US Politics

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares168 Views

      in US Politics

      Advertising giant WPP cuts diversity references from annual report

      by

      The British advertising giant WPP has become the latest company to cut the phrase “diversity, equity and inclusion” from its annual report as the policies come under attack from the Trump administration.The agency, which counts the US as by far its largest market, boasts the storied “Madison Avenue” agencies J Walter Thompson, Ogilvy and Grey among its top brands.In WPP’s annual report, which was released on Friday, the chief executive, Mark Read, told shareholders that “much has changed over the last year” due to political events.“In today’s complex world, a pressing question for brands and organisations is whether to engage on social issues in a more contested public arena, and how to navigate the expectations of different audiences with competing views on sensitive topics,” he wrote.The same document axed all references of “diversity, equity and inclusion”, “DE&I” and “DEI”. The policy attracted 20 mentions in the previous year’s report. The earlier document mentioned three times that the company was seen as a “diversity leader”.The omissions, which were first reported by the Sunday Times, included changes to how the company reports on measuring top executives’ non-financial performance, which contributes to the size of their short-term bonuses. In the new report, the phrasing has switched to “people and culture”.WPP declined to comment on whether the new wording was a response to anti-DEI policy moves by the Trump administration. The company said that, while the phrasing in its annual report had changed, the way in which executives’ short-term bonuses are calculated was unaltered.Within his first few days in office, Donald Trump instructed US government agencies to shut down their DEI programmes and federal employees working in diversity offices were immediately put on paid leave.Trump signed two executive orders targeting DEI programmes within the federal government. The first executive order largely scrapped the DEI efforts that took place under Joe Biden, who had ordered all federal agencies to come up with equity plans.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA second executive order effectively ended any DEI activities within the federal government. This order overturned a handful of executive orders from past presidents, including one from Lyndon B Johnson that was signed during the civil rights era that required federal contractors to adopt equal opportunity measures.The Financial Times recently reported that more than 200 US companies have removed references to “diversity, equity and inclusion” from their annual reports since Trump’s election. More

    • 188 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on attacks on lawyers: democracies must stand up for justice | Editorial

      by

      What the law says on paper is irrelevant if it cannot be upheld, or even stated clearly. That is why lawyers are targeted – with harassment, disbarment from the profession or even jail – by repressive regimes.Russia’s attempts to suppress the voice of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny did not end with his death in an Arctic prison colony. In a bleak coda, three of his lawyers have been jailed for several years. Vadim  Kobzev, Alexei Liptser and Igor Sergunin were found guilty of participating in an “extremist organisation” for relaying his messages to the outside world.The Center for Human Rights in Iran warned earlier this year that Iranian lawyers were being kicked out of the profession, arrested and jailed for representing protesters and dissidents. As its executive director, Hadi Ghaemi, noted: “Every lawyer imprisoned or disbarred represents many defendants whose rights have been trampled and now lack legal defence.”In China, where more than 300 human rights lawyers who had dared to take on sensitive cases were detained in 2015’s “709” crackdown, the pressure continues. As a grim joke had it at the height of the campaign, “even lawyers’ lawyers need lawyers” – those who represented arrested friends were then seized themselves.The unrelenting nature of the clampdown is particularly striking when, as one Chinese lawyer, Liang Xiaojun, observed: “We know we can’t win.” When the verdict is clear before a case has started, lawyers can only offer solidarity, spread their clients’ stories, and highlight the gulf between legal theory and reality. But in doing so, they challenge the official narrative. Targeting these lawyers didn’t just signal that resistance only invites further trouble. It attacked the concept of the rule of law itself, which lawyers had attempted to assert, hammering home the message that the party’s power was unassailable.The Council of Europe warned earlier this month that there are increasing reports of harassment, threats and other attacks on the practice of law internationally. The human rights body has adopted the first international treaty aiming to protect the profession of lawyer. Member states should now ratify this. Lawyers must be defended, as they defend others and the concepts of rules and justice.That message is more important than ever as the Trump administration turns on lawyers and judges as part of its broader assault on the institutions of US democracy and the principles that underpin them. The sanctioning of staff at the international criminal court is only the most flagrant example. William R Bay, president of the American Bar Association, told members in a recent letter: “Government actions evidence a clear and disconcerting pattern. If a court issues a decision this administration does not agree with, the judge is targeted. If a lawyer represents parties in a dispute with the administration, or … represents parties the administration does not like, lawyers are targeted.” Government lawyers too have faced “personal attacks, intimidation, firings and demotions for simply fulfilling their professional responsibilities”.Democratic governments and civil society must speak up for the law wherever it is threatened. Mr Bay is right to urge those in the profession to stand up and be counted. “If we don’t speak now, when will we speak?” he asks. The law still counts – both materially and culturally – in the US. Those who practise it need some of the courage in resisting abuses that their counterparts have shown elsewhere.  More

