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      in US Politics

      'We just keep fighting': behind an urgent, inspiring film about the ACLU

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      If there was ever any doubt that Donald Trump would cement a campaign heralded by calling Mexicans rapists into policy, it was dispelled on 27 January 2017, when, to cap his first week in office, the president issued an executive order barring entrance from a slew of Muslim-majority countries. The so-called “Muslim travel ban” immediately roiled the country’s airports, as travelers were detained and families indefinitely separated in the midnight hours after the ban’s announcement. At the same time, protesters gathered outside the federal courthouse in Brooklyn; as depicted in early scenes from The Fight, a new documentary on the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a crowd cheered as lawyers got to messy, long-haul business of going to judicial war.Actor Kerry Washington, most recently of Hulu’s Little Fires Everywhere and a producer on The Fight, watched on TV as the deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants Rights Project, Lee Gelernt, exited the courthouse to chants of “ACLU! ACLU!” and declared a temporary victory: those detained by the new administration in airports would not be deported. Gelernt’s breathless recounting of the injunction’s relief had the feel of a post-championship court-side interview, and it caught Washington’s eye. “They are going to be on the frontlines of all the most important battles that we’re going to be facing to defend our civil rights and civil liberties,” she recalled thinking to the Guardian. “Who’s going to be in the trenches with these guys capturing this war movie that’s unfolding in front of us?”In the crowd at the Brooklyn courthouse that night was Elyse Steinberg, a documentary film-maker captivated by the same determined exhilaration on Gelernt’s face. “When Lee got his victory and he emerged from the steps and I saw him with his fists raised high,” she told the Guardian, “I just felt like this is the film that we needed to make. We needed to be with the ACLU and the lawyers in this epic battle for civil liberties that was going to be raging for the next four years.”In the three and half years since Steinberg stood outside the courthouse, the ACLU has held the legal line against the civil rights assaults of the Trump administration, work that The Fight depicts as variously harried and routine for the Manhattan-based team of lawyers and deeply consequential for the clients they represent. The Fight, co-directed by Steinberg, Josh Kriegman and Eli Despres follows four pivotal court cases central to combatting the Trump administration’s racist, Maga-exclusive agenda: the separation of migrant families at the southern US border and the horrific, indefinite detention of children without their parents; a policy which allowed the Office of Refugee Resettlement to deny abortion access to an undocumented woman detained by Ice; the addition of a citizenship question to the decennial US census; and the blanket ban of transgender people from serving in the US military.In each case, The Fight reveals the work of an ACLU attorney, particularly under an administration whose policies are often enacted without regard for bureaucratic chaos, to be mostly a scramble: hustling through briefs, cramming in a hotel room the night before argument, hungrily reading just-downloaded PDFs. The moments of mundane work dilemmas – Gelernt finding a single workable outlet at Starbucks to charge his dying phone, the LGBT & HIV project attorney Joshua Block fussing with uncooperative Microsoft Word dictation, the voting rights lawyer Dale Ho accidentally misreading a consequential decision or saying goodnight to his kids during another long day on the road – paint a fuller picture of the work. They take the ACLU staff “from being these larger than life Avengers legal superheroes, which is what they are, to also being husbands and wives and moms and dads, regular folks who have figured out how to use their talent for good in the world”, said Washington.The unglamorousness of the hustle, or of the reproductive rights lawyer Brigitte Amiri’s celebratory “train wine” on the Amtrak back to New York after a favorable hearing, contrast sharply with the stakes of the court cases at hand. “If I’m not going to be a civil rights lawyer right now, in this moment, then…when?” says Ho as he worked on a census decision which, had it been in favor of the administration, would have inaccurately skewed fair representation in Congress and federal funding for a decade to come. Amiri’s case – in which the federal government unlawfully barred an unidentified, undocumented asylum claimant for obtaining an abortion was “a harbinger of things to come”, she told the Guardian, as it preceded several states passing abortion restrictions or outright bans in 2019. More

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      in US Politics

      Mrs America's Uzo Aduba: 'It's worth examining the shortcomings of our feminist heroes'

