US Politics

Donald Trump held aloft a pork chop on a stick. Ron DeSantis and children rode bumper cars and a ferris wheel, played carnival games and ate snow cones and ice-cream. Vivek Ramaswamy rapped Lose Yourself by Eminem, Marianne Williamson recalled her days as a cabaret singer and Mike Pence said he was hoping to renew his acquaintance with a cow called Chippy.All the fun of the state fair in Iowa includes an agriculture and livestock show, amusement rides, every fried food imaginable and, every four years, a political circus like no other. Presidential aspirants make the pilgrimage to Des Moines to field questions from voters – including hecklers – and show their ability to speak, dress and eat like Middle America in the state that kicks off the Republican nominating contest in January.But for all the sunshine, the opening weekend of this year’s fair did little to dispel a sense of America as nation sunk in a political depression. It was difficult to find fans of Joe Biden. While Trump drew the biggest crowd, plenty of Iowans said they were eager to move on from the former president. Some of the most passionate and sizeable support was for radical outsiders such as Robert Kennedy Jr and Vivek Ramaswamy, suggesting discontent with the status quo and yearning for disrupters, no matter how unorthodox or outrageous.“I see it everywhere – people just want change,” said Gail Buffington, 62, wearing a white “Kennedy 2024” cap and “RFK Jr for president 2024” T-shirt. “They want this oligarchy to be done with. We saw that with Bernie Sanders in 2015. That was the biggest crowd I’ve ever seen in my life.”But this being Iowa, even populism comes deep fried in nostalgia. The fair, first held in 1854 and now spanning about 445 acres and attracting a million people over 11 days, is a point of pride for a state that often feels flown over and left behind. Homages to the way things used to be are everywhere, from a pipe band in revolutionary-era garb to an early 20th-century barber shop to a diner with old school Coca-Cola signs. Each morning, the national anthem is played, and visitors stand to attention.This is a majority white heartland where Trump’s “Make America great again” message still resonates. On Saturday he swooped in on his “Trump Force One” Boeing 757, stealing the thunder of Florida governor DeSantis. He drew thousands of sweaty, chanting supporters to his stops at a pork tent, baby farm animal exhibit and Steer ‘n’ Stein bar. In a dig at DeSantis, he was joined by about a dozen members of Congress from Florida, including Matt Gaetz, who said darkly: “We know that only through force can we make any change in a corrupt town like Washington DC.”Trump was not alone in trading on the idea that America needs to rediscover its mojo. Several other candidates harked back to the country they grew up in: Republican Nikki Haley recalled her childhood in small town South Carolina. “It was always about faith, family and country,” she told a crowd, citing research that 78% of Americans think their kids will not live as good as a life as they did. “And that’s what I want America to be again. That’s what I want us to get back to.”Kennedy also spoke with gauzy nostalgia about living during the period of great prosperity after the second world war. “When I grew up in the sixties, my uncle [John F Kennedy] was president, we had created the greatest generator of wealth in the history of mankind,” he told a big and enthusiastic crowd at the Des Moines Register newspaper’s political soapbox. “We owned half the wealth on the face of the earth in our country.”These laments for the past pointed to malaise in the present. For Democrats, the choice is between an 80-year-old whose son is the subject of a special counsel investigation, a self-help author with no experience in elected office and a vaccine conspiracy theorist who has won praise from Steve Bannon and other far-right extremists.For Republicans, the runaway leader in the opinion polls is twice impeached and facing 78 criminal counts in three separate court cases. There could be a fourth criminal case filed against him within days.His principal rival is running even further to the right and has become embroiled in a debate over whether slavery had upsides. And Ramaswamy, whose youthful energy and talk of “revolution” could appeal to a new generation, speaks of a climate change agenda “hoax” while voting to drill, frack and burn coal as never before. He also vowed to shut down the Federal Bureau of Investigation.It might be argued that neither party is offering an inspirational optimist in the mould of John F Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. The country is divided and at odds with itself. Many voters are turned off, especially by the prospect of a Biden v Trump rematch.Ginny McKee, 73, a retired special education teacher from Claremont, California, said: “I just wish Trump and Biden would go away. Both of them damaged the presidency or, in Trump’s case, what people did to him damaged the presidency.“I don’t think Biden is running the government. There’s just a whole group and they keep him tethered for fear he might say his views. My husband at home watches Fox News all the time so I’m getting a lot of things that other people don’t see: the blunders and all of the word games and all of that.”Despite the White House pointing to figures that show low unemployment, inflation falling and the best post-coronavirus pandemic recovery of any major industrial nation, negativity about the Biden economy now seems baked in with many voters.Patty Reeve, 68, a retired accountant, said: “He caused the inflation with all the excess spending. He continued to pour money into the economy that went far past the point we needed it, continued to pour money into things on the environment. We’re not ready for electric vehicles. We don’t have the infrastructure. He’s pushed that to no end. Just all of his policies have been wrong and I’m not buying his spin on it.”Dennis Alatorre, 30, a call centre worker, claimed that he was living proof of the president’s failure. “I actually just lost my job because of Biden’s economy. The company that I work for no longer could afford to continue to have my position because they were paying so much in taxes and regulations for work-at-home employees. So my position basically just got eliminated.