    • 100 Shares102 Views

      in US Politics

      White House correspondents’ dinner cancels anti-Trump comedian’s appearance

      by

      Comedy is off the menu at the annual White House correspondents’ dinner, a once convivial get-together for reporters to meet with federal governments officials that has become too fraught for light-heartedness amid the second Donald Trump presidency.The dinner, scheduled for 26 April, is organized by the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA), and it typically features a post-meal comedic interlude where a comedian sets to work on the powerful. Beginning with Calvin Coolidge in 1924, every president has attended at least one WHCA dinner – except for Trump.But this year, the WHCA, already at war with the White House over some news outlets’ restricted access to Air Force One and the Oval Office, selected Amber Ruffin, a Nebraska comedian known for mixing her humor with song-and-dance routines – and for frequently criticizing the Trump administration.The White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich attacked the association for planning to spotlight Ruffin, opening a new front in a conflict between the president and the press that began when the administration said it – not the press association – would now organize the rotating pool of news media members covering the president.On Saturday, the WHCA announced it was dropping Ruffin’s comedic performance so the event’s “focus is not on the politics of division” but rather on honoring the work of the group’s journalist, according to association president Eugene Daniels.The decision essentially left the WHCA friendless. Budowich slammed the scrapping of Ruffin’s performance, labeling it a “cop out” and calling the entertainer “hate-filled”. He said it was “so sad that such a storied and consequential group has been so quickly driven into irrelevancy”.But others saw the WHCA’s decision as further evidence that the press, at large, has become too willing to bend to the administration’s wishes, especially after a series of media company settlements in seemingly winnable defamation cases as well as ongoing efforts by the White House to defund government-backed news outlets, including Voice of America.Ruffin, an Emmy- and Tony-nominated comedian, began her career as a writer for NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers, a US talkshow with a stronger political bent than most. She recently joked about a dispute between the White House and the Associated Press over Trump’s executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America – a conflict that got the AP booted from the presidential plane and the Oval Office.“I was like ‘What! Now you care about deadnaming?’” Ruffin said, to laughs, a reference to the hostility that many conservatives aim at people who are transgender.Trump has a conflicted history with the association dinner. In 2011, then-president Barack Obama turned his comedic spotlight on Trump, who was in the audience, over Trump’s preoccupation with Obama’s birth certificate. Obama called the would-be president “The Donald” and said he should get back to issues that matter, “like did we fake the moon landing?”Trump won his first presidency five years later.The dinner itself has long come under scrutiny, with some questioning if a lavish, jovial get-together between the press and the government, who are highly co-dependent but have opposing interests, should be happening in the first place.The Hill decided to opt out of the dinner after comedian Michelle Wolf delivered a routine that the outlet’s chairperson, James Finkelstein, found “offensive” and “vulgar”.“There’s simply no reason for us to participate in something that casts our profession in a poor light,” he said.False kinship, elevated hostility, traffic in jobs between media and government, and other aspects of the relationship raise ethical questions for both.For instance, some have seen the recent scandal surrounding Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg’s being added to a group chat on Signal in which Trump cabinet members were discussing plans of a military strike as a journalistic coup. But others have questioned whether a journalist being inadvertently added to such a group – as was the case in Signalgate – could illustrate how close relationships between press and government members can get.Other matters which thrust the correspondents dinner under review include Trump administration’s restrictions on mainstream media access to Defence Department press cubicles as well as the president’s habit of asking where reporters work – and ignoring those whose employers displease him.The Washington Post recently questioned if the conflicts were contributing to a loss of appetite for the top-ticket, meet-and-greet event. A White House press veteran told the outlet that there was a growing sentiment that it should be scrapped.“It’s been a bad idea for a long time. It’s even more of a bad idea at this point,” New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker told the outlet. The Times has long opted out of the dinner.An unnamed White House reporter also told the Post that the dinner has “never has looked great, but now especially, are we really going to be mingling in our tuxes and our ball gowns with members of an administration that is curtailing press access”.Ron Fournier, a former Washington bureau chief for the Associated Press, told the Post reporters would be better off simply calling sources and filing Freedom of Information Act requests. He said: “Why be around powerful people if the only way they’re using their power is to lie to the public and to demean your profession and to undermine the amendment in the constitution that your profession is built around?” More

    • 175 Shares149 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘Revenge is his number one motivation’: how Trump is waging war on the media

      by

      On Tuesday 4 March, Donald Trump stood in the House of Representatives to issue a speech to a joint session of Congress, the first of his second term.Near the beginning of what was to be a marathon address, the president declared: “I have stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America. It’s back.”What Trump did not mention was that less than three weeks earlier he had barred Associated Press journalists from the Oval Office, because the news agency refused to use his preferred nomenclature for the Gulf of Mexico. He did not mention that he was waging lawsuits against ABC and CBS, nor that the man he appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission had ordered a flurry of investigations into NBC News, NPR and PBS.The president ignored entirely what has become an all out attack on the media and other institutions, something that media experts have described as a “broad, systematic assault” on free speech, a vendetta that threatens “the essential fundamental freedoms of a democracy”.Since that speech the situation has only got worse. The anti-media rhetoric has ramped up from Trump officials, Trump has suggested some media groups should be “illegal”, funding has been cut from organisations like Voice of America and last week the White House lambasted journalist Jeffrey Goldberg and the Atlantic magazine for breaking a scoop about national security lapses on a Signal messaging app.“Revenge is Trump’s number one motivation for anything in this second term of office, and he believes he has been treated unfairly by the media, and he is going to strike out against those in the media who he considers his enemies,” said Bill Press, a longtime liberal political commentator and host of The Bill Press Pod.“He’s going in the direction of really curtailing the freedom of the press, following the pattern of every autocrat ever on the planet: they need to shut down a free and independent press in order to get away with their unlimited use of power.”Trump was critical of the media in his first term. But as Press pointed out, that was more verbal attacks: the never-ending accusations of “fake news”, the encouragement of anti-CNN chants at rallies. Two months into Trump’s second term, he has already taken it further. Associated Press, one of the world’s premier news agencies which is relied upon by thousands of news outlets, remains banned from the Oval Office and Air Force one: the president angered by the agency’s refusal to use the term “Gulf of America” to refer to the Gulf of Mexico.Trump is suing the owner of CBS News for $10bn, alleging the channel selectively edited an interview with Kamala Harris, which the network denies, and the Des Moines Register newspaper, which he accuses of “election interference” over a poll from before the election that showed Kamala Harris leading Trump in Iowa.The FCC investigations, led by the hardline Trump appointee and Project 2025 author Brendan Carr, are ongoing, while in February Trump ejected a HuffPost reporter from the press pool – which refers to a rotating group of reporters allowed close access to the White House – and denied reporters from the news agency Reuters access to a cabinet meeting.View image in fullscreenAt various times Trump and rightwing groups have accused each of the outlets of bias or of presenting negative coverage of his presidency. By contrast, the White House has allowed rightwing news outlets, including Real America’s Voice and Blaze Media and Newsmax, to be included in the press pool.“It’s designed to shut down criticism, and I think that the danger of that is that there is this effort to make it look like everyone approves of the government and of the Trump administration,” said Katie Fallow, deputy litigation director at the Knight First Amendment Institute, a non-profit which seeks to preserve and advance first amendment freedom rights.“It’s a threat to the ability of the of the press to critically cover the president, but perhaps more importantly, the function of the press is to inform the public about the workings of government, and allow the public to decide whether or not it wants to vote for these people again, or whether it approves. And so it’s more than just its effect on the media, its effect on the general public.”In recent days the Trump administration’s attack-the-media playbook has been on show in the way senior officials have sought to discredit Goldberg, the editor in chief of the Atlantic who was invited into a secret Signal group where a coming US attack on Yemen’s Houthi militia was being discussed.The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, the national security adviser, Mike Waltz, and Trump himself have criticized Goldberg: Waltz described him as “the bottom scum of journalists”, while Trump called the reporting “a witch-hunt” and described the Atlantic as a “failed magazine”.Trump has also appeared to flirt with using law enforcement to target the media, including a speech to federal law enforcement officials in March. “As the chief law enforcement officer in our country, I will insist upon and demand full and complete accountability for the wrongs and abuses that have occurred,” Trump said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe disparaged certain lawyers and non-profits, before later adding: “The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and MSDNC, and the fake news, CNN and ABC, CBS and NBC, they’ll write whatever they say.”Trump continued: “It’s totally illegal what they do,” adding: “I just hope you can all watch for it, but it’s totally illegal.”The war on free speech has not just been limited to the media. Trump’s efforts have increasingly also focussed on areas including education, law and charitable organizations, as the government seeks to bring key aspects of society into line.“You have to look at this as part of a broad, systematic assault that the president and his administration have been waging since he returned to office on every other power center that impacts politics in any way,” said Matthew Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters, a watchdog group.“All the sort of liberal, civil society institutions: big law firms, universities, the government itself, the courts and the press have come under fire, and as part of that, we have this really unprecedented multifront attack on media institutions.”Trump has been aided in this endeavor by the owners of some media organizations. Jeff Bezos, the Amazon co-founder and owner of the Washington Post, pulled an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris during the campaign and recently overhauled the newspaper’s opinion pages.Amazon donated a million dollars to Trump’s inauguration, and Bezos’ space company Blue Origin competes for federal government contracts. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, also blocked the newspaper from endorsing Harris, while Mark Zuckerberg dismantled Facebook’s factchecking network after Trump won the presidency. (Like Bezos, Zuckerberg donated to, and attended, Trump’s inauguration.)“What makes the situation so worrying is that for the last several years, Donald Trump himself and the leading lights of the rightwing media and political movement: from Tucker Carlson to Kevin Roberts at the Heritage Foundation, have cited as their exemplar Viktor Orbán of Hungary. That’s what they want to accomplish,” Gertz said.“And what Orbán did with the press was squeeze different media corporation owners until they agreed to either make their press more palatable to him, or sell their outlets to someone who would. I think that is basically, by their own admission, what the Trump administration is trying to bring about in this country.“I think the hope is that we have more guardrails than Hungary did to prevent that from happening. But it’s unnerving that the president of the United States is trying to follow in those footsteps.” More

