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      Making sense of conspiracy theorists as the world gets more bizarre

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      In 1999 I sat in a Vancouver café with a group of anti-capitalist activists. They’d just returned from protesting the WTO in Seattle to find a new, far stranger foe in town – David Icke. He was there to lecture about how the ruling elite are actually child-sacrificing, blood-drinking paedophile lizards in human disguise.Nobody had ever suggested such a thing before, and the activists were working to get his books seized and destroyed. They were alarmed not just by the echoes of antisemitism but because something startling was happening. Icke was beginning to win over people who should have been on their side. I wrote back then that they were “seeing an omen of the blackest kind, the future of thought itself: a time when irrational thought would sweep the land”. But this wasn’t prophecy on my part. I thought they were probably being overdramatic.I spent much of the late 1990s chronicling the embryonic world of Satanic Hollywood lizard paedophile conspiracy theories for my book, Them: Adventures with Extremists, which turns 20 this week. Lately, of course, the theories have proliferated wildly – radicalising unparalleled swathes of YouTubers, inspiring an insurrection and reportedly in the past two years at least one murder and a suicide bombing. I feel lucky to have been there at its inception, but annoyed with myself for not anticipating quite how vast and malevolent things would get. Looking back, were there clues?It was a tip-off from a militant Islamist that alerted me to that fledgling world. In 1995 the director Saul Dibb and I began filming Omar Bakri Mohammed, who had just announced that he wouldn’t rest until he saw the flag of Islam flying over Downing Street.“Maybe,” our editor at Channel 4 said, “it’ll be the Islamic fundamentalist version of following around Hitler the watercolourist.”Omar Bakri’s jihad campaign was indeed so nascent we had to drive him to Office World to get his “Islam the Future for Britain” pamphlets photocopied. His sweet 13-year-old son Mohammed flapped around anxiously, watching the Malcolm X biopic and worrying that his father might one day be assassinated, too.Fifteen years later, Omar Bakri was imprisoned in Lebanon for supporting terrorism. His anxious teenage son Mohammed grew up, joined Isis, and was murdered by them, reportedly for cursing the Prophet Muhammad. It was heartbreaking. But these days when I recall the “Hitler the watercolourist” comment, I mostly remember a remark made by one of Omar’s circle during our first day’s reporting.The man was recounting his daydream of releasing a swarm of mice into United Nations headquarters when he suddenly asked if I was aware that the world was being secretly controlled by a network of shadowy cabals from secret rooms. A year later I met a Ku Klux Klansman in Arkansas who was consumed by the same shadowy cabal conspiracy theories, and that’s when it hit me: there was an under-chronicled relationship between 1990s political and religious extremism and conspiratorial thinking. So I started hanging around the conspiracy world.And, in hindsight, it was all clues. The most popular tables at the gun shows were frequently the ones selling the conspiracy VHS tapes – recordings of very long conversations between unengaging men in public access TV studios. They’d discuss how the Illuminati were the puppet masters behind the deaths at David Koresh’s church in Waco, or how the all-seeing eye on the dollar bill was evidence of the Illuminati’s takeover of the Federal Reserve. They were as dull as anything, but due to their scarcity the VHSs were passed around militia circles like rare jewels, gun-show Rosetta stones.Then there was Art Bell’s popular paranormal radio show, Coast to Coast AM, broadcast from Bell’s desert home in Pahrump, Nevada. Ten million Americans routinely tuned in to hear spellbinding night-time tales of ghosts and UFOs and conspiracies – like how the streaks of condensation you see coming from aeroplanes are actually chemicals designed to keep the masses docile. It was the perfect theory for the extremely lazy. No travelling was necessary, no trips to ancient rune sites or whatever. You only had to look out of your window and up into the sky to see the smoking gun. It was Miss Marple for those who wanted to expend as little physical exertion as possible.These days nothing much has changed, except instead of streaks of vapour and the dollar bill they’re deciphering clues in Beyoncé videos and Chrissy Teigen’s tweets. For QAnon to work, adherents have to allow themselves to believe that the secret paedophile elite, despite their Machiavellian genius, can’t resist leaving little visible pointers to their malevolent power, like a thief placing a monogrammed glove at the scene of the crime. It’s lucky for the armchair detective that that’s their achilles heel.Looking back then, it’s obvious that all the movement needed was a much better distribution system and some charismatic leaders, Art Bell being reclusive and not a tub-thumper.It turned out I had a knack for star-spotting future conspiracy luminaries – although, to be honest, it wasn’t hard. In the 1990s two men towered over the others in terms of oratory skills and engrossing theories – David Icke and Alex Jones.In 1991 Icke, then a popular BBC sports presenter, unexpectedly announced on Wogan that he was the son of God. The screams of laughter from the studio audience felt like a firing squad. When I met him soon afterwards he said of that interview: “One of my very greatest fears as a child was being ridiculed in public. As a television presenter people come up to you and shake your hand and talk to you in a respectful way. And suddenly, overnight, this was transformed into ‘Icke’s a nutter.’ I couldn’t walk down any street in Britain without being laughed at. That was so important for me in understanding how it was possible for a relatively few people in key positions to run the world. They do it by manipulating the way people think and feel.”I felt quite sure then, and still do, that he was right about that last part. The mainstream media loves to form a consensus about who the new most ridiculed person ought to be. The same is true of social media, of course. Sometimes these warring factions disagree, and a person monsterised by one clique is deemed a magnificent hero by another, but with each wild generalisation our grey areas become unfashionable and there’s a narrowing of what constitutes an acceptable person.All the conspiracy movement needed was charismatic leadersBut there was something that the mainstream media, in its hubris, failed to notice about David Icke: a growing number of people were feeling more aligned to him than to his tormentors. These were people who also, for their own reasons, felt ridiculed and shut out of the culture. And so when Icke