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      Morning After the Revolution review: a bad faith attack on ‘woke’

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      Writing on Substack in 2021, Nellie Bowles described some of the less attractive qualities that motivated her work as a reporter: “I love the warm embrace of the social media scrum. One easy path toward the top of the list … is communal outrage. Toss something (someone) into that maw, and it’s like fireworks. I have mastered that game. For a couple of years, that desire for attention … propelled me more than almost anything else. I began to see myself less as a mirror and more as a weapon.”Bowles is married to Bari Weiss, a former editor on the opinion section of the New York Times whose furious resignation letter earned her encomiums from Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Donald Trump Jr.But Bowles wrote that her decision to convert to the faith of her Jewish wife had actually softened her approach to journalism: “I want to cultivate my empathy not my cruelty. I am trying to go back to being closer to the mirror than the knife.”However, her new book, Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History, is dazzling proof she is completely incapable of changing her approach to her profession.Bowles is a former tech reporter for outlets including the Guardian and the New York Times. For many reporters, the decision to write a book comes from wanting to dig deeper into a particular subject, or a desire for freedom from the restrictions of one’s former employer. For Bowles, longform turns out to be the chance to jettison the standards of accuracy of her previous employers in favor of the wildest possible generalizations.Here are a few fine examples: “The best feminists of my generation were born with dicks.” This is the author’s jaunty description of trans women, who, she informs us, are “the best, boldest” and “fiercest feminists”, who unfortunately – according to her – have concluded “that to be a woman is, in general, disgusting”.On the ninth page of Bowles’s introduction, meanwhile, readers realize how much we must have underestimated the universal impact of the movement to Defund the Police. Did you know, for example, that “if you want to be part of the movement for universal healthcare … you cannot report critically on #DefundThePolice”?Bowles identifies a similar problem with marriage equality: “If you want to be part of a movement that supports gay marriage … then you can’t question whatever disinformation is spread that week.”The wilder the idea, the more likely Bowles is to include it, almost always in a way that can never be checked. To prove the vile effect of wokeness on the entire news business, she informs us that colleagues “at major news organizations” have “told me roads and birds are racist. Voting is racist. Exercise is super-racist. Worrying about plastic in the water is transphobic.” And a “cohort” took it “as gospel when a nice white lady said that being on time and objectivity were white values, and this was a progressive belief”.Writing about a tent city in Echo Park, Los Angeles, Bowles explains why nobody living there was interested in a free hotel room: “Residents could not do drugs in the rooms. And the rooms were, of course, indoors. People high on meth and fentanyl prefer being outdoors, with no rules, with their friends.”Predictably, the book reaches a whole new level of viciousness when it reveals Bowles’ attitude toward trans people.Intelligent people know three essential facts about the debate over whether children under 18 should have access to hormones or surgery to make their bodies conform to the gender in which they think they belong.First, a large majority of trans people of all ages never take hormones or get surgery. Second, nearly all of those who do choose to use medicine to alter their bodies report a dramatic improvement in personal happiness. Third, a very small number of those who have undergone surgery or taken hormones to block puberty do change their minds and opt for de-transition.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNaturally, Bowles mentions none of those facts. According to her narrative, “the transition from Black Lives Matter to Trans Lives Matter was seamless … I don’t think this was planned or orchestrated. The movement simply pivoted.”No mention, of course, of polls conducted by Christian nationalists and their allies which determined that the best new fundraising tool would be an all-out attack on trans people, including the denial of their very existence, as well as the introduction of hundreds of bills in state legislatures across the country to make this tiny minority as miserable as possible.Instead, Bowles wants us to believe the debate is dominated by websites you might not have heard of, like Fatherly, which asserts: “All kids, regardless of their gender identity, start to understand their own gender typically by the age of 18 to 24 months.” One parent who appeared on PBS in 2023 is equally important in Bowles’s book, because she said her child started to let her parents know “she was transgender really before she could even speak”.Needless to say, Bowles is horrified that as America became more aware of the existence of trans people, the number of clinics available to treat them grew to 60 by 2023. Then she makes another remarkable claim: “If a parent resists” medical changes requested by a child, “they can and do lose custody of their child.”Is that true? I have no idea. If Bowles had written that sentence in the Times or the Guardian, her editor would most certainly have requested some sort of proof. Fortunately for her – but unfortunately for us – her publisher, a new Penguin Random House imprint, Thesis, does not appear to impose any outdated fact-checking requirements. The only visible standard here is, if it’s shocking, we’ll print it.
      Morning After the Revolution is published in the US by Thesis More