    • 175 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘Have you no sense of decency, sir?’ Joe McCarthy and the road to Trump

      by

      On 9 June 1954, in a Senate hearing room on Capitol Hill, Joseph Nye Welch made American history. With one question, the lawyer prompted the downfall of Joe McCarthy, the Republican Wisconsin senator who for years had run amok, his persecution of supposed communist subversives ruining countless lives.“Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness,” Welch said, as millions watched on TV, as he defended Fred Fisher, a young lawyer in McCarthy’s sights.“Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”As Clay Risen writes in his new history, Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America: “McCarthy, it seemed, did not.”The public listened. McCarthy was abandoned by those in power. McCarthyism had become McCarthywasm, President Dwight D Eisenhower joked. The senator died three years later, aged just 48, firmly in disgrace.Risen published his book last week, to glowing reviews, smack in the middle of another dramatic Washington moment, full of drama, replete with disgrace, in which many have compared McCarthy and Donald Trump, a Republican president pursuing his own purges and persecutions.Government workers are in Trump’s sights. So are protesting students and anyone or anything he deems representative of progressive values – of promoting diversity, equity and inclusion. Trump’s political enemies are best defined as anyone he thinks wronged him in his first term, his defeat in 2020, his four criminal cases and in the election last year.“McCarthy was not a lone wolf,” Risen said, “but he was willing to go and say things. No one knew what he was going to say. There was something Trumpian in that regard.”Asking historians to discuss their subjects in light of modern figures and events is a journalistic cliche. But it seems fair when talking to Risen. He has addressed the question, writing for his employer, the New York Times, about the Trumpist “New Right” in a piece illustrated with a picture of McCarthy in a red Maga cap.Given McCarthy was finally brought down by a simple appeal to decency, could that possibly happen, one day, to Trump?View image in fullscreen“I think that’s been the question since 2015,” Risen said. “I remember when he went crossways with [the Arizona senator] John McCain, and everyone said, ‘Well, that’s the end, because you say something like that about a war hero … ’ But remember, Trump said right around the same time, ‘Look, I go walk out into Fifth Avenue and shoot someone, and my supporters will still be with me.’ And it’s funny: so many things he’s been wrong about, or incoherent about, but in that he was right.”Reading Red Scare, it seems inconceivable such hysteria could have lasted so long, stoked by postwar paranoia about agents of the emerging Russian enemy, reaching sulfurous heights in years shot through with nuclear panic. It seems inconceivable ordinary Americans could have allowed it. To Risen, it’s not inconceivable at all.“The way I always explain it is, ‘Look, America is a big place, and most Americans don’t pay any attention to politics. They have no idea. Most of their interpretation at least of national politics is strictly economic.’”The 1950s were boom years. Now, since Trump’s return to the White House, the economy is shaky but the president has not shouldered the blame.“There are ancillary things,” Risen said. “Immigration as an economic issue. Occasionally a cultural element comes in. Abortion is obviously part of that. But most people, when they think about ‘What does the federal government mean to me?’, they think in economic terms.”As the red scare raged, most Americans simply did not care. Now, Risen said, many persist in thinking: “Well, shouldn’t we have a businessman running the country?”“So that raises the question: now the economy’s tanking, or the markets are tanking, and we may find ourselves in recession, do those people move away from Trump? Or do people go with it?”At long last, sir, have you no currency?Could happen.Risen is 48. He worked at Democracy: A Journal of Ideas and the New Republic, then at the Times he edited opinion and politics before switching to writing obituaries. Somehow he has written nine books, five on American whiskey and four histories: of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr; of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; of Teddy Roosevelt at war; and now Red Scare.“Postwar American politics and political culture is sort of my lodestone. The red scare seemed a natural fit.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRisen spoke from the Times newsroom in midtown Manhattan. Further uptown, in the Morningside Heights neighborhood, protesters rallied for Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate student with a green card and an American wife, arrested for his role in anti-Israel protests. Spirited to Louisiana, Khalil was charged with no crime. Instead, he was held under an obscure law – from 1952, the heart of the red scare – that allows for the deportation of anyone deemed a threat to US foreign policy.Many fear Khalil is a test case for purges to come.Risen said: “The way they have gone after him, even the tools they’re using, are one and the same with the way they tried to get Harry Bridges, who was an Australian-born labor leader of the west coast longshoremen” in the early 1950s. “Personally, I think Bridges is a hero … He was detained without cause at the start of the Korean war because he was considered a threat to national security. His case went to the supreme court, he won, and he lived a long time.“Obviously there are some differences but it’s hard not to see the same stories playing out now. The Department of Education recently announced a tip line where if you’re a parent and you think some teacher or some librarian is, I don’t want to use the verb, ‘DEI’ … Essentially, it’s: ‘If you just have a complaint about a teacher, in this vein, let us know.’“The same thing existed during during the red scare. The FBI had the Responsibilities Program, where they would take input from grassroots organizations, veterans groups, concerned parents groups, and then they would share information with PTAs, with local school boards. You know: ‘This teacher has a background that’s kind of suspect,’ ‘Here’s a list of books that you want to remove from your library.’ It’s just the same playbook. It’s terrifying to see it play out. And in fact, in some ways, I think it’s much scarier now.”View image in fullscreenAfter the red scare, Republicans marched ever further to the right. There was Richard Nixon, who cut his teeth questioning suspected communists as a congressman in the 50s, scenes retold in Risen’s book. There was Ronald Reagan, who testified before the House un-American activities committee and flirted with extremists. There was Pat Buchanan, who challenged the establishment from the far right, and there was Newt Gingrich, who polarized and radicalized Congress.But, Risen said, “despite everything, there were safeguards” that had ultimately withstood the red scare.“We had a center-right establishment of the Republican party that tolerated but ultimately moved on from the red scare. We had a fairly established media that was credulous and made a lot of mistakes but ultimately was not taken in by the red scare and was willing to call some of the worst red scarers to account. One of the things that came out of the red scare was a stronger awareness of the importance of defending civil liberties. The ACLU and the American Bar Association did not cover themselves in glory during the red scare. But ever since then, groups like that have been much more present and aggressive in terms of defending civil liberties, and so we see that today.“Hopefully it’s enough. I think a lot remains to be seen whether what we’re going through now will be worse than the red scare, but I’m not at all hopeful.”In that fateful hearing in 1954, Joe McCarthy’s own counsel sat at his side. It was Roy Cohn, a ruthless New York lawyer who later became mentor to a young Trump. Risen sees plenty of other parallels between McCarthy and Trump.View image in fullscreen“I spent a lot of time looking at the encomiums to McCarthy when he died, and letters his friends were sharing, and so much of it was the sentiment that McCarthy was the ultimate victim, because McCarthy was the guy who was willing to say the truth, and he was destroyed for it.”Trump also presents himself as both victim and avenger, promising revenge and retribution.“There was around [McCarthy] this idea that it wasn’t enough just to replace the leaders. It wasn’t enough just to control spending. Reform was not enough. The fundamental core of the New Deal” – Franklin Roosevelt’s vast modernization of the US state, from the 1930s – “needed to be thrown in the garbage, and anybody ever connected to any of that needed to be banished.”In the 1950s, that effort failed. In the 2020s, Trump and his mega-donor and aide Elon Musk are trying again – it seems with more success.Risen said: “When you look at not so much Trump but at some of the more systematic thinkers around him, like JD Vance and his circle, like Kevin Roberts, Stephen Miller, I think some of these guys do have a sense of history.”“I don’t think Elon Musk does, necessarily, but he is saying those same things about ‘We need to go in and dismantle, essentially, the New Deal architecture.’ And it’s not just because it’s expensive, it’s because it’s [seen as] un-American and a rot on society. In the 1940s and 50s, the name for this was ‘communism’. In that sense, communism was a red herring. It wasn’t really about communism. It was about progressivism. It was about the New Deal. It’s about this culture in America that was more tolerant, pluralistic, in favor of labor rights, women’s rights, civil rights. That was the target.”During the red scare, in what came to be called “the lavender scare”, gay men were ensnared and ruthlessly ruined.Risen said: “Today, it’s DEI or woke or whatever. But it’s the same thing. It’s not that they’re getting rid of DEI programs, whatever that might mean. They’re mainly getting rid of fundamental civil rights protections or offices that protect civil rights, that are nothing about what they charge.“That is the real game, at heart. It’s what was going on in the red scare.”

