In this end-of-year episode of Straight White American, Jesus, Brad Onishi steps away from headlines, interviews, and analysis to offer something closer to a sermon—a reflection shaped by grief, exhaustion, and defiance at the close of 2025. Naming this past year as the hardest in the life of the show, Brad traces the weight of watching democratic erosion, state violence, and everyday cruelty unfold alongside ordinary life: birthday parties, school pickups, conversations about weather and sports. Drawing on biblical myth, philosophy, and personal memory, he asks what it means to remain human—self-aware, vulnerable, morally implicated—when it would be easier to numb ourselves, to live like giants who only eat, sleep, and survive.
This episode is an argument for joy as resistance, not escapism. Brad reflects on loss, fear, and doubt, while insisting that the fight for justice is inseparable from the small, ordinary pleasures that make life worth defending: shared meals, family rituals, love, curiosity, creativity, and care. As we look toward 2026, this is a call to hold wonder alongside sorrow—to refuse the theft of our humanity by authoritarians, cynicism, or despair. The work continues, both in the streets and in the quiet moments that remind us why we fight at all.
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Axis Mundy Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad O'Nishi, author of Preparing for War, The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next, and founder of Axis Moondy Media.
Today is near the end of 2025, and so I want to do something a little different.
I used to be a preacher.
I used to be somebody in ministry, and I've also spent so much time in my professional life in a classroom.
And I rarely get to preach anymore, and I rarely am in the classroom, at least right now.
Hopefully that'll change in the future.
I wanted to leave this year, this last Monday that I'll come to you live or close to live or at least close to the time of publication, with something that's not normal.
Usually you're going to hear on Mondays at this show an interview, analysis, something from the headlines, something of deep importance when it comes to religion and politics.
And if that's what you're looking for, I totally get it.
But today I'm going to do something a tad different from that.
And so if you need to go queue up your favorite sports podcast or the bulwark or something else, I totally get it.
But if you want to stick around on the ride, I want to talk about the ways that 2025 has been overwhelming and why we should not give up on joy today or in 2026.
So here it goes.
This has been a hard year for all of us.
There's just zero way to avoid that.
I have felt, if I'm completely honest with you, like it's been the hardest year to do this show since we started it.
A lot of times in 2020 or 2021, 2022, people would ask Dan or me about what it's like doing this show and if it's difficult to find things to talk about or to stay linked into the news when sometimes the news is hard to deal with.
And, you know, my answer was always sure, it is, but we are passionate about this.
We care about it deeply.
We want to help people learn and understand and heal.
And so it is hard, but it doesn't feel like something that's a burden.
But when we got to January and February this year, I think like all of you listening, there was a sense that we were in just territory that was not normal by any standard and was even more terrifying than what we'd lived through before as people who pay attention to the news and do deep dives.
I mean, so many of you in our community are so well read and so attentive to what's happening in your local communities around the country and so on.
In February, I remember being at a birthday party for a preschooler from my daughter's school and the party was at Build-A-Bear in the mall.
I don't know if anybody knows about Build-A-Bear, but that's where I was.
And it happened to be the weekend when Elon Musk was at the Treasury.
And there was just like little bits of news about it.
No headlines, no hair on fire media reports, just a few folks reporting on the ground about what was happening and a few elected officials actually doing anything.
And I had this moment at Build-A-Bear when I was like, I don't know if I can do this because all of these parents here who care deeply about their kids and want them to have a good life and want them to have a good Saturday at this birthday party.
And we're going to build a bear and then we're going to go eat cake.
And that's really nice.
All the while, there's something happening in our government that feels like a coup.
It feels like they're tearing down the democratic experiment that's lasted for the last two and a half centuries.
And no one cares.
We're all just a Build-A-Bear or for senators or congresspeople.
We don't have the backbone to do anything.
And that continued.
That was sort of the first weekend of many where Elon Musk ran roughshod over the federal agencies, took Doge and destroyed U.S. aid and U.S. Institute of Peace and everything else.
It hurt.
And then the rest of the year was kind of more the same.
We saw the ICE raids across the country.