re-emerged with his paedophile lizard theory he immediately began selling out concert halls across the world. It was an incredibly surprising and, I suspect, spiteful story born from injury: conspiracy theory as grievance storytelling. And it was a dangerous theory, with its appeals to paranoia and delusion.When sceptics are asked to explain why people succumb to conspiracy theories, they tend to say they offer a strange comfort – they allow people to make sense of a chaotic world. But I think there’s another, more often ignored reason. You get renaissances of conspiracy theories when the powerful behave in conspiratorial ways. The mystery is why the theorists are never happy with the actual evidence, and instead behave like amateur sleuths inside some magical parallel world where metaphors are facts. In that world, the deaths at David Koresh’s church in Waco were caused not by government overreach but by the Illuminati’s Satanic desire for blood sacrifice. Why they invariably slap a layer of fiction on top of an already fascinating truth had long been a puzzle to me, and to many others, too: a question I’ve been asked over and over is whether I think Alex Jones knows he’s lying when he tells his millions of listeners that, for instance, the Sandy Hook school shootings were “a giant hoax”.Finally, after 20 years, I think I’ve figured the answer out.I first met Alex Jones at the site of David Koresh’s church, five years after 76 Branch Davidians died there. I’d been told that an Austin conspiracy radio host was organising its rebuilding with listener donations. As I drove in I saw a bunch of militia people – bikers and separatists – hammering away, but when Jones wandered towards them they turned tongue-tied and star-struck. Jones was 26, unknown outside militia and Austin hipster circles, but clearly, as his future wife Kelly put it to me that week, “a new sensation”.I visited his home and watched him broadcast down an ISDN line in a child’s bedroom decorated with choo-choo train wallpaper. He was mesmerising. “We see decadent empires in their final stages of corruption as they become insane!” he yelled of the Waco siege. “Engaging in mass murder, just to do it! Are you going to be that Aztec villager who hands his child over to be lunchmeat for the priesthood?” Between his incredible eloquence and his disregard for the truth, he was unstoppable.But unlike David Icke, it turns out that Jones’s conspiratorial thinking has nothing to do with being ridiculed or cast out of society. Two years ago I visited some of his classmates for a story about his teenage years. He was raised by loving parents in a gated community in the Dallas suburb of Rockwall. According to everyone we spoke to, he wasn’t bullied at school. He was the bully – the most violent bully at Rockwall High. He beat one boy, Jared, almost to death. Jared says he has never fully recovered. (Jones claims he was defending himself.) And from the beginning, Jones was a conspiracy theorist. “He always had something to say about the teachers and the principal and the school cop,” Jared told me. “If we were at the pool hall, it was ‘the guy that owns the pool hall has called the DEA and they’re setting a deal up.’ It was weird, man. Everybody was like, what?”In 2017, I spent a few days in a courtroom watching Jones and his now ex-wife Kelly go through what divorce lawyers were calling Austin’s most acrimonious child custody hearing in living memory. At one point as I sat in the gallery a court psychologist, Alissa Sherry, was called to give evidence about Jones’s mental state. She testified that he had been diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder.At first, I felt sad for him, wondering if he was embarrassed that a thing like that had come out in court. But I kept thinking about it and, honestly, it answers a lot of questions. High-scoring narcissists are prone to paranoia and black-and-white thinking. Through their eyes everyone is either wonderful or else they’re the enemy. (Often the wonderful person commits some minor transgression and instantly becomes the enemy; if you’ve been close to a narcissist you’ll probably recognise that “love-bomb, devalue, discard” relationship arc.) And narcissists need to feel like they’re the smartest person in the room – hence, I suspect, their reaching for conspiracy theories with their obnoxiously counterintuitive, superficially complex worldviews.With David Icke and Alex Jones the movement had found its stars. So now all it needed was a better distribution system. Unfortunately the one it got turned out to massively exacerbate our proclivity for paranoia and black-and-white thinking – social media algorithms.In 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook executives had realised four years earlier that its algorithms were “exploiting the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness” – like the startling fact that 64% of users who joined extremist groups were enticed to do so by clicking on the “Groups you should join” and “Discover” buttons. Inside the company there was alarm. What might these rabbit holes be doing to users’ mental health and to society? Internal teams suggested numerous fixes – algorithmic tweaks to make the site more civil. But the executives nicknamed the proposals “Eat Your Veggies” and ignored them. (They argued that it was for reasons of fairness: there are more far-right pages on Facebook, so any changes would have disproportionately affected conservatives.) Facebook claimed in 2020 that it had changed in the years since these deliberations.Were I a conspiracy theorist, I could easily concoct a theory about the man instrumental in killing the recommendations. He was Facebook’s policy chief, Joel Kaplan. In 2000, when Kaplan was an adviser to George W Bush’s election campaign, he was present at the Brooks Brothers riot, where dozens of paid Republican operatives masquerading as concerned citizens stormed Miami-Dade polling headquarters with the goal of shutting down the recount. They pounded on windows and chanted “Stop the fraud!” In the ensuing chaos, the recount was abandoned and Bush was elected president.Between 2001 and 2009 Kaplan worked for the Bush administration’s policy and budget management offices. During that time the administration launched Operation Shock and Awe in Iraq. Shock and Awe was described by Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine as economic strategy: “the brutal tactic of using the public’s disorientation following a collective shock – wars, coups, terrorist attacks, market crashes or natural disasters – to push through radical pro-corporate measures”.And so Kaplan was right there at three pivotal moments in recent history when his employers’ goals were furthered by creating disorienting chaos. The tech utopians and their devotion to algorithms was the one clue I could never have anticipated. I could describe Kaplan as a player in a conspiracy. But what it really was, I suppose, is business. More