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      Shirley Chisholm was a woman of many firsts. She was the first black woman elected to Congress, the first black candidate to seek the presidency, and the first woman, full-stop, to participate in a US presidential debate. She introduced more than 50 pieces of legislation, most championing racial, economic and gender equality, and is often credited as paving the way for Barack Obama. In doing so, she occupied a space that many black women recognise: the solitary seat as the only such face at the table.Uzo Aduba, who plays Chisholm in the acclaimed new FX series Mrs America, says that this was a key factor in bringing this formidable politician to life. “That feeling of being the ‘only’,” she says, speaking via Zoom with a warm smile on her face. “It was important to get that right.”It’s certainly something Aduba can relate to. The 39-year-old made history in 2015 as the first female actor to win both a drama and comedy Emmy for the same role – the part of Suzanne “Crazy Eyes” Warren in Orange Is the New Black. “It was an honour to represent Chisholm,” she says, “because she’s not often portrayed. I just wanted to get her humanity.”The humanity of the much-mythologised feminists of the 1970s is a central part of the series, which spotlights the aims and the internal struggles of the activists who fought to pass the Equal Rights Amendment – as well as the conservatives who opposed it, led by staunch anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly. A lauded ensemble cast boasts Hollywood giants and household names: Cate Blanchett as Schlafly, Rose Byrne as Gloria Steinem and Tracey Ullman as Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique. More

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      in US Politics

      White Too Long review: how race trumped American Christianity

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      In 2016, Robert Jones proclaimed the death of a US dominated by its pioneer stock. White Protestants comprised less than a third of the country, white Christians just 47%. Only four decades earlier, more than four in five had identified as white and Christian and 55% were white Protestants. To drive the point home, Jones titled that book The End of White Christian America.Talk about jumping the gun. Just months after publication, white evangelicals went for Donald Trump by better than four to one while white voters overall cast their lot with the Republican by a 20-point margin. Like it or not, Trump’s election demonstrated the potency of religion fused to race. Gloria in excelsis Deo.As the former White House press secretary Sarah Sanders would proclaim: “God wanted Trump to be president.” The fact her guy lost the popular vote was apparently theologically irrelevant. Franklin Graham, the late Billy Graham’s son, went a step further, threatening Americans with divine retribution if they criticized Trump.Impeachment, Covid-19 and recession followed. Joe Biden holds a clear lead. The deity moves in mysterious ways.Jones is the founder of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). Its board includes the Very Reverend Dr Kelly Brown Douglas, dean of the Episcopal Divinity School at Union Theological Seminary in New York, and Alan Abramowitz of Emory University, a political science professor. Its worldview is liberal and ecumenical.Just in time for the 2020 election, Jones is back with White Too Long. His timing is impeccable, as is his subtitle: “The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity”. The book’s draws its title from the biting words of James Baldwin: “They have been white … too long; they have been married to the lie of white supremacy too long.”Once again the US is beset by racial strife. Its president worships a mythologized past and genuflects before statues of dead Confederate generals. This is what idolatry can look like.In Trump’s words: “When people proudly have their Confederate flags, they’re not talking about racism.” Colin Kaepernick, by the president’s logic, should just shut up and be grateful and Nascar, the NCAA and SEC football all got it wrong when they ordered the Confederate battle flag removed from public spaces. Ditto Mississippi, which recently redesigned its state flag.Jones leaves little doubt as to where he stands, and he deserves our attention. White Too Long marshals history and statistics impressively. It is also semi-autobiographical. The author describes his life and churchgoing as he grew up in the south. He refers kindly to a family Bible from the early 1800s.Looking at the numbers, Jones contends that active religious affiliation correlates to racial bias, and makes a colorable case. White Too Long also points to data that being a religious dominant group in a particular region ties to higher prejudiced attitudes. In other words, heightened racial bias is found to be particularly prevalent among white Catholics in the north-east and white Protestants in the south.Even so, white Catholics in Delaware, New York and Rhode Island preferred Barack Obama to John McCain on election day 2008. Generalizations have their limits.As expected, Jones points a finger at southern churches, as pillars of slavery and segregation. But he also chronicles how mainline Protestant and Catholic churches assisted their congregants in resisting integration. Religion became handmaiden to the status quo. “Love thy neighbor” was read narrowly.In Mississippi, Southern Baptists successfully argued that a new state flag was a moral obligationYet as Jonathan Haidt of New York University has repeatedly observed, diversity and social cohesion seldom go hand-in-hand. By contrast, a shared faith lends itself to community and common outlook. As a result, what is preached from the pulpit is usually in sync with what gets said at church picnic or Sunday dinner, not the other way around. Scripture’s stated ideals are limited by facts on the ground, if not outright ignored.As the US careened toward civil war, slavery and secession divided white Christians and Jews alike. The “Curse of Ham”, invoked in a New York synagogue in the run-up to the conflagration, recapitulated arguments posited by slavery-sympathetic Protestant clergy a century earlier.The Bible could mean different things to different people in different ways at different moments. The Israelites’ exodus could be tethered to Paul’s admonition that slaves obey their masters. Not surprisingly, slave owners were frequently paragons of piety. More

