watching early s6 is so funny because you get to see how the uk views the us and it's so wrong.

It should be noted: disgust is one of the primary languages of modern advocacy — Environmental activists with climate change, animal rights activists with slaughterhouses, anti-smoking groups with lung biopsies, Black Lives Matter activists with police brutality, Christians with sin, white supremacists with interracial couples, another almost-infinite list — all of them (at least partly) built on taking advantage of the emotional flare-up of disgust in a person. Disgust brings people to a persuadable place, where anything offered solution to the trigger will be more readily received. You can see it in the large swaths of advertising, where messages are designed around provoking and relieving disgust. We are taught to be disgusted by our bodies, then offered products to fix it. We are encouraged to be disgusted by our enemies, and assuaged by our own correctness.

Donald Trump is man of disgust. He is perpetually disgusted: foods, nations, germs, his opponents, his supporters, all of them disgust him. More than most, Trump is proud of his disgust at the world, and he often relies on it to attract people to his side. If a shared disgust is a dark solidarity, Donald Trump is the center of so many networks. His disgusted affect has meandered down into all of us: Trump is not just disgusted, but disgusting. His politics are designed to antagonize and repulse, and in this concern, are incredibly successful at grabbing attention. So many of us are disgusted these days. Disgusted by things we read on our phones and laptops (yet oddly we never seem disgusted enough to put down the technology), offended by craven politicians, sickened by violence and lies — it’s the defining emotion of our time. We’ve all been ensnared in the web.

A survey of the common elicitors of disgust is like seeing a prism for all of Pastel QAnon, for the intersection of wellness and conspiracy theories. In wellness, disgust about body fat, cholesterol, aging, disease, and other issues of body purity animate our shopping and lifestyles, and lead us to fetishize “clean eating.” Body products like shit and piss and blood and organs are commonly found to be disgusting, so it would be understandable that folks would find the idea of elites harvesting chemical compounds in our brains to be a far more riveting than the actual harvesting of our time, peace, and wages. Food and hygiene are traditional fields of disgust, so fears around genetic modification or chemically treated food will hold their attention far more than food deserts or general hunger. Vaccines, when viewed through a prism of body horror, will be a perpetual source of disgust for some people, especially among the pregnant and early parents. Disgust for the feminine is another common thread: soy is a vehicle of feminine chemicals (the dreaded estrogen), ready to wreck our natural balances. Even the evangelical opposition to The Da Vinci Code is rooted in the disgust at the idea of Mary or Jesus as sexually active people.

Yet disgust blinds us to reality, distracts us from real problems. An example of how disgust can drive people away from reality and into useless theories is the famed and dreaded idea of mandatory microchip implantation. For all of the fear, the threat of microchip totalitarianism is miniscule, especially considering the far more grave threats posed by facial-recognition software and the modern surveillance state. It’s obvious to the non-disgusted mind: why would any elite group go to the effort to try and put something inside our bodies if we’re all already addicted to our smartphones and posting? We can’t give up our phones and smartwatches if we wanted to, why would they waste time on hooking us up with anything else? [Ed.- Again, I wrote this in the summer, but by now we have all seen Q fans raiding the U.S. Capitol while proudly broadcasting them on their phones, much to the delight of federal prosecutors.] The crux of why this conspiracy remains potent is because of the disgust that is provoked by the idea of violating a person’s body envelope (similar to disgust over gore or other intrusive instruments in a body). Even though the threat is far less real, the disgust provoked isn’t, which is why the idea remains so powerful. Incidentally, I read a rumor recently that even David Icke was starting to realize that microchips were a dumb idea, and he would start pivoting towards stirring up fear around facial recognition pretty soon. Color me skeptical of that idea taking hold with his followers. Facial recognition, while a real threat, isn’t vivid enough and is too non-disgusting to hold much sway with people hooked on conspiracies.

Coping with religious trauma

CONTENT WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS DISCUSSIONS OF MENTAL ILLNESS, TRAUMA RECOVERY, AND HOMOPHOBIA. The advice in this post is intended for an adult audience, not for those who are legal minors.

A lot of people find their way to paganism after having traumatic experiences with organized religion, especially in countries like the United States, where 65% of the population identifies as Christian. (This number is actually at an all-time low — historically, the percentage has been much higher.) Paganism, which is necessarily less dogmatic and hierarchical than the Abrahamic religions, offers a chance to experience religion without having to fit a certain mold. This can be extremely liberating for people who have felt hurt, abused, or ignored by mainstream religion.

To avoid making generalizations that might offend people, I’ll share my own story as an example.

My family joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, better known as the Mormons, when I was nine years old. The Mormons are an extremely conservative sect of evangelical Christianity that places a heavy emphasis on maintaining a strong community that upholds their religious values. The problem with that is that Mormon values are inherently racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic. As a teenager in the Mormon Church, I was told that as a woman, my only purpose in life was to marry a (Mormon) man and raise (Mormon) children. I was discouraged from pursuing a college education if it meant delaying marriage. I was not allowed to participate in the full extent of religious ritual because I was not a man. I was not allowed to express myself in ways that went against Mormon culture, and I kept my bisexuality secret for fear I would be ostracized. I didn’t have any sort of support system outside the Church, which inevitably made the mental health issues that come with being a queer woman in a conservative Christian setting much, much worse.

I left the Mormons when I was seventeen, and by that time I had some major issues stemming from my time in the Church. I had been extremely depressed and anxious for most of my teen years. I struggled with internalized misogyny and homophobia. I had very low self-esteem. I had anxiety around sex and sexuality that would take years of therapy and self-work to overcome. I wanted to form a connection with the divine, but I wasn’t sure if I was worthy of such a connection.

I was attracted to paganism, specifically Wicca, because it seemed like everything Mormonism wasn’t. Wicca teaches equality between men and women, with a heavy focus on the Goddess in worship. It places an emphasis on doing what is right for you, as long as it doesn’t harm anyone else. It encourages sexuality and healthy sexual expression. Learning about Wicca, and later other types of paganism, helped me develop the kind of healthy spirituality I’d never experienced as a Mormon. Although Wicca is no longer the backbone of my religious practice, it was a necessary and deeply healing step on my spiritual journey.

I’m not sharing my story to gain sympathy or to make anyone feel bad — I’m sharing it because my situation is not an uncommon one in pagan circles. The vast majority of pagans are converts, meaning they didn’t grow up pagan. Some had healthy upbringings in other faiths, or no faith at all, and simply found that paganism was a better fit for them. Others, like myself, had deeply traumatic experiences with organized religion and are attracted to paganism because of the freedom, autonomy, and empowerment it offers.

If you fall into this latter category, this post is for you. Untangling the threads of religious trauma can be an extremely difficult and overwhelming task. In this post, I lay out six steps to recovery based on my own experiences and those of other people, both pagan and non-pagan, who have lived through religious trauma.

While following these steps will help jumpstart your spiritual healing, it’s important to remember that healing is not a linear process — especially healing from emotional, mental, and spiritual trauma. You may have relapses, you may feel like you’re moving in circles, and you may still have bad days in five or ten years. That’s okay. That’s part of the healing process. Go easy on yourself, and let your journey unfold naturally.

Step One: Cut all ties with the group that caused your trauma

Or, at least, cut as many ties as reasonably possible.

Obviously, if you’re still participating in a religious organization that has caused you pain, the first step is to leave! But before you do, make sure you have an exit plan to help you disengage safely and gracefully.

To make your exit plan, start by asking yourself what the best, worst, and most likely case scenarios are, and be honest in your answers. Obviously, the best case scenario is that you leave, everyone accepts it, and all is well. The worst case scenario is that someone tries to prevent you from leaving — you may be harassed by missionaries or concerned churchgoers, for example. But what is the most likely case scenario? That depends on the religious community, their beliefs, and how involved you were in the first place. When making your exit plan, prepare for the most likely scenario, but have a backup plan in case the worst case scenario happens.

Once you’ve prepared yourself for the best, worst, and most likely outcomes, choose a friend, significant other, or family member who can help you make your exit. Ideally, this person is not a member of the group you are trying to leave. Their role is mainly to provide emotional support, although they may also need to be willing to run off any well-meaning missionaries who come calling. This person can also help you transition after you leave. For example, you might make a plan to get coffee with them every week during the time your old religious community holds worship services.

Finally, make your strategy for leaving. Choose a date and don’t put it off! If you have any responsibilities within the group, send in a letter of resignation. Figure out who you’ll need to have conversations with about your leaving — this will likely include any family members or close friends who are still part of the group. Schedule those conversations. Make sure to have them in public places, where people will be less likely to make a scene.

If you feel it is necessary, you may want to request that your name be removed from the group’s membership records so you don’t get emails, phone calls, or friendly visits from them in the future. You may not feel the need to do this, but if contact with the group triggers a mental health crisis, this extra step will help keep you safe.

Of course, it’s not always possible to completely cut ties with a group after leaving. You may have family members, a significant other, or close friends who are still members. If this is the case, you’ll need to establish some clear boundaries. Politely but firmly tell them that, although you’re glad their faith adds value to their lives, you are not willing to be involved in their religious activities. Let them know that this is what is best for your mental and emotional health and that you still value your relationship with them.

Try to make compromises that allow you to preserve the relationship without exposing you to a traumatic religious environment. For example, if your family is Christian and always spends all day on Christmas at church, offer to celebrate with them the day after, once their religious commitments are over.

Hopefully, your loved ones can respect these boundaries. If not, you may need to distance yourself or walk away altogether. If they are knowingly undermining your attempts to take care of yourself, they don’t deserve to be in your life.

During this time, you may find it helpful to read other people’s exit stories online or in books. One of my personal favorites is the book Girl at the End of the World by Elizabeth Esther. Hearing other people’s stories can help you remember that other people have been through similar situations and made it out on the other side. You will too.

Step Two: Seek professional help

I cannot overstate the importance of professional counseling when dealing with trauma of any kind, including religious trauma. Therapists and counselors have the benefit of professional training. They are able to be objective, since they’re approaching the situation from the outside. They can keep you from getting bogged down in your own thoughts and feelings.

I understand that not everyone has access to therapy. I am very lucky to have insurance that covers mental health counseling, but I know not everyone has that privilege. However, there are some options that make therapy more affordable.

There may be an organization in your area that offers free or low-cost therapy — if you live in the U.S., you can find information about these services by checking the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) HelpLine or visiting mentalhealth.gov. You can also look for therapists who use a sliding scale for payment, which means they determine an hourly rate based on the client’s income. And finally, if you have a little bit of extra cash you may want to look into therapy apps like BetterHelp or Talkspace, which are typically cheaper than in-person therapy.

If none of those options work for you, the next best option is to join a support group. Support groups allow you to connect with other people whose experiences are similar to yours and, unlike therapy, they allow you to get advice and feedback from multiple people. These groups are often free, although some charge a small fee.

Finding the right group for you is important. You’re unlikely to find a group for people recovering from religious trauma but, depending on the nature of your trauma, you may fit right in with a grief and loss group, an addiction recovery group, or a group for adult survivors of child abuse. If you’re a member of the LGBTQ+ community, you may be able to find a queer support group. (The LGBTQ+ club at my college was an invaluable resource in my recovery!) Depending on your area, you may also be able to find groups for specific mental and emotional issues like depression or anxiety.

Make sure to do your research before attending a meeting. Find out what, if anything, the group charges, who can join, and whether they use a curriculum or have unstructured sessions. See if you can find a statement about their values and philosophy. Make a note of where meetings are held and of who is running the group. Some support groups meet in churches and may or may not have a religious element to their curriculum. It’s best to avoid religious groups — the last thing you need right now is to be preached to.

Getting other people involved in your recovery will make you feel less alone and prevent you from getting stuck in your own head. A good therapist, counselor, or support group can help you realize what you need to work on and give you ideas for how to approach it.

Step Three: Deprogramming

“Deprogramming” refers to the practice of undoing brainwashing and reintroducing healthy thought patterns. This term is normally used in the context of cult survivors and their recovery, but deprogramming techniques can also be helpful for people recovering from a lifetime of toxic religious rhetoric.

To begin the process of deprogramming, familiarize yourself with the way organizations use thought control to shape the behavior of their members. I recommend starting with the work of Steven Hassan — his BITE model is a handy way to classify types of thought control.

The BITE model lays out four types of control. There’s Behavior Control, which controls what members do and how they spend their free time. (For example, requiring members to attend multiple hours-long meetings each week.) There’s Information Control, which restricts members’ access to information. (For example, denying certain aspects of the group’s history.) There’s Thought Control, which shapes the way members think. (For example, classifying certain thoughts as sinful or dirty.) And finally there’s Emotional Control, which manipulates members’ emotions. (For example, instilling fear of damnation or punishment.)

Here’s a simple exercise to get you started with your deprogramming. Divide a blank sheet of paper into four equal sections. Label one section “Behavior,” one “Information,” one “Thought,” and one “Emotions.” Now, in each section, make a list of the ways your old religious group controlled — and maybe still controls — that area of your life. Once you’ve completed your lists, choose a single item from one of your lists to work on undoing.

For example, let’s say that in your “Information” column, you’ve written that you were discouraged from reading certain books because they contained “evil” ideas. (For a lot of people, this was Harry Potter. For me, it was The Golden Compass.) Pick up one of those books, and read it or listen to it as an audiobook. Once you’ve read it, write down your thoughts. Did you enjoy it? Why or why not? Why do you think your group banned it? What was in this book that they didn’t want you to know about? Write it down.

Once you’ve worked on the first thing, choose something else. Keep going until you’ve undone all the items on your lists.

If you want to go further with deprogramming, I recommend the book Recovering Agency by Luna Lindsey. Although this book is specifically written for former Mormons, I genuinely believe it would be helpful to former members of other controlling religious groups as well. Lindsey does an excellent job of explaining how thought control works and of connecting it to real world examples, as well as deconstructing those ideas. Her book has been a huge help in my recovery process, and I highly recommend it.

Step Four: Replace toxic beliefs and practices with healthy ones

This goes hand-in-hand with step three, and if you’re already working on deprogramming then you’ll already have started replacing your unhealthy beliefs. This is the turning point in the recovery process. You’re no longer just undoing what others have done to you — now you get an opportunity to decide what you want to believe and do going forward. This is the time to let go of things like denial of your desires, fear of divine punishment, and holding yourself to unattainable standards. Get used to living in a way that makes you happy, without guilt.

Notice how each step builds on the previous steps. Therapy and deprogramming can help you identify what beliefs and behaviors need to be adjusted or replaced. Your therapist, support group, and/or emotional support person can help you make these changes and follow through on them.

These new beliefs and practices don’t have to be religious — in fact, it’s better if they aren’t. If you can live a healthy, happy, balanced life without religion, you’ll be in a better position to choose a religion that is the right fit for you, if that is something you want.

Your new healthy, non-religious practices may include: mindfulness meditation, nature walks, journaling, reading, exercise, energy work, learning a hobby or craft, or spending time with loves ones — or it might include none of these things, and that’s okay too. Now is the time to find what brings you joy and start doing it every day.

Step Five: Ritual healing

This is an optional step, but it’s one that has been deeply healing for me. You may find it helpful to design and perform a ritual to mark your recovery.

Note that when I say “ritual,” I don’t necessarily mean magic. Rituals serve a psychological purpose as well as a spiritual one. They can act as powerful symbolic events that mark a turning point in our lives or reinforce what we already know and believe. Even if you don’t believe in magic, even if you’re the least spiritual person you know, you can still benefit from ritual.

You might choose to perform a ritual to finalize your healing, or to symbolically throw off the chains of your old religion. It can be elaborate or simple, long or short, joyful or solemn. It might include lighting a candle and saying a few words. It might include ecstatic dance. It might include drawing or painting a representation of all the negative emotions associated with your old religion, then ritually destroying it. The possibilities are literally endless. (If you’re looking for ritual ideas, I recommend the book Light Magic for Dark Times by Lisa Marie Basile.)

One type of ritual that some people find very empowering is unbaptism. An unbaptism is exactly what it sounds like — the opposite of a baptism. The idea is that, if a baptism makes a Christian, an unbaptism makes someone un-Christian, no longer part of that lineage. It is a ritual rejection of Christianity. (Obviously, this only applies if you’re a former Christian, though some of the following suggestions could be adjusted to fit a rejection of other religions.)

If you’re interested in unbaptism, here are some ideas for how it could be done:

A classic method of unbaptism is to recite the Lord’s Prayer backwards under a full moon. (For a non-Christians version, use a significant prayer from whatever religion you have left.)

Run a bath. Add a tiny pinch of sulfur (a.k.a. brimstone) to the water. Get into the bath and say, “By water I was baptized, and by water my baptism is rejected.” Submerge your entire body under the water for several seconds. When you come back up, your unbaptism is complete. (You may want to shower after this one. Sulfur does not smell good.)

The Detroit Satanic Temple has a delightfully dramatic unbaptism ritual. For a DIY version, you will need holy water or some other relic from the faith you were baptized in, a fireproof dish, a black candle, and an apple or other sweet fruit. Light the candle and place it in your fireproof dish. Toss some holy water onto the flame (not enough to extinguish it) and say, “I cast my chains into the dust of hell.” Take a bite of the apple and say, “I savor the fruit of knowledge and disobedience.” Finally, declare proudly, “I am unbaptized.” You can add “in the name of Satan” at the end or leave it out, depending on your comfort level.

Personally, I’ve never felt the need to unbaptize myself. I’ve ritually rejected my Mormon upbringing in other ways. Maybe someday I’ll decide to go for the unbaptism, but I’ve never really felt like I needed it. Likewise, you’ll need to decide for yourself what ritual(s) will work for you.

Step Six: Honor your recovery

Our first reaction to trauma is to hide it away and never speak of it again. When we do this, we do ourselves a disservice. Your recovery is a part of your life story. You had the strength to walk away from a situation that was hurting you, and that deserves to be celebrated! Be proud of yourself for how far you’ve come!

You may choose to honor your recovery by celebrating an important date every year, like the day you decided to leave the group, the date of the last meeting you attended, or the date you were removed from the membership records. Keep this celebration fun and light — get drinks with friends, bake a cake for yourself, or just take a few moments to silently acknowledge your journey.

If you feel like having a party is a bit much, you can also honor your recovery by talking to other people about your experiences. Share your story with others. If you’re feeling shy, try sharing your story anonymously online. (Reddit has several forums specifically for anonymous stories.) You’ll be amazed by how validating it can be to tell people what you’ve been through. `

Another way to honor your recovery is to work for personal and religious freedom for all people. Protest laws with religious motivations. Donate to organizations that campaign for the separation of church and state. Educate people about how to recognize an unhealthy religious organization. Let your own story motivate you to help others who are in similar situations.

And most of all, take joy in your journey. Be proud of yourself for how far you’ve come, but know that your recovery is a lifelong journey. Be gentle and understanding with yourself. You are doing what is right for you, and no god or spirit worthy of worship could ever be upset by that.