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      The Agenda review: why Biden must expand the supreme court – fast

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      If Congress follows Joe Biden’s $1.9tn Covid relief bill with an even more ambitious infrastructure bill, the new president could quickly claim the mantle of most transformative president since Franklin D Roosevelt.But this short, powerful new book by the legal journalist Ian Millhiser pinpoints the gigantic threat that could thwart most of the progress embodied in those two pieces of landmark legislation: the new 6-3 conservative majority on the supreme court.Writing clearly and succinctly, Millhiser dissects many of the worst opinions the modern court has rendered about voting rights, administrative law, religion and forced arbitration. After reading his cogent arguments, it becomes perfectly obvious why he thinks it’s necessary to end “with a note of alarm”.The extreme conservatives now steering the highest court may pose the single greatest “existential threat to the Democratic party’s national ambitions – and, more importantly, to liberal democracy in the United States … a Republican supreme court will fundamentally alter the structure of the American system of government” and “is likely to build a nation where … only conservatives have the opportunity to govern”.Trump’s greatest (and worst) achievement was the appointment of 234 federal judges, including three on the supreme courtHow radical are these justices? When the American Bar Association polled experts, 85% of them predicted all or most of the Affordable Care Act would be upheld. Then four supreme court justices voted to repeal it in its entirety. Clarence Thomas has suggested his predecessors were absolutely right to strike down child labor laws more than a century ago. The conservative justices on the current court rarely side with their liberal colleagues in 5-4 decisions – Samuel Alito has never done so. Chief Justice John Roberts dismantled much of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 and many observers think he is likely to join his newest colleague, Amy Coney Barrett, in a ruling this term that could complete the evisceration of the landmark civil rights legislation.Of course, most of the damage to voting rights has been done – and scores of state legislatures are poised to follow the loathsome example of Georgia by doing everything they can to make minority voting every more difficult than it already is.Millhiser does an especially good job of explaining the catastrophic effect of Roberts’ decision to no longer allow the justice department to require local jurisdictions to submit proposed voting rights law changes before they go into effect.This, he writes, gave state lawmakers “a profound incentive to enact gerrymanders and other forms of voter suppression even if those laws will ultimately be invalidated by a court order”, because “if the state gets to run just one rigged election under the invalid law”, it will already have advanced the racist goals of the law’s authors.Millhiser’s book is bulging with examples that prove that the same Republican justices who proclaim the need to rein in the executive branch whenever there is a Democrat in the White House have no trouble at all ignoring their imaginary “judicial philosophies” – as soon, say, as a Republican such as Donald Trump asserts a unilateral right to ban Muslims from entering the US.Trump’s greatest (and worst) achievement was the appointment of 234 federal judges, including three for the supreme court and 54 for the courts of appeals. This means there is only one Biden administration initiative which is potentially even more important than the Covid and infrastructure bills.It is the newly appointed commission charged with carrying out Biden’s campaign promise to investigate whether or not membership of the supreme court should be expanded – something that can be accomplished by a simple act of Congress.It’s no coincidence that Millhiser started making smart arguments to expand the court two years ago.In the words of Aaron Belkin, whose advocacy group Take Back the Court pushed for the rapid creation of the new commission, the current court “is a danger to the health and wellbeing of the nation and even to democracy itself”.“This White House judicial reform commission has a historic opportunity to both explain the gravity of the threat and to help contain it,” Belkin told USA Today.This great short book makes it clear that the breadth of the new commission’s ambitions and the success of the Biden administration in carrying them out will be more important to our nation’s future than everything else the president and Congress accomplish. More