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      in Elections

      Kim Kardashian requests compassion for Kanye West's bipolar disorder

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      Kim Kardashian West has spoken for the first time about her husband Kanye West’s bipolar disorder after he posted and deleted a string of erratic tweets regarding his family life after the launch of his presidential campaign in Charleston, South Carolina, on Monday.“Those who are close with Kanye know his heart and understand his words sometimes do not align with his intentions,” she wrote on her Instagram Stories.The fashion and reality TV mogul said she had previously avoided commenting on West’s mental health in order to protect her children and West’s right to privacy. In breaking that silence, she said she wished to address the “stigma and misconceptions” surrounding mental health.She wrote: “Those that understand mental illness or even compulsive behaviour know that the family is powerless unless the member is a minor. People who are unaware or far removed from this experience can be judgmental and not understand that the individual themselves have to engage in the process of getting help no matter how hard family and friends try.”In the US, involuntary hospitalisation and treatment is deemed to violate an individual’s civil rights. An individual must pose a danger to themselves or others in order to be held, for evaluation only, which typically lasts no longer than 72 hours. An elderly or “gravely disabled” person may be placed under a conservatorship. Britney Spears has been subject to such an arrangement since she experienced a breakdown in 2008, which has given rise to controversy over its appropriateness to her situation.West was willingly admitted to hospital in 2016, after an emergency call regarding his welfare during a period of erratic behaviour.Kardashian West added: “I understand Kanye is subject to criticism because he is a public figure and his actions at times can cause strong opinions and emotions. He is a brilliant but complicated person who on top of the pressures of being an artist and a black man, who experienced the painful loss of his mother, and has to deal with the pressure and isolation that is heightened by his bipolar disorder.”West has been subject to more widespread media attention than usual since he announced his presidential campaign in early July. While he is not thought to have filed official paperwork, he has tweeted asking fans to get him on the ballot in certain states.In Charleston on Monday, he gave a rambling address referencing the terms of his deal with Adidas for his fashion brand Yeezy, his faith in God and racism in the US, including an assertion that “[abolitionist] Harriet Tubman never actually freed the slaves, she just had the slaves go work for other white people”. He has since expressed doubt over whether to continue with his run this year, or postpone until 2024.Kardashian West asked the media and the public to give their family “compassion and empathy” and thanked those who had expressed concern for her husband’s wellbeing. “We as a society talk about giving grace to the issue of mental health as a whole, however we should also give it to the individuals who are living with it in times when they need it the most,” she wrote.West has said he will release a new album, Donda: With Child – named after his late mother – this Friday. More

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      in World Politics

      Political Behavior and Basketball Correctness

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      Like an elementary school, the United States has a permanent problem defining and enforcing the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. It has reached a point at which every issue becomes focused not on general interest but on individual behavior, largely because the notion of social behavior appears to have been definitively lost.

      Recent weeks have seen an acceleration of the trends associated with what is often called the “culture wars.” Politics itself has been increasingly reduced to accepting or denouncing someone else’s rules to live, work and breathe by. Ironically, in some cases, breathing itself has become the issue.

      Deutsche Bank Regrets Its “Association” With Jeffrey Epstein

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      In a context in which the deprivation of one man’s breath has spawned massive and ongoing protests, the National Basketball Association (NBA), a sports league comprised of a majority of black players, announced that it would allow its players to display on their jerseys a message of solidarity in response to the questions raised by the killing of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis policeman.

      US Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri — a populist Republican in a state that not only has no NBA team but has, in recent years, been rocked by racist violence — audaciously stepped in to deviate the discussion toward themes he considers more legitimate. In the face of recent attacks against the tradition of slavery, Hawley has embraced the sacred cause of defending the memory of the Confederacy and its heroes. He accuses his enemies, the Democrats, of using the pretext of anti-racism to dismantle the police, neuter the military and erase the history of the Confederacy. In his mind, none of those three entities can be suspected of racism, not even the Confederacy, which was just about brave white people defending their traditions.