When a young Southern Baptist pastor named Alan Cross arrived in Montgomery, Ala., in January 2000, he knew it was where the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. had his first church and where Rosa Parks helped launched the famous bus boycott, but he didn't know some other details of the city's role in civil rights history.

The more he learned, the more troubled he became by one event in particular: the savage attack in May 1961 on a busload of Black and white Freedom Riders who had traveled defiantly together to Montgomery in a challenge to segregation. Over the next 15 years, Cross, who is white, would regularly take people to the old Greyhound depot in Montgomery to highlight what happened that spring day.

"They pull in right here, on the side," Cross said, standing in front of the depot. "And it was quiet when they got here. But then once they start getting off the bus, around 500 people come out – men, women and children. Men were holding the Freedom Riders back, and the women were hitting them with their purses and holding their children up to claw their faces." Some of the men carried lead pipes and baseball bats. Two of the Freedom Riders, the civil rights activist John Lewis and a white ally, James Zwerg, were beaten unconscious.

Though he had grown up in Mississippi and was familiar with the history of racial conflict in the South, Cross was horrified by the story of the 1961 attack on the Freedom Riders. Montgomery was known as a city of churches. Fresh out of seminary, Cross had come there to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ.

"Why didn't white Christians show up?" he recalled wondering.

To his dismay, Cross learned that many of the people in the white mob were regular churchgoers. In the years that followed, he made it part of his ministry to educate his fellow Christians about the attack and prompt them to reflect on its meaning.

"You think about the South being Christian, but this wasn't Christianity," Cross said. "So what happened here in the white church? How did we get to that point?" It's a question he explored in his 2014 book, When Heaven and Earth Collide: Racism, Southern Evangelicals, and the Better Way of Jesus.

As she cleans up the counter where the teenagers at her church’s Vacation Bible School ate their cookies and yogurt, Luba Yanko complains about the state of the country. President Trump is trying to act on Christian values, she believes. But from what she reads online, it seems that a certain group keeps getting in the way.

Trump, she says, “is surrounded by a Zionist environment with completely different values from Christians. It’s kabbalist. It’s Talmudic values. Not the word of God.”

In other words: It’s the Jews’ fault.

“Why do we have pro-abortion, pro-LGBTQ values, and we do not have more freedom to protect our faith? We are persecuted now,” Yanko says about evangelical Christians like herself. “[Jews] say, ‘We’ve got America. We control America.’ That’s what I know.”

...In churches across America, evangelicals say they don’t believe they can get unbiased facts from any traditional news outlet that Trump has branded “fake news” (though many are fans of Fox News). They watch TV networks other than Fox and read major news websites but don’t trust them. Instead, they seek news from alternative websites and YouTube videos in which fiery pastors decry Jewish influence.

...“I’m not in government. It would be like me trying to understand the insurance business,” [pastor Mark English at the Christian Life Center ] said, when asked about Yanko’s allegation that Jews control the government. “The government is so complex — I don’t think that any one group controls everything.”

He felt no need to address his congregant’s anti-Semitic beliefs, either one on one or from the pulpit.

Historically, evangelicals have thought of themselves as very good friends of the Jews, not as anti-Semites [...] But Christian theology has also gone hand in hand with anti-Semitism for centuries, dating back long before Martin Luther. To this day, some Christians believe that the Jews killed Jesus and that modern Jews should bear the guilt.

...[Daniel Hummel, a historian at a Christian study center at the University of Wisconsin] described the deep-rooted anti-Semitic beliefs among some evangelicals as both cultural and theological, with the cultural beliefs coming from their conservative neighbors and the theological beliefs dating to early Christianity, when Christians first started casting themselves as the new chosen people replacing the Jews.

“Some associations in certain conservative areas, with Jews being liberal, cosmopolitan, international and that being a threat to American Christian identity: You’re going to find those views, weirdly, right alongside expressing support for Israel,” Hummel said. “Someone like that would be vaguely or even strongly anti-Semitic but also pro-Israel.”

And politically, evangelicals find themselves sharing common cause with right-wing anti-Semites. They might have little else in common, but both groups are enthusiastic supporters of Trump. [...]

Deborah Lipstadt, a historian who is one of the foremost researchers on anti-Semitism, said she has noticed that politically conservative talking points echo the language common to anti-Semites much more often. She pointed to Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-Mo.) speech at the National Conservatism Conference, in which he used the word “cosmopolitan” 12 times.

“This class lives in the United States, but they identify as ‘citizens of the world.’ They run businesses or oversee universities here, but their primary loyalty is to the global community,” Hawley said, referring not to Jews but to liberal elites.

“I’m sure most of the people who appeared there would say, ‘I’m a good friend of Jews,’ and they probably are,” Lipstadt said. “But if you took out the word ‘cosmopolitan’ and put in the word ‘Jew’ — it sounds like a traditional anti-Semitic trope … It’s the kind of thing that will attract the anti-Semites.”

At its root, this trope relies on a mistrust of major institutions, and a suspicion that Jews are manipulating them. ...

“There’s a theory that’s out and about, about the manipulation of news, fake news. And how you can’t trust judges. And you can’t trust big pharma, that’s why we shouldn’t be vaccinated … These kind of conspiracy theories [about manipulating institutions], for centuries, are just so connected to anti-Semitism that it’s hard to just ignore,” Lipstadt said. “It’s hard to say this is just by chance.”

Evangelicals are not inherently anti-Semitic, she noted. But they tend to share these conservative suspicions of the news media and of elites, and to view themselves as the victims of the elites — a worldview that predisposes some to align themselves with anti-Semites.

...Aryeh Tuchman, the associate director of the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League, points to several YouTube channels where pastors promote a mix of Christian theology and anti-Jewish animus.

TruNews, a nightly newscast with more than 18 million views on YouTube, bills its purpose “to offer Christians a positive alternative to the anti-Christian bigotry of the mainstream media.” Jews and Israel are a constant target for Rick Wiles, the Florida pastor who runs the show.

In the past month alone, Wiles has posited that sex offender Jeffrey Epstein might not have died but instead been spirited away to a safe house in Israel; listed the names of “Hollywood Jews” who produced the pulled-from-theaters satirical movie “The Hunt” and suggested that they actually want to hunt and kill white Christians; called the non-Jewish billionaire “Rabbi Warren Buffett"; said the government could take away guns from anyone who criticizes Israel; referred to Ivanka Trump, who is Jewish, as “Yael Kushner"; and more.

...For Wanda and Doug Meyer, like many other evangelical Christians across the country, these YouTube channels are their primary source of news. They turn to YouTube to understand events that seem vitally important to them, like policy in Washington that will impact their religious freedom at home in Brandon, Fla.

...“It’s right there on YouTube. You don’t hear it on mainstream media. We know Kenneth Copeland. We know Paula White. We know David Barton,” Wanda said. “Different ministers, that’s where we get our news. People who know what’s really going on.”

As they ate lunch after the service at their large evangelical church, the Meyers said they would like to someday visit Israel, which is religiously important to them. But they also watch a lot of videos online when they’re watching those pastors’ sermons. They believe, with total certainty, in what they hear, even when the information is false: that humans have nothing to do with climate change. That Muslims are trying to implement laws in U.S. states that would allow them to kill Christians with impunity. That a shadowy group, including wealthy Jews as leaders, meant to use Hillary Clinton to bring about “one world government.”

Wanda says they try to “stay up to date” on the “spiritual battle … financed by the Illuminati and the Rothschilds.”

After all, she trusts the source has a higher authority: “These are ministers we know, we respect.”

[Read Julie Zauzmer’s full piece at The Washington Post.]

Ravi Zacharias (1946 – 2020)

When Ravi Zacharias was a cricket-loving boy on the streets of India, his mother called him in to meet the local sari-seller-turned-palm reader. “Looking at your future, Ravi Baba, you will not travel far or very much in your life,” he declared. “That’s what the lines on your hand tell me. There is no future for you abroad.” By the time a 37-year-old Zacharias preached, at the invitation of Billy Graham, to the inaugural International Conference for Itinerant Evangelists in Amsterdam in 1983, he was on his way to becoming one of the foremost defenders of Christianity’s intellectual credibility. A year later, he founded Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM), with the mission of “helping the thinker believe and the believer think.” In the time between the sari seller’s prediction and the founding of RZIM, Zacharias had immigrated to Canada, taken the gospel across North America, prayed with military prisoners in Vietnam and ministered to students in a Cambodia on the brink of collapse. He had also undertaken a global preaching trip as a newly licensed minister with The Christian and Missionary Alliance, along with his wife, Margie, and eldest daughter, Sarah. This trip started in England, worked eastwards through Europe and the Middle East and finished on the Pacific Rim; all-in-all that year, Zacharias preached nearly 600 times in over a dozen countries. It was the culmination of a remarkable transformation set in motion when Zacharias, recovering in a Delhi hospital from a suicide attempt at age 17, was read the words of Jesus recorded in the Bible by the apostle John: “Because I live, you will also live.” In response, Zacharias surrendered his life to Christ and offered up a prayer that if he emerged from the hospital, he would leave no stone unturned in his pursuit of truth. Once Zacharias found the truth of the gospel, his passion for sharing it burned bright until the very end. Even as he returned home from the hospital in Texas, where he had been undergoing chemotherapy, Zacharias was sharing the hope of Jesus to the three nurses who tucked him into his transport. Frederick Antony Ravi Kumar Zacharias was born in Madras, now Chennai, in 1946, in the shadow of the resting place of the apostle Thomas, known to the world as the “Doubter” but to Zacharias as the “Great Questioner.” Zacharias’s affinity with Thomas meant he was always more interested in the questioner than the question itself. His mother, Isabella, was a teacher. His father, Oscar, who was studying labor relations at the University of Nottingham in England when Zacharias was born, rose through the ranks of the Indian civil service throughout Zacharias’s adolescence. An unremarkable student, Zacharias was more interested in cricket than books, until his encounter with the gospel in that hospital bed. Nevertheless, a bold, radical faith ran in his genes. In the Indian state of Kerala, his paternal great-grandfather and grandfather produced the 20th century’s first Malayalam-English dictionary. This dictionary served as the cornerstone of the first Malayalam translation of the Bible. Further back, Zacharias’s great-great-great-grandmother shocked her Nambudiri family, the highest caste of the Hindu priesthood, by converting to Christianity. With conversion came a new surname, Zacharias, and a new path that started her descendants on a road to the Christian faith. Zacharias saw the Lord’s hand at work in his family’s tapestry and he infused RZIM with the same transgenerational and transcultural heart for the gospel. He created a ministry that transcended his personality, where every speaker, whatever their background, presented the truth in the context of the contemporary. Zacharias believed if you achieved that, your message would always be necessary. Thirty-six years since its establishment, the ministry still bears the name chosen for Zacharias’s ancestor. However, where once there was a single speaker, now there are nearly 100 gifted speakers who on any given night can be found sharing the gospel at events across the globe; where once it was run from Zacharias’s home, now the ministry has a presence in 17 countries on five continents. Zacharias’s passion and urgency to take the gospel to all nations was forged in Vietnam, throughout the summer of ’71. Zacharias had immigrated to Canada in 1966, a year after winning a preaching award at a Youth for Christ congress in Hyderabad. It was there, in Toronto, that Ruth Jeffrey, the veteran missionary to Vietnam, heard him preach. She invited him to her adopted land. That summer, Zacharias—only just 25—found himself flown across the country by helicopter gunship to preach at military bases, in hospitals and in prisons to the Vietcong. Most nights Zacharias and his translator Hien Pham would fall asleep to the sound of gunfire. On one trip across remote land, Zacharias and his travel companions’ car broke down. The lone jeep that passed ignored their roadside waves. They finally cranked the engine to life and set off, only to come across the same jeep a few miles on, overturned and riddled with bullets, all four passengers dead. He later said of this moment, “God will stop our steps when it is not our time, and He will lead us when it is.” Days later, Zacharias and his translator stood at the graves of six missionaries, killed unarmed when the Vietcong stormed their compound. Zacharias knew some of their children. It was that level of trust in God, and the desire to stand beside those who minister in areas of great risk, that is a hallmark of RZIM. Its support for Christian evangelists in places where many ministries fear to tread, including northern Nigeria, Pakistan, South African townships, the Middle East and North Africa, can be traced back to that formative graveside moment. After this formative trip, Zacharias and his new bride, Margie, moved to Deerfield, Illinois, to study for a Master of Divinity at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Here the young couple lived two doors down from Zacharias’s classmate and friend William Lane Craig. After graduating, Zacharias taught at the Alliance Theological Seminary in New York and continued to travel the country preaching on weekends. Full-time teaching combined with his extensive travel and itinerant preaching led Zacharias to describe these three years as the toughest in his 48-year marriage to Margie. He felt his job at the seminary was changing him and his preaching far more than he was changing lives with the hope of the gospel. It was at that point that Graham invited Zacharias to speak at his inaugural International Conference for Itinerant Evangelists in Amsterdam in 1983. Zacharias didn’t realize Graham even knew who he was, let alone knew about his preaching. In front of 3,800 evangelists from 133 countries, Zacharias opened with the line, “My message is a very difficult one….” He went on to tell them that religions, 20th-century cultures and philosophies had formed “vast chasms between the message of Christ and the mind of man.” Even more difficult was his message, which received a mid-talk ovation, about his fear that, “in certain strands of evangelicalism, we sometimes think it is necessary to so humiliate someone of a different worldview that we think unless we destroy everything he holds valuable, we cannot preach to him the gospel of Christ…what I am saying is this, when you are trying to reach someone, please be sensitive to what he holds valuable.” That talk changed Zacharias’s future and arguably the future of apologetics, dealing with the hard questions of origin, meaning, morality and destiny that every worldview must answer. Flying back to the U.S., Zacharias shared his thoughts with Margie. As one colleague has expressed, “He saw the objections and questions of others not as something to be rebuffed, but as a cry of the heart that had to be answered. People weren’t logical problems waiting to be solved; they were people who needed the person of Christ.” No one was reaching out to the thinker, to the questioner. It was on that flight that Zacharias and Margie planted the seed of a ministry intended to meet the thinker where they were, to train cultural evangelist-apologists to reach those opinion makers of society. The seed was watered and nurtured through its early years by the businessman DD Davis, a man who became a father figure to Zacharias. With the establishment of the ministry, the Zacharias family moved south to Atlanta. By now, the family had grown with the addition of a second daughter, Naomi, and a son, Nathan. Atlanta was the city Zacharias would call home for the last 36 years of his life. Meeting the thinker face-to-face was an intrinsic part of Zacharias’s ministry, with post-event Q&A sessions often lasting long into the night. Not to be quelled in the sharing of the gospel, Zacharias also took to the airwaves in the 1980s. Many people, not just in the U.S. but across the world, came to hear the message of Christ for the first time through Zacharias’s radio program, Let My People Think. In weekly half-hour slots, Zacharias explored issues such as the credibility of the Christian message and the Bible, the weakness of modern intellectual movements, and the uniqueness of Jesus Christ. Today, Let My People Think is syndicated to over 2,000 stations in 32 countries and has also been downloaded 15.6 million times as a podcast over the last year. As the ministry grew so did the demands on Zacharias. In 1990, he followed in his father’s footsteps to England. He took a sabbatical at Ridley Hall in Cambridge. It was a time surrounded by family, and where he wrote the first of his 28 books, A Shattered Visage: The Real Face of Atheism. It was no coincidence that throughout the rhythm of his itinerant life, it was among his family and Margie, in particular, that his writing was at its most productive. Margie inspired each of Zacharias’s books. With her eagle eye and keen mind, she read the first draft of every manuscript, from The Logic of God, which was this year awarded the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (ECPA) Christian Book Award in the category of Bible study, and his latest work, Seeing Jesus from the East, co-authored with colleague Abdu Murray. Others among that list include the ECPA Gold Medallion Book Award winner, Can Man Live Without God?, and Christian bestsellers, Jesus Among Other Gods and The Grand Weaver. Zacharias’s books have sold millions of copies worldwide and have been translated into over a dozen languages. Zacharias’s desire to train evangelists undergirded with apologetics, in order to engage with culture shapers, had been happening informally over the years but finally became formal in 2004. It was a momentous year for Zacharias and the ministry with the establishment of OCCA, the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics; the launch of Wellspring International; and Zacharias’s appearance at the United Nations Annual International Prayer Breakfast. OCCA was founded with the help of Professor Alister McGrath, the RZIM team and the staff at Wycliffe Hall, a Permanent Private Hall of Oxford University, where Zacharias was an honorary Senior Research Fellow between 2007 and 2015. Over his lifetime Zacharias would receive 10 honorary doctorates in recognition of his public commitment to Christian thought, including one from the National University of San Marcos, the oldest established university in the Americas. Over the years, OCCA has trained over 400 students from 50 countries who have gone on to carry the gospel in many arenas across the world. Some have continued to follow an explicit calling as evangelists and apologists in Christian settings, and many others have gone on to take up roles in each of the spheres of influence Zacharias always dreamed of reaching: the arts, academia, business, media and politics. In 2017, another apologetics training facility, the Zacharias Institute, was established at the ministry’s headquarters in Atlanta, to continue the work of equipping all who desire to effectively share the gospel and answer the common objections to Christianity with gentleness and respect. In 2014, the same heart lay behind the creation of the RZIM Academy, an online apologetics training curriculum. Across 140 countries, the Academy’s courses have been accessed by thousands in multiple languages. In the same year OCCA was founded, Zacharias launched Wellspring International, the humanitarian division of the ministry. Wellspring International was shaped by the memory of his mother’s heart to work with the destitute and is led by his daughter Naomi. Founded on the principle that love is the most powerful apologetic, it exists to come alongside local partners that meet critical needs of vulnerable women and children around the world. Zacharias’s appearance at the U.N. in 2004 was the second of four that he made in the 21st century and represented his increasing impact in the arena of global leadership. He had first made his mark as the Cold War was coming to an end. His internationalist outlook and ease among his fellow man, whether Soviet military leader or precocious Ivy League undergraduate, opened doors that had been closed for many years. One such military leader was General Yuri Kirshin, who in 1992 paved the way for Zacharias to speak at the Lenin Military Academy in Moscow. Zacharias saw the cost of enforced atheism in the Soviet Union; the abandonment of religion had created the illusion of power and the reality of self-destruction. A year later, Zacharias traveled to Colombia, where he spoke to members of the judiciary on the necessity of a moral framework to make sense of the incoherent worldview that had taken hold in the South American nation. Zacharias’s standing on the world stage spanned the continents and the decades. In January 2020, as part of his final foreign trip, he was invited by eight division world champion boxer and Philippines Senator Manny Pacquiao to speak at the National Bible Day Prayer Breakfast in Manila. It was an invitation that followed Zacharias’s November 2019 appearance at The National Theatre in Abu Dhabi as part of the United Arab Emirates’ Year of Tolerance. In 1992, Zacharias’s apologetics ministry expanded from the political arena to academia with the launching of the first ever Veritas Forum, hosted on the campus of Harvard University. Zacharias was asked to be the keynote speaker at the inaugural event. The lectures Zacharias delivered that weekend would form the basis of the best-selling book, Can Man Live Without God?, and would open up opportunities to speak at university campuses across the world. The invitations that followed exposed Zacharias to the intense longing of young people for meaning and identity. Twenty-eight years after that first Veritas Forum event, in what would prove to be his last speaking engagement, Zacharias spoke to a crowd of over 7,000 at the University of Miami’s Watsco Center on the subject of “Does God Exist?” It is a question also asked behind the walls of Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola Prison, the largest maximum-security prison in the United States. Zacharias had prayed with prisoners of war all those years ago in Vietnam but walking through Death Row left an even deeper impression. Zacharias believed the gospel shined with grace and power, especially in the darkest places, and praying with those on Death Row “makes it impossible to block the tears.” It was his third visit to Angola and, such is his deep connection, the inmates have made Zacharias the coffin in which he will be buried. As he writes in Seeing Jesus from the East, “These prisoners know that this world is not their home and that no coffin could ever be their final destination. Jesus assured us of that.” In November last year, a few months after his last visit to Angola, Zacharias stepped down as President of RZIM to focus on his worldwide speaking commitments and writing projects. He passed the leadership to his daughter Sarah Davis as Global CEO and long-time colleague Michael Ramsden as President. Davis had served as the ministry’s Global Executive Director since 2011, while Ramsden had established the European wing of the ministry in Oxford in 1997. It was there in 2018, Zacharias told the story of standing with his successor in front of Lazarus’s grave in Cyprus. The stone simply reads, “Lazarus, four days dead, friend of Christ.” Zacharias turned to Ramsden and said if he was remembered as “a friend of Christ, that would be all I want.” =====|||=====

Ravi Zacharias, who died of cancer on May 19, 2020, at age 74, is survived by Margie, his wife of 48-years; his three children: Sarah, the Global CEO of RZIM, Naomi, Director of Wellspring International, and  Nathan, RZIM’s Creative Director for Media; and five grandchildren. =====|||=====

By Matthew Fearon, RZIM UK content manager and former journalist with The Sunday Times of London

Margie and the Zacharias family have asked that in lieu of flowers gifts be made to the ongoing work of RZIM. Ravi’s heart was people.