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      in US Politics

      Say More review: Jen Psaki on Biden, Trump and how to make your point

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      Jen Psaki left the Biden White House after 16 months as press secretary. Saturday Night Live never savaged her, though Kate McKinnon played her. By that and other measures, Psaki compares favorably to Sean Spicer and Sarah Sanders, her predecessors from the years of Trump. A veteran of the Obama West Wing, before that a competitive collegiate swimmer, Psaki had the president’s ear and spoke with knowing authority.Her press briefings were not cauldrons of rancor. Her tussles with Peter Doocey, the Fox News White House correspondent, never neared the boiling point. They played nice.Unlike Karine Jean-Pierre, her successor, Psaki didn’t have to share the White House podium with John Kirby, spokesperson for the national security council and a retired rear admiral. Psaki was a force in her own right.Now a host at MSNBC, Psaki is out with her first book. It mixes political vignettes with tips on navigating life’s competing demands, including how to dodge – and throw – sharp elbows. As a political memoir, it does its share of score-settling. But, true to its subtitle, Lessons from Work, the White House, and the World, Psaki’s book is not a tell-all, terribly newsy or an audition for a slot in a second Biden administration, if there is one.To be expected, Psaki is critical of Donald Trump and his minions, but injects subtlety too. She wields a scalpel, lacerating Spicer and his former boss. She frames criticisms as career advice, not frontal assault.“Shouldn’t [Spicer] have rejected the job offer, if he were truly credible?” she asks of the Republican official who had first go at speaking for Trump, perhaps the most thankless task yet invented in politics.Great question. We all know the answer. As the anti-Trump operative Rick Wilson put it, everything Trump touches dies. Only Ivanka is safe and even then … who knows.“While Sean may not have been acting entirely on his own behalf when he was giving his press briefings,” Psaki writes, “he was the one who suffered as a result.”True. If Melissa McCarthy plays you in an SNL cold open, as she did Spicer, lampooning your loud parroting of your boss’s absurd lies … you’re screwed.Then again, Spicer was kind of lucky. Banished from the Trumpian kingdom early on, he never suffered a January 6-related indictment. Eventually, he expressed regret for beclowning himself over the inauguration in 2017.Back on Psaki’s own side of the aisle, Say More is no hagiography of Joe Biden. Psaki is aware of the president’s capacity for empathy but also mindful of his tendency to bring the story back to his own losses, most recently including that of Beau Biden, his late son who served in Iraq.In summer 2021, amid the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, a suicide bomb at Kabul airport left 13 US soldiers and 170 Afghans dead. Three days later, American bodies arrived at Dover air force base in Delaware, Biden’s home state. The president and the first lady, Jill Biden, attended. Things did not work out as planned.Psaki conveys how Biden was stunned into silence when told that family members of dead Americans were complaining he had spent too much time talking about Beau, alleging he was insufficiently focused on the deaths of their own children.“I paused for the president to respond,” Psaki writes. “The silence that followed was a bit too long. I worried for a moment that our connection had been lost.”Biden finally responded, but did so “in a softer voice than usual”.“I thought I was helping them. Hearing about how other people went through loss always helps me,” Biden said.Again he paused: “Thanks for telling me. Anything else?”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPsaki also tweaks Chuck Schumer, now Senate majority leader, and John Kerry, Barack Obama’s second secretary of state and until March a member of Biden’s administration as his climate envoy.Once upon a time, the Affordable Care Act was unpopular, viewed by many as another welfare scheme. Against the backdrop of the Great Recession, a stock market crash and the mortgage crisis, Obamacare cost the Democrats both chambers of Congress.“There were those … who suggested that we shouldn’t do anything other than the economy,” Obama later acknowledged to Jonathan Cohn of the Huffington Post.One of those “outsiders” was Schumer. The New Yorker grasped the political consequences of going all in on healthcare amid a meltdown in jobs and housing. Political prescience, however, isn’t always welcomed, let alone rewarded. Recalling how the White House rejected Schumer’s suggestion that Obama’s final State of the Union address contain a pitch for student loan relief, Psaki seems to delight in the outcome.“I was telling [Obama] he needed to decide whether he wanted this to be his State of the Union speech, or Senator Schumer’s,” she recalls. “I delivered my thoughts calmly. My argument tapped into my knowledge of how the media would cover the speech. The president eventually agreed. Sorry, Senator Schumer.”Psaki also recalls a gaffe made by Kerry in 2014. Responding to a question, he intimated that if conflict broke out between Japan and China, the US would use military force – a stance at odds with the stated American position.“That was a huge mistake,’” chided David Wade, a longtime Kerry aide. Kerry didn’t yell back. Instead, he gave Psaki and Wade the green light to contact the White House and distance itself from his comments. In that moment, Psaki learned that being effective in her job meant delivering quick feedback, at times.“Advising someone is not the same as appeasing them,” she writes.The Biden administration has been relatively leak-free. Nothing approaching Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury or Team of Vipers by Cliff Sims, an early memoir by a Trump administration official, has appeared. Whether this matters come election day remains, of course, to be seen.
      Say More is published in the US by Simon & Schuster More