      Embed from Getty Images

      As a senator, Hawley has no authority over a sports league. But he does have access to public platforms, which he uses to promote his political agenda. He complained that the NBA “is limiting its social messages on jerseys.” Hawley wants the NBA to include in its list of authorized messages his own preferred political mantra, “Free Hong Kong,” which of course has nothing to do with the Floyd drama or with the players’ lives, or, for that matter, the US Senate.

      One of the most respected commentators on the NBA, Adrian Wojnarowski, reacted on Twitter with a simple but deliberately impolite message: “F–k you!” What he meant was: You may be a senator but you have no stake in this; you don’t have the faintest idea of what it is about or what it means to the players, and, moreover, this has nothing to do with China or any other demagogic message you probably want to broadcast to your electoral base.

      That might have been too long for a tweet. The two words he used conveyed the message much more succinctly.

      Alas, for Woj (as the commentator is familiarly known), once Hawley expressed his shock at the crudity of the response, his employer, the sports network ESPN, suspended the seasoned reporter after making this statement on July 13: “This is completely unacceptable behavior and we do not condone it. It is inexcusable for anyone working for ESPN to respond in the way Adrian did to Senator Hawley. We are addressing it directly with Adrian and specifics of those conversations will remain internal.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Unacceptable behavior:

      The expression of justified emotion toward an impertinent figure of authority by someone employed by an organization professionally dedicated to containing expression within a rigidly controlled framework that must avoid offending its audience

      Contextual Note

      Senator Hawley framed his message in populist terms, complaining that by refusing to mention Hong Kong, the NBA was stifling the players’ freedom of expression out of fear of upsetting the Chinese government and losing the lucrative Chinese market. In his letter to the NBA’s commissioner, Adam Silver, Hawley claimed “that the league’s policy on social injustice messages ‘appears to stop at the edge of your corporate sponsors’ sensibilities.’”

      Hawley remembers that the NBA’s delicate attitude toward China had briefly become a hot-button issue in 2019. It resonated with the populist anti-China sentiment pushed by the Trump administration. But that issue has since been eclipsed by something far more dramatic that directly impinges on the lives of players and their families.

      As a senator and supposedly responsible citizen, Hawley should be aware that the NBA’s intention was not to turn players’ jerseys into a new open social media platform for the expression of random political opinions, but rather as an opportunity to express solidarity on an issue that affects their lives.

      Hawley, the politician, sees it as an occasion to score a political point that has nothing to do with the question of racial justice. It would even have the effect of undermining its importance. Race is not a serious issue for Hawley, certainly not as urgent as protecting the political rights of the Hong Kong Chinese. He seems less concerned by the plight of the Saudis, who are far more oppressed.

      As a response to such twisted reasoning, Woj found the best two words to use in the English language.

      Historical Note

      In a speech on June 11 from the floor of the Senate, Josh Hawley invoked Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address and even called one of the most violent battles of the American Civil War a “shared struggle.” He seems to have retained the idea that when two groups of brave people spent four years massacring each other, they were engaged in an act of sharing.

      In a fundamentally hyperreal way, Hawley has a point. Intolerance and even murderously violent behavior in the US have come to exist as a form of sharing to the extent that everyone willingly and often eagerly participates. His message about the Civil War seems to be that white people disagreed only to end up agreeing in the end, which allowed them to emancipate the slaves for the betterment of the nation.

      This view of history implies that once that was done, the problem ceased to exist. That may be why Hawley feels that what the NBA should be focusing not on saving its season interrupted in March by the COVID-19 pandemic, nor on allowing its players to grapple with their racial identity in US society, but addressing the issue he considers vital for his constituents in Missouri: humiliating the Chinese government, if only to comfort President Donald Trump’s and other Republicans’ chances of being reelected.

      In defending the tradition of the South’s role in the war, Hawley claims that his aim is “not to embrace the cause of the Confederacy, but to embrace the cause of union, our union shared together as Americans.” This is particularly ironic coming from a senator from Missouri, since the status of Missouri played a key role in provoking the Civil War. But, as Hawley notes, once the bloodshed and the sacrifice of more than 600,000 American lives was over, the nation came together.