His passion and life’s work centered on helping people understand the beauty of the gospel message of salvation. 

Our prayer is that, at his passing, more people will come to know the saving grace found in Jesus through Ravi’s legacy and the global team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

Headlines

Where reopening is working (NYT) Across much of the United States and Europe, the coronavirus has been spreading less rapidly than many people feared. Over the past six weeks—as communities have started to reopen, Americans have flocked to beaches and lakes and European schools have reopened—but the number of new cases has continued falling in many places. Across the Northeast and Midwest of the U.S., they’re down more than 50 percent, and often much more, since May 1. Nationwide, weekly deaths have fallen for six weeks in a row. And Europe “seems to have turned a corner,” Caitlin Rivers of Johns Hopkins University says. How could this be? Public health experts gave two main answers. One, the virus spreads much less easily outdoors than indoors. “Summer—being outside, warmer weather, humidity—seems to help, and we may have underestimated how much it’s helped,” Ashish Jha, the incoming dean of Brown University School of Public Health, told me. Two, many people are taking more precautions than they were in February and March. They’re wearing masks, remaining six feet apart and being careful about what they touch. The combination appears to have eliminated most “superspreader events,” like parties, concerts and restaurant meals, where multiple people get sick. Such events may account for 80 percent of all transmissions, research suggests.

Beleaguered and besieged, police try to come to grips with a nation’s anger (Washington Post) The crowds have thinned and the smoke has cleared, with more than a week of nationwide protests leaving in their wake a nation increasingly resolved to change a broken law enforcement system. But they also have left police officers badly shaken, and in some cases physically bruised. Nationwide, police leaders say the rank and file are struggling to come to grips with the level of animus they encountered on the streets, as epithets, bricks and bottles all came hurtling their way. Police have been targets of protest many times before, of course. But never quite like this. “I’ve had members say they feel like a Vietnam veteran returning home to a country that hates them,” said Robert Harris, a Los Angeles police officer and director of the force’s police union. “It’s not that our members expect thank-yous. It’s the difficulty in knowing that the protesters want to be treated with equality and fairness and respect, and what they’re protesting for isn’t afforded to the officers themselves.” “The morale is low,” he said. “They’ve taken quite a beating.”

Federal Debt Tops $26 Trillion for First Time; Jumps $2 Trillion in Just 63 Days (CNS News) The debt of the federal government topped $26 trillion for the first time on Tuesday, when it climbed from $25,960,547,920,986.11 to $26,003,751,512,344.91, according to data released today by the Treasury Department. The federal debt had topped $24 trillion for the first time on April 7, 2020.

A Single Session of Exercise Alters 9,815 Molecules in Our Blood (NYT) When we exercise, the levels of thousands of substances in our bloodstream rise and drop, according to an eye-opening new study of the immediate, interior impacts of working out. The study is the most comprehensive cataloging to date of the molecular changes that occur during and after exercise and underscores how consequential activity—and inactivity—may be for our bodies and health. Over all, the researchers were taken aback by the magnitude of the changes in people’s molecular profiles after exercise, according to Dr. Michael Snyder, the chair of the genetics department at Stanford University and senior author of the study. “I had thought, it’s only about nine minutes of exercise, how much is going to change? A lot, as it turns out.”

United will require passengers to complete health assessments before they fly (Washington Post) United Airlines on Wednesday became at least the second U.S. carrier to ask travelers to answer questions about their health status before they fly, part of a strategy to ease the minds of travelers concerned about flying in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. United’s “Ready-to-Fly” checklist will ask travelers to confirm that they have not experienced any coronavirus-related symptoms in the 14 previous days or been in close contact with any individual who has tested positive during the same time period. It also will require passengers to verify that they are aware of the airline’s policy requiring face coverings when aboard an airplane.

Are religious communities reviving the revival? Outdoor worship is a US tradition (Religion News Service) Religious communities have been forced to find alternative ways to worship together during the coronavirus pandemic. For some that has meant going online, but others have turned to a distinctly non-digital practice steeped in this history of the American religious experience: outdoor worship. Prayer sessions in parking lots and services in green spaces formed part of an improvised response to the lockdown by religious leaders and they may now be part of the plan as the United States emerges from the crisis. Indeed, a team of clergy and scientists have issued a new guide suggesting, among other recommendations, that baptisms could take place in “flowing streams, lakes or in beach settings.” So are brick-and-mortar houses of worship essential? It is a question that states and courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have asked in considering the extent to which states can or should place restrictions on meetings in religious buildings. Religious communities, too, have reflected on whether the term “church” describes a building or a community. While white evangelical Protestants have been some of the more vocal protesters of government restrictions on houses of worship during the pandemic, they actually have a long history of embracing outdoor worship in services and revivals.

Watch kids near water (NYT) This year, with outings to the community pool, day camps and pool parties still on hold, kids cooped up at home will be eager to get in the water as the weather warms. Experts worry that parents are stretched too thin to provide the required supervision, leading to an increase in child drownings this summer. As of mid-May, both Florida and Texas—the top two states for child drownings in pools and spas—are already seeing higher numbers than last year. If you have toddlers and you think you don’t have to worry because you don’t have a real pool—just one of those little plastic or inflatable baby pools—you still have a hazard sitting in your yard. Little kids can drown in less than two inches of water. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, drowning is the leading cause of injury death in children ages 1 to 4, and nearly 70 percent of the time, it happens when children aren’t supposed to be in the pool.

Zoom censors video talks on Hong Kong and Tiananmen, drawing criticism (Washington Post) Several prominent critics of the Chinese government, including protest leaders in Hong Kong and pro-democracy activists in the United States, have accused Zoom of shutting their accounts and severing live events in recent weeks under pressure from Beijing. The three incidents are reviving concerns about the fast-growing Silicon Valley company’s susceptibility to Chinese government influence weeks after the firm began facing scrutiny over security, including its routing of data through China. Coming in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the episode also highlights the world’s dependency on services such as Zoom and their ability to control speech. Zoom on Thursday acknowledged that “a few recent meetings” related to China have been disrupted. In each instance, event organizers told The Washington Post that they relied on Zoom in lieu of in-person events because of social distancing and travel restrictions. And each of the Zoom accounts and events was created and hosted outside mainland China but appeared to be quashed under Chinese government pressure after publicly advertised.

EU pushes back on Beijing (Foreign Policy) China’s aggressive diplomacy in Europe is now causing serious pushback. The European Union, normally reluctant to speak out against Beijing, has accused the government of running “targeted influence operations and disinformation campaigns in the EU, its neighborhood, and globally,” along with Russia. The move may be a response to earlier criticism that the EU softened a report on the same topic. Meanwhile, Britain’s swerve away from China has been fast, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson proposing a D-10 alliance of democracies—the existing G-7, plus South Korea, India, and Australia—to build 5G networks free of Chinese influence. The Hong Kong crisis has further soured U.K.-Chinese relations, with Beijing warning that it may pull out a British nuclear power construction deal. Since the original nuclear deal was widely seen as a disaster in the U.K., this doesn’t give Beijing much leverage.

Poland troop plan falters (Foreign Policy) After U.S. President Donald Trump said he would remove 9,500 troops from Germany, plans to relocate troops further east in Poland have fallen into disarray, Reuters reports. A plan announced in June of last year to send 1,000 U.S. troops to Poland permanently has been held up over disputes over how much of the bill Poland would cover, where to station the troops, and whether they would gain legal immunity while stationed there.

Lack of beds slows Delhi’s virus fight (AP) In New Delhi, a sprawling capital region of 46 million and home to some of India’s highest concentration of hospitals, a pregnant woman’s death after a frantic hunt for a sickbed was a worrying sign about the country’s ability to cope with a wave of new coronavirus cases. “She kept begging us to save her life, but we couldn’t do anything,” Shailendra Kumar said, after driving his sister-in-law, Neelam, and her husband for hours, only to be turned away at eight public and private hospitals. Two and a half months of nationwide lockdown kept numbers of infections relatively low in India. But with restrictions easing in recent weeks, cases have shot up, rising by a record of nearly 10,000 on Thursday, raising questions about whether authorities have done enough to avert catastrophe. Half of Delhi’s 8,200 hospital beds dedicated to COVID-19 patients are already full and officials are projecting more than half a million cases in the city alone by July 31.

Chinese recovery (Foreign Policy) Some data indicates that the speed of economic recovery in China may be faster than feared, with oil use already back to 90 percent of pre-coronavirus levels. Domestic demand for consumer goods is strong, but a lack of global demand is hamstringing Chinese manufacturers: Reopened factories are struggling to find customers.

Floyd killing finds echoes of abuse in South Africa, Kenya (AP) Collins Khosa was killed by law enforcement officers in a poor township in Johannesburg over a cup of beer left in his yard. The 40-year-old black man was choked, slammed against a wall, beaten, kicked and hit with the butt of a rifle by the soldiers as police watched, his family says. Two months later, South Africans staged a march against police brutality. But it was mostly about the killing of George Floyd in the United States, with the case of Khosa, who died on April 10, raised only briefly. Despite racial reconciliation that emerged after the end of the apartheid system, poor and black South Africans still fall victim to security forces that now are mostly black. The country is plagued by violent crime, and police often are accused of resorting to heavy-handed tactics. Journalist Daneel Knoetze, who looked into police brutality in South Africa between 2012 and 2019, found that there were more than 42,000 criminal complaints against police, which included more than 2,800 killings—more than one a day. There were more than 27,000 cases of alleged assault by police, many classified as torture, and victims were “overwhelmingly” poor and black, he said. And in Kenya, the police force has for two decades been ranked the country’s most corrupt institution. It’s also Kenya’s most deadly, killing far more people than criminals do, according to human rights groups.

The Handmaid's Tale: Household (3x06)

This episode was... well, it was something, alright.

Cons:

I really did like it, just like I've liked every episode of this show. It was powerful and well-made. But I will admit, for the first time in this very symbolism-heavy show, I was a little put off by how much symbolism there was in D.C. Like, I get it... this was the capital of the USA, and now it's under Gilead's control. It's supposed to be this terrifying dichotomy between the former "land of the free" and what we have now. But the contrast didn't quite work because we know it's not a matter of black and white here. It's usually a lot more of a gradual slope. This was maybe an example of less being more. We have the mouth rings for the Handmaids, which is obviously chilling but also a little bit impractical... how do they eat? We have that obnoxious shot of June standing in front of a statue so it looks like she has wings. What is this, Game of Thrones? Those shots are certainly artistically cool to look at, but it's putting things on a bit thick, don't you think? Same with the shot of the Lincoln Memorial with the top of it blown off. Heavy-handed comparisons between slavery in the U.S. and slavery in Gilead are all well and good, but we have to admit that the way race is handled on this show is clumsy at best, so... not sure they want to draw such stark attention to themselves there.

I'm obviously reserving judgment about Nick, because like everything else in this show, there are complexities there. He seems to have tried to help negotiate with the Swiss, but maybe he chickened out, or they wouldn't accept his information, or he wasn't willing to go far enough... and then we get the revelation that he was part of the "holy crusade" that brought about Gilead in the first place. This is brand new information to June, and to the audience as well. The thing is... it doesn't quite track with Nick as a character thus far. If he was an opportunist who, whether he believed in the system or not, decided to keep his head down and accept his fate, then why was he involved in the resistance, even before he fell in love with June? And if he was forced into all of his actions, and has always been a rebel at heart, why is he stopping now? I don't think Nick's characterization thus far is a problem for the show, or at least not a problem that they can't easily rectify. It's just a little unclear to me right now exactly where they're going with this, and I'm starting to get nervous that I won't like the end result.

Pros:

There was one piece of overwrought symbolism that absolutely worked for me and knocked me on my ass, and that was the sight of the Washington Monument turned into a giant cross. I think the reason that this worked better for me than some of the other D.C. imagery was that it was about re-purposing and distorting the meaning of an existing piece of art, instead of just destroying it. Gilead has left the rubble of the Lincoln Memorial there for all to see. They're not trying to hide the fact that they destroyed something. But with the Monument... they didn't shear it in half, or knock it over and leave it lying there... they built from it. They warped and twisted it, and if you didn't know what the Washington Monument was, you'd never know there had been anything different there before. That's the chilling thing to me. Warping history, erasing the past, so that there could conceivably be a future, not so distant, where nobody alive remembers things the way they were.

As always, I want to discuss Serena. For the past couple of reviews I've been noting how interesting it is to have a performance so well done that you feel a bit of sympathy for Serena's plight, despite her despicable actions. This episode continues that thread. Serena Joy really is one of the most interesting villains I've ever seen on any TV show. The moment I want to focus on is when Mrs. Winslow tells Serena that she liked her book. This is taboo, since of course the women aren't allowed to read. But it is also a stark and important reminder that Serena helped to shape this world. I'm not saying it makes her culpable for everything, but she was an evangelical Christian extremist who wrote a book about how women were meant to stay in the home and take care of the children. She did that, and the result is plain to see.

Mrs. Winslow was fascinating to me as well, because she thanks Serena for helping to change her life - she used to work at a law firm, and she and her husband had no time for a family. But look at them now! Six children, and they still have a Handmaid. The privileges of rank. That's an important point to make here - Commander and Mrs. Winslow are both seemingly a bit more casual and down-to-earth than a lot of the other Comamanders and Wives we've seen. They have openly affectionate and goofy relationships with their genuinely happy children. They offer their first names to their guests. Mrs. Winslow hugs Serena and hands her a baby when first meeting her. It's all quite... normal. It reminds me that oppressive systems do not oppress equally - that if you're in a position of power, even as a member of the oppressed class (women), you are given more leeway. I as a white woman still have to deal with the effects of sexism on my day-to-day life, but I have the privileges granted by my whiteness and many other privileges besides.

We should also talk about Fred Waterford. He's such a weak-willed man. He's slimy and annoying and only scary because of the context of this society. As a man, he has so much power. As Fred Waterford, he doesn't know how to actually properly take advantage of that. I think you can see that in how he interacts with Commander Winslow. He's just so desperate for a chance to improve his prospects, and his brown-nosing is really pathetic. I think Fred Waterford is just as interesting as Serena in some ways, although the type of villainy is very different. You don't get the sense that he really cares all that much about Nichole, in the long run. He wants to leverage a personal tragedy for professional gain, and despite some moments of sentimental bonding between husband and wife, I'm not sure Fred and Serena are ever going to repair any sort of healthy partnership... that is, if they even had one to begin with.

To continue the trend of interesting villains... we see that Aunt Lydia is very shaken by what she sees in D.C. I liked the moment when June asks her if she wants them all to be silenced, and Lydia immediately says that she does not. Lydia is one of the more terrifying figures on this show, because unlike Fred, who I really do believe to be just an opportunist, Aunt Lydia seems to have a genuine desire to help people. Her harshness with the Handmaids is in some way an attempt to protect them from even worse punishment. That excuse is flimsy and does not hold up under even the smallest amount of pressure, but it makes for a really complicated portrait of this woman, who could beat Janine one week, and then be genuinely sympathetic to June, and be horrified by the oppression she sees around her. Again, like with Serena, just because I can understand and untangle some of her twisted motivations, doesn't mean I'm on her side or that I forgive her for her monstrous actions.

I liked the idea of the Swiss being neutral negotiators here, because it's another chance to get some hints about world politics. Gilead is enough of a military threat that Canada doesn't want to provoke conflict. And yet Canada has been offering asylum to refugees from Gilead. We know that the gender politics of Gilead seem to be restricted to just Gilead, because we've seen women in positions of leadership in every other country we've interacted with. I'm so interested in how the rest of the world reacts and responds to Gilead. It's sort of a chilling reminder of how much power the United States has, that other countries kind of have to let us do whatever we want, in a really messed up way. When I think about the endgame of this show, of how it's all going to wind up, really the only thing I can imagine is a widening of the scope - does this show end when Gilead is destroyed and balance starts to come back to the world? What does that look like? I don't know, but I want to find out.

So that's that - again, a wonderful episode of a complicated, difficult television show. I had some qualms about the over-abundance of symbolism, because I guess even this show can go too far sometimes. But still... this was great!

8/10

Okelleys in Tenwek 2019

Since returning from Africa, my wife Dana and I have found it difficult to respond when asked how our trip was. “Good” or “great” is the usual one-word response but many more adjectives come to mind, as it was a trip filled with a mixture of different encounters, experiences, and emotions. And somehow just one or two words do not suffice. It would definitely be accurate to say that it was eye-opening.