We saw our neighbors, our friends, our family members.
We saw the people who make up the fabric of our society, of our culture, of our community being kidnapped.
Those are people who are migrants from Mexico, people from Central America, South America.
In many cases, they were U.S. citizens or green card holders.
In others, they were graduate students walking down the street.
People trying to live their lives, take care of their newborn children, attend to wives who have just given birth, pick up their kids from school.
It's really, really hard to find joy in that kind of setting, isn't it?
When you see your military deployed to your city in L.A. or in D.C. or in Memphis, it's really hard to figure out how there's time to be something like happy or joyful, full of a sense of calm or ease, somebody who finds little things or big things to make them smile.
And I want to talk about that because I think that's the whole game, if I'm honest with you.
There's been moments this year where I've really just not known what to do.
I've wondered if I needed to do everything I could to take my family out of this country, which doesn't seem like a possibility really for us right now.
I've wondered how long it would be safe.
I've wondered how long we could do this show.
As niche as we are and as just well down the pecking order of important people, I've wondered how long it would be until they would start to crack down even on niche religion and politics podcasts like this one.
But I've just, I think more to the core of who I am, I've had a sense, and I'm sure that many of you have too, that I'm not even sure what we're doing anymore.
That when somebody wants to talk to me about football or the weather or what they're building on that corner that is by the kids' school or whatever, every time somebody wants to talk about a vacation or something that feels like it's about ordinary life, I think our friends are being kidnapped.
Our government is corrupt.
We're killing people in boats for oil and to distract from the fact that our president is a pedophile.
We are destroying the post-war liberal order, telling our allies in Europe that we'll support them as long as they go nationalistic and xenophobic, nativist, anti-democratic and post-liberal.
The question I've asked myself is like, how do you find a way not only to go forward, but to look forward when things are like this?
It brings me back to a talk, a sermon, a speech I've given many times, but I want to rehearse some of it here today because this is what I hold on to when I feel this way.
This is what I hold on to when things like 2025 feel grim and I've forgotten what it means to look forward to something in a new year or in a new day.
I used to tell my students about a biblical story that's quite obscure, and it's the biblical story of the giants who emerged on the earth after the flood.
Some of you know your Bible, or some of you grew up in households where you knew all the stories, and so these are the Nephilim.
These are these strange creatures who somehow were on the earth after it flooded.
And other than Noah and his boat, they survived, they persevered, they emerged, and they were on this planet running amok.
And who were the giants?
Who were the Nephilim?
Well, I always go back to two sources on this who I think are really interesting.
One is Gianbatista Vico, and the other is the Stanford literary scholar Robert Polk Harrison.
And they both talk about the Nephilim in an interesting way.
They talk about them as giants, these beings that were in some ways more than human, bigger, more powerful, more agile.
And they were beings that did three things and three things only.
They ate and they slept and they reproduced.
Eating, napping, having sex.
Doesn't sound like a bad day altogether, but that was kind of their whole existence.
And one of the things that's interesting for me about thinking about the Nephilim in this sense is that in many ways they were more than human and in many ways they were less.
They were bigger and stronger and more capable to survive in the physical environment without air conditioning or mineral water or anything else.
But they were less than human in the sense that they were not aware of themselves.
They were not aware of others.
They were not aware of their mortality.
They had not been cursed with what Adam and Eve had been cursed with, and that is a sense of self, a sense of understanding that they were among others.
A sense that they had been thrown into the world without a choice and now had to deal with being here.
That not only did they have to eat and sleep and mate, but they had to make meaning of an existence that was liminal, provisional.
A condition, a human condition, caught between birth and death.
One in which you have to cope with being on a planet that is already in media res, where things have already happened.
You're always trying to catch up, but you're always also trying to look ahead.
And I'm not going to lie, y'all, like in 2025, you just wonder if being a giant wouldn't be easier.
You eat, you sleep, you mate.
That's it.
No concern about justice or democracy.
No worries about dignity or freedom.
No sense that you have a duty to make sure that you and others are not subjugated to the powers of authoritarians, that you don't have your rights, your worth stolen from you, that you protect people who need it, you protect yourself when you need it.