      As author David Rothkopf notes in an article in Haaretz, Trump “has embraced a defense of the losers in the American Civil War as a central theme of his campaign.” Hawley has stepped up to support both of those causes: defending the memory of slave-holders and reelecting Trump. “Let us work together … to build on the history and the responsibility that we share as Americans,” Hawley said. He never stops insisting that it’s all about “sharing.”

      On July 16, Hawley asked for an investigation of a prosecutor focused on the needs of the black community. St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, an African American, “has sought to reduce incarceration and low-level marijuana cases and has angered the St. Louis police union with her reform efforts.” Most objective observers agree that Gardner’s efforts correspond to the most basic reforms aimed at reducing the patent inequality of a system designed to disproportionately imprison members of the black community. Gardner described Hawley’s demand as “a dog whistle of racist rhetoric and cronyism politics.”

      Some of the new “enlightened” populists on the right, such as the otherwise open-minded and anti-racist Saagar Enjeti, see Hawley as a hero, a defender of a working class that includes oppressed minorities. Adrian Wojnarowski begs to differ. A generation of descendants from former slaves probably feels the same way.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Click here to read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      The Political Implications of the Hagia Sophia Reconversion

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      On July 10, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan issued a decree reconverting the Hagia Sophia museum into a mosque, thus realizing a long-cherished dream of conservative currents in Turkish society. Originally built as a cathedral by the Romans, the Hagia Sophia functioned as Istanbul’s main mosque throughout the Ottoman era. Its conversion into a museum in 1934 was one of a series of moves intended to distance Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s new secular republic from the Islamic heritage of the defunct Ottoman Empire — and became a totem of conservative resentment toward the Kemalist regime.

      Why Making Hagia Sophia a Mosque Again Is Good News

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      The reconversion of Hagia Sophia should, therefore, be considered a significant symbolic achievement for the conservative side and a settling of scores with the early republican period. Erdogan is also seeking political gain by treating this issue as an identity battle between conservatives and secularists.

      A Tactical Move?

      According to a poll conducted in June by MetroPOLL, a majority of the Turkish population regard the Hagia Sophia controversy as an attempt by the government to divert attention from economic problems and reverse its declining support. Only 30% said they felt it was really just about a change of use from a museum to a mosque. This means that even among supporters of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its ultranationalist junior partner, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), significant numbers consider the move to be more tactical than ideological — even if they ultimately agree with the outcome.

      Erdogan’s earlier statements also suggest that this is a tactical move. During campaigning for the local election in 2019, he responded angrily to a crowd that raised the topic of Hagia Sophia, pointing out that the adjacent Sultan Ahmad Mosque (Blue Mosque) is almost always empty during prayer times. He told his audience that he would consider reconverting the Hagia Sophia if they first filled the Sultan Ahmed Mosque. Given that this was consistent with previous remarks and little has changed since the exchange, political expediency now seems to have outweighed religious or ideological considerations. Erdogan expects reconversion to produce three political benefits.

      Erdogan’s Political Expectations

      The first benefit is to energize the more conservative segments of his power base by meeting one of their longstanding symbolic demands, in particular in light of the emergence of two splinter parties from the AKP, with the potential to appeal to this electorate. The prominence of the controversy suggests he has succeeded in this.

      The second benefit would be to distract the public from the country’s serious socioeconomic problems. Where the youth unemployment rate — including those who have given up seeking work — has reached 24.6%, the government would like to talk about anything but the economy. Here, Erdogan has gained relief, but probably not to the extent he hoped.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The third and most important benefit would be to establish yet another identity battle between conservatives and secularists. This is the arena where Erdogan feels most secure, and the Hagia Sophia issue appeared ideally suited for the AKP’s identity wars. Its symbolism is multi-layered.

      First of all, a fight over mosque versus museum slots easily into a religion/modernity binary. It can also be used to create an Islam/Christianity binary as Hagia Sophia was originally built as a church and functioned as such for nine centuries until the Ottoman conquest of Istanbul. Secondly, it awakens historical allusions and underlines the real or perceived dichotomy between the Ottoman Empire and the Republic. Reversing a decision taken by Ataturk also inflames existing debates over the early republican reforms. Finally, the move is also expected to provoke adverse international reactions, thus offering a perfect opportunity for Erdogan to breathe new life into his narrative of Turkey encircled by enemies, with Western powers subverting its sovereignty.

