Saturday, August 10, 2024
Christian Fundamentalism Continues to Rear Its Ugly Head
t was an age of wonder. Young, free-spirited women in feathery dresses smoked in jazz clubs. Families gathered around big radio cabinets in their living rooms. The marvel of mass production enabled millions of automobiles to roll off assembly lines each year. In the nineteen-twenties, modernity was transforming America, ushering in prosperity, polyglot metropolises, and new norms around gender and sexuality. Perhaps most significantly, doubt was creeping into the citadel of religion. A crisis of belief, brought on by social and technological change, and by growing acceptance of Darwin’s theory of evolution, threatened Protestant Christianity, the dominant American creed. Fierce fights over the authority of Scripture divided denominations. A backlash was inevitable. The Ku Klux Klan experienced a renaissance, expanding beyond the rural South and into Northern cities, the Midwest, and the Pacific Northwest, under the banner of white Protestantism. A loose coalition of Protestant ministers began to style themselves as “fundamentalists”––defenders of Christian orthodoxy and foes of modernism.
On January 21, 1925, Representative John Washington Butler, a forty-nine-year-old farmer and clerk for a circle of churches whose members called themselves “primitive Baptists,” introduced a bill in the Tennessee legislature that he had written out by hand, in front of his fireplace. The Butler Act, as it came to be known, was less than two hundred words long. It forbade educators to teach “any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” Butler believed evolutionary theory to be dangerous––a threat to the “Christian life of our homes.” The bill sailed through the legislature and was signed into law on March 21st, by Governor Austin Peay.
The international spectacle that followed is the subject of “Keeping the Faith” . . . In the preface to “Keeping the Faith,” Wineapple notes the modern-day parallels to the Scopes “monkey trial,” as it was famously dubbed. “Democracy was on trial in Dayton,” Wineapple writes. “As it would be again in our time: teachers being told what or how to teach; science regarded as an out-of-control, godless shibboleth; books tossed out of schools and libraries; loyalty oaths; and white supremacists promising that a revitalized white Protestant America would lead its citizens out of the slough of moral and spiritual decay to rise again, regardless of what or whose rights and freedoms might be trampled.”
In recent weeks, conflagrations over the place of religion in American civic life have spread. On June 19th, Louisiana enacted a law that mandated the display of the Ten Commandments in its schools. A week later, Oklahoma’s state school superintendent issued a memo requiring that the “Bible, which includes the Ten Commandments,” be incorporated into curricula, effective immediately.
The central protagonists of “Keeping the Faith” are Clarence Darrow, the legendary trial lawyer and self-described agnostic who helped defend Scopes, and William Jennings Bryan, a golden-tongued, thrice-failed Democratic Presidential candidate who was fundamentalism’s flag-bearer. Bryan . . . was a fervent believer in Christianity’s ability to spur people to generosity and compassion. But he also demonstrated the racism that has long been embedded in the American church, once stating that social equality would “throw the white and the black races into greater antagonism and conflict.” He joined the prosecution because he felt that the crusade against “apeism” was vital to protecting young minds. “We cannot afford to have a system of education that destroys the religious faith of seventy-five per cent of our children,” he said.
The climactic moment of the trial arrived on a Monday afternoon, July 20th, when Scopes’s lawyers announced, “The defense desires to call Mr. Bryan as a witness.” It was an audacious maneuver. Darrow’s plan was to put the views of a “Bible expert,” as Bryan described himself, to the test under oath.
Darrow opened by asking Bryan about his credentials as a Bible scholar. Bryan said that he’d been studying the Bible for fifty years, and that the text “should be accepted as it is given.” He hastened to point out, however, that there were certain passages that were not meant to be taken literally. . . . With that, Bryan had walked into a trap. Darrow commenced a series of hypotheticals, first querying Bryan about the story of Jonah, who is swallowed by a big fish, in the Old Testament. “How do you literally interpret that?” Darrow asked.
Darrow bore down on Bryan about the Biblical stories of Noah and the Flood and the Tower of Babel. Finally, he turned to the creation account in Genesis and asked if Bryan believed that the earth was created in six literal days. Bryan interjected, “Not six days of twenty-four hours”––a response that prompted a few gasps from the lawn. Darrow was pleased now: “Doesn’t it say so?” Bryan said, “No.” . . . He was standing and screaming. “I want the papers to know I am not afraid to get on the stand in front of him and let him do his worst,” he continued. He explained that the six days of creation could refer to “periods,” rather than to literal twenty-four-hour days.