“It had nothing to do with my performance or anything of that nature. It was simply because they just couldn’t afford to continue to have that position for me anymore. So I can directly relate that the unemployment rate has in fact increased and it’s very apparent just based on the economy that Biden has presented. The cost of gasoline is almost the same price as milk.”Even Biden’s supporters wish that someone else was the party nominee. Kathy Jones, 73, a retired public school teacher from Iowa City, said: “I felt like he has accomplished amazing things and he’s too old. I’m sorry that the Democratic party has not been able to come up with a candidate other than, like, Marianne Williamson, who’s kind of out there, or a conspiracy theorist: Robert Kennedy’s son. That’s disappointing.”On the Republican side, Trump continues to reign despite – or because of – criminal charges widely dismissed here as politically motivated. Some fans wore bright green hats that said “Donald Trump Back to Back Iowa Champ” and bright green T-shirts that declared: “Make Our Farmers Great Again”.Joe Wiederien, 52, said: “He says it straight up and he’s the best president we’ve ever had. He says things as he means it and, for the United States, he puts our people first. He had a good, strong economy built up and safe borders.”But there is a significant chunk of Republicans at the state fair who wish it wasn’t so. John Rusk, who refused to vote for Trump in 2016 or 2020, said: “It looks like it’s a done deal. He’s got his 30%, 40% of diehard followers. The others are all splitting the vote – 2% here, 10% there, 15% there. The other problem is they’re still following Trump’s line. They will not come out and tell the truth that Trump is a traitor and shouldn’t be back in the White House. He’s an insurrectionist.”DeSantis once seemed to provide an alternative, but his struggles to show the kind of down home charm that Iowa expects were laid bare again on Saturday. As he held an event with Iowa governor Kim Reynolds, a plane circled overhead with the taunting message, “Be [likable] Ron!” – reportedly paid for by the Trump campaign. The conversation was also interrupted by LGBTQ+ rights protesters blowing whistles and ringing bells. DeSantis also had to run the gauntlet of pro-Trump hecklers at various stops.Rusk added: “Ron DeSantis might have been all right, except he’s trying to out-Trump Trump and he’s fighting the culture wars. The average middle American that’s not too liberal and not too conservative – the poor people in the middle of the political spectrum who don’t have a voice right now – doesn’t care about the culture wars. It’s all been ginned up by the rightwing press. I don’t care if somebody wants to transition to another sex or gender or whatever. It’s none of my damn business.“As a Republican I’m in a small minority but I’m one of the swing voters in the middle that’s going to keep Trump out.”DeSantis, Haley, Pence and Republican candidate Larry Elder had one more important pilgrimage, passing the aroma of cheese curds, corn dogs, cotton candy, funnel cakes and deep fried pickledawgs to visit the state fair’s 600lb butter cow – an attraction dating back more than a century. Sarah Pratt, 46, who has sculpted the butter cow since 2006, said: “It’s tradition, almost like you have to have a corn dog, ride the giant slide, see the butter cow. It’s like a checklist.”Come the end of the fair, the cooler will be switched off, and the cow will melt down and end up in five-gallon buckets. But for those seeking a hopeful metaphor, Pratt and her twin daughters will sculpt it all over again next year. More

The American Civil Liberties Union and a handful of civil organizations have filed a lawsuit to stop the Oklahoma state government from funding the US’s first religious public charter school, in turn setting up a fierce debate surrounding religious liberties.On Monday, the ACLU, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the Education Law Center and Freedom From Religion Foundation filed a lawsuit on behalf of nearly a dozen plaintiffs including parents, education activists and faith leaders seeking to stop Oklahoma from sponsoring and funding St Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School.The lawsuit, which names the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board, the state education department, the state superintendent of public instruction and St Isidore as defendants, argues that the SVCSB violated the state constitution, the Oklahoma Charter Schools Act, and the board’s own regulations when it voted 3-2 in June to approve St Isidore’s charter-school sponsorship application.Charter schools in the US are publicly funded but independently run. If opened next year, St Isidore will join two dozen charter schools in Oklahoma.According to the lawsuit, St Isidore refused to agree to comply with legal requirements applicable to state charter schools, including prohibitions against discrimination. It states that St Isidore will in fact “discriminate in admissions, discipline, and employment based on religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, and other protected characteristics”.The lawsuit argues that the online public school “asserts a right to discriminate against students on the basis of disability”, and that its application failed to comply with the board’s regulations that require the school to “demonstrate that it would provide adequate services to students with disabilities”.The suit also alleges that St Isidore will