      Domestically, Erdogan would expect the reconversion to provoke uproar among secularist circles and lead the secularist People’s Republican Party (CHP) in particular to condemn the decision and mobilize public opposition. This would create another opportunity for him to stir the “culture wars.”

      In fact, however, the CHP and most of the other opposition parties avoided this ploy and either supported the reconversion or remained neutral. This approach is in line with the new strategy of CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, who has been careful to avoid such traps in recent years. While he has received much criticism from his party base — especially the secularist intelligentsia — for his calculated lack of interest in cultural conflicts, Kilicdaroglu seems to have been successful in preventing Erdogan from picking his fights.

      In light of the lack of domestic push-back, the Turkish president will focus on international condemnation to fan the flames of identity conflicts, presenting these reactions as interference in Turkey’s internal affairs — if not outright Islamophobia. Given that certain European countries have their own problems with accommodating Muslim places of worship, European criticisms can easily be framed as hypocritical and anti-Islamic.

      In that sense, Hagia Sophia is the perfect fight for Erdogan: it is symbolic, emotionally charged, politically polarizing and consolidates political camps. And all this is achieved with scant real-life consequences. European policymakers should follow the example set by the opposition parties in Turkey and deny Erdogan the trivial rhetorical fights he clearly seeks.

      *[The German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) advises the German government and Bundestag on all questions related to foreign and security policy. An earlier version of this article was first published on the SWP website.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      God, abortion and better acoustics: Kanye West launches campaign with chaotic rally

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      Kanye West

      Rapper’s rambling and emotional address – which included an apparent $1m for new mothers – was almost drowned out by a rowdy crowd in Charleston

      Play Video

      0:33

      Kanye West makes chaotic presidential rally debut in South Carolina – video

      Kanye West has launched his campaign tour for the US presidential election in chaotic fashion at an event in Charleston, South Carolina, delivering a rambling address that touched on theology, homelessness, corporate power, and involved a long debate with an audience member about abortion. West also suggested that women should be given $1m when they have a baby.
      The rapper took to the stage at the event wearing a bulletproof vest, and “2020” shaved into his head. Without a mic, he proceeded to address a rowdy audience of a few hundred people, asking for complete silence before asserting that future events “will be in rooms where the acoustics will be incredible because I will be involved with the design”.
      West repeatedly referenced the terms of his deal with Adidas, his faith in God and racism in the US, including an assertion that “[abolitionist] Harriet Tubman never actually freed the slaves, she just had the slaves go work for other white people”.
      Tubman is one of the most respected figures of 19th century America. An African American who escaped slavery, she helped enslaved Black men and women travel north to freedom and fought for the Union during the Civil War. She later became a supporter of women’s suffrage.
      But the event hit peak emotional intensity when West began to tell a story about what he believed was divine intervention into his life in a way that caused his wife, Kim Kardashian West, to refuse to terminate a pregnancy.
      “I was having the rapper’s lifestyle,” he said. “I was sitting up in Paris, and I had my leather pants on … and I had my laptop up and I got all of my creative ideas … And the screen went black and white and God said, ‘if you fuck with my vision I’m going to fuck with yours’.
      “And I called my wife and she said, we’re gonna have this baby. I said we’re gonna have this child … So even if my wife were to divorce me after this speech, she brought North into the world when I didn’t want to. She stood up and she protected that child.”
      West then started crying when speaking about his father, who he said had wanted his mother to have an abortion when she was pregnant with him.
      “My mom saved my life. My dad wanted to abort me. My mom saved my life. There would have been no Kanye West because my dad was too busy,” he said, sobbing into his hand, before shouting: “I almost killed my daughter! I almost killed my daughter!”
      Referencing the media coverage of the event, he then said: “They’re going to run this, they’re going to tell you that I’m crazy. [Well] the world’s crazy!”
      He then called up to the stage a pro-choice activist who had been yelling questions to him in response to his story. He claimed he understood “why someone would make the choice of getting an abortion” and eventually clarified that his position wasn’t that abortion should be banned, but rather that maximum financial assistance should be made available to women who do have children.
      “My stance is not to make abortion illegal at all. It should always be legal. But there should be an option of maximum increase available … Maximum increase would be, everybody that has a baby gets a million dollars,” he said. He did not say where this money would come from.
      “It takes a village to raise a child,” he said. “Society has been set up for single moms to not have a village, to not have a child.”
      West’s remarks, which were mostly yelled in order to be heard by the crowd, repeatedly circled back to his Christianity.
      “We are all equal in God’s eyes,” he said. “Sometimes people are controlled by demons, sometimes people are controlled by the environment that we are in but we are all God’s people, there [are] no bad people. There are lost people, but we are all God’s people.”
      Struggling to be heard, West repeatedly told audience members to be quiet at the same time as assuring them that he was “not trying to quiet their voices”. The event ended after West was substantially drowned out by the shouting crowd.
      West announced his intention to run for president on 5 July but he missed the deadline to qualify for the ballot in several states, and it was unclear if he was willing or able to collect enough signatures required to qualify in others.
      Last week, he qualified to appear on Oklahoma’s presidential ballot, the first state where he met the requirements before the filing deadline.
      West needed to collect 10,000 signatures by noon Monday to appear on the South Carolina ballot, according to state law. The entertainer tweeted out a list of locations around the Charleston area where petitions could be signed.