It was not until four decades later, in the spring of 1967, that state lawmakers finally repealed the Butler Act. The following year, the Supreme Court of the United States invalidated an anti-evolution statute in Arkansas that dated back to the Scopes era, ruling that the First Amendment “mandates government neutrality between religion and religion, and between religion and nonreligion.”
The humiliation of the Scopes trial led to the implosion of the fundamentalist coalition. Moderate Protestant figures, even those who still held deeply conservative theological beliefs, were no longer willing to be associated with the movement. It seemed on its way to becoming a historical curiosity––a laughingstock born of a particular period of upheaval. The opposite turned out to be true.
[T]he story of fundamentalism’s near-demise, hibernation, and eventual rebirth as a revanchist, militant political force partly underpins the cultural conflict that threatens American democracy today.
By the nineteen-fifties, a “new evangelical” movement had emerged, led by Billy Graham and other prominent figures such as Harold Ockenga, the pastor of the Congregationalist Park Street Church, in Boston, and Carl F. H. Henry, a theologian at Fuller Theological Seminary, outside Los Angeles. These men wanted to forge a more intellectually respectable, culturally engaged movement than their fundamentalist forebears had, one that would allow them to regain a foothold in American life. They succeeded, attracting believers from a broad spectrum of theological and even political commitments––mainline Protestants, Pentecostals, Reformed, and others. The largest contingent, however, comprised those whose religious lineages could be traced directly back to fundamentalism.
In many ways, today’s America resembles the tumultuous one in which the Scopes trial unfolded. The religious landscape is, once again, undergoing precipitous change: according to the Pew Research Center, the number of Americans who identify as Christian plunged from nine out of ten, in the early nineties, to less than two-thirds, in 2020. Once again, norms around gender and sexuality are rapidly evolving. A notable difference is that liberal mainline Protestant denominations have dwindled in number and influence.
In recent years, a raft of books have been published by authors decrying the evangelical movement’s alliance with right-wing politics, its vulnerability to racism, its unseemly blending of God and country, and particularly its obeisance to Donald Trump. . . . Russell Moore, the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today . . . argues that the current exodus from American churches is different from the crisis of belief in the nineteen-twenties. “We see now young evangelicals walking away from evangelicalism not because they do not believe what the church teaches, but because they believe the church itself does not believe what the church teaches,” he writes.
The authors of “The After Party” remind believers that “reconciliation to God inherently leads to reconciliation with others.” They encourage Christians to draw on the resources of their faith to model a more relational, less tribal approach to politics. It’s a stirring admonition, but Wineapple’s observation about the tragedy of the Scopes trial is that both sides failed to see the other. The “self-appointed arbiters of culture” can seem just as contemptuous of faith as they were a century ago, even as their own beliefs become an altar unto themselves. The divide may very well be unbridgeable . . . .
As in the 1920's, "Christian" fundamentalism must be defeated. Defeating Donald Trump in November would be a good first step.
Friday, August 09, 2024
Harris Has Gotten Under Donald Trump's Skin
A brush with death can change a person. They can choose to become a better person and to count their second chance at life as a blessing, an opportunity to engage in critical self-reflection and a mark of good fortune to be repaid to others. Alternatively, a person can be indifferent to how Fate smiled upon them and to continue living life as they had before. Perhaps the worst outcome is when a person faces their own mortality and sees their luck as a mark of their greatness if not immortality, fueling their egomania and the worst aspects of their personality.
After an attempt on his life several weeks ago in Pennsylvania, Donald Trump chose the third option.
An assassin’s bullet barely missed his head. Trump was supposedly a changed man after such a horrible experience, one who would “unite” the country and “heal” its division and acrimony.
There were members of the news media who, even after nine years of experience with Donald Trump and his lies and demagoguing, uncritically accepted Trump’s declarations that he was now changed for the better. Not surprisingly, some of these public voices also said, at various points during Trump’s first regime, that he was finally “presidential” and was “rising to the demands of the office.” Such public voices have little to no credibility left.
