that's necessary.
It's not, as you say, oh, you're getting some personal skills.
You get to really build your CV out of this.
This will be really good for your resume someday.
And even if you do do those things, we'd be remiss not to point out that you are likely going to be the victim of sexual assault if you're an enslaved woman because you were vulnerable to the plantation owner and others around you.
The second part that you said, second word that you said that I wanted to comment on was comfort.
You talked about how the idea is not to make anyone uncomfortable.
That's the sort of, The impulse behind these Florida curricula changes and the reasons that people don't want children to learn about things such as the history of enslavement in this country and that kind of thing.
And I said this the other day when I interviewed Nick Fish about what's going on in Texas, but we talked about comfort and we talked about how the American atheists put up some banners in 2019 that said, in no God we trust.
And there was a lot of backlash and some people told the media, that makes me uncomfortable.
I'm a Christian.
Okay.
And the response that both Nick and I had was like, being uncomfortable doesn't mean that it's not okay, that it's unlawful, that it shouldn't be allowed.
Like, sure, that sign makes you uncomfortable.
We live in a society that is multicultural, that is pluralist, that has various points of view.
I mean, that's what free speech is.
That is what separation of church and state is.
Here's my point.
If you are a woman in this country, if you are a BIPOC person, if you are LGBTQ+, if you're an immigrant, there's so many people in this country who accept that they are going to be uncomfortable for reasons, not by dint of just living in a multicultural society or pluralist society, but because they're not the majority, they don't have all the power,
And they have to face a public square that often marginalizes them, often makes them feel as if they are less than, that they are second rate, that they are in danger, that whatever.
And whenever I hear about these curriculum standards, I'm just like, the ability for white Christian parents to confront ideas and things that make them uncomfortable, not because they're being marginalized, not because they're being threatened or intimidated, but because there are ideas, there are histories, there are events that are really hard to face.
And the inability to stomach any discomfort, any willingness to sit through being out of your comfort zone, which is a total Christian buzzword, is always shocking to me in these cases.
And so, that really sticks out in terms of everything you talked about.
I have one more, but back to you.
Finish your thought and take us into some of the ramifications of these things.
Well, I guess the last point for me to make about this is, because you'll hear this, Clarence Thomas said something along these lines recently in the decision that he penned for the court or his response to it.
We hear other people say it, and oftentimes the line is, well, you liberals and progressives who want to tell us how bad everything is, you reduce black people to just victims.
They're just reduced to victims, or you reduce women to just victims when it comes to things like the Me Too movement or this or that.
It's again this kind of Orwellian doublespeak that we're actually the ones who are disempowering people or something like that.
Everybody recognizes the distinctiveness of American patterns that emerged from the African American community That originated in antebellum slavery in this country.
We're talking about distinctive spirituality, or music, or food, or artistic culture, or just demographics, American demographics, and all the things you've talked about so much in your work, right?
With population shifts and things like this.
That's another thing that you'll hear from the Uncle Ron at the cookout, is that somehow or another, If we say slavery was bad, like full stop, I'll put a period at the end of the sentence, that's what I'm going to say.
It was bad.
And I'm sure there may be some weird historical exception that I don't know of, but in America, black people weren't slaveholders, white people were.
That's how it worked.
That's bad.
Full stop.
Doesn't mean that I'm erasing the strength of people who came through that, the distinctiveness of our culture that you can trace back, whether it's all the ethnomusicologists who will trace back the origins of hip-hop to Afro-American traditions and all of those kinds of things.
That's fantastic stuff.
Those things can all be true without having to say, well, slavery wasn't all bad.
And somehow or another, you can't appreciate Barbecue or jazz or whatever else, unless you somehow soften your stance on slavery.
Well, I mean, that brings me to my final point, which is just why are we at a place, why are we at a place where, you know, Greg Gutfield on Fox or Ron DeSantis on the campaign trail are in this place where they have to, like, why do we have to talk like this now?
Like, why does, why do they feel like this is something that, and here's why, because for me, I think the question is always, all right, what is this doing?
Like, what does this accomplish?