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      On the House review: John Boehner’s lament for pre-Trump Republicans

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      In October 2015, John Boehner abruptly vacated the speaker’s chair. Confronted by a hyper-caffeinated Freedom Caucus, the Ohio congressman announced his retirement singing Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah. He walked before they made him run.By all indications, Boehner is happier on the outside – advising high-priced clients, pushing marijuana liberalization. The distance between Boehner’s unfiltered Camel cigarettes and Kona Gold is shorter than the chasm between the Republicans and Coca-Cola.Against the backdrop of the Trump-induced insurrection of 6 January, On the House delivers a merlot-hued indictment of Republican excesses and heaps praise on those who play the game with aplomb – regardless of party.Nancy Pelosi gets props for “gutting” the late John Dingell, a senior midwest Democrat, like a “halibut she found floating around San Francisco Bay”. Boehner posits that Pelosi may be the most powerful speaker ever.Likewise, Mitch McConnell receives a shoutout even after dressing down the author, saying: “I’ll never presume to know more about the House than you do. And trust me, you’ll never know as much about the Senate as I do.” Boehner offers no pushback.Boehner expresses contempt for Senator Ted Cruz and Mark Meadows, a former North Carolina congressman who became Donald Trump’s final chief of staff. As for Flyin’ Ted, Boehner is unsparing: “There is nothing more dangerous than a reckless asshole who thinks he is smarter than everyone else.”PS, Ted Cruz: Go fuck yourselfNot surprisingly, Boehner finds the Cruz-led government shutdown of 2013 to have been senseless. On the other hand, the GOP recaptured the Senate a year later. Regardless, one audio clip of Boehner reading On the House concludes: “PS, Ted Cruz: Go fuck yourself.”As for Meadows, Boehner campaigned for him, only for Meadows to oppose Boehner’s election as speaker, then offer a surprising, moist-eyed apology.“I wondered what his elite and uncompromising band of Freedom Caucus warriors would have made of their star organizer on the verge of tears,” Boehner writes. “But that wasn’t my problem.”On the House also serves bits of vaguely remembered history, like Boehner’s attempt to make the late justice Antonin Scalia Bob Dole’s Republican running mate against Bill Clinton in 1996. Boehner met with Scalia. Scalia was open to the idea but Dole picked Jack Kemp, a former quarterback, congressman and cabinet officer. The senator from Kansas did Scalia a favor. Dole lost badly.More puzzling is Boehner’s continued embrace of Dick Cheney, George W Bush’s vice-president and a former Wyoming congressman. In Boehner’s words, Cheney was a “phenomenal partner” for the younger Bush and the two made a “great team”. He makes no mention of Cheney’s role in the run-up to the Iraq war, though he does detail his own deliberations on voting to authorize the Gulf war under Bush Sr.By the time George W’s time in the White House was done, his relationship with Cheney had grown distant and strained. The marriage of convenience reached its end. Perhaps Boehner knows something Cheney’s old boss doesn’t.On the House offers a clearer assessment of Newt Gingrich’s skillset and foibles. Like Boehner, Gingrich was speaker. He was also responsible for ending decades of Democratic control of the House. But Boehner crystalizes Gingrich’s inability to help run a co-equal branch of government. Politics isn’t always tethered to bomb-throwing. Governing is about the quotidian. Gingrich couldn’t be bothered.The book acknowledges the visceral hostility of the Republican base toward Barack Obama. After Boehner announced that he believed that Obama was born in the US, he caught a blizzard of grief. The GOP’s embrace of fringe theories remains.Boehner describes his attempts to reach compromises with Obama on “fiscal issues” and immigration. On the former, he acknowledges Obama’s efforts. On the latter, he contends that Obama would “phone it in” and “poison the well” for the sake of partisan advantage.Based upon the 2016 election, Obama bet wrong. Open borders are a losing proposition. On the other hand, so is opposing the Affordable Care Act amid an ongoing pandemic and the aftermath of the great recession. Specifically, Boehner claims credit for dismantling Obamacare “bit by bit”, pointing to the rollback of the medical device tax. Incredibly, he claims “there really isn’t much of Obamacare left.”Really? Boehner definitely gets this wrong.The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that the number of uninsured non-elderly Americans dropped from more than 46.5 million in 2010 to under 29 million in 2019. Also, about 9 million purchase subsidized health insurance with federal premium assistance.If the theatrics of the Trump administration and the Republican challenge pending before the supreme court teach us anything, it is that Obamacare is very much alive. When it comes to government spending, the Republican donor and voting bases don’t necessarily sing from the same hymnal.Like most people, Boehner’s relationship with Trump ended worse than it began. Early on, Trump reached out. Less so with the passing of time. Boehner chalked that up to Trump getting comfortable in his job but also surmises: “He just got tired of me advising him to shut up.”Days after the insurrection but before the Biden inauguration, Boehner said Trump should consider resigning. The 45th president had “abused the loyalty of the people who voted for him” and incited a riot.Boehner admits that he was unprepared for the aftermath of Trump’s defeat. The insurrection “should have been a wake-up call for a return to Republican sanity”. It wasn’t. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, the congresswoman from QAnon, has amassed a $3.2m re-election war chest. “The legislative terrorism” Boehner had witnessed helped birth “actual terrorism”.Boehner is confident about Americans, “the most versatile people God put on earth”. As for the survival of the American conservative movement, he is less optimistic. More