In a Wednesday post on Twitter, Wajahat Ali, who is a columnist at the Daily Beast, directly called out such Trump-enablers in the news media: "Again, every single pundit and reporter who said Trump was a changed man after he survived an assassination please resign. Just leave this profession. . . . . Go do something else. You're not made for this moment."
Of course, Donald Trump had no intention of becoming a better man. Trump’s charade lasted only a few days before his fascist-religious coronation at the Republican National Convention and his acceptance speech where he reverted to his ugly true form and attacked the Democrats and his other “enemies.” . . . . In all, Donald Trump, because of his temperament, personality and mind is unable to act differently. Trump only knows how to attack. He appears incapable of human empathy or concern for others.
When President Biden decided to pass the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris, Donald Trump only became more enraged and horrible in his speech, threats, and other behavior. It is being reported that Trump has been raging in private, as the momentum, at least for now, appears to have shifted to the Democrats in the upcoming election. Trump’s public statements and other behavior strongly suggest that he is experiencing some type of existential crisis at the thought of having to do political battle against a highly intelligent Black South Asian woman who is also a former prosecutor and attorney general.
Trump’s niece Mary Trump, who is a trained mental health professional, made this observation ; . . . Donald hates being laughed at….Donald also hates women (especially strong women) and minorities, so you can see why current Vice President and presidential candidate Kamala Harris terrifies him to the point of incoherence. . . . . Faced with the reality that he is now running against a vibrant, intelligent, experienced woman who is fully two decades younger than he is, Donald spent Sunday and Monday flailing, trying to find an angle of attack that would stick.
[L]ongtime observers of Trump have concluded his behavior appears to be driven almost completely by the id and his other most core and primal instincts.
Tuesday morning, Kamala Harris announced that she chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her vice-presidential pick in the 2024 Election. Trump responded with more violent and apocalyptic language, sending out a fundraising email stating that Walz would “unleash hell on Earth.”
Later in the day, Trump would continue with his threatening and menacing emails about Kamala Harris (and now Tim Walz), telling his MAGA followers that she will “destroy this country” and “is coming for you next”
Trump and his propagandists are using stochastic terrorism and related techniques to emotionally train and condition the MAGA people and his other followers into committing acts of political violence and destruction in the name of “the movement”. This is the logical end goal of Trump’s repeated use of apocalyptic language such as “unleash hell.” That language also has multiple valences and meanings. Yes, Trump is commanding his followers to commit such actions against their shared “enemies.” But he is also telling his followers the lie that Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and the Democrats and “the Left” are going to unleash hell against them. In that logic, Donald Trump is their only protector and savior—which is why he must be made into a dictator to “save” them from the evil forces that are going to hurt them, their families, and (sacred) communities. In keeping with how radicalization into political extremism usually takes place, the resulting violence against the “enemy” is understood to be defensive and a last option—and therefore legitimate and perhaps even honorable and just—in what is an existential struggle for survival.
Donald Trump’s MAGA people and other cultists are listening to his commands very closely. . . . Political scientists and other experts in national security and law enforcement have compiled data that shows that there are many thousands of Trump-MAGA followers and other right-wing extremists and malign actors who are willing to commit acts of political violence to remove the Democrats from power and to put Trump and his MAGAfied Republicans in control of the country. These people will be the foot soldiers for a Trump dictatorship and permanent state of emergency that will include massive political violence and “revolution” against “the Left” and the other “enemies” of “MAGA” as outlined by Project 2025, Agenda 47, and elsewhere.
Donald Trump and his propagandists and other agents are engaging in a highly coordinated messaging campaign to depict Vice President Kamala Harris, like the other leaders of the Democratic Party (and its voters and supporters), as a monster. And what does one usually do with monsters and other horrors? You slay them.
In America, both historically and in the present, such imagery and threats—especially against Black and brown people—all too often are not metaphorical, they are literal.
Thursday, August 08, 2024
The GOP Is a Messy Soap Opera
Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party have defied the expectations of many observers—and as usual, when I say “many observers,” I mostly mean “me”—by making an almost flawless transition from President Joe Biden’s faltering chances to a new and energized campaign. Yesterday, Harris rolled out the ebullient Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate at a rally in Philadelphia, where one of Walz’s former competitors for the job, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, gave a rousing address to the crowd.