We came to this particular place because of the Many family. Most folks know of our long-term friendship with them, so I won’t elaborate here, but it was wonderful to visit them and experience what life is like for them at Tenwek. I believe they are where the Lord wants them to be, but like life anywhere, Tenwek has its share of happiness and hardships. We had learned what we could ahead of time about Kenya and Tenwek from materials provided by Samaritan’s Purse who took care of all the logistics of our trip, as well as from conversations with the Many’s and also from our daughter Claire, who had visited with them for several months in 2015. But nothing really could prepare us for a place that is so different from our everyday experience back home.

Our drive to Tenwek hospital took us 4-5-hours from the airport in Nairobi on a rough road that had become paved only 5 years prior. Tenwek is located in the rural highlands of southwestern Kenya which has no large or modern cities nearby, yet the population in the general area is quite large. In addition, patients are referred from long distances for treatment at Tenwek which is one of Africa’s largest mission hospitals. As you might expect in a developing country, the people there do not have most of the things we take for granted. Clean water, reliable electricity, passable roads, and adequate sanitation are still hard to come by there, and there would be no access to adequate healthcare without Tenwek Hospital. It is a 300-bed teaching facility with a long evangelical-centered mission to provide the best healthcare possible. 72 of those beds are designated to the maternity service, where I spent my time working as a member of the “OB service”.

Most women in this area give birth at home. There are smaller clinics in the area which provide very basic care but lack the ability to handle most emergencies. So, women who come to Tenwek either arrive from their village, or are referred by these smaller clinics with little or no prenatal care and are either high-risk or suffering some sort of complication related to pregnancy or childbirth. The maternity service delivers about 3-400 babies per month, and also receives a large number of patients who have delivered elsewhere and are experiencing complications. The single delivery room holds 3 delivery beds or “couches” and is used for deliveries, triage, and labor exams. There is a 5-bed “labor” ward for laboring patients, inductions (of which there were usually 4-5 daily), and any high-risk antepartum patients. Of course, this ward stays full and often spills over to the other rooms on the unit, which normally accommodate lower risk antepartum, postpartum and post-operative patients. Healthy newborns stay with their mothers. Mothers whose babies are in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) stay until their babies are discharged. The NICU has a capacity of about 45. So, the halls are normally crowded with patients, visitors, and staff, and it is not unusual to have 2 mothers assigned to the same bed or 2 babies assigned to the same isollete due to overflow. There is one O.R. in maternity for cesarean sections, or other minor procedures, but it is only available from 9 AM to 4 PM. Outside these hours an emergency cesarean section must be done in the main O.R. or “theatre”, which is in another building.

To say that the conditions in the hospital are different than what I normally have available at home would be an understatement for sure. That being said, Tenwek provides excellent care for maternity patients considering their limited resources. Nurses manage all labor patients and perform all uncomplicated vaginal deliveries. They have medications such as Pitocin and magnesium sulfate for inductions and treatment of preeclampsia but do not have infusion pumps. They also have available the usual medications to treat postpartum hemorrhage. There is no continuous fetal monitoring available including for patients on Pitocin or with other high-risk indications. There is no epidural service available. Intermittent fetal monitoring and a vaginal exam (VE) usually are performed by the nurses every 4-6 hours on all labor patients. Inductions are performed with misoprostol, Pitocin or Foley balloon. Patients are not screened for group B strep but antibiotics are available to treat infections and are given preoperatively. Patients with one previous cesarean are allowed to “TOLAC” (trial of labor after cesarean). Everything is in short supply, and items we normally consider disposable in the U.S. are “repurposed” until they are no longer usable, such as Bovie pens and laparoscopic trocars. O. R. packs included cotton drapes and towels, which are sterilized and reused.

2-3 nurses cover active labor patients and inductions in 12-hour shifts, and 2-3 to cover postpartum, gyn post-op, etc. There are another 2-3 in the nursery caring for the newborns who are sick or premature. As I mentioned, the nurses perform the labor checks, non-stress-tests (NST’s), and routine deliveries and call the intern or physician for complications. The only patients directly under the supervision of the OB team are antepartum admissions, post-surgical patients, and patients with complications. During my time there were 2 medical officers (completed one year of post-medical school training), and 1-2 Ob- gyn’s, depending on who is available on a given day. The Ob-gyn doctors are currently Americans including Dr. Cheryl Cowles and Dr. Angela Many, but there is a new Kenyan Ob/Gyn starting soon who had just completed residency training in Uganda. There were also 2 clinical interns and 3 medical interns. Clinical interns have similar training and background to physician assistants in the U.S., whereas medical interns have completed medical school and will be medical officers at the end of their internship. Night and weekend call are divided among the Ob gyn doctors, medical officers, and family practice residents; however, the Ob doctors are always on the hook if needed to help with complicated cases. The interns take call also, and work pretty much like interns in our training programs back home, which is to say “hard”. On the OB service during my visit there was also a 1st year family practice resident and a 2nd year surgery resident. The daily rounding list included post-op, antepartum, ICU, and any other patients with complications and usually had 40 or so names on it. There were usually 10 or more new admissions every day. Many patients presented with “LAPS” (lower abdominal pains) and were full-term or post-dates based upon their last menstrual period but had no prenatal care and no ultrasound to confirm their due-date. There is one portable ultrasound machine on the maternity ward used by OB physicians and medical officers for performing scans. Typically, these patients would receive an ultrasound, NST, and a VE and were either induced, kept in the hospital for observation, or discharged undelivered and given a follow up appointment in the clinic in 1 week with the prayer that they would keep that appointment or return in labor and deliver a healthy baby.

So, between daily rounds, clinic, scheduled surgeries (non-emergent surgeries are booked on Tuesdays and Thursdays in the main theatre), new admissions, and emergencies, the OB service kept very busy. In fact, the number of patients and seriously ill patients was more than I had ever encountered in one place. The diagnoses on our rounding list resembled the contents section of an obstetrical text book. Tenwek mothers are also chronically anemic and that is a bad thing in obstetrics, where the potential for rapid blood loss is high. We ordered more blood transfusions during my 2 weeks than I have in over 10 years and possibly my entire career. Family members were required to donate, and nursing students, medical staff and missionaries were also called upon often to give blood in order to address the critical need. OB patients occupied 3 out of the 6 ICU beds in the hospital the first week I was there. Unfortunately, 2 of the 3 did not survive their illnesses. We also had several babies born premature and several stillbirths and most of these outcomes could have been prevented if they had gotten to the hospital earlier in their illness. I often thought of how back in Knoxville I would transfer such seriously ill or preterm patients somewhere else for their care, but at Tenwek there is no such thing as “somewhere else”. I took call 4 nights in 2 weeks including an entire weekend. I lied awake at night waiting for the beeper to go off and it usually did. I was able to take call from “home” (our small apartment at the guesthouse which is a 5-minute walk away), but they were not particularly restful nights.

Tenwek is a teaching hospital. So, we would begin “teaching” rounds every morning between 7 and 8 am, just like back in medical school and residency. This took some getting used to since I had not done this in 30 years, but I did enjoy the interaction with clinicians in training. Of course, acting as first assistant and helping an intern learn to perform a cesarean section requires patience, but this is critically important at Tenwek as the goal is to train more Kenyan nationals to provide for the healthcare needs of their country. There were daily conferences such as grand rounds, and “M&M” (morbidity and mortality), just like in any traditional academic setting. But there is also a clear spiritual emphasis here that cannot be missed; one that is related to the spiritual well-being of the interns, residents and ultimately the patients. The motto at Tenwek is, “we treat, Jesus heals”. Prayers are said for the patients before rounds and before every surgery. These prayers became a great source of comfort and strength to me personally as we cared for many seriously ill patients. In addition, a morning team devotion preceded rounds each day, and there is a devotional meeting for the entire medical staff every Wednesday morning in the hospital auditorium. In the evenings there are small group meetings for Bible study and fellowship in the homes of the missionaries for medical staff, interns, and students.

As you might gather from my description, the daily conditions, work load, and severity of illnesses which I encountered during my time at Tenwek was almost overwhelming. And yet I was humbled and amazed by the ability of the medical staff and missionaries to carry on tirelessly with great compassion and concern for their patients. Before the trip, I read a book entitled “Miracle at Tenwek”, which describes how the mission of Tenwek began and has since remained focused on seeking God’s leadership in sharing the gospel through medical missions. I believe that the success of Tenwek is due to the fact that the focus is still the same today. “They still do it right”, was an assessment I heard from a returning missionary in describing Tenwek in it’s mission to train individuals to provide compassionate care for the physical as well as the spiritual need of their patients.

So, to find one word to describe our trip to Kenya is difficult. It was a trip filled with joy, kindness, and beauty as well as suffering, sorrow, and poverty. But if I had to choose one word, I would use the word that another visiting physician kept saying: “amazing”. It’s a good word to describe Africa, Kenya, the Kenyan people, and the missionaries who work at Tenwek. But it is also a great word to describe God, whose hand we saw in every aspect of our trip.

Former practitioners of Falun Gong told NBC News that believers think the world is headed toward a judgment day, where those labeled “communists” will be sent to a kind of hell, and those sympathetic to the spiritual community will be spared. Trump is viewed as a key ally in the anti-communist fight, former Epoch Times employees said.

In part because of that unusual background, The Epoch Times has had trouble finding a foothold in the broader conservative movement.

“It seems like an interloper — not well integrated socially within the movement network, and not terribly well-circulating among right-wingers,” said A.J. Bauer, a visiting professor of media, culture and communication at New York University, who is part of an ongoing study in which he and his colleagues interview conservative journalists.

“Even when discussing more fringe-y sites, conservative journalists tend to reference Gateway Pundit or Infowars,” Bauer said. “The Epoch Times doesn’t tend to come up.”

That seems to be changing.

Before 2016, The Epoch Times generally stayed out of U.S. politics, unless they dovetailed with Chinese interests. The publication’s recent ad strategy, coupled with a broader campaign to embrace social media and conservative U.S. politics — Trump in particular — has doubled The Epoch Times’ revenue, according to the organization’s tax filings, and pushed it to greater prominence in the broader conservative media world.

Started almost two decades ago as a free newspaper and website with a stated mission to “provide information to Chinese communities to help immigrants assimilate into American society,” The Epoch Times now wields one of the biggest social media followings of any news outlet.

In April, at the height of its ad spending, videos from the Epoch Media Group, which includes The Epoch Times and digital video outlet New Tang Dynasty, or NTD, combined for around 3 billion views on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, ranking 11th among all video creators across platforms and outranking every other traditional news publisher, according to data from the social media analytics company Tubular....

It has also invited scrutiny of the spiritual leader’s more unconventional ideas. Among them, Li has railed against what he called the wickedness of homosexuality, feminism and popular music while holding that he is a god-like figure who can levitate and walk through walls.

Li has also taught that sickness is a symptom of evil that can only be truly cured with meditation and devotion, and that aliens from undiscovered dimensions have invaded the minds and bodies of humans, bringing corruption and inventions such as computers and airplanes. The Chinese government has used these controversial teachings to label Falun Gong a cult. Falun Gong has denied the government's characterization.

The Epoch Times provided Li with an English-language way to push back against China — a position that would eventually dovetail with Trump’s election.

In 2005, The Epoch Times released its greatest salvo, publishing the ''Nine Commentaries," a widely distributed book-length series of anonymous editorials that it claimed exposed the Chinese Communist Party’s “massive crimes” and “attempts to eradicate all traditional morality and religious belief.”

The next year, an Epoch Times reporter was removed from a White House event for Chinese President Hu Jintao after interrupting the ceremony by shouting for several minutes that then-President George W. Bush must stop the leader from “persecuting Falun Gong.”

But despite its small army of devoted volunteers, The Epoch Times was still operating as a fledgling startup.

Ben Hurley is a former Falun Gong practitioner who helped create Australia’s English version of The Epoch Times out of a living room in Sydney in 2005. He has written about his experience with the paper and described the early years as “a giant PR campaign” to evangelize about Falun Gong’s belief in an upcoming apocalypse in which those who think badly of the practice, or well of the Chinese Communist Party, will be destroyed.

Hurley, who wrote for The Epoch Times until he left in 2013, said he saw practitioners in leadership positions begin drawing harder and harder lines about acceptable political positions.

“Their views were always anti-abortion and homophobic, but there was more room for disagreements in the early days,” he said.

Hurley said Falun Gong practitioners saw communism everywhere: former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, movie star Jackie Chan and former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan were all considered to have sold themselves out to the Chinese government, Hurley said.

This kind of coverage foreshadowed the news organization’s embrace of conspiracy theories like QAnon, the overarching theory that there is an evil cabal of “deep state” operators and child predators out to take down the president.

“It is so rabidly pro-Trump,” Hurley said, referring to The Epoch Times. Devout practitioners of Falun Gong “believe that Trump was sent by heaven to destroy the Communist Party.”

A representative for Li declined an interview request. Li lives among hundreds of his followers near Dragon Springs, a 400-acre compound in upstate New York that houses temples, private schools and quarters where performers for the organization’s dance troupe, Shen Yun, live and rehearse, according to four former compound residents and former Falun Gong practitioners who spoke to NBC News.

They said that life in Dragon Springs is tightly controlled by Li, that internet access is restricted, the use of medicines is discouraged, and arranged relationships are common. Two former residents on visas said they were offered to be set up with U.S. residents at the compound.

it’s not that difficult to find monetary relationships between falun gong and the us intelligence community. the falun gong-run hosting provider for the epoch times, “dynamic internet technology”, hosts 3 other websites: voice of america, radio free asia, and human rights in china. that being said, falun gong, like most cults, currently makes enough money through its ventures to be more than self-sufficient, as any decently run cult should (otherwise, why set up a cult?). this relationship seems more of a throwback to the cold war days, when republicans would often use relationships with organizations grounded in american-based diasporas to drum up votes. reagan, for instance, courted both the sun myung moon cult as well as the organization of ukrainian nationalists for votes, pandering to their fears in the in-house press outlets of these groups in exchange for us intelligence grant money and perhaps a bit of recruitment when specialists in the region were needed for analysis. what the intelligence community got out of the arrangement was the ability to sidestep the protections against cia propaganda running within america that were instituted in the 70s. after the smith-mundt act was “modernized” though, this was no longer necessary, leaving only the republicans and their long-cultivated cult-media relationships.

the simple fact is, in order to make support for the incredibly weak presidency of trump make sense, to remove the cognitive dissonance, some belief in a qanon-like conspiracy is necessary, so it makes sense that a republican-tied outlet like epoch times would be supportive. the increased pageviews that generate ad revenue are the other big factor.

What Are The Republicans Afraid Of

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/what-are-the-republicans-afraid-of/

What Are The Republicans Afraid Of

What Are Republicans So Afraid Of

Elizabeth Warren: ‘Republicans are AFRAID of voters!

Instead of conspiracy-mongering about an election they did well in, they could try to win real majorities.

By Jamelle Bouie

Opinion Columnist

There was a time, in recent memory, when the Republican Party both believed it could win a national majority and actively worked to build one.

Take the last Republican president before Donald Trump, George W. Bush. His chief political adviser, Karl Rove, envisioned a durable Republican majority, if not a permanent one. And Bush would try to make this a reality.

To appeal to moderate suburban voters, Bush would make education a priority and promise a compassionate conservatism. To strengthen the partys hold on white evangelicals, Bush emphasized his Christianity and worked to polarize the country over abortion, same-sex marriage and other questions of sexual ethics and morality. Bush courted Black and Hispanic voters with the promise of homeownership and signed a giveaway to seniors in the form of the Medicare prescription drug benefit. He also made it a point to have a diverse cabinet, elevating figures like Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Alberto Gonzales.

Whether shrewd or misguided, cynical or sincere or outright cruel and divisive these gambits were each part of an effort to expand the Republican coalition as far as it could go without abandoning Reaganite conservatism itself. It was the work of a self-assured political movement, confident that it could secure a position as the nations de facto governing party.

‘nobody Is Afraid Of Their Grandfather’

Many Republicans expect Americans will become dissatisfied with record levels of government spending and debt, an increasingly crowded U.S.-Mexican border;and new rules and regulations promulgated by the Democratic Congress and the Biden administration.

Pledging to work with the Biden administration on an infrastructure bill, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said he is “hopeful” that “we may be able to do some things on a bipartisan basis; but they got off to a pretty hard left-wing start.”

“We don’t intend to participate in turning America into a left-wing,;kind of Bernie Sanders vision of what this country ought to be like,” McConnell told Fox News after the meeting between Biden and congressional leaders.

Fiscally conservative groups are stepping up campaigns against Biden and his spending proposals.

The organization Americans For Prosperity is preparing ads for competitive House districts in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia. Biden wrested those states from Trump in the 2020 election, providing him his margin of victory in the Electoral College.

Some Republican criticism plays off Biden’s age and his occasionally mangled syntax, but that strategy has met limited success. Some of the attacks mirror the ones Trump made in 2020 against “Sleepy Joe.”

“Trump never found a salient way to brand Biden, and Republicans continue to struggle after the election,” Republican strategist Alex Conant said.

Opinion: What Are Georgia Republicans Afraid Of

It wasnt so long ago that disenfranchised Blacks and activist Whites were beaten and killed for attempting to secure the right to vote.

Among the better-known victims were civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, three young men who were abducted, shot at close range and buried in an earthen Mississippi dam on June 21, 1964. Part of the Freedom Summer, the three had hoped to register Black voters and educate them so they could pass the literacy tests required to vote.

When their bodies were discovered nearly two months later, one of the dead men had red clay in his lungs and clenched in his fist, indicating he was probably still alive when buried. The perpetrators included members of the local Ku Klux Klan and the Neshoba County Sheriffs Office.

This incident was but one of many leading up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but is illustrative of how bloody and hard-won the right to vote was. Weve come a long way, as they say, but some people are still determined to make voting more, not less, difficult. Georgias recent 98-page voting reform legislation, signed into law on March 25 by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, is a case in point. These red-clay legislators dont require a literacy test, but theyve created a host of new regulations that potentially make voting more difficult for minorities.

Read more:

Also Check: How Many States Are Controlled By Republicans

Opinion: What Are Republicans Afraid Of

Its almost funny, in a twisted sort of way. Election after election, Republicans have based their core political appeal on fear.

And yet as dual gun massacres this weekend starkly illustrate they refuse to offer solutions to any of the mortal threats Americans actually face.

President Trumps closing message;in the midterms was Be afraid, be very afraid; he and his co-partisans have lately doubled down on it for 2020. Of course, the perils that Republicans promise to rescue us from are often fictional, or of their own making.

We must fear the coming scourge of socialism . Trump likewise stokes public anxiety;over;a Market Crash the likes of which has not been seen before if anyone but me takes over in 2020 .

;Trump and allies urge us to cower in trepidation from helpless parents and children seeking asylum, a threat so grave they needed to be separated from one another and caged. We must also fear the supposed Muslim and Latino hordes, who threaten to;wipe out;Anglo-European culture and displace white babies with their own.

