The House select committees hearings on the 2021 Capitol insurrection, which begin on June 9, should not neglect a key driver of the attack: white Christian nationalism.

White Christian nationalism is the belief that Americas founding is based on Christian principlesand that Christianity should be the foundation of how the nation develops its laws, principles and policies, as my co-author defined it in a report we wrote earlier this year for the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

This ideology played a crucial part in fomenting the insurrection, from the buildup and dry runs that occurred immediately following Election Day in November 2020 to the attack itself. It was clear the terrorists perceived themselves to be Christians, D.C. Metropolitan Police Officer Daniel Hodges testified before the House in July 2021.

Luke Mogelson the New Yorker journalist who filmed the shocking video of the attack from inside the Capitol similarly remarked: The Christianity was one of the surprises to me in covering this stuff, and it has been hugely underestimated. That Christian nationalism you talk about is the driving force and also the unifying force of these disparate players. Its really Christianity that ties it all together.

The white Christian nationalist version of patriotism is racist, xenophobic, patriarchal and exclusionary. And it celebrates the use of violent force, as dramatically seen on Jan. 6, 2021.

But white Christian nationalism is not the only way Christians have understood the link between religious commitments and political activism. In contrast to those who preach white Christian nationalism, many Black Christian communities have historically embraced a different kind of patriotism, one that leads to an expansion of democratic processes, the inclusion of marginalized people and nonviolent calls for the nation to live up to its foundational ideals.

Historical leaders such as Fannie Lou Hamer, Ida B. Wells and Martin Luther King Jr., as well as contemporary leaders such as Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., civil rights activist and lawyer Bernice King, and LaTosha Brown of Black Voters Matter have been outspoken about their Christian faith as the foundation for their pursuit of a multiracial, participatory democracy.

And yet, despite Black Christians and other inclusive religious communities alternative visions of faith, white Christian nationalism remains the most dominant force of religion in U.S. politics and represents an urgent risk to democracy in the nation. Networks of power and money prop up white Christian nationalism and give it outsized influence in national civic life and discourse.

Its sway over political leaders depends largely on its ability to deliver significant numbers of votes in a consistent way. While there are several ways that white Christian nationalists mobilize voters, perhaps the movements biggest draw is that it reconciles two seemingly contradictory notions: that our nation, a Christian nation, is the greatest on Earth and, at the same time, it is overrun with alien and evil forces.

White Christian nationalism, for its role in the Jan. 6 insurrection alone, is a harmful and extremist belief system that deserves more public alarm. At present, it is the greatest threat to democracy and maintaining the peaceful transfer of power in the United States. We neglect this dangerous ideology at our own peril.

Jemar Tisby, Ph.D., is a New York Times bestselling author, national speaker, and public historian. He is the author of The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Churchs Complicity in Racism and How to Fight Racism.

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Jemar Tisby: White Christian nationalism fueled Jan. 6 attack

Amid the outpouring ofgrief and heartache following Saturday's massacre in Buffalo that left 10 people dead and three wounded, critical observers say the racial animus which evidence shows motivated the killer must be seen in the larger context of a white nationalist mindset that has increasingly broken into the mainstream of the right-wing political movement and Republican Party in recent years.

Taken into custody at the scene of the mass shooting at the Tops Market was Payton Gendron, the white 18-year-old male who has charged with murdering the victims. Gendron live-streamed his attack online and also posted a detailed, 180-page document that has been described by those who have reviewed it including journalists and law enforcement as a white nationalist manifesto rife with anti-Black racism, antisemitism and conspiracy theories about "white replacement."

RELATED:Mass shooting in Buffalo: Tucker Carlson and other right-wing conspiracy theorists share the blame

According tolocal outletNews 4in Buffalo:

The document, which News 4 has reviewed, plotted the attack in grotesque detail. The writer plotted his actions down to the minute, included diagrams of his path through the store and said he specifically targeted the Tops Markets location on Jefferson Avenue because its zip code has the highest percentage of Black people close enough to where he lives.

"This was pure evil," said Erie County Sheriff John Garcia during a press conference on Saturday. The attack, he said, "was straight-up racially motivated hate crime from somebody outside of our community."

A senior law enforcement official in BuffalotoldNBC Newsthat officials were working to verify the document's authenticity and confirm Gendron was behind it.

"We are aware of the manifesto allegedly written by the suspect and we're working to definitively confirm that he is the author," the official said.

NBC, which reviewed the document, reports:

The manifesto includes dozens of pages of antisemitic and racist memes, repeatedly citing the racist "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory frequently pushed by white supremacists, which falsely alleges white people are being "replaced" in America as part of an elaborate Jewish conspiracy theory. Other memes use tropes and discredited data to denigrate the intelligence of non-white people.

In the manifesto, Gendron claims that he was radicalized on 4chan while he was "bored" at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020.

The document also claims "critical race theory," a recent right-wing talking point that has come to generally encompass teaching about race in school, is part of a Jewish plot, and a reason to justify mass killings of Jews.

The manifesto also includes repeated references to another mass shooter motivated by racial hate, Brenton Tarrant, who in 2019 live-streamed his vicious Islamophobic assault on a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, where he murdered 51 people and wounded dozens of others.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

With these and other facts established about Gendron's apparent motivations and ideology, many of those horrified by Saturday's killings responded by saying the brutal and deadly attack in Buffalo cannot and should not be separated from the growing embrace of the far-right nationalism that has increasingly found a home inside more mainstream institutions in the U.S., including right-wing media outlets like Fox News and a Republican Party enthralled by the xenophobic and fascistic conspiracy theories of Donald Trump.

"We are horrified, heartbroken, and enraged at the news of the vicious attack on our neighbors and loved ones in Buffalo, New York," said People's Action, the progressive advocacy group, in a statement.

"This racist attack is a pure example of evil," the group added. "It's also the predictable result of the relentless onslaught of white nationalist and antisemitic conspiracy theories spewed from the far right, increasingly distributed by major corporate news outlets like Fox News and the extremist politicians their billionaire allies have cultivated."

"In Christchurch, New Zealand and El Paso, Texas and Poway, California and now again in Buffalo, New York, a gunman motivated by a white nationalist conspiracy theory about invading immigrants shot and killed people of color," saidSumayyah Waheed, senior policy council for Muslim Advocates, in a statement referencing a series of mass shootings carried out by white supremacists in recent years.

"In Christchurch, El Paso, Poway, California, and now in Buffalo, a gunman. motivated by white nationalist conspiracy theory ... shot and killed people of color."

"Just like in Christchurch," Waheed continued, "the alleged Buffalo shooter both posted a manifesto about the 'great replacement' conspiracy theory and also livestreamed his massacre on social media. Our hearts go out to the families of the victims and to the people of Buffalo."

In a statement on Sunday, Kina Collins, a gun violence prevention advocate and Democratic congressional candidate running for Congress in Illinois' 7th district, made similar arguments.

Calling the shooting a "devastating and sickening display of the racism, white supremacy, hate, and gun violence that plague this country," Collins said, "Black people in Buffalo were targeted for no reason other than that they are Black."

"This was an act of terrorism and it should be treated as such," she added. "It is another reminder that white supremacy has and will always be America's greatest threat. White supremacy has infiltrated our military and police departments. It was also on display on January 6th last year as insurrectionists, fueled by white supremacy, attacked our Capitol and threatened the lives of sitting members of Congress."

Journalist Sam Sacks also made a connection between the Buffalo shooter and the "Big Lie" movement that drove the Jan. 6 insurrection last year.

Waheed in his statement said, "This hateful, white nationalist rhetoric is not just being spread by lone gunmen."

Such rhetoric, he said, "can also be found on cable news and in the rhetoric of politicians today. On his cable news show, Tucker Carlson said that 'the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World.' In campaign ads, Donald Trump described Latino immigrants as an 'invasion.' In a speech, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called the election of Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib 'an Islamic invasion of our government.'"

With Republicans and major media personalities "normalizing white nationalist, anti-immigrant, anti-Black, anti-Latino, antisemitic and anti-Muslim conspiracy theories," and gunmen like the one in Buffalo carrying out such attacks, Waheed said it is now "clear that white nationalism is the greatest threat to our nation's security and we must hold everyone who spreads this hate accountable before anyone else is harmed."

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Buffalo gunman's racism appears linked to mainstreaming of white ...

The presence and visibility of white nationalism are rising in the U.S., and the Patriot Front is one of the groups responsible.

Around 100 members of the group a rebrand of neo-Nazi group Vanguard America known for its role in the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 descended on Boston on July 2. They marched along Bostons Freedom Trail holding a banner that read Reclaim America and have been accused of attacking Black artist and activist Charles Murrell.

In June, 31 members of the Patriot Front were arrested in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, on conspiracy to riot charges. Members arrived packed into a U-Haul truck with plans to disrupt a Pride event at a local park.

The group has chapters in 40 states. Patriot Front and other neo-Nazi groups have been tied to ideas of accelerationism, a theory that calls for violence to spur societal unrest.

The threat is large, says Pete Simi, a professor at Chapman University who testified in a trial that led to a $26 million verdict against organizers of the rally in Charlottesville. It's been large for a long time. And the near future poses a lot of risk.

On whats concerning about the groups beliefs

Their basic underlying beliefs while they may claim publicly that this is not the case support violence and support the necessity to use violence to, as they say, reclaim the country, to reclaim America, and to defend the white race. Patriot Front is active nationwide. These folks are leafleting. They're holding these kinds of marches across the country. They're on social media. So I think we can do a lot more to be prepared for when these folks come to town.

On Patriot Fronts recruiting measures and attempts to grow

The estimates back in 2019 put [Patriot Front at] around 300 members. It seems to be growing since then over the last few years. In terms of the recruitment on college campuses, we've seen their propaganda where I work at Chapman University on several occasions. That's happening across the country as well. We're seeing the recruitment of folks in the military. And I think it's important to understand the Patriot Front is part of a larger threat landscape. It's not just the Patriot Front in the singular. It's the plural that they represent in terms of this threat to democracy.

We are dealing with a massive movement. It's a global movement. There's certainly a national context to it. We saw it manifest itself in terms of the Jan. 6 insurrection. We saw it in Charlottesville, at the deadly rally there. We're seeing it with these single-actor attacks all over the country: Buffalo, El Paso and Pittsburgh. Time and time again, we're seeing those incidents of violence kind of written off as a single, lone, deranged actor instead of an actual movement that's promoting this kind of violence.

On the goals of the white supremacist movement at large

Accelerate the violence. Accelerate the destruction of society. Deconstruct the society, as Steve Bannon has advocated as former White House adviser to President Trump. The accelerationist ideas run deep across a wide web. This is a very broad web and we need to see the connections. This is not isolated to a singular group or set of individuals, but the accelerationist ideas have been prominent for quite some time among white supremacists and are taking hold more broadly.

Lynn Menegon produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Gabe Bullard.Grace Griffinadapted it for the web.

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White supremacy poses increasing threats in the U.S.: We are dealing with a massive movement. - WBUR News

A few days ago, I stopped by CVS to buy cheap U.S. flag gear: a headband with two small flags glued to it, LED flag-themed glasses and a hat in red, white and blue. I wanted to see if I could rediscover my former enthusiasm for the flag.

Long before I was called anti-American (by devotees of the white demagogue), you could say I was a kind of patriot. The flag inspired in me a sense of pride.

But the flag has changed meaning for many of us. At the drugstore, I grabbed the patriotic items quickly and used self-checkout, hoping nobody would see. Though Donald Trump lost reelection nearly two years ago, the marketing master left a mark on the flag. Many Latinos and other people he scapegoated still recoil upon seeing it. It has become a stand-in for the GOPs white nationalist agenda.

Opinion Columnist

Jean Guerrero

Jean Guerrero is the author, most recently, of Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump and the White Nationalist Agenda.

The hopeful sense in November of 2020 that wed reclaimed the flag has died as the GOP deals blow after blow to hard-won equal rights, including womens right to bodily autonomy. The euphoria of a spontaneous dance party I joined at a Los Feliz gas station on Nov. 7, 2020 as Angelenos twerked with abandon amid U.S. flags is long gone.

How can we celebrate Independence Day, with its flags and belligerent displays of patriotism, when so many in our communities feel terrorized by such rituals? I dumped the flag merchandise on my sofa and squinted. The stuff looked clownish and sinister, like the authoritarian himself. I picked up the LED flag glasses and put them on. Stepped in front of the mirror. Disturbed, I took them off.

How had Trump come to live inside this symbol I once believed represented me?

As a child, Jean Guerrero proudly wore her American flag shirt.

(Courtesy of Jean Guerrero)

When I was 7 or 8, my mom bought me a T-shirt patterned like the flag. I wore it proudly, including on a visit to New York City when I posed on Ellis Island, with the Twin Towers in the background. The Statue of Liberty was spectacular, calling outcasts to our shores. My mother, who paid for medical school in Puerto Rico by enlisting in the National Health Service Corps, told me we lived in the land of opportunity.

A few years later, I watched the towers fall on TV from home in San Diego. President George W. Bush said we were attacked because were the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world. My mother bought U.S. flags for our house. I joined a large human flag formation at Qualcomm Stadium. I painted flags on my face and waved patriotic pompoms.

It wasnt long before the fiction began to fray. I dreamed of becoming a journalist; early experiments in it taught me skepticism. Moreover, Id always sensed a conflict at the heart of my mothers patriotism. Where she cited a land of opportunity for all, I saw a Sisyphean topography for her.

In Greek legend, Sisyphus is doomed to roll a boulder up a mountain for eternity. My single mother seemed to be in an endless struggle for me and my sister. While raising us, she was also taking care of her elderly parents who had moved in with us from Puerto Rico. And she had developed a painful auto-immune disorder most common among women of color. Her license plate read: CLIMING.

The land of opportunity had a sinister side. Some people were condemned to climb forever.

Soon I learned Bush was using 9/11 as a pretext for war against innocent Muslims. I read about Mexicans dying at our militarized border. Later, as a reporter, I saw the bodies. I saw the U.S. guns displacing people in Latin America.

Then a Mexican-hating, Muslim-barring bully became president and raised a mob to attack the Capitol after he lost four years later. His Supreme Court paved a path to Gilead.

After all these horrors, how could the flag mean the same as it had before?

When I asked Myriam Gurba, a Long Beach activist and author of the coming essay collection Creep, whether she thought the flag was redeemable, she said: Some things need to be burned. I found myself agreeing with her.

U.S. protesters have a long tradition of burning the flag to demand change. Its a form of protected speech. But I personally couldnt do that. The flag has been at the center of so many courageous scenes in our history, not only shameful ones.

Later, while driving to see friends, I saw the small U.S. flags splayed on my car floor. They looked pitiful like trashed, once-treasured mementos. The sight triggered a reflexive protectiveness.

I didnt want to give up on the flag. Still, I had a hard time seeing past the moguls mark. I tossed my flag merchandise in my car, wanting it out of my place but unsure what to do with it.

I pulled up photos of the 2006 immigrant rights marches, when hundreds of thousands of Americans, mostly Latinos, demonstrated in more than 140 cities. The U.S. flag was everywhere.

It must have been nightmarish to the nativists reading Samuel Huntingtons mad ravings about Latinos as a threat U.S. identity: a sea of U.S. flags among Latinos. (The dreaded reconquista, accomplished!)

It was a political maneuver and very strategic, said Toms Jimnez, a professor of sociology at Stanford University who studies American and racial identities. You saw Latinos and immigrants in general claiming it as a symbol for their lives.

Spanish-language radio host Eddie El Piolin Sotelo encouraged listeners to carry U.S. flags. We wanted them to show that we love this country, Sotelo told the Los Angeles Times. Bringing the U.S. flag, that was important.

In the flag-studded sea, Latinos saw a country that included them. The 2008 elections saw historic Latino voter turnout. Repurposed, the flag had a striking power: strengthening democracy.

Mythology is more useful as a political tool than rationality, the British Indian writer Rana Dasgupta told me. In those marches, pro-immigrant forces tapped into a powerful myth of American identity. However, Dasgupta argues, the political right lately shows the greater mastery of myth, fueling nationalism.

