Culture

Subterms

    More stories

    • 225 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump’s Unesco withdrawal is part of a broader assault on democracy | Liesl Gerntholtz and Julie Trebault

      by

      Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States a second time from what is essentially the beacon of global culture and heritage – Unesco – is depressing but unsurprising given the administration’s lack of respect for art and culture that celebrates the diversity of humanity in all of its fullness. But it is still a grave error of moral leadership that harms the United States’ global standing on free expression, human rights and democracy.Earlier this year, he initiated a takeover of the Kennedy Center’s programming and content, and linked National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grants to highly partisan ideological conditions. Meanwhile, the government’s attempts at censorship in schools are all but rewriting American history.Trump has also systematically removed the United States from global obligations connected to health, human rights and the betterment of society. This includes withdrawing from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN human rights council (UNHRC) and in effect the dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).It was only a matter of time before Unesco – the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization – came under fire, representing as it does everything the Trump White House rails against. Unesco’s chief was unsurprised, saying that since the last time Trump was in power and pulled the US out of the organization, they had reduced their reliance on US funding significantly and would be carrying on with its mission.Why, then, does this withdrawal matter? Surely it can be chalked up to another strong-arm tactic designed to make headlines and give the administration some more “America First” policies to boast about. Unfortunately, when it comes to culture, it is not that simple.Culture comes under fire when democracy is dying. Russia’s imprisonment of writers, artists and cultural figures who question official narratives about the war on Ukraine; or the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas – these are examples of how culture becomes both a target and a battleground because it represents identity, memory and freedom of thought – the very things authoritarianism seeks to control or erase.What the US administration has dismissed as “woke” is actually Unesco preserving democratic ideals, teaching the world valuable lessons based in history and protecting artistic freedom – all things that autocrats see as a threat to their ability to control the narrative. It is no small irony that the organization’s recognition of Palestine has also been used as an excuse for the withdrawal, when Unesco is one of the leaders of Holocaust education in the world, and Palestine itself is suffering near total cultural obliteration.It would be a grave error for the United States not to recognize that Trump’s disdain for cultural preservation is part of a broader assault on human rights, democracy, free expression and artistic freedom. It is a story repeated across the world and throughout time. It is notable that one of the few countries to also withdraw from Unesco was South Africa, which withdrew in 1955 in protest against Unesco’s stance against apartheid. During this period of isolation, the apartheid government intensified its control over culture and education, seeking to tightly control the narrative in South Africa and globally about its discriminatory policies.There is still time to reverse this decision. PEN America, which defends free expression worldwide and ARC, the Artists at Risk Connection that protects artistic freedom, urge Congress to oppose this latest move to further isolate the United States globally, and ensure that the country continues to fulfill its international human rights obligations. US funders and foundations should also increase support to writers, journalists and media outlets, artists and cultural institutions, and free expression advocates in countries affected by the shutdown of US foreign assistance.By working with Unescoto commemorate sites of apartheid resistance when it rejoined in 1994, South Africa has shown how global engagement can honor truth and build inclusive memory; the United States, by contrast, risks forfeiting that same moral leadership by retreating from the very institution that makes such progress possible.

      Liesl Gerntholtz is the managing director of the PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Center at PEN America. Julie Trebault is executive director of the Artists at Risk Connection More

    • 213 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Losing Stephen Colbert and the Late Show is a crushing blow, whatever the reason | Adrian Horton