So far, the Democrats have avoided the backbiting and chaos that could have erupted after Biden’s unprecedented departure from the race. They’ve left that to the Republicans, who don’t seem to be handling any of the news from the past few weeks very well. Before we turn to Trump himself, let’s review some of the recent banner moments for the Grand Old Party.
This week, the former Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis accepted a deal from the state of Arizona to cooperate in its fake-elector case. Ellis, who served as a deputy district attorney in a Colorado county for six months before getting fired, was finally disciplined in May by the Colorado Supreme Court for her actions related to the 2020 election, and agreed to give up her law license for three years. An Arizona grand jury described by Politico as “unusually aggressive” (read: deeply pissed off) indicted 18 people in the scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election, even asking to bring in others who were not targets of the investigation. In the days since Ellis flipped, one of the fake electors became the first to take a plea deal.
Nevertheless, Arizona Republicans last week nominated Kari Lake—the MAGA darling, election denier, and loser in the 2022 gubernatorial election—for one of Arizona’s Senate seats. Early polls show Lake running behind Democratic candidate Ruben Gallego, and her weakness as a statewide candidate prompted the conservative Arizona commentator Jon Gabriel to post a simple prediction on X: “Onto another loss in the general.”
Other GOP state parties are flailing about as well. A number of former GOP state and national officials are ditching their party’s nominee and joining “Republicans for Harris,” a group with a name few conservatives could even have parsed five years ago. These defections are understandable when new GOP leaders are people like Lake and Mark Robinson, the Republican nominee for governor in North Carolina who said in June—while standing in a church—that “some folks need killing.”
At the national level, GOP commentators seem especially flummoxed about the Walz rollout. They are, for now, trying mightily to make it seem as if Harris opting for Walz over Shapiro is evidence of roiling anti-Semitism in the Democratic Party. . . . . Trump himself has called Walz’s selection “insulting to Jewish people,” which, of course, makes no sense.
Meanwhile, J. D. Vance’s excruciating flameout as Trump’s running mate seems to have some Republicans wishing they could just drive him back to Ohio and leave him there.. . . . Trump, for his part, backed up his running mate a week ago by telling the audience at the National Association of Black Journalists convention that vice presidents really don’t matter for the outcomes of elections.
Vance might be grateful that so much of the news this week was about Walz, because at least it overshadowed the story in The Washington Post that Vance—a United States senator—was texting with a notorious internet troll named Chuck Johnson.
A Vance spokesperson claims that Johnson “spam texted” the senator and that Vance “usually ignored him, but occasionally responded to push back against things [Johnson] said.” That’s not how those texts read, but as a former Hill staffer, I might suggest to Vance’s assistants that someone like Chuck Johnson isn’t even supposed to have your boss’s phone number.
No one is handling the past few weeks more poorly than Trump himself, who, as The Bulwark’s Andrew Egger noted, seems to have retreated into an Aaron Sorkin–inspired fantasy. . . . Trump’s reactions lately are so unhinged, so hysterical, that they could pass for one of those scenes in a soap opera where a drunken dowager finds out that her May-December romance is a sham, and she begs him, as mascara flows down her cheeks, to fly off with her to Gstaad or Antibes to rekindle their love.
In reality, of course, this is all a disturbing reminder that Trump is a deeply unwell person who is not fit to be the commander in chief, and that should he return to office, other Republican officials cannot be counted on to protect the nation—especially Vance, who reveals himself daily as every bit the intellectual lightweight and political fraud his critics believe he is.
The Democrats are doing well, and Republicans are sitting in the middle of a tire fire. But Trump is still in a commanding electoral position, and he could still win. The pro-democracy coalition has every reason to enjoy some good news, but these past few weeks should not obscure the existential danger America faces in November.
Wednesday, August 07, 2024
Harris-Walz: An Antidote to Trump’s American Carnage
Kamala Harris and Tim Walz want to make America joyful again. The vice president’s rocking rollout of her running mate on Tuesday sent jolts of energy through a huge crowd, as the pair personified the extraordinary transformation of the 2024 election campaign.
Such a scene would have been unthinkable even three weeks ago — in a Democratic Party that believed it was doomed to a disastrous defeat as an aged president resentfully faced a revolt that ultimately ended his reelection bid.
