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      Rupert Murdoch often wishes Donald Trump dead, Michael Wolff book says

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      Rupert Murdoch loathes Donald Trump so much that the billionaire has not just soured on him as a presidential candidate but often wishes for his death, the author Michael Wolff writes in his eagerly awaited new book on the media mogul, The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty.According to Wolff, Murdoch, 92, has become “a frothing-at-the-mouth” enemy of the 77-year-old former US president, often voicing thoughts including “This would all be solved if … ” and “How could he still be alive, how could he?”The Fall was announced last month and will be published in the US next Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.Wolff has written three tell-all books about Trump – Fire and Fury, Siege and Landslide – and one about Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News. In his second Murdoch book, he says he may be “the journalist not in his employ who knows [Murdoch] best”.Wolff also describes his source material as “conversations specifically for this book, and other conversations that have taken place over many years … scenes and events that I have personally witnessed or that I have recreated with the help of participants in them”.After Trump entered US politics in 2015, winning the White House the following year, he, along with an increasingly extreme Republican party, Fox News and other properties in Murdoch’s rightwing media empire formed a symbiotic relationship.But Murdoch has long been reported to have soured on Trump – a process which, according to Wolff, saw Murdoch personally endorse the Fox News call of Arizona for Joe Biden on election night in 2020 that fueled Trump’s campaign of lies about voter fraud, culminating in the deadly January 6 attack on Congress.By the beginning of this year, Wolff writes, what Murdoch “adamantly didn’t want … was Trump.“Of all Trump’s implacable enemies, Murdoch had become a frothing-at-the-mouth one. His relatively calm demeanor from the early Trump presidency where, with a sigh, he could dismiss him merely as a ‘fucking idiot’ had now become a churning stew of rage and recrimination.“Trump’s death became a Murdoch theme: “We would all be better off …? “This would all be solved if …” “How could he still be alive, how could he?” “Have you seen him? Have you seen what he looks like? What he eats?”Trump has regularly claimed to be exceptionally fit for his age, claims backed by doctors when he was in the White House. He also claims to be more mentally fit for office than Biden, his 80-year-old successor, claims many observers increasingly doubt.After Trump left office, Wolff writes, Murdoch “like much of the Republican establishment … had convinced himself that Trump was, finally, vulnerable. That his hold on the base and on Republican politicians had weakened enough that now was the time to kill him off, finally.”But now, as another election year approaches, Trump is in rude political health.Notwithstanding 91 criminal charges – for state and federal election subversion, retention of classified information and hush-money payments – and assorted civil cases, Trump leads the Republican primary by vast margins in national and key state polling, the overwhelming favourite to win the nomination to face Biden in another White House battle. More

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      For Elon Musk, the personal is political – but his march to the right affects us all

