For the end of the year Weekly Roundup, Dan provides his airing of grievances in the great Festivus tradition. Brad's to come soon.
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Call this maybe a Festivus event or something like that.
What this really is, as I think about it, and those of you who know me and listen to me will know this is probably not surprising, sort of a little bit of a year-end rant.
A little bit more Grinch than Cindy Lou Who.
Certainly, let's say, more Krampus than Santa, if you like.
As Brad and I were talking about this, just thinking about some things that are sort of on our mind, like sort of general overarching over the past year or month or whatever, things that don't necessarily fit into what we do in the Weekly Roundups or things that I do and it's in the code.
I'm not going to keep you too long with this, but giving some thought to this, the first thing that came to mind was something that Ties in and overarches with a lot of things that we've talked about over the last year.
But it's a general, instead of any one of those things, it's the general overarching issue.
And for me, it is just the issue of this kind of hypocrisy and Orwellian logic that overarches so much of what goes on with contemporary American Christian nationalism, the politics of the right, and so forth.
The things that we talk about And sort of this really came to mind for me this week again.
We were confronted with a scandal.
Everybody knows about Moms for Liberty.
We've talked about Moms for Liberty for a long time.
Came to prominence during the COVID era and, you know, opposing mask mandates and school closures and things like that at a time when those were really hot-button issues.
Gained control in a lot of school districts and school boards, and as we know, has become a potent political force, really about issues primarily now related to anti-LGBTQ efforts, banning books, modifying curriculum, and so forth.
Well, there was a big scandal recently.
Bridget Ziegler, who's a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, has been involved in a sex scandal.
Apparently, she and her husband, who was the party chair of the Florida GOP, were involved in a consensual relationship with another woman, okay?
Now, that's not the scandal, or there's nothing scandalous about that.
Adults doing what they do, doing what they want to do, whatever kind of relationship, fine, cool, good, whatever.
Unless, unless you have made your political bones on being an anti-LGBTQ quote-unquote traditional family values sort of person, right?
And then it becomes blatant hypocrisy.
The reason it blew up is that the woman involved has accused Ziegler's husband of sexual assault.
He has been stripped of his powers as party chair in the Florida GOP.
Bridgette Ziegler is under pressure to resign from the school board that she's part of.
They had a vote, I think a non-binding vote.
I think it was four to one for her to step down.
The only vote for her to not step down was from her.
So on and on.
But why do I talk about this?
We talk about moms.
It's not about Moms for Liberty.
It's the hypocrisy of it.
It's the hypocrisy of building a political movement around a notion of family values, anti-LGBTQ, whatever.
While you are busy, if you are Bridgette Ziegler, And her husband, but Ziegler in particular, having sex with another woman.
Pretty much any way you slice it, if you're female identified and you have sex with other female identified people, that puts you somewhere on a spectrum of queer sexuality.
Again, that's fine.
Everybody should be able to do what they want if it's with other consenting adults.
It's the hypocrisy of claiming this identity and this brand that she has built.
But she's not alone in that.
It links to me with other stories that we've talked about.
Earlier this year, we talked about Lauren Boebert.
Hardcore, MAGA, right-wing, Republican, traditional American values, etc., etc., etc.
All the same rhetoric.
Made news when she was kicked out of a Beetlejuice performance in the Denver area.
She was there with a date, and ostensibly, originally, it was that they were kicked out for being, you know, disruptive and vaping and so forth.
And her people, of course, came out and said that this was false and that she wasn't doing this.
Turns out there's video of it.
It was more than just that.
They were sort of groping each other and making out at this, like, family-friendly event and so forth.
She had to come out and issue an apology and said she fell short of her values and so forth.
So that's one piece of hypocrisy, but it goes further.
It turns out the guy that she was dating was a bar owner.
Her campaign had spent hundreds of dollars at his bar, but among other things, what does a bar do?
It hosts drag shows.
So once again, we've got somebody who builds her brand, as it were, on taking down the left, on traditional family values, on an anti-LGBTQ platform, and on and on and on and on.
And what is she doing?
She's dating a guy and supporting an establishment that hosts drag shows, okay?
Again, I have no problem with drag shows.
I like drag shows.
I think drag shows are fun.
I absolutely do not think that drag shows are inherently bad or that they have to be lewd or unsafe for children.
They're obviously like adult-themed drag shows, but there are drag shows that are fun.