Democrats have shied away from boldly pro-immigrant policies and rhetoric. Theyre the party of moderation, mythologys kiss of death. But were a nation of immigrants. We can reimagine how inclusive a flag can be.

A Pew Research Center survey last year found that views on national identity here and in Western Europe are growing more inclusive despite xenophobic politics. As people meet more foreigners, their fear abates. And most Americans believe openness to the stranger is essential to who we are.

The U.S. flag should not belong to the fascists, who fail to grasp our strength. The flag should belong to the people carrying the boulder of this country on their backs.

Theyve been giving and giving and giving. They have every right to take back the flag.

@jeanguerre

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Guerrero: Im officially reclaiming the U.S. flag from the fascists - Los Angeles Times

On 19 November 1990, Boris Yeltsin gave a speech in Kyiv to announce that, after more than 300 years of rule by the Russian tsars and the Soviet totalitarian regime in Moscow, Ukraine was free at last. Russia, he said, did not want any special role in dictating Ukraines future, nor did it aim to be at the centre of any future empire. Five months earlier, in June 1990, inspired by independence movements in the Baltics and the Caucasus, Yeltsin had passed a declaration of Russian sovereignty that served as a model for those of several other Soviet republics, including Ukraine. While they stopped short of demanding full separation, such statements asserted that the USSR would have only as much power as its republics were willing to give.

Russian imperial ambitions can appear to be age-old and constant. Even relatively sophisticated media often present a Kremlin drive to dominate its neighbours that seems to have passed from the tsars to Stalin, and from Stalin to Putin. So it is worth remembering that, not long ago, Russia turned away from empire. In fact, in 1990-91, it was Russian secessionism together with separatist movements in the republics that brought down the USSR. To defeat the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachevs attempt at preserving the union, Yeltsin fused the concerns of Russias liberal democrats and conservative nationalists into an awkward alliance. Like Donald Trumps Make America Great Again or Boris Johnsons Brexit, Yeltsin insisted that Russians, the Soviet Unions dominant group, were oppressed. He called for separation from burdensome others to bring Russian renewal.

The roots of nationalist discontent lay in Russias peculiar status within the Soviet Union. After the Bolsheviks took control over much of the tsarist empires former territory, Lenin declared war to the death on Great Russian chauvinism and proposed to uplift the oppressed nations on its peripheries. To combat imperial inequality, Lenin called for unity, creating a federation of republics divided by nationality. The republics forfeited political sovereignty in exchange for territorial integrity, educational and cultural institutions in their own languages, and the elevation of the local titular nationality into positions of power. Soviet policy, following Lenin, conceived of the republics as homelands for their respective nationalities (with autonomous regions and districts for smaller nationalities nested within them). The exception was the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, or RSFSR, which remained an administrative territory not associated with any ethnic or historic Russia.

Russia was the only Soviet republic that did not have its own Communist Party, capital, or Academy of Sciences. These omissions contributed to the uneasy overlap of Russian and Soviet.

It was Joseph Stalin, a Georgian, who promoted Russians to first among equals in the Soviet Union, confirmed by his postwar toast that credited most of all, the Russian people with the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany. Nikita Khrushchev continued the Soviet commitment to the formation of a multiethnic community that would eventually converge in a shared economic, cultural and linguistic system. In this Soviet melting pot, Russia was a kind of older brother, especially to the purportedly less-advanced peoples of Central Asia. Russian remained the Soviet language of upward mobility, Russian history and culture were the most celebrated, and Russians generally thought of the Soviet Union as theirs. Like white Americans who marked other groups as ethnic, Russians saw themselves as the norm in relation to national minorities.

By the late 1960s, the Soviet Union was a majority urbanised, educated society whose legitimacy had come to rest on its status as a stable welfare state. Freed from the terror, war and mass mobilisation of the previous decades, Soviet citizens spent their leisure time watching TV and listening to records (some officially banned, but easily available thanks to state-produced consumer technologies). After the horrors of the Second World War, in which 20 to 28 million Soviet citizens died, the hard-won stability of the postwar decades led some to wonder what a meaningful life looked like when the era of epic struggle was over. The question was particularly acute for the generation that reached adulthood after Stalins death in 1953. They inherited the Soviet states crowning achievements victory over Hitler, the conquest of space but lacked a unifying world-historical cause. Like their peers in other highly developed societies of the 1970s, they sought answers through self-improvement quests, spiritual awakening, aimless hedonism and environmental activism. Some Soviet citizens idealised the inaccessible West. Still others looked for roots in different national pasts. The Soviet empire subsidised distinct ethnocultural identities that were subordinate to a universalising Communist (Russian) one. As the latter grew hollow, the former was ready to fill the void.

The village prose writers expressed various nationalities sense that they were losing their patrimony. These authors, who were born in rural areas and studied in Moscow, framed village-dwellers as authentic bearers of tradition, in an elegiac key equivalent to foreign contemporaries such as Wendell Berry in the United States or the Irish writer John McGahern. The most catastrophist feared that Russias land and people were imperilled by forces beyond their control. Valentin Rasputins apocalyptic novel Farewell to Matyora (1976) was inspired by the flooding of his native village to create the Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station. In the novel, the old widow Darya condemns the project as an ecological and spiritual catastrophe. She mourns the destruction of her ancestral home but, rather than relocating to the city, she and several others stay behind and drown.

Solzhenitsyn saw Communism as a foreign ideology that separated Russia from its Orthodox heritage

The village prose movement was not alone in perceiving Russian identity as under existential threat in the Soviet Union. Their concern was shared by Russian apparatchiks such as the Politburo member Dmitry Polyansky and members of the intelligentsia such as the October magazine editor Vsevolod Kochetov. In their view, the Soviet Union was the reincarnation of the Russian empire, destined to take up its historic mantle as an anti-Western autocracy rooted in a revitalised peasantry. It was supposedly held back by Jews (and, increasingly, people from the Caucasus and Central Asia), who leeched off Russians labour and resources, and impeded their advancement. Beginning in the 1960s, the Soviet party-state turned to co-opting Russian nationalist sentiments in order to fortify its weakening legitimacy. Official institutions such as the Young Guard publishing house and the All-Russian Society for the Protection of Culture and Monuments served as key recruitment centres for the Russian nationalist cause.

Much of the culture that Russian nationalists produced was compatible with the Soviet Unions self-image. The painter Ilya Glazunov glorified figures such as Ivan the Terrible and St Sergius of Radonezh alongside portraits of Leonid Brezhnev, the Communist Partys General Secretary. The Slavophile critic Vadim Kozhinov declared that Russia had saved the world three times: from Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and Hitler. Importantly, praise for Russians achievements was sometimes paired with indignation about their mistreatment, and more radical materials circulated in samizdat (self-published form). Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who viewed Communism as a foreign ideology that separated Russia from its Orthodox heritage, was stripped of his Soviet citizenship after a vicious press campaign that accused him of choking with pathological hatred for the country and its people.

While Russian nationalists such as Solzhenitsyn were punished for directly challenging the Soviet claim to rule, Soviet rulers were punished for directly challenging Russian nationalism. In 1972, Alexander Yakovlev, the acting head of the Central Committees Propaganda Department and later a top advisor to Gorbachev, published a letter in a Soviet newspaper that attacked both dissident and officially aligned forms of Russian nationalism. The article led to Yakovlevs demotion to an ambassadorship in Ottawa.

The most popular and broadly relatable image of Russian victimisation was created by the writer, director and actor Vasily Shukshin. Shukshin was born in the Altai region of Siberia to a peasant father executed during Stalins forced collectivisation of agriculture (a fact that was excluded from his official biography as unbefitting for a Communist Party member). After moving to Moscow, he became known for playful short stories about eccentric rural men who resist conforming to modern life by playing the balalaika or steaming in the bathhouse. By the early 1970s, however, his characters were increasingly lost and marginalised. Shukshins last effort as a film director and his biggest hit, Kalina Krasnaya (1974) released in English as The Red Snowball Tree was centred on Egor, an ex-convict who struggles to find his place after fleeing hunger in the countryside as a young man. I dont know what to do with this life, Egor tells the saintly pen-pal who takes him in after his release from prison. Egor ultimately reconnects with his rural roots and takes up a new life as a tractor driver, but his redemption is cut short when his former gang shows up and shoots him dead in an open field. Dont pity him, Egors murderer says coolly as he smokes a cigarette. He was never a person he was a muzhik [peasant man]. And there are plenty of them in Russia.

Shukshins allegory of emasculation and deracination reflected his darkening outlook: in private remarks, he lamented the poor and depopulated state of Russias countryside, noting that most of his male relatives were alcoholics or in jail. Theres trouble in Rus, great trouble, he wrote in his notebook. I feel it in my heart. But his work was wryly sentimental rather than angry or accusatory, and his rise from the peasantry to the intelligentsia modelled official myths of upward mobility. Shukshin won top prizes and benefited from extensive state support.

However, when Shukshin died of a heart attack shortly after Kalina Krasnayas release, some nationalists whispered that he, like his most famous hero, was the victim of predation. The village prose writer Vasily Belov, a close friend, wrote in his diary that if [Jews] didnt poison [Shukshin] directly, then they certainly poisoned him indirectly. His entire life was poisoned by Jews. Shukshins cinematographer Anatoly Zabolotsky claimed in the draft of his memoirs (written in the early 1980s) that Shukshin had read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion before his death and was shocked to learn that a genocide was being committed against the Russian people. Zabolotsky suggested that the actor who played Egors killer and his (Jewish) wife had murdered Shukshin to protect the secret.

Until the late 1980s, Russian nationalists paranoid xenophobia (which included broadsides against disco music and aerobics) was semi-covert and irrelevant to most. During Gorbachevs perestroika (reform) and glasnost (openness), however, when everything from Solzhenitsyns The Gulag Archipelago (1973) to astrology was openly permitted, nationalist intellectuals concerns found freer and wider expression in political life, where they latched on to broader dissatisfaction. As activists in the Caucasus and the Baltics began demanding greater cultural and political autonomy, in April 1989 Soviet troops crushed a large demonstration in Tbilisi.

Denunciations of this repression kicked off the opening sessions at the televised First Congress of Peoples Deputies of the USSR in May 1989. Valentin Rasputin, author of Farewell to Matyora, was among the delegates. After listening to Baltic and Georgian deputies complaints about Russian imperialism, Rasputin took the floor to bitterly suggest that

Under the influence of other republics demands, Russian nationalists long-running resentment was rapidly turning into separatism.

Enough feeding the other republics! he exclaimed in a speech to industrial workers

Gorbachevs political and economic devolution of the USSR produced chaos, including severe food shortages. The suddenly uncensored media exposed violence and degradation ranging from Stalinist repressions to the flailing war in Afghanistan. In response to the rush of bad news, the intelligentsia lamented Russias total ruin. The cultural historian and Gulag survivor Dmitry Likhachev said that the communist regime humiliated and robbed Russia so much, that Russians can hardly breathe. In Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union (2021), Vladislav Zubok recounts how the separatist idea gained momentum in the first half of 1990 thanks to three mutually hostile forces: Russian nationalists inside the party and elites; the democratic opposition that dominated Moscow politics; and the masses behind Gorbachevs rival, Yeltsin, a charismatic apparatchik who transformed into the peoples tsar.

Yeltsin, who was elected the first head of the Russian Supreme Soviet, riled up crowds by declaring that the Soviet Union was stealing from Russians to subsidise Central Asia. Enough feeding the other republics! he exclaimed in a speech to industrial workers, who responded with a chant against Gorbachev. Yeltsin called for Russias democratic, national, and spiritual resurrection and promised to redistribute resources to the people. Though Yeltsin adopted elements of conservative nationalists ideas, he was also pro-Western and pushed for further democratisation and marketisation, which they opposed.

In contrast to Yeltsin, Gorbachev dreamed of creating a common European home that would include all peoples of the USSR in a closer relationship with the West. By the end of 1990, all of the Soviet republics had responded to the vacuum of central authority and the example set by former Soviet satellites in eastern Europe by declaring themselves sovereign (and in several cases independent). Yet the future shape of their relationship with the union remained unclear, and possibly still compatible with Gorbachevs vision of a more equal federation.

In November 1990, Yeltsin travelled to Kyiv as part of a strategy to undermine Gorbachev by building a new union from below based on horizontal ties between Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Like other political elites at the time, Yeltsins use of the word sovereignty in his speeches and promotional materials was ambiguous. According to his advisor Gennady Burbulis, Yeltsin was under the heavy influence of Solzhenitsyns recently published essay Rebuilding Russia, which claimed that the Russian people were exhausted, and proposed dissolving the USSR while retaining a Slavic core of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, along with Russian-populated parts of Kazakhstan. Solzhenitsyns view that all three of these peoples sprang from precious Kyiv was shared by many Russians who did not necessarily identify as nationalists but assumed they would stay together.

Yeltsins expectations for a rapprochement with Ukraine were soon disappointed. In August 1991, the Communist hardliners failed coup put an end to Gorbachevs hopes for a revitalised union and consolidated the power of Yeltsin, who was now the first elected president of the RSFSR. The Verkovna Rada, Ukraines parliament, passed an act proclaiming an independent state of Ukraine with indivisible and inviolable territory. Particularly panicked at the thought of losing Crimea, Yeltsin had his press officer announce that the Russian republic reserved the right to reconsider its borders, angering the Ukrainian leader Leonid Kravchuk. Yeltsins administration backtracked and recognised all existing borders, and in December 1991 Yeltsin joined the heads of Ukraine and Belarus in the Belavezha forest to officially dissolve the USSR. Conservative Russian nationalists were outraged by the sudden end of Moscows control over the region but, as Zubok notes, it was they who had initially raised the question of Russian sovereignty and opposed Gorbachev when he was struggling to save the union.

The Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev learned about Belavezha only after the fact. Yeltsin thought that Kazakhstan should be part of a new commonwealth of independent states but wanted to keep out the Muslim republics of Central Asia. Nazarbayev insisted on their inclusion, and prevailed. According to Adeeb Khalids book Central Asia (2021), full independence from the Soviet Union was unexpected and, in many ways, unwanted by both the people and the political elites of Central Asia. As a supplier of raw materials, the region was ill-served by isolation from the unions economic structures. However great their enthusiasm for strengthening national identity and autonomy, some politicians and members of the intelligentsia still saw weaker union with Russia as preferable to separation. The surprise dissolution at Belavezha was the final irony of Soviet empire: for peoples seen as inferior, even freedom was dictated by Moscow.

Yeltsins administration announced a contest for a new national idea. It never chose a winner

As other countries in the former Eastern Bloc celebrated a return to Europe, the fusion of the Russian and the Soviet prevented the creation of a national identity based on casting off an oppressive foreign yoke. Yeltsin expected that Russia would be welcomed into the West with a massive aid package and NATO membership. Instead, it was left in the East and received meagre humanitarian assistance. After decades of being told that they represented the worlds leading civilisation, Russians were reduced to eating expired US military rations. The Yeltsin administrations economic shock therapy, carried out in consultation with Western advisors, brought an atmosphere of brutal lawlessness that enriched a few and impoverished many others. The neoliberal Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs and the Harvard Institute for International Development in Moscow helped design Yeltsins market reform and privatisation package, and implement it at dizzying speed. Crime and mortality rates skyrocketed as savings vanished overnight.

Reeling from inflation and shortages, several Russian republics and regions developed sovereignty movements aimed at achieving political and economic advantages over other territories (including Yeltsins native Sverdlovsk Oblast, which briefly declared itself the Urals Republic). These were largely brought to heel by Yeltsins December 1993 constitution. The republic of Chechnya, however, pressed for full independence, prompting Yeltsins disastrous decision to invade in 1994. The Russian Federation was a web of nationality-based republics, autonomous districts and territorial regions without a unifying concept. In June 1996, Yeltsins administration announced a contest to generate a new national idea. It never chose a winner.