And overall, you try to make meaning of what you're doing here and have a sense of joy in the process.
There's this sense that for giants, none of that matters.
And as humans, it always matters.
That we are cursed with the project of ourselves.
We are cursed with the project of making meaning of every moment and every year and every decade we spend here.
And that means inevitably experiencing unspeakable pain, exclusion, self-doubt, and sorrow.
It means that at times the human condition feels like a curse.
And I don't know all of you listening.
I know some of you.
And I've gotten to hang out with a bunch of you, whether at Happy Hour or on Discord, whether on a live recording or at an event.
And I know some of you are just amazing, extroverted activists who are in your communities every day fighting battles that others think can't be won.
I know a lot of you are canvassing, knocking on doors, organizing in red states, red counties, places where people have no hope of political change, but where you haven't given up.
I know a bunch of you are readers and researchers.
You're folks who support by offering insight and advice and information.
But here's what I know about all of you: all of you have felt the pain of the human condition in 2025 and before.
That you've lost people.
You've lost yourself.
You have felt a sense of not being included or wanted, not being welcomed, of not knowing who you are or who you might be.
And around the holidays, it becomes easy for us to get subsumed by those things, by the pain of watching what we saw in 2025, but also the things that are always present, no matter what state we're living in, when it comes to human society and the human condition.
You've had a friend who's passed too early.
You've had a grandparent or a parent who's departed.
You've had a loved one who said goodbye unexpectedly.
You have somebody who you remember, but the world doesn't seem to.
You have felt like you're not sure who you are, but also what your role is to play in this story.
I know a lot of you feel trapped between dreams and expectations, between traditions and desires, between the past and the future, between this place and another place, between your home and a future one.
Some of you are plagued by self-doubt, a voice that creeps up your back and over your shoulder.
Every time you try to do something new to reach beyond, to venture forth, it asks you, do you think you can really do this?
I'm not sure you belong here.
Give up.
That one's really hard.
And as I've said over and over and over to anyone who will listen, the thing I always come back to is this.
The joy and beauty of the human experience is always without fail accompanied by sorrow and tragedy.
To be human rather than to be a giant is to leave the forest and enter a clearing where there is potential beyond mating and sleeping and eating, where we love, where we build community, or we discover, or we explore.
And that's always counterbalanced, unfortunately, by death and injustice and isolation.
Just recently, I was talking with an old friend who was telling me about the way to find joy.
And it made me reflect on the ways that as human beings, we can overcome our curse.
We can overcome our condition.
We can't escape the fact that we all showed up here, that we left the forest, that we are now human beings who live in a place that's marked by injustice and murder and greed and sexism and inequality and racism, idiotic strong men, unspeakable brutality and all the rest.
But I want to reflect on something else today, and that's this.
What they want to take from you is not only the big things, the big future you thought you had, the house you wanted to buy, the job you wanted to get.
It's not just the big things that they want from you.
What they really want from you are the ordinary ones that make human life worth it.
What they really want to take away are the moments that often go unnoticed.
The moments where you have not stopped looking for joy and community and solidarity.
I was reading about Melissa Hortman the other day, the state rep in Minnesota who was assassinated this year.
And as I read the profile of her life and the ways that her friends spoke about her, the parts that made me cry were not the parts about what happened the night that she was shot, but they were the parts about the things she loved doing.
Gardening, eating chocolate, spending time with her kids.
The things that on an everyday basis made her human life something that was more than just eating, sleeping, or mating, that made her life something marked by joy.
By a sense that if we are going to live here as humans, thrown into this world, then we are going to overcome our curse.
When I look forward to 2026, I look forward to fighting the fights we've all fought in 2025.
Why?
Because I want change on a macro level.
I want this country to be revolutionarily different.
I want there to be a different system, a different vision for the future.
I want there to be a transformed understanding of how we might live together on this planet.
I want to see despots disposed.
I want to see authoritarians jailed.
I want to see bigots and racists and misogynists jettisoned from our public life.