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      in US Politics

      Abigail Disney evokes Old Yeller in plea to reject Republicans after Kristi Noem kills dog

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      Evoking the classic Disney tearjerker Old Yeller, in which a family is forced to put down their beloved dog, the US film-maker and campaigner Abigail Disney exhorted voters to oppose the Republican party of Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor whose story of killing Cricket, a 14-month-old dog, shocked the world and seemingly dynamited her hopes of being Donald Trump’s running mate.“My great-uncle Walt Disney knew the magic place animals have in the hearts of families everywhere,” Disney wrote in an email released by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) and obtained exclusively by the Guardian.“When he released Old Yeller, the heart wrenching story stayed with people because no one takes the killing of a family pet lightly.“At least that’s what I thought until I read about potential Trump VP Kristi Noem shooting her family’s puppy – a story that has shocked so many of us.”Noem describes the day she killed Cricket (and an unnamed goat) in No Going Back, a campaign memoir published this week but first reported late last month by the Guardian.Cricket, a 14-month-old wirehaired pointer, met her fate in a gravel pit because Noem deemed her “untrainable” after she disrupted a pheasant hunt and killed a neighbour’s chickens. The goat, which had not been castrated, was deemed too aggressive and smelly and a danger to Noem’s children. By the governor’s own admission, it took two blasts with a shotgun to finish the goat off.Noem has repeatedly defended her story as indicative of her willingness to do unpleasant but necessary things in life as well as politics. Nonetheless, she has reportedly slipped way down Donald Trump’s list of possible vice-presidential picks, should the presumptive Republican nominee avoid prison on any of 88 criminal charges and should he beat Biden in November.Two weeks after the Guardian report, shock and revulsion over Noem’s story continues to ring throughout the US. This week, amid a string of uncomfortable interviews even on usually friendly rightwing networks, also questioning an untrue claim to have met the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, the governor cut short a promotional tour for her book.In her email in support of the PCCC, Disney said: “Walt Disney also understood story telling. Together, we must make sure all voters see how this sad Kristi Noem episode is part of the larger story of the 2024 election: America could vote into the White House extremists that glorify cruelty and lack basic empathy and compassion.”View image in fullscreenAsking readers to post pictures of beloved pets and the hashtag #UnleashTheVote, Disney also promoted a petition against “Trump and extreme Republicans who lack the character to lead our nation”.Old Yeller, which the Guardian called “one of the best and most poignant boy-and-his dog movies”, was released in 1957. It tells the story of a family in Texas in 1869 that adopts a large yellow dog.Disney said: “In Old Yeller, the family comes to see the lovable stray dog as an indispensable member of the family. The film’s climactic moment is a heartbreaking one, when the father has no choice but to shoot Old Yeller when the dog contracts rabies because of the inevitable threat to their lives – and, out of compassion, to end the suffering the dog would have to endure.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Noem shot her family’s 14-month-old puppy after a hunting trip, in her own account, because she was too hard to teach. ‘I hated that dog,’ she wrote, framing the killing of a puppy as an example of strength.“Kristi Noem is not strong. Like Trump, she is cruel and selfish.”Listing positions taken by Trump and supporters like Noem, Disney said: “If Kristi Noem was actually strong, she would stand up to the January 6 insurrectionists instead of celebrating them. Or she would make billionaires pay their fair share of taxes instead of lining up for their campaign donations.“If she had real courage, she might even criticise the supreme court for abolishing abortion rights or making it easier to flood our streets and schools with guns.“True strength is not demonstrated through harshness, brutality, or callous indifference, but through steadfast kindness and compassion. Our pets teach most of us this lesson every day through their loyalty and unconditional love.“Let’s make sure Americans demand leaders who do the same when it comes time to vote.” More