Russian nationalist politicians attempted to turn poverty and disillusionment into votes against Yeltsin. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a racist and antisemitic provocateur and head of the misleadingly named Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), argued for the re-establishment of an autocratic Russian state within Soviet-era borders. Gennady Zyuganovs Communist Party of the Russian Federation offered a Stalinist brand of Russian imperialism influenced by Lev Gumilevs concept of Eurasianism. These parties achieved moderate electoral success: LDPR performed well in the 1993 elections, and Zyuganov trailed Yeltsin by only three percentage points in the 1996 presidential race. But most Russians, especially in the younger generation, were more interested in the problems and possibilities of the present (including foreign travel and consumer goods) than chauvinist messianism that looked to the past.

Through the 1990s, visions of national disempowerment and revenge gained more traction in Russian popular culture. The lost men of Shukshins stories, for example, morphed into action heroes who offered redemptive masculinity through violence. Danila, the protagonist of the hit movies Brother (1997) and Brother 2 (2000), is a young veteran of Yeltsins war in Chechnya from a poor provincial town. In an early scene, his grandmother tells Danila hes a hopeless case and will die in prison like his father. She sends him to Saint Petersburg to be mentored by his big brother, who turns out to be a contract killer for the mafia. Rather than falling victim, Danila becomes an earnest vigilante who hurts the bad guys (especially men from the Caucasus) and protects the weak (poor Russian women and men).

In the sequel, Danila travels to the US to rescue the victims of an evil empire run by American businessmen in cahoots with Chicagos Ukrainian mafia and new Russians in Moscow. Stereotyped Others embody the threats facing the Russian people; in Chicago, he meets a sex worker named Dasha who is controlled by an abusive Black pimp. In the climactic scene, Danila takes revenge by committing a mass shooting at a nightclub in the citys Ukrainian district. Moral righteousness is clearly on his side: Danila declares his love for the motherland and repeats Second World War-era slogans such as Russians in war dont abandon their own. At the end, he and Dasha drink vodka on a flight back home as the song Goodbye, America (sung by a childrens choir) plays in the background. Brother 2 was released in 2000, the year that Vladimir Putin ascended to the presidency.

Putin kept his distance from nationalists, affirming that Russia was part of European culture and cooperating with the US invasion of Afghanistan, while maintaining LDPR and the Communists as a loyal opposition in parliament. Like Yeltsin, he selectively incorporated aspects of their ideas, for example, in his decision to bring back the Soviet national anthem. He rejected other Russian nationalist hobby horses, including open racism and antisemitism. The booming oil and gas prices of Putins first two terms (2000-08) significantly improved Russians quality of life. Putin increasingly espoused the countrys mission as a bastion of traditional values that was ready to seek payback for the indignities of the preceding years.

An ex-convict considers killing a man he feels has humiliated him, but takes his own life instead

Putins 2014 annexation of Crimea pushed his approval ratings to record highs among ethnic Russians as well as Tatars, Chechens and other groups in the Russian Federation. Yet public enthusiasm for further expansionism remained limited. In January 2020, a poll by the Levada Center found that 82 per cent of Russians thought that Ukraine should be an independent state. Annual surveys have consistently shown that Russians prefer a higher standard of living to great power status (except in the post-Crimea afterglow of 2014). Now, as Putin tries to channel national aggrievement into support for a full-scale war against the neighbour who was once promised freedom, the late-Soviet case serves as a reminder that resentment is an unpredictable tool. Russians sense of pride and victimisation propped up the Soviet empire when Communist orthodoxy lost the power to convince. But it ultimately fuelled claims that imperial ambition came at too high a cost for the Russian people, turning them into a disposable resource.

Shukshin died in the relative torpor of the Soviet 1970s, when a sense of national disorientation wasnt necessarily hitched to a political programme. His work didnt idealise a vanishing past or a bright future. There are no scapegoats or saviours, and attempts at revenge end in self-destruction. In Shukshins short story Bastard (1970), an ex-convict from the countryside considers killing a man he feels has humiliated him, but takes his own life instead. During his final moments, he feels the peace of a lost person who understands he is lost.

Putin came of age in Shukshins heyday and knows of his work. Like the Russian nationalists who once whispered about murder, he has tried to appropriate Shukshins memory for his own ends. In November 2014, he made an appearance at a theatre adaptation of Shukshins stories in central Moscow. The occasion was the Day of National Unity, an imperial holiday brought back by his administration, marking the expulsion of Polish-Lithuanian forces from the Kremlin in 1612 and the founding of the Romanov dynasty. In his onstage remarks, Putin praised Shukshin for showing a simple man, for this is the essence of Russia.

Its a shame that Shukshin is no longer with us, Putin concluded. But at least we have his heroes.

Russia depends on them.

Link:

The Soviet Union never really solved Russian nationalism - Aeon

The drive home away from the city, is, as always, gorgeous. Get off of the turnpike, wind through the back roads; the small, New England towns with drystone walls and 17th century monoliths, directional signposts affixed to each along the way. You always notice the beauty, but today it is more so because the trees are no longer bare. The sun is warm. People are out. It is finally summer.

The drive is pretty, but long, and within the tedium your mind drifts. The Fourth of July nears, and through these Massachusetts towns and villages -- Three Rivers, Palmer, Belchertown -- you see the annual preparations for its arrival. The current American flag, the old Betsy Ross flag, line each side of the main drag. Your mind drifts, backward to family. Technology has sharpened the memories, turned them quaint, so quaint your son laughs at the antiquity, calls you a dinosaur when you tell him your parents rushed feverishly to the bank to cash their paychecks before the holiday weekend -- direct deposit took care of that long ago. You remember the years the Fourth fell on a Monday and the panicked Saturdays that preceded them, the urgency to make sure there was enough booze for the barbecue because nothing was open on the holiday and, back then, Massachusetts Blue Laws kept liquor stores closed on Sunday.

July 4th was the best day of the year. Everything was centered on family. In some ways it was even better than Christmas because the entire family showed up -- the Fourth was a de facto family reunion. The massive barbecue, the pool at one uncle's house, even though you nearly drowned in it not once, but twice. All the cousins. The older ones who brought the cherry bombs and bottle rockets, the younger ones like you who were content with a strip of firecrackers. The Boston fireworks displays at the Esplanade, or later, at Stephens Field in Plymouth. The touch football games. The math reminds you just how young everybody was. When you were 40, your boy was in preschool. When your mother turned 40, you were a freshman in college.

You look out the window. The towns pass and so do the memories. Don't think about them. Your mother is dead. Long dead. Fifteen years now. Your father, ravaged by dementia, is breathing, but he's not alive. Hasn't been a presence in years. The young family is now old, a small family getting smaller. Look ahead. Look at the road. Look at what has replaced the memories. The Fourth is coming. Look at what it has become.

ONE YEAR, THERE was no bash. You don't remember why. No extended family. No barbecue. No pool to drown in -- you had learned how to swim by then. It was 1983. The only thing you remember about that day is sitting in your room watching your black-and-white TV. Sox-Yankees. Channel 38. Ned Martin and Bob Montgomery on the call. The Yankees' Dave Righetti threw a no-hitter. Wade Boggs struck out swinging to end it. If black-and-white televisions and a world before direct deposit feel ancient, you smile at the memory of Righetti pitching nine innings, these days a feat that feels as rare as a no-hitter, as contemporary as the dead ball.

Last month, Major League Baseball and its partners again released Independence Day-themed baseball hats that each of the 30 teams will wear. This year's version features a flush of stars across the front against a blue and white backdrop, offset with a shaggy shock of red. The Toronto Blue Jays, located in a country that does not celebrate American independence, were also issued the caps -- even though the Canadian flag does not contain stars nor the color blue. Public outrage prompted a redesign of the Toronto caps. Next is the USA-themed socks, the marketing, the freedom-inspired spikes, gloves, wristbands, the inevitable paeans to the armed forces.

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By now, we're all numb to the spectacle. At least publicly, the emphasis on the Fourth of July shifted from family to symbols years ago -- Sept. 11 did that. Two decades of paid patriotism has made it ever harder to center the Fourth on reconnecting with your favorite aunts and uncles. No backyard barbecue and badminton game could compete with 20 years of military tributes and unquestioned nationalism. You think back to Righetti. Cosmetically, there was nothing about that July 4, 1983, that said patriotism. All Yankee Stadium said that day 39 years ago was baseball. Ninety-four degrees. Sox-Yankees. The Stadium looked as it did every other day. The crowd came because it was July 4, a Monday day game -- a great day for baseball and family -- and, along with Bat Day, the biggest giveaway day of the year: Yankee Cap Day. You smile a little at the victory in that, because only a few decades earlier, the Yankees were most resistant to a brilliant piece of marketing. In the 1950s, the Yankees did not want fans wearing Yankees caps. George Weiss, the Yankees' general manager at the time, thought a million New York kids wearing the team cap cheapened the brand. Yankees hats were a piece of a professional uniform. They were for players, not fans.

Grilling, baseball and fireworks, first replaced by symbols -- and now by a country tearing itself completely apart. July 4, 2022, falls in the midst of devastation. It is Independence Day in America with independence under current and relentless assault. From Miranda rights to the environment, to the separation of church and state, to guns -- so many guns -- people are reeling. The U.S. Supreme Court has run a chain saw through what two generations of Americans had known to be the legal baselines of their lives. Tens of millions of women today do not feel freedom and certainly are not celebrating independence. The people who can become pregnant who feel celebratory toward the Court may do so from the victory of their position, but it nevertheless remains true that the power of choice -- and the right to privacy -- has been taken from all of them.

You look at the Betsy Ross flag, and then you look at it again. As a kid it was your favorite version of the American flag because the 13 stars in a circle looked kind of cool, reminded you of "Schoolhouse Rock!"-- the old Saturday morning cartoon. As an adolescent, you associated the 13 circular stars with sports -- Dr. J, Andrew Toney and the Philadelphia 76ers. Today, as an adult, you see how the flag has been co-opted by white nationalist groups, some of the same ones who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

"Schoolhouse Rock!" A cartoon short birthed during a period of Congressional concern in the early 1970s that children devouring Saturday morning cartoons required some balancing educational component. ABC voluntarily created the legendary three-minute cartoon focusing on math, science, grammar -- and civics, the basic tenets of the American democracy. There is no pretense of basic civics today.

YOU WATCH TV, even though you swore to not pay attention to the Jan. 6 congressional hearings. It was not a decision made from the perch of elegant privilege, of too rich to care, but from a full dissidence -- a weariness of the gaslighting and false equivalencies, the whataboutisms, the goalposts moving that have defined the past several years. The spectacle of all-white juries acquitting proud, admittedly guilty white killers of Black people largely predated your birth, and thus for the past 18 months you've held on to a truth: The events of Jan. 6, where Americans stormed the most symbolically important legislative building in the free world -- and a sitting president reportedly enraged he was not taken to the Capitol to join them -- are the most unforgivable betrayals of the American ideal in your lifetime.

You said you were not going to watch, but inner conflicts aside, you are an American -- so you watch. You revisit the images of police barricades being knocked down, of Americans climbing through windows trying to breach the U.S. Capitol, of elected American officials sheltering in place and of police running from Americans lest they be trampled by them. Think about the people chasing them, the ones over past decades who always told your people to obey, the ones so quick to call others anti-American. You tell yourself to not think about the utter, enraging hypocrisy, to resist the useless and flaccid equivalencies. (Imagine if Black people did that...) It all falls flat. We are post-hypocrisy. The equivalencies don't hold up. They never did.

Instead, you drift back into sports, to the players over the past decade, the Black ones who knelt silently, who appealed for better with a momentary gesture -- and for it, they were called unpatriotic. They were called sons of b------. By the fans who paid to see their wondrous abilities. By the then-president of the United States. They lost their careers for it. They were traded for it. A Supreme Court Justice, the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, called the protest by Colin Kaepernick and others "stupid," as well as "dumb and disrespectful" before the eventual unsatisfactory apology. These Black players were the subject of constant news stories dissecting the appropriateness of their actions. Recall the individual moments; CC Sabathia, as a Yankees pitcher, on the team plane trying to explain the Black communities and their tense relationships with police after one of his white teammates asked of Black suspects, "Why don't they just obey?" You think about John Mara, a co-owner of the NFL's New York Giants, and Steve Bisciotti, majority owner of the Baltimore Ravens, who indirectly reached the same conclusion: The majority of their fan bases just simply would not accept a kneeling player. That crime was that great, a line too far. Both publicly said they supported Kaepernick's right to protest, but neither dared even let Kaepernick try out as a backup -- even after several productive conversations between Ravens coach John Harbaugh and Kaepernick. They said the right words, but their deeds, along with the other 30 owners, told a different, far more truthful story.

You always wondered how the players would react to Jan. 6, knowing that the people who stormed the Capitol, threatened congressional leaders and the vice president of the United States, and were part of a riot that led to a police officer's death, reflected the same constituency of Americans who told the players to obey, to respect the flag, to find a better way to protest.

You think about Tony La Russa, manager of the Chicago White Sox, who always has so much to say about who is doing what and how they're doing it. Kaepernick was just seeking attention, La Russa said. He was disrespecting the flag, La Russa said. You think about John Tortorella, who as coach of both the NHL's Columbus Blue Jackets and the U.S. National Hockey team, said in 2016 -- before changing his stance in 2020 -- that any player who took a knee or made any sign of protest against the flag wouldn't play. You think about Boomer Esiason, the former NFL quarterback turned broadcaster who criticized Black players for their protest, which consisted of a silent gesture. You think of Ray Lewis, the Hall of Fame Baltimore Ravens linebacker, who said Kaepernick needed to shut his mouth if he wanted to play in the NFL.

When the barricades were overrun, and elected officials of both parties hid under their desks, and the cops were killed, and the very people who told Black people to respect the law and obey did not obey, where was La Russa? Where was Tortorella, who believed so much in America? Where was Esiason, and Ray Lewis and all the commentators who demanded law and order and respect?

They were silent.

One man who wasn't silent was Washington Commanders defensive coordinator Jack Del Rio, who lit the gas lamp -- and dismissed Jan. 6. He called it a "dust-up." There was the outrage. Internally. On Twitter. But you get it. If the past several years have reinforced anything, it is that there has always been a separate set of rules, a concierge lane, a front door exclusively for white America. Jan. 6 crystalized this truth.

You know that what you think is not controversial, or speculative, or worthy of the hapless, inevitable hourlong TV town hall specials. ("Does America have a racial problem?") It is as uncomplicated as reading a rsum. Black people have always lived in this country in service to -- and not with ownership of -- the United States. The message is unhidden: A significant percentage of white America believes this country belongs to them. It explains the difference between the reaction to San Francisco Giants manager Gabe Kapler's decision to protest the paucity of gun control laws in this country after the Buffalo and Uvalde mass shootings by not appearing on the field for the national anthem, and the weight of the federal government landing on Colin Kaepernick -- where legislators enacted anti-protest laws around the country, a revered Supreme Court justice called his actions disrespectful and the then-president called any NFL player who kneeled an SOB.

You wondered what the players would do, how they felt when they saw the images of Eugene Goodman, the lone Capitol police officer running from the Jan. 6 rioters to protect members of Congress and their staffs, alerting them to take cover. Would they react to years of being told to shut up and play, of backing the blue, or respecting the law? Physical protest is unsustainable for long stretches of time, but values are constant. Whatever the players may feel, however, emboldened or vindicated, they have publicly turned inward. Protest post 2020 is on the wane, in favor of empire, and for the grassroots, the people on the street who have needed allies in the fight, they see the juxtaposition clearly: During a time of rights being taken, or Jan. 6 hearings, the big news in sports was LeBron James being crowned a billionaire.

There are two rules in the United States, never directly articulated but rife with consequence when broken: Beyond what the mainstream, which is to say white America, determines to be acceptable, it is forbidden to express humanitarian compassion and concern for the people of Palestine -- just ask Dwight Howard. And it is unacceptable to unequivocally advocate for Black people. The former is in general violation of the nation's foreign policy, the latter is universally understood to be career threatening for the simple fact that any Black athlete that stands up for his people is routinely referred to as "brave."

Kapler through direct gesture asked his country to do better by challenging its most powerful symbol. He did against guns what Kaepernick did in support of Black people. He was not fired. He is not a pariah. There are no incessant news cycles demanding him to explain his position, no president calling him a son of a b----, no whisper campaigns that whenever his managerial term with the Giants comes to an end, he has managed his last big-league baseball team. Nor should he have been. He made his statement and, like an American ostensibly should, kept on living.