      by

      Last Thursday, when Stephen Colbert announced on air that CBS had decided to cancel The Late Show, its flagship late-night comedy program, after 33 years in May of next year, I was shocked.For the better part of six years, I have watched every late-night monologue as part of my job at the Guardian (hello, late-night roundup), and though I often grumble about it, The Late Show has become a staple of my media diet and my principle source of news; as a millennial, I haven’t known a television landscape without it. There are many bleaker, deadlier things happening daily in this country, and the field of late-night comedy has been dying slowly for years, but the cancellation of The Late Show, three days after Colbert called out its parent company for settling a lawsuit with Donald Trump, felt especially and pointedly depressing – more a sign of cultural powerlessness and corporate fecklessness in the face of a bully president than the inevitable result of long-shifting tastes.Reporting in the days since the announcement have lent some credence to CBS’s claim that this was “purely a financial decision”. Though The Late Show has led the field of late-night comedy in ratings for years, it only averages about 2.47 million viewers a night. Its ad revenue plummeted after the pandemic; Puck’s Matthew Belloni reported that the show loses $40m for CBS every year. Of the network late-night shows – NBC’s Late Night With Seth Meyers, The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon, and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! – Colbert’s Late Show has the smallest footprint on social media, where Fallon’s celebrity gags still reign supreme. The format of late-night television – a host delivering a topical monologue, house band, celebrity guest interviews – is a living relic of a different time, when a youth-skewing audience would reliably pop on linear television at 11.30pm. The field has been contracting for years, with programs hosted by Samantha Bee, James Corden and Taylor Tomlinson ending without replacement. Ad revenue for the genre as a whole is down 50% from just seven years ago, in the middle of Trump 1.0. It’s long been assumed that the hosts currently in these once-coveted chairs would be the last, their programs expiring when they decided to step down.What’s shocking is that Colbert, who was reportedly set to renegotiate his one-year contract at the end of this season, was not given that time, which just so happens to coincide with a critical window for the intended merger of CBS parent company Paramount with Skydance Media. Three days before the announcement, Colbert called Paramount’s settlement with Trump a “big fat bribe” to incentivize the administration’s approval of this $8bn deal managed by two billionaire families.Regardless of Colbert’s contract timing, it seems the cancellation of The Late Show is a financial decision, just not in the way CBS is framing it. It’s not about the $40m The Late Show is losing per year – a lot of money, to be sure, though a drop in the bucket for the major players here – but the $8bn on the line with this merger. There were presumably other options; Late Night With Seth Meyers dispensed of its house band and musical acts last year to save money. With new billionaire ownership, there could be some business maneuvering, should independent political comedy be a priority. Colbert’s Late Show, a leading critic of Donald Trump on network television, is clearly not; the show may have been a money loser, but in this context, it’s a convenient sacrifice.And though it’s easy to roll one’s eyes at late-night television – I often do – it’s an especially disappointing one, both in the culture at large and in the dwindling 11.35pm time slot. For years, I have argued that the late-night shows have long outstripped their original function as comedy programs. They are satirical, occasionally relevant, sometimes profane, but hardly ever funny, in the traditional sense of making you laugh. Often, they resort to so-called “clapter” – laughter as a polite applause, jokes for agreement rather than laughter – in a deadening anti-Trump feedback loop. With the exception of The Daily Show, a cable program founded for the purpose of political satire, the shows basically serve two functions in the internet era: 1 Generate viral celebrity content as they promote another project, and 2 Comment freely on the news, unbound from the strictures of decorum, tone and supposed “objectivity” that hamstrings so much journalism in the US.The latter was, I’d argue, the most important contribution of late-night television in the Trump era, when the president and his minions exceeded parody, and Colbert was the best at it. Nimble, erudite, self-deprecating but exceptionally well-read, Colbert transformed from extremely successful Fox News satirist to the reverend father of late-night TV: principled, authoritative but hardly ever self-righteous, deeply faithful to the American project, steadfastly believing in the decency of others. (Colbert is a practicing Catholic and die-hard Lord of the Rings fan, facts that sometimes snuck into his monologues.) At times, such old-school values felt insufficient for the moment; the format of late-night comedy as a whole has proven futile, even pathetic, in the face of Donald Trump’s brand of shamelessness, the Maga movement’s ability to turn everything into a joke. But these hosts, and the Daily Show-trained Colbert especially, did something that the rest of news media or the sprawling celebrity and comedian podcast network could not: call bullshit on the administration with the imprimatur of a major television network, and say exactly what they were feeling.That ability proved useful to me, as a viewer, at times when it seemed standard media was incapable of articulating what was happening. During the pandemic, or the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, or on January 6, or when Trump was re-elected, or when Republicans mocked Californians during the devastating LA wildfires earlier this year, late-night television had the freedom to express outrage, and Colbert in particular to express moral injury. The jokes were almost never surprising; they weren’t really even jokes. But it still felt soothing to see someone say them, with corporate backing, at an institution that still carried enough name recognition to, well, merit a “late-night roundup”.Colbert, ultimately, will be fine. He is a skilled comedian whose talents weren’t always well-tapped by the strict format of late-night comedy. Perhaps he will join the legion of comedians with podcasts, speaking directly to fans; perhaps he will release a special. But his absence from late-night television spells doom for the rest of the format, and more importantly for freedom of speech on the big networks. Late-night comedy has been fighting a losing battle for a long time, and The Late Show was never going to out-influence the rising tide of rightwing media, the manosphere or any number of independent shows in a fracturing media landscape. But the fact that he could try, from one of the more famed perches in television, still meant something. More

    • 188 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Summer of Our Discontent by Thomas Chatterton Williams review – the liberal who hates leftists