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      in US Politics

      Sweat review – chilling vision of a divided, alienated America

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      Although principally set in 2000, Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer-winning 2015 play anticipated Donald Trump’s presidency with its portrayal of a divided, frustrated and disfranchised community in the deindustrialising city of Reading, Pennsylvania. With Trump campaigning for a second term, the Royal Exchange’s revival is timely. Jade Lewis’s production ultimately presents a chilling vision of how job insecurity can destroy one’s sense of self and lead to the poisonous othering stoked by Trump.The stage design by Good Teeth studio has huge slabs suspended from the rafters, powerfully suggesting an industrial landscape hoisted away overnight. This in effect is what happens to the play’s steelworkers who, amid a dispute with management over pay cuts, are locked out of their plant, with their machines and jobs destined for Mexico as a result of the contentious North American Free Trade Agreement whose renegotiation was a Trump campaign pledge.This conflict is heightened by a familial dimension akin to Human Resources, the 1999 film by the late Laurent Cantet in which a management trainee is embroiled in job cuts that affect his father on the shop floor. Nottage’s play centres on African American Cynthia (Carla Henry) who works at the factory with her son Chris (Abdul Sessay) and has finally crossed the floor to become a supervisor only to encounter resentment, some of it racially fuelled, from her friends. Suspicious of her new colleagues (“I wonder if they gave me this job on purpose. Pin a target on me”), Cynthia is also alienated by her former neighbours at the machines.View image in fullscreenSimilarly targeted is Colombian American Oscar (Marcello Cruz) who works at the local bar and crosses the picket line to pick up factory shifts. He is labelled a traitor by workers whose union has long been a closed shop to him and the story, framed by the aftermath of a violent climax, has a lucid sense that blustering calls for solidarity usually conceal exceptions. Nottage gave the play an epigraph from Langston Hughes’ Let America Be America Again, in which the poet declares the country “never was America to me”.With its sparse, barely stocked bar-room design, Lewis’s production perfectly conveys the play’s desolation – embodied by Cynthia’s ex, the drug-addicted Brucie (Chris Jack), one of the bar’s regulars – but missing is the atmospheric, authentic sense of place that marked Lynette Linton’s blistering 2018 staging at the Donmar Warehouse. It’s not just in the occasionally wavering accents or oddly pristine costumes but in the bonds between the characters, which need to be more fully established for the play’s second half to detonate. While the cast convey the bodily toll of work, a visceral sense of physicality is missing in their confrontations. Further use of the revolve stage, which heightens some scenes, might have prevented the energy seeping from other exchanges.If it never finds the right rhythm, there are powerful performances, especially from Henry as the weary yet steadfast Cynthia, Pooky Quesnel as her rancorous friend Tracey and Cruz as the observant Oscar who captures the lived-in tone of Hughes’ poem, which evades Maga fantasy nostalgia in its call to simply “make America again”.
      At the Royal Exchange, Manchester, until 25 May More

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      in US Politics

      Civil War is a terrifying film, but Trump: The Sequel will be a real-life horror show | Simon Tisdall