Yet inside Temple University’s packed basketball arena in Philadelphia, activists and Harris supporters beamed smiles of deliverance, marveling at the turn of events and a second chance against Donald Trump they can barely believe. . . . . the fresh vibe in Philadelphia was striking because it emerged after one of the darkest chapters of modern US politics.
Americans have experienced a Trump presidency that threatened to tear the country apart, suffered through a pandemic that killed more than a million citizens and endured grinding years of economic insecurity caused by inflation and high grocery prices. For most of this year, the former president has promised a second presidency of retribution. President Joe Biden, meanwhile, had been delivering searing warnings that his rival was tarnishing the very soul of America, even as the haunting signs of the president’s advancing age became increasingly painful to watch.
“We both believe in lifting people up, not knocking them down,” Harris said of her new running mate, Minnesota Gov. Walz. “Do we believe in opportunity? Do we believe in the promise of America? And are we ready to fight for it?” the vice president asked before adding, “We both know the vast majority of people in our country have so much more in common than what separates them.”
This message is a mirror image of Trump’s political method, which relies on tugging at the fault lines of US society for political gain.
Walz rammed home the point, as if anyone in the packed arena filled by roaring cheers had missed it. “Thank you for bringing back the joy,” he told his new boss, as he riffed through a series of dad jokes about Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, showing why the Harris team thinks he’ll be a hit in the Blue Wall battleground states that will decide the election.
Just a few weeks ago, Democrats dreaded Biden’s small and glum campaign events when the 81-year-old president’s stumbles revived memories of his disastrous Atlanta debate performance.
Now, they have a candidate and a running mate who can draw a massive crowd, inspire the base and project vigor and hope in a way that will take the battle to Trump over the frenetic last three months of the campaign.
Multiple rallygoers Tuesday expressed delight at the extraordinary twist in their fortunes at an event that conjured flashbacks to Barack Obama’s hope-and-change rallies of 2008, especially when the crowd chanted “Yes We Can” when Harris pledged to save the Affordable Care Act.
The optimism, laughter and positive energy in Philadelphia on Tuesday felt like a different planet from the dystopian dirge of Trump rallies, which devolve into festivals of personal vengeance for a candidate who has tripled down on the American carnage mantra of his first inaugural address.
“We are a nation in decline, we are a failing nation,” Trump said at a typical event in Manchester, New Hampshire, in January, portraying the US as a hellscape of energy shortages, drug-infested cities, out-of-control immigration and crime. He added: “We are a nation that has lost its confidence, its willpower and its strength. We are a nation that has lost its way.”
America now has a choice between the former president’s nightmarish vision of national decline that only a strongman can fix and Harris’ optimistic vow that America is still a land of aspiration.
But that dichotomy also points to a huge risk for Harris.
Running a campaign rooted in hopefulness and good cheer at a time when many Americans feel demoralized and tired could backfire. . . . . Without solutions, Harris’ hope-fueled speeches could become bromides by repetition, especially if Trump has more accurately judged America’s collective psyche than she has. Harris is, after all, a key part of an unpopular administration – which, for all its success in passing sweeping legislation that could revive US manufacturing and overhaul the country’s infrastructure, has not been able to convince millions of Americans of the reality of the country’s relatively strong economic rebound after the pandemic.
Tuesday’s rally proved the vice president can draw a crowd and work it — to great theatrical effect. But her most significant assignment in the next two months will come in convincing Americans she can meet building crises at home and abroad . . . Still, in a race likely to be decided across the three battleground states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, Walz may be able to reach rural voters that the California Democrat can’t. While the Minnesota governor is not going to help her beat Trump in his rural heartlands, any trimming of the ex-president’s margins there could complement Harris’ expected high turnout among inner city minority voters and suburban women.
The symbolism of reassurance was strong. A plainspoken, White, Midwestern dad, football coach and high school teacher who reached the rank of command sergeant major in the Army National Guard was vouching for the values and patriotism of a running mate who is being demeaned by Trump as a racial chameleon and out of the American cultural and political mainstream.
Ironically, given the events of the last two weeks, Walz is serving a similar role that then-vice presidential nominee Biden played for future President Obama in 2008.
Walz is sure to reprise his endorsement at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in a couple of weeks — and on pretty much every day until Election Day as he and Harris set off on an exhausting journey.