And we talked about the kinds of events at libraries with drag queens reading books to kids.
Affirm all of that.
I think it's fantastic.
I think it's a huge part of queer culture, and I love that it is gaining more of a mainstream following.
I think that that's good for the queer community.
The issue is, again, the hypocrisy.
But that's like par for the course.
On the right now is just this blatant hypocrisy and this sort of Orwellian logic of this.
Let's go further.
Let's talk about SCOTUS.
We've talked about SCOTUS a lot of times this year.
SCOTUS that refuses to have a code of ethics.
The Supreme Court doesn't have a code of ethics.
Every other level of the judiciary does.
At least the federal judiciary.
They refuse to do it.
You've got conservative justices coming out with, like, hackneyed, twisted up reasons of why it is that they don't need a code of ethics.
And why does the issue come up?
The issue comes up primarily because of our buddy Clarence Thomas.
Who has done nothing but, in my view, abuse his power and authority to, you know, gain lavish gifts from the largesse of big-name donors and things like this.
This is to say nothing about what I think are conflicts of interest with his partner and her efforts overturning the election with J6.
I know we're not doing a regular Weekly Roundup, but the news just came out that the Colorado Supreme Court has ruled that Trump can't be on the ballot for 2024.
This will now go to the Supreme Court.
We talked about Jack Smith issuing a request for the Supreme Court to determine whether or not Trump is immune from prosecution.
Guess what?
Ginny Thomas backed election conspiracies.
We know this.
It's public record.
And there's nothing that makes Clarence Thomas have to recuse himself or step aside when those issues are directly confronted at the court.
Again, blatant hypocrisy of saying, well, we don't want an ethics code, we don't need it, we hold ourselves to a high standard, all while it's increasingly public that they don't.
Let's go to another really contemporary issue in this level of hypocrisy.
Elise Stefanik, a representative from New York, very visibly over the past few weeks went after the presidents, particularly of MIT, Harvard, and University of Pennsylvania, about issues related to anti-Semitism and whether or not those universities were doing enough to protect students from anti-Semitism. about issues related to anti-Semitism and whether or not those You know the story.
We talked about it.
Those presidents flubbed their answers badly in front of giving their congressional testimony when asked if their codes of conduct for students would prevent people from calling for the genocide of the Jewish people.
I said it then, let me just repeat.
Yes, those codes would come down on students for that.
Free speech does not include threats of violence to individuals or groups.
That's how they should have answered.
They didn't answer it.
Huge fallout.
We know this.
The president of the University of Pennsylvania was forced to step down.
The others are holding on.
Harvard came out in strong support of their president.
But lots of lots of cries, hewing cry for them to step down.
What does all that matter?
It matters because this week, or over the last couple of weeks, Donald Trump has in his anti-immigrant rhetoric, basically started quoting Mein Kampf, talking about immigrants poisoning the blood of America He has referred to them as vermin in the past.
He's getting called out for this.
He keeps using the language and has now assured us that he hasn't read Mein Kampf.
Okay?
Just a thought for everybody out there.
If you have to, like, defend yourself and say, well, no, no, no, no, no, no, I didn't get that language from Mein Kampf.
It kind of makes us think you got it from Mein Kampf.
And he said that, you know, basically he said he's using the same language but in a very different way than Hitler used it.
All of this, I mean, everybody, it's evidence to everybody that he shouldn't be talking this way.
But what do we hear from Elise Stefanik, the one who is so concerned about making sure that we're inviting and protecting everybody and making sure that everybody's safe and standing up against dangerous language and violence against others?
Nothing.
Silence.
Nothing from Elise Stefanik, right?
So, these are just some examples.
The rant that I have here is just the hypocrisy of it, and going beyond hypocrisy to, as I say, the Orwellian language, the sort of doublespeak of having all of these policies and this language and these actions that are about quote-unquote family values, that are about providing safety, that are about acceptance, that are about protecting other people,
On and on and on, when the aim is to target people, to explicitly make particular segments of the population unsafe, to make it so that millions of American families don't get to express their values, their love, their traditions, whatever it is.
They don't get to be what they are.
On and on and on.
So, this is my first kind of rant of the ones that I have here.
I guess what I have is, you know, wishes for these folks over the holiday season.
Not that Santa will come and give them a lump of clay, but that Krampus can come and sort of carry them away where they can get what they deserve for the evil that they have done over the years.
