Weekly Roundup: MAGA’s War on Education, Sanctuary, and DEI

Straight White American Jesus

Axis Mundi Media: Bradley Onishi + Daniel Miller

News, Politics

4.7 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 22 August 2025

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus content most Mondays, bonus episodes every month, ad-free listening, access to the entire 850-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/ Dan goes solo to unpack a series of stories that reveal how the MAGA movement is working to operationalize a white Christian nationalist vision of America. From the Department of Education’s rollback of guidance meant to support English-language learners, to Trump-era attacks on sanctuary cities like Boston, to rhetoric targeting Native American sovereignty in Tulsa, Dan shows how each of these actions fits into a broader strategy of exclusion and racialized politics. The episode also highlights how the dismantling of DEI programs on college campuses strips away resources that protected marginalized students, even as discrimination persists. Through historical context, cultural decoding, and contemporary examples, Dan demonstrates how seemingly disparate headlines connect to a single ideological project—and why resistance, vigilance, and collective action matter now more than ever. Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC Order Brad's book: https://bookshop.org/a/95982/9781506482163 Check out BetterHelp and use my code SWA for a great deal: www.betterhelp.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	AXIS Moondy
0:07.0	AXIS Moondy Hello and welcome to straight white American Jesus.
0:31.7	I am Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
0:35.8	This is the weekly roundup, and I am flying solo this week.
0:39.6	Brad is traveling this week and doing some other things, and so best wishes to him.
0:46.7	However, if you tune in, many of you will already know, James Dobson passed this week,
0:52.4	and Brad posted sort of a short reflection on that. That's been posted
0:56.9	to the website. Take a listen if you would like. Brad, of course, has done a lot of work on James
1:01.4	Dobson and specifically really great work highlighting the connections of James Dobson, who's, you know,
1:06.6	a child psychologist and known for parenting books and so forth, but connecting that whole
1:11.7	movement to Christian nationalism and everything that's going on in America now. So I invite
1:16.8	you to take a listen to that if you need to hear Brad's voice this week, as we all do. And also
1:22.6	because he did a great job with that, and I'm not going to talk about Dobson this week in
1:27.3	this week's
1:27.6	roundup. So, I want to begin, as always, by thanking all of you for listening, thinking the subscribers, all of you who do so much to keep us going. We are, as you know, an indie program. We do a lot of programming content three times a week. It takes a lot of work and we can't do it without you. So
1:44.3	thank you so much. I want to dive in here. What I want to do this week is I want to focus on a few,
1:50.5	I think, sort of smaller stories. They're not, you know, some of them got big news. Some of them,
1:55.8	I think, are big headlines. Some of the I think were smaller smaller, but there's stories I've come across this
2:01.7	week that for me, when we take them together, they paint a picture of the rights attempts
2:06.7	to sort of operationalize a MAGA vision of America. And I think it's worth seeing the ways
2:12.5	that these work. Everybody knows me. You know, if you listen to it's in the code, you know that cultural decoding
2:18.4	is part of what I like to do. And you really can delve into the things that are said and the way
	...

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