Tuesday, August 06, 2024
“Unhumans”- JD Vance Embraces Fascism and the Extreme Far Right
In a normal political environment, there would be little need to pay attention to a new book by the far-right provocateur Jack Posobiec, who is probably best known for promoting the conspiracy theory that Democrats ran a satanic child abuse ring beneath a popular Washington pizzeria. But “Unhumans,” an anti-democratic screed that Posobiec co-wrote with the professional ghostwriter Joshua Lisec, comes with endorsements from some of the most influential people in Republican politics, including, most significantly, vice-presidential candidate JD Vance.
The word “fascist” gets thrown around a lot in politics, but it’s hard to find a more apt one for “Unhumans,” which came out last month. The book argues that leftists don’t deserve the status of human beings — that they are, as the title says, unhumans — and that they are waging a shadow war against all that is good and decent, which will end in apocalyptic slaughter if they are not stopped. “As they are opposed to humanity itself, they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman,” write Posobiec and Lisec.
As they tell it, modern progressivism is just the latest incarnation of an ancient evil dating back to the late Roman Republic and continuing through the French Revolution and Communism to today. Often, they write, “great men of means” are required to crush this scourge.
The contempt for democracy in “Unhumans” is not subtle. “Our study of history has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans,” write Posobiec and Lisec.
One of their book’s heroes is the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, who overthrew the democratic Second Spanish Republic in the country’s 1930s civil war. The authors call him a “great man of history” and compare him to George Washington. They quote him on what doesn’t work against the unhuman threat: “We do not believe in government through the voting booth.
Nakedly authoritarian ideas like this one are not uncommon in the dank corners of the reactionary internet, or among the sort of groups that led the Jan. 6 insurrection. “Unhumans” lauds Augusto Pinochet, leader of the Chilean military junta who led a coup against Salvador Allende’s elected government in 1973, ushering in a reign of torture and repression that involved tossing political enemies from helicopters.
Pinochet-inspired helicopter memes have been common in the MAGA movement for years. And as the historian David Austin Walsh wrote last year, there’s long been a cult of Franco on the right. Nevertheless, it’s extremely unusual for a candidate for vice president of the United States to openly align himself with autocratic terror.
Vance provided the first blurb on the “Unhumans” book jacket. “In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through H.R., college campuses and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people,” he wrote. “Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.”
Other endorsements come from Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr., a key figure in his father’s presidential campaign. The foreword is by Stephen Bannon, Donald Trump’s former chief strategist.
[U]nless and until he [Vance] credibly distances himself from it, we should take him at his word that he shares the book’s analysis. After all, some of the language in “Unhumans” resembles his own rhetoric.
“The great American counterrevolution to depose the Cultural Marxists must occur on all terrains of society they currently possess and on those they aim to seize,” write Posobiec and Lisec, adding, “It is achievable but only with the resolve of Franco and the thoroughness of McCarthy.” (They mean Joseph McCarthy, another of the book’s icons.) Compare that to what Vance said on the alt-right podcast “Jack Murphy Live” in 2021, when he argued that Republicans, upon taking power, should purge their opponents the way Iraq’s government once purged members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.
Trump, said Vance, should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” And if the courts try to stand in his way, Trump should “stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
You can and should laugh at Vance’s melodramatic self-importance and creepy subcultural fixations. (On “Jack Murphy Live,” Vance respectfully references Curtis Yarvin, a right-wing blogger popular in reactionary Silicon Valley circles who calls for replacing democracy with a sort of techno-monarchy.)
“Much like the United States founding fathers, Franco and his fellows saw themselves as rebels intended to overthrow a corrupt, tyrannical government that aided and abetted murder and rape as well as other repugnant sins,” write Posobiec and Lisec. We should take seriously the possibility that Vance and his fellows see themselves the same way.