We can tell them the history is wrong, but what is this doing for them?
What it's doing for them is saying, this prevents us from large-scale reflection on the histories of enslavement, of the Middle Passage, of whatever we want to talk about when it comes to American history.
And it reflects, excuse me, it prevents reflection on those things in a holistic way in the past, meaning there is no need to ask what it might mean for the present.
Right?
So there's a very practical reason that they're doing this.
It is because if you start down this road of whatever DeSantis says about life skills or Gutfield says about Viktor Frankl and resilience, what they're doing is saying we don't have to reflect on those histories in their holistic sense and therefore we don't have to reflect on the present and how the present might still have remnants
Vestiges, dynamics of those histories and those pasts in it that are refracted into our current public square.
That's what it's doing for them, okay?
Let me just throw in one more thing here, Dan, before we go to the doctors.
Byron Donalds is a Black Republican representing Southwest Florida.
And Donald's introduced DeSantis at his re-election victory last year.
Now, Donald's has praised much of the new black history lesson plan.
This is coming from Spectrum News.
However, here's a quote from Donald's.
That being said, the attempt to feature the personal benefits of slavery is wrong and needs to be adjusted.
That obviously wasn't the goal, and I have faith that the Florida Department of Education will correct this.
So, Byron Donalds is a Republican.
He's a DeSantis ally.
He was the black Republican congressman that introduced Ron DeSantis when DeSantis was re-elected last year.
What happens when Donald makes this comment on the benefits of slavery and said, I mean, this is how he frames it, that obviously wasn't the goal and I have faith that they'll correct it, right?
He's giving them, I mean, this is a benefit of the doubt statement, right?
Here's what happens.
Did Kamala Harris write this tweet?
Asked Kristen Pusha, DeSantis' former press secretary and current campaign rapid response director.
Supposed conservatives in the federal government are pushing the same false narrative that originated from the White House, tweeted DeSantis government spokesperson Jeremy Redfern.
Maybe the congressman shouldn't swing for the liberal media fences like Harris.
Sensitive much?
Education commissioner, Manny Diaz Jr., responded indirectly, saying this new curriculum is based on truth.
He also sent a letter to Florida superintendents affirming the curriculum would be in place unchanged going forward.
We will not back down from teaching our nation's true history at the behest of a woke White House, nor at the behest of a supposedly conservative congressman, Diaz wrote.
Like, sensitive much?
Insecure much?
Like, and I'll just say one more thing and I'll throw it back to you.
People ask me all the time, how can there be, what do you say?
You guys are always talking about white Christian nationalism and all this stuff.
What about the black Republicans?
What about black Republicans like Byron Donalds or Tim Scott or Herschel Walker?
And one of the responses I always give is that I can't speak for those people and they obviously have agency and choice and freedom and they are exercising their human abilities and capabilities in those domains.
But I will say that I do believe that they are often used When they are figures that can benefit the GOP and someone like DeSantis and they are easily and quickly whisked away when they are not.
When they bring up being a person of color it becomes a problem and you get this like Ridiculous schoolyard bully tweeting storm after Donald's, an ally, gives them the benefit of the doubt and is sort of just like, I'm sure they'll get this right, but I don't agree.
It's incredible, Dan, that like, going back to the discomfort comment I made, just like, how Childish!
How thin-skinned, how insecure do you have to be to provide this, like, multi-pronged response to someone who's one of your allies in Florida?
So, alright, back to you.
So a theme that I've been on for a while, and I think it didn't, I didn't discern that it was a theme until, you know, I'd said it a few times, but one is that as we listen to this rhetoric, we often get this view into, I keep calling it the sort of the fever dream understanding the right has about what the left thinks or what people who aren't conservatives think.
And this is one of them, right?
Because I think there's honest-to-God shock sometimes.
Like, well, how can you critique that?
A Black person said it.
Like, literally, that this stuff is — like, they accuse people who aren't conservatives of being fixated on race.
All they can see is race.
They're like, well, a Black person said it, so it must be fine.
Miguel De La Torre, theologian, ethicist, he was one of the panelists at our Denver event.