And that, you know so painfully well after more than a half-century in this land, is the difference. Black people have known it for centuries, and the alarm will always ring for the ones who have forgotten. You participate in the American dream at their pleasure. This is theirs, not yours, and thus they can trash the Capitol if they want because the Capitol building is theirs. After all, they came here to build a better life. The laws enacted in that building, before your ancestors fought to undo them, were in protection of them.

You? You were brought here to work.

NO ONE WHO cares will ever forget where they were on June 24, 2022, when the Supreme Court ended legal, federally protected reproductive choice the day after the 50th anniversary of Title IX, the same week Cleveland Browns quarterback Deshaun Watson settled sexual misconduct lawsuits with 20 of 24 women -- the remaining four will go to trial -- the same week that Daniel Snyder, owner of the Washington Commanders, is resisting a subpoena by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform regarding the "toxic workplace culture" at his football team, including "allegations of sexual harassment, spanning multiple decades."

Some prominent male athletes offered public support, as did the social media accounts of some teams, but you think about the players, the teams, the games, and all of the performative nature of support. Just the word support is incorrect, for it suggests the abortion option did not affect men, was not their fight. You think of the hideous mendacity of it all, that Roe saved the futures of as many men as it did women. Careers continued. Dreams were not derailed. Privacies were maintained. You think about the enormous gap between the fashionable statements, where the adversaries profit by saying the right things, and the actually committed people who will march and support and do the work. And while you contemplate another example of gaslighting in this country, it reminds you of USA Today columnist Nancy Armour's piercing question the day Dobbs replaced Roe: Where are all the girl dads?

Race, class and gender. They are the third rails of American life and cannot be separated. You think about the pandemic, when so many of the girl dads, in the clubhouse, the press boxes and in the stands, gaslit their girls by stealing their language because they did not want to wear a mask or be vaccinated. "My body, my choice," they would insultingly say. The term of empowerment that belonged to the pro-choice movement for a half-century became a rallying cry for people who could not bear the horrors of wearing a mask.

You see sports supporting Pride month. The corporate sponsors love that. They can sell hats with team logos and rainbows. They can talk about inclusion. They can hire people who will tell the world that institutions are committed to everyone, and you see another gas lamp lit, for the billionaires who sign the checks and hire the inclusion people to the big jobs who order the hats with team logos and rainbows on them also bankroll the political movements that have led to the stripping away of rights from citizens with the strength of a tsunami. Gabe Kapler protests, but his employer, like so many of them, is actually the adversary. Having maxed out his contributions to far-right causes, Giants billionaire owner Charles B. Johnson, contributes money that supports the candidate and enables the Court, which has telegraphed the coming assault on Griswold, Lawrence and Obergefell. Daniel Snyder owns the team that fined Jack Del Rio $100,000 for his comments about the Jan. 6 riot, but in 2016, Snyder was among a handful of NFL owners who each gave $1 million to Donald Trump's inaugural committee -- in support of the man now accused of inciting the whole thing.

But at the ballpark, there will be hats for sale. Aspiration spray painted on the field (End Racism). And online? Hashtags.

You can stop drifting now. You're home. Pull the car into the driveway. Home. For a moment, you are unsure exactly what that word means -- or perhaps more accurately, on this Independence Day and during the crushing weeks that preceded it, you are 100% certain that you do.

See the article here:

Baseball, barbecue and losing freedom this Fourth of July - ESPN

Ndabaningi Sithole was one of the founding fathers of the modern state of Zimbabwe in southern Africa. In August 1963, he became the first president of the Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu), the militant liberation organisation that fought against white minority rule that he led for a decade before being deposed in a palace coup engineered by his rival Robert Mugabe. Mugabe went on to become the post-independence leader of Zimbabwe.

Sithole was the most prolific black writer in colonial Rhodesia from the 1950s until the country gained independence as Zimbabwe in 1980. In that period he published nine books (one serialised in African Parade magazine). He also left an incredible archive of the liberation struggle that was generated in real time. Surprisingly, most of Zimbabwes liberation figures did not leave behind a lot of their own writings. Sithole is unique in that regard.

His most important book, African Nationalism, which has recently been republished, is part autobiography and part polemics that provides a history of the liberation movement in Zimbabwe at its nascent stages. It was first published in 1959 and then in 1968.

A third edition of African Nationalism is timely. It was released by his family through the Ndabaningi Sithole Foundation which was launched last year to honour and perpetuate his legacy as an advocate for civil rights and pan African democracy through republishing his books and hosting events.

Its timely because there is a reconfiguration of the politics of Zimbabwe. Mugabe, who was a dominant force for almost four decades, has since died. There is currently a vigorous contestation for power and legitimacy going on in the country. Figures like Sithole who have been sidelined in Zimbabwes history offer us an opportunity to reconsider suppressed views and perspectives.

More than six decades after the publication of African Nationalism, it remains a critical text to think about topical subjects such as self determination, political representation and decolonisation. Sitholes foray into active politics was primarily through his writings and thus his bona fide credentials as a leading intellectual were embraced. His books wide critical acclaim and translation into half a dozen European languages earned him respect among his peers.

Sithole composed the book in the US where he was a student of theology. He explained his impetus in his introduction:

I was confronted by what some of my American friends said about African nationalism, which at the time was just beginning to be felt throughout the length and breadth of the continent of Africa, and which was also beginning to make fairly sensational international headlines. The big question which everyone was asking: Is Africa ready for sovereign independence? The majority greatly doubted that Africa was ready. Some regarded the rise of African nationalism as a bad omen for the whitemen in Africa.

As historian David Maxwell writes, nationalism supporting the interests of the nation-state has been a powerful force in Zimbabwean history as a mobilising ideology. It continues to play a key part in the arena in which political ideas and participation are imagined.

Zimbabwean nationalism, a version of which historian Terence Ranger called patriotic history remains central to debates about who belongs, and who has the right to speak, to vote and to own land.

Sitholes tenure as leader of Zanu was mostly from prison, between 1964 and 1974. It was a treacherous time. Most of the black political leaders had been rounded up, detained, killed or forced into exile. Besides directing Zanus insurgent activities from his prison cell, Sithole also filled up time writing books: novels, poetry, and political tracts. He considered writing as a revolutionary tool.

His manuscripts, smuggled from prison with the help of guards and sympathisers, were mostly published abroad to avoid censorship. Two of these included The Polygamist and Obed Mutezo the story of an African Nationalist (Christian) Martyr. Sithole was also a leading contributor to the Zimbabwe News, a newsletter that was published by Zanu to convey its revolutionary messages.

As if he knew history was not going to be kind to him, Sithole spent considerable time writing his ideas, but also about people he met as a leader. He partly coordinated the liberation struggle through the barrel of the pen. Sithole writes himself into history. He is not just a chronicler of the liberation struggle, as it is happening in real time, but also acts as an archivist for the future.

Sithole was a primary school teacher at home before studying theology in the US between 1955 and 1958. He had been mentored by the revered missionaries Garfield and Grace Todd at Dadaya Mission. This relationship was formative to his politics and civic interests. Despite later political disagreements, they maintained a cautious allyship and respect.

While in the US, Sithole published AmaNdebele kaMzilikazi in 1956, the first published novel in Ndebele in Zimbabwe. It was released by Longmans, Green & Co. in Cape Town before being republished in 1957 as Umvukela wamaNdebele by the newly established Rhodesia Literature Bureau. The book is inspired by the events of the Ndebele uprisings of 1896.

Sithole was the product of an unusual progeny a father from the Ndau clan and a mother from the Ndebele clan. As such, he was not easily contained by the Shona-Ndebele binary that has informed much of Zimbabwes modern politics. Growing up in rural Matebeleland, he was raised under Ndebele tradition and culture. It is not surprising that his first published book was inspired by Ndebele traditions.

To look at Sitholes life and career in retrospect is to wade through so much hubris, of his own making and of others. His fall from grace was spectacular. He has been for the modern Zanu-PF a persona non grata. But a figure like Sithole cannot be easily expunged from history, which he actively contributed to as a leading actor and as a writer.

At a time when a young generation of Africans are calling for decolonisation, Sitholes ideas resonate even further. In the preface to the new edition of African Nationalism, former Kenyan prime minister, Raila Odinga posits:

Reading African Nationalism evokes mixed feelings of sadness and joy. It is sad to imagine that a whole book had to be written to try and explain to fellow humans why Africans were agitating for and deserved self rule.

It is always important to look back to the past, in order to navigate the present and the future. His ideas aside, Sithole is also a reminder of the fickleness of politics and history.

Go here to read the rest:

Ndabaningi Sithole: Zimbabwe's forgotten intellectual and leader - The Conversation Indonesia

In a Buffalo supermarket, 10 people died. In a Texas elementary school, the fatality count was 19 students and two teachers. Those were the mass shootings, only 10 days apart, that attracted global attention in May but there were many others that passed in a quick staccato, devastating families and communities but streaming past everyone else in a blur. They seemed to fade from the headlines in days, having become too frequent, too dismal, too commonplace to absorb.

In the same month there were mass shootings at a Taiwanese church luncheon in California, a flea market in Houston, a nightlife district in Milwaukee, a park in Lexington, Ky., and a high school graduation in Hot Springs, Ark., to name only a few.

Rarely did these episodes involve a heavily armed lone gunman like the one who fired dozens of shots from a rooftop at an Independence Day parade in Highland Park, Ill., killing seven people. Rampage shootings get the most scrutiny, but they account for only a tiny proportion of gun violence victims. Lesser-known episodes often were just as random, just as public and just as scarring for those affected.

After a shooting at a church in Laguna Woods, Calif., a security company was hired to guard the church. Mark Abramson for The New York Times

There is no single definition of a mass shooting it can be targeted or indiscriminate, based on number of deaths alone or injuries as well. Some researchers, like those at the Gun Violence Archive, count any shooting with four or more people wounded or killed; others begin at four fatalities. Some researchers count what the F.B.I. calls active shooters or mass public shootings separately from gang or drug-related violence or domestic family annihilators.

However these episodes are defined, they are on the rise in the United States so much so that horrific events that might once have dominated the news now slip quickly out of the public eye. In Phoenix, the police have had very little to say about a shooting episode, reportedly outside a house party, that left one teenager dead and five others wounded. In Goshen, Ind., almost no details have been released about a gunman who shot a family of four siblings in their home, killing one, who was 17.

And that was just in May, during which the Gun Violence Archive counted 63 mass shootings; a small number are described below. The archive counted 65 mass shootings in June, and 25 already this month, as of July 7.

In Buffalo, Zeneta Everharts son is still healing from injuries after being shot at the supermarket by a gunman who the authorities say was motivated to kill Black people. For too long, weve always just gone, These things happen now theres another one, so well move on, Ms. Everhart said. We all need to keep talking about this.

Audra Melton for The New York Times

The Brannon Hill condos, near the Atlanta suburb of Clarkston, Ga., are a place where suffering has become commonplace.

You see sort of this crescendo of murder, the buildings burning, people dying in fire, people dying from gunshots, a tremendous amount of dumping, said Ted Terry, who represents the area on the DeKalb County Board of Commissioners.

But a shooting on May 8 was a tragedy of a different degree.

Police officers arrived at Brannon Hill that evening to find three men Alsadig Awad, 43; Masi Maybay, 22; and Jory Fasse, 23 dead in the living room of a condo. Three other people were wounded. An obituary of Mr. Fasse described him as a former high school football player with a great smile who was about to become a father.

Jory Fasse

Mr. Terry, a former mayor of Clarkston, said the 14-building Brannon Hill condo complex had been decaying for about 20 years. Some buildings were demolished a few years ago after fires, and the others have persistent problems. The condo board is functionally nonexistent, and many of the units are separately owned and rented out, which makes it difficult for the government to force changes.

Erica Williams, who does volunteer work each week at the complex, assisting residents with chores like taking out the trash and cleaning up common areas, said the residents were good people. Many are immigrants from Africa, struggling to pay rent and make their way in a new country. They are victims, Ms. Williams said, of outsiders who come to the complex after dark to dump trash, commit crimes and terrorize residents.

The recent killings, she said, only added to residents fear and helplessness. They were lost after those murders happened, she said.

Kenny Holston for The New York Times

Saturday afternoons are slow in one quiet section of Buffalo: Traffic is light, older residents rest on their front porches and neighbors meander through a local grocery store. But on May 14, that grocery store became the scene of the deadliest racist attack in the country in recent years when a gunman fatally shot 10 people.

The accused gunman, Payton S. Gendron, had written that he chose the area because it had a large percentage of Black residents. In so doing, he espoused white supremacist ideology that has been a driving factor in other mass shootings in recent years, from El Paso to Poway, Calif.

On Buffalos East Side, where the grocery store remains closed, Black residents have struggled for decades with the effects of the citys severe segregation. Homicides across the city rose about 40 percent during the pandemic, and Black neighbors have borne the brunt. But to some Buffalonians, racism seemed to quickly disappear from the national conversation after the May shooting.

Celestine Chaney

Roberta Drury

Andre Mackniel

Katherine Massey

Margus Morrison

Heyward Patterson

Geraldine Talley

Aaron Salter, Jr.

Ruth Whitfield

Pearl Young

The truth of the matter is, nobodys talking about white supremacy, said Garnell Whitfield Jr., a former Buffalo fire commissioner whose mother, Ruth Whitfield, 86, was killed at the grocery store. The conversation, he said, devolved into mental health, school security, gun legislation it was anything but white nationalism.

Ten days after the grocery-store shooting, another high-profile tragedy unfolded when 21 people were killed at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, pulling national attention away from Buffalo. The lights and cameras turned off, Mr. Whitfield Jr. said. But theres a whole community thats traumatized that never got any help.

One of the victims of the shooting, Katherine Massey, was buried at Forest Lawn cemetery. Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

When the news broke in Uvalde, one Buffalo family had just returned home from a repast after burying their relative. Six others still awaited funerals. And Zeneta Everhart tended to her son Zaire Goodman, 21, who had a bullet strike his neck and rip through his back.

My ancestors, the first currency of America, were stripped of their heritage and culture, separated from their families, Ms. Everhart said in recent testimony before Congress. Sold, beaten, raped and lynched. Yet I continuously hear after every mass shooting that this is not who we are as Americans and as a nation.

This is exactly who we are, she said.

Mark Abramson for The New York Times

Barely 24 hours after a gunman opened fire at a Buffalo supermarket, a Las Vegas man drove hundreds of miles to Southern California and shot at a group of Taiwanese Americans as they ate lunch inside the Geneva Presbyterian Church in Laguna Woods, Calif. The gunman killed a 52-year-old physician and wounded several other people, including a 92-year-old man, before he was subdued by congregants.

John Cheng

Officials called the shooting a politically motivated hate incident, saying that the gunman attacked the group because he hated Taiwanese people. Unlike many of the hate crimes targeting Asian Americans in recent years, the perpetrator was an Asian man whose heritage was similar to his victims, underscoring Taiwans complicated political and cultural history and the way such complications can endure in the United States.

The episode was also a reminder that a community of retirees with an astonishingly low crime rate was not immune to the horror of a mass shooting.

Inside Geneva Presbyterian Church, where the shooting occurred, the church has started repairing the walls where stray bullets landed. Mark Abramson for The New York Times

It really is impressive how relatively low our rates of this kind of stuff is, in light of our population characteristics, said Charis E. Kubrin, a professor of criminology at the University of California, Irvine.

Orange County, which includes Irvine and Laguna Woods, has a population of more than three million people, and almost half its residents speak a language other than English at home. More than half of its residents are Asian or Latino. Dr. Kubrin, who has studied the relationship between crime and immigration, has found that the two are inversely related.

Places that have the highest concentrations of immigrants have some of the lowest crime rates, Dr. Kubrin said.

Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times

On a weekday night in the middle of downtown Chicago, a gunman opened fire from the steps of a transit station. Within seconds, prosecutors said, he sprayed 21 bullets into a crowd, hitting nine people and killing two of them. Anthony Allen, 31, was fatally struck in the lower back. Antonio Wade, 30, who also died, was hit by several bullets.