Monday, August 05, 2024
The NABJ Trump Interview Is a Model for Media Coverage
I have complained frequently about the mainstream media's ongoing failure to adequately challenge the endless lies and overt racism that spew from Donald Trump's mouth incessantly. Similarly, while the media fixated on Joe Biden's age and supposed fragility, no similar coverage has focused on Trump's declining mental faculties and age - or how devastating Trump's economic proposals would be for millions of Americans. We instead see softball questions and no meaningful follow up or challenges to blatant untruths. I find it maddening. Thankfully, the National Association of Black Journalists ("NABJ") interview of Trump last week showed how journalists need to treat Trump who was yanked off the interview by his own handlers as he said one inflammatory and untruthful statement after another. At the NAGJ event, Trump faced relentless fact checking and follow up questioning. The mainstream media needs to learn a lesson and use the NABJ model in all future interviews and/or debates involving Trump. A column in the Washington Post looks at the NABJ event and Trump's being held accountable:
The National Association of Black Journalists’ invitation to former president Donald Trump to sit for an interview last Wednesday at its Chicago convention had its critics. Don’t platform him. Don’t allow him to soft-pedal his racism. The critics’ assumption that NABJ members were somehow being manipulated proved to be unfounded; instead, we got the most revealing questioning of Trump in this election cycle. In the process, the interview revealed shortcomings in news coverage of Trump’s campaign so far.
“Trump drew audible gasps and disbelieving laughter over the roughly 35-minute sit-down session as he berated a Black reporter who pressed him about past offensive comments, falsely claimed that undocumented immigrants were ‘taking’ attendees’ votes, and suggested [Vice President] Harris ‘was Indian all the way’ before ‘all of a sudden she made a turn’ and ‘became a Black person.’”
Rachel Scott of ABC News, in addition to confronting Trump with some of his past racially incendiary remarks, got him to admit that he would spare Jan. 6 insurrectionists who assaulted police officers. . . . And in a rare real-time correction, Scott didn’t let Trump get away with claiming that Democrats allow babies to die after birth.
Trump’s NABJ appearance also afforded Harris the opportunity later on Wednesday to rebuke his hateful rhetoric in a way that made him look like a sad has-been. “It was the same old show. The divisiveness and the disrespect,” she declared in a speech in Houston. “And let me just say: The American people deserve better. The American people deserve better.” She continued, “The American people deserve a leader who tells the truth, a leader who does not respond with hostility and anger when confronted with the facts. We deserve a leader who understands that our differences do not divide us.
No other single interview or media encounter with Trump in this cycle has laid bare as much about the candidate or opened him up to as much criticism. Kudos go to Scott and her co-moderators in Chicago. The NABJ interview also raises a troubling question: What’s wrong with the rest of the media?
Not one question in the CNN-hosted debate with Trump and President Biden on June 27 confronted Trump about racism or antisemitism. . . . CNN’s debate moderators did not ask about pardons for Jan. 6. insurrectionists.
Unfortunately, too many in the mainstream political media have been taken in by Republican spin. The preposterous suggestion that, after the assassination attempt, Trump might have “changed,” entertained as a possibility by far too many outlets . . . . unsurprisingly turned out to be wishful thinking.
The initial reaction to Trump’s NABJ interview appeared to be tepid in many quarters. Relatively benign phrases such as “racially insensitive” to describe such patently bigoted comments serve only to normalize Trump. Too few reports noted that Trump was yanked off the stage by his own staff after 35 minutes.
The mainstream media now faces a test of sorts. After the June 27 debate, the media spent three weeks flooding the zone with coverage of Biden’s frailty, in effect demanding every Democrat to defend Biden or distance themselves from him, and consulting a host of experts on aging. (As I have noted, the vast majority of outlets also have steered clear of assessing Trump’s mental and emotional state, despite repeated episodes in which his slurred speech, verbal glitches, incoherent ranting, mixing up people and bizarre references are obvious to anyone watching.)
Truth demands the free press pull no punches, even if that appears to be “taking sides.” (Taking the side of truth is the media’s job.) The NABJ journalists showed how it’s done. Now we wait to see whether others will follow their lead.
Failure to deploy similarly exacting treatment of Trump would confirm Democrats’ complaints that there is a bizarre double standard in coverage that allows Trump to escape appropriate scrutiny. It’s long past time to stop using euphemisms and soft-pedaling his bigotry.
Sunday, August 04, 2024
What Trump’s Kamala Harris Smear Reveals
The first iteration of birtherism was a synthesis of conservative ideology aimed at the first Black president, Barack Obama. It said that immigrants and nonwhite people had usurped the birthright of real Americans, who were white, and inverted the natural hierarchy of the nation.
The second iteration of birtherism, directed at Kamala Harris, who would be America’s second Black president, is similarly ideological. But it tells a different story, one in which Black identity confers an unfair advantage over white people—an advantage that is doubly unfair for Harris to seize because she is not truly Black.