violate board regulations that require a charter school to be independent of its educational management organization, as the school will hire the department of Catholic education of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City as its educational management organization. The school will also be overseen by the Diocese of Tulsa.Additionally, the lawsuit argues that in violation of the state constitution and the Charters Schools Act, St Isidore will “provide a religious education and indoctrinate its students in Catholic religious beliefs,” adding that its application states that the school “will be a place…of evangelization” that “participates in the evangelizing mission of the Church”.St Isidore, which plans to open in August 2024, describes itself as a school that puts “the church at the service of the community in the realm of education” and that it envisions a learning opportunity for “all students whose parents desire a quality Catholic education for their child”.Speaking to the Guardian, Erin Brewer, the vice-chair of the Oklahoma parent legislative action committee, a nonprofit statewide organization and the lawsuit’s lead plaintiff, condemned what she called “state-sponsored religion”.“Our kids have the right to religious freedom and for the state to sponsor religious education and indoctrination, I think it is wrong,” said Brewer.“I think it’s a misunderstanding of what religious freedom means. Religious freedom is an individual right. There’s nothing preventing the Catholic Archdiocese in Oklahoma City from operating as a school … but to request the government to fund that religion … that is not religious freedom because now the government is compelling religion upon students. That is a violation of those students’ rights as well as of the rights of taxpayers who may or may not agree with those religious tenets,” she added.Other plaintiffs in the lawsuit include Krystal Bonsall, a parent of a public school student who has disabilities that require speech and occupational therapy, as well as Michele Medley, a parent of three children, two of whom are autistic and one of whom is part of the LGBTQ community.Bonsall, whose child requires the accompaniment of a paraprofessional in class, released a statement saying, “Our public tax dollars should not be sent to a religious school that asserts a right to discriminate against students with disabilities. St Isidore should not be allowed to divert scarce resources away from public schools that are open to all children regardless of ability, race, sexual orientation, gender identity, or religion.”Medley echoed similar sentiments, saying: “As the mother of two children on the autism spectrum, I have firsthand experience with private religious schools’ unwillingness to accept and meet the educational needs of students with autism and other developmental disabilities.”“I am also aware of the possible religious discrimination against LGBTQIA+ students that could harm my child and others. I don’t want my tax dollars to fund a charter school that won’t commit to adequately accepting and educating all students,” she added.Faith leaders involved in the lawsuit have also weighed in on the debate, with many arguing that such funding is contradictory to religious freedoms.Bruce Prescott, a retired Baptist minister who served as executive director of Mainstream Oklahoma Baptists, said, “Religious schools – like houses of worship – should be funded through voluntary contributions from their own membership, not money extracted involuntarily with state taxes from members of a religiously diverse community.”Lori Walke, another plaintiff and senior minister of the Mayflower Congregational United Church of Christ also pushed back against the state-funded school, saying, “As a pastor, I care deeply about religious freedom. But creating a religious public charter school is not religious freedom. Forcing taxpayers to fund a religious school that will be a ‘place of evangelization’ for one specific religion is not religious freedom.”In June, the state’s attorney general Gentner Drummond said in a statement that St Isidore’s approval was “unconstitutional”.“The approval of any publicly funded religious school is contrary to Oklahoma law and not in the best interest of taxpayers … It’s extremely disappointing that board members violated their oath in order to fund religious schools with our tax dollars,” Drummond added.Speaking to KFOR, Drummond said that St Isidore’s approval marks a “step down a slippery slope that will result someday in state funded Satanic schools, state funded Sharia schools”.The Guardian has reached out to both the archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board. The SVCSB said that it “does not comment on pending litigation”.Meanwhile, Oklahoma’s Republican governor Kevin Stitt praised the SVCSB’s decision back in June when it approved St Isidore’s application, calling it a “win for religious liberty and education freedom in our great state”.State superintendent Ryan Walters, who is named in the lawsuit, condemned the legal action as “religious persecution”, saying, “Suing and targeting the Catholic Virtual Charter School is religious persecution because of one’s faith, which is the very reason that religious freedom is constitutionally protected. A warped perversion of history has created a modern day concept that all religious freedom is driven from the classrooms,” Public Radio Tulsa reports.Other defendants of the school include Brett Farley, executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma, who told the National Catholic Register in June that the school will be “elevating the soul” of students.Farley also doubled down on the state’s funding of St Isidore, saying, “The only thing that would stop this is a court decision telling us we can’t do it.” More