      Red Scare is published in the US by Scribner More

    • 200 Shares149 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘It reminds you of a fascist state’: Smithsonian Institution braces for Trump rewrite of US history

      by

      In a brightly lit gallery, they see the 66m-year-old skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex. In a darkened room, they study the flag that inspired Francis Scott Key to write the national anthem. In a vast aviation hanger, they behold a space shuttle. And in a discreet corner, they file solemnly past the casket of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy lynched for allegedly whistling at a white woman in the US south.Visitors have come in their millions to the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s biggest museum, education and research complex, in Washington for the past 178 years. On Thursday, Donald Trump arrived with his cultural wrecking ball.The US president, who has sought to root out “wokeness” since returning to power in January, accused the Smithsonian of trying to rewrite history on issues of race and gender. In an executive order entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”, he directed the removal of “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology” from its storied museums.The move was met with dismay from historians who saw it as an attempt to whitewash the past and suppress discussions of systemic racism and social justice. With Trump having also taken over the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, there are fears that, in authoritarian fashion, he is aiming to control the future by controlling the past.“It is a five-alarm fire for public history, science and education in America,” said Samuel Redman, a history professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “While the Smithsonian has faced crisis moments in the past, it has not been directly attacked in quite this way by the executive branch in its long history. It’s troubling and quite scary.”View image in fullscreenThe Smithsonian was conceived in the 19th century by the British scientist James Smithson, who, despite never setting foot in the US, bequeathed his estate for the purpose of a Washington-based establishment that would help with “the increase and diffusion of knowledge”. In 1846, 17 years after Smithson’s death, then president James Polk signed legislation calling for the institution’s formation.The Smithsonian now spans 21 museums, most of them in the nation’s capital lining the national mall from the US Capitol to the Washington monument, including the National Air and Space Museum, the National Museum of American History, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. The National Portrait Gallery, which displays a photo of Trump in its presidents gallery, is in downtown Washington.The Smithsonian also encompasses the National Zoo, famed for its giant pandas, and 14 education and research centres employing thousands of scientists and scholars and offering various programmes for schools.Visitors to the National Museum of Natural History’s FossiLab can see paleobiologists chipping away at rock to uncover bones buried for hundreds of millions of years. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory played a key role in the Event Horizon Telescope project, which produced the first-ever image of a black hole in 2019.View image in fullscreenAbout 60% of the Smithsonian’s funding comes from the federal government, but trust funds and private sources also provide money.The institution has known its share of controversies. In 1995, the air and space museum planned to display the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, with accompanying text that critics complained was more sympathetic to Japan than the US. The exhibition was cancelled and the plane put on display with no interpretation.Trump visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture a month after taking office in 2017. His reaction to the Dutch role in the global slave trade was: “You know, they love me in the Netherlands,” according to the museum’s founding director, Lonnie Bunch, who subsequently became the first Black person to lead the Smithsonian.Trump paid little attention to the institution during the rest of his first term, although in 2019 his vice-president, Mike Pence, took part in the unveiling of Neil Armstrong’s spacesuit at the air and space museum, marking the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch.View image in fullscreenAs in so many other ways, however, Trump’s second term is a whole different beast. The president believes there has been a “concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth”, according to the White House executive order.He argues this “revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light”. The order also asserts: “Once widely respected as a symbol of American excellence and a global icon of cultural achievement, the Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.”It cherrypicks examples, arguing that the African American museum “has proclaimed that ‘hard work,’ ‘individualism’ and ‘the nuclear family’ are aspects of ‘white culture’”. This refers to content that was on the museum’s website in 2020 and later removed after criticism.The order points to the exhibition The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture, currently on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which states that societies including the US have used race to establish systems of power and that “race is a human invention”.It criticises a planned women’s museum for “celebrating the exploits of male athletes participating in women’s sports” and aims to ensure the museum does not “recognize men as women in any respect”.The order stipulates that the vice-president, JD Vance, a member of the Smithsonian’s board of regents, work with Congress and the office of management and budget to block programmes that “degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with federal law and policy”. It calls for new citizen members “committed to advancing the policy of this order”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAll of this is in line with his administration’s efforts to do away with diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes in government, universities and corporations. The Smithsonian shut its diversity office soon after the president signed a January executive order banning DEI programmes at organisations that receive federal money.It is also of a piece with Trump’s longstanding demand for “patriotic” education. In February, he issued an executive order re-establishing his 1776 Commission, which was a riposte to the New York Times newspaper’s 1619 Project – and he has been a strident critic of renaming or removing Confederate statues and monuments.The order bears the hallmark of the conservative Heritage Foundation, which created the influential Project 2025. The thinktank’s website has an article that describes the 1619 project as “yet another attempt to brainwash you into believing your country is racist, evil and needs revolutionary transformation”. Another warns that the Smithsonian’s proposed Latino museum would be “a woke indoctrination factory”.But progressives say the cultural clampdown will only sow further discord. Tope Folarin, a Nigerian American writer and executive director of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, said in an email: “You cannot ‘foster unity’ by refusing to tell the truth about our history. Ignorance of the truth is what actually deepens societal divides.“These museums are important because they tell the full American story in an unvarnished way. We will only achieve unity when we are able to reckon with the truth about how this country was founded, and acknowledge the heroes who worked continuously to bring us together.”On Friday, the mood at the Smithsonian, which has long enjoyed positive relations with both Democratic and Republican administrations, was rife with uncertainty. Many had been bracing for this moment, but it remained unclear what impact the order will have on staffing levels or current and future exhibitions, including plans to celebrate next year’s 250th anniversary of US independence.David Blight, a historian and close friend of Bunch, the Smithsonian’s secretary, said: “I haven’t talked to him yet. I’m sure he’s trying to decide what to do. I hope he doesn’t resign but that’s probably what they want. They want the leadership of the Smithsonian, the directors of these museums, to resign so they can replace them.”Blight, who is the current president of the Organization of American Historians, was “appalled, angry, frustrated but not fully surprised”, when he read the executive order. “There have been plenty of other executive orders but this is a frontal assault,” he said. “I read it as basically a declaration of war on American historians and curators and on the Smithsonian.”The professor of history and African American studies at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, continued: “What’s most appalling about this is the arrogance, or worse, the audacity to assume that the executive branch of government, the presidency, can simply dictate to American historians writ large the nature of doing history and its content.“I take it as an insult, an affront and an attempt to control what we do as historians. On the one hand this kind of executive order is so absurd that a lot of people in my field laugh at it. It’s a laughable thing until you realise what their intent actually is and what they’re doing is trying to first erode and then obliterate what we’ve been writing for a century.”Trump’s previous cultural targets have included the Kennedy Center and Institute of Museum and Library Services. This week he urged congressional Republicans to defund National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). He has also threatened to cut funding to universities refusing to bend the knee.Blight regards the moves as drawn from the authoritarian playbook: “It’s what the Nazis did. It’s what Spain did. It’s what Mussolini tried. This is like the Soviets: they revised the Soviet encyclopedia every year to update the official history. Americans don’t have an official history; at least we’ve tried never to have.”The sentiment was echoed by Raymond Arsenault, a professor of southern history at the University of South Florida, St Petersburg. He said: “What is written in that order sounds almost Orwellian in the way Trump thinks he can mandate a mythic conception of American history that’s almost Disney-esque with only happy endings, only heroic figures, no attention at all to the complexity of American history and the struggles to have a more perfect union.He added: “It’s so chilling. Everything I’ve worked on in my career is simply ruled out by this one executive order. It’s like the barbarian sack of Rome in the level of ignorance and ill-will and anti-intellectualism.”Arsenault, a biographer of John Lewis, who was instrumental in creating the African American museum, said the late congressmen would be “shocked” by Trump’s order: “It’s totalitarian. It does remind you of a fascist state and makes us a laughingstock around the western world. I have to confess in my worst nightmares I didn’t think it would proceed this far in terms of willful megalomania.” More

    • 163 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      I’ve got the message: security leaks are no laughing matter | Stewart Lee