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      The personal is political. The phrase was popularized by 1960s second-wave feminism but it sums up Elon Musk’s ideological journey. Once a “fundraiser and fanboy for Barack Obama”, to quote his biographer, Walter Isaacson, the sometime world’s richest man now plays thin-skinned, anti-woke warrior – a self-professed free-speech purist who in fact is anything but.His rebranding of Twitter to X having proved a disaster, he flirts with antisemites for fun and lost profits. He threatens the Anti-Defamation League with a multibillion-dollar lawsuit. The ADL never suggested the name “X”. That was a long-term fetish, now a clear own-goal.Like the building of Rome, Musk’s march to the right did not take only one day. A series of events lie behind it. Musk is a modern Wizard of Oz. Like the man behind the curtain, he is needy. According to Isaacson, outright rejection – and gender transition – by one of Musk’s children played an outsized role in his change. So did Covid restrictions and a slap from the Biden White House.In March 2020, as Covid descended, Musk became enraged when China and California mandated lockdowns that threatened Tesla, his electric car company, and thus his balance sheet.“My frank opinion remains that the harm from the coronavirus panic far exceeds that of the virus itself,” he wrote in an intra-company email.But Musk jumped the gun. Moloch would take his cut. In the US, Covid has killed 1.14 million. American life expectancy is among the lowest in the industrialized west. Thailand does better than Florida, New York and Iowa. For their part, Ohio, South Carolina and Missouri, all Republican-run, trail Thailand. Bangladesh outperforms Mississippi. Overall, the US is behind Colombia and Croatia. Under Covid, Trump-voting counties became killing fields.But in May 2020, amid a controversy with local government in California, Musk tweeted, “take the red pill”. It was a reference to The Matrix, in which Neo, the character played by Keanu Reeves, elects to take the “red pill” and thereby confront reality, instead of downing the “blue pill” to wake happily in bed. Ivanka Trump, of all people, was quick to second Musk: “Taken!”Musk’s confrontation with California would not be the last time he was stymied or dissed by those in elected office. In summer 2021, the Biden administration stupidly declined to invite him to a White House summit on electric vehicles – because Tesla was not unionized.“We, of course, welcome the efforts of all automakers who recognize the potential of an electric vehicle future and support efforts that will help reach the president’s goal. And certainly, Tesla is one of those companies,” Biden’s press secretary said, adding: “Today, it’s the three largest employers of the United Auto Workers and the UAW president who will stand with President Biden.” Two years later, the UAW has gone on strike. At midnight on Thursday, 13,000 workers left the assembly lines at General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.For all of his talk of freedom, Musk sidles up to China. This week, he claimed the relationship between Taiwan and China was analogous to that between Hawaii and the US. Taiwan is “an integral part of China that is arbitrarily not part of China”, Musk said. Such comments dovetail with Chinese talking points. He made no reference to US interests. He is a free agent. It’s not just about Russia and Ukraine.Musk’s tumultuous personal life has also pressed on the scales. In December 2021, he began to rail against the “woke mind virus”. If the malady were left unchecked, he said, “civilization will never become interplanetary”. Musk apparently loves humanity. People, however, are a different story.According to Isaacson, the outburst was triggered in part by rejection and gender transition. In 2022, one of his children changed her name to Vivian Jenna Wilson, telling a court: “I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.” She also embraced radical economics.“I’ve made many overtures,” Musk tells Isaacson. “But she doesn’t want to spend time with me.” His hurt is palpable.James Birchall, Musk’s office manager, says: “He feels he lost a son who changed first and last names and won’t speak to him anymore because of this woke mind virus.”Contradictions litter Musk’s worldview. Take the experiences of Bari Weiss, the professional contrarian and former New York Times writer. In late 2022, she was one of the conduits for the Twitter Files, fed to receptive reporters by Musk in an attempt to show Twitter’s bias against Trump and the US right. On 12 December, Weiss delivered her last reports. Four days later, she criticized Musk’s decision to suspend a group of journalists, for purportedly violating anti-doxxing policies.“He was doing the very things that he claimed to disdain about the previous overlords at Twitter,” Weiss charged. She also pressed Musk over China, to his dismay. He grudgingly acknowledged, she told Isaacson, that because of Tesla’s investments, “Twitter would indeed have to be careful about the words it used regarding China.“China’s repression of the Uyghurs, he said, has two sides.”“Weiss was disturbed,” Isaacson writes.Musk is disdainful of Donald Trump, whom he sees as a conman. This May, on X, Musk hosted a campaign roll-out for another would-be strongman: Ron DeSantis. A glitch-filled disaster, it portended what followed. The Florida governor continues to slide in the polls, Vivek Ramaswamy nipping at his heels.Musk remains a force. On Monday, he is slated to meet Benjamin Netanyahu, the indicted rightwing prime minister of Israel who will be in New York for the United Nations general assembly. Like Musk, Netanyahu is not a favorite of the Biden White House. Misery loves company. More

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      The Last Politician review: the case for Joe Biden, polling be damned