This is what Donald Trump meant when he smeared Harris during an appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists’ convention on Wednesday. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” Trump said.
The first thing to understand is that Trump’s professed ignorance is a lie. Harris was identified in news reports as the first Black woman to become a district attorney in California back in 2003, when she won office in San Francisco. Trump donated to Harris twice in 2011 and 2014, during her campaign for attorney general of California, around the time she was being touted as “the female Obama” precisely because she is Black. In 2020, a Trump campaign spokesperson pointed to those donations as proof that Trump was not racist . . .
Harris did not recently become Black; Trump recently decided to pretend to be confused about it. . . . But the attack is also a smear, because Harris has never hidden her background as the child of an Afro-Jamaican father and an Indian mother, having gone to the historically Black Howard University and joined a Black sorority. I suspect that this attack emerges out of a place of fear and desperation. Trump is afraid that he is running against the second coming of Obama, rather than the aging white man he had built his campaign around defeating.
Conservatives have attacked virtually every Black person who has risen to public prominence in the past few years as a “DEI hire”—that is, as someone who was given their status rather than earning it. Now, it bears repeating that this narrative is false, that Black and white working- and middle-class Americans have more interests in common than in conflict, and that demagogues like Trump have used this kind of racial division to facilitate the upward redistribution of economic and political power for centuries.
Trump’s attack on Harris is meant to evoke this worldview, in which Black advancement is a kind of liberal conspiracy to deprive white people of what is rightfully theirs.
Trump stumbled at NABJ after he declared that immigrants were stealing “Black jobs” and the hosts asked him to explain what a “Black job” was, but in context it is fairly clear. Black jobs are high-effort and low-wage, while white jobs include things like being president. Everyone in their place.
Trump’s smear of Harris is also an accusation of racial disloyalty—that she was ashamed of being Black until it was politically convenient. . . . .The idea that liberal Jews are not truly Jewish operates similarly to Trump’s attack on Harris, in that it gives the speaker permission to attack a Jewish target in anti-Semitic terms because the target is not “truly” Jewish. Attacking Harris in racist terms, under this logic, is not racist, because she is not “truly” Black. The point of this rhetorical maze is simply to justify racist attacks on a particular target while deflecting accusations of bigotry.
Chattel slavery, which existed longer on this continent than the United States has existed, was a form of systematized rape in which white men who publicly advertised their deeply Christian piety ran slave-labor camps filled with their own children. As the southern white aristocrat Mary Chesnut wrote in her diary, “God forgive us but ours is a monstrous system and wrong and iniquity … Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines, and the mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children.”
Historically in America, white identity has been defined by the completely unscientific concept of racial purity, the most infamous example being the “one-drop rule” that labeled anyone with African ancestry as Black. As a result, Black American identity has long been inclusive and expansive.
Trump’s attempt to say that a Black woman with a non-Black parent cannot be Black is an imposition of the concept of racial purity on a culture that does not share it.
I wish I could say that any of this is new. In fact, it is all emblematic of how much the racist politics of the past remain with us. The worldview behind the “DEI hire” smear is one that conceives of Black people as incapable of rising on their own merits but instead achieving only at other people’s expense. Even attacking Harris as not really Black is a way to diminish her success by suggesting that a “real” Black person would be incapable of reaching such heights without unjust assistance.
In 1865, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass—whose owner before he escaped bondage was likely his father—described a dynamic that is jarring in its familiarity: Black people are defined as “not Black” the moment they escape the conceptual prison of racist stereotype.
“When prejudice cannot deny the black man’s ability, it denies his race, and claims him as a white man. It affirms that if he is not exactly white, he ought to be. If not what he ought to be in this particular, he owes whatever intelligence he possesses to the white race by contract or association,” Douglass said.
This contention, which is of course a rationalization, is necessary to preserve a racist conception of Black people as inherently limited compared with white people. The moment they show themselves to be intelligent and capable, they cease to be Black, because racists define Blackness as the absence of such capabilities.
In Douglass’s case, any insistence by his racist critics that he was not truly a Black person was soon contradicted by their behavior. We know they saw him as a Black person, because they treated him as one. The same is ultimately true of how Trumpists treat Harris.
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