Very into Krampus lately.
I find the Krampus myth very fascinating.
That's the first thing I've got.
Hope you enjoyed it.
I know some people love the Dan rants, others maybe not so much.
So from me to you this holiday season, my first rant of the Straight White American Jesus Festivus episode.
Hi, my name is Peter, and I'm a prophet in the new novel, American Prophet.
I was the one who dreamed about the natural disaster just before it happened.
Oh, and the pandemic.
And that crazy election.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not bragging.
It's not like I asked for the job.
Actually, no one would ask for this job.
At least half the people will hate whatever I say and almost everyone thinks I'm a little crazy.
Getting a date is next to impossible.
I've got a radio host who is making up conspiracies about me, a dude actually shooting at me, and an unhinged president threatening me.
But the job isn't all that bad.
I've gotten to see the country, and meet some really interesting people, and hopefully do some good along the way.
You can find my story on Amazon, Audible, or iTunes.
Just look for American Prophet by Jeff Fulmer.
That's American Prophet by Jeff Fulmer.
Welcome everyone to my second sort of rant or set of reflections.
If we're being academic, we call them a set of reflections.
If I'm being me in a grouchy mood, I'll call it a rant.
The second sort of swage, festivus, best wishes for a visit from Krampus episode.
My second theme that I've been thinking about is related to the Christmas holiday season.
There are two lines of sort of discourse that tend to go around this time of year.
I've talked about them and it's in the code before.
The first is a kind of discourse of those who don't identify as Christian or maybe they do but they don't think America is a Christian nation or whatever.
And these are the people that basically bemoan and note the kind of Christian privilege of this time of year or the kind of cultural Christian hegemony that continues to hold.
And these are the people that will sort of look at, you know, all the Christmas songs.
So the fact that we celebrate Christmas and that there are lots of other holidays that sometimes figure, sometimes don't, or there might be people for whom this is not a holiday season at all, but that the focus is always on Christmas.
And that can take different shapes.
Sometimes people celebrating alternative seasons or turning to kind of neo-pagan, yuletide re-appropriations of traditions and so forth.
Whatever.
A criticism of a kind of what they see as a cultural Christian hegemony, okay?
The other one that we've talked about, that I've talked about specifically on It's in the Code, is the whole war on Christmas kind of thing, right?
The line that has come from the right for years, That there's a war on Christmas and that America is turning away from its Christian values and that things like saying Happy Holidays or noting Kwanzaa or Hanukkah or certainly neo-pagan festivals or whatever are all signs of the moral decadence and decay of America that we're turning from our Christian values and so forth.
Okay?
Those are sort of two main discourses.
I don't want to talk about those in this.
This is not what this is about.
Could talk a lot about those.
Have talked about those some in the past.
But what I want to rant about is a whole new sort of discourse that has kind of come to me in recent weeks.
And it's interesting because Christmas songs figure prominently in, I think, this one as well as the kind of secular critique of Christian hegemony and so forth.
But there has lately, as I've come across it, A few people have said, well, you know what, actually, that war on Christmas thing, that's not the real issue.
The real issue is that the holiday season and all the Christmas songs they play, they prove that the Christian nationalists are wrong, that this is still a Christian nation, that all of you secularists and you people who hate America and hate religion and everything else, you godless, atheist, communist folks, That you're all wrong.
America hasn't changed.
America is not secular.
America really is Christian after all, and this is the time of year when we see it.
When we come into the holiday season—they wouldn't say holiday season—when we come into the Christmas season, this is where we see the real Christian heart of America.
And what is their evidence for this?
Their evidence for this is none other than—wait for it—Christian songs that play.
And we know, you get whole radio stations that, you know, Thanksgiving night, they switch over and it's holiday music from then on.
Certainly Christian radio stations, Spotify playlists, what have you.
And if you listen to those, if you can palate those, I know some of you can't for lots of reasons, there are lots and lots of holiday songs that are focused on Christmas and that have religious Language.
Songs like O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, all the Noel songs, The Little Drummer Boy, Three Kings, Angels We Have Heard on High, Silent Night, on and on and on and on and on.
Christian songs.
Christian songs with Christian lyrics.
Sometimes so Christian, I was reading a list in Rolling Stone the other day of the worst Christmas or holiday songs that weren't all Christian.
But they were really mocking the lyrics of one.