      by

      During the Brexit era, it became obvious many comments under these columns were being placed by Russian trolls, with slightly strange grasps of idiomatic English, cut-and-pasting blocks of approved pro-Putin and anti-EU texts to change the direction of the discourse. Their posts read like the computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but trained on 90s MTV Europe presenters’ accents and Russia Today op-eds.I began to bait the bots by inserting deliberately incomprehensible, but also somehow provocative, sentences into my pieces, culminating in the following paragraph, from the summer of 2016, after which point the Russian provocateurs left me alone:“One may as well give the kosovorotka-marinading wazzocks something incomprehensible to feed their bewildered brainstems. To me, then, Vladimir Putin is a giant, prolapsed female worker bee that sucks hot ridicule out of langoustines’ cephalothoraxes. Let’s see what crunchy, expansionist lavatory honey this notion causes the parthenogenic Russian wendigos to inflate for us this week, in the shadow of Paul McGann and his art gnome.”But nature abhors a vacuum, and soon the comment space the Russians vacated was filled by Tories and Brexiters, like rats entering a vacant building, or unseated Tory MPs getting their own reality TV shows. Between 2020 and the fall of the last government these columns were the subject of complaints and criticisms on the right, many with their own newspaper columns in the Daily Mail or the Telegraph, and their own House of Commons notepaper and/or links to opaquely-funded Tufton Street outlets.But although Kemi Badenoch just took a £14,000 freebie from Neil Record – whose tentacular connections include Tufton Street’s climate change denial group the Global Warming Policy Foundation, its Truss-grooming charity the Institute of Economic Affairs, and its monomaniacal astro-turfed anti-National Trust outfit Restore Trust – the background noise has lessened since the election. Perhaps because the US government are now doing Tufton Street’s job of normalising rightwing talking points more effectively than just getting the former IEA staffer Kate Andrews on to the BBC’s Question Time for the 14th time. That’s what I call a special relationship!But, as I enter my 15th year of satirising the news for money here at the Observer, the quality of complaint has changed again. These past few weeks it has been helpful readers that have been writing in to correct my factual errors and my “jokes”, although admittedly last week’s column on the Trump government’s attitude to its Navajo citizens was a hot mess for which I, like Trump’s national securty adviser Mike Waltz, take full responsibility.I accept the point that Trump did acknowledge the Navajo veterans by inviting them to the White House in 2017, but at the same event he did then make a joke about Pocahontas while standing in front of a portrait of president Andrew Jackson, author of the Indian Removal Act, which relocated Indigenous peoples and saw their lands seized, which probably soured the celebration for the Indigenous wartime heroes.As usual with Trump, it’s difficult to know if the crass behaviour was calculated to play to his base, or whether it was just evidence of the ongoing tone deaf stupidity and systemic incompetence of his team. As a rule, one should hesitate before ascribing motive to a landslide, for example, or to a prolapse. Like Trump perhaps, they just happen.Which is where the worst western military security failure of the century so far comes in. On 15 March the Trump team used the Signal messaging service to discuss their forthcoming attack on the Houthi pirates, and accidentally invited a Democrat-supporting magazine editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, to join their discussion. If it was a sitcom plot you’d reject it as being too on-the-nose.Goldberg could have revealed the bombing plans and a CIA operative’s identity. And now everyone knows the depth of the current American administration’s ideologically-driven contempt for European democracy, and the fact that Mike Waltz, a 51-year-old man in a position of some responsibility, uses emojis to celebrate airstrikes. Like a baby with its own bombs.Does Keir Starmer still think he can salvage the special relationship, an abused husband watching his furious wife throw all of his jazz vinyl out of the bedroom window? The whole world saw America’s Uncle Sam mask slip. But when Trump was questioned about the incident by a journalist on Tuesday, he claimed to know nothing about it, as if he had just been roused from a 24-hour KFC coma and thrust before the cameras without being briefed on a story that was global front page news. Maybe, like in the classic Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads episode where Bob and Terry don’t want to know the football result, Trump was trying to savour the moment of discovery.Clearly, we can no longer share intelligence with Trump’s US, and no future defence or foreign policy plans can rely on the cooperation of a country that wishes Europe material harm. But more importantly, is it worth me writing jokes about Trump’s US? A paranoid reading of recent events makes it look as if they are targeting even their mildest visa-carrying critics, recently denying entry to a French scientist and three-quarters of punk veterans UK Subs. Although to be fair, five years ago the drummer from the offensively apolitical stoner metal band Orange Goblin was also denied entry, like some kind of innocent shrimp-like bycatch.First they came for a French scientist. And I did not speak out. Because I was not a French scientist.Then they came for UK Subs. And I did not speak out. Because I was not a member of UK Subs.And then they came for the drummer from Orange Goblin. And I did not speak out. Because I prefer Electric Wizard.And then they came for me. More