But the thing I'm going to focus on as I go into the very first moments of 2026 are the small ones, the small things, the minuscule things that we often whisk away even when they happen.
A nice dinner with aging parents, when somebody cracks a joke, and there's this sense that after decades of work, you've all come to accept one another on your terms.
A gathering at Hanukkah or Christmas, a birthday or New Year's, when your strange and weird and confusing family celebrates in its ways with its foods and its histories.
A moment you might realize that the peculiarity of who you are and your whole genealogical tree makes you and your existence unique and radiant.
It gives you a sense of being proud of the story that you've dropped into and the one you're going to carry on.
I'd rather reflect on the awe of discovering a new place with a new love.
The sense of curiosity that comes when you wander on a new path in the forest or down cobblestone streets in a quaint village.
A new town or just a new place for you.
The times when you find a bench in the city where you can sit and break bread and appreciate sitting there with somebody who you love somehow and having moments of not having the human alone.
Where you sense that they understand who you are, at least in part, and they want to see as much as they can.
I want to reflect on those moments when you wake up next to someone who you truly care about.
Someone with whom you've shared some kind of love and reciprocity.
Little moments of care or joy or levity.
I'd rather focus as we enter 2026 on cherishing the small times.
Sledding down a hill, a dip at a swimming hole with friends, eating a hot cookie, making grandma's recipe for mac and cheese or ham or mashed potatoes, commiserating over a glass of wine at the end of a grueling day.
I'd rather tell you that when we go into 2026, we're going to sing and we're going to dance and we're going to love and we're going to write and we're going to act and we're going to play and we're going to invent and we're going to create.
Because when we do that, we not only prevent them from taking our humanity from us, but we counterbalance the curse of what it means to be human.
The awareness of yourself, the awareness of others, the awareness of your mortality is overwhelming.
And the way we overcome it is through immeasurable wonder.
When you cross boundaries and make homes, when you confront suffering and revel in joy, when you break bread and welcome others to your table, when you have the courage to try something new, discover something novel,
when you have the patience and the persistence to stop and to notice all of them, to not treat them as minuscule or so ordinary that they're unremarkable.
But when you allow yourself to notice them, to me, you'll be surprised at how much joy there is.
And you'll be reminded of why we fight and why we care.
It's so we can change things on a mega political scale, but it's also so that our neighbors, all of us, our kids, our parents, our friends, and even our enemies, can live in a place where they can bake cookies and garden, take a dip in a swimming hole, listen to a friend play the guitar at a campfire,
listen to their elders tell stories about what happened before, teach their kids how to make the recipes that their ancestors taught them.
Because if we don't notice these things, we allow ourselves to become less than the giants because we'll have the curse of the human experience without experiencing the potential beauty that it offers.
So when I go into 2026, I want to be human in a way that I'm going to breathe thankfully and I'm going to recognize humbly the universe made me a human who can witness the universe itself.
That the universe made me a self-conscious being acutely aware of its mortality and its place in this fucked up world.
That I am the universe witnessing itself become itself.
I'm going to be thankful that I am a human and not a giant.
And in every breath, I'm going to breathe an inaudible and steadfastly defiant fuck you because the universe made me a human and not a giant.
And I'm going to face that tragedy with the resolve to find the beauty and the vibrance and the love that can accompany it.
I'm going to breathe a steadfastly defiant fuck you to all of those who would try to take the possibility of that beauty and vibrance away.
We do this for the small things and we do it for the big.
We are human in the everyday, in the quotidian, in the small.
The unremarkable thing is often the one that is the most wondrous.
Don't forget that.
Thanks for spending 2025 with us.
This has been the hardest year I've done this show.
I got dozens of emails from people who said, hey, I love you, but I can't listen anymore because the news is just too much.
And for those of you who stayed with us, I know you probably felt that at some point.
I can't wait to share with you all the stuff we're going to do to expand this show next year and to bring in new voices to connect with all of you in ways we haven't done before.
For now, I want you to be safe and I want you to find a way over the next two weeks to recognize the things that are transcendent and wondrous about yourself and about your life and to not allow those things to go unnoticed.