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      Director, cast and critics all agree: Civil War, the movie depicting America tearing itself to bloody bits while a cowardly, authoritarian president skulks in the White House, is not about Donald Trump. But it is, really.Likewise, the first ever criminal trial of a US president, now playing to huge audiences in New York, is ostensibly about claims that Trump fraudulently bought the silence of a former porn star called Stormy after a tacky Lake Tahoe tryst. But it isn’t, really.Both movie and trial are about a Trump second term. They’re about sex, lies and Access Hollywood videotape, about trust and betrayal, truth and division. They’re about democracy in America, where political feuds and vendettas swirl, guns proliferate and debates over civil rights are neither civil nor right.Alex Garland’s smash-hit “post-ideological” dystopian nightmare and the Manhattan courthouse peak-time showdown are both ultimately about the same things: the uses and abuses of power, about a nation’s journey to extremes where, as in Moby’s song, it falls apart.Talking of disintegration, what a diminished figure Trump now cuts in court. Slouched, round-shouldered and silenced alongside his lawyers, he acts up, sulky, aggrieved, childishly petulant. The room is cold, he whinges. Potential jurors rudely insult him to his face! It’s all so unfair.Trump never did dignified, not even in the Oval Office. Yet even by his tawdry standards, this daily demeaning before an unbending judge is irretrievably, publicly humiliating. The loss of face and sustaining swagger begin to look terminal. For Trump the alleged criminal conspirator, as opposed to Trump the presidential comeback king, the familiar campaign cry of “Four More Years!” has a disturbing ring. Four years in chokey is what he faces if found guilty on 34 felony charges.It’s no coincidence, so Trump camp followers believe, that Civil War premiered in election year. No surprise, either, that a Democratic district attorney pushed for the trial. Or that latest polling by the “liberal media” suggests Trump is losing ground to Joe Biden.Despite all that, the Make America Great Again screenplay is unchanging. Trump’s blockbuster second march on Washington is merely on pause, Maga-men say. He’s making an epic sequel and he’ll be back in November with all guns blazing – which is the problem, in a nutshell.If you doubt it, just look at Pennsylvania. Even as the defendant, dozy and defiant by turns, snoozed in court and slandered witnesses on social media, this same presumed 2024 Republican champion was effortlessly sweeping last week’s party primary with 83% of the vote.View image in fullscreenThere’s no real-world contradiction here. A grumpy Trump scowling at the bench and a Civil War-like wannabe dictator hot for White House power and glory are united in one unlovely, vicious personage. Two sides of the same bent cent. The list of Trump’s crimes for which he has yet to be tried extends far beyond the New York indictment and the charge sheets in three other pending cases. Like Tom Ripley, the sociopathic narcissist anti-hero of Netflix’s popular TV mini-series, Trump is violently dangerous beyond all knowing.The lethal 6 January insurrection he incited and applauded was stark treason against the republic. No argument. The racist relativism of Charlottesville in 2017 foreshadowed recent, unrepentant talk of “poisoning the blood of our country”. His corrosive words burn like acid through the social fabric. No Civil War paramilitary crazy could wish for more than Trump’s eager feeding of America’s gun addiction, support for domestic execution and assassination overseas, collaboration with murderous dictators, debasement of the supreme court and hostility to open government, free speech and impartial reporting.No Ripley-style conman or fraudster could hope to emulate the master criminal’s arm-twisting of Ukraine to dig up dirt on Biden’s son, Hunter, his political protection rackets and shameless nepotism, his suborning of his party, Congress and the legal system or his rich man’s contempt for the ordinary Joe who actually pays taxes.A prospective second Trump term presages obsessive score-settling at home and abject appeasement abroad. Judges, law officers, witnesses, female accusers, military men, diplomats, academics and critical media may be among the early victims of a national revenge tragedy – a personalised purge of the institutions of state that could prove fatal to democracy.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump’s fawning obsequiousness towards Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and vendetta against Kyiv’s leadership, spell disaster for Ukraine. Nor can there be much confidence, for all his bluster, that he would stand up to China should it invade Taiwan.Prepare, too, for a likely European rupture and trade war, a Nato split and an unravelling of 75 years of transatlantic collaboration. Prepare for an out-of-control global arms race, unchecked nuclear weapons proliferation on Earth and in space and the wholesale abandonment of climate crisis goals. A Trump success in November, with all the ensuing chaos, schism and constitutional outrages, would bring closer both an end to peaceful, rational debate within America and the demise of US global leadership.So truly, is Civil War so very far off the mark? Is it really not about Trump and Trumpism? It’s certainly more comforting to frame the movie as an entertainment, to interpret its studied avoidance of direct references to present-day politics as reassurance that, at heart, it’s essentially make-believe. But that denialist view is itself a type of escapism or wishful thinking. It won’t silence the guns.In one untypical, symbolic scene, the war-weary photojournalist played by Kirsten Dunst, all body armour and pursed lips, tries on a pretty dress in a downtown store insulated from the fighting. It is as if she, like America, is trying, fleetingly, to recover her humanity.It’s unclear whether she succeeds. More hopeful moments like that, and a good deal less trumpery, are badly needed now. Simon Tisdall is the Observer’s Foreign Affairs Commentator
      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk More

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      in US Politics

      ‘Demolishing democracy’: how much danger does Christian nationalism pose?