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      Beautiful Things review: Hunter Biden as prodigal son and the Trumpists' target

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      Robert Hunter Biden is not a rock star. Instead, the sole surviving son of Joe Biden – senator, vice-president, president – is a lawyer by training and a princeling by happenstance. Regardless, life on the edge comes with consequences.As Hunter Biden grudgingly acknowledges in his memoir, comparisons to Billy Carter, Roger Clinton or the Trump boys, appendages to power who sought to capitalize on proximity, may be apt. Indeed, Biden cops to the possibility that his name might have had something to do with his winding up on third base without hitting a triple.“I’m not a curio or a sideshow to a moment in history,” he writes, defensively, channeling the mantra of those with parents in high places: “I’ve worked for someone other than my father, rose and fell on my own.”But Biden is not content to leave well alone. Instead, he announces: “Having a Biden on Burisma’s board was a loud and unmistakable ‘fuck you’ to Putin.” He protests too much.Glossed over by Beautiful Things is that while his overseas venture may have ended up at the heart of Donald Trump’s first impeachment, it also discomforted Barack Obama’s White House. Confronted with Hunter’s foray into Ukraine and the energy business, the 44th president’s spokesman, Jay Carney, declined to express support.“Hunter Biden and other members of the Biden family are obviously private citizens, and where they work does not reflect an endorsement by the administration or by the vice-president or president,” said Carney, back in 2014.Hunter possesses little filter. His craving for absolution is hardwiredBiden also portrays the relationship between his father and the Obama crowd as uneven to say the least. He points a finger at David Axelrod, an Obama counselor who played naysayer to Joe Biden’s chances in 2020, on CNN.Hunter recounts the aftermath of a conversation between his father and then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton, about Afghanistan: “Goddamnit … Axelrod’s gotten in her ear!”As for Clinton, Biden elides the tension that existed between his father and the 2016 nominee. It wasn’t just about Obama encouraging Clinton. Back then, Joe Biden was scared of running against her.In Chasing Hillary, written by Amy Chozick in 2018, Joe Biden is paraphrased as saying to the press, off the record: “You guys don’t understand these people. The Clintons will try to destroy me.” Hell hath no fury like a Clinton crossed.The younger Biden’s book shows flashes of his grasp of power politics. But he also demonstrates a continuous blind spot for his own predicament. Confession should not be conflated with self-awareness.Biden recounts a conversation with Kathleen, his first wife, after the funeral in 2015 of Beau, his brother. He goes so far as to muse about running for office – despite his multiple addictions, all now detailed extensively on the page, and the ups-and-downs of his marriage.She responds: “Are you serious?”That Biden even went there is beyond puzzling. Or as he puts it, “I underestimated how much the wreckage of my past and all that I put my family through still weighed on Kathleen.”This was before Biden commenced an affair with his late brother’s wife.Hunter possesses little filter. His craving for absolution is hardwired.Describing a series of interviews he granted to the New Yorker’s Adam Entous, regarding Burisma, Ukraine and all that, he writes that he “didn’t know how cathartic the experience would be”. For good measure, he adds: “It was my opportunity to tell everyone out there, ‘This is who I am, you motherfuckers, and I ain’t changing!’”The italics are his.Through it all, Joe Biden is shown as a loving and caring father, like the dad in the story of the prodigal son. Biden depicts his father’s efforts to intervene in his personal nightmare and the times he rebuffed such entreaties. The family’s Catholicism is present throughout his book.The empathy and emotion Joe Biden conveys on television are part of who he is. His own setbacks and suffering helped elect him amid a terrible pandemic. Whatever facade exists is thin – and transparent.That said, the president’s capacity to forgive his son’s trespasses makes recent stories of his low tolerance for prior marijuana use among political appointees hard to comprehend.Beautiful Things is smoothly written and quickly paced. We know how and where the story ends. Hunter Biden appears to have found happiness in his second marriage. His father is now president.Still, the son cannot hide his bitterness in being turned into the whipping boy of the Trump campaign. The ex-president is “a vile man with a vile mission” who sank to “unprecedented depths” in his bid to retain power. The 6 January insurrection was vintage Trump. Charlottesville was prelude.Recent events offer Hunter Biden some measure of personal vindication and schadenfreude. A report by the National Intelligence Council (NIC) assessed that he and his father were targeted by Russia as part of campaign to swing the election in favor of Trump.According to the NIC, Moscow used “proxies linked to Russian intelligence” –including “some close to former President Trump and his administration” – “to push influence narratives including misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden”. Rudy Giuliani looks like a Kremlin dupe.But it doesn’t end there. In December 2019, the Florida congressman Matt Gaetz belittled Hunter Biden for his substance abuse. It was a no-holds barred takedown, unleavened by Gaetz’s own history of drinking and driving.Timing is everything. Biden returns the favor in his book, calling Gaetz a “troll”. On Tuesday night, Gaetz admitted to being under justice department investigation “regarding sexual conduct with women” and allegedly trafficking a 17-year-old girl. More