    • 138 Shares168 Views

      in US Politics

      Visions of America: 25 films to help understand the US today

      by

      This is a dire moment in the US. It’s a moment where there’s an opportunity for people with a lot of money to rip apart all of the guidelines enacted by the Roosevelt administration, way back in the day, to guard against the brutality of unfettered capitalism. Capitalists like to have all the power that they want, whenever they want it. They’re not much interested in democracy either, it turns out. Nor, apparently, the rule of law. The government is not the solution – it’s the problem. And now a vengeful president who just wanted a get-out-of-jail-free card is going to punish his enemies and show us all how to destroy the American administrative state by using the big stick of Elon Musk’s chequebook.It reminds me of that moment in Once Upon a Time in the West, when Henry Fonda sits behind the rail tycoon’s desk and says: “It’s almost like holding a gun, only much more powerful.” The US has always been about money. That’s been our blessing and our curse. It’s the land of great opportunity, but that obsession with money over everything else has now taken us to a very bad place. We’ve reached the dark side of the American dream.As a film-maker at this moment, I feel defeated in one sense: you always look in the rear-view mirror and wish your films had had a more lasting impact. Yet the fight for liberty and democracy is a never-ending one, so I’m still very much engaged. I’m reminded of what Salman Rushdie said at the Pen America World Voices festival in 2022: “A poem cannot stop a bullet. A novel can’t defuse a bomb. But we are not helpless. We can sing the truth and name the liars.”Art can always have an impact, but it isn’t Pavlovian. It isn’t a vending machine. A film won’t make someone go out tomorrow and pass a law. What you hope for is that it will be a kind of a slow-motion timebomb in the psyche of the audience, where they begin to reckon with essential human values. When I made The Crime of the Century, my documentary about the opioid crisis, I wasn’t thinking to instigate a particular kind of change. That wasn’t the purpose of the film. I was concerned that people tended to look at the crisis as something that just “happened”, like a hurricane. I wanted to emphasise that it was an intentional crime, in which people were literally killing people for money. It wasn’t something to be endured, but to be reckoned with. I wanted the film to help reorient the vision of the viewers.I’ve got a diptych of films coming out next month called The Dark Money Game, all about the power of dark money and how that’s become part of the American system. It’s about how white-collar crime is now almost legal: so long as rich people are stealing, it’s OK. And I’ve also been working for two years on a film about Elon Musk, to get at some deeper understanding of not only who this man is and why he’s doing what he’s doing, but also why we’re letting him. A lot of my films are crime films, in a way. It was Chekhov who said that if there’s a gun on the mantel in the first act, it had better go off in the third act. So very often I’m faced with the spectacle of a gun going off. My job is to look back to find the guns on the mantels.I’m naturally drawn to the film-makers who explore the dark side: the Scorseses of this world. And at a time such as this, you want to engage the darkness of the moment – but you also want films that reaffirm your sense of humanity. It’s not an American film, but I was deeply inspired recently by Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here, about surviving a military dictatorship: it was so finely observed and so deeply human. There’s always a way out. This is a pendulum and it swings back and forth. But, you know, if we don’t wake up, then it’s going to be a very long, dark period. Alex Gibney (as told to Guy Lodge)American Factory(Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar, 2019)Best for: a look at what the American workforce faces in a globalised economy.View image in fullscreenAn Oscar winner for best documentary feature and the first film acquired by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground production company, this perceptive, humane film examines the initial promise of a modified, modernised American dream, as an abandoned General Motors plant in Ohio is reopened by a Chinese company, only for the new owners’ labour practices and values to clash sourly with those of their working-class American employees. Shot between 2015 and 2017, it captures a country’s growing insularity at the outset of the Trump era.The Apprentice(Ali Abbasi, 2024)Best for: a primer on how the Trump mythos began.View image in fullscreenFew were especially looking forward to a Donald Trump biopic from Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi when it premiered at Cannes last year: don’t we see enough of him as it is? But this period-perfect, video-grainy portrayal of his rise to celebrity in the 1980s is caustically gripping and insightful, as Sebastian Stan’s dead-on performance captures the chronic insecurity behind his bluster, while Jeremy Strong’s venal lawyer Roy Cohn models the behaviour of a toxic sociopath. A stark, shattering scene of Trump raping his former wife Ivana, meanwhile, was a gutsy inclusion.Bisbee ’17(Robert Greene, 2018)Best for: understanding how the US confronts its history, or doesn’t.View image in fullscreenIn 1917, in the small Arizona mining town of Bisbee, more than 1,200 immigrant mine workers were kidnapped and illegally deported to the New Mexico desert 200 miles away. Robert Greene’s highly original hybrid documentary studies how the Bisbee of the 21st century processes this shameful history, as local people mark the centenary of the event by staging a grand-scale re-enactment that raises debate and dissent in the general community. It’s a wise, eerie reflection on how Americans can compartmentalise or rationalise the past – but also acts as a mirror for anti-immigrant sentiment in the present day. History is never fully over.Bowling for Columbine(Michael Moore, 2002)Best for: fuelling rage against US gun laws.View image in fullscreenThe obnoxiously hectoring documentary style of Michael Moore might now seem of a previous era, but in the 22 years since this ferocious polemic won an Oscar, the frank absurdity of the US gun crisis hasn’t been more vigorously addressed on screen. By now, mass school shootings such as the Columbine massacre are distressingly commonplace stateside; Moore’s restless, roving examination of its causes and effects still hits hard, and bitterly underlines just how little has been done to prevent such occurrences in the intervening decades.The Brutalist(Brady Corbet, 2024)Best for: a timeless dissection of the soured American dream.View image in fullscreenBrady Corbet’s Oscar-winning, three-and-a-half-hour-plus epic might be set between