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      Bad Faith, a new documentary on the rise of Christian nationalism in the United States, opens with an obvious, ominous scene – the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021 – though trained on details drowned out by the deluge of horror and easily recognizable images of chaos. That Paula White, Donald Trump’s faith adviser, led the Save America rally in a prayer to overturn the results for “a free and fair election”. That mixed among Trump flags, American flags and militia symbols were numerous banners with Christian crosses; on the steps of the Capitol, a “JESUS SAVES” sign blares mere feet from “Lock Them UP!”The movement to overturn the 2020 election for Donald Trump was, as the documentary underscores, inextricable from a certain strain of belief in America as a fundamentally Christian nation, separation of church and state be damned. In fact, as Bad Faith argues, Christian nationalism – a political movement to shape the United States according a certain interpretation of evangelical Christianity, by vote or, more recently, by coercion – was the “galvanizing force” behind the attempted hijacking of the democratic process three years ago.Bad Faith traces the origins of the movement as a savvy, disproportionately powerful political force, from churches to Republican political operatives to donors, either from conviction or convenience. “I think a lot of Americans have a very difficult time accepting and understanding the fact that such treason, such anti-democratic activity, could be carried out by people who basically look like Sunday school teachers,” Stephen Ujlaki, the film’s director, told the Guardian. By looking back on the half-century of Christian nationalist belief, organizing and action, the events of January 6 no longer seemed shocking, but the logical endpoint of anti-democratic ideals. “It was unmistakable, once you looked in the right place and you listened to what people were saying, and you understood how to decode what they were saying,” said Ujlaki. “Little would you know that when they talk about recreating the kingdom of God on earth, they weren’t talking about something spiritual. They were talking about demolishing democracy so that God, ie themselves, could rule. And for that reason, I call it a conspiracy carried out in broad daylight.”Though Christian nationalists are quick to invoke the founding fathers, whom they claim were directed by a Christian God, the conspiracy has its modern origins in the 1970s, when the Republican political organizer Paul Weyrich began uniting evangelical parishioners and televangelist preachers like Jerry Falwell with Republican party politics opposing desegregation, via a political action group called the Moral Majority. It’s not that evangelical Christians weren’t political – as the film, narrated by Peter Coyote, points out, the idea of America as a white Christian nation undergirded the Ku Klux Klan, which at its peak in 1924 claimed 8 million members, the vast majority of whom were white evangelicals, including 40,000 ministers.Accordingly, the crucial tie between white evangelicals and the Republican party came not from the 1972 ruling in Roe v Wade, as is often misattributed, but from opposition to a different ruling preventing racially segregated institutions – including schools and churches – from claiming charitable, tax-exempt status. The ruling brought segregated church leaders such as Falwell in alignment with Republican operatives like Weyrich, who cannily realized that emotional arguments against abortion would drive more grassroots support than openly racist talk against desegregation.Bad Faith highlights Christian nationalism’s “origins in the racism, and the segregation mentality, and you can draw a straight line from that to gerrymandering and voter suppression,” said Anne Nelson, a film participant and author of Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. Christian nationalist supporters, she added, were “very skillful at … framing and branding and messaging, that makes something like voter suppression look like electoral integrity. And they do this time after time, on every front”.The film juxtaposes the decades-long roots of the movement with its evolving principles: that America was founded as a Christian nation, for and by Christians; that maintaining such a state is a divinely sanctioned, righteous fight; that anti-democratic or violent tactics should be employed in the name of God. And in recent years, that Donald Trump – a thrice-married, profligate cheater with too many character scandals to name – is, if not a true “Christian”, a divinely sanctioned “King Cyrus” figure sent to disrupt the secular order. “The divisiveness and the distrust of institutions that we’re seeing today was part of a plan,” said Ujlaki. “It was a result of an actual plan, successfully executed to get to this point. And once the institutions are weakened and people have lost faith in elections, there’s room for the strongman to come in.”View image in fullscreenIn addition to political experts contextualizing the growth and funding of Christian nationalism, Ujlaki also enlisted several prominent, faithful Christians to dispute another of the movement’s prominent myths: that it’s a true distillation of Christian teachings. “It is absolutely not Christian. It is anti-Christian,” said Ujlaki. He quoted the theologian Russell Moore, who calls the movement “heresy” in the film, as well as the Rev William Barber II, whose faith leads him to advocate for wealth redistribution, racial equality and social justice: “They may have their Trump, but they don’t have their Jesus.”“They don’t care about the actual Jesus,” said Ujlaki. That’s underscored by the money trail, followed by Nelson and others, which leads to several non-evangelical donors – the Koch brothers and more – who nevertheless benefit from the movement’s weakening of institutions and drive to the far right, as with the Tea Party movement in 2010. “They’re in bed together, based on economic principles, not theology,” said Nelson.And yet theology continues to drive an anti-democratic movement, for which January 6 was not a disaster but a starting point. Bad Faith ends with a note about Project 2025, announced in December 2023 by the Heritage Foundation. The 900-page document builds on Weyrich’s Conservative Manifesto and recommends, among other things: placing all independent government agencies, including the FBI and Department of Justice, under direct presidential control; purging government employees considered “disloyal” to the president; and deploying the military against American citizens under the Insurrection Act.Some of the recommendations sound far-fetched and extreme, but if Bad Faith has one point, it is to take Christian nationalism as a serious threat to democracy. “These people are not stupid,” said Nelson. “They’re incredibly strategic. They’re extremely good at organization, and they have a very, very long attention span. If they set out an objective, they will give it 40 years to play out, they will build organizations, they will go into electoral districts not a month before the election, but two years before the election, organizing voters.”In Nelson’s view, major media organizations misunderstood this in the run-up to January 6. “They look at these events as independent grassroots eruptions, like the Tea Party,” she said. “And they’re actually fully integrated as a strategy with massive coordinated funding and implementation. If you don’t see that, you miss the story.”
      Bad Faith is now available to rent digitally in the US with a UK date to be announced More