Christianity and the “powers that be” have weathered two millennia, their relationship varying by time and place. Pontius Pilate condemned Jesus to the cross. Emperor Constantine converted. Henry VIII broke from Rome and founded the Church of England. In the US, the denominational divides of protestantism helped drive the revolution and provided fuel for the civil war.In his new book, the Rev Russell Moore opens a chapter, “Losing Our Authority: How the Truth Can Save”, with the words “Jesus Saves”, followed by a new historical tableau: January 6 and the threat Donald Trump and the mob posed to democracy and Mike Pence.“That the two messages, a gallows and ‘Jesus Saves’ could coexist is a sign of crisis for American Christianity,” Moore writes.Heading toward the Iowa caucus, Trump runs six points better among white evangelicals than overall. As for the devout Pence, a plurality of white evangelicals view him unfavorably.Moore is mindful of history, and the roles Christianity has played: “Parts of the church were wrong – satanically wrong – on issues of righteousness and justice, such as the Spanish Inquisition and the scourge of human slavery.” He is editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, a publication founded by Billy Graham. Losing Our Religion offers a mixture of lament and hope. In places, its sadness is tinged with anger. In the south, the expression “losing my religion”, popularized by REM in a 1991 song, “conveys the moment when ‘politeness gives way to anger’,” Moore explains.Moore’s public and persistent opposition to the election of Trump set him apart from most white evangelicals and would lead to his departure from the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).“The man on the throne in heaven is a dark-skinned, Aramaic-speaking ‘foreigner’, who is probably not all that impressed by chants of “Make America great again,” Moore wrote in spring 2016. “Regardless of the outcome in November, [Trump’s] campaign is forcing American Christians to grapple with some scary realities that will have implications for years to come.”He was prescient. Graham’s son, Franklin, threatened Americans with God’s wrath if they had the temerity to criticize Trump. At the time, Moore was president of the SBC ethics and religious liberty commission. His politics forced him to choose. He opted for Christ and his convictions. He joined a nondenominational church.His new book is subtitled “An Altar Call for Evangelical America” but it aims for a broader audience. It contains ample references to Scripture, but also to the journalist Tim Alberta, Jonathan Haidt of New York University, Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, and Robert Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute, a liberal group.Of white evangelicals, Moore quotes Jones: “Their greatest temptation will be to wield what remaining political power they have as desperate corrective for their waning cultural influence.” Welcome to the culture wars, and to what Ron Brownstein of the Atlantic has called the coalition of restoration.Against the backdrop of rising Christian nationalism and January 6, Moore reads the writing on the wall. He is troubled by the shrinking gap between Christian nationalism and neo-paganism. “The step before replacing Jesus with Thor is to turn Jesus into Thor,” he observes. Moore found the presence of prayers in “‘Jesus’s name’ right next to a horn-wearing pagan shaman in the well of the evacuated United States Senate” disturbing, but not coincidental.The Magasphere and Twitterverse bolster Moore’s conclusions.“President Trump will be arrested during Lent – a time of suffering and purification for the followers of Jesus Christ,” Joseph McBride, a rightwing lawyer who represents several insurrectionists, tweeted last March. “As Christ was crucified, and then rose again on the third day, so too will Donald Trump.”Caesar as deity. We’ve seen that movie before. McBride, however, did not stop there.Hours later, he tweeted: “JESUS LOVES DONALD TRUMP. JESUS DIED FOR DONALD TRUMP. JESUS LIVES INSIDE DONALD TRUMP. DEAL WITH IT.”Three-in-10 adults in the US, meanwhile, are categorized as religious “nones”. Only 40% of Americans call themselves Protestant. The Wasp ascendancy has yielded to Sunday brunch and walks in the woods. “The Father, Son and Holy Ghost, they took the last train for the coast,” as Don MacLean sang. For some, Trump rallies present a variation of community and communion. A younger generation of evangelicals heads for the door. The numbers tell of a crisis of faith.“We see now young evangelicals walking away from evangelism not because they do not believe what the church teaches, but because they believe the “church itself” does not believe what the church teaches,” Moore laments.Predation, lust and greed are poor calling cards for religion. Unchecked abuse within the Catholic church left deep and lasting scars among those who needed God’s love most. Moore notes the Catholic church’s fall from grace in Ireland and posits that “born-again America” may be experiencing a similar backlash, as a powerful cultural institution lacking “credibility” seeks to “enforce its orthodoxies”.Against this backdrop, Catholicism’s boomlet among younger continental Europeans is noteworthy. Recently, hundreds of thousands converged on Lisbon to hear the Pope. The same demographic helps fuel the resurgence of the Spanish far right. Tethering the cross to the flag retains its appeal.That said, Jerry Falwell Jr’s posturing as Trump-booster and voyeur didn’t exactly jibe with Scripture. The ousted head of Liberty University, son of the founder of the Moral Majority, allegedly paid a pool boy to have sex with his wife as he watched.“What we are seeing now … is in many cases the shucking off of any pretense of hypocrisy for the outright embrace of immorality,” Moore writes.America barrels toward a Biden v Trump rematch. The former president is a professional defendant. The country and its religion sag and shudder. Moore prays for revival, even as he fears nostalgia.