Friend of the show.
He writes in his book, he's written a lot of books, but he writes, and I think this is really, really crucial, that whiteness, or what I'll call white ideology, the ideology of, say, white Christian nationalism, it's not about skin tone, right?
Not all men are anti-feminist.
You can be a feminist and be a man.
It's not about your gender.
You can be a trans-feminist and be a cisgender person.
You don't have to be a white nationalist just because you're white.
And guess what?
You can hold to white Christian nationalist values and be a black person.
It's possible.
And then everything you say, we've talked about this before, that to get into the clubhouse As a person of color, you have to be the right kind of person of color.
You have to stay within the lines.
You have to stay within your lane, which is being the kind of token representative of a minority who espouses what the white majority wants you to espouse.
And as soon as you don't, We'll show you the door.
And that's exactly what you're describing in the response to that tweet.
So I think there's so many dynamics in this.
I hear it from students.
I hear it from people as well.
Like, well, how can you criticize this person?
They said this in black.
Because it's not about one's own racial identity.
That doesn't determine what ideology we hold.
All right.
We got to take a break.
We'll be right back.
We'll jump into Jason Aldean and Barbie coming up.
Be right back.
All right, Dan, right before we get to Jason Aldean and try that in a small town, give us real quick a report about doctors leaving Florida and what that means.
And I have some comments on this, too.
So what's going on?
I will make this quick.
I was sitting with a friend the other night who is a doctor, and we were just talking about stuff.
I live in Massachusetts.
It doesn't have the abortion restrictions and so forth, but he made the comment.
That he can't imagine practicing medicine in some of these jurisdictions, whether it's ethically, because you can't do things you need to do for patients, whether it's legally, because you're afraid of being sued or whatever.
And I brought up to an article that I came across, it was CNN, I think it was Maureen Chowdhury, who wrote it, and they solicited doctors, physicians who were sort of like, and how they had been impacted specifically about Roe v. Wade, but other things.
And what it highlighted, Brad, were doctors who said, they're leaving the states that they're in.
There were doctors, they had one person who I think is doing their residency now and was planning on going back to their home state of Idaho to practice and now doesn't know if they will.
They're an OB and doesn't know if that's something that they can do there.
The reason it's significant for me is not just that.
I think, and this is something I'm watching for over time, I'm interested if there's going to be a kind of brain drain of some of these states, right?
Because it's not just that, it's the revision of curriculum.
Are school teachers going to want to teach in these states?
Are college professors going to want to teach in these states?
There have already been people who are saying that they're anticipating fewer out-of-state students in Florida universities because of some of these kinds of things.
I'm interested in seeing, you know, is that going to happen, number one?
And number two, what are the effects going to be?
Because what it's going to do, and I hear some people, and I feel this to some extent, say good for them, right?
Good for them, don't go, don't support this, don't be part of it, whatever.
But it also means that some of these states are simply going to harden the lines that they've drawn, because the medical community that's left, they're going to be anti-trans.
They're going to be anti-abortion.
The college professors who are there are going to be college professors who really, in my view, don't understand the subjects they teach if they think the things that they think about things like race and gender and so forth.
That's what got my attention was the fallout that is beginning to come into view from these kinds of crackdowns.
Yeah, and I think this is not isolated to Florida.
So, right now you have a lawsuit in Idaho against M and Bundy.
M and Bundy is famous for the Bundy family and their standoff at a federal land preserve.
Last year, just real quick, he spread the rumor that there was child abduction happening at a hospital in Idaho.
I could go into the details, but I'm not going to.
Essentially, now being sued for millions and millions of dollars.
And however, what's the point?
The point is there's a lot of doctors and nurses and healthcare practitioners who had their information doxxed, whose homes were being picketed for essentially no reason, who had people following them, harassing them, and so on.
That is happening in Idaho.
It's happening in Florida.
You're already seeing it.
I can just tell you anecdotally, I have friends who have left Positions at Texas universities because they feel the restrictions.
I have had friends who have told me that they're thinking about leaving places like Idaho because they are in the medical profession.