These are hardly the only foreigners who should inspire existential dread, according to right-wing fever dreams. Rogue nations should, too, thus justifying enormous increases in our defense budget. Of course, all the nukes and jets in the world wont protect us from the assault our enemies abroad are currently waging against us, and that Republicans;resist;confronting: the one on our electoral system.;;

Read more:

Senate Republicans Use Filibuster To Kill Jan 6 Commission

Only six Republicans joined Democrats in a procedural vote.

Senate Republicans block Capitol riots commission

In a remarkable political moment, Republicans on Friday blocked the Senate from moving forward on a bill that would establish a bipartisan, independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 assault by Trump supporters on the U.S. Capitol.

Six Republicans joined Democrats in the 54-35 vote, but that fell six votes short of the 60 needed to start debate on establishing a commission — which then, normally, would require only a simple majority to pass in a final vote.

“Out of fear or fealty to Donald Trump, the Republican minority just prevented the American people from getting the full truth about January 6,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said right after the vote.

“Senate Republicans chose to defend the ‘big lie’ because they believe anything that might upset Donald Trump could hurt them politically,” he said.

The Senate leader reminded GOP senators they “all lived the horrors of January 6.”

“I was no further than 30 feet from those white supremacist hooligans. Do my Republican colleagues remember that day?

“Do my Republican colleagues remember the savage mob calling for the execution of Mike Pence — the makeshift gallows outside the Capitol? Men with bulletproof vests and zip ties, breaking into the Senate gallery and rifling through your desks. Police officers crushed between doorways?” he said.

“Not so today,” he concluded.

No Republican spoke.

Also Check: Who Controls The Senate Republicans Or Democrats

Gop Lets Trump Fight Election For Weeks Despite Bidens Win

WASHINGTON Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday theres no reason for alarm as President Donald Trump, backed by Republicans in Congress, mounts unfounded legal challenges to President-elect Joe Bidens election victory a process that could now push into December.

Republicans on Capitol Hill signaled they are willing to let Trump spin out his election lawsuits and unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud for the next several weeks, until the states certify the elections by early December and the Electoral College meets Dec. 14.

McConnells comments show how hard Republicans are trying to portray Trumps refusal to accept the election results as an ordinary part of the process, even as its nothing short of extraordinary. There is no widespread evidence of election fraud; state officials say the elections ran smoothly. The delay has the potential to upend civic norms, impede Bidens transition to the White House and sow doubt in the nations civic and election systems.

Trump remained out of sight at the White House, tweeting his views, but the social media company Twitter swiftly flagged the presidents tweets that he actually won the election as disputed.

Its not unusual, should not be alarming, McConnell told reporters on Capitol Hill. At some point here well find out, finally, who was certified in each of these states, and the Electoral College will determine the winner. … No reason for alarm.

What Do Republicans Fear

What do Republicans fear?

Muslims? Political correctness? Taxes slightly higher than zero?

Having to adapt and compete with everyone, not a select few? Fully funded and functional public goods? Obamaphones?

Hearing strange languages? Waiting a little longer at the all-you-can-eat buffet line? Not being able to hunt deer with a rocket launcher?

Equality? Opportunity? Their own aging genitalia? Falafel?

Or maybe they fear for their wallets. Fair enough. I worry about my economic future, too. But, you know what? Economics is a policy question. Economics is not a science. If it were, we’d be doing the optimal thing all the time.

You know what is a science? Medicine. Reproductive health. Environmental studies. Geology. Biology. Meteorology. Science is a frikkin’ science! Believe me!

I think they’re scared of losing a dream of what they could have been. They’re nostalgic for a past that never existed. Norman Rockwell–painter of Great America–was married three times and one of his wives tried to burn his house down with him inside. There was never a perfect world.

“Make America Great Again”? America’s been great forever, but that doesn’t mean it’s been great for everyone.

I would love to be proven wrong. I mock, but I’m eager to learn, because right now, it makes no sense:

Republicans seem to fear being slightly uncomfortable. The rest of us fear being slightly dead.

I’m afraid of nuclear war and having to learn Russian or Mandarin.

Hooray.

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Primary Election Snafus Show Challenges For November Vote

Republicans’ and Democrats’ vastly different starting points help explain why the politics over voting and elections have been and likely will remain so fraught, through and beyond Election Day this year.

Sometimes it seems as if the politicians involved barely live in the same country. It has become common for one side to discount the legitimacy of a victory by the other.

And the coronavirus pandemic, which has scrambled nearly everything about life in the United States, makes understanding it all even more complicated. Here’s what you need to know to decode this year’s voting controversies.

The Rosetta stone

The key that unlocks so much of the partisan debate about voting is one word: turnout.

An old truism holds that, all other things held equal, a smaller pool of voters tends to be better for Republicans and the larger the pool gets, the better for Democrats.

This isn’t mathematically ironclad, as politicians learn and relearn regularly. But this assumption is the foundation upon which much else is built.

The Goal Is To Undermine Confidence In Elections

Why Are Republicans Still So Afraid Of Trump? | The 11th Hour | MSNBC

Underscoring the point, Rep. Jim Banks , the chair of the Republican Study Committee, made an extraordinarily disingenuous appearance on Fox News Sunday. Banks had endorsed the Texas lawsuit, which would have invalidated millions of votes in four states based on fictions, and voted to overturn President Bidens electors in Congress.

Pressed by Foxs Chris Wallace to admit Biden won fair and square, Banks kinda sorta acknowledged it, but immediately pivoted to claiming those actions were entirely justified, by insisting that his serious concerns about the election were still valid.

This is not the act of a coward who fears Trump, and would vouch for the integrity of the election if only he could do so without consequences.

Rather, it is the act of someone who is fully devoted to the project of continuing to undermine confidence in our elections going forward.

This is for purely instrumental purposes. Republicans are employing their own invented doubts about 2020 to justify intensified voter suppression everywhere. Banks neatly crystallized the point on Fox, saying those doubts required more voting restrictions after reinforcing them himself.

Indeed, with all this, Republicans may be in the process of creating a kind of permanent justification for maximal efforts to invalidate future election outcomes by whatever means are within reach.

Read Also: Democrats Republicans

Officer Goes From ‘sadness’ To ‘rage’

Sicknicks partner on the Capitol police, Sandra Garza, wrote an essay about the attack and the aftermath in which she said in part, I saw officers being brutalized and beaten, and protesters defying orders to stay back from entering the Capitol. All the while, I kept thinking, Where is the President? Why is it taking so long for the National Guard to arrive? Where is the cavalry!?

She added, As the months passed, my deep sadness turned to outright rage as I watched Republican members of Congress lie on TV and in remarks to reporters and constituents about what happened that day. Over and over they denied the monstrous acts committed by violent protesters.;

For example, when Gosar called the Jan. 6 attackers peaceful patriots.

During the Benghazi hearings, Republicans were laser-focused on trying to place blame on then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. But after four years of investigations, most of them purely partisan affairs, they found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing on her part.

Republicans dont want anything close to that type of scrutiny on the Capitol attacks of Jan. 6. In fact, they dont seem to want any scrutiny at all.

Almost as if they know what will be found.

Almost as if I didnt have to use the word almost.

Reach Montini at .

Cap Times Idea Fest: Panelists Consider How Law Enforcement Can Evolve

“They put up with the crazy in order to have the power and do the job,” Rucker said. “And then once they were in the job, they didn’t want to give it up, in part because they enjoyed the trappings of power, but also because they worried, ‘OK, if not me, who is going to be here next?'”

The bigger question, Rucker said, is why Republican members of Congress didn’t act as a check on the executive branch, even after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Republican members of Congress can be broken into three groups, Leonnig said. Some were willing to say privately they were concerned about or angry with Trump, but concealed their feelings because of the voting base he commanded. A much smaller group of officials was willing to publicly criticize him, like Sen. Mitt Romney and Rep. Liz Cheney. Finally, there were “true believers,” like Sen. Ron Johnson and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green.

“Our country is in peril right now. It is on the brink,” Leonnig said. “‘It’s a republic if you can keep it’ is a serious question right now, because how do you continue along the path of democracy when … the overwhelming number of the members of are afraid of the former president and want his voters?

“How do you continue when you are feeding them baloney and they are believing it?”

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No More Distractions Maybe Maybe Not

Republicans said they were distracted in making the case against Biden by a lack of cohesion, including internal disagreements over what to do about Trump.

Some blamed Cheney, the now-former House Republican Conference chair who argued that the party should move past Trump and stop echoing his lies that the 2020 election was stolen from him. She said those claims triggered the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, an incident Democrats would surely use against Republicans when elections roll around.

House Republicans voted Wednesday to demote Cheney from her role as third-ranking Republican. She responded that the GOP would struggle against Biden and his agenda if it continues to embrace Trump and his conspiracy theories.

“To be as effective as we can be to fight against those things, our party has to be based on truth,” Cheney told NBC News.

House Republican Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., who supported demoting Cheney, said voters are disenchanted with Biden and the Democrats. Scalise told Fox News he sees “a lot of really serious concern about the direction that the socialist Democrats are taking us,” and “Biden has embraced that far-left Bernie Sanders;agenda.”

“People don’t want this to become a socialist nation, yet you see how far theyre moving,” Scalise said.

“It’s always difficult to generate a unifying message when you’re the party out of power,”; GOP pollster Whit Ayres said.

New Poll: Americans Overwhelmingly Support Voting By Mail Amid Pandemic

Traditionally, Republicans have tended to support higher barriers to voting and often focus on voter identification and security to protect against fraud. All the same, about half of GOP voters back expanding vote by mail in light of the pandemic.

Democrats tend to support lowering barriers and focus on making access for voters easier, with a view to encouraging engagement. They support expanding votes via mail too.

The next fight, in many cases, is about who and how many get what access via mail.

All this also creates a dynamic in which many political practitioners can’t envision a neutral compromise, because no matter what philosophy a state adopts, it’s perceived as zero-sum.

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Days after a bipartisan agreement was reached in the House to form a commission to examine the roots and events of the January 6 riot at the US Capitol, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy announced Tuesday that he opposes the bill.

) McCarthy doesn’t want to testify under oath about his phone conversation with former President Donald Trump on January 6“What I talked to President Trump about, I was the first person to contact him when the riots was going on. He didn’t see it. What he ended the call was saying — telling me, he’ll put something out to make sure to stop this. And that’s what he did, he put a video out later.” 2) McCarthy wants to be speaker badly.

For years, women have struggled to gain equality in all areas of life—from the home to the workplace, and especially in positions of leadership. Despite being 50.8 percent of the population, only 14.6 percent of executive officers in companies are women, and overall, women only earn 80 cents for every dollar men make. These discrepancies are even larger among women of color. Yet women of faith have historically played a pivotal role in challenging gender inequality, and they continue to defy stereotypes in politics, the workplace, and houses of worship. Here are five ways in which women of faith are fighting for gender equality at work and in broader society—empowering young women as feminist and womanist theologians, faith community leaders, social justice advocates, and elected officials.

1. Shaping and elevating feminist theology

Feminist and womanist theologians exist in every religion, actively engaging in efforts to achieve gender equality from a perspective of faith and making clear that women’s equality and faith are not inconsistent with one another. Challenging misunderstandings or misinterpretations of religious texts that have justified segregating society along gender lines, feminist theologians have surfaced the issue of gender inequality in religious communities. For example, Native American feminist Renya Ramirez wrote an article proposing that gender equality be part of any conversation about the oppression of Native American communities, and she challenges the gender-discriminatory practices that some indigenous nations have traditionally followed. Zainah Anwar also empowers women of faith as a founding member and director of the organization Sisters in Islam, which seeks to teach gender equality through an Islamic framework. In addition, the Sikh Feminist Research Institute exists to engage the Sikh community in feminist research to understand further the causes of gender-based oppression and how to combat it.

In the early 1970s, several Jewish feminists created the social justice group Ezrat Nashim in an effort to give men and women “equal access” to leadership roles within the Jewish community. María Pilar Aquino, a pioneer in the field of Latina feminist theology as a professor of religious studies, has authored more than 50 works on Latina rights, including Our Cry for Life: Feminist Theology from Latin America. Finally, bell hooks, a Buddhist Christian expert on womanism—a form of feminism centering on black women’s liberation—has written numerous essays and books analyzing the effects of racism, sexism, and spirituality on black women and feminist movements.

2. Holding leadership positions in faith communities

In 2012, only 11 percent of American congregations were led by women, and today, only 1 of the 100 largest churches in the United States is led by a woman, due in large part to institutionalized patriarchal models of leadership present in many houses of worship. More women of faith are redefining leadership in their houses of worship, providing important role models for young congregants and pushing to transform gender inequality from within their religious traditions. Bishop Vashti McKenzie was the first woman head of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, a role in which she encouraged and empowered women to grow professionally and attain leadership positions. Sally Jane Priesand was the first woman in the United States to be ordained as a rabbi and has worked in the Central Conference of American Rabbis’ Task Force on Women to help more women become ordained in the Reform Jewish movement.

Some of the largest and most historically significant churches today are led by women, such as Amy Butler, the first woman pastor of The Riverside Church. “Any time we can see women in roles of leadership doing good work … we’re changing people’s perception and chipping away at the patriarchy we all live with,” Butler says. She often uses her platform to speak out about women’s issues including abortion and sexual harassment. Rabi’a Keeble and M. Hasna Maznavi—founders of the first two female-run mosques in the country—have created their own communities of faith, where they saw a need for more gender-inclusive houses of worship. It is imperative that women continue to take the helm of faith-based organizations and communities, so that female congregants will feel more comfortable sharing their experiences as religious women.

3. Fighting against sexual harassment in religious communities

Over the past year, there have been numerous complaints of pervasive and persistent sexual harassment to which no industry has been immune, including faith communities. According to a recent survey, 81 percent of women and 43 percent of men experience sexual harassment at some point in their lives. Building on the #MeToo movement, which aims to destigmatize survivors of sexual violence, Hannah Paasch and Emily Joy created the #ChurchToo movement on Twitter. #ChurchToo gives victims a platform to share their stories of sexual abuse in religious spaces. Paasch states, “for those who felt themselves silenced and their experiences erased, this hashtag is meant to be a place where survivors are heard, believed, seen and surrounded,” as well as hold churches accountable for their actions. In response to this campaign, Belinda Bauman and Lisa Sharon Harper started the movement #SilenceIsNotSpiritual to urge evangelical congregations and leaders to elevate and show solidarity with the voices of those affected by sexual assault.

Popular evangelical leader Jen Hatmaker has openly taken a stand against leaders who have committed sexual assault, telling abusers, “You will not be covered by … your clergy robes … your powerful position … Let this filthy, evil system that protects abusers fall to shreds.” As more women of faith share their stories and create platforms for others to do the same, houses of worship will continue to take steps to reform their sexual harassment policies.

4. Serving in public offices from underrepresented religions

Elected officials that practice a religion other than Christianity are grossly underrepresented in local, state, and federal levels of government. For example, 91 percent of Congress identifies as Christian, while Jews make up only 6 percent, Buddhists make up 3 percent, Muslims make up 2 percent, and Hindus make up 3 percent. Today, the number of women running for elected office is increasing at an unprecedented rate, including women from underrepresented religions. Muslim women are filling legislative positions across the country and advocating for policies to help women in their faith community and beyond: Ilhan Omar (D-MN) made history in 2016 as the first Somali American legislator in the country when she was elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives, where she successfully advocated for paid parental leave for city employees to increase support for working families.

At the federal level, Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) was the first Asian American woman and first Buddhist woman elected to the U.S. Senate. Earlier in her career, she founded the Patsy T. Mink Political Action Committee (PAC) with the goal of helping elect pro-choice women to Hawaii state offices. As an Obama administration appointee, Farah Pandith was the U.S. State Department’s first special representative to Muslim communities, where she led initiatives to help Muslim youth feel more accepted in society in an effort to reduce extremism. She also led the State Department’s Women in Public Service Project, a program to help women become the next academic, foreign policy, and advocacy leaders through learning institutes and mentorship.

5. Leading advocacy for immigrants and refugees

Since early 2017, the Trump administration has launched a slew of attacks on immigrants: removing protections for hundreds of thousands of immigrants, including asylum seekers and long-term U.S. residents; detaining and deporting parents of U.S.-citizen children; and continuously targeting some of the most vulnerable people. In response to increased deportations, women of faith have called for immigrant justice in their local communities and beyond. Social justice activists such as Stosh Cotler— who helped organize a day of action for the Muslim and Jewish communities in solidarity with immigrants—were arrested at the U.S. Capitol while demanding renewed protection for Dreamers. Bishop Minerva Carcaño was not only the first Hispanic woman elected as a bishop to the United Methodist Church, but she has also long advocated for immigrant rights, even testifying before Congress.

Today, approximately 50 percent of refugees worldwide are women and girls seeking safety and economic opportunity in new countries. In their journeys toward refuge, they are often vulnerable to sex trafficking, in which 96 percent of victims are women and girls. Yet faith leaders such as Nadia Murad Basee Taha are fighting to ensure the safety and success of these affected communities. After escaping Islamic State captivity, Taha became a Yazidi human rights advocate and is now the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime Goodwill Ambassador for Human Trafficking. She has testified on the international stage to raise awareness for the disproportionate vulnerability young women face in areas of extreme violence and called on international organizations to help stop the violence against her community. In addition, poet and author Rafeef Ziadah uses her writing to advocate for human rights and women’s rights in areas of war, especially Palestine.

Conclusion

The historical contributions and leadership of women in religious communities are paramount. While the fight for women’s equality has persisted for years, there remains much room for progress. Women faith leaders are defying the limitations that society has historically placed on them in houses of worship, politics, activism, and society more broadly. Moving forward, women will continue to rise in all areas of public life, and in faith communities in particular, as an integral part of the rising tide of women’s leadership and the continuing fight for gender equality.

An American Kingdom

A new and rapidly growing Christian movement is openly political, wants a nation under God’s authority, and is central to Donald Trump’s GOP

Mercy Culture Church in Fort Worth. (Dylan Hollingsworth for The Washington Post)

By Stephanie McCrummen

July 11, 2021|Updated July 12, 2021 at 3:05 a.m. EDT

FORT WORTH — The pastor was already pacing when he gave the first signal. Then he gave another, and another, until a giant video screen behind him was lit up with an enormous colored map of Fort Worth divided into four quadrants.

Greed, the map read over the west side. Competition, it said over the east side. Rebellion, it said over the north part of the city. Lust, it said over the south.

It was an hour and a half into the 11 a.m. service of a church that represents a rapidly growing kind of Christianity in the United States, one whose goal includes bringing under the authority of a biblical God every facet of life, from schools to city halls to Washington, where the pastor had traveled a month after the Jan. 6 insurrection and filmed himself in front of the U.S. Capitol saying quietly, “Father, we declare America is yours.”