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      in World Politics

      What Will Future Generations Say About Us?

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      This week, 216 years ago, one founding father killed another in a duel in Weehawken, New Jersey. On that early July morning, the vice president of the United States squared off against the former secretary of the treasury. As virtually everyone in America now knows, thanks to Lin-Manuel Miranda, Alexander Hamilton didn’t survive the shootout with Aaron Burr.

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      At the beginning of this month, Disney released the film version of Miranda’s blockbuster musical, “Hamilton.” So, I could finally see this extraordinary synthesis of history, biography, music and dance. As a musical, it’s riveting. As political commentary, however, it’s surprisingly dated.

      America’s Musical

      “Hamilton” debuted five years ago, in the middle of Barack Obama’s second term as president. Just as Obama was daily reimagining the American presidency, “Hamilton” reimagined the American Revolution and the creation of the United States.

      By casting people of color as the Founding Fathers — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison —  the musical speaks to the universality of that 18th-century struggle and visually links the oppression of Americans at the hands of British colonialism to the oppression of people everywhere. It’s both a projection backward of Obama’s breakthrough and a lyrical version of an Obama speech.

      “Hamilton” is radical in form: the casting, the incorporation of rap. The content, however, is quite mainstream. Aside from a couple of references to slavery and the interests of wealthy bankers, it celebrates the spirit of 1776 in a way that Americans of all political persuasions can embrace.

      And have embraced. On November 18, 2016, only a week after that gut punch of an election, Mike Pence attended a show, which prompted the actor portraying Burr to say at the close, “We, sir — we — are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights. We truly hope that this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us.” It was a message from one rogue vice president to another.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Pence “appeared to enjoy the show and applauded liberally,” NPR reported. And for the next three years, he ignored the remonstration. Pence and Donald Trump, too, portrayed themselves as revolutionary underdogs — rather than the reactionary overlords they really were — who wanted to be in “the room where it happens.” They, too, were not going to throw away their shot.

      Now, in perhaps the supreme designation of mainstream status, Disney has made “Hamilton” available to the masses. How times have changed.

      In 2020, thanks to the coronavirus, live theater seems impossibly risky (why are the performers touching each other? How can the audience sit so close together?). And, with protesters on the street challenging Washington and Jefferson over their slave ownership, the musical suddenly seems behind the times, though not nearly as backward as Aunt Jemima and the soon to be former Washington Redskins.

      As A.O. Scott recently pointed out in The New York Times, “There’s been a bit of a backlash from the left against what’s perceived as an insufficiently critical perspective on slavery (and also on Hamilton’s role in the birth of American capitalism). At the same time, the extent to which Miranda celebrates America’s political traditions has been taken up as a cudgel against the supposed illiberalism of the statue-topplers and their allies.” Miranda himself has acknowledged the criticisms from the left. History doesn’t stand still for anyone, not Jefferson, not Hamilton, not Lin-Manuel Miranda.

      The Great and the Not-So-Great

      What’s remarkable, of course, is the speed with which the political temperament has changed. In a few short months, statues have fallen throughout the United States, and not just those dedicated to the Confederate cause.