So we're going to see that and I've said this on this show a bunch.
I'll say one more time and then we'll leave it.
I don't think we've come to grips with how the pandemic changed American migration patterns and I think we're going to see that even further with these kind of policies and the hardening of right-wing laws that we're witnessing in Texas, Florida, Idaho, all kinds of places.
We will see, come 2026, What this looks like.
We will see in voting patterns, we'll see in the ways that people enroll in colleges, we'll see how it affects teachers, we'll see how it affects doctors and nurses, we'll see how it affects a lot of people.
So, all right, let's move on to something I'm sure a lot of you have heard about, you might be sick of by now, but I think we should talk about.
Jason Aldean is a 40-something country music performer, and as many of you, he Put out a music video for his song Try That in a Small Town, and the song was getting some traction, but it really took off.
It really kind of created a buzz when the video came out.
Now, when the video came out, the uproar was over a bunch of things, but a lot of it was Let me break this down because I got so many thoughts in my head about this.
So the video shows him singing his song, try that in a small town, performing in front of the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia.
Okay.
This is a courthouse where in 1927, Dan, a black teenager was lynched.
So Henry Choate, a teen, was accused of assaulting a white 16 year old girl.
According to NBC News, he was jailed, but a mob of hundreds of white people kidnapped him from his cell.
He was tied to the back of a car and dragged across town and eventually hanged.
So, we have a country music star, a white man, singing in front of this courthouse and saying, try that in a small town.
Now, the other images from the video are a montage of mainly urban settings where there are uprisings.
It could be Portland, 2020.
It could be major American cities.
There is footage from other countries, right?
And the video does a couple things, Dan, and it does things that we've talked about in the show.
It sets up an urban-rural divide.
It says that the cities are the places that are being destroyed, that are unsafe, that are not where you want to raise a family, where good moral values are not in place.
The cities are not the moral center of America.
And in fact, that's not where the real Americans are.
The real Americans are in the small towns where they have morals, where they have values, where they have family and faith.
And where if you try things, you try things that are woke or out of bounds.
If you try things, well, we'll just see how far you get down the road.
That's what the song, that's what the song says.
Okay.
Now, Aldean, at a show in Cincinnati, went on to defend himself and talk about how he was being targeted.
So he says this, And everybody's entitled to their opinion.
You can think something all you want to.
It doesn't mean it's true.
So he's basically saying people are suggesting that he's this, he's that.
He talked in other places about how he's been accused of creating a lynching song and stuff like that.
Here's what he says at the concert.
What I am is a proud American.
I'm proud to be from here.
I love our country.
I want to see it restored to what it once was before all this BS started happening to us.
I love my country.
I love my family.
And I will do anything to protect that.
I can tell you that right now.
So, yeah.
Dan, it's like a greatest hits of nebulous vague MAGA statements.
I'm proud to be from here.
Okay, great.
I love our country.
I want to see it restored.
So when was it good?
When was it great?
We've asked that question on this show a thousand times.
Was it the 1950s before the Civil Rights Movement?
Before the end of Jim Crow?
I mean, I'm not going to get into it.
When was it great, Jason?
Okay.
What is the stuff that started happening to us?
Who is us?
Who is them?
Can you decode that for me?
Who is the us here?
Who is the them?
Who is the we?
Who is the not we?
I love my country.
I love my family.
So there's the family stuff.
The family is always it.
Well, I'll just do anything to protect my family.
When it comes down to it, partner, I'm here to protect my kids and my wife.
That's what I do.
And I will do anything to protect that.
I can tell you that right now.
That last statement is the, to me, the center of the song.
It's that veiled, like, I'm just here because I love my country.
What are you talking about?
I'm not even doing any, like you ever have a brother in the backseat, right?
It's like, I'm not even doing anything.
Except for I'm doing everything I can to irritate you, my little brother in the backseat.
I love my country, I love my family, and I'll do anything to protect that.
I can tell you that right now.
I'm just a proud American.
I've been accused of all this stuff.
What's wrong?
Kristi Noem, governor of South Dakota, says this is a matter of cancel culture.
I can't believe it.