Now he stood in front of the glowing map, a 38-year-old White man in skinny jeans telling a congregation of some 1,500 people what he said the Lord had told him: that Fort Worth was in thrall to four “high-ranking demonic forces.” That all of America was in the grip of “an anti-Christ spirit.” That the Lord had told him that 2021 was going to be the “Year of the Supernatural,” a time when believers would rise up and wage “spiritual warfare” to advance God’s Kingdom, which was one reason for the bright-red T-shirt he was wearing. It bore the name of a church elder who was running for mayor of Fort Worth. And when the pastor cued the band, the candidate, a Guatemalan American businessman, stood along with the rest of the congregation as spotlights flashed on faces that were young and old, rich and poor, White and various shades of Brown — a church that had grown so large since its founding in 2019 that there were now three services every Sunday totaling some 4,500 people, a growing Saturday service in Spanish and plans for expansion to other parts of the country.

“Say, ‘Cleanse me,’ ” the pastor continued as drums began pounding and the people repeated his words. “Say, ‘Speak, Lord, your servants are listening.’ ”

***

The church is called Mercy Culture, and it is part of a growing Christian movement that is nondenominational, openly political and has become an engine of former president Donald Trump’s Republican Party. It includes some of the largest congregations in the nation, housed in the husks of old Baptist churches, former big-box stores and sprawling multimillion-dollar buildings with private security to direct traffic on Sundays. Its most successful leaders are considered apostles and prophets, including some with followings in the hundreds of thousands, publishing empires, TV shows, vast prayer networks, podcasts, spiritual academies, and branding in the form of T-shirts, bumper stickers and even flags. It is a world in which demons are real, miracles are real, and the ultimate mission is not just transforming individual lives but also turning civilization itself into their version of God’s Kingdom: one with two genders, no abortion, a free-market economy, Bible-based education, church-based social programs and laws such as the ones curtailing LGBTQ rights now moving through statehouses around the country.

This is the world of Trump’s spiritual adviser Paula White and many more lesser-known but influential religious leaders who prophesied that Trump would win the election and helped organize nationwide prayer rallies in the days before the Jan. 6 insurrection, speaking of an imminent “heavenly strike” and “a Christian populist uprising,” leading many who stormed the Capitol to believe they were taking back the country for God.

Even as mainline Protestant and evangelical denominations continue an overall decline in numbers in a changing America, nondenominational congregations have surged from being virtually nonexistent in the 1980s to accounting for roughly 1 in 10 Americans in 2020, according to long-term academic surveys of religious affiliation. Church leaders tend to attribute the growth to the power of an uncompromised Christianity. Experts seeking a more historical understanding point to a relatively recent development called the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR.

A California-based theologian coined the phrase in the 1990s to describe what he said he had seen as a missionary in Latin America — vast church growth, miracles, and modern-day prophets and apostles endowed with special powers to fight demonic forces. He and others promoted new church models using sociological principles to attract members. They also began advancing a set of beliefs called dominionism, which holds that God commands Christians to assert authority over the “seven mountains” of life — family, religion, education, economy, arts, media and government — after which time Jesus Christ will return and God will reign for eternity.

None of which is new, exactly. Strains of this thinking formed the basis of the Christian right in the 1970s and have fueled the GOP for decades.

What is new is the degree to which Trump elevated a fresh network of NAR-style leaders who in turn elevated him as God’s chosen president, a fusion that has secured the movement as a grass-roots force within the GOP just as the old Christian right is waning. Increasingly, this is the world that the term “evangelical voter” refers to — not white-haired Southern Baptists in wooden pews but the comparatively younger, more diverse, more extreme world of millions drawn to leaders who believe they are igniting a new Great Awakening in America, one whose epicenter is Texas.

That is where the pastor wearing the bright-red T-shirt, Landon Schott, had been on the third day of a 40-day fast when he said the Lord told him something he found especially interesting.

It was 2017, and he was walking the streets of downtown Fort Worth asking God to make him a “spiritual father” of the city when he heard God say no. What he needed was “spiritual authority,” he remembered God telling him, and the way to get that was to seek the blessing of a pastor named Robert Morris, an evangelical adviser to Trump, and the founder of one of the largest church networks in the nation, called Gateway, with nine branches and weekly attendance in the tens of thousands, including some of the wealthiest businessmen in Texas.

Morris blessed him. Not long after that, a bank blessed him with the funds to purchase an aging church called Calvary Cathedral International, a polygonal structure with a tall white steeple visible from Interstate 35. Soon, the old red carpet was being ripped up. The old wooden pews were being hauled out. The cross on the stage was removed, and in came a huge screen, black and white paint, speakers, lights and modern chandeliers as the new church called Mercy Culture was born.

“Mercy” for undeserved grace.

“Culture” for the world they wanted to create.

***

Mercy Culture

A video introduces the theme of the pastor’s sermon at Mercy Culture Church. (Stephanie McCrummen/The Washington Post)

That world is most visible on Sundays, beginning at sunrise, when the worship team arrives to set up for services.

In the lobby, they place straw baskets filled with earplugs.

In the sanctuary, they put boxes of tissues at the end of each row of chairs.

On the stage one recent Sunday, the band was doing its usual run-through — two guitar players, a bass player, a keyboardist and two singers, one of whom was saying through her mic to the earpiece of the drummer: “When we start, I want you to wait to build it — then I want you to do those drum rolls as we’re building it.” He nodded, and as they went over song transitions, the rest of the worship team filtered in for the pre-service prayer.

The sound technician prayed over the board controlling stacks of D&B Audiotechnik professional speakers. The lighting technician asked the Lord to guide the 24 professional-grade spotlights with colors named “good green” and “good red.” Pacing up and down the aisles were the ushers, the parking attendants, the security guards, the greeters, the camera operators, the dancers, the intercessors, all of them praying, whispering, speaking in tongues, inviting into the room what they believed to be the Holy Spirit — not in any metaphorical sense, and not in some vague sense of oneness with an incomprehensible universe. Theirs was the spirit of a knowable Christian God, a tangible force they believed could be drawn in through the brown roof, through the cement walls, along the gray-carpeted hallways and in through the double doors of the sanctuary where they could literally breathe it into their bodies. Some people spoke of tasting it. Others said they felt it — a sensation of warm hands pressing, or of knowing that someone has entered the room even when your eyes are closed. Others claimed to see it — golden auras or gold dust or feathers of angels drifting down.

That was the intent of all this, and now the first 1,500 people of the day seeking out those feelings began arriving, pulling in past fluttering white flags stamped with a small black cross over a black “MC,” in through an entrance where the words “Fear Go” were painted in huge block letters above doors that had remained open for much of the pandemic. Inside, the church smelled like fresh coffee.

“Welcome to Mercy,” the greeters said to people who could tell stories of how what happened to them here had delivered them from drug addiction, alcoholism, psychological traumas, PTSD, depression, infidelities, or what the pastor told them was the “sexual confusion” of being gay, queer or transgender. They lingered awhile in a communal area, sipping coffee on modern leather couches, taking selfies in front of a wall with a pink neon “Mercy” sign, or browsing a narrow selection of books about demonic spirits. On a wall, a large clock counted down the final five minutes as they headed into the windowless sanctuary.

Inside, the lights were dim, and the walls were bare. No paintings of parables. No stained glass, crosses, or images of Jesus. Nothing but the stage and the enormous, glowing screen where another clock was spinning down the last seconds as cymbals began playing, and people began standing and lifting their arms because they knew what was about to happen. Cameras 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 were in position. The live stream was on standby. In the front row, the 85-year-old retired pastor of the church this used to be secured his earplugs.

What happened next was 40 nonstop minutes of swelling, blasting, drum-pounding music at times so loud that chairs and walls seemed to vibrate. The huge screen became a video of swirling clouds, then a black galaxy of spinning stars. The spotlights went from blue to amber to gold to white. A camera slid back and forth on a dolly. Fog spilled onto the stage. Modern dancers raced around waving shiny flags. One song melded into the next, rising and falling and rising again into extended, mantralike choruses about surrender while people in the congregation began kneeling and bowing.

A few rows back, the pastor stood with one hand raised and the other holding a coffee cup. And when the last song faded, a worship team member walked onstage to explain what was happening in case anyone was new.

“The Holy Spirit is in this room,” he said.

Now everyone sat down and watched the glowing screen. Another video began playing — this one futuristic, techno music over flash-cut images of a nuclear blast, a spinning planet, advancing soldiers, and when it was over, the pastor was standing on the stage to deliver his sermon, the essence of which was repeated in these kinds of churches all over the nation:

America is in the midst of a great battle between the forces of God and Satan, and the forces of Satan roughly resemble the liberal, progressive agenda. Beware of the “seductive, political, demonic, power-hungry spirit that uses witchcraft to control God’s people.” Beware of “freedom that is actually just rebellion against God.” Beware of confusion. Beware of “rogue leaders.” Beware of a world that “preaches toleration of things God does not tolerate,” and on it went for a full hour, a man with a microphone in a spotlight, pacing, sweating, whispering about evil forces until he cued the band and gave instructions for eternal salvation.

“Just say, ‘Holy Spirit, would you teach me how to choose to obey you,’ ” he said, asking people to close their eyes, or kneel, or bow, and as the drums began pounding again, the reaction was the same as it was every Sunday.

People closed their eyes. They knelt. They bowed. They believed, and as they did, people with cameras roamed the congregation capturing peak moments for videos that would be posted to the church’s website and social media accounts: a man with tattooed arms crying; a whole row of people on their knees bowing; a blond woman in a flower-print dress lying all the way down on the floor, forehead to carpet.

When it was over, people streamed outside, squinting into the bright Fort Worth morning as the next 1,500 people pulled in past the fluttering white flags.

“Welcome to Mercy,” the greeters said again.

Music portion at Mercy Culture

Part of the music portion of worship services at Mercy Culture. (Stephanie McCrummen/The Washington Post)

***

By late afternoon Sunday, the parking lot was empty and the rest of the work of kingdom-building could begin.

One day, this meant a meeting of the Distinct Business Ministry, whose goal was “raising up an army of influential leaders” across Fort Worth.

Another day, it meant the church hosting a meeting of a group called the Freedom Shield Foundation, a dozen or so men huddled over laptops organizing what one participant described as clandestine “operations” around Fort Worth to rescue people they said were victims of sex trafficking. This was a core issue for the church. Members were raising money to build housing for alleged victims. There were always prayer nights for the cause, including one where church members laid hands on Fort Worth’s sheriff, who sat with a Bible in his lap and said that the problem was “the demonic battle of our lifetime” and told those gathered that “you are the warriors in that battle.”

Another day, it meant the steady stream of cars inching toward the church food bank, one team loading boxes into trunks and another fanning out along the idling line offering prayers.

A man in a dented green sedan requested one for his clogged arteries.

A man trying to feed a family of seven asked in Spanish, “Please, just bless my life.”

A stone-faced woman said her mother had died of covid, then her sister, and now a volunteer reached inside and touched her shoulder: “Jesus, wrap your arms around Jasmine,” she said, and when she moved on to others who tried to politely decline, the volunteer, a young woman, gave them personal messages she said she had received from the Lord.

“God wants to tell you that you’re so beautiful,” she said into one window.

“I feel God is saying that you’ve done a good job for your family,” she said into another.

“I feel God is saying, if anything, He is proud of you,” she said in Spanish to a woman gripping the steering wheel, her elderly mother in the passenger seat. “When God sees you, He is so pleased, He is so proud,” she continued as the woman stared straight ahead. “I feel you are carrying so much regret, maybe? And pain?” she persisted, and now the woman began nodding. “And I think God wants to release you from the past. Say, ‘Jesus, I give you my shame.’ Say, ‘Jesus, I give you my regret,’ ” the volunteer said, and the woman repeated the words. “ ‘You know I tried my best, Jesus. I receive your acceptance. I receive your love,’ ” the volunteer continued, and now the woman was crying, and the food was being loaded into the back seat, and a volunteer was taking her name, saying, “Welcome to the family.”

Another day, the Kingdom looked like rows of white tents where a woman in a white dress was playing a harp as more than a thousand mostly young women were arriving for something called Marked Women’s Night.

“I feel the Lord is going to be implanting something in us tonight,” a 27-year-old named Autumn said to her friend, their silver eye shadow glowing in the setting sun.

“Every time I come here the Lord always speaks to me,” her friend said.

“Yeah, that happens to me all the time, too,” said Autumn, who described how the Lord had told her to move from Ohio to Texas, and then to attend Gateway Church, and then to enroll in a Gateway-approved school called Lifestyle Christianity University, where she said the Lord sent a stranger to pay her tuition. Not long after that, the Lord sent her into an Aldi supermarket, where she met a woman who told her about Mercy Culture, which is how she ended up sitting here on the grass on a summer evening, believing that the Lord was preparing her to go to Montana to “prophesy over the land” in anticipation of a revival.

“I don’t understand it; I just know it’s God,” Autumn said.

“So many miracles,” said her friend, and soon the drums were pounding.

They joined the crowd heading inside for another thunderous concert followed by a sermon by the pastor’s wife, during which she referred to the women as “vessels” and described “the Kingdom of Heaven growing and taking authority over our nation.”

Another day — Election Day in Fort Worth — hundreds of church members gathered at a downtown event space to find out whether their very own church elder, Steve Penate, would become the next mayor, and the sense in the room was that of a miracle unfolding.

“Supernatural,” said Penate, a first-time candidate, looking at the crowd of volunteers who’d knocked on thousands of doors around the city.

A candidate for the 2022 governor’s race stopped by. A wealthy businessman who helped lead the Republican National Hispanic Assembly drove over from Dallas. The pastor came by to declare that “this is the beginning of a righteous movement.”

“We are not just going after the mayorship — we’re going after every seat,” he said as the first batch of votes came in showing Penate in sixth place out of 10 candidates, and then fifth place, and then fourth, which was where he stayed as the last votes came in and he huddled with his campaign team to pray.

“Jesus, you just put a dent in the kingdom of darkness,” his campaign adviser said. “We stand up to the darkness. We stand up to the establishment. God, this is only the beginning.”

Another day, 100 or so young people crowded into a church conference room singing, “God, I’ll go anywhere; God, I’ll do anything,” hands raised, eyes closed, kneeling, bowing, crying, hugging. At the front of the room, a man with blond hair and a beard was talking about love.

“Everyone says they have the definition for what love is, but the Bible says, ‘By this we know love,’ ” he said. “Jesus laid down his life for us, and we are to lay down our lives for others.”

He dimmed the lights and continued in this vein for another hour, the music playing, the young people rocking back and forth mouthing, “Jesus, Jesus,” trancelike, until the blond man said, “It’s about that time.”

He turned the lights back on and soon, he sent them out on missions into the four demonic quadrants of Fort Worth.

***

Avoca Coffee Roasters, on Magnolia Avenue, is in a Fort Worth neighborhood designated by Mercy Culture for its missionaries as Lust. (Dylan Hollingsworth for The Washington Post)

One group headed east into Competition, a swath of the city that included the mirrored skyscrapers of downtown and struggling neighborhoods such as one called Stop 6, where the young people had claimed two salvations in a park the day before.

Another team headed west toward the green lawns and sprawling mansions of Greed.

Another rolled south toward Lust, where it was normal these days to see rainbow flags on bungalow porches and cafe windows including the one where a barista named Ryan Winters was behind the counter, eyeing the door.

It wasn’t the evangelicals he was worried about but the young customers who came in and were sometimes vulnerable.

“Maybe someone is struggling with their identity,” Ryan said.

He was not struggling. He was 27, a lapsed Methodist who counted himself lucky that he had never heard the voice of a God that would deem him unholy for being who he was, the pansexual lead singer of a psychedelic punk band called Alice Void.

“I never had a time when I was uncomfortable or ashamed of myself,” he said. “We all take care of each other, right, Tom?”

“Oh, yeah,” said a man with long gray hair, Tom Brunen, a Baptist turned Buddhist artist who was 62 and had witnessed the transformation of the neighborhood from a dangerous, castoff district that was a refuge for people he called “misfits” into a place that represented what much of America was becoming: more accepting, more inclined to see churches in terms of the people they had forsaken.

“It’s all mythology and fear and guilt that keeps the plutocracy and the greed in line above everybody else,” Tom said. “That’s what the universe showed me. If you want to call it God, fine. The creative force, whatever. Jesus tried to teach people that it’s all one thing. He tried and got killed for it. Christianity killed Jesus. The end. That’s my testimony.”

That was what the kingdom-builders were up against, and in the late afternoon, Nick Davenport, 24, braced himself as he arrived at his demonic battlefield, Rebellion, a noisy, crowded tourist zone of bars, souvenir shops and cobblestone streets in the north part of the city. He began walking around, searching out faces.

“The sheep will know the shepherd’s voice,” he repeated to himself to calm his nerves.

“Hey, Jesus loves y’all,” he said tentatively to a blond woman walking by.

“He does, he does,” the woman said, and he pressed on.

“Is anything bothering you?” he said to a man holding a shopping bag.

“No, I’m good,” the man said, and Nick continued down the sidewalk.

It was hot, and he passed bars and restaurants and gusts of sour-smelling air. A cacophony of music drifted out of open doors. A jacked-up truck roared by.

He moved on through the crowds, scanning the faces of people sitting at some outdoor tables. He zeroed in on a man eating a burger, a red scar visible at the top of his chest.

“Do you talk to God?” Nick asked him.

“Every day — I died twice,” the man said, explaining he had survived a car accident.

“What happened when you died?” Nick asked.

“Didn’t see any white lights,” the man said. “Nothing.”

“Well, Jesus loves you,” Nick said, and kept walking until he felt God pulling him toward a young man in plaid shorts standing outside a bar. He seemed to be alone. He was drinking a beer, his eyes red.

“Hi, I’m Nick, and I wanted to know, how are you doing?”

“Kind of you to ask,” the man said. “My uncle killed himself yesterday.”

“Oh,” said Nick, pausing for a moment. “I’m sorry. You know, God is close to the brokenhearted. I know it doesn’t feel like it all the time.”

He began telling him his own story of a troubled home life and a childhood of bullying, and how he had been close to suicide himself when he was 18 years old, and how, on a whim, he went with a friend to a massive Christian youth conference in Nashville of the sort that is increasingly common these days. A worship band called Planet Shakers was playing, he said, and deep into one of their songs, he heard what he believed to be the voice of God for the first time.

“The singer said if you’re struggling, let it go, and I halfheartedly said, ‘Okay, God, I guess I give it to you,’ and all of the sudden I felt shaky. I fell to the ground. I felt like a hand on my chest. Like, ‘I have you.’ I heard God say, ‘I love you. I made you for a purpose.’ When I heard that, I bawled like a baby. That was when I knew what I was created for. For Jesus.”

The man with red eyes listened.