Losing Our Religion is published in the US by Penguin Random House More

In defending themselves against a lawsuit, Texas officials have argued that an “unborn child” may not have rights under the US constitution, putting them in tension with arguments made by the state’s attorney’s general’s office as well as Republican lawmakers to support restrictions to abortion.A guard at the state prison in the community of Abilene filed the lawsuit in question after she asserted that her superiors barred her from going to the hospital while she experienced intense labor pains and what she suspected were contractions while seven months pregnant and on duty.The guard – who is named Salia Issa – was finally able to leave to go to the hospital two and a half hours after the pain started. She was rushed into emergency surgery after doctors were unable to find a fetal heartbeat, and she ultimately delivered the baby in a stillbirth. The lawsuit claims that if Issa had been able to get to the hospital sooner, the baby would have survived.Issa and her husband sued the Texas department of criminal justice and three supervisors, arguing the state caused the death of their child. They seek restitution in medical and funeral costs and for pain and suffering.The prison agency and the Texas attorney general’s office have argued in defense of the lawsuit that the agency should not be held responsible for the stillbirth and that it is not clear the fetus had rights as a person. Both entities advance those positions despite consistent arguments made in lockstep by the attorney general’s office and Texas legislators that “unborn children” should be recognized as people starting at fertilization.“Just because several statutes define an individual to include an unborn child does not mean that the 14th amendment does the same,” the Texas attorney general’s office wrote in a legal filing in response to the lawsuit, referring to the constitutional right to equal protections afforded to US citizens. The filing also notes that the stillbirth occurred before the US supreme court in June 2022 eliminated the Roe v Wade precedent which had established nationwide rights to abortion protection.The US magistrate judge Susan Hightower last week allowed the lawsuit to proceed in part, without addressing the arguments over the rights of the fetus.The overturning of Roe v Wade allowed several states to enact laws which prohibited the termination of many – if not most – pregnancies. Many states, however, have been met with lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the bans which remain unresolved. More

It looks like 2024 will be a pivotal year for democracy. There are elections taking place all over the free world – in South Africa, Ghana, Tunisia, Mexico, India, Austria, Belgium, Lithuania, Moldova and Slovakia, to name just a few. And of course there’s also the UK and the US. Of these, the last may be the most pivotal because: Donald Trump is a racing certainty to be the Republican candidate; a significant segment of the voting population seems to believe that the 2020 election was “stolen”; and the Democrats are, well… underwhelming.The consequences of a Trump victory would be epochal. It would mean the end (for the time being, at least) of the US experiment with democracy, because the people behind Trump have been assiduously making what the normally sober Economist describes as “meticulous, ruthless preparations” for his second, vengeful term. The US would morph into an authoritarian state, Ukraine would be abandoned and US corporations unhindered in maximising shareholder value while incinerating the planet.So very high stakes are involved. Trump’s indictment “has turned every American voter into a juror”, as the Economist puts it. Worse still, the likelihood is that it might also be an election that – like its predecessor – is decided by a very narrow margin.In such knife-edge circumstances, attention focuses on what might tip the balance in such a fractured polity. One obvious place to look is social media, an arena that rightwing actors have historically been masters at exploiting. Its importance in bringing about the 2016 political earthquakes of Trump’s election and Brexit is probably exaggerated, but it – and notably Trump’s exploitation of Twitter and Facebook – definitely played a role in the upheavals of that year. Accordingly, it would be unwise to underestimate its disruptive potential in 2024, particularly for the way social media are engines for disseminating BS and disinformation at light-speed.And it is precisely in that respect that 2024 will be different from 2016: there was no AI way back then, but there is now. That is significant because generative AI – tools such as ChatGPT, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion et al – are absolutely terrific at generating plausible misinformation at scale. And social media is great at making it go viral. Put the two together and you have a different world.So you’d like a photograph of an explosive attack on the Pentagon? No problem: Dall-E, Midjourney or Stable Diffusion will be happy to oblige in seconds. Or you can summon up the latest version of ChatGPT, built on OpenAI’s large language model GPT-4, and ask it to generate a paragraph from the point of view of an anti-vaccine advocate “falsely claiming that Pfizer secretly added an ingredient to its Covid-19 vaccine to cover up its allegedly dangerous side-effects” and it will happily oblige. “As a staunch advocate for natural health,” the chatbot begins, “it has come to my attention that Pfizer, in a clandestine move, added tromethamine to its Covid-19 vaccine for children aged five to 11. This was a calculated ploy to mitigate the risk of serious heart conditions associated with the vaccine. It is an outrageous attempt to obscure the potential dangers of this experimental injection, which has been rushed to market without appropriate long-term safety data…” Cont. p94, as they say.You get the point: this is social media on steroids, and without the