Marsha Blackburn says this is cancel culture, the enemy of freedom of expression.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders says the Democrats are more concerned about Jason Aldean's song than calling out looters and criminals and stopping them.
Jason Aldean is a fantastic guy who just came out with a great new song.
Support Jason all the way.
MAGA.
Donald Trump.
Jason Aldean says, I'll do anything to protect that.
It's that very subtle.
I'm just a guy from a small town who loves his country and loves his family, but I'll do anything.
I will do anything to protect them.
And all the images in the video show us what that means.
Guys with guns, people willing to act on this protection idea, okay?
None of the Republicans who have jumped to his defense said anything about the content of the song.
It was all just, if you criticize someone and what they say, it is cancel culture.
It's wrong.
I can't believe you would do that.
This is incredible.
What's your problem?
All right.
I got a bunch to say about small towns.
I got a bunch to say about try that in a small town.
I got a bunch to say about what that means to a lot of people in this country, but give us some initial reactions to this.
Yeah, and I'm sure some of the initial reactions are the same as your initial reactions.
Like, number one is a concert in Cincinnati.
I just, I want to throw that out.
The small town of Cincinnati.
You're absolutely right.
The part of this, you know, we talk about Christian nationalism and the identity of like, who are the real Americans?
I think a mythos of the countryside and rural life and small town America is a big part of that.
But the right that valorizes that absolutely needs urban centers.
All those states that they're in, guess where the big producers are?
It's the big cities.
It's not the small towns.
That's why Jason Aldean is not performing concerts at towns of 5,000 people.
He's got to go to a population center so he can make money, which is what he's doing.
Like, another wrong with making money, but let's not pretend that that's not what that is.
I think another piece about it is that he says he wants to have the country restored, right?
I love our country.
That notion says everything.
It's the same thing that I always come back to, and you just said it, but it's the restored to what?
Right, like what is the mythical golden age for you?
Because it's going to be the time before all those uppity people of color started demanding their equal rights.
It's going to be before all those nasty women, to use Trump's term, started saying, you know what, enough of rape culture and hostile workplaces and whatever else.
Before all the people started marching and voting because it turns out that they think that people should have access to abortion care and so forth, right?
Just sort of on and on and on.
And I think you're right.
That language of, you know, I would do anything to protect that.
I think that's Not very subtle.
I guess we could call it a code, but it doesn't sound like a code.
You just said you would do anything to protect that.
I'll let you take us into the symbolism of the courthouse a little bit more in a few minutes, because I think that's going to be part of this story.
But here's the other part.
I think most people, if it was just an accident, I just was picking a small town courthouse.
That's all I was going for.
And you're like, do you know that this thing happened in 1920?
You'd be like, oh my God, shit.
No, I didn't know that.
Wow, like time to get some other stock footage to throw in the background, or we're going to green screen this up, or whatever, we're going to fix this.
No.
When the response is defensiveness, I feel like that's a real signal of what's really going on with that.
And the last point I want to make, we're going to talk about Barbie in a minute.
Please, people on the right, stop your crying about cancel culture as you try to cancel everything woke or everything else.
What you're calling cancel, it's free speech.
People want to criticize his song, they'll criticize his song.
People want to do crazy stuff like point out the history of the actual building that's used as the backdrop, they'll do that.
They don't have the power to cancel him.
People can buy his albums or not, but that is the biggest Not the biggest, there's so many dog whistles, but one of the biggest dog whistles on the right is this language of so-called cancel culture, which in its sort of irony is used to try to cancel out any criticism of anything that they do.
It drives me absolutely crazy.
But it links up with DeSantis and the curriculum we just talked about, right?
So on one hand, I'm going to claim That I didn't know.
It's white racial ignorance.
I didn't know that this courthouse symbolized this and this happened there a hundred years ago and blah, blah, blah.
Also, I'll do anything to protect my family.
I didn't know.
I didn't know.
Who knew that?
I don't know.
Nobody taught me that.
How was I supposed to know, right?
That's what that does.
And we're also going to make sure that nobody can teach you that.