the 1940s and the 1980s, but it has plenty to say to the 2020s, as it unfolds the plight of a Hungarian immigrant architect whose personal fortunes and creative ideals are gradually stymied by the Faustian allure of American capitalism. As a miserable east coast mogul seeking to own not just art but the artist, by dint of sheer wealth, Guy Pearce unnervingly encapsulates the ruinous entitlement of the 1%.The Crime of the Century(Alex Gibney, 2021)Best for: a journalistic exploration of the continuing US opioid crisis.View image in fullscreenWeighing in at nearly four hours overall, Gibney’s two-part documentary is as comprehensive a film as has been made on the opioid epidemic plaguing the US today, beginning with a look at how the Sackler family got OxyContin approved by the Food and Drug Administration, before getting into the mass marketing of fentanyl – taking on all manner of corporate corruption and human devastation along the way. If you can handle more rage against big pharma after watching it, pair it with Laura Poitras’s more emotive, award-winning All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.Don’t Look Up(Adam McKay, 2021)Best for: summing up the divided US stance on the climate crisis.View image in fullscreenAdam McKay’s brash, broad social satire split critical opinion a few years ago, but there’s resonance in even the silliest aspects of its farce, as it captures the grating, oppressive cacophony of a population at war with itself, even in the face of universally impending disaster. The environmental crisis isn’t directly addressed, but the metaphor couldn’t be clearer: a planet-destroying comet is headed towards Earth, but scientists can’t make Americans take heed over a din of debate, denial and political spin.Election(Alexander Payne, 1999)Best for: American electoral politics brought down to brass tacks.View image in fullscreenAny number of films have been made about the complex vagaries of American electoral campaigns, but have they ever been summarised as simply and cruelly as they are in Alexander Payne’s lethally dark high school comedy? The stakes might be comparatively low in this anatomy of a midwestern student body vote, but try telling that to Reese Witherspoon’s indelible overachiever Tracy Flick – an analogue for every ambitious, capable woman ever deemed too unlikable to succeed by dominant male mediocrity.A Face in the Crowd(Elia Kazan, 1957)Best for: a prescient vision of the US media landscape at its most cynical.View image in fullscreenNot a great success upon its release in 1957, Elia Kazan’s nearly 70-year-old media satire has enjoyed quite a revival in recent years – even being adapted into a stage musical at the Young Vic last year. That’s because, its mid-century milieu notwithstanding, it speaks directly to the modern era of faux-populist celebrity construction and public manipulation. Its protagonist, Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes, a drifting Arkansas hayseed discovered by a New York radio producer and turned into a merchant of increasingly hypocritical homespun wisdom, is an idiot savant monster whose popular touch calls Joe Rogan to mind.The Florida Project(Sean Baker, 2017)Best for: a slice of life on the poverty line.View image in fullscreenSeveral years before he stormed the Oscars with his sex worker story Anora, Sean Baker received less than his due for one of the definitive modern portraits of poor white America, turning an attentive and compassionate gaze to a demographic often dismissed with cruel stereotypes. Playing out largely through the eyes of Moonee, the six-year-old daughter of an unemployed stripper barely surviving day to day in an Orlando fleapit motel, it avoids condescension as it shows us the wonder that the young girl routinely finds in squalor.Hale County This Morning, This Evening(RaMell Ross, 2018)Best for: an immersive, unsensationalised view of everyday life in the south.View image in fullscreenBefore switching to fiction with his recent, radical adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Nickel Boys, RaMell Ross made his name with this exquisite, Oscar-nominated mosaic of daily routines and rhythms among the predominantly Black residents of Hale County, Alabama. Interspersing carefully observed vignettes with more lateral poetic meditations, it was described by Ross as an “epic banal” work, aiming to “bring elation to the experience of blackness”. The film’s calm lyricism and granular detail stand out against other, more vocally political modern docs on that experience.Here(Robert Zemeckis, 2024)Best for: a telling boomer viewpoint on the US past and present, for better or worse.View image in fullscreenRobert Zemeckis’s kitschy, AI-assisted graphic novel adaptation about centuries of American life playing out on one patch of land bombed in cinemas, and not undeservedly so – but I’m not sure I’ve seen a film recently that captures the stiflingly conservative family values of the modern US with more inadvertent accuracy, or the political overreach of white liberal worldview. (Its passages on Indigenous trauma and the Black Lives Matter movement are a veritable time capsule of cringe.)I Am Not Your Negro(Raoul Peck, 2016)Best for: bringing a fresh context to the history of US racism.View image in fullscreenThis Bafta-winning documentary from Haitian film-maker Raoul Peck is based on Remember This House, an unfinished manuscript by trailblazing Black writer and activist James Baldwin, and brings vital visual information to his literary examination of racism in the US. Told via Peck’s own experiences and through reflections on the work and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X, among others, it’s a fascinating history lesson bristling with modern relevance.In Jackson Heights(Frederick Wiseman, 2015)Best for: a celebration of American diversity.View image in fullscreenVeteran documentarian Frederick Wiseman is the foremost US chronicler of the country’s institutions and communities, whether in his midwest portrait Monrovia, Indiana or his exhaustive administrative study City Hall. But his most vital recent work is this vast cinematic patchwork of life in the teemingly diverse New York City neighbourhood of Jackson Heights, as its gaze takes in everything from a Muslim school to an LGBTQ support meeting to a Jewish community centre – adding up to a compelling study of how the US, at its best, can evolve to meet the needs of a changing population.Joker(Todd Phillips, 2019)Best for: a popular touchstone of current American masculinity.View image in fullscreenWhen Todd Phillips’s unexpectedly artsy, ambitious superhero spinoff movie premiered at Venice, scooping up the Golden Lion, the heated critical debates began: had he made the ultimate “incel” manifesto, or a snarling critique thereof? Six years and one flop sequel later and there’s still no consensus, not least because some audiences adopted Joaquin Phoenix’s downtrodden, mentally