      by

      Thomas Chatterton Williams, a public intellectual of some standing in the US, dislikes the Trumpian right for its erratic authoritarianism. But he dislikes its hysterical leftwing critics too – arguably with more vehemence. He takes great pride in having no truck with tribes, but he does belong to one: like halitosis, as Terry Eagleton quipped, ideology appears to be only what the other person has. Williams may think he is a freethinker above the fray, but he has a creed – and it is liberal complacency.His 2010 debut memoir Losing My Cool was the story of – as the subtitle had it – Love, Literature and a Black Man’s Escape from the Crowd. Rap, he declared, was not so much a genre as a subculture, seducing young black men into a world of crime. That, apparently, would have been Williams’s fate (when he physically attacks his girlfriend, for instance, hip-hop lyrics shoulder the blame) had it not been for Pappy, his disciplinarian father, who foisted 15,000 books on him.The classics beat crime in the end, and we leave Williams on his happy road to intellectualdom, absorbing Sartre in Parisian cafes. But it wasn’t enough for him to merely present his own story; Williams elected to hold up his life as an example for black Americans. “See, you can be just like me” is the breathless gist of Losing My Cool. It never struck him that he might have had certain class advantages – a father with a PhD in sociology; a mixed-race heritage; an upbringing in white, bourgeois, suburban New Jersey – that make him somewhat unrepresentative as a role model.Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race, Williams’s second memoir, published just before the pandemic, served up more hyper-agentic advice. The springboard for these post-racial reflections was the birth of his daughter. Bearing, as babies tend to do, a resemblance to her mother, who is white and French, Williams’s child is blond. It follows that there is an arbitrariness to the whole business of race, from which Williams swiftly emancipates himself. Then comes the counsel: black Americans would do well to follow in his footsteps by “transcending” race themselves. Conceding that this may be an easier proposition for him and his white-passing daughter, he exhorts mixed-race people to “form an avant garde when it comes to rejecting race”.Williams’s grand subject being himself, now we have a third memoir. Summer of Our Discontent takes a caustic look at Black Lives Matter from the lofty vantage point of his Parisian garret. At the outset, he tells us that the self-preening, race-mad identity politics of left-leaning liberals has fostered atomisation and precluded solidarity. As a consequence, the illiberal, unhinged right, now united behind Trump, has stolen a march on them. But from this not unreasonable edifice, Williams throws up a enormous scaffolding of enemies, which comes to encompass anyone and everyone engaging in some form or another of collective action. Ultimately, by the end, it appears that Williams’s beef is not so much with Trump as with his leftwing critics.This is a strange, muddled book. On the one hand, Williams emphasises the primacy of class over race in the US. George Floyd, he says, was not your average African American: he was poor, unemployed, and had a criminal record. Horrific as his killing by a white policeman was, it was unduly racialised by BLM. Fewer than 25 unarmed black civilians are killed by police annually. Most black people will never find themselves in Floyd’s shoes, Williams contends.While class is important for Williams, class politics isn’t. There is only so much that initiatives to lift the poor from poverty can achieve, we are told, because “the fundamental political unit, going back to Aristotle, remains the family”. The left has got it all wrong, obsessing over the “macro level” when real change apparently happens at the individual level.Williams’s strategy is to cherrypick the most ludicrous examples of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” to smear the entire left. Sympathy from a few celebrities for the actor Jussie Smollett – who was accused of faking a hate-crime against himself, which he denied – is taken as evidence of the left’s crumbling “moral authority and credibility”. BLM, he claims, was driven by “an ascendant raider class” of middle-class and not always black activists seizing institutional power – such as when a “multi-ethnic mob of junior employees” ousted New York Times opinion editor James Bennet for publishing Senator Tom Cotton’s call to deploy troops against BLM protests.Williams’s other objections appear to be mostly aesthetic. He expends much energy pillorying the performative activism of such BLM “allies” as “the official Twitter account of the wildly popular British children’s cartoon Peppa Pig”, which tweeted a black square in solidarity. Later, visiting BLM-ravaged Portland, he mourns that “a beloved statue of an elk has been toppled”. This in a town with a “well-deserved reputation” for “exquisite gastronomy”. Quelle horreur.He concludes by suggesting that the left and right are just as odious as one another. The storming of the Capitol in 2021, he says, had a mimetic quality, the populist right “aping” the “flamboyant reflex” of the unruly left. With such invidious comparisons, and with such a dim view of collective action, Williams is unable to make the case as to how precisely his homeland is to move towards a post-racial utopia. Excelling in sending up bien-pensant opinion, he has no answers. Fixated on slagging off the left, he has marooned himself on an island of vacuity. So when he articulates a positive vision of the future, all he offers are new age nostrums such as “reinvestment in lived community” and “truth, excellence, plain-old unqualified justice”.His plea for perspective is similarly misplaced. Young black Americans, Williams whinges, have been seduced by the race pessimism of the likes of Ta-Nehisi Coates, his more popular nemesis. He enjoins us to look on the bright side: the racial wage gap is closing; black school attainment rates are nearing white levels.Williams’s Panglossian outlook is, I suspect, a form of American parochialism. His homeland, he says, is a “society that is frankly more democratic, multi-ethnic, and egalitarian than any other in recorded history”. The Gini coefficient and Democracy Index beg to differ. There are eminently sensible reasons for race pessimism in America. Segregation and ghettoisation are facts of life. The wage gap between black and white people is still a staggering 21% (in Britain, it’s under 6%). White Americans live three-and-a-half years longer than black Americans on average (black Britons outlive white Britons).Collectively, it was not the complacent optimists (who declared we had never had it so good) but rather the do-gooding pessimists (that demanded change at the dreaded “macro level”) who overthrew slavery and fought for civil rights. Individually, too, pessimism pays. For someone who sets great store by personal agency, Williams will no doubt appreciate Billy Wilder’s melancholy observation – occasioned by losing three relatives at Auschwitz – that “the optimists died in the gas chambers; the pessimists have pools in Beverly Hills”. More

    • 63 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Should we ban opinion polls?