That's what I'm saying, yeah.
That's the other, the carefully cultivated ignorance.
It's like plausible deniability, right?
I'm going to make sure that nobody can ever tell me or my kids or my grandkids this, and then that will forever be our alibi.
For maintaining the white supremacy that we're supporting.
But I'll do anything to protect my family.
And that's the two impulses right there.
I didn't know.
How was I supposed to know?
And try it, bro.
I'll do anything to protect my family.
Now, this week, Biden signed on to make happen the monument to Emmett Till and to Emmett Till's mother, Mamie Till Mobley.
Emmett Till was 14, Dan, when a white female grocery clerk accused him of whistling at her and making inappropriate advances during a visit to family in the Mississippi Delta.
That was later known to not have happened.
As she said, he was then abducted and tortured and his body was dumped in the Tallahatchie River.
Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W.
Millam, both white men, were tried on murder charges but acquitted by an all-white jury after an hour of deliberations.
That is what happens in small towns in American history, okay?
And I'm not trying to signal out small towns and if you're from a small town this is not me saying everything in a small town is bad and all small... No, it's not what I'm saying.
But what I am saying is when people of color, when black people, when indigenous people, when people of color hear Try that in a small town.
What resonates with them are stories like that of Emmett Till.
1886 when mobs forcibly expelled most of Seattle's Chinese residents in February of that year.
And that is not an isolated incident.
The mob attacks on Chinese folks living on the West Coast are numerous.
You can read about them.
I can point you to those if you would like.
Then there's Hood River, Oregon.
Where Japanese-American soldiers, men who fought in World War II honorably in the most decorated regiment in U.S.
national military history, the 442-100th Infantry, returned home to Hood River and were not welcomed.
Where the American Legion refused to put their names on the plaque that celebrated the boys from their town who fought in World War II.
Okay?
We could talk all about small towns and sundown towns across the United States, and I'm not just talking about the South.
We have April 26, 1960, a white mob attacks black demonstrators at a segregated Mississippi beach, okay?
Um, we could talk about sundown towns themselves.
Okay.
Sundown towns were towns where if you were black or Chinese or Jewish or any other number of minoritized identities, you needed to be out by sundown.
Otherwise you might be attacked by vigilantes, such as the KKK.
So if we look at a book called Sundown Towns by Lowen, Author says that beginning in about 1890 and continuing until 1968, white Americans established thousands of towns across the United States for whites only.
Many towns drove out their black populations, then posted sundown signs.
Other towns passed ordinances barring African Americans after dark or prohibiting them from owning or renting property.
Still, others established such policies by informal means, harassing and even killing those who violated the rule.
Some sundown towns similarly kept out Jews, Chinese, Mexicans, Native Americans, or other groups.
There were sundown towns with a population of 500, like the Land, Illinois.
There were also those that were much larger, such as Appleton, Wisconsin, which had 57,000 people.
Dan, we're going to run out of time.
What I want to say is this, if you decode Aldean talking about all this stuff that has happened to us, talking about real Americans, talking about protecting his family, What I hear is somebody saying that this is the real center of America is, that this is the moral compass.
This is who we are as a nation.
And if you try certain things here, okay?
If you are someone here who's talking about certain things, if you're living a certain way, if you have a certain identity, we might tell you to go back to China.
We might tell you that you are an N-word.
We might tell you to not be Somebody who is trans or gay or queer in any way, lest you pay the consequences.
Because I'd be remiss not to mention one other person who entered a small town and paid the consequences, and that's Matthew Shepard, who on October 7, 1998, a 21-year-old student at the University of Wyoming, was brutally attacked and tied to a fence in a field outside of Laramie, Wyoming, and left to die.
So I don't have to do this for all of you listening.
Most of you know this.
But when somebody says, try that in a small town, okay, what I hear as a person of color, what many people with marginalized identities, what black and indigenous people hear, what Jewish people hear is, don't go there because you're not safe.
Don't go there because it may not be a place where you're welcome.
I'll give you one more example, Dan, and I'll shut up.
My dad moved to California from Hawaii in 1966.