In Chicago, 344 people were shot during the month of May. Most of the citys gun violence has long been concentrated in some neighborhoods on the South and West Sides. During the pandemic, though, downtown has increasingly struggled with crime, and episodes like the one in May have started to feel common.

Anthony Allen

Antonio Wade

Young people, coming together, getting into a fight, and the difference-maker is someone had a gun and that someone used it, Mayor Lori Lightfoot said in the hours after the shooting.

At least 14 people have been killed so far in 2022 in the two police districts that encompass downtown Chicago. It is a small fraction of the citywide total, but more than twice the number who were killed downtown during the comparable period in 2021.

Less than a week before Mr. Allen and Mr. Wade were killed, on a block near a brand-new Whole Foods store, a teenager was killed just over a mile away at Millennium Park, a tourist showcase, prompting the installation of metal detectors and a more restrictive curfew for unaccompanied minors. The next day, a man who refused to go through the new security checkpoint at the park was wounded in an exchange of gunfire with an off-duty sheriffs deputy, officials said.

Despite relatively restrictive gun laws in Illinois, violence has remained a fact of life in the city, and officials have often blamed the traffic of guns across state lines from places where weapons are easier to obtain. Prosecutors said they believed the gun used to kill Mr. Allen and Mr. Wade had been acquired in Indiana, where many weapons used in Chicago originate.

Emily Elconin for The New York Times

A report of shots fired brought sheriffs deputies to a home in rural Western Michigan on the afternoon of May 27. They found three young children and their mother dead. The father, who prosecutors said would be charged in the killings, was airlifted to a hospital with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

Dawn Gillard

Katelynn Gillard

Ronald Gillard

Joshua Gillard

Becoming a mom was a pinnacle of Dawns life, read the obituary of the mother, Dawn Gillard, 40. It said she loved to take the children Katelynn, 6, Ronald, 4, and Joshua, 3 on nature walks. The school district where Katelynn was a student sent out a letter to parents to quell rumors of a school shooting, and held a vigil on the high school football field.

Katelynn was in first grade at Morley Stanwood Elementary School. A vigil was held for her family at the Morley Stanwood football field. Emily Elconin for The New York Times

The authorities have not released details of the killings, the weapon or a motive.

Researchers have found that a majority of mass shootings are linked to domestic violence. Looking at 110 shootings that resulted in four or more fatalities, a 2021 study at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions found that almost 60 percent were cases of domestic violence, and in another 9 percent the perpetrator had a history of domestic violence. A woman is six times as likely to be killed by an abuser if there is a gun in the home.

Joseph Rushmore for The New York Times

The town of Taft, founded at the turn of the 20th century, is proud of its status as one of about a dozen historically Black towns in Oklahoma. Though its population is well under 200, on Memorial Day weekends the town swells with former residents returning to see old friends, eat barbecue and dance near a gazebo in the center of town.

This year, though, the festivities held for the first time since the pandemic began were derailed when gunfire broke out during an argument that townspeople say was between two groups from out of town. One local woman, Sherika Bowler, 39, was killed, leaving behind a 5-year-old daughter. Eight people were injured, including a 9-year-old girl. The police found shell casings from four different firearms. One suspect turned himself in; there have been no other arrests.

Sherika Bowler

DAntai Wallace, 28, a cousin of Ms. Bowlers, was heading for his uncles food truck for a baked potato when he was shot. The bullet is still lodged in his leg, and Memorial Day weekend will never be the same for him.

You used to be able to go down there and be at peace, he said. Now you go down there and this is where your cousin passed away.

Sarah Pitts was injured during the Memorial Day weekend shooting. Chase Castor for The New York Times

Sarah Pitts, 19, had been eager to see Taft with her boyfriend, who is from there. The town is not big enough to have a supermarket or a police station, she said, and you just dont think about small towns like that having something like that happening.

Ms. Pitts was taken to Saint Francis Hospital in Tulsa with gunshot wounds to her abdomen and foot. While she was there, on June 1, a gunman killed two doctors, a receptionist and a patient on the hospital campus, in a completely unrelated episode.

Excerpt from:

In May, a Month of Mass Shootings, One After Another - The New York Times

Oakland, Ca. (Special to Informed Comment) The American-Israel Public Affairs Committee or AIPAC, the major coordinator of thousands of organizations making up the Israel lobbies, can no longer call itself non-partisan. That they would openly endorse 37 Republican Members of Congress who voted to overturn the 2020 Election quashes any notion of non-partisan standing. Previously, their mutual, self-aggrandizing endorsements of Donald Trump and former Israeli PM Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu sealed the alliance of Israels far-far right with their American counterparts.

In recent years, AIPAC has declared that Republicans are friendlier to Israel than Democrats, and former presidents Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama to be enemies of Israel (and therefore the Jews). They missed the memo about friends not letting friends commit political and economic suicide. Republican Jews love Donald Trump because he would never tell Bibi no, and fulfilled every Jewish, right-wing fantasy with the Abraham Accords and moving the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. AIPAC knows that their political base is wedded to the evangelical agenda, whose supporters have become Israels new target market for tourism. This is because many American Jews are withholding or withdrawing support over the illegal, expansionist settlements and military atrocities.

I reached out and invited comments from public information directors at AIPAC and the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), as well as some local Jewish Republican leaders. They all responded by not responding to my calls and emails a dynamic I became familiar with from the directors of the Memphis Jewish Community Center, which rescinded my lifelong membership privileges because of my publications, including one that critiqued the two Jewish Congressmen who represent Memphis. The JCC also responded by not responding to my outreach for this essay.

By registering for the RJC PAC page, I unlocked the gateway to their alternative universe and false narrative. In selective bold-face type, they declare:

Its no secret the Democrats control the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. In other words, they control Washington. Its scary what theyve done with that power in such a short amount of time. Theyre making moves to rejoin the deadly Iran nuclear deal; they cancelled the Keystone pipeline, destroying thousands of good-paying energy jobs; theyve caved to the teachers union and kept students locked out of school; theyve built a wall around our Capitol but oppose securing our Southern border; and socialism has become their unabashed governing policy.

I crawled into and out of the belly of the beast, and now I must wash myself off. Nothing in that passage is true! AIPAC parrots the same alarmist lies and talking points as Fox News and the Republican National Committee.

Jewish Republicans tend to be single-issue voters based on who they perceive to be most friendly to Israel. Though President Carter made history by dragging Menachem Begin along to create the Camp David Agreements, and Obama gifted Israel with the United States-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act of 2012,, most Republican Jews consider both to be traitors to Israel and Judaism because they are captive to AIPACs mendacious propaganda.

As long as hes friendly to Israel, theyll overlook the former presidents serial assaults on women and his racism. And by friendly to Israel, I mean willing to overlook Israeli military atrocities, and the deeply anti-Jewish agenda of the evangelical community, who are hoping that as soon as Israel firmly controls all the territory of the ancient kingdoms of Judah and Israel, it will provoke a Resurrection Day in which there will at last be no Jews. Given the antisemitic cast of the Trump movement and its deep entanglement with Putins militant Christian white nationalism, Jewish Republicans and AIPAC are full-throated supporters of politicians and issues deeply inimical to the interests of Jewsnot to mention of humanity more generally.

The stated vision and ideology of the RJC leads to a deep rabbit hole that would give Lewis Carroll a bad acid trip flashback.

The RJC PAC page says of Florida Senator Marco Rubio:

Time after time, hes led the way on issues that are top priority for pro-Israel voters. To take just the most recent example, he led a group of 16 Senate Republicans who sent a letter to President Biden opposing the administrations plans to reopen the PLO office in Washington DC and a US consulate in East Jerusalem.

Theyll forgive anybody for anything, as long as they believe that the Hammer of Justice and Bell of Freedom does not apply to the Palestinians.

Putins USSR-style invasion of Ukraine has laid bare some myths propping up both Russias unlawful imperial claims and Republican Party myths. Im so old, I remember when Republicans made anti-Communism a litmus test of American loyalty. In what I once referred to as the Republicans Dr. Strangelove dynamic, they openly embrace concepts they once declared abhorrent. New Statesman editor Emily Tamkin also picked up the vibe, offering, How the American Right Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Russia. She cites Trump and Tucker Carlson for their continued fawning over Putins war crimes, along with one of the most bizarre conflations of unrelated issues in socio-linguistic history: Steve Bannons assertion that We did not serve in the Marine Corps to go and fight Vladimir Putin because he didnt believe in transgender rights, which is what the U.S. State Department is saying is a major problem with Russia. So there it is in a nutshell. They admire autocratic strong men who dont tolerate LGBQT culture. And they admire a spirit of intolerance.

The hypocrisy and self-serving nature of the Abraham Accords is best revealed in how the UAE and Sudan were bribed to sign on, but abstained from condemning the Ukraine invasion at the UN. It was never about peace, but rather a real estate deal as Jarrod Kushner has characterized and managed it.

The spinelessness of Republicans is now in full frontal view. When Trump tried to blackmail Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy by withholding contracted military assistance in return for interfering with the 2020 election, Republicans couldnt say enough bad things about Ukraine and its leader. While Trump fawned over Putin throughout his presidency, Republicans bought in and elevated Putin to most-favored-nation status. Putins agenda has always been to reconstitute the USSR geographically while abandoning socialism for plutocracy, and the Ukraine invasion is the first strike.

The sons and daughters of Republicans who fought Soviet tyranny, now support its revival. AIPAC made a deal with the devil, that is, with the 37 Republican Electors who voted to overturn the 2020 Election. Had these perfidious Congressmen succeeded in overturning the election and giving Trump a second term, we may safely conclude that he would have been a doormat for Putins expansionism. AIPACs support for them is another surrender to white Christian nationalism.

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How the most Powerful Israel Lobby started Preferring anti ...

If a head of state or foreign minister asked for my advicedont be alarmed; thats not likely to happenI might start by saying: Respect the power of nationalism. Why? Because as I look back over much of the past century and consider whats happening today, the failure to appreciate this phenomenon seems to have led numerous leaders (and their countries) into costly disasters. Ive made this point beforein 2019, 2011, and 2021but recent events suggest a refresher course is in order.

What is nationalism? The answer has two parts. First, it starts by recognizing that the world is made up of social groups that share important cultural traits (a common language, history, ancestry, geographic origins, etc.), and over time, some of these groups have come to see themselves as constituting a unique entity: a nation. A nations claims about its essential character need not be strictly accurate in either biological or historical terms. (Indeed, national narratives are usually distorted versions of the past.) What matters is that members of a nation genuinely believe that they are one.

Second, the doctrine of nationalism further asserts that every nation is entitled to govern itself and should not be ruled by outsiders. Relatedly, this view tends to make existing nations wary of those who do not belong to their group, including immigrants or refugees from other cultures who may be trying to enter and reside in their territory. To be sure, migration has been going on for millennia, many states contain several national groups, and assimilation can and does occur over time. Nonetheless, the presence of people who are not seen as part of the nation is often a hot-button issue and can be a powerful driver of conflict.

If a head of state or foreign minister asked for my advicedont be alarmed; thats not likely to happenI might start by saying: Respect the power of nationalism. Why? Because as I look back over much of the past century and consider whats happening today, the failure to appreciate this phenomenon seems to have led numerous leaders (and their countries) into costly disasters. Ive made this point beforein 2019, 2011, and 2021but recent events suggest a refresher course is in order.

What is nationalism? The answer has two parts. First, it starts by recognizing that the world is made up of social groups that share important cultural traits (a common language, history, ancestry, geographic origins, etc.), and over time, some of these groups have come to see themselves as constituting a unique entity: a nation. A nations claims about its essential character need not be strictly accurate in either biological or historical terms. (Indeed, national narratives are usually distorted versions of the past.) What matters is that members of a nation genuinely believe that they are one.

Second, the doctrine of nationalism further asserts that every nation is entitled to govern itself and should not be ruled by outsiders. Relatedly, this view tends to make existing nations wary of those who do not belong to their group, including immigrants or refugees from other cultures who may be trying to enter and reside in their territory. To be sure, migration has been going on for millennia, many states contain several national groups, and assimilation can and does occur over time. Nonetheless, the presence of people who are not seen as part of the nation is often a hot-button issue and can be a powerful driver of conflict.

Now, consider how nationalism has derailed leaders who failed to appreciate its power.

Exhibit A, of course, is Russian President Vladimir Putins failure to understand how Ukrainian nationalism may thwart his attempt to restore Russian influence in Ukraine through a swift and successful military campaign. Russias war effort has been error-prone from the start, but the Ukrainians fierce and unexpected resistance has been the most important obstacle in Russias path. Putin and his associates forgot that nations are often willing to absorb huge losses and fight like tigers to resist foreign invaders, and that is precisely what the Ukrainians have done.

But Putin is hardly the only world leader to blunder in this way. For much of the 20th century, European rulers of vast colonial empires waged long, costly, and ultimately unsuccessful campaigns to keep restive nations inside their imperial sway. These efforts failed nearly everywherein Ireland, India, Indochina, most of the Middle East, and much of Africaand at a frightful human cost. Japans efforts to conquer and establish a sphere of influence in China after 1931 was equally unsuccessful.

When it comes to grasping the meaning of nationalism, the United States hasnt done much better. Although U.S. diplomat George Kennan and other U.S. officials recognized that nationalism was more powerful than communism and fears of a communist monolith were overblown, most U.S. officials continued to worry that left-wing movements would sacrifice their own national interests and do Moscows bidding for ideological reasons. During the Vietnam War, a similar blindness to the power of nationalism led U.S. leaders to underestimate the price North Vietnam was willing to pay to reunify the country. Not to be outdone, the Soviet Union came to grief when it invaded Afghanistan in 1979 because it failed to realize how fiercely the Afghans would fight to repel a foreign occupier.

Sadly, U.S. leaders didnt learn very much from these experiences. After Sept. 11, 2001, the George W. Bush administration convinced itself that it would be easy to topple the existing regime and replace it with a shiny new democracy because it assumed Iraqis and Afghans were yearning to be free and would greet U.S. soldiers as liberators. What the administration got instead was stubborn and ultimately successful resistance from a local population that did not want to take orders from an occupying army or embrace Western values and institutions.

The failure to appreciate the power of nationalism is not confined to wars and occupations. The European Union was created in part to transcend national attachments, foster a shared European identity, and mitigate the competitive pressures that have led to repeated and ruinous European wars. One can argue that the EU has had pacifying effects (though I would argue other factors are more important), but national identities remain an enduring part of Europes political landscape and continue to confound elite expectations.

For starters, the structure of the EU itself privileges national governments that are loath to cede too much authority to Brussels. Among other things, this explains why the EUs repeated efforts to develop a common foreign and security policy have been largely stillborn. More importantly, each nations first response whenever a crisis occurs is not to turn to Brussels but to their own elected officials. Unity was conspicuously lacking during the eurozone crisis in 2008 and during the COVID-19 pandemic; instead, it was every country for itself.

Furthermore, a failure to appreciate the enduring appeal of nationalism helps us understand why so many observers underestimated the risk of Brexit or the unexpected emergence of hard-line nationalist parties. Polands ruling Law and Justice party and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbans Fidesz party have triumphed by appealing first and foremost to each countrys sense of nationalism in ways that are directly at odds with the EUs liberal values.

Last but by no means least, the unlikely political career of former U.S. President Donald Trump owes much to his ability to market himself as an ardent American nationalist and to contrast himself with the supposedly decadent globalist elites who he accused of selling the United States down the river. His political platform and public persona put nostalgic nationalism front and center, whether in the slogan Make America Great Again, his mantra of America First, or his open hostility to (non-white) immigrants. Anyone who is still baffled by Trumps political appeal must begin by recognizing that he has tapped the power of nationalism more effectively than anyone else in contemporary U.S. politics.

Given the abundant evidence of nationalisms enduring importance, why do so many smart leaders underestimate it? Im not sure, but one of nationalisms central features may be part of the problem, akin to a bug in software. Not only do nations see themselves as unique and special, but they also tend to see themselves as superior to others and therefore destined to triumph if a conflict was to arise. This blind spot makes it harder to recognize that another nation might be its equal (or, god forbid, superior). It was hard for some Americans to understand how the Viet Cong or the Taliban could possibly defeat them, and it seems to have been hard for Putin to recognize that the Ukrainians he regarded as inferior could and would stand up to a Russian invasion.