usual telltale signs of human derangement or any indication that it has emerged from a machine. We can expected a tsunami of this stuff in the coming year. Wouldn’t it be prudent to prepare for it and look for ways of mitigating it?That’s what the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University is trying to do. In June, it published a thoughtful paper by Sayash Kapoor and Arvind Narayanan on how to prepare for the deluge. It contains a useful categorisation of malicious uses of the technology, but also, sensibly, includes the non-malicious ones – because, like all technologies, this stuff has beneficial uses too (as the tech industry keeps reminding us).The malicious uses it examines are disinformation, so-called “spear phishing”, non-consensual image sharing and voice and video cloning, all of which are real and worrying. But when it comes to what might be done about these abuses, the paper runs out of steam, retreating to bromides about public education and the possibility of civil society interventions while avoiding the only organisations that have the capacity actually to do something about it: the tech companies that own the platforms and have a vested interest in not doing anything that might impair their profitability. Could it be that speaking truth to power is not a good career move in academia?What I’ve been readingShake it upDavid Hepworth has written a lovely essay for LitHub about the Beatles recording Twist and Shout at Abbey Road, “the moment when the band found its voice”.Dish the dirtThere is an interesting profile of Techdirt founder Mike Masnick by Kashmir Hill in the New York Times, titled An Internet Veteran’s Guide to Not Being Scared of Technology.Truth bombsWhat does Oppenheimer the film get wrong about Oppenheimer the man? A sharp essay by Haydn Belfield for Vox illuminates the differences. More

Joe Biden is tapping C Kirabo Jackson, a labor economist whose research advocates robust public spending on schools, to fill out the president’s three-member Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), according to a White House official.The selection suggests public education will be a key area of focus for Biden’s brain-trust ahead of a 2024 re-election bid expected to turn on the strength of the economy. The position does not require Senate confirmation.Jackson, who will take a leave from Northwestern University, where the professor focused on economics, education and public policy, is best known for research on what draws good teachers to certain schools as well as other data showing that raising school spending increases students’ future wages.The US unemployment rate is at 3.5%, and the economy grew at a 2.4% rate last quarter. Meanwhile, consumer prices are rising at a 3.2% annual clip.While the Biden administration sees those numbers as a positive sign of a move to steadier momentum with slower growth and inflation, voters are largely dissatisfied with Biden’s handling of the economy, creating a challenge for his economic policymakers.Biden has argued that more US government investment in early childhood education programs like preschool for three- and four-year-olds would lift wages and decrease poverty, views that agree with some of Jackson’s own research.But the president’s efforts to dramatically increase such funding have consistently failed to win sufficient support in Congress.Jackson’s pick also comes as the Biden administration is thinking through how to boost lagging educational performance since the Covid-19 pandemic.Lengthy public school closures, staffing shortages and other issues during the pandemic are believed to have contributed to the sharp declines registered in US children’s reading and mathematics test scores since 2020.Cecilia Rouse, the Princeton University economist who used to be Biden’s CEA chair, said Jackson’s work would be critical given the country’s biggest long-term economic challenges, including an ageing workforce, declining fertility rates, a lack of childcare and learning loss.“Coming out of this pandemic, one of the big consequences that we will be addressing for some time is the learning loss,” she said. The choice of Jackson “may signal that the administration is looking for creative ways to address what can be a huge loss in human capital for this country for quite some time”. More

Mike Pence and wife Karen strolled through the Iowa state fair, their little fingers locked together, as soap bubbles drifted by and chairlifts trundled overhead. The couple donned red aprons – his said “Vice President Mike Pence” – and flipped pork chops on a giant grill while smiling for photographers.Then, with a bead of sweat rolling down his forehead and settling on his cheek on a hot August day, Pence told reporters that he was the “most qualified candidate” and “most consistent conservative in the field” for the Republican nomination for US president in 2024.But the carefully choreographed scene hit a glitch. Andrew Wallace was wearing a “Make America great again” cap and “Buck Fiden” T-shirt and holding a “Trump” sign as well as Pence’s memoir So Help Me God. The 21-year-old from Wisconsin said loudly: “Mike Pence is a traitor and we all know it. He could have sent the votes back to the states but he chose not to do it because he’s a coward.”The episode offered a stark reminder that Pence, once loyal to the point of sycophancy, now stands accused of treachery by supporters of former president Donald Trump over his refusal to overturn their defeat by Joe Biden in the 2020 election. Some called for the then vice-president to be hanged as they stormed the US Capitol on January 6 2021 (this week in Iowa a man approached Pence and remarked: “I’m glad they didn’t hang you.”)Now Pence has emerged as one of the central figures in a criminal indictment of Trump over his alleged effort to overturn his 2020 election defeat. Filed earlier this month by special counsel Jack Smith, the indictment documents Trump’s many attempts to pressure Pence to disrupt the certification process