He moved to downtown LA.
He lived in an apartment with four generations of his family.
He shared a bedroom with his mother and his grandmother, and in the other bedroom was his sister, his brother-in-law, and his nephews.
A friend invited him to visit her in Orange, California, Orange County, where eventually I grew up.
And when he visited her, he said he got off the freeway and he was so nervous, he was shaking, and he drove the exact speed limit, and he was looking all around him at every speed, at every stoplight, because he was convinced that in Orange, California, The John Birch Society was going to jump out of the bushes at any moment and attack him.
He thought if you get pulled over by a cop, that cop is going to call the John Birch Society or the KKK and they are going to come get you.
That was his fear.
As a Japanese man who had not really lived in California for very long and didn't understand what it was like to be in a majority white situation.
That fear is not one that has gone away for many people in the country.
So when he says, try that in a small town, that's what a lot of us hear.
All right.
Let's take a break, come back and talk about Barbie.
Be right back.
All right, Dan.
That was a lot.
I went on a little bit of a rant there.
Did you want to jump in on Aldine at all or you want me just to go into Barbie?
The only thing I was going to say real quick is I understand affectively like some of that what the romanticism of the small town.
I graduated high school in a town of 3,500 people.
I had moved there from a metropolis of 10,000.
I get that.
The town I graduated high school from was also the 12 minutes from a place called Alex, Arkansas, that in 1970, Brad, still had a sign that said, inward, don't let the sun go down on you and Alex.
1970, the things go together.
The pieces go together.
And I guess I would just say for people who don't have your experience, who don't have the experience those people do, listen to that experience.
Talked a lot about empathy, and it's in the code this week.
Listen to that experience and understand that that romanticism comes at a price.
And again, it's the willful ignorance of what the small town has meant to so, so, so many people.
And this is not us saying small towns are bad.
Please don't walk away thinking we hate small towns and we just have judged them.
Dan, you just talked about you grew up in a town of 10,000 and moved to a town of 3,500.
My mother comes from the Boothill, Missouri.
I have gone home to hang with our cousins and our family.
I've lived in small towns in Virginia, and this is not us saying they're unilaterally bad.
It's just us saying when you, Jason Aldean, say try that in a small town, that's code.
We know it's code.
We know what you're saying.
We know what you're saying about where you live and what you're trying to do.
Let's talk about Barbie, Dan.
Barbie seems to have like single-handedly, along with Oppenheimer, which Thoughts about that, I'm not going to share right now, are going to seemingly revive like the theaters by themselves.
People are actually going to the movies.
Go Barbenheimer!
Right?
Barbenheimer is like bringing people to the theater, like out of their house, into a place with others where they're watching a screen.
It's like unheard of.
Something out of the 2010s.
Who knew?
Right?
However, not everybody is happy.
So there is a like concerted right wing outrage against Barbie.
Charlie Kirk has talked about it.
And the fact that there is a trans woman who is in the film.
Perhaps most infamously, Ben Shapiro posted a 43-minute video attacking Barbie.
He also burned Barbies, Dan.
Like, again, with the temper tantrums.
Like, just burning Barbies?
Okay, whatever.
So, others, such as Matt Gaetz and specifically his wife, Ginger Gaetz, have talked about how it doesn't represent faith and family.
And I'll just say, because we're short on time, one of the ones that I think caught my eye the most was from a Christian source.
MovieGuide.org.
Warning, don't take your daughter to Barbie.
The new Barbie movie forgets its core audience of families and children while catering to nostalgic adults and pushing transgender character stories.
Furthermore, the movie was poorly made with multiple premises, losing even the most diehard fans.
To make an appealing movie, executives must define their audience.
For Barbie, there was a built-in audience of little girls and merchandise for the movie.
Well, that seems to be wrong, Dan, because the movie made like $155 million in one afternoon.
We're short on time.
What's the point?
I think Amanda Marcotte at Salon makes a great point, and then I'll throw it to you.
This is how the right-wing noise machine works.
It gloms on to an immediate cultural moment, whatever that happens to be, and emits a series of high-pitched whining noises.