Elites may also discount the power of nationalism if they spend their lives in a transnational, cosmopolitan bubble. If you go to the World Economic Forum conference held in Davos, Switzerland, every year; do business deals all over the world; hang out with like-minded people from lots of different countries; and are as comfortable living abroad as you are in your native country, its easy to lose sight of how people outside your social circle retain powerful attachments to places, local institutions, and their own sense of belonging to a nation. Liberalisms emphasis on the individual and his/her/their individual rights is another blind spot, insofar as it directs our gaze away from the social bonds and commitments to group survival that many groups view as more important than individual freedom.

So if some political leader came to me for advice or wanted to know what I thought about some foreign-policy maneuver they were contemplating, Id ask them if they took nationalism into account, and Id remind them of what happens when major powers ignore it. And Id paraphrase Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky: You may not be interested in nationalism, but it is still interested in you.

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Elites From Russia, Europe, and the United States Are Still Getting Nationalism Wrong - Foreign Policy

On April 14, World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus rebuked the world for treating crises differently depending on race. I need to be blunt and honest that the world is not treating the human race the same way, he said. Some are more equal than others. And when I say this, it pains me.

Tedross heartfelt plea embodied deep unease with inadequate responses to health and social crises beyond Russias brutal and illegal invasion of Ukraine. The UN, for instance, is struggling to get aid into the conflict-hit Tigray region of Ethiopia a crisis the WHO chief previously described as a forgotten one that is plainly out of sight and out of mind.

That said, Tedros should not have claimed the world is perpetrating systemic racism and ignoring ongoing emergencies in Ethiopia, Yemen, Afghanistan and Syria. It is the West that is in fact so unapologetically indifferent to the many urgent crises engulfing Black and brown people.

Tedros had a front-row seat to the Wests unapologetic spectacle of medical colonialism during the COVID-19 pandemic. The US, for example, acquired enough vaccines for three times its 250 million adult populationat a time 130 countries had not administered a single dose. To be precise, the West collectively treated millions of desperate high-risk people, including Africans, as undeserving and ostensibly dispensable second-rate world citizens. Besides, Tedros is a former foreign minister of Ethiopia and should understand the absolute futility of merely appealing to the Wests moral sentimentalities.

Indeed, Western leaders rarely arrive at and implement decisions affecting Africa or the African diaspora on just humanitarian grounds. Many decisions, such as British Prime Minister Boris Johnsons controversial plan to process possibly tens of thousands of asylum seekers, more than 6,000km (4,000 miles) away in Rwanda, are immoral and clearly lack compassion and common sense. They are designed to pander to racist predispositions and please voters at any cost.

This explains why the WHOs chief, no less, has to beg world leaders to demonstrate strong and inclusive leadership as Tigray endures a catastrophic disaster. As this third-world crisis is sidelined and millions suffer unfathomable hardships, unendingly, only an organised and comprehensive Pan-African response can help to fight endemic racism and whiteness.

The globalanti-colonialand anti-apartheidmovementsof the past fought hard to get Western leaders to act against colonialism and apartheid in Africa. They did so in a hostile climate. America, for example, maintained deep economic ties to apartheid SouthAfrica.

Yet, the mostly British and American pressure groups persevered because they demonstrated a steadfast commitment to promoting progressive ideals and Pan-Africanism. In America, for instance, the Council on African Affairs,the American Committee on AfricaandTransAfricawere established to promote independence for African and Caribbean countries and all African diaspora groups.

Today, however, Pan-Africanism is in the doldrums. In June 2020, George Floyds death at the hands of a police officer triggered a renaissance of classic Pan-Africanist actions around the world. Demonstrations against the police murder of Floyd were held in Ghana, Kenya, Brazil, France, Jamaica and South Africa, amid complaints that a Black man is hated everywhere. Crucially, Americas Black Lives Matter movement inspired protest groups, such as #EndSARSin Nigeria and #ZimbabweanLivesMatter, across Africa.

Nevertheless, the global solidarity did not last or lead to the establishment of permanent support mechanisms or organisations similar to the traditional Pan-African movements of yesteryear.

Back in the 1950s and 60s, for example, American civil rights leader Dr Martin Luther King Jr had cultivated a constructive relationship with Ghanas founding president Kwame Nkrumah.

In March 1957, King and his wife Coretta Scott King travelled to West Africa to attend Ghanas independence ceremony. On returning home, King lamented the devastating effect of slavery and the 1884 Berlin Conference that established European colonies in Africa. He described Africa as the continent that had suffered all of the pain and the affliction that could be mustered up by other nations.

King was inspired by Nkrumahs arduous journey to emancipation and drew parallels between resistance against European colonialism in Africa and the struggle against racism in the United States. And he hoped to expand Americas civil rights movement to Africa. And so did Malcolm X, the widely lauded African American Muslim minister and human rights activist. During the 1960s, Malcolm visited several African countries to meet African leaders and givespeeches.

Today, however, African-Americans do not exhibit the Pan-African spirit that Malcolm and King espoused. An explosive 2021 report by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights detailed systemic violations of international human rights law against Africans and people of African descent. Yet, African-Americans reportedly believe that Africans the world over do not share common struggles.

According to Alden Young, assistant professor of African American studies at UCLA, contemporary Afro-pessimist intellectuals see no shared identity that can serve as the basis for solidarity between Africans and African-Americans. This, he argues, is because Afro-pessimists insist on the particularity of enslavement in the Americas and reject the equation of the struggles of a permanent minority with anti-colonial nationalism in Africa and Asia.

The Biden administration (and others) can deliberately ignore crises in Africa, partly because African American lobby groups are mostly silent on and impervious to our struggles with white supremacy. They are not, unfortunately, sufficiently empathetic towards Africas challenges and pretty much toe the official line.

US foreign policy experts relegate African affairs to a position of secondary importance, only significant as it relates to the US-China competition or the spectra of terrorism, asserts Young. Likewise, US domestic policy has long consigned African American affairs to a position of lesser importance, only significant as it relates to city, congressional or presidential elections.

The same dubious modus operandi that protects white privilege in America is being deployed abroad. Nevertheless, Africans have not forgotten about the African American struggle for equality and social justice. In September 2021, President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa suggested the UN should discuss reparations for the African diaspora.

He said: Millions of the descendants of Africans who were sold into slavery remain trapped in lives of underdevelopment, disadvantage, discrimination and poverty. South Africa calls on the United Nations to put the issue of reparations for victims of the slave trade on its agenda.

And conscious that a protracted and highly regrettable preponderance of whiteness is nurturing overtly exclusionary practices, just as Tedros so painstakingly bemoaned, Ramaphosa added, Let us all allow humanism to be our guide and solidarity be our strongest force.

King would definitely condemn the lopsided global responses to human crises and lobby for change, because he believed in equality for everyone, regardless of race. And he would not exclude Africans from the African American agenda. The struggle is clearly not over, and Africas star is rising.

Going forward, Africa can contribute much to the African American agenda and vice-versa. It is time for African-Americans to rekindle their passion for Africa and direct it towards establishing a fair and inclusive world. African-Americans should strive to ensure that Americas foreign policy truly demonstrates that Black and brown lives matter, too.

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Pan-Africanism is the panacea to the Wests systemic racism - Al Jazeera English

Dear Mr. Reader:

White nationalism has taken many forms, from the blatantly racist to the freedom movements, a scope that includes journalism, a form with which you have some familiarity. All profess their preference for a White society and the way it was racially before 1965, yet none, absolutely none, have strategized a plan to achieve it. The enclosed booklet does that.

The problem of achieving a White nation in North America is compounded by those who are action oriented and may have the inclination to proceed with a plan, being obsessed with ideology, one that has no attraction for the vast majority of White voters who want nothing to do with racial supremacy or anti-Semitism. I am hoping that you are one that sees the absurdity of this predicament, and are willing to make the modicum effort to circumvent it. The only solution to our racial demise is racial partition. Freedom movements, anti-Antifa, anti-Semitism and conspiratorial revelations are all valid efforts, yet they do nothing to achieve a White nation. On the other hand, if that were achieved, especially if it resulted in a White nationalist government, we would be surprised at how quickly all such anti-White aberrations would disappear. Such efforts are diversions from what should be our real objective - the establishment of a White nation. So let’s keep our thinking straight. Achieving White nationhood should be every White nationalist’s political priority.

I am a Canadian living in Canada, watching my race and heritage disappear as I dwell in this multicultural la-la land, while the great neighbour to the South, the backbone of our Western world, adopts the liberal stance that has turned Canada into a world-class racial melting-pot. Not only are racially mixed neighbourhoods sufficient in Canada, the push is on for actual racial mixture, evident now in business commercials involving Black-White couples, that have become the norm even in bedroom scenes. This is a development in business commercials occurring just over the past year, in all media, much of it targeting the young generation. Not a decibel of resistance can be heard, an indication of how a racialist movement is pretty hopeless in this country, although several have been tried in the past. The most serious we currently have is the French Canadian separatist party, the Parti Quebecois, that nearly separated Quebec in 1985, but even that is a cultural nationalist party, not racial nationalist, that is idiotically tolerant of Haitian migrants into Quebec because they speak French.

I would take up the ORION challenge myself, despite my approaching 84 years, if not for being foreign to the United States and have no right, legal or otherwise, to initiate an organization for the electoral capture of the American Congress and White House, as the booklet scenario requires. The only bright spot in this picture is the on-going racial division in America, that can be utilized for White nationhood, but presently only with the cooperation of Black, Hispanic, possibly native Indian, organizations that have national aspirations of their own. Our most rewarding strategy, therefore, would not be a purely White nationalist endeavour. The booklet gives that required strategy, which I think is obvious for a country that is a bare majority 58% White and can no longer achieve a purely White federal objective democratically. In addition to the racial percentage, within that 58% is a large number of liberals who would like nothing better than to see a ‘no race’ country. To balance this disadvantage, it is Black and Hispanic nationalism that would ironically give hope in a presidential election of producing a racial-nationalist government, and the possibility of using that majority for legal partition. What other option do we have? The one other option is one we must avoid at all cost: violent confrontation and bloodshed. That would mean the end of the entire White nationalist movement, forever. That said, if you can describe one, only one, different scenario from ORION for the purpose of long range White existence in North America, I would be delighted to know it.

I am aware that partitioning the country could mean, in the minds of some, a patriotic betrayal, whereas in reality it could mean a greater nation than ever. U. S partitioning would give cause to break-away sentiment in Western Canada, in provinces that are land-locked with a strong North-South trading pattern. Large segments of Canada would be available for absorption into the new White nation. With partition there would be territorial loss, principally in the South and South West, but gains in the North would more than compensate, not only in territory but also in resources, combined with riddance of a criminal and dependent element in current American society. This would be the ‘red state’ area of North America, that now favours traditional White values and presumably would favour a White nationalist regime politically. Free of liberal, decadent elements that presently infest the U. S., under a WN regime the new White nation of North America would be more vibrant and powerful than ever before.

The enclosed booklet is intended as a propaganda piece for distribution to potential voters of all races. You will note it has none on the self defeating White supremacist or anti-Semitic, ‘Nazi’ comments usually afflicting White nationalist rhetoric. Although definitely racialist it bases its progam on scientific rationalism and cannot be accused of ‘red-neck’ ignorance on the subject. On the contrary, it is liberal illogic that is illuminated. Additionally, a section on banking gives an understanding in simple language of the money-power that feeds every destructive element of our society, yet seldom mentioned in White nationalist discussions or media. The booklet is available on website http://www.euvolution.com, in booklet formatting and therefore not intelligible until printed, page 2 on the back of page 1, etc. That is because this Internet version is intended as a master, for printing multiple copies on home computers for distribution by an ORION movement. The money power has its media; White nationalism has its numbers that could be just as effective, if used. If every White nationalist downloaded the master to make copies just for family and friends, and especially for street distribution, the movement would snowball exponentially. That is what I am trying to instigate. I have been told many times that email distribution is more efficient. Yes, it is, but the viewer must first have the interest to go to the mentioned website. By this method, with booklets, the message comes to the viewer by distribution at street corners, bus or train stops, etc. It can be literally pushed into a person’s face, although I don’t recommend it. In this era of media hostility against White nationalism our objective must be to persuade the mainstream, not just the friendly. Having a message that addresses all races, not only the White, I believe an ORION Party would have potential to persuade a majority of voters. Eventually racial nationalism would prevail.

You could help by simply mentioning ORION in Occidental Quarterly and giving the Euvolution website address. If that were all there is to spreading ORION I could simply advertise in your magazine. There is much more. If I were American I would not use a Canadian address for replies. I could work with entire legality within the United States. As it is, I cannot. So I must appeal to Americans to take the initiative. That is why I am writing to you directly, not necessarily for your direct involvement but to seek the leaders who might be. That is what I am trying to do, so that the ORION Party will grow from within the United States. I am seeking the P.O. addresses of White nationalist organizations in America that would be interested in participating in an ORION program, that are still extant. These would be approached with an introduction to the program and with the suggestion to nominate willful candidates for leadership of an ORION Party. Once candidates are nominated an Internet election would be held and a leader elected. A speech has been written, now on the Euvolution website, for the elected leader to introduce himself on social media to the White nationalist movement and the world. The party will then be underway.

I know the leaders are there, somewhere. I ask for you help to find them.

It is incredibly important that we all head into the upcoming elections with a level of humility and fresh eyes about what the political landscape is going to look like, Petkanas added. It would be a mistake to know for certain who is easier to beat than somebody else. Weve all seen this movie before and they occasionally have a twist ending.

Officials working for the Lincoln Project contend theyre simply being practical even shrewd about the new political climate, in which Trump is likely to be the GOP nominee anyway and brass-knuckle tactics are now the norm.

President Joe Biden even called one of the Lincoln Project co-founders Steve Schmidt after the 2020 election to say thank you for the groups work helping him get elected, according to a person familiar. The White House did not comment.

But a year after delighting liberals with their insistence on bringing guns to a gunfight, operatives across the spectrum now say the group is, at best, ineffective and prodigal, at worst, counterproductive. In particular, fellow never-Trumpers and moderate Republicans have recoiled at Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilsons recent encouragement of a Trump presidential run in 2024.

I think this is the mother of bad ideas, said conservative commentator and Trump critic Charlie Sykes. But also the father, brother, sister, and cousin of a truly bad idea. [It] ignores the fact that Trump could actually be elected again, and you wouldve thought we had all learned our lesson from playing games with that possibility the last time.

Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist and Trump critic who started Defending Democracy Together, joined in a chorus of other anti-Trump Republicans baffled by Wilsons strategy.

It would be a high-impact event on our democracy if Trump were reelected and you want to do everything you can to keep him from getting one step closer, Longwell said. The best way to ensure Trump doesn't win the election 2024 is to make sure he doesnt become the nominee.

In an interview with POLITICO, Wilson defended his position by arguing that Trumpism was a greater problem now than just Trump himself. He pointed to his response on Twitter and added that the idea that he actually wants the 45th president to run again is risible.

Its not that I want [Trump] to be here, Id love for him to be eaten by a shark tomorrow, Wilson said. I want Trump to run to destroy the people who are more sophisticated than Trump. I want to use Trumps psychological problems to weaken him because I think the most dangerous thing we face is Trump with an Ivy League degree. All the abrasive authoritarianism and nationalism and none of the obvious deficits.

The Lincoln Project was started in 2019 by a number of prominent Republican operatives who opposed Trumps presidency and feared the direction their party was taking. They faced charges of self-dealing and ineffectualness both of which they heartedly dismissed. And along the way, the group raised tens of millions of dollars, in large part because of the splashy web and TV ads it ran going after the sitting president and his family in visceral, personal ways.

The post-Trump presidency has been a more difficult era. The group was rocked by the allegations that co-founder John Weaver sexually harassed young men, and finger-pointing over the fallout has lasted for months. A law firm, Paul Hastings LLP, hired by the Lincoln Project found no evidence that anyone at The Lincoln Project was aware of any inappropriate communications with any underage individuals at any time prior to the publication of those news reports. Critics have questioned the independence of that inquiry.