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      in Elections

      Aaron Sorkin to write film about January 6 and Facebook disinformation

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      Aaron Sorkin is set to write a film about the January 6 insurrection and the involvement of Facebook disinformation.The Social Network screenwriter is returning to similar territory for an as-yet-untitled look at how social media helped radicalise Donald Trump supporters who went onto storm the US Capitol in 2021.“I blame Facebook for January 6,” he said on a special edition of The Town podcast, live from Washington DC. When asked to explain why, he responded: “You’re gonna need to buy a movie ticket.”He then announced that he would be covering the subject in an upcoming project.“Facebook has been, among other things, tuning its algorithm to promote the most divisive material possible,” he said. “Because that is what will increase engagement and because that is what will get you to, what they call inside the hallways of Facebook, the infinite scroll.”When asked whose responsibility that was, he replied: “Mark Zuckerberg.”He continued: “There is supposed to be a constant tension at Facebook between growth and integrity, there isn’t. It’s just growth so if Mark Zuckerberg wakes up tomorrow and realises that there is nothing you can buy for $120bn that you can’t buy for $119bn, so how about if I make a little less money, I will tune up integrity and I will tune down growth.”Sorkin said he has yet to have a conversation with the Facebook CEO that isn’t “through the op-ed pages of the New York Times”.The writer-director’s 2010 adaptation of Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires looked at the origins of the site and the early controversy surrounding it. The script won Sorkin his first Oscar.Sorkin was also asked about why he dropped his agent Maha Dakhil last year after she shared a post online that criticised Israel’s involvement in the ongoing conflict with Palestine which read: “You’re currently learning who supports genocide.”“She posted something on Instagram that I just didn’t understand,” he said before adding: “There were people in my family who would have been hurt if I stayed.”Last year saw Sorkin return to the stage with an adaptation of the musical Camelot, which received five Tony nominations but mixed reviews. His last film was 2021’s Being the Ricardos starring Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem. More