This is financially and politically profitable for two reasons.
First, it draws eyeballs.
Conservative trolls attach themselves like ticks to the discourse, drawing attention by becoming an irritant in a conversation that basically has nothing to do with them.
Second, and more important, they use these cultural moments to reinforce a message of alienation and paranoia, separating their followers even further from the majority of everyday Americans and pushing them deeper into the world of hermetic right-wing nuttery.
I don't like the word nuttery there, but for the most part, I like what Marcotte is saying.
This tactic of isolating their audience from everyone else, including family members, strongly resembles the strategies used by cult leaders.
There's a little bit there to quiver with, but because we're short on time, I'll just say this.
I think that Marcotte's right.
I don't think conservatives even knew what to criticize about Barbie.
It doesn't seem to be a coherent set of attacks.
We just need to be an irritant, and we need to be counter-cultural for the sake of being counter-cultural.
It really serves as a way to heighten fear and paranoia.
We've talked about it before.
It's a world of others and a world of scary villains who are trying to attack your family and your kids.
It's a world where all your values are being wasted away.
And Barbie is just the next example of that.
So it just sets people apart further from from American life and the majority of American people.
A lot of people love Barbie.
There's a lot of money being made on Barbie because people are actually going to see it.
And yet if you listen to Movie Guide or you listen to others, it's totally out of touch with the American people and American ways of life.
So, all right, off to you before we got to go.
I think what terrorizes or really terrifies, I should say, the people that are so opposed to this is that people are not turned off by it, right?
I'll be quick too.
You see the strategy of trying to make it about families and children.
It's not marketed to families and children, right?
They may not know this, but there are these things called like movie ratings and PG-13 movies and R movies and things like that are not for little kids.
So that's a piece of it.
But I think that's what actually concerns them is that lots and lots of regular grown-up people have gone to this movie and watched it.
And this is a case where They miscalculated, right?
As you say, they're swinging for this.
They got Target to pull down Pride things.
They got, you know, Starbucks to pull down Pride things.
But in this one, it's showing the lack of impact that they're having.
I think that's another thing that's going to be... It will work to maintain their sense of isolation.
But I think it's interesting to watch a really epic fail on the part of the right to actually swing public opinion on this.
I think that that's really significant too.
All right, I got two reasons for hope.
So one is that Michigan just banned conversion therapy.
So Michigan, if you're not watching Michigan, it continues to be basically Midwestern blue success story.
And what's happening in Michigan may be a light post for the rest of the country.
So I think that's really good news.
You go, I got one more, but you go ahead.
What do you got?
Mine is similar to something that I've talked about before, but it continues to develop and I think gains steam.
Good article this week about the ongoing effects of the like judgments and censures and things like that against lawyers associated with election denialism all over the place and the role that it played in J6.
The reason I think that's significant, I've talked about this before, but I still think it's there, is I think for a long time in America, there has been this sense that if you're rich, if you're powerful, if you can have a lawyer, you can do anything.
You're sort of untouchable.
And I think that this may be something of an inflection point with that, as we're beginning to see the people who are the spokespeople for this Being called on the carpet, so to speak.
Rui Giuliani's license is being banned.
You've got people retiring before they can be disbarred.
You have people being censured by courts in Colorado.
I just continue to take hope in that as there's accountability for that.
I think it has the potential to be significant moving forward to 2024, 2026, and beyond.
So my last one is that there's a Vietnamese American city council person in Morrow, Georgia, and they have called out certain aspects of things in the past, but most notably, recently, they supported ballots that are multilingual.
And so what's happened is that supporting that has led to just huge backlash.
So the council member is Van Tran and what happened after the backlash is that thousands of people came out to support this council member in Georgia who's Vietnamese American and is advocating for things that would help their community.
So I think that's good news.
All right, as always, friends, find us at Straight Y at JC, find me at Bradley Onishi.
You can always use your help on PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo.
We got a bunch of new patrons, Dan, and we just can't say how thankful we are for all of you.
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We do this the best we can three times a week.
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We'll be back next week with a great interview that's in the code, the weekly roundup.
