The possibility of political violence is currently high. I do not write this to sound alarming, but let's look at a few things that have happened in the last week.
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Unless you have maxed out your data plan for June, you are aware that last Thursday was the first night of the Jan 6 Commission’s first televised hearing. If you are looking for highlights or quick hits of what to know about the hearings, the New York Times has a great four takeaways article with more context and information at the end.
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As we've covered before, the "great replacement" theory, or something extremely close to it, has been a near-constant buzz in the news lately. In some form or another, people are talking about and trying to understand this idea that, given the changing demographics in America or due to an influx of immigrants, white Americans are slowly being replaced. Of course, the theory does not stop there because it is not enough to say that BIPOC are replacing white Americans- the American way of life must also be in danger.
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How do you stop another American Civil War? Setting aside the alarmist nature of that question, this discussion is at the heart of Edward Luce's latest article for Financial Times. In his piece, Luce cites three books (How Civil Wars Start, This Will Not Pass, and The Next Civil War) to trace how another war between Americans might happen and what can be done to stop it.
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This week, the Big Lie is back in the news, but don’t worry; it’s still not true. Of course, you are not likely to hear Dinesh D’Souza, the man behind the new “documentary” 2000 Mules, about how the 2020 election was stolen, or Lee Roy Mitchell, the founder of Cinemark and promoter of both Donald Trump and the Big Lie, admit that the Big Lie is just a lie. They have tickets to sell, and revealing their documentary is fraudulent would go against that goal.
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In the wake of Buffalo's white supremacist terrorist shooting, you have likely heard the two phrases "lone wolf" and "Replacement Theory" ad nauseam. The reasons for this are relatively simple: 18-year-old Payton Gendron, the gunman, believes the Replacement Theory, no longer a fringe conspiracy, is true. "Lone wolf" is being used because it is easier to think that Gendron acted alone than to admit that we do not live in a vacuum and our actions, intentional or not, have consequences.
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What happens when you prime a group of people to believe that every four years is the most crucial election in history, and if the right party does not win the presidency, wickedness will reign? Writing for The Atlantic, Tim Alberta chronicles the seismic shift undergoing in the American Evangelicalism Church as a result of this kind of thinking. As we have covered before, Tim points out that Evangelicalism is becoming a political identity. And as a result, America's pastors have become more political.
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Last week we asked how new is the New Right thanks to Vanity Fair’s exposé on the movement. This week the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent interviews David French and French pokes holes in the metanarrative the New Right uses to stir up their base. David French is a “conservative Christian writer and First Amendment lawyer.” French is also no friend to the New Right, “arguing that they betray classically liberal principles and liberal democratic constitutionalism.”
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Who is the New Right? That is the question at the heart of James Pogue's engrossing and somewhat disturbing story for Vanity Fair. To answer this question, Pogue covers the influence Peter Thiel has on this budding group of "rich crypto bros and tech executives to back-to-the-landers to disaffected members of the American intellectual class."
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Ryan Sanders has a thought-provoking piece for the Dallas Morning News on the need for Conservative Christians to tell better stories. Sanders traces many who have told powerful stories that have compelled people to better action or helped people to marvel at beauty, writers like Faulkner and Victor Hugo. And, of course, Sanders points out that one of the many things that made Jesus so compelling to people was Jesus’ ability to tell a good, powerful story.
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Jonathan Haidt has a worthwhile longform article for The Atlantic about why American life has become increasingly “uniquely stupid.” In short, social media is to blame. Haidt traces all the ways he believes that social media is what ails us. In particular, he points out that the "Retweet" and "Share" functions on Twitter and Facebook, respectively, have become like darts we lob at each other's brains until we have become dumber and dumber.
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Donald Moynihan reports for The Washington Post that QAnon catchphrases were all over the recent hearings for the nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson. Q may have been wrong about the 2020 election, but that has not stopped its power.
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Bob Woodward and Robert Costa of the Washington Post dropped a bomb on the political world this past week. If you have not been keeping up, that bomb is that Virginia "Ginni" Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, was texting the Trump White House Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, in the days after the 2020 election. Her texts show that Ginni had not just bought into absolutely deranged conspiracies about how Trump had won the election; Ginni Thomas encouraged Meadows to take these ideas seriously.
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At the root of any contrarian idea is to take a specific view or action because the wrong kind of people say to do the opposite.
Writing for The Atlantic, David French argues that a small but loud wing of the GOP has been overrun by contrarianism. Contrarianism is why only 57% percent of Republicans, compared to 76% of Democrats, believe we should be on the side of Ukraine after the Russian invasion. It’s why only 56% of Republicans are vaccinated, compared to 92% of Democrats.
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The culture wars are deepening, and Axios-Ipsos has a new poll out with a mildly shocking reason for why: it's the media. The poll points out that two years ago, in March of 2020, roughly 9 out of 10 people said they trusted the CDC. It did not matter if these people got their news from Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, network news, or other outlets. A majority of Americans still believed the CDC to be trustworthy.
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Megan Garber has a recent piece for The Atlantic, “The Great Fracturing of American Attention,” where she notes the current work on the importance of attention. In particular, Garber talks about resisting distraction and choosing what we give our attention to and for how long political acts are. Especially in a post-Trump political world.
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Maya Angelou reminds us, “When someone shows you who they are, believe the first time.” So how many times is enough before we can believe that the far-Right are who they say? Have we reached the point where we are willing to accept that the far-Right would prefer the rule of an autocrat who might serve their interests over actual liberty and justice for all people?
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Birds of a feather flock together. That’s how I would summarize the latest report from John Burnett at NPR on the Big Sort happening among Americans along political lines. Like the saying, Americans are flocking to cities or states that align more with their politics than where they currently live. Conservatives from liberal places like California are moving to more conservative states like Texas, Tennessee, or Idaho. Meanwhile, liberals living in more conservative states are moving to more liberal cities like Austin, Texas.
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Threats of violence to elected officials, often involving death threats, are on the rise. This was highlighted by two news reports this week.
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