There are questions about who remains in the group and directs day-to-day strategy. There have been internal frustrations over resources being put toward things such as an online streaming show. After the scandal involving Weaver went public, one of the co-founders, Jennifer Horn, as well as fellow officials or advisers Kurt Bardella, Ron Steslow, Mike Madrid, and George Conway all resigned, with some publicly calling for the group to be permanently shuttered.

Currently, the groups website names co-founders Rick Wilson and Reed Galen, Tara Setmayer, Stuart Stevens and Steve Schmidt as involved in the project, although it is unclear how involved some remain. Two people close to the group said there have been internal tensions and disputes with Schmidt, who resigned from the board of the Lincoln Project after the sexual misconduct charges against Weaver surfaced.

Ryan Wiggins, a spokesperson for the Lincoln Project, said the streaming shows garner hundreds of thousands of viewers each week and provide a unique, innovative connection to our millions of supporters. Also, the podcast has over 1 million downloads/month.

Theres no question as to who runs the day-to-day or the strategy. Rick Wilson, Reed Galen, [Stuart] Stevens and Joe Trippi run the strategy. The day-to-day is managed by our incredible team. Anyone who doesnt know that doesnt spend anytime watching and/or listening to us, Wiggins said.

Schmidt reappeared months later vowing for the group to fight on. But he also tore into the organization for being recklessly stupid and dishonest for the stunt involving actors posing as Charlottesville white nationalist protesters at a stop made by incoming Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin.

A McAuliffe adviser conceded that the Lincoln Projects ads in the governors race were solid, but echoed Schmidts assessment, saying the Charlottesville stunt backfired so spectacularly at least in the cable news-social media bubble that the groups involvement was altogether unhelpful.

More broadly, Democrats who once saw the Lincoln Project as a helpful compliment to their efforts to defeat Trump now view the group as a distraction and a drain of broader campaign funds.

When it first started, I was like, This is so great. I love it, said Tim Lim, a veteran Democratic digital strategist. Now, Lim added, Most of the left is not sure why they're still around. Thats the prognosis in story after story, and its been brutal for them.

With fewer allies and Trump off the ballot, the Lincoln Project has suffered financially. In the first half of 2021, the most recent figures available, the group raised $4.8 million and spent $8.7 million, an exceedingly high burn rate. But digital strategists predicted that the organization, with its robust email list, could survive down cycles. The idea that its so far been able to withstand so much scandal and infighting has surprised people familiar with the dynamics, including several who believe the Lincoln Project long exceeded its expiration point.

Still, the group has a formidable online following, boasting just as many Twitter followers as the Republican National Committee at 2.7 million followers, for example. And those involved with the group say their daily work and mission is simply different without Trump on the ballot right now.

The group has made the case for its relevance by getting involved in down-ballot races. It tried, unsuccessfully, to tie Youngkin to Trump and has gone after lawmakers who have spread election fraud lies. But theyve also continued going after the 45th president as part of a campaign it often describes as political psy-ops. The group also aired ads in Trumps getaways of Bedminster, N.J., and Palm Beach, Fla., taunting him, and they have plans to play an active role in the upcoming midterm elections.

Even though Trump has not officially announced any plans to jump in the 2024 race, Wilson said the group remains relevant because they understand how to attack the vertical power structure of Trump in the Republican Party.

No one is here because its comfortable and fun or a great way to make new friends, we work a hard job against very tough people and bad guys who spend a lot of money attacking us and the individuals inside the Lincoln Project, Wilson said. Are we perfect? Of course not and we own those mistakes but what we do is fill a gap in the pro-democracy movement and we show people how to fight.

In interviews, two big Republican donors to the organization defended its work, both contending that the mere threat of Trump returning to the national stage and the likely impacts on American democracy itself make their support worthwhile. One stressed that Lincoln Projects work on so-called moveable voters college-educated people and suburban women went far beyond the TV and digital ads. But two operatives with insight into its operations said its mostly surviving off of small-dollar donors, thanks to that massive email list and its ability to generate internet buzz.

Despite the intense focus on rattling Trump, people close to the former president say he hasnt been moved by Lincoln Projects recent attacks. But he and his allies still delight in taking digs at the organization.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Trump said the Lincoln Project was a sad group. Democrats are abandoning the group not just because theyve been terribly ineffective, but because they are worried that the last shoe has not dropped. Yikes!

There is an obvious self-interest to Trump worlds gloating over Lincoln Projects troubles. But the general criticism that the organization has veered from its overall mission and is beset by controversy is shared elsewhere, including by those once involved with it. Now, some never-Trumpers wonder where their efforts fit in the broader Republican party.

As far as never-Trumpers are concerned, its a problem, people like us are without a home, we dont have influence in the party, and even the best people who are taking a stand are taking huge political risks, like Liz Cheney, who wasnt even a never-Trumper until Jan. 6, said former Lincoln Project leader and vocal Trump critic George Conway. Forming a third party is a non-starter because the research has all shown a third party would help Trump. So its a conundrum, and I don't know how its going to play out.

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No one seems to like the Lincoln Project anymore - Politico

White nationalism is a dangerous ideology thathas seen an exponential rise in prevalence across the United States since 2017.1 The threat of white nationalism gained new attention after the insurrection on January 6 2021, where many members of the mob attacking the US Capitol displayed white nationalist symbols and slogans2. Other recent attacks motivated by white nationalist ideology include the shootings in a Walmart in El Paso, Texas; in mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand; in the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. White nationalist violence is not a new phenomenon, even if it is taking on new forms. In the United States, the 1979 Greensboro shootings, various attacks committed in the 1980s by the Order, and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, were all motivated by the white nationalist ideology.3 Increasingly, white nationalists are targeting young people for recruitment online, and white nationalism has been linked to bullying, threats, and violence in schools. For these reasons, it is critical that we all understand what white nationalism is and why it is harmful.

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Explainer: White Nationalism | Facing History and Ourselves

Another political rift is stirring U.S. universities, this one rooted in India, and it has resulted in a federal complaint being filed against the University of Pennsylvania.

The Hindu American Foundation, led by Philadelphia-based cofounder and executive director Suhag A. Shukla, has asked the U.S. Department of Educations Office of Civil Rights to investigate Penns treatment of students and faculty of Indian and Hindu descent.

The foundation asserts that Penn faculty, its South Asia Center, and its department of South Asia studies were involved in planning, sponsoring, hosting, and/or participating in a one-sided conference about India and Hindus that promoted negative stereotypes, slurs, and distorted facts. It also says they helped prepare a field manual that perpetuated negative stereotypes.

The three-day online conference, Dismantling Global Hindutva, which was held last month with at least 30,000 attendees, failed to adequately distinguish between Hindutva, generally defined as Hindu nationalism, with Hindu, the religion, Shukla said.

READ MORE: Haverford College students launched as strike last fall after a racial reckoning. The impact still lingers

When an entire country, an entire religious tradition, and its people are painted as dangerous, bigoted, an anathema to democratic ideals, you have no choice but to defend yourself, said Shukla, whose husband is a Penn medical professor.

Penn did not respond to a request for comment. The Department of Education said it does not acknowledge complaints it receives until they have been accepted for investigation.

Several faculty members who participated disputed that characterization: A few speakers did argue the two were the same, but it was far from the overarching view, they said.

They were being hotly contested by other panelists, and thats the point of a conference, said Suvir Kaul, an English professor and president of the American Association of University Professors chapter at Penn, who attended the conference.

He dismissed the foundations concerns as unfounded.

Hindu nationalists want to conflate criticism of a political ideology, namely Hindu nationalism, which is also know as Hindutva, with criticism and discrimination against an entire broad-based religion of Hinduism, said Audrey Truschke, an associate professor in the department of history at Rutgers-Newark, who attended the conference. That is incorrect.

Hindutva, she said, advocates for the supremacy of Hindus over other religious minorities, similar to Christian nationalism and white supremacy.

READ MORE: A new wave of activism on campus: Students aggressively seek their demands

Truschke said the conference included a mix of speakers from India, the United States, and elsewhere and offered a variety of viewpoints.

And she added that another national Hindu group, Hindus for Human Rights, wrote a letter supporting the conference and condemning Hindu nationalism.

The conference involved professors or departments from dozens of universities, including Harvard and Princeton, and garnered a letter of support from more than 1,000 faculty members, including 17 at Penn. Other locals include Rutgers, Widener, Villanova, Lehigh, Lafayette, Drexel, Swarthmore, Stockton, Princeton, and Pennsylvania State University. The foundation has filed a complaint only against Penn, alleging that faculty there initiated it, though some professors involved said thats not the case.

While less than 1% of the U.S. population is Hindu, India accounts for the second-largest number of international students at U.S. colleges, nearly 200,000.

The conference has drawn international media attention with some supporting scholars saying they have been subjected to death and rape threats over their involvement. The Hindu American Foundation mounted an intense writing campaign to universities whose scholars were involved.

Its not the first such international conflict to reach university campuses. The Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel on college campuses also brought intense debate and accusations of anti-Semitism.

Regarding the Hindutva conference, several professors and students contacted, both supporters and critics, asked not to be identified because they feared professional repercussions or threats.

Truschke said she and her children have been threatened multiple times over the years, most recently in August when a threat was called in to Rutgers and she was contacted by police. It was traced back to India, she said.

She has come under fire from some Rutgers students. Last March, a group of Hindu students in a petition asked the university to prevent Truschke from teaching courses on India or Hinduism. Rutgers in a statement to The Inquirer defended Truschkes freedom to pursue her scholarship and said it emphatically affirms its support for all members of the Hindu community to study and live in an environment in which they not only feel safe, but also fully supported in their religious identity.

Truschkes area of study is 16th- and 17th-century South Asia when a Muslim dynasty ruled over Hindus. Because of the rising Hindu-Muslim tensions in India today and the rising death toll of Muslims who are being lynched by Hindu nationalist groups in India, my work is considered to be politically explosive, she said.

She said the Hindu American Foundation, which is suing her for defamation, has supported the current Indian government, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a right-wing Hindu nationalist who campaigned in the United States for Donald Trump.

Shukla, of the Hindu American Foundation, called threats against academics horrible and not acceptable. She disputed Truschkes account that the foundation supports Modi. Shukla believes that a conference should explore multiple views.

Anyone who disagrees with the predominant ideology that was being promoted at this conference is labeled a fascist, is labeled a supremacist, she said.

One speaker listed Hindu surnames of people alleged to have had a long history of participating in violence, she said. She found about 60 people at Penn with those names, she said.

A medical professor at Penn who asked not to be identified said Penn should have spoken out against the conference or at least disassociated itself from views shared.

We would never say anti-Semitism is OK or Islamophobia is OK, he said. We want to hear from our university that what happened is not OK.

The Department of Educations Office of Civil Rights has investigated more than 1,000 complaints about discriminatory conduct at colleges and universities over the last decade. Many have ended with resolutions in which a school agrees to change its practices or take steps to work with the complainants.

Projit Bihari Mukharji, an associate professor in Penns department of history and sociology of science, who was born and raised Hindu, said he was not offended by the conference and in fact signed the letter in support, though he was not able to attend.

Im not necessarily supporting this or that view, he said. What I do support is the right of university spaces to have civilized conversations in a serious, orderly fashion, where people have the right to push back and disagree.

He said he was appalled that professors who supported the conference were threatened.

That was not the Hinduism my parents taught me, he said.

Kaul, the Penn English professor, said whats happening in India under the current government is a real problem. He noted a New York Times story from last week, which says Modi has used an antiterror law to silence critics, jailing thousands, including poets, political organizers, and a Catholic priest.

A Penn freshman who is Hindu and whose parents are involved in the foundation said that although he has always found Penn welcoming and diverse, the conference was offensive.

I have no problem with professors expressing their opinions on political issues in India, but the problem right now is they are conflating that with Hinduism, he said. That conflation contributes to negative stereotypes about India.

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A Hindu foundation has filed a complaint against University of Pennsylvania, saying an online conference perpetuated stereotypes - The Philadelphia...

There was an air of inevitability when fighting broke out in the away end during Hungarys 1-1 draw with England at Wembley on Tuesday night.

Hungarys fans had been disciplined over their behaviour at four of the previous six games played in front of fans, with homophobic banners seen against Portugal and Germany, and monkey chanting heard against France and England.

The abuse directed at Raheem Sterling and his teammate Jude Bellingham at last months game in Budapest led to Fifa imposing a stadium closure on Hungary after another enforced by Uefa because of the summers troubles.

In Hungary, there is an overriding sense of injustice, with both bans vehemently condemned by football fans and government ministers.

At Ferencvaross game with Real Betis in the Europa League on 30 September, the Green Monsters Ultra group revealed a banner reading: Double standards instead of equality! This is not FARE!

Hungarys foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, wrote on Facebook in July of the Uefa ban: The committee that makes a decision like that is a pitiful and cowardly body. They should be ashamed of themselves.

In Hungary, the Fidesz partys governmental figures are loth to criticise Hungarian football fans, owing to the close relationship between the government and ultra groups. These relationships are more than a decade old, going back as far as when the government was in opposition.

In 2009, in an effort to contain neo-Nazi violence on the terraces, Fidesz met ultras groups from Hungarys biggest clubs and formed the now-infamous and unmistakeable black-shirted Carpathian Brigade.

Founded on the promise of bringing all fans together the ultras groups, the left, liberals, the right for years the Carpathian Brigade built a healthy relationship within Hungary. The group conducts a wide range of charity work and is credited with bringing a much-improved atmosphere to national team games.

Fifa will take no disciplinary action over the confrontation between England's Kyle Walker and Poland's Kamil Glik during last month's World Cup qualifier in Warsaw owing to a lack of evidence. It is understood Football Association officials immediately reported the incident to the Fifa match delegate, with the Polish federation denying any racist element. Both associations were asked for their observations on the incident by Fifa.

A spokesperson for the world governing body said: "After a thorough assessment which included relevant match reports, the Fifa disciplinary committee has decided not to open disciplinary proceedings in relation to Poland against England on September 8 due to insufficient evidence. Fifa's position remains firm and resolute in rejecting all forms of discrimination. In this particular case, no evidence has been produced to support further action."PA Media

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Only the big matches had a proper atmosphere but the ultras of the clubs did not unite behind the national team or skipped the games altogether, Gergely Marosi, a sports journalism lecturer at Budapest Metropolitan University, tells the Guardian.

Because these ultras had their conflicts amongst themselves, sometimes they did not stand close to each other, otherwise there was a chance for trouble. That obviously did not help the atmosphere. Chants were disjointed and coming from different sectors; there were a lot of lifeless games in terms of fan performance.

Yet the Carpathian Brigade soon became a victim of its own success. For many years it was able to keep its members in check, but as the group grew, so did the trouble. Games against fierce rivals Romania in 2013 and 2014 saw coordinated violence, and at Euro 2016 the Carpathian Brigade made headlines around Europe for the first time after clashing with stewards during the game against Iceland in Marseille.

Initially being made up of 50-100 core ultras, the membership grew and the neo-Nazi element that the Hungarian government tried so hard to contain was again seen on the terraces. The group in time became a sort of safe space for that white nationalist element to fester.

White nationalism on the terraces of Hungarian football stadiums dates back to the 1950s, and grew through the 1970s and 1980s as Hungarys youth, disillusioned with communism, became more brazen with their protests.

When the Soviet system collapsed, fan violence at games became commonplace and most of the regular match-attending fans not interested in violence walked away. When communism fell in 1989, attendances in Hungary averaged about 7,000. Today they are below 3,000.

The remaining match-going public largely share similar sentiments. White power tattoos are common among the ultras groups at domestic games, as are Nazi-inspired banners, and this has spilled into national team games more recently, so much so that before Hungarys European Championship game in Munich in June, the Carpathian Brigade warned fans on its Facebook page that they would need to cover tattoos to abide by local laws.

The Carpathian Brigade has become almost impossible to control. The principles it was founded on are starting to shatter and it is impossible to determine who belongs to the group.