      by

      Ahead of the 2016 US presidential election, opinion polls predicted a win for Hillary Clinton. She lost, and the polling industry went through one of its regular spasms of self-criticism and supposed reform. Alas, it did not vote itself entirely out of existence. France and Spain ban the publication of opinion polls in the days leading up to an election, but we should go one better and ban their publication at any time.No doubt it adds much to the gaiety of the British nation to see the Conservative party slip to third or fourth in the polls, but any poll asking who you would vote for if there were a Westminster election tomorrow, held at a time when there almost certainly will not be an election for another four years, is meaningless as a guide to the makeup of the next Parliament.If polls were simply useless that would be no reason to ban them, though. A better reason is that they are actively harmful: a species of misinformation that pollutes the public sphere.One fundamental problem, recognised long ago, is that there is no such thing as “the public”, thought of as a hive mind with a single homogeneous view. To report the results of any poll as “the British public thinks…” is simply a falsehood, except perhaps in the unlikely circumstance that fully 100% of respondents agree on some point. There is, for the same reason, no such thing as “the will of the British people”, a spectre conjured into being only when something very dubious is being proposed.So what is it exactly that opinion polls measure? A random sample, hopefully statistically reliable, of differing and irreconcilable opinions. Not informed opinions exclusively, of course, but also the opinions of conspiracy theorists, the news-phobic and the merely deranged. By such a scientific operation we may uncover the valuable truths that a third of Conservative voters would prefer to see Nigel Farage as prime minister, while 7% of American men believe they could beat a grizzly bear in unarmed combat.A deeper question is whether polls actually create, in whole or in part, what they purport to be revealing. Does everyone go around with settled, reasoned views on every hot-button issue of the day, just waiting to be revealed by a questioning pollster? The answer was clear to the American journalist Walter Lippmann in his 1922 book Public Opinion. It is unrealistic, he argued, to expect people to be able to form “sound public opinions on the whole business of government”, and they shouldn’t actually have to. “It is extremely doubtful whether many of us would … take the time to form an opinion on ‘any and every form of social action’ which affects us.”The act of asking a question, though, heightens the importance of the subject in the mind of the questionee, creating an urge to have one’s say where there might previously have been neither urge nor say at all. As Walter Bagehot, the 19th-century political theorist and editor of the Economist, once observed: “It has been said that if you can only get a middle-class Englishman to think whether there are ‘snails in Sirius’, he will soon have an opinion on it.” As though to prove him right, in 1980 a third of American respondents helpfully offered their view on whether the “1975 Public Affairs Act” should be repealed, even though that legislation did not actually exist.The way you ask the question, moreover, can profoundly influence the outcome. A 1989 study by the American social scientist Kenneth A Rasinski found that varying verbal framings of political issues changed the outcome: “More support was found for halting crime than for law enforcement, for dealing with drug addiction than for drug rehabilitation, and for assistance to the poor than for welfare.” Other such experiments have shown that the order of questioning also matters, that Americans express more support for government surveillance if terrorism is mentioned in the question, and that nearly twice as many people think that the government “should not forbid speeches against democracy” than it “should allow speeches against democracy”, though the options are exactly equivalent.Modern opinion polls, then, are part of the machinery behind the “manufacture of consent”, a phrase originally coined by Lippmann to describe the propaganda operations of politicians and the press. It is no accident, after all, that George Gallup had been an advertising man, with the Madison Avenue firm Young & Rubicam, before he helped to pioneer the methods of systematic opinion polling by borrowing from market research and PR. In 1936, Gallup and his colleagues correctly predicted the election of Franklin D Roosevelt, proving the old-fashioned forecasting methods outdated. Using the “new instrument” of polling, he declared happily in 1938, “the will of the majority of citizens can be ascertained at all times”. This was, of course, partly by way of advertising his own commercial interest as founder, in 1935, of the American Institute of Public Opinion (Gallup Poll). His fellow pollster Elmo Roper described their nascent industry as “a veritable goldmine”.Profitable it may be, but the constant drizzle of polling also incentivises short-term, knee-jerk decision-making by governments. A leader may make a hasty policy change merely in response to a poll, and then if the polling improves, take that as proof that the new policy is correct. Keir Starmer was no doubt cheered when, following his Enoch Powell-adjacent speech on immigration in May, polling found that “more Britons [now] believe that the government wants to reduce net migration”. But a policy designed to massage approval ratings over the course of weeks is not always going to be the same as a good policy that will last years.It would be invidious after all this not to mention one consideration that strongly favours opinion polls, which is that they provide a steady stream of pseudo-news to the media. If each day did not bring a new revelation about the imaginary public’s confected opinion on one or another issue, there would be much less for news programmes to report on. And what would we all do then?Further readingPublic Opinion by Walter Lippmann (Wilder, £7.49)Manufacturing Consent by Edward S Herman and Noam Chomsky (Vintage, £12.99)Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics by Michael Wheeler (WW Norton & Company, £13.99) More

    • 238 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘My parents got me out of Soviet Russia at the right time. Should my family now leave the US?’