Like, these lyrics are crap.
They're really terrible.
I don't know who came up with these.
And the lyrics are straight from the Bible, right?
Like, that's what the lyrics are.
That Rolling Stone was like, these are trash lyrics.
They're just straight from the Bible.
That's how religious the language is!
So the evidence of this reasoning is, if America wasn't a Christian nation, you wouldn't have all these Christian songs.
The fact that everybody plays these songs, that pop artists and bands release their albums, their holiday albums, and they play these songs, and all these secular radio stations that spend the rest of the year playing godless, terrible music that features too much sex and has queer artists and whatever.
Nope.
This time of year we see what they really are when they play these heartwarming Christian songs.
It turns out that America really is a Christian nation after all.
This drives me nuts.
This is such a stupid argument that I guess it's only worth bringing up in a year-end Festivus Wish-You-A-Visit-From-Krampus episode of Straight White American Jesus.
Why is it stupid?
Here's the fallacy.
And honestly, I think that sometimes this fallacy is operative in the opponents of a kind of cultural Christmas as well.
That would be a bigger discussion.
But here's the thing.
For most of those performers, It's not Christian songs.
They're just a part of a broad culture of holidays.
A holiday culture.
Has nothing to do with religion.
Now, are there religious artists who release albums?
Yes.
Are there religious folks who, in their worship services or singing along in their car or whatever, for whom these are deeply meaningful religious songs?
Yep, sure are.
Are there churches that perform these?
Yep, absolutely.
But when most people hear these songs, It's not about religion.
It's about nostalgia.
It's remembering hearing these songs growing up.
Maybe, maybe it's about, I don't know, Christmas Eve candlelight service or something like that and they've got warm memories of that.
Doesn't mean that they still identify as Christian or that they go to church or that they practice Christianity in any way.
Certainly doesn't mean that it's evidence that this is secretly a Christian nation and we all just miss it the other, you know, 11 months of the year, right?
For most people, these are just kind of cultural artifacts.
They are just part of a holiday that's essentially secular, essentially public.
It's about nostalgia.
It's about being nice.
It's about trading gifts.
It's about getting some time off work and being able to visit family and friends and, you know, maybe just not being an a-hole to everybody.
It's about looking forward to a new year.
Talked about this in the past, I think there are still those kind of midwinter overtones to it that had very little to do with Christian origins.
As we look to a new year, and you get past the solstice, and the days start getting longer—all that stuff!
All of that!
A way to say this for me would be that the affective load of these songs, the things that these songs make you feel, the things that they make you think of, the things that they bring to mind, for most of the people who hear them, it's not Christian stuff.
And I would suggest that for most of the performers, it's not either.
They're just making a holiday album.
Why?
Maybe because they want to.
Definitely because they can make some money.
I don't know how much money Mariah Carey makes on holiday songs, and her famous ones are not Christian ones, but it's a way to make some money.
It's a way to cash in.
It's a way to stay visible.
It's a way to get airplay.
And here's the irony of this.
Many of those people don't identify as Christian.
And not only that, but the same people who want to claim these songs for a month out of the year and say, see?
This proves we're really Christian America.
We really do celebrate Christmas.
Eh, the war on Christmas wasn't successful.
In fact, we'll turn it on its head and show that we're really a Christian nation after all.
These are the same artists that they vilify The rest of the year, these are the same artists that are part of, you know, the Hollywood elite, the same artists that they vilify whenever they come out on social media, you know, on Pride, to celebrate Pride, or to stand with Black Lives Matter, or whatever it is.
These are the same artists they've got nothing good to say about, that they see as part of a corrupt, secular America, 11 months out of the year, but then for a month, they want to claim them and say, see, they're evidence that America really is a Christian nation.
So, That's my other sort of rant.
I wish a happy Krampus visit to those making this argument.
This silly, ridiculous argument that the fact that there are lots of songs with religious lyrics that play during the Christmas season somehow proves that we're really a nation of Christians, the Christian Nationalists are right, evil secularists like me and Brad and probably everybody listening to this have missed it, and so on.
So, I will close with that.
Whatever you do over this season, whether you're a holiday observer or not, whether you burn a yule log and just have some evergreen holly, whether you look forward to the new year, whether it's just another couple weeks for you, whatever it is, I wish you well.
And if you are listening to us and supporting us, I certainly do not wish you a visit from Krampus.