On Tuesday night the core of the Carpathian Brigade were not in attendance, yet the groups rising infamy is breeding a culture that inspires those in the ultras culture outside the groups core to hide under its banner.

It was a mix of Hungarian and Polish fans who caused the trouble at Wembley on Tuesday night. Poland and Hungarys close connections date back centuries and in football terms over the past decade the ultras groups have begun to form ever more intertwined relationships.

Before 2009 Hungarys ultras at national team games were fragmented. Ferencvaros ultras would not associate with their rival ultras Ujpest, and neither would Fehervar, Honved or Debrecen. Each ultras group would sit in a different part of the stadium and they would never walk under the same banner.

Now under the Carpathian Brigade name, Hungarys ultras (and to a small extent Polands too) have formed alliances that in the fragmented years most would have thought impossible. That name is starting to become one of the most feared and infamous ultras groups in Europe. It is an extremely worrying development and the question is, where it will all end?

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Why Hungary is infected by ultras who are almost impossible to control - The Guardian

Democrats are heading into the fall campaign cycle with a ticket full of northern Virginia candidates.

Michael Pope reports that might shape the election dynamics.

Now that Democrats have their candidates for the fall election, Republicans are boasting that they have the most diverse statewide ticket in Virginia history. The GOP ticket includes candidates from Hampton Roads and northern Virginia, as well as a Black woman and a son of Cuban immigrants.

But David Ramadan at George Mason University's Schar School says Republicans have lost the ability to invoke identity politics.

"That would sell if the Republicans were not selling white supremacy and were not selling white nationalism," Ramadan says. "Minorities are not going to vote for Republicans period because of what they saw in the last 10 years."

Democratic strategist Ben Tribbett says Democrats will be facing a problem for the rest of the election cycle. Terry McAuliffe, Hala Ayala and Mark Herring are all from northern Virginia.

"Typically statewide elections tend to be determined in Hampton Roads, and Republicans have one candidate from Hampton Roads but all three have ties to Hampton Roads," Tribbett explains. "And so, they have more geographic balance. I think that's more important than the other diversity that the Republicans are trying to highlight."

Some Democrats say they're worried that Republicans can go across the state and brand them as the party of northern Virginia; potentially costing them votes in key parts of the state.On the other hand, northern Virginias huge population is increasingly influential in elections.

This report, provided byVirginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from theVirginia Education Association.

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The Impact of an All NOVA Democratic Ticket This Fall - WVTF

Forget the Alamo divides neatly in half. The first half recounts the events leading up to and through the fiasco at the Alamo, and often reads like a boys story of action and adventure, although there is an absence of heroes in the factual version of the tale. For example, Jim Bowie, the knife-wielding pioneer of legend, is revealed to be a slave trader, a swindler and a murderer; William Barret Buck Travis is a racist syphilitic who writes in his diary that he has bedded 56 women; the coonskin-capped Davy Crockett emerges as a former U.S. congressman and self-promoter in thrall to his own large ego. Their defense of the fort is not just foolhardy, its weirdly suicidal. They can no longer be the holy trinity of Texas, nor can the Alamo be the Shrine of Texas Liberty, the authors proclaim with complete justification, drawing their own Travis-like line in the sand.

The books second half is a more discursive examination of the ways various groups have exploited the myth of the Alamo, weaponizing it as propaganda, as Sam Houston did when he cried out to his troops to remember the Alamo, or invoking the myth in defense of white supremacy, as was the case with Texas History Movies, which was in fact a popular racist comic strip that ran in The Dallas Morning News in the late 1920s; it was later published in book form and for decades distributed free to all Texas seventh graders. Shockingly little serious academic study of this touchy subject occurred until the 1980s.

Predictably, Hollywood played a villainous role in spreading the false narrative of the old fort, notably through John Wayne, who used the subject to indulge in his own hypermasculine version of nationalism. In 1960 Wayne produced, directed and starred in a nearly three-hour $12 million epic called, fittingly, The Alamo, in which he played Davy Crockett. The result was, in Texas parlance, horse pucky and a bomb at the box office. The book ends with an amusing account of the states farcical effort to build a $450 million museum to house a collection of Alamo antiquities compiled by the British pop star Phil Collins that includes an ammo pouch once used by Crockett to load Old Betsy and a Bowie knife, allegedly bought for $1.5 million. The authors make a convincing case that the most important items are of dubious, if not fraudulent, provenance.

In A Single Star and Bloody Knuckles, Bill Minutaglio, a Texas journalist with a saddlebag of books to his name, takes a decade-by-decade look at Texas politics, placing particular emphasis on events at the Statehouse and its succession of unlikely governors, but digressing to include other key players in the story like Sam Rayburn and Barbara Jordan. He begins with General Order No. 3, announcing Emancipation in Galveston at the end of the Civil War, and moves through to the present. Smoothly tackling this near-herculean research task, he keeps the sweat stains from showing and writes in prose as cool as a trout stream.

Texas, from its earliest days, championed a form of swashbuckling free enterprise that minimized the regulatory touch of government. Even today, the Legislature convenes for only a maximum of 140 days every other year. Business oversight and federal interference have been anathema from the outset. In the immediate post-Civil War years, plantation owners pivoted toward sharecropping and a patrn system that turned freed slaves into impoverished indentured servants with no ability to vote. Further crimes against humanity appeared later in the form of the cruel convict-leasing system that was used to build the roads and railroads across the states vast interior. And then big oil gurgles up into the story: A maze of miles of pipes, a metallic Oz of roaring tanks, flares, hoses, storage tanks and train tracks, was growing on the shallow bays and marshes that a few decades earlier had been mostly devoid of human presence, except for the crab collectors and oyster men pushing their flat-bottomed boats past the great blue herons.

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Two Books on the Bizarreness of Texas - The New York Times

There are two times in U.S. history when the government saw the mistreatment of Black Americans as something we could no longer tolerate: The First Reconstruction followed the Civil War and the Second Reconstruction was the Civil Rights movement.

For years, Rev. William Barber has been calling for a Third Reconstruction a sweeping effort from the federal government to dismantle racist policies and structures to reimagine American society for the betterment of us all. This idea has gained traction over the last year.

Barber is co-chair of the Poor Peoples Campaign, president of Repairers of the Breach, and author of the book "The Third Reconstruction: How a Moral Movement is Overcoming the Politics of Division and Fear."

In his work, Barber once posed the question, what is the cost of inequality? In the U.S., 140 million people live in poverty 43% of the nations population, according to the Poor Peoples Campaign.

Barber believes there's not a scarcity of resources, but a scarcity of political consciousness. The U.S. has the capacity to give Americans health insurance, for example, which would give the country a boost, he says.

We know every time corporations want money, they get the tax cut, he says. But poor and low wealth people get the short end of the stick and it's hurting this nation.

This transformation requires more than a single bill, agenda or political power, though some elements of what Barber pushes for are included in the Biden administrations most recent measures taking on systemic ills.

The Poor People Campaign brought 35 people poor and low wealth folks, public health experts, environmentalists, economists, lawyers to meet with Bidens policy team before the inauguration, Barber says. The group laid out a 14 point plan on establishing justice in order to heal the nation.

Number one, we need living wages, he says. We need health care for all. We need infrastructure that's targeted toward poor and low wealth communities and infrastructure that addresses climate change. We said we needed restoration of the Voting Rights Act.

Barber is glad to see some of these asks moving forward but questions remain about pushing these policies all the way through. And the campaign doesnt think the dollar amount in Bidens infrastructure bill is enough.

Barber is working with Democratic Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Barbara Lee to pass a resolution that would realize at least one goal of the Third Reconstruction ending poverty in the U.S.

The bill explains how to end poverty and why making these investments will benefit the nation in the long run even if it means some deficit spending now, he says. The plan to fully address poverty includes a living wage, universal health care, permanent earned income and child tax credits.

Barber pushed Walmart to embrace an Employee Safety and Wages Initiative. But the company voted against the plan, saying it already has proper health protocols and offers workers two weeks paid leave for COVID-19 related reasons.

Walmarts decision shows why the country needs reconstruction and policy shifts, he says. He believes corporations should pay workers living wages and provide health care because its the right thing to do, both economically and morally, but federal laws are needed to ensure compliance.

He recalls the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think thats pretty important also.

One major part of all of this is the need for bipartisan support in a divided nation. The division stems from, as King said, the ruling classs fear of poor people of all races joining together and using their voting power to change the economic architecture of this nation, Barber says.

A study with Columbia University showed that new low-income voters could flip election results in 15 states.

In his recent op-ed in The New York Times, Barber reminds us that the generation of kids who watched the case of the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in 2012 are now adults who are mobilizing this week, which marks the anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre.

The U.S. cant wait 20 years for this next reconstruction, he says, because our democracy will implode without it.

The solution starts at the state level and requires building multiracial coalitions, he says.

You can't have coalitions of Black folks over here fight for voting rights, white people over here fighting against environmental injustice. They all intersect, he says. And we must deal with interlocking injustices with an intersectional moral fusion coalition.

And Barber believes the coalition is forming. The Poor Peoples Campaign had to make its planned march on Washington virtual last June because of COVID-19 and 2.7 million people tuned in to join the fight, he says.

But it can't be too long because if we don't get a handle on the issues of systemic racism, systemic poverty, ecological devastation, denial of health care and this false moral narrative of white supremacy and religious nationalism, it will undermine this democracy in ways that may not be able to be fixed, he says. The reconstruction must be now.

Ciku Theuri produced and edited this interview for broadcast withJill Ryan.Allison Haganadapted it for the web.

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Rev. William Barber Calls For Restructuring U.S. Policies To Root Out Racism, Poverty - Here And Now

Author's Opinion:Our country is stricken with a plague ofpolarizationthatsso dangerous its deadly. Here's how to build bridges.

What we need is a revolution.

Youve heard it before from the right, from the left and everything in between. And who am I to say theyre wrong?

In fact, theyre right. Our country is stricken with a plague ofpolarizationthatsso dangerous its deadly.

Now is not the time to go soft, failing to address what truly ails us just for the sake of afalse semblance of civility.

No, that wont get us anywhere. But what I found inwriting a new book aboutAmericans who are spanning gaps between people of differenceis that these bridge builders are pursuing their own unique form of revolution something that looks a lot different than what we're used to.

Nathan Bomey's book, "Bridge Builders: Bringing People Together in a Polarized Age," available in May 21, 2021.(Photo: Polity)

Their revolution is predicated on forming relationships between people who aren't like each other under the premise that we won't overcome our deepest divides until we can see the world through each other's eyes.

Bridge builderssee solutions where the rest of us see problems.And they see nuance where the rest of us see caricature.

Bridge builders are a rare species.And we have a lot to learn from them. But in writing this book, I spent nearly as much time deconstructing myths about the metaphorical process of bridge building than I did on elucidating the lessons bridge builders can teach us.

Here are five misconceptions about the act of bridge building and the role it can play in tearing down the walls that divide us.

The reality is quite the opposite. Bridge building is countercultural. Our cultural instinct is to cling to people who are like us. Its human nature to gravitate toward tribalism.

But its revolutionary to form relationships with people who arent like you. Its revolutionary to engage in deep, meaningful conversation with people who think differently, pray differently or look differently and, on that last point, Im speaking primarily about white people, like me, who often dont get to know people of color.

Valarie Kaur, author of the dynamic book See No Stranger and founder of theRevolutionary Love Project, put it this way: You are a part of me I do not yet know.

Its revolutionary to consider the possibility that your destiny is intertwined with mine or, as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther KingJr.famously put it, We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,tied in a single garment of destiny.

Like it or not, we need each other to achieve progress.

The pursuit of unity is admirable, but achieving it is not necessary to begin bridging our divides.

We will always have conflict, and thats OK. In fact, its necessary.

What we need isto reestablish a degree of social trust in the midst of conflict.That involves demonstrating basic respect for each other as humans.It often means listening first and speaking second.

David Blankenhorn co-founder of the nonprofitBraver Angels, which is teaching Americans of difference how to communicate told me that the goal of his group isnt to get people to agree on policy.

Were not trying to do away with conflict, Blankenhorn said. Most progress would not have occurred without conflict. The only way you get rid of conflict is to get rid of freedom. Free people disagree, often passionately, and thats normal and healthy. The question is, how do you deal with it?

Think of it like this: Friction generates fire. Fire can create, or it can destroy. The goalof bridge buildingis to make sure its a refiners fire, gradually burning away the imperfections of hate, distrust, callousness and distance.

I like the way author Amanda Ripley put it in her new book, High Conflict: We need some heat to survive.

Perhaps youve heard the catchy pop song The Middle.

Oh baby, why don't you just meet me in the middle?! it goes.

Well, with apologies to Zedd, Maren Morris & Grey, I can report that bridge builders dont always meet in the middle.

As it turns out, even real-life bridge builders often dont build their structures from both sides of the divide to meet at a halfway point. In fact, they often use a process called incremental launching, wherein the bridge deck is preassembled offsite and then effectively pushed from one side to the other.

What does that mean for metaphorical bridge building? It means that sometimes one side is right, and the other side is wrong.

Sometimes perhaps most of the time there is no moral equivalence on the issues that divide us. Yet that doesnt mean we should stop trying to build bridges.

Clearly there are exceptions. There is no excuse for hate, and we cannot and must not tolerate it.

But many of our deepest divides fall in the gray middle ground of perspective.Which leads me to my next point.

Former Rep. Bob Inglis talks about climate change with James Eskridge, the Republican mayor of Tangier Island, Virginia, in August 2017.(Photo: Price Atkinson)

There is room for selfishness in the process of bridge building. That is, the ultimate goal is to achieve some form of policy change in many cases. Perhaps you want to achieve progress on climate change, for example.

OK. Well, building bridges with people on the other side of that issue doesnt require you to compromise your identity or your principles.

What it requires, however, is for you to consider the perspective of people on the other side of the fence and to help them see how your proposed solution fits within their values. Sure, maybe in the long run, they might change their personal identity and come over to your side. But the better bet is that they wont change who they are for the sole purpose of yielding to your point of view.

Bob Inglis, a former South Carolina Republican congressman who is now pursuing action on climate change through his nonprofitrepublicEn, is reaching his fellow conservative Christians by speaking their language of accountability and casting biblical principles in a new light. Hes showing how conservatives dont have to change the fiber of their being to embrace the need to do something meaningful about greenhouse gas emissions.

What we need to do is tell people under the tents in my tribe (that)its completely consistent with your values, he said.

Sometimes, the gaps between us seem impossibly wide. It seems like nothing will ever change.

And Americans are worried about it.In a Public Agenda/USA TODAY poll published in April as part of our Hidden Common Ground series, 44% of Americans said the countrys ability to deal with major disagreements over the next decade will get even worse than it already is.

Yet despite our disagreements, as deep as they are, there is plenty of reason to believe that people can and will change. History proves it.

In 2004, only 31% of Americans supported same-sex marriage,according to the Pew Research Center. By 2019, it was 61%.

Let that sink in. Over the course of a decade and a half, the nation's attitude on a contentious social issue changed drastically.

But I thought we were impossibly divided?

Here's the bottom line: People arent static. Even in a culture racked by toxic polarization, Americans are capable of considering the possibility that they could be wrong. They are capable of change.

For my book, I had the privilege of interviewing the Rev. Alvin Edwards, pastor ofMt. Zion First African Baptist Churchin Charlottesville, Virginia. Edwards founded theCharlottesville Clergy Collective, an interfaith group of ministerspursuing racial and religious reconciliation in that community in the wake of thedeadly clash there fueled bywhite nationalism and white supremacy in August 2017.

In spite of everything his community has endured and in spite of all the hate that Black Americans like Edwards have faced he still retains his conviction that others are capable of a turnaround.

No matter what theyve done, what their history, what their past is, I believe they can change, he told me. I have to believe that because, see, the belief that people cannot change means I cannot change.

Nathan Bomeyis a reporter for USA TODAY and the author of anew book, Bridge Builders: Bringing People Together in a Polarized Age, published byPolityand available in hardcover and e-book. You can follow him on Twitter: @NathanBomey

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Opinion: Why we don't need to meet in the middle but we can't allow political polarization to fester unchecked - Times Record News