Weekly Roundup: Cruelty as Policy, From Healthcare to Trans Panic

Straight White American Jesus

Axis Mundi Media: Bradley Onishi + Daniel Miller

News, Politics

4.7 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 19 December 2025

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dan Miller unpacks how Republican policy and ideology are converging around harm rather than governance. He begins with healthcare, breaking down how congressional action allowed Affordable Care Act subsidies to lapse and what that means for millions of Americans who rely on them. Rather than offering alternatives, the GOP continues to frame healthcare through an ideological lens that treats public support as illegitimate, even when the human cost is clear. From there, Dan traces the familiar shift from policy failure to moral panic, focusing on the escalating attacks on trans youth. He examines the House passage of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Protect Children’s Innocence Act, the Trump administration’s push to ban gender affirming care for minors, and recent FDA actions targeting breast binders. Dan connects these moves to a broader right wing strategy that defines itself through opposition to marginalized groups, warning that restrictions justified in the name of protecting children and morality often pave the way for wider government overreach. He closes by looking at Pete Hegseth’s influence inside the military and the dangers of folding Christian nationalism into institutions meant to serve a pluralistic society. Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus content most Mondays, bonus episodes every month, ad-free listening, access to the entire 1000+ episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/ Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC Order Brad's book: https://bookshop.org/a/95982/9781506482163 Subscribe to Teología Sin Vergüenza Subscribe to American Exceptionalism Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	AXIS Moondy
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1:03.5	Sign up for your £1 per month trial at Shopify.com.ukau.ukes slash Spotify. Hello and welcome to the straight white American Jesus weekly roundup. I am Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought of Landmark College. Joining you solo today, Brad
1:08.6	couldn't be here this time nothing wrong nothing serious anything like
1:12.4	that but you get just me this week and you might get just brad next week we'll see as always
1:18.5	i want to say thank you for listening thank all of you who subscribe and support us in so many ways
1:22.8	we do a lot of different things on straight white american jesus we can't do it without you we're
1:26.5	very aware of that and thank you as we come up on the at the end of the year just very conscious and aware of what this
1:32.6	means to us what it means to you what it means to others and the ways that you you made that possible
1:37.5	so thank you i want to dive in it's it's the you know i'm recording this it's the week before
1:42.7	christmas and i have for those who who can see I'm wearing my crampus shirt. The reason I'm wearing my crampus shirt is it's a very crampusy sort of mood. I would like to send crampus to Washington and crampus can gather up certain key figures, political figures, and put them in crampus's bag and haul them off to wherever crampus hauls them and do whatever crampus wants to do to them. A lot of things we could talk about this week that we're not going to have time to get into. We could talk about Trump's prime time address using a teleprompter. Made it very evident why Trump doesn't like using a teleprompter. Apparently, they told him to try to make it 20
2:18.2	minutes or less. He was super fixated on that and kind of sped through the thing. And at times, you can't understand what he's saying. And he's not good when he's off script and so on. But, you know, trying to get to the affordability issue. We're not going to get to talk about that. We could talk about Susie Wiles, a Vanity Fair interview.
2:35.5	She's his advisor.
2:37.3	There's apparently, I guess, a series of interviews over months that was released in Vanity Fair.
2:42.6	Very unflattering.
2:44.0	Basically confirms every criticism of Trump that people have.
2:48.0	But weird because the Trump administration has come out in full-throated defense of her.
	...

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