A Year That Nearly Broke Us—and Why We Keep Going

Straight White American Jesus

Axis Mundi Media: Bradley Onishi + Daniel Miller

News, Politics

4.7 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 22 December 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	AXIS Moondy
0:07.0	AXUS Moondy Welcome to Straight White American Jesus. I'm Brad Onishi.
0:33.5	Author for Preparing for War, the Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next,
0:45.6	and founder of Access Moody 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
0:52.9	time in my professional life in a classroom. And I rarely get to in ministry, and I've also spent so much time in my professional life
0:54.7	in a classroom. And I rarely get to preach anymore, and I rarely am in the classroom, at least
1:00.1	right now. Hopefully, that'll change in the future. I wanted to leave this year, this last Monday
1:06.8	that I'll come to you live or close to live or at least close to the time of publication
1:12.0	with something that's not normal. Usually you're going to hear on Mondays at this show,
1:18.3	an interview, analysis, something from the headlines, something of deep importance when
1:23.4	it comes to religion and politics. And if that's what you're looking for, I totally get it.
1:28.3	But today I'm going to do something a tad different from that. And so if you need to go queue up
1:34.6	your favorite sports podcast or the bulwark or something else, I totally get it. But if you want to
1:40.4	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.
1:53.9	So here it goes.
2:05.3	This has been a hard year for all of us. There's just zero way to avoid that.
2:12.8	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.
2:28.2	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.
2:34.1	We care about it deeply.
2:35.5	We want to help people learn and understand and heal.
2:38.4	And so it is hard, but it doesn't feel like something that's a burden.
2:44.0	But when we got to January and February this year, I think like all of you listening,
	...

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