      by

      Oh, to have been born in a small, stylish country with good food and favourable sea breezes. No empire, no holy faith, no condescension, no fatal ideologies. The fish is grilled, the extended family roll in on their scooters, the wine looks amber in its glass as the socially democratic sun begins its plunge into the sparkling waters below.This was not my fortune. I was born to one dying superpower and am now living in another. I was born to an ideology pasted all over enormous granite buildings in enormous Slavic letters and now live in one where the same happens in bold caps on what was once Twitter and what purports to be Truth (Pravda?) Social. America, Russia. Russia, America. Together they were kind enough to give me the material from which I made a decent living as a writer, but they took away any sense of normality, any faith that societies can provide lives without bold-faced slogans, bald-faced lies, leaders with steely set jaws, and crusades against phantom menaces, whether Venezuelan or Ukrainian.I have written dystopian fiction before, and my latest novel, Vera, or Faith, is a continuation of the natural outcome of my birth in Leningrad and my removal, at age seven, to Reagan’s America. I think I have predicted the future with fairly good aim in novels such as Super Sad True Love Story, where social media helps to give rise to a fascist America, although my timeline when that book was published in 2010 was 30 years into the future, not a decade and change.But before I wrote that book, there was a period of some optimism where, I confess, I got things terribly wrong. I imagined, in my least cynical moments, that Russia would become more like America over the years, or at the least more habituated to pluralism and the rule of law. Of course, the very opposite happened. America is becoming Russia with every day. The tractors I would watch on Soviet television leading to ever more heroic harvests are now tariffs that will bring manufacturing back to our land. The dissidents who were the Soviet enemy within are now the vastly fictionalised Tren de Aragua gang members who supposedly terrorise our land, and indeed all migrants deemed insufficiently Afrikaner. Politicians in all countries lie, but the Russian and American floods of lies are not just harbingers of a malevolent ideology, they are the ideology.Vera, the titular character of my new novel, is a 10-year-old girl growing up in an America that is just slightly different from our own. Her best friend is an artificially intelligent chessboard named Kaspie (after the chess player), the car that drives her to school is an ingratiating AI named Stella, and the lessons of her school are preparing her for a constitutional convention that will allow certain “exceptional” Americans, ie those who can trace their heritage to the colonial era but were not brought to the country in chains, five-thirds of a vote. This is being done, Vera is continually told, not to diminish her rights (she, being half-Korean, would not qualify for the enhanced vote), but to honour the Americans who are exceptional by nature of their birth.One reason I wanted to write from the point of view of a 10-year-old character – who, as it happens, is also half-Russian by heritage – is because of the way living in an authoritarian regime changed my own life. There was daily cruelty in the courtyards, classrooms and workplaces of the Soviet Union (not to mention the daily fisticuffs over nonexistent products in the food stores), but there was something else you could never forget even as a child: ubiquity. I grew up a stone’s throw from the biggest statue of Lenin in Leningrad; Lenin looked down at me from the walls of the kindergarten classroom in which my mother taught music; and the very city in which I lived had been renamed after him.When I wrote Vera, my own son was 10, and Trump was every bit as much a part of his life as Lenin was of mine, from talk in the playground to conversations at the dinner table to the discussions of his social studies class. It is unsurprising that Trump’s sometime ideological consigliere Steve Bannon has chosen Leninism as a model for his hero’s rule. All mode of social inquiry, even at a fifth-grade level, must lead back to the scowling man on the television and telephone screen. My parents and I may have different styles of childrearing and certainly different politics, but despite our disagreements I will always honour them for getting me out of the Soviet Union at the right time. The question for my son as well as the fictional Vera remains: is it time to do the same with our children? Or is there still room to stay and fight?Of course, there are large, some would say crucial differences between the Soviet Union of the 1970s and the Trumpistan that America has become today. Much as the comparisons of the contemporary United States with Hitler’s Germany are incomplete (though getting more complete by the day), Russia and America are hardly twins either. And yet, their increasing similarities raise the question of how the similarities that seemed nonexistent at the end of the cold war are becoming unavoidable now.To start with, these are vast lands that stretch from sea to sea. Their size alone is enough to fuel messianic complexes, manifest destinies, divine rights. And religion, which can easily morph into ideology and then violence, drives the stupidity of both nations. In both societies, religion helped normalise the bondage of other human beings: slavery in America and the institution of serfdom in Russia. Inequality is baked into the national psyche of both, despite Russia’s experiments with state socialism: the idea