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      Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue review: how Ruth Bader Ginsburg changed America

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      Two and a half years ago, at a naturalization ceremony for newly minted Americans, Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked: “What is the difference between a bookkeeper in New York City’s garment district and a supreme court justice?”Her answer: “One generation … the difference between opportunities available to my mother and those afforded me.”From this new selection of Ginsburg’s arguments, speeches and opinions – the justice’s greatest hits – it is clear she deserves at least as much credit as any other American for that remarkably rapid transformation.This book is full of evidence that even in a nation like ours, where over the last 50 years the concentration of power in the hands of the top 1% has steadily worsened, a brilliant and determined individual with the right alliances can still bring about extraordinary change within her own lifetime.The book’s co-author, Amanda L Tyler, writes that Ginsburg’s work for gender equality is comparable to Justice Thurgood Marshall’s trailblazing quest to dismantle segregation.The burning determination of the gay activist Frank Kameny similarly transformed the status of LGBTQ people – and Ginsberg’s commitment to equal rights for all meant that she ended up doing just as much to expand the rights of sexual minorities as she did for the rights of women.Looking back from the third decade of the 21st century, the breadth and depth of the discrimination women of Ginsberg’s generation faced at the beginning of their careers is astonishing.Harvard Law School never allowed a woman student until 1950. When Ginsburg entered, in 1956, she was one of just nine women in a class of 500. Across America, women were routinely excluded from jury pools. Through the 1960s, the supreme court even declined to disturb a law that prohibited women from bartending “unless they did so under the auspices of a husband or father”.In 1963, when she started teaching law at Rutgers, Ginsburg was only the 19th woman professor at an American law school – and the dean proudly disobeyed the newly passed Equal Pay Act by paying her much less than her male colleagues, because she had a “husband with a well-paid job”.Ginsburg’s determination was obvious. When she was still in law school, her husband, Marty, developed a virulent form of cancer. They also had an infant daughter. But neither handicap prevented her or her husband from excelling in their studies and she actually described her child-rearing duties as an advantage in law school, because they gave her a more balanced life than most of her classmates.“Each part of my life was a respite from the other,” Ginsberg explained, six decades later. “After an intense day at the law school, I was glad to have the childcare hours. And then when Jane went to bed, I was ready to go back to the books. I think it was an appreciation that there is more to life than law school that accounts for how well I did.”In one of the first cases she litigated with her husband, in 1971, Moritz v Commissioner of Internal Revenue, they argued that Charles Moritz, a never-married man who cared for his mother, was denied a caregiver deduction a woman in his position would have received.Congress amended the law to permit all caregivers to claim the deduction going forward, but the government kept the appeal going anyway. It was then that Ginsburg received her greatest gift from her adversary: a list of every provision in the United States Code that differentiated on the basis of sex.“There it was, right in front of us,” she recalled, “all the laws that needed to be changed or eliminated … it was our road map, a pearl beyond price, that list of federal statutes.”In the 60s, excelling in law school didn’t mean a woman would be a strong candidate to be hired by any of the fanciest firms. But in retrospect Ginsberg agreed with the first woman on the supreme court, Sandra Day O’Connor, that even this kind of adversity had its advantages.Ginsburg often repeated O’Connor’s comment: “Suppose you and I had gone to law school … when there was no barrier to women in the legal profession. Where would we be now? We would be retired partners of a large law firm.” But because they had to find a different path, “both of us ended up on the US supreme court.”This book is also a reminder of the wisdom of Vincent Scully, the great Yale architectural historian, who noted just two years after Ginsburg was appointed to the court that “ours is a time which, with all its agonies, has … been marked most of all by liberation” – black liberation, women’s liberation and gay liberation.“Those movements, though they have a deep past in American history, were almost inconceivable just before they occurred,” Scully said. “Then, all of a sudden in the 1960s, they burst out together, changing us all.”Ginsberg’s energy and perspicacity gave her a singularly important role in bringing about many of those fundamental changes. More