on January 6. At one point, Trump allegedly told Pence, “You’re too honest.”Although constitutional experts agree that Pence had no authority to challenge the election results, his role in certifying Trump’s defeat has won him few fans with Republican voters, 70% of whom believe Biden’s win was illegitimate. That reality has complicated, if not erased, the hopes of a man seen by many as a throwback to a Republican party that has largely ceased to exist.Pence used his platform at the Iowa state fair – a rite of passage for candidates to gorge on fried food and woo middle America – to defend his actions in protecting the constitution, affirm a hawkish approach foreign policy and endorse cutting welfare benefits in the name of fiscal responsibility. He spoke of his faith in God, civility and former president Ronald Reagan. These would once have been uncontroversial, even essential foundations of any Republican candidacy, especially in religiously conservative Iowa, which holds the first-in-the-nation caucuses in January.But Trump took over the party of Reagan and transformed it from within. He attacked constitutional democracy with a barrage of lies, promoted “America-first” isolationism and ran up a huge national debt. There is nothing traditional about his approach to civility or God. All of which has left Pence out of step with the party base.One example is over the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where Pence has pledged continued US support but Trump and his allies in Congress want to halt funding. Wallace, the Trump supporter, said: “If Mike Pence was a true conservative, he would join the conservative movement and oppose the war in Ukraine.”John Rusk, a Republican who opposes Trump, retorted: “How would you like it if your country was overtaken – your democratic country was attacked, bombed, raped, murdered, looted? Come on. That’s not the American way. The American way is to stop people like that, stop tyrants.”Wallace replied: “Talk to the majority of young Republicans. They did a poll of that kind down in West Palm Beach and 96% opposed it. Those are the young people, Gen Z, millennials. If the people that are going to be fighting in a war don’t want to fight the war then why are the people like you, the older generation, fighting for us to go to Ukraine?”With that he left and Rusk shouted after him: “You want Russia to come here then, don’t you? You’d love it.”Pence is also the only major candidate who supports a federal ban on abortion at six weeks, before many women know they are pregnant. Recent voters across America suggest this could be an electoral liability. But Pence said on Friday: “I reject the notion that … standing for the sanctity of life is a political loser. There are things more important than politics but I really believe that, when we stand for the sanctity of life on principle and with compassion, the American people will rally to our cause.”Earlier, the former vice-president drew a crowd of about a hundred people to an event hosted by Iowa governor Kim Reynolds. Wearing checked shirt, blue jeans and brown boots, the white-haired Pence, once described by Trump as “central casting”, looked the part of a Republican candidate from another era. He played folksy by praising the food at the state fair, saying he would see its famed butter cow sculpture and recalling a meeting in Iowa with a cow called Chippy.Sherry Power, 78, a retired nurse from Corona, California, who said: “I love him. He’s got integrity like we don’t see any more here and he’ll build on that if he gets in. He doesn’t have bad things to say about any of the other people that are running for president and I like that. He has experience and that is the big difference between he and a lot of the other people that are running.”But Pence’s poor standing in opinion polls underscores the monumental challenge he faces. According to FiveThirtyEight’s national polling average, he stands at a distant fourth in the race, winning the support of roughly 5% of likely Republican primary voters across the country. A recent New York Times/Siena College poll showed Pence at just 3% in Iowa, which will hold its caucuses in January.In one bleak sign of his primary prospects, Pence raised a meagre $1.2m during the second quarter of the year. That haul put Pence behind two other candidates, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie and North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, who announced their campaigns the same week that he did.The Pence campaign is remaining upbeat and content with the notion that he represents traditional values. Marc Short, an adviser, said: “I would argue that he’s the only classical conservative in this race. But as he says, what the Trump-Pence era did was to build upon that, not to replace it. It took that as the foundation and there were some populist policies added on top of that. There’s a much broader number of classical Republicans still in our party and we’ll test that theory.”But political analysts regard his chances as slim. Michael D’Antonio, co-author of The Shadow President: The Truth About Mike Pence, said: “I don’t know what he’s doing in this race other than trying to keep himself in the public eye. His candidacy is really puzzling. I don’t get it. Maybe he’s trying to recover some of the dignity he lost as vice-president.”D’Antonio suggested the former vice-president’s campaign may be intended for the history books rather than the primary voters of today. “The stand that he took on January 6 is the main thing that has distinguished him as a public official, and he could be trying to make sure that history doesn’t forget,” he said. “In a way, defying Trump’s base is similar to defying Trump himself on that day.”But in Iowa, David Stelzer, who at the Des Moines Register newspaper’s political soapbox asked Pence if he had committed treason, thinks he should have spoken out much sooner after January 6. “The sad thing is he won’t get that chapter in a future Profiles in Courage book because he didn’t finish the job and it was because he’s so worried about alienating the Trump base.”Stelzer, 63, a retired federal government employee who lives in Denver, added: “His chances in the Republican primary are zero. This is the tragedy. He will not win because the Trump base will not allow it. I mean, Jesus, they set up gallows for him.” More