ill, ultimately murderous Arthur Fleck as an anti-woke icon and others recoiled from his toxic villainy. Phoenix’s Oscar-winning performance makes him disturbingly sympathetic in either light.RoboCop(Paul Verhoeven, 1987)Best for: a not-so-futuristic projection of where the American police state is heading.View image in fullscreenForget the various meat-headed sequels and increasingly kid-targeted cartoon violence. Verhoeven’s original action blockbuster was an ice-cold, viciously satirical vision of American capitalism and militarisation heading towards an unholy worst-case scenario: a privatised corporate police force staffed by ruthless droids, with predictably dire consequences for humanity. Nearly 40 years later, it’s ageing horribly well: under Trump, its dystopian world-building seems only slightly far-fetched.Shy Boys IRL(Sara Gardephe, 2011)Best for: a snapshot of the origins of incel culture.View image in fullscreenGardephe’s viral short is scrappily shot and only half an hour long, but remains a definitive visual text in our understanding of what, in 2011, had not yet been popularly named “incel culture” – an online community of young men, frustrated by their failure to meet and date women, whose involuntary celibacy seeds an increasingly toxic view. Gardephe’s film, which has recently enjoyed a resurgence on TikTok, treated incels as a subculture then, but today looks prescient in identifying a far broader social phenomenon.Sound of Freedom(Alejandro Monteverde, 2023)Best for: an insight into rightwing blockbuster heroism.View image in fullscreenOn the face of it, Alejandro Monteverde’s sentimental search-and-rescue thriller is straightforwardly gung-ho stuff, following an intrepid homeland security agent (played by The Passion of the Christ star Jim Caviezel) as he sets out to crack a child sex-trafficking ring in Colombia. But as produced and marketed by conservative faith-based entertainment company Angel Studios, the film became laden, intentionally or otherwise, with intricately coded QAnon conspiracy theories, and was championed by the right as a rejoinder to the supposedly reprobate output of leftist mainstream Hollywood. Sure enough, it was a sleeper hit, and there’s a lot to be learned from watching it.Stillwater(Tom McCarthy, 2021)Best for: a canny distillation of the culture gap between the US and Europe.View image in fullscreenPlainly inspired by the Amanda Knox case, Tom McCarthy’s quietly potent culture-clash thriller was unfairly written off by many critics, but there’s some acute wisdom in its portrayal of a gun-loving, blue-collar Oklahoma dad navigating the intricacies of the French legal system – and eventually taking his own roughneck revenge – to save his imprisoned daughter. It’s a criminal melodrama with blunt contrivances softened and complicated by Matt Damon’s knotty, humane portrayal of a character who would be easier to demonise.Strong Island(Yance Ford, 2017)Best for: a searingly personal account of the struggles of social integration.View image in fullscreenIn 1992, Yance Ford’s brother William, a young, unarmed Black man, was shot dead by a white 19-year-old who claimed self-defence and was subsequently acquitted by an all-white jury. That might have been more than 30 years ago, but Ford’s pained, unflinching documentary points to enduring unequal treatment in its first-hand portrait of a Black family who anticipated a better life on moving to the suburbs of Long Island, only to find, ultimately, they were unwelcome outsiders. Ford, a trans film-maker, has a sharply intersectional understanding of minority identity; his film is both an elegy and a plea for change.Support the Girls(Andrew Bujalski, 2018)Best for: A snapshot of labour politics with a side of lively feminism.View image in fullscreenThere may be no brand more absurdly and quintessentially American than the lurid, unabashedly chauvinist “breastaurant” Hooters, and it gets a wicked send-up in this breezy but bittersweet workplace comedy, starring a wonderful Regina Hall as the world-weary manager of one such institution. Following her across her last two days of employment, and glancing upon the various crises of its female staff members, it’s a casually piquant skewering of unjust labour practices in a still-patriarchal society, and a warm valentine to the women who endure them.13th(Ava DuVernay, 2016)Best for: a thorough breakdown of the US prison-industrial complex.View image in fullscreenThe title refers to the 13th amendment to the US constitution, abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude – except as punishment for convicted criminals. In her first documentary, Ava DuVernay uses this caveat as the basis for a compelling argument that slavery continues to this day in the US prison system, further challenging the corporations that profit from it. With interview subjects ranging from activist Angela Davis to politician Newt Gingrich, it’s the most expansive and searching work of DuVernay’s career.Time(Garrett Bradley, 2020)Best for: an unromantic, long-view take on fighting the power.View image in fullscreenIf 13th offers an essayistic takedown of the prison-industrial complex, Garrett Bradley’s heart-wrenching documentary takes a more personal view of the subject, portraying Black abolitionist Fox Rich, AKA Sibil Fox Richardson, and her 20-year campaign for the release of her husband, Robert, sentenced to 60 years in prison for his role in an armed bank robbery. It’s a powerful study of systemic dysfunction and the lives caught up in it, but also a hard, realistic view of the exhausting grind of long-term activism.Us(Jordan Peele, 2019)Best for: an allegory for the class divide in the Black US.View image in fullscreenJordan Peele’s 2017 smash, Get Out, immediately established him as a leading Hollywood merchant of political commentary as entertainment, as it probed the threat posed to the Black population even by supposed white liberals. But this even better follow-up film got into thornier, more nuanced territory with its ingenious examination of American privilege, classism and gentrification, alongside its ramifications as visited upon a bourgeois Black family terrorised by their “tethered” underclass doppelgangers. It’s witty, frightening and rings violently true.White Noise(Daniel Lombroso, 2020)Best for: explaining the rise of the far right.View image in fullscreenIt’s cold comfort that the three principal subjects of Daniel Lombroso’s upsetting documentary on the surge of the “alt-right” movement in the US – Richard Spencer, Mike Cernovich and Lauren Southern – are no longer as prominent in the news as they were when the film was made five years ago: they’ve simply been surpassed by other toxic celebrities as white supremacy has expanded from the fringes to the mainstream. Produced by news publisher the Atlantic, the film works as an excavation of the movement’s roots, and is suitably pessimistic about where it’s heading. More