“Thanks for saying that,” he said, and Nick continued walking the sidewalks into the early evening, his confidence bolstered, feeling more certain than ever that he would soon be leaving his roofing job to do something else for the Lord, something big. He had been preparing, absorbing the lessons of a church that taught him his cause was righteous, and that in the great spiritual battle for America, the time was coming when he might be called upon to face the ultimate test.

“If I have any choice, I want to die like the disciples,” said Nick. “John the Baptist was beheaded. One or two were boiled alive. Peter, I believe he was crucified upside down. If it goes that way? I’m ready. If people want to stone me, shoot me, cut my fingers off — it doesn’t matter what you do to me. We will give anything for the gospel. We are open. We are ready.”

***

Mercy Culture took over a building once used by Calvary Cathedral International, a polygonal structure with a tall white steeple visible from Interstate 35. (Dylan Hollingsworth for The Washington Post)

Ready for what, though, is the lingering question.

Those inside the movement have heard all the criticisms. That their churches are cults that prey on human frailties. That what their churches are preaching about LGTBQ people is a lie that is costing lives in the form of suicides. That the language of spiritual warfare, demonic forces, good and evil is creating exactly the sort of radical worldview that could turn politics into holy war. That the U.S. Constitution does not allow laws privileging a religion. That America does not exist to advance some Christian Kingdom of God or to usher in the second coming of Jesus.

To which Penate, the former mayoral candidate, said, “There’s a big misconception when it comes to separation of church and state. It never meant that Christians shouldn’t be involved in politics. It’s just loving the city. Being engaged. Our children are in public schools. Our cars are on public streets. The reality is that people who don’t align with the church have hijacked everything. If I ever get elected, my only allegiance will be to the Lord.”

Or as a member of Mercy Culture who campaigned for Penate said: “Can you imagine if every church took a more active role in society? If teachers were preachers? If church took a more active role in health? In business? If every church took ownership over their communities? There would be no homeless. No widows. No orphans. It would look like a society that has a value system. A Christian value system.”

That was the American Kingdom they were working to advance, and as another Sunday arrived, thousands of believers streamed past the fluttering white flags and into the sanctuary to bathe in the Holy Spirit for the righteous battles and glories to come.

The drums began pounding. The screen began spinning. The band began blasting, and when it was time, the pastor stood on the stage to introduce a topic he knew was controversial, and to deliver a very specific word. He leaned in.

“Submission,” he said.

“We’ve been taught obedience to man instead of obedience to God,” he continued.

“God makes an army out of people who will learn to submit themselves,” he continued.

“When you submit, God fights for you,” he concluded.

He cued the band. The drums began to pound again, and he told people to “breathe in the presence of God,” and they breathed. He told them to close their eyes, and they closed their eyes. He gave them words to repeat, and the people repeated them.

“I declare beautiful, supernatural submission,” they said.

By Stephanie McCrummen

Stephanie McCrummen is a national enterprise reporter covering an array of subjects for The Washington Post. Previously, she was the paper's East Africa bureau chief based in Nairobi. She has also reported from Egypt, Iraq and Mexico, among other places. She joined The Post as a Metro reporter in 2004.

Can Biden Reverse Trump’s Damage to the State Department?

Reeling from the leadership of Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo, career officials wonder whether Secretary of State Antony Blinken can revitalize American diplomacy.

— By Ronan Farrow | June 17, 2021 | The New Yorker

Donald Trump whispers to Mike Pompeo in a Cabinet meeting. Mike Pompeo echoed many of Donald Trump’s hard-line foreign-policy views, and was adept at surviving under a mercurial President. Photograph by Tom Brenner / NYT / Redux

Last year, in the early hours of October 27th, Philip Walton, an American citizen living and working as a farmer in southern Niger, was kidnapped in front of his family by armed mercenaries. The militants demanded a million-dollar ransom from Walton’s family and threatened to sell the American to local extremist groups. As Walton’s captors smuggled him across the border into northern Nigeria, Navy seals planned a rescue operation. Several days later, as the seals stood ready to conduct the raid, then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was on a government plane, flying back to the United States after travelling in Asia. A State Department staffer entered Pompeo’s cabin and updated the secretary on Walton’s case. The staffer outlined the steps that Pompeo would need to take to facilitate the exfiltration, including a call to the President of Niger.

To the surprise of his aides, Pompeo pushed back on the staffer’s requests. Pompeo grew visibly annoyed with the request that he make the phone calls, eventually replying, “When am I going to sleep?” The staffer told Pompeo that the American citizen being held was unlikely to be sleeping much. At the end of the discussion, Pompeo agreed to make the necessary calls. On the morning of October 31st, the seals parachuted from an Air Force Special Operations Command plane and rescued Walton, killing six of his kidnappers. Donald Trump and Pompeo later boasted about the operation on Twitter, where Pompeo called it “outstanding.” Staffers said the tweet was one of multiple instances when Pompeo appeared to use his position to boost his or Trump’s political fortunes.

Aides who worked under Pompeo said the exchange regarding the raid typified a leadership style that included brusque treatment of personnel and an intense focus on partisan politics that sometimes hampered the day-to-day business of the State Department. In interviews, dozens of other department employees alleged that Pompeo’s chaotic tenure, and that of his predecessor, Rex Tillerson, left deep institutional and cultural scars that continue to impede American diplomatic efforts around the world.

During the Trump Administration, a hiring freeze, radical proposals to cut the State Department’s budget, and an unprecedented number of vacancies in pivotal roles undercut the institution’s capacity to conduct diplomacy. In an interview before taking office as the current Secretary of State, Antony Blinken warned that the departure of so many career diplomats had deeply damaged the department. That “penalizes you in all sorts of ways that will go on for generations, not just for a bunch of years,” Blinken told me. Absent a more robust department, he said, “We’re going to get into all kinds of conflicts we might have avoided through development, through diplomacy.”

State Department officials told me that the Biden Administration is acting too slowly to reverse the effects of the purge. Some said that they feared that Blinken and other Administration officials, eager to distance themselves from the reckless decision-making of the Trump era, have been hesitant to make bold policy decisions. “Things aren’t moving forward,” one career diplomat, who works with Blinken and asked not to be named, told me. “There’s starting to be some chatter around the building about, you know, let’s do the hard work. And I’m not sure that these folks are prepared at this point to do that.”

The initial wave of Trump-era damage was wrought by Rex Tillerson, who championed budget cuts of proportions not seen since the first Clinton Administration, which advocated for a downsizing of the department in the name of a post-Cold War focus on domestic priorities. Pompeo, a Republican who had served as a congressman from Kansas and as Trump’s C.I.A. director, promised to restore the institution’s “swagger.” He had little by way of diplomatic experience, but was politically savvier than Tillerson—and, ultimately, more adept at surviving under a mercurial President. An evangelical Christian from Orange, California, Pompeo graduated first in his class at West Point and served in the U.S. Army’s 4th Infantry Division. After graduating from Harvard Law School, he moved to Kansas to start an aerospace business, with investment from the Kochs’ venture-capital fund. He successfully ran for Congress amid the Tea Party wave, in 2010, again with Koch backing. Pompeo’s tenure as C.I.A. director was brief, just fifteen months, but he gained a reputation for being sharp-elbowed there as well, discarding the standing precedent of serving as an apolitical director and instead cultivating unusually close ties to Trump, sometimes even accompanying the President to meetings that were unrelated to intelligence. Pompeo echoed some of Trump’s hard-line foreign-policy views. When the President issued pugnacious calls to dismantle the Iran nuclear deal, Pompeo did so, too. And he appeared to internalize some of the lessons cited by White House officials about playing to Trump’s ego. The President, Pompeo declared during his tenure as C.I.A. director, “asks good, hard questions.”

After arriving at the State Department, Pompeo lifted the hiring freeze enacted by Tillerson but then isolated himself from the staff, in what seemed to some officers to be a deliberate show of mistrust. “Tillerson’s problem was function, Pompeo’s was deliberate,” one Foreign Service officer who worked closely with Pompeo told me. “There was never really any input from the field. There was less input from the building.” The new Secretary of State, several staffers said, treated them harshly. “He did a lot of screaming in private,” the Foreign Service officer added. “Pompeo was a dick, that I would agree on,” another senior official who worked closely with Pompeo told me. At times, his outbursts were directed to foreign interlocutors, including one prominent European foreign minister.

By the end of the Trump Administration, morale in the department had collapsed. Pompeo had lost the confidence of his staff, some of whom believed that he was preoccupied with a potential Presidential run and was playing to his conservative political base. Several cited his repeated refusals to sign off on even perfunctory commitments to diversity, at a time when Black and Hispanic diplomats each comprised just eight per cent of Foreign Service officers. Allegations of corruption surrounded him as well. The House Foreign Affairs Committee moved to hold Pompeo in contempt for refusing to comply with multiple subpoenas. The State Department inspector general’s office disclosed the existence of five different investigations into State Department activities, including at least two that directly involved Pompeo.

One investigation focussed on his use of subordinates to run personal errands for him and his wife, such as picking up dry cleaning and walking their dog. After Steve Linick, the department’s inspector general, began examining the Secretary’s conduct, a Pompeo ally dismissed him. Linick, a career public servant, was abruptly placed on administrative leave and locked out of his office. He later told a congressional committee that he was given no explanation for the removal. (In April, the State Department’s Office of Inspector General concluded that Pompeo had violated the department’s ethics rules, but noted that he is no longer subject to penalties because he has left the government.)

After Trump’s loss, last November, staffers’ concerns about Pompeo’s political activities increased. As Trump rejected the election results, Pompeo’s State Department impeded the transition process. Messages from foreign leaders to President-elect Joe Biden piled up, as Pompeo declined to observe protocol and release them. In the department’s press briefing room, Pompeo told reporters, “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump Administration.” No one was sure whether he was joking. Pompeo seemed irritated at follow-up questions, saying that “every legal vote” had to be counted, an adage used by Trump allies claiming, falsely, that the election results were fraudulent.

As Pompeo set out on a post-election international trip, last November, his refusal to acknowledge the balloting results cast a shadow over his diplomacy. E.U. officials declined to meet with him, prompting Pompeo to cancel some stops. As he visited Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Georgia, where the United States has encouraged electoral transparency, career Foreign Service officers wondered what moral authority their country still carried on the subject. After he learned that plans for a routine transition meeting with his successor, Blinken, had leaked to the press, Pompeo cancelled it. Although the meeting later took place, Foreign Service officers who worked with Pompeo were dismayed by the apparent prioritization of politics over an orderly transition. “He didn’t want to be seen as doing his job,” one told me.

During the same period, Pompeo was posting political messages on Twitter. The messages were reposted to an account in Pompeo’s name, with more than a hundred thousand followers, on Telegram, where a far-right audience, shunned by some mainstream platforms, had congregated. (A spokesperson for Pompeo said that Pompeo was unaware of the Telegram account.) His posts often focussed on domestic issues, including criticism of news outlets, and featured political slogans like “#AmericansFirst” and “#SoMuchWinning.” In one message, from January, Pompeo told his followers, “America is a land of many freedoms - it’s what makes us the best country in the world. Even after I leave office, I will continue to do all I can to secure those freedoms. Follow me @mikepompeo and join me.”

After Pompeo and Trump left office, the State Department was riddled with vacancies. More than a third of all Assistant Secretary or Under-Secretary positions—the organization’s top leadership—were empty or filled by temporary, “acting” officials. For more than half of the Trump years, the senior position responsible for nonproliferation and arms control, including confronting nuclear threats from North Korea, had been vacant or led by an acting appointee. Diversity among senior staff had dwindled, and the department’s workforce was overwhelmingly white, with just thirteen per cent of the senior executive service roles filled by individuals of color. Concerns about a lack of diversity in the department’s workforce predate the Trump Administration, but recent employee surveys showed growing frustration with the department’s failure to address the problem.

Today, the staffing challenges persist. Five months after taking office, the Biden Administration has filled numerous senior roles, but the State Department still employs slightly fewer Foreign Service officers than at the conclusion of the Trump Administration. And diversity has yet to improve, according to figures published in March.

The Trump Administration also left behind a culture of suspicion. “There’s this mistrust of career officers,” Blinken told me, of his predecessor’s era. A 2019 State Department inspector-general investigation found that Trump’s political appointees had retaliated against career employees who typically serve under Administrations of both parties. Those employees, who carry much of the department’s institutional memory, were pilloried as “disloyal” or “traitors,” part of a shadowy and allegedly liberal “deep state.” Pompeo defended Trump’s habit of praising authoritarian leaders—a practice that diplomats told me was generally not part of any wider diplomatic strategy. Trump extended White House invitations to the Egyptian autocrat Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, who was presiding over a brutal human-rights crackdown, and the President of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, who has admitted to murdering opponents and had encouraged his troops to rape women. Echoing Trump, Pompeo praised Sisi’s approach to religious freedom and, according to a Philippine spokesperson, told Duterte that he was “just like our President.”

Numerous diplomats acknowledged what they described as unprecedented challenges ahead for the State Department. “There’s a real corrosion of the sense of American leadership in the world and the institutions that make that leadership real,” William Burns, President Biden’s current C.I.A. director and a former Deputy Secretary of State, told me before taking office. “Diplomacy really ought to be the tool of first resort internationally. It can sometimes achieve things at far less cost, both financially and in terms of American lives, than the use of the military can.” Several staffers praised Biden for pledging, on the campaign trail, to empower diplomats, and for embracing diversity initiatives that Pompeo had shunned. “They’re saying all the right things about diversity, they’re doing all the right things about affinity groups,” one official told me. But many diplomats said that there had been little visible progress on these issues. They wondered whether Biden, an establishment figure, was the right President to confront them at a time that they believe merits a radical course correction.

Biden ran on promises to reverse his predecessor’s embrace of dictators. “No more blank checks for Trump’s ‘favorite dictator,’ ” Biden tweeted during the 2020 campaign, referring to Sisi, in Egypt. But in his long career in Washington, Biden often championed such relationships. As chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he had presided over the rubber-stamping of unfettered military aid to the Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak. As Vice-President, he was one of Mubarak’s last supporters in Washington, saying, two weeks before Mubarak was unseated, in 2011, that he was not a dictator and didn’t need to leave office. Blinken told me that the subject had been a focus of fierce debate within the Obama Administration. “There were some folks who wanted us to much more forcefully defend Mubarak,” Blinken said. “And others suggested that, as one said, we needed to be on the right side of history.” The dispute had been “more generational than anything else,” he added, with a group of younger officials, including the current U.S.A.I.D. administrator, Samantha Power, arguing against “some of the older, more seasoned hands, who had, after all, been dealing with the relationship with Egypt for years,” including “[Robert] Gates, Hillary [Clinton], Biden,” who defended Mubarak. Blinken said that loyalty to Mubarak had been a mistake. “Yeah, maybe we were caught flat-footed in Egypt,” he told me.

Several diplomats said that the Biden Administration, in an effort to strike a different tone than that of Tillerson, Pompeo, and Trump, is being too cautious. “These new folks are doing their best to be not-the-last-folks,” the career diplomat who works with Blinken said. “That’s great in some ways, and, in some ways, it’s sort of keeping them from finding their groove. Sometimes there are tough decisions to make. And if the last folks made that decision, they’re trying not to do it.” As an example, the diplomat cited conversations about the extent of the United States’ ongoing presence in Iraq, which have, several staffers said, largely stalled since Biden took office. The diplomat added, “We can’t get a rhythm until we stop trying to be the anti-Trump, anti-Pompeo people.” (A State Department spokesperson told me, “We’re not going to make apologies for running a process that is inclusive and appropriately deliberative,” a reference to consultations with offices across the State Department and the wider government. “You can’t have an inclusive process and expect dramatic shifts, in every single realm, in a hundred and fifty days.”)

William Taylor, an Ambassador who testified during Trump’s first impeachment, said that rebuilding the Department’s battered workforce would be difficult. “They’ve seen things that have bothered them, that have disturbed them, that have shaken their faith in this institution they have been serving in. And a whole lot of people have left the Foreign Service,” Taylor told me. “It’s a real loss. They’ve left a hole, a vacuum.” But Taylor and other veterans of the State Department expressed optimism that American diplomacy could be revitalized. “Damage has been done. But there are smart people, good people,” Taylor said. “If we get good leadership and reëstablish trust and transparency, they’ll go back.”

— This piece was drawn from “War on Peace: Revised and Updated,” by Ronan Farrow, published by Norton.

— Ronan Farrow, a contributing writer to The New Yorker, is the author of “Catch and Kill” and “War on Peace.” His reporting for The New Yorker won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for public service.

June 14, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

Jun 15

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Today, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told radio personality Hugh Hewitt that it is “highly unlikely” that he would permit President Biden to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court if the Republicans win control of the Senate in 2022.

While it seems certain that, if returned to his leadership role in the Senate, McConnell would block any Biden nominee, the fact he said it right now suggests that he is hoping to keep evangelical voters firmly in the Republican camp. In 2016, after Justice Antonin Scalia died in February, McConnell refused even to hold hearings for President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland. McConnell’s justification for this unprecedented obstruction was that Obama’s March nomination was too close to an election—a rule he ignored four years later when he rushed through Amy Barrett’s appointment to the Court in late October when voting in the upcoming election was already underway—and yet the underlying reason for the 2016 delay was at least in part his recognition that hopes of pushing the Supreme Court to the right, especially on the issue of abortion, were likely to push evangelical voters to the polls.

McConnell’s stance was at least in part directed to the changing nature of the judiciary under President Biden. Last week, the Senate confirmed the first Muslim American federal judge in U.S. history, a truly astonishing first since Muslims have been part of the U.S. since the earliest days of African enslavement in the early 1600s. By a vote of 81 to 16, the Senate confirmed Zahid Quraishi, the son of Pakistani immigrants and veteran of two tours of duty in Iraq, to the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey.

More to the point, perhaps, for McConnell, is that the Senate today confirmed Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Jackson takes the place of Merrick Garland, who is now the attorney general. This post is generally seen as a stepping stone to the Supreme Court. Biden has suggested he would appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court, and Jackson is widely thought to be a top contender.

Aside from its implications for the Supreme Court, McConnell’s stand makes a mockery of Senator Joe Manchin’s (D-WV) insistence on bipartisan support for legislation that protects voting rights. Manchin is demanding that bills protecting voting win bipartisan support because he says he fears that increasing partisanship will injure our democracy. McConnell’s flaunting of his manipulation of Senate rules to cement Republican control of our courts leaves Manchin twisting in the wind.

States, too, are passing voter suppression legislation along strictly partisan lines. The Brennan Center for Justice keeps tabs on voting legislation. It writes that “Republicans introduced and drove virtually all of the bills that impose new voting restrictions, and the harshest new laws were passed with almost exclusively Republican votes and signed into law by Republican governors.”