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      White people, black authors are not your medicine | Yaa Gyasi

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      In 2018, two other novelists and I were being driven back from a reception in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, to our hotel in downtown Detroit, when we saw a black man getting arrested on the side of the road. The driver of our car, a white woman who had spent the earlier part of the drive ranting about how Coleman Young, Detroit’s first black mayor, had ruined the city, looked at the lone black man surrounded by police officers with their guns drawn and said: “It’s good they’ve got so many on him. You never know what they’ll do.”
      Two years before, I had published my first novel, Homegoing, a book that is, among other things, about the afterlife of the transatlantic slave trade. The book thrust me into a kind of recognition that is uncommon to fiction writers. I was on late-night shows and photographed for fashion magazines. I did countless interviews, very little writing. The bulk of my work life was spent touring the country giving various readings and lectures. I spent about 180 days of 2017 either at an event, or travelling to or from one. By the time that car ride in Michigan came around, I was exhausted, not just by the travel but by something that is more difficult to articulate – the dissonance of the black spotlight, of being revered in one way and reviled in another, a revulsion that makes clear the hollowness of the reverence.
      The next morning, I delivered my address to a room full of people who had gathered for a library fundraiser, an address where I insisted, as so many black writers, artists and academics have before me, that America has failed to contend with the legacy of slavery. This failure is evident all around us, from our prisons to our schools, our healthcare, our food and waterways. I gave my lecture. I accepted the applause and the thanks, and then I got into another car. It was a different driver, but it was the same world.
      I was thinking about that driver’s words again last summer as news poured in about the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. I was thinking about the way in which white people, in order to justify their own grotesque violence, so often engage in a kind of fiction, an utterly insidious denialism that creates the reality it claims to protest. By which I mean an unwillingness to see the violence that is actually happening before you because of a presumption of violence that might happen, is itself a kind of violence. What exactly can a man with a knee on his neck do, what can a sleeping woman do to deserve their own murder? To make room for that grotesqueness, that depraved thinking, to believe in any murder’s necessity, you must abandon reality. To see a man with several guns aimed at him, his hands on his head, as the problem, you must leave the present tense (“It’s good they’ve got so many on him”) and enter the future (“You never know what they will do”). A future, which is, of course, entirely imagined.