that human beings must be parsed into a multitude of categories. Obviously, other countries have caste systems, but none has the capacity to impose its worldview on the rest of the globe with such stubborn resilience. The Soviet Union loudly professed the brotherhood of nations, but Russian racism remained thick and outlandish on the ground (ask almost any African exchange student), and was converted with great ease into a hatred of Ukrainians, with Russian television using animated images of Ukrainians rolling in the mud with pigs and references to a racial slur that can be compared with the worst used in the States.Trumpistan dives right into this morass with the falsehood that some commonplace tattoos found on Venezuelan bodies supposedly signify gang orientation, but really emphasising that some people – brown or black or non-Christian or non-straight – can never fully claim the mantle of Americanness. There are, indeed, “exceptional” Americans, those that look like Trump and much of his coterie, and then there are those who semi-belong, or who may stay as long as they are useful, and then there are those who don’t belong at all and can be deported at will.Trump loves Putin with good reason. Putin takes the messianic ideals that are found at the nub of both American and Russian societies and he makes something out of them that Trump can only find beautiful and instrumental to his own power and corrupt dealings.As both countries enter headlong into postindustrial, likely artificially intelligent ages, Putin subverts the meaninglessness of Russian working-class lives with loud (though sometimes nonsensical and contradictory) narratives, rooted in a perceived insult to the messianic ideals of the fatherland. When, during his debate with the doomed Kamala Harris, Trump said that Haitian immigrants – those who would never be true Americans even if granted citizenship – are “eating the cats … eating the dogs”, he almost surpassed his master in terms of the clarity and shamelessness of his message, as well as an understanding of the audience for whom these comments were intended. It is most interesting to see older Russian-speaking immigrants in America, who fled the authoritarian USSR of their younger days, embrace Trump precisely because of the clarity of his message, their inability to deny a great leader shouting slogans that, if you take away their ideological direction, look much like the ones that lined the walls of our metro stations or the front pages of the newspapers we sometimes used as toilet paper.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhen I wrote Vera, there was one thing I couldn’t quite do to my 10-year-old heroine, which is to subject her to the threat of violence. She was simply too young for that, and also, because her family was financially privileged, less likely to face such a threat. But as I write this, in June 2025, Trump is taking the final steps of authoritarian progression in his attempt to label any protest against the unconstitutional nature of his rule as an insurrection that must be put down with military force. These attempts, as we can see, can be easily accepted by his followers, many of whom drink from the well of (often Russian-born) misinformation. There are parts of our population who are aching to shoot a brown “un-American” person at the border, in the same way many Russians without a purpose in life dream of profitably shooting a Ukrainian.And whereas Putin has relied on his own praetorian guard, the Rosgvardia (or Russian National Guard), so Trump is stumbling toward his own force in the fiercely racist and loyal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or Ice, which, in cities like Los Angeles and elsewhere, happily spreads the fuel with which our democracy may soon burn.View image in fullscreenI want to take a step back and return to the mythical country with which I began. My favourite country in the world, Italy, is ruled by a political party with ties to Mussolini. Other countries I love are not paragons of social democracy and have little love of the “outsider”, although they may rely on exactly such people to care for their parents or raise their children. But the danger of America and Russia lies in the ferocity with which we believe, a ferocity that in Russia is fuelled by a justifiable anger (and built-in fatalism), given how the population has been ruled throughout the entirety of Russian history, and in America is enhanced by a population that, despite its relative wealth, reads below a sixth-grade level and is easily susceptible to manipulation. Ignorance, to add a pinch of Orwell to the proceedings, is the strength of both regimes. Convincing these populations that slavery was but a feeble blip on the radar of American history or that Ukrainians are porcine savages who precipitated Russia’s invasion requires a groundwork set by centuries of hatred and exploitation.So where should my Vera live? It is hard to say, because living under these regimes is already preparing our children for the two choices they will inevitably face – to fight or to conform. And is it right to ask a child to give up her birthright, the right to live in a country that invented the grace of the blues, the easy slide of denim jeans, the sweet, almost religious voices of Walt Whitman and James Baldwin? That is a lot to ask of a 10-year-old.The beauty of writing about a child is that you can see the monstrosity of the world adults have built filter through their innocence. But no child stays innocent for ever. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Stephen Colbert on Trump’s Epstein controversy: ‘Desperately looking for a scapegoat’