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      in US Politics

      ‘We were going down fast’: how Benjamin Franklin saved America

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      “A long life has taught me that diplomacy must never be a siege but a seduction,” says Michael Douglas’s Benjamin Franklin, raising a wine glass in a world of candlelit tables, baroque music and powdered wigs. “Think of America as a courted virgin. One that does not solicit favours but grants them. And nothing speaks to romance quite as loudly as a dowry worth half a hemisphere.”This is the first episode of Franklin, now streaming on Apple TV+, which tells the story of author, printer, postmaster, scientist, statesman and all-round Renaissance man Benjamin Franklin’s late-life secret mission to France, aimed at persuading the country to help America win the Revolutionary war and gain independence from Britain.The eight-part limited series is achingly sumptuous and splashily cast: Douglas, 79, is best known for roles including Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, Andrew Shepherd in The American President, Dan Gallagher in Fatal Attraction and Liberace in Behind the Candelabra. “Ben Franklin was as charismatic as he was complicated,” says Stacy Schiff, author of A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, on which the series is based. “I’ve no idea how Michael did it, but in scene after scene he drives both points quietly home.“He seems to be able to speak a paragraph with the arch of an eyebrow. He spouts Franklin’s lines, channels his mannerisms, prints his pages, raises his grandson – all without recourse to a Ben Franklin makeover. I will admit that it’s startling, even a bit eerie, to hear him speaking lines of Franklin’s that I know to have slept in foreign archives for over 200 years and that have not been spoken aloud since.”Douglas’s father was a Hollywood titan; Franklin’s was a candle and soap maker from England who married twice and had 17 children. Born in Boston, Franklin left school aged 10 and began an apprenticeship in his brother’s print shop at 12. He ran away at 17, had a spell in London then set up a print shop in Philadelphia and began to publish the Pennsylvania Gazette.Franklin was a man of many talents. He helped establish Philadelphia’s first public library, police force and volunteer firefighting company and an academy that became the University of Pennsylvania. He became postmaster of Philadelphia and served as a clerk of the Pennsylvania legislature.Franklin began researching electricity in 1748 and, in an experiment, flew a kite in a thunderstorm to prove that lightning is an electrical discharge. He came up with inventions including bifocals, the medical catheter, the odometer and the Franklin stove, a wood-burning stove that made home heating safer. For nearly a decade Franklin represented Pennsylvania in London, where he testified before the British parliament about the colony’s hatred for the Stamp Act.He returned to America as the American Revolution drew near and was a delegate at the Continental Congress. He helped draft the Declaration of Independence and signed the final document. At the same time Franklin’s illegitimate son, William Franklin, emerged as a leader of the British loyalists (he was exiled to England in 1782 for his political views).In 1776 Congress dispatched Franklin to France to secure recognition of the new United States. But it was a gamble. Why send a 70-year-old with no prior diplomatic experience who could be hanged as a traitor if caught by the British? In an email interview, Schiff, who lives in New York, explains: “Already Franklin had crossed the ocean seven times; he had more experience of the world beyond American shores than any other congressional delegate.“He was dimly understood to speak French. He was a masterful negotiator and – as the only thing the colonies had by way of a senior statesman – the unanimous choice of Congress. The obvious candidate on one side of the the ocean turned out to be the ideal one on the other; Congress had no idea they were sending a sort of walking Statue of Liberty to France, where Franklin was already a celebrity, for his scientific work.”View image in fullscreenAfter a 38-day voyage across the Atlantic, Franklin – who brought two grandsons, 16-year-old William Temple Franklin and seven-year-old Benjamin Franklin Bache – was warmly greeted as the most famous American in the world. Schiff adds: “He seemed to the French to have walked out of the pages of Rousseau; he was hailed as the man who had tamed the lightning. Mobbed on his arrival, he soon saw his portrait reproduced on walking sticks and wallpaper. The callers were continuous; he came to dread, as he put it, the sound of every carriage in his courtyard.”With New York having just fallen to the British army, Franklin threw himself into the all-important effort to secure French support for the American cause. Charming and witty, and trading on his novelty value as an “American”, he cultivated relationships with King Louis XVI, Queen Marie Antoinette and the French minister of foreign affairs, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes. The TV dramatisation finds Douglas’s Franklin outfoxing British spies, French informers and hostile colleagues.Schiff reflects: “Franklin considered his eight and a half years in France the most critical – and the most taxing – assignment of his life. At the same time it’s the chapter of his life about which we know the least, partly because it takes place abroad, partly because it takes place in a foreign language, partly because the documentation for the Paris years is difficult to access.“I wanted to know how Franklin had pulled off a feat of statecraft that made the Revolution possible – and what that errand told us about Ben Franklin. Sometimes you can see a biographical subject best when he is out of context, stumbling about in a language not his own. This chapter felt a little like Franklin laid bare. He was after all on what sounded like a fool’s errand: it was his job to convince an absolute monarch to help found a republic.”Diplomats and historians still regard it as the greatest single tour of duty by an ambassador in American history. Franklin pushed a reliable button: French hatred for the British. He could also point to some battlefield successes to convince them that America had a decent chance of winning.After two years, he secured two treaties that included political recognition for the United States. The French government provided military assistance, including troops, naval support and supplies. The support was vital to the pivotal triumph of the Continental Army at Yorktown in 1781. Without French aid, the American Revolution would probably have failed; with it, the British were defeated.Douglas told the New York Times last week: “I did not realize to what degree, if it was not for France, we would not have had a free America. It would have been a colony, absolutely. We were going down fast.”View image in fullscreenOutside the White House today is Lafayette Park, where a the bronze statue is thought to portray the Marquis de Lafayette petitioning the French national assembly for help for the Americans in the fight for independence. Whenever a French president visits the White House today, the US president invariably refers to “our oldest ally”.Schiff reflects: “The war could not have been fought without the arms, money and munitions that Franklin winkled out of the French government, both before and after the 1778 alliance. At the time of Franklin’s arrival in France Washington’s army had something like five rounds of powder to a man.“The world wondered, Franklin wrote, why the Americans never fired a cannon. The reason was that they could not afford to do so. Independence rested squarely on the assistance, and the alliance, that he engineered abroad.”With John Jay and John Adams, Franklin negotiated the Treaty of Paris with Britain, confirming its acceptance of a “free, sovereign and independent” United States, which was signed in 1783.But Schiff adds: “For the posting Franklin received no syllable of gratitude. Once the peace had been signed it was preferable to think that American independence had been won by America; the foreign assist was largely written out of the picture, Franklin’s French mission with it.”Franklin, who died in 1790 aged 84, does at least enjoy recognition today in books, museums, a recent Ken Burns documentary and now the Apple TV+ series directed by Tim Van Patten (Masters of the Air, The Sopranos). There is also a statue of him in front of the Old Post Office on Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue, in front of what used to be the Trump International hotel.Indeed, in an era when American democracy seems unduly fragile, politicians and commentators are fond of recalling the story that, when exiting the Constitutional Convention, Franklin was approached by a group of citizens asking what sort of government the delegates had created. He replied: “A republic, if you can keep it.”So what would Franklin make of Donald Trump and the divisions in America today? Schiff says: “Party politics would have horrified all of the founders. Franklin believed especially fervently in selfless public service. ‘The less the profit,’ as he put it, ‘the greater the honor.’ Enough said.”
      Franklin is now showing on Apple TV+ More