      I make my living off my imagination, but this summer, as I watched Homegoing climb back up the New York Times bestseller list in response to its appear­ance on anti-racist reading lists, I saw again, with no small amount of bile, that I make my living off the articulation of pain too. My own, my people’s. It is wrenching to know that the occasion for the renewed interest in your work is the murders of black people and the subsequent “listening and learning” of white people. I’d rather not know this feeling of experiencing career highs as you are flooded with a grief so old and worn that it seems unearthed, a fossil of other old and worn griefs.
      When an interviewer asks me what it’s like to see Homegoing on the bestseller list again, I say something short and vacuous like “it’s bittersweet”, because the idea of elaborating exhausts and offends me. What I should say is: why are we back here? Why am I being asked questions that James Baldwin answered in the 1960s, that Toni Morrison answered in the 80s? I read Morrison’s The Bluest Eye for the first time when I was a teenager, and it was so crystalline, so beautifully and perfectly formed that it filled me with something close to terror. I couldn’t fathom it. I couldn’t fathom how a novel could pierce right through the heart of me and find the inarticulable wound. I learned absolutely nothing, but some minor adjustment was made within me, some imperceptible shift that occurs only when I encounter wonder and awe, the best art.
      To see my book on any list with that one should have, in a better world, filled me with uncomplicated pride, but instead I felt deflated. While I do devoutly believe in the power of literature to challenge, to deepen, to change, I also know that buying books by black authors is but a theoretical, grievously belated and utterly impoverished response to centuries of physical and emotional harm. The Bluest Eye was published 51 years ago. As Lauren Michelle Jackson wrote in her excellent Vulture essay “What is an anti-racist reading list for”, someone at some point has to get down to the business of reading.
      And it’s this question of “the business of reading”, of how we read, why we read, and what reading does for and to us, that I keep turning over in my mind. Years ago, I was at a festival with a friend, another black author, and we were trading stories. She said that the first time she did a panel with a white male author she was shocked to hear the questions he was asked. Craft questions. Character questions. Research questions. Questions about the novel itself, about the quality and the content of the pages themselves. I knew exactly what she meant. More

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      in US Politics

      This is the Fire review: Don Lemon's audacious study of racism – and love

      by

      Don Lemon’s new memoir is an audacious and improbable book by a remarkable man. “We must summon the courage to love people who infuriate us, because we love the world we share,” he writes, near the start.

      Relatively young, a short 20 years ago, the CNN anchor was almost unknown. How then, without seeming arrogant or pompous, does he place his life and his experience beside the best-known champions from the pantheon of Black freedom fighters? Invoking the zeal and courage of Dr King and Sojourner Truth, portraying even the proscribed accomplishments of Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen in the same light of heroic survival, his is a voice as essential for our time as Ta-Nehisi Coates and as compelling as Caroline Randall Williams.
      Lemon was initially a Republican, he tells us, from a time in his Louisiana homeland when Republicans were still pro-civil rights. He has taken a circuitous route to ardent Black activism. He revealed three sensational secrets in a 2011 memoir, Transparent, and seemed destined to become a media star akin to Oprah Winfrey. But his nightly broadcasts as the only African American anchor in prime time, his Zoom chats and podcast on racism have been calculated towards his rise. Affectingly, he appeals to a growing fanbase by relating that success notwithstanding, his was a life as troubled as their own.
      For one thing, his parents hadn’t been legally wed. His mother, working for his dad as a legal secretary, was married to another man, his father to another woman. His dad died when Lemon was nine and his divorced mom remarried. His family were loving and even his relationship with his stepfather was good. But he realized he was a “double negative” – gay and Black – living in the south, undoubtedly confused by childhood sexual assaults at the hands of a friend of his mother. He overcame all of this but one media instructor later told him: “I don’t know why you’re here. You’ll never be a newscaster.”
      But he was, and he took off. And then, around 2014, he seemed to change. Out of the blue, he was hectoring Black youth on air to “pull up their pants!” Denouncing a rebel fashion which endures on account of its effectiveness at pissing off old people, particularly old white authority figures? One wondered, was he embracing Bill Cosby’s “respectability” political stand? Admonishing youth about the importance of being married before starting a family, even endorsing the value of New York’s discriminatory stop-and-frisk policing, many reasoned Lemon must be trolling for ratings from the enemy. Some denounced him as an “Uncle Tom”.
      The change of Lemon’s disappointing trajectory began before Trump. Certainly the threat the former president posed helped to radicalize someone who often seems happiest finding and presenting both sides. Trump’s recurring slur of “stupid”, alternating with, “the stupidest!”, was consistently met with good-natured laughter and ever more incisive analysis. Trump was Lemon’s trial by fire. White-hot, through it he was refined. From a mere Black pundit he was transformed into a tested, un-cowed combatant in the struggle for civil rights.
      Beginning with a cautionary letter to his nephews and nieces with his white fiance, Tim Malone, Lemon purposefully emulates his hero, James Baldwin. Explaining the killing of George Floyd, Lemon deliberately imitates a letter Baldwin wrote to his nephew in 1963. It is a preamble to a plea to learn all one can about the past. He warns of the omnipresence of patriarchal white supremacy, the west’s original sin.
      “Racism is a cancer that has been metastasizing throughout the land ever since Columbus showed up,” he states, making an excellent argument for replacing all memorials to Columbus with tributes to Frank Sinatra.
      Elucidating on the extent to which the wealth and might of America was derived from land appropriated from Native Americans and labor coerced from red, brown and especially enslaved Black Americans, he notes that even enterprises not directly involved in slavery benefited from the exploitative system. More