      by

      Late-night hosts dig into Donald Trump’s growing anxiety over the Jeffrey Epstein files and his beef with the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell.Stephen ColbertOn Thursday evening, Stephen Colbert announced that the Late Show would end in May 2026, owing to a decision by the CBS parent company, Paramount. Though Paramount said the decision was “purely financial”, the cancellation comes just three days after Colbert openly criticized the company for settling a lawsuit with Donald Trump for $16m.The settlement coincided with Paramount seeking approval from the Trump administration for an $8.4bn merger with Skydance Media. Colbert called the settlement “a big fat bribe”.In a separate message to viewers on Thursday, Colbert said he was informed of the decision the night before. “Yeah, I share your feelings,” he said as the audience booed.“It’s not just the end of the show, it is the end of the Late Show on CBS. I’m not being replaced, this is all just going away,” he added. “Let me tell you, it is a fantastic job. I wish someone else was getting it. And it is a job I am looking forward to doing with this usual gang of idiots for another 10 months.”During his monologue, Colbert focused on the Jeffrey Epstein controversy consuming the White House, and “causing so much trouble for Trump that he recently ordered it to be put in a cell and for the cameras to stop working for three minutes”.“Maga is furious because they think Trump is refusing to release the Epstein files,” he explained. “In response, Trump has been saying that there are no credible files, and if there are, they’re really boring, and also Obama made them up.“That part is true, and you can read them on Obama’s annual summer Epstein client list,” he joked.“As crazy as it is, Trump is going all in on the idea that his followers have fallen for a nefarious Democratic scheme.” As Trump said in the Oval Office on Wednesday: “Certain Republicans got duped by the Democrats, and they’re following the Democrat playbook.”“That is ridiculous – the Democrats have never had a playbook,” Colbert joked. “It’s improv, baby!“Trump is desperately looking for a scapegoat,” so on Wednesday, he fired the Manhattan prosecutor who handled the Epstein case and “pulled the Uno reverse card”, calling on the FBI to investigate “this Jeffrey Epstein hoax”.“By which he evidently means he wants the FBI to investigate the folks who investigated Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking,” Colbert said, “which is weird, but we could get a whole new spinoff of To Catch a Predator.”Seth MeyersTrump “is under a lot of pressure from all this Epstein stuff. Even his most devoted supporters are trashing him and demanding answers,” said Seth Meyers on Thursday’s Late Night before clips of numerous Republicans demanding answers and even calling for an independent special counsel.In an interview with a far-right media network, Trump called the Epstein files a “scam” that’s “all put out by Democrats, some of the naive Republicans fall right into line like they always do”.“Fall in line with what?” an exasperated Meyers asked. “Democrats didn’t say a word. Your own supporters are the ones who spent years demanding the files and obsessing over the Epstein case, which was a very real criminal case involving a very real person, and now you’re the one fanning the flames of the conspiracy by calling it all a hoax. I swear we’re like a day away from Trump claiming Jeffrey Epstein was never even a real person.”Meyers also homed in on the far-right interviewer who validated Trump with “they definitely set the Republicans up.”“Set them up how?!” he implored. “We’ve been asking this question all week: how did they set up the Republicans? They made up fake Epstein files, then kept those fake files secret, then convinced the entire Maga base to spend years demanding the release of those files, then knew they would lose the election to Trump, who would then refuse to release the files they made up? You people all need to take a fucking dementia test.”The Daily Show“We all know President Trump has spent the last two weeks in a wrestling match with the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein,” said Jordan Klepper on the Daily Show. “But he’s been fighting the last six months with a much more alive person: Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell. And boy does Trump hate the guy.”Klepper played a series of clips in which Trump called Powell a “stupid person”, an “average, mentally, person. I’d say low at what he does” and a “numbskull … you talk to the guy and it’s like talking to nothing. It’s like talking to a chair.”“Yeah! Whatever happened to all of our exciting, dynamic Federal Reserve chairs?” Klepper joked.“The way Trump talks about him, you’d think they caught him at a Coldplay concert with Trump’s wife,” he added. “But at its heart, this is a beef about economics. Trump wants to lower interest rates to help juice the economy, but Jerome Powell is in charge of setting those interest rates, and he refuses to lower them because he’s worried that will increase inflation. And nothing, nothing makes Trump angrier than someone doing their job well.”In another clip, Trump blasted Joe Biden for nominating Powell. Except … Klepper cut to a clip of Trump nominating Powell in 2017, calling him “strong,” “committed” and “smart”.“Damn, Joe Biden looks fat as shit,” Klepper joked. “But also, I get it. I’m also trying desperately to forget everything that happened during Trump’s first term.” More

    • 238 Shares149 Views

      in US Politics

      The end of Stephen Colbert’s Late Show is a concerning nail in the coffin for comedy | Jesse Hassenger