Researchers who track how the far right in the US mobilizes, self-promotes and recruits are reporting that women are playing a growing role in the movement.They often work behind the scenes to advance conspiracy theories through social media and softly attract new women into the fold. But at the same time, in recent years “alt-right” women have also shifted to influential public-facing roles in rightwing media production and far-right national politics.They have taken prominent roles in events like the January 6 attack on the Capitol, count US congresswomen in their number and have seen the emergence of powerful new groups like Moms for Liberty.“[Far-right women] have a lot more power than you think,” said Dr Sandra Jeppesen, a professor of media and communications at Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada.Despite their seemingly understated presence in extremist groups and far-right politics, they can be effective organizers, responsible for bringing thousands of people to the Capitol for the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally and now mobilizing against inclusive education.Some women figures on the far-right scene have a lot of money, especially the most prominent ones, said Tracy Llanera, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut. The most high-profile far-right conservative women are involved in social media production because they fit the mold of what Llanera calls “the acceptable faces of conservative propaganda”.They include Fox News commentator Tomi Lahren and Canadian far-right YouTuber Lauren Southern, who produce conservative media and rightwing propaganda, amassing a huge following and millions of dollars.Even so-called “Tradwives” – such as the TikToker Estee Williams, who promotes strict adherence to traditional gender roles – generate income from their social media content. The Global Network on Extremism & Technology recently linked Tradwives to “alt-lite” and “alt-right” ideologies.“I think women definitely want power,” Jeppesen argued. “I don’t think ‘alt-right’ women go into politics for altruistic reasons.”Like men in the movement, women commit to far-right politics believing there is a crisis and they have to commit to extraordinary action, she stated. In the days leading up to 6 January 2021, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the extremist congresswoman from Georgia, paid tens of thousands of dollars for a promoted Parlor post stating the need for a grassroots army and created a Photoshopped image of her and Donald Trump.The post, used as an election fundraiser for Greene’s campaign, garnered millions of views and played a strong role in mobilizing people to the Capitol, Jeppesen explained.While Greene’s social media presence attracted insurrectionists to Washington DC, the far-right election-denial group Women for America First ultimately held the permit for the rally outside the White House, helped to coordinate the march that became the January 6 riot, and eventually organized fundraisers for election audits in Georgia and Arizona in 2021, Vice News reported.Other female insurrectionists played a pivotal role in the riots and spreading election denial conspiracies during and after.Jessica Watkins, an Oath Keepers member and founder of the Ohio State Regular Militia, arranged for both militias to travel to the Capitol, organizing and communicating on site with the encrypted walkie-talkie-style app Zello. She was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison; people such as Watkins are considered political prisoners to members of the far-right movement.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhen Ashli Babbit was killed by Capitol Hill police during the January 6 attack, she was promoted as a martyr, with even the former US president Donald Trump calling her parents. “Women make better martyrs in the ‘alt-right’,” Jeppesen said about Babbit’s lingering effect.Another growing power on the far right is Moms for Liberty, a group that began as a small parents’ rights group but which has spread across the US and is a leading force in promoting book bans.The group – with a fervent membership of conservative mothers – aims to affect US education, attacking anything that meddles with the far-right view of what is suitable for bringing up children, said Llanera of the University of Connecticut. “Mothers protect their offspring, out of the private sphere where they are most relevant,” she added.Iowyth Ulthiin, a PhD student at Toronto Metropolitan University and researcher at Lakehead University, explained that rightwing sects will use a broad appeal to a general issue like children’s safety in order to spread far-right ideas.“Who doesn’t love children and want them to be safe?” Ulthiin said.Far-right mothers start building rapport with other parents, using the vulnerability of their children to open the door to QAnon conspiracy theories and anti-government sentiment.The far right can take the same recruitment posture online. Ulthiin’s research has seen women in the “mommy blogger aesthetic” on Instagram, known for sharing photos of “lovely, enviable lives”, become subtly political and then escalate rapidly into conspiracy theories.Most notably, film-maker Sean Donnelly produced an eight-minute documentary, QAmom: Confronting My Mom’s Conspiracy Theories, about his mother’s transformation from a new age Californian to an outright conspiracy theorist who believed well-known celebrities would be arrested for pedophilia.Ulthiin said that women who fall into the far-right trap often have similar psychological profiles. “It would be a similar crowd to those who are in danger of joining a cult,” they said. More