      Also torn down or relocated are statues honoring figures associated with the genocide of indigenous people (Christopher Columbus), with slave-owning (Hamilton’s father-in-law, Philip Schuyler) and with racist policing (former Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo). Statues connected to colonialism have fallen in the UK, Belgium and elsewhere. Everything, it seems, is up for debate, even monuments to the heroes of the American Revolution.

      We fully expect books and plays written in the 1950s to seem dated. Ditto those produced in the 1970s or even the 1990s. But 2015? The critiques of American failings — slavery, colonialism, racist policing — are not new. What’s changed is that the powerful have been forced to listen.

      Perhaps “Hamilton,” despite its slighting of slavery and reverence for the Founding Fathers, even played a role in preparing the powerful for this shift. But let’s be real: The destruction of images — literally, iconoclasm — is a lighter lift than the transformation of structures. It’s one thing to take down Confederate statues, but quite another to remove racism’s grip on housing, education and employment. Likewise, it’s more politically palatable to recast a play about the Founding Fathers than to grapple with the ugly truths that accompanied the founding of this nation.

      At a deeper level, the musical and the statues share a common veneration of the great person. History, we are constantly reminded in art and monuments, is the product of founding fathers, great conquerors, kings, presidents and prime ministers. Campaigns are launched to diversify those numbers to include women, people of color, perhaps even an activist or two like Martin Luther King Jr. But the focus remains on the individual, not the countless people who turned the gears of history, planted the fields of history, occupied the streets of history and, ultimately, changed the course of history.

      As “Hamilton” acknowledges, great persons are always a product of their time and place, and they’re always flawed in some way or another. Sometimes, those flaws are of an individual nature, like Alexander Hamilton’s adultery (or, more recently, the sexual harassment charges against Park Won Soon, the progressive activist and former mayor of Seoul who committed suicide last week).

      More often, the famous personages are as blind to their faults as most everyone else in their society. Transforming society requires a collective effort to shine a light on these blind spots, as the Black Lives Matter movement has done, at home and abroad, around police violence, racist iconography and the legacy of colonialism.

      Iconoclasts of the Future, Unite!

      So, perhaps it’s time to conduct a thought experiment. We’ve seen how quickly culture has moved on and left the blind spots of “Hamilton” more readily visible. How will future generations condemn us for our blind spots as they tear down today’s statues tomorrow?

      I can almost hear our children gathering in the street to pull down the statues of the famous as they chant, “Carbon hog!” For will not contribution to the destruction of the planet ultimately be seen in the same light as colonialism, as the plunder and robbery of future generations?

      The emancipation of slaves was a radical act in 18th-century America. The Polish revolutionary Tadeusz Kosciuszko berated Jefferson — his friend — at length to free his slaves, and Jefferson ignored him because, just as Pence shrugged off Burr, he could. Jefferson certainly had mixed feelings about slavery, but he was able to maintain the contradiction in his life of slave ownership and sentiments like “all men are created equal” because popular opinion, as opposed to Kosciuszko’s opinion, allowed him to do so.

      Future generations may feel the same way about our simultaneous recognition of the perils of climate change and our car ownership, air travel and use of air conditioning. Greta Thunberg, our generation’s Kosciuszko, similarly berates world leaders and with as little immediate impact.

      Future generations may also look askance at our nationalism. Why do we believe that we owe debts of obligation to strangers who live within certain borders and not strangers who live outside those borders? How could we countenance the return of desperate migrants and refugees to, in many cases, their certain death?

      And what about all the statues raised to military leaders? It seems rather ridiculous to honor men who oversaw the slaughter of others just because they were on the winning side. Future generations may well look at all the celebrated generals as so many mass murderers.

      Speaking of mass murder, how will future generations feel about the millions of animals that we kill every day for our own consumption? Or even the millions that we own as pets? The list of potential blind spots is long indeed, and there are plenty of motes in my own eye. History is constantly evolving. There is no timeless art; there are no timeless values.

      Everything reflects the moment of its production, from the American Constitution to the latest iteration of “Hamilton.” We are engaged in a long, collective conversation enlivened by a soundtrack of insightful speeches, catchy tunes and the rising roar of street protest. As for those future statues, I dearly hope that they are pulled down, defaced, disgraced. Because that would mean, in a future of superstorms and nuclear threats and periodic pandemics, that at least there are still people around to take them down.

      *[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More