      by

      The idea that the political career of Donald Trump would be a goldmine for comedy died a long time ago, with the coffin accepting stray nails for the past five years. The latest and possibly last such nail is the cancellation of The Late Show, the CBS late-night talkshow hosted by Stephen Colbert since the fall of 2015, and originated by David Letterman when the network poached him from NBC in 1993. At this point, Trump hasn’t just made topical late-night comedy look outdated, hackneyed and an insufficient response to his reign of terror; he’s also made a chunk of it flat-out go away.There will be time to eulogize Colbert’s particular talkshow style later; the Late Show isn’t leaving the air for another 10 months, when his contract is up. Surely that leaves plenty more time to savage the president – and Colbert has been in this slot since right around the time Trump became a real contender in the presidential race, so why has this only now come to a head? Seemingly because the axing of the Late Show franchise follows the $16m settlement of a frivolous Trump lawsuit against CBS and their newsmagazine show 60 Minutes over the show’s editing of a 2024 interview with presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Colbert made great fun of his bosses’ payout as a cowardly “bribe” designed to appease the Trump administration, who are in the position to approve or deny the sale of Paramount, the corporate owners of CBS, to the company Skydance. In other words, the pre-merger nixing a comedian who regularly goofs on Trump on network TV seems like a convenient bit of timing – maybe even an unspoken bonus to go along with those millions of dollars.The network, of course, has characterized the decision as “purely financial” amid a period when most traditional late-night shows have struggled. As excuses go, it’s not entirely unconvincing. After all, Colbert isn’t being replaced with another host; The Late Show is simply going the same route as its short-lived companion series After Midnight (and The Late Late Show before it). CBS is surrendering the late-night block entirely. This represents a major retreat after the Letterman deal made the network a genuine player for the first time in ages. Presumably it’s back to reruns and old movies going forward.In that sense, this decision does transcend politics. CBS has ripped off a bandage that the big three networks have been applying to similar wounds for years. Late-night programming simply doesn’t mean as much as it used to, with smaller network lead-ins from primetime lineups and more audience choices for comedy, talk, music or even the dopey celeb games that Jimmy Fallon throws together. Saturday Night Live has retained some cultural cachet, thanks to a combination of lower commitment (20 episodes a year, on a night where many people don’t have work the next day, versus eight times as many, all airing on weeknights), legacy branding (it’s still known as a star showcase and political comedy go-to, no matter how wan those cold-open sketches get), and sketch comedy that travels well online. These days, it’s routinely one of the highest-rated network shows of the week when it airs a new episode, offering an encouraging sign that old time-slot rules about viewership no longer apply. It’s also extremely expensive to produce and difficult to replicate, which nonetheless looks more viable than the tired talkshow format.View image in fullscreenBroadly, this could be a good thing for comic minds including Colbert or Conan O’Brien. Some comedians seem unable to resist the siren call of late-night talkshows, chasing the Tonight Show dream even when that actual job remained out of reach. O’Brien is a singularly brilliant comedy writer and performer; as great as his late-night shows could be, in retrospect should he have spent three decades primarily in that waning medium? Colbert, meanwhile, did his strongest political satire playing a parody of a conservative commentator on The Daily Show and its later spinoff The Colbert Report. His warmth and sometimes-sharp humor made him a good “real” talkshow host – and by most standards, a successful one. In recent matchups, his Late Show has been the most-watched such program across the major networks. That he can face cancellation anyway should (alongside O’Brien losing his Tonight Show gig years ago) signal to newcomers that the rarified air of the national late-night talkshow host is also getting pretty thin, maybe unbreathable.Yet Trump has sucked up some of that oxygen, too. Even with the “challenges” cited by CBS, it’s difficult to believe that vanquishing a longtime issuer of Trump mockery wasn’t at least considered a side benefit of canceling The Late Show. Even if the decision was, as claimed, a financial one, it accompanies another financial decision: that Paramount could afford to pay Trump $16m rather than proceed with litigation that many seemed to think they could win. That’s precisely the kind of expense that could diminish how, say, your late-night talkshow attracts more eyeballs than The Tonight Show.Beyond Trump personally smudging up the balance sheets, he’s helped to hasten the demise of late-night comedy simply by being himself, seeming to provide the perfect target: a venal, dimwitted perma-celebrity with an army of devoted sycophants. But after two non-consecutive administrations have flooded the zone with grotesqueries, performing a lightly zinging monologue or sketches as a warmup act for good-natured interviews seems unlikely to entice either those craving anti-Trump catharsis, or those desperate to believe in his strongman powers.That Colbert took a somewhat less cutesy approach than his competitor Fallon seemed to be all that was necessary to mark him as a troublemaker. The thing is, Trump might have ultimately consumed him either way. By providing a ready-made caricature of himself, intentionally or not, the president has beaten the system again. It may not be worth mourning the hacky, presidential-themed jokes we might miss in a future with fewer talkshows than ever. But it does feel like the enforcement of one of Trump’s more minor cruelties: the ability to see himself as the only real star in the world. More

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      TV tonight: inside Donald Trump’s relationship with Vladimir Putin

      by

      Dispatches: Trump – Moscow’s Man in the White House9pm, Channel 4This film promises to be an explosive behind-the-scenes investigation into the biggest political story of the decade – and Dispatches always delivers on its word. Former US intelligence officials and White House insiders speak out about Donald Trump’s relationship with Vladimir Putin to help answer the questions: what is really underpinning it? And what will happen next? Hollie RichardsonSupercruising: Life at Sea8pm, Channel 4This behind-the-scenes peek at life aboard two luxury cruise ships heads to very different locations this week. In one, the navigation crew stress about getting their craft through the locks of the Panama Canal while passengers whip out phones for pics. Over in Tenerife, it’s whale-watching time. Alexi DugginsThe Great Fire of London With Rob Rinder & Ruth Goodman9pm, Channel 5Rob and Ruth continue to be captivating history teachers as they ask what living during the Great Fire of London was like on both sides of the wealth line. Rob steps into the shoes of diarist Samuel Pepys and the city’s Lord Mayor, while Ruth explores the reality of being a widowed innkeeper with five mouths to feed. HRThe Walking Dead: Dead City9pm, Sky MaxNow that his baseball bat has been upgraded with an electroshock function, surely the listless Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is ready to be a hammy villain again? A cowboy faction attempting to invade zombified New York by boat seems like a perfect opportunity for the leather-clad baddie to get back into the swing of things. Graeme VirtueOutrageous9pm, U&DramaView image in fullscreenBessie Carter is best known as Prudence Featherington in Bridgerton, but she’s great here as Nancy Mitford narrating the turbulent lives of her family. While Nancy deals with inferior-husband problems, her sister Diana makes plans to marry Oswald Mosley while Unity defends her friendship with Adolf Hitler. HRSuch Brave Girls10pm, BBC ThreeThere are at least two feckless men hanging around the house and an unwanted boat in the front garden – could motherhood be the answer? Kat Sadler’s comedy concludes with babies – stolen, borrowed and imagined – in the mix as the girls hit the casino. It’s resolutely rude, ridiculous and very funny. Jack Seale More