The Republican domination of the government over the past four years is on the table today as Democratic lawmakers try to get to the bottom of who authorized the FBI under former president Trump to spy on reporters, Democratic lawmakers and their families and staff members, and on White House Counsel Don McGahn and his wife. CNN chief congressional reporter Manu Raju tweeted that Adam Schiff (D-NY) who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, says after speaking with Garland that he still doesn’t know who started the investigation. “We discussed the need to really do a full scale review of what went on in the last four years, and make sure that steps are taken to re-establish the independence of the department,” he said.

While Attorney General Merrick Garland has referred the issue to the inspector general of the Justice Department, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Jerry Nadler (D-NY), tonight announced the committee would open a formal investigation into the department’s secret seizure of data. “It is…possible that these cases are merely our first glimpse into a coordinated effort by the Trump Administration to target President Trump’s political opposition,” the committee members said in a statement. “If so, we must learn the full extent of this gross abuse of power, root out the individuals responsible, and hold those individuals accountable for their actions.”

In the midst of the uproar over the news that the Trump Department of Justice investigated Democratic lawmakers, the top national security official in the Justice Department, John Demers, a Trump appointee, has retired. Demers ran the department that had a say in each of the leak investigations.

Meanwhile, in Brussels, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, organized as a military alliance after WWII, met today. The heads of state of the 30 participating countries issued a communique reaffirming “our unity, solidarity, and cohesion,” and reiterating that, in case of attack, each nation would come to the aid of another. The members reiterated their commitment to a rules-based international order.

While the statement said NATO members remained open to a periodic, focused, and meaningful dialogue,” it singled out Russia as a threat and called for it to withdraw its forces from Ukraine, Georgia, and the Republic of Moldova. It condemned Russia’s “illegal and illegitimate annexation of Crimea.” It warned that NATO countries would, in certain circumstances, recognize a cyberattack as “amounting to an armed attack” and would treat it as such, rising to each other’s defense.

The statement was less strident against China, noting its “growing influence and international policies can present challenges.”

NATO leaders vowed to stand against terrorism and to continue to support Afghanistan despite the U.S. withdrawal. They reiterated that they did not want Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. In a reflection of the new era, the signatories’ statement called for addressing climate change. It also affirmed “the critical importance of women’s full, equal, and meaningful participation in all aspects of peace and stability, as well as the disproportionate impact that conflict has on women and girls, including conflict-related sexual violence.”

Biden says he promises to prove "that democracy and that our Alliance can still prevail against the challenges of our time and deliver for the needs and the needs of our people." With this strong statement of NATO solidarity in hand, Biden will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday.

Graphic by Carl Davidson Right click on it and open in new tab to get a closer look.

The U.S. ‘Six Party System' 3.0: Revising the Hypothesis Again

By Carl Davidson

Keep on Keepin' On

"Successful strategic thinking starts with gaining knowledge, particular gaining adequate knowledge of the big picture; of all the political and economic forces involved…It's not a one-shot deal. Since both Heaven and Earth are always changing, strategic thinking must always be kept up to date, reassessed and revised."

May 30, 2018 - This statement above was part of the opening to a widely circulated article I wrote twice, about two and four years ago. With the upcoming November 2018 elections, it's time to take my own advice again and do another update. The strategic terrain is always changing, and we don't want to be stuck with old maps and faulty models.

In the earlier versions,  I suggested setting aside the traditional ‘two-party system' frame, which obscures far more than it reveals, and making use of a ‘six-party' model instead. The new hypothesis, I suggested, had far more explanatory power regarding the events unfolding before us. Some critics have objected to my use of the term ‘party' for what are really factional or interest group clusters. The point is taken, but I would also argue that US major parties, in general, are not ideological parties in the European sense, but constantly changing coalitions of these clusters with no firm commitment to program or discipline. So I will continue to use ‘parties,' but with the objection noted. You can substitute ‘factions' if you like. Or find us a better term.

For the most part, the strategic picture holds. The ‘six parties', under two tents, were first labeled as the Tea Party and the Multinationalists under the GOP tent, and the Blue Dogs, the Third Way New Democrats, the Old New Dealers, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus, under the Democratic tent. In the second version, we had three ‘parties' under each. 

First and most important for us on the left was the rise of Bernie Sanders, who showed far more strength than imagined.  The second was the dramatic and unexpected flowering of Trump and rightwing populism on the right. Both of these, from different directions, challenged, narrowed and weakened the dominant neoliberal hegemonic bloc, which spanned both the GOP multinationals and the Third Way Democrats. It saw the Blue Dogs disappear and the Tea Party divide into Rightwing Populists and Christian Nationalists. Now here's the new snapshot of the range of forces for today, (including a graphic map). The two main changes are the re-emergence of the Blue Dogs, due to the recent three-way breakup of the Labor-Liberal center bloc, and the powerful growth of the Rightwing Populists under Trump. Starting from the left upper corner of the map:

The Rightwing Populists. This ‘party' has mushroomed via the Trump candidacy and unexpected 2016 victory. Trump, an ‘outlier elite' in his own right, is now directly connected to the Robert Mercer family fortune, the 4th ranking billionaire funding right causes. For example, the Mercers keep Breitbart News afloat and funded the career of Steve Bannon, former Trump ‘strategist' that took him to victory in the last stretch. Now along with Breitbart, Fox news is the hourly mouthpiece for Trump's war against the mainstream ‘fake news' mass media. Trump and his allies are waging political warfare against the ‘Deep State.' This is actually a contest for a new ‘America First' nationalist hegemony against the neoliberal globalists under both tents, the GOP Establishment and the Democrat's Third Way. This also includes the ‘intelligence community,' with a long list of Trump-targetted CIA and FBI ‘corrupt leaders', of which FBI director James Comey was the first to fall. ‘Corruption' was their refusal to pledge loyalty to Trump personally, like an old-style Mafia boss.

Trump also has a strong alliance with the Christian Nationalists (Mike Pence, Betsy DeVos, et al), and the DeVos family (Amway fortune), which represents another billionaire donor to the GOP right. Devos's brother, Erik Prince, has also massed billions from his Blackwater/Xe firms that train thousands of mercenaries to serve as ‘private contractors' for US armed intervention anywhere.

Where these two blocs under the GOP tent grew in strength all during the campaign, the Establishment Neoliberals divided a dozen ways, and they were defeated with some humiliation one by one. After the primaries, they were much weaker and were left with the choice of surrender, voting for Hillary Clinton (HRC) or staying home.

Trump's reach under the Dem tent to form an alliance with the Blue Dogs was more tactical. It stemmed from his appeals to ‘Rust Belt' Democrats and some unions on trade and tariff issues, plus white identity resentment politics. The economic core of rightwing populism remains anti-global ‘producerism' vs ‘parasitism'. Employed workers, business owners, real estate developers, small bankers are all ‘producers', and they oppose parasite groups above and below, but mainly those of ‘the Other' below them—the unemployed (Get a Job! as an epithet), the immigrants, poor people of color, Muslims, and more. 

Trump entered politics by declaring Obama to be an illegal alien and an illegitimate office holder (a parasite above), but quickly shifted to Mexicans and Muslims and anyone associated with ‘Black Lives Matter.' This was aimed at pulling the fascist and white supremacist groups of the ‘Alt Right,' using Breitbart and worse to widen their circles, close to Trump's core. With these as ready reserves, Trump reached farther into Blue Dog territory and its workers, retirees, and business owners conflicted with white identity issues—immigration, Islamophobia, misogyny, and more.

Trump's outlook has deep roots in American history, from the anti-Indian ethnic cleansing of President Andrew Jackson to the nativism of the Know Nothings, to the lynch terror of the KKK, to the anti-elitism of George Wallace and the Dixiecrats. Internationally, he combines aggressive jingoism, threats of trade wars, and an isolationist ‘economic nationalism' aimed at getting others abroad to fight your battles for you, while you pick up the loot (we should have seized and kept the oil!).

All this has set up the Rightwing Populists, aligned with Christian Nationalists, in a bid for hegemony over Establishment Neoliberals. So far, Trump is making gains, and the November midterms will bright to light the new balance. Trump's successes, however, also contain his internal weaknesses: the support of distressed white workers. At present, they are forming a key social base of his victories, assuming they will get lush jobs or rising 401Ks of the ‘Make America Great Again!' promises. The problem, however, is that Trump has not implemented any substantive programs apart from tax cuts. These mainly benefit the top 10% and create an unstable class contradiction in his operation, one bound to surface as promises are unfulfilled. His white supremacist demagogy and misogyny has also united a wide array of all nationalities of color and many women and youth against him. 

The Christian Nationalists. This is a subset of the former Tea Party made up of several Christian rightist trends, that has gained more coherence with the election of Mike Pence. It's made up of many who are simply conservative evangelicals.  A good number, however, are theocracy-minded fundamentalists, especially the ‘Dominionist' sects in which Ted Cruz's father is active. They present themselves as the only true, ‘values-centered' (Biblical) conservatives. They argue against any kind of compromise with the globalist ‘liberal-socialist bloc', which ranges, in their view, from the GOP's Mitt Romney to Bernie Sanders. They are more akin to classical liberalism than neoliberalism in economic policy, and thus stress abandoning nearly all regulations, much of the safety net, overturning Roe v. Wade, getting rid of marriage equality (in the name of ‘religious liberty') and abolishing the IRS and any progressive taxation in favor of a single flat tax. 

This is a key reason they attract money from the Koch Brothers, while the Kochs hold Trump and his populists in some contempt. As mentioned above, they also have some access to the Devos fortunes.

Effectively, Christian nationalist  ‘prosperity economics' amounts to affirmative action for the better off, where the rise of the rich is supposed to pull everyone else upwards, so long as those below also pay their tithes and pull upward on their ‘bootstraps.' They do argue for neo-isolationism on some matters, but favor an all-out holy war on ‘radical Islamic terrorism,' to the point of ‘making the sand glow.' They pushed for moving the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and ripping up the Iran nuclear deal. All this is aimed at greasing the skids for the ‘End Times,' the ‘Rapture, ‘and the ‘Second Coming' in the Middle East. With Cruz, Pence and Devos as leaders, they have become the second most powerful grouping under the GOP tent, and the one with the most reactionary platform and outlook, even more so than Trump.

The Establishment Neoliberals. This is the name now widely used in the media for what we previously labeled the Multinationalists. It's mainly the upper crust and neoliberal business elites that have owned and run the GOP for years, including the quasi-libertarian House ‘Freedom Caucus,' the smaller group of NeoCons on foreign policy (John Bolton and John McCain), and the shrinking number of RINO (Republican In Name Only) moderates. The Establishment also favors a globalist, US hegemonist and even, at times, unilateralist approach abroad, with some still defending the Bush-Cheney disaster in Iraq. Their candidates were Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, but when both of these collapsed under fire from Donald Trump, their voice was reduced to that of John Kasich, governor of Ohio. Kasich presents himself as a pragmatic, pro-worker neoliberal, a difficult circle to square. But he had the NSA/CIA's Michael Hayden and many from the ‘Intelligence Community' in his camp near the end. When Kasich was defeated, some went over to Clinton. Under Mitch McConnell's smothering wings, most are riding out the Trump vs ‘Deep State' storms in silence, as best as they can.

This is a big change. Previously dominant in the GOP and anchored on Wall Street, the Establishment forces were seriously weakened by both the Rightwing Populists and the Christian Nationalists.  It's possible they could be pushed out entirely, but a lot will depend on the results of Robert Mueller's investigations and the outcome of the 2018 mid-term elections. They could purge a weakened Trump and rebuild. They could try to form a new party with neoliberal Dems. Or they could join the Dems and try to push out or smother those to the left of HRC's grouping.

Now let's turn to the Dem tent, starting at the top of the graphic.

The Blue Dogs. This ‘party', while still small, has grown and gained some energy. This is largely because the United Steel Workers and a few craft unions decided to ‘work with' Trump on tariffs and trade. The USW got firmly behind Connor Lamb for Congress. Lamb's narrow victory was won in a Western PA CD in a rural and conservative area, but with a good number of USW miners. Now that the earlier gerrymandered lines have changed, however, Lamb has to run again in the new 17th CD, which is Beaver County and part of Pittsburgh itself, where Trump has less support. Support for ‘Medicare for All' is strong in this area. Lamb claims to favor it but claims it's unaffordable for now. This is a sore point for a good number of left progressive Democrats. They're likely to vote for him, but put their energies into working for better candidates running for legislative seats in Harrisburg.

The Blue Dog resurgence may not last. On one hand, the DNC Third Way gang currently loves people like Lamb, and want to see more candidates leaning to the center and even the right. On the other hand, Trump is unstable on tariffs. If he doesn't follow through on those he has put out as proposals, and folds up on major infrastructure plans save for ‘building The Wall, the unions involved may turn against him.

The Third Way New Democrats. Formed by the Clintons, with an international assist from Tony Blair and others, this dominant ‘party' was funded by Wall Street finance capitalists. The founding idea was to move toward neoliberalism by ‘creating distance' between themselves and the traditional Left-Labor-Liberal bloc, i.e., the traditional unions and civil rights groups still connected to the New Deal legacy. Another part of the ‘Third Way' thinking was to shift the key social base away from the core of the working class toward college-educated suburban voters, but keeping alliances with Black and women's groups still functional.

Thus the Third Way tries to temper the harsher neoliberalism of the GOP by ‘triangulating' with neo-Keynesian and left-Keynesian policies. But the overall effect is to move Democrats and their platform generally rightward. This had been Hillary Clinton's starting point in her campaign. But caught off guard by the Sanders insurgency, she adopted some positions, at least for the sake of campaigning, from both the former Liberal-Labor bloc and the Congressional Progressive Caucus. She kept her ‘Rainbow' allies with her this way.

Now that HRC was narrowly defeated, the Third Way's power in the party has diminished somewhat. Its labor alliances have weakened, with unions now going in three directions. In terms of the current relation of forces in the party apparatus, the Third Way about 60% of the positions but still controls the major money. In California, for example, the Regulars kept control of the state party committee only with extremely narrow margins over Bernie supporters. The key test is the November midterms: Who will inspire and mobilize the much-needed ‘Blue Wave', give it focus and put the right numbers in the right places?  The measured moderates? Or the insurgent left? This brings us to the last of the six ‘parties.'

The Social Democrats. This is a better description than simply calling it the Congressional Progressive Caucus, as in the first version. I've also taken off ‘Rainbow' from the second version because this term is more fairly shared with the Third Way, which has kept the older and more pragmatic voters of the rainbow groupings under its centrist influence. And as before, the ‘Social Democrat' title doesn't mean each leader active here is in a social-democrat group. It means the core of the CPC, PDA, WFP and Our Revolution platforms are roughly similar to the left social democrat groupings in Europe.  

This is made even more evident with Bernie's self-description as a ‘democratic socialist' in the primaries, where it only seemed to help. It must be noted, however, that the platform is not socialism itself, but best described as a common front vs finance capital, war, and the white supremacist right. This is true of groups like Die Linke (‘The Left') in Germany as well. 

Finally, there is the dramatic growth of the Democratic Socialists of America due to their wise tactics in the Bernie campaign. They went all in for Bernie but also lost no opening to make themselves visible. Now with over 32.000 members which chapters in every state, they are winning a few local and statehouse races. They are now a player in their own right.

This is all to the good. The common front approach can unite more than a militant minority of actual socialists. Instead, it's a platform that can also unite a progressive majority around both immediate needs and structural reforms, including both socialists and non-socialists. Apart from winning many state primaries and 46% of the Convention delegates with a positive, high road approach, this party is now noted for two things: first, the huge, elemental outpourings of young people, mainly women, students and the young workers of the distressed ‘precariat' sector of the class, in elemental risings of millions after Trump took office.  Second, its organized character, with groups like Our Revolution, Indivisible, and the Working Families Party added to this dynamic and growing cluster.

What Does It All Mean?

With this brief descriptive and analytical mapping of the upper crust of American politics, many things are falling into place. The formerly subaltern groupings in the GOP have risen in revolt against the Neoliberal Establishment of the Romneys and the Bushes. Now they want hegemony. On the other hand, the Third Wayer are seeking a ‘restoration' of the Obama coalition, with its alliances with the Keynesian Labor Liberals, while co-opting and controlling the Social Democrats as energetic but critical secondary ally. The Sanders forces have few illusions about this and don't want to be anyone's subaltern. So they continue to press all their issues and policies of a common front vs finance capital, war, and the white supremacist right, building more organization and more clout as they go.

This 'big picture' also reveals much about the current budget debates, which are shown to be three-sided--the extreme austerity neoliberalism of all three parties under the GOP tent, , the 'austerity lite' budget of the Third Way-dominated Senate Democrats, and the left Keynesian, progressive and social democratic 'Back to Work' budget of the Social Democrats and the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The 'Keynesian Labor Liberals' are divided, though they often holding decent programs as positions. But looking for side deals with Trump at the same time may not turn out too well. 

We have to keep in mind, however, that 'shifting the balance of forces' is mainly an indirect and somewhat ephemeral gain. It does 'open up space', but for what? Progressive initiatives matter for sure, but much more is required strategically. We are interested in pushing the popular front vs. finance capital to its limits, and within that effort, developing a 21st-century socialist bloc. If that comes to scale in the context of a defeat of the right, the 'Democratic Tent' is also likely to collapse and implode, given the sharper class contractions and other fault lines that lie within it, much as the Whigs did in the 19th Century. That demands an ability to regroup all the progressive forces there and on the outside into a new 'First Party' alliance, one that also includes a militant minority of socialists, which will be able to contend for power.

An old classic formula summing up the strategic thinking of the united front is appropriate here: 'Unite and develop the progressive forces, win over the middle forces, isolate and divide the backward forces, then crush our adversaries one by one.' In short, we have to have a policy and set of tactics for each one of these elements, as well as a strategy for dealing with them overall. Moreover, take note of warning from the futurist Alvin Toffler: 'If you don't have a strategy, you're part of someone else's strategy.' Then finally, as to tactics, ‘wage struggle on just grounds, to our advantage and with restraint.'

To conclude, we still need to start with a realistic view of ourselves as an organized socialist left. Save for DSA, we are quite small as organizations, but now we can see we are swimming in a sea of millions open to socialism. What can we do now? If you can see yourself or your group honestly working to achieve DSA's stated program, by all means, join and make them larger. Or set up Jacobin / In These Times Reading Groups in your living rooms and unite socialists with them. Join or start PDA or WFP chapters everywhere, use base organizations and broad 'Third Reconstruction' alliances and popular rainbow assemblies to build mass mobilizations and defeat the GOP in November. 

With both socialists and Rainbow progressives, start at the base, focus on city and state governments, and expand the Congressional Progressive Caucus. You rarely gain victories at the top that have not been won and consolidated earlier at the base. Most of all, in order to form broader and winning coalitions, you need organizations of your own to form coalitions and alliances WITH! Seize the time and Git ‘er done!

Carl Davidson is a national committee member of the Committee of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism,  a DSA member in the Steel Valley, an activist with Progressive Democrats of American in Western PA's 17th CD, and a LeftRoots Compa. The views expressed here are his own.