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      By the polling, Joe Biden is stuck in a footrace with Donald Trump, his 91-times criminally charged predecessor as president. More than three-quarters of voters say Biden is too old to govern effectively. Two-thirds of Democrats wish he would throw in the towel.The intersection of Biden’s work as vice-president to Barack Obama and what Franklin Foer calls the “dodgy business dealings of son Hunter” haunts the father still. More than three fifths of Americans now believe Joe Biden was involved in Hunter’s business. The impeachment specter hovers.Kamala Harris poses a further problem. The polls, again: 53% of independents disapprove of the vice-president, two in five strongly. Were Biden to leave the stage, few would be reassured.Under the subtitle “Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future”, Foer dives into our political morass. He emerges with a well-sourced look at Biden and his time in power. A staff writer at the Atlantic and former editor of the New Republic, Foer acknowledges his own doubts about Biden but also voices his admiration for the back-slapping politician from Scranton. Foer’s title, The Last Politician, points to his thesis: that Biden’s old-fashioned approach to politics drives and shapes all he does.Foer captures Biden’s successes and his cock-ups, his abilities and insecurities. At times, Biden is portrayed as overly confident. He is also caught wondering why John F Kennedy was not so tightly handled by his aides – or “babied”, as Foer reports it. Youth, vigor and acuity are all parts of the answer.The Last Politician is definitely news-laden, a must-read for political junkies. Biden’s staff finally spoke. Foer lays out how Biden’s age shapes his first term and his re-election odds; Harris’s shortcomings as vice-president; and Biden’s relationships with Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Ukraine and Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. Complications dominate.Biden’s “advanced years were a hindrance, depriving him of the energy to cast a robust public presence or the ability to easily conjure a name”, Foer writes. “His public persona reflected physical decline and time’s dulling of mental faculties that no pill or exercise regime can resist.”Biden was gaffe-prone as a younger politician. Now, his verbal and physical stumbles lead news cycles.Decades ago, Ronald Reagan’s typical day began with his arrival in the West Wing at 9am. Biden starts about an hour later. That’s an hour earlier than Trump, sure. But Foer writes: “It was striking that [Biden] took so few morning meetings or presided over so few public events before 10am.” Plenty has been written about Reagan’s capacity by the end of his term. When Reagan left the White House, after eight years, he was nearly 78. Today, Biden is nearly 81.“In private,” Foer writes, Biden “would occasionally admit that he felt tired.” Unstated is this: the cumulative effect of such realities of age leaves Biden on the cusp of being ignored, unable to woo swaths of the American public or drive his message and numbers. In the 2022 midterms, his popularity deficit kept him sidelined. For a politician, a shrug or a yawn can be more damning than disdain.Expect Republicans to quote Foer as they bash Harris. “Rabbit Ears” is the chapter title of Foer’s examination of the former California senator, a moniker bestowed by Biden’s inner circle. As they saw it, Foer writes, Harris was sensitive to “any hint of criticism … instantly aware” of the slightest dissatisfaction.She projected clinginess and uncertainty. “Instead of carving out an independent role, she stuck to the president’s side – an omnipresence at every Oval Office meeting.” Harris’s “piercing questions” impressed Gen Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, but lunches with Biden gradually fell “off the schedule”.Then again, Biden owed Harris little. She brutalized him in a debate, intimating he was a bigot. Then she dropped out of the Democratic primary before a vote was cast, the political equivalent of a face-plant.The relationship between Biden and Zelenskiy also had its ups-and-downs, Foer says. He lauds Biden for “quietly arming the Ukrainians”, helping them “fend off invasion” by Russia. He also describes tensions between the two leaders.Biden and Zelenskiy failed to establish swift rapport. Zelenskiy demanded Nato membership and offered “absurd analysis” of alliance dynamics, leaving Biden “pissed off”. In Foer’s telling, “even Zelenskiy’s most ardent sympathizers in the [Biden] administration agreed that he had bombed”, while Zelenskiy “at least subconsciously … seemed to blame” Biden “for the humiliation he suffered, for the political awkwardness he endured” at the hands of Trump.“Where Biden tended to expect Zelenskiy to open with expressions of gratitude for American support, Zelenskiy crammed his conversations with a long list of demands.” Sucking up to Ted Cruz didn’t help either.In the end, Foer is a Biden fan. He gives the Inflation Reduction Act, in his view the crowning achievement of the first term, an unqualified endorsement. Homing in on provisions that aim to “stall climate change”, Foer says the law stands as “an investment in moral authority”, enabling the US to “prod” other countries on environmental issues.Watching the latest spate of environmental cataclysms, it is hard to dispute that the climate crisis is real – all while Republican presidential aspirants continue their denials. But there is something amiss in Foer’s enthusiasm and the administration’s posture. For now, inflation holds more public attention. Nearly three-quarters of Americans see inflation as a “very important” issue. Climate crisis and the environment? Forty-four per cent.A hunch: voters are less worried about moral authority and more about grocery bills and prices at the pump. According to the polls, the Democrats have lost their grip on voters without a four-year college degree, regardless of race. A priorities gap is on display again.Issues that speak loudest to white progressives lack broad resonance. The faculty lounge makes a lousy focus group. Foer’s enthusiasm is premature.
      The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future is published in the US by Penguin More

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      ‘We have to come to grips with history’: Robert P Jones on The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy

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      How did Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election despite the Access Hollywood tape? How did he gain even more votes in 2020 despite an administration of chaos, lies and pandemic blunders? How can he be running neck and neck with Joe Biden for 2024 despite four indictments and 91 criminal charges?Future historians will surely debate such questions and why so many Americans saw themselves in a tawdry tycoon and carnival barker. One of the most persuasive theories is captured in a single word: race.Trump won white voters without a college degree by 32 points in 2020. A glance at his rallies shows the lack of diversity in his notorious “base”. His signature slogan, “Make America great again”, is a thinly disguised appeal to nostalgia for postwar suburbia.In his books The End of White Christian America and White Too Long, Robert P Jones has steadily built the argument that this movement is animated by shifting demographics. He points out that in 2008, when Barack Obama, the first Black president, was elected, 54% of Americans identified as white and Christian. By the end of Obama’s second term, that share had fallen to 47%. Today it is 42%.“It’s just a continued slide,” says Jones, 55, sitting at his desk at the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), where he is founder and president, in downtown Washington. “Most importantly, moving from majority to decisively non-majority white and Christian has set off a kind of ‘freak out’ moment among many white Christians.”In The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future, effectively the third book in an unofficial trilogy, Jones traces the roots of Trumpism back more than 500 years.He explains: “Go back and understand they really do believe that this country was divinely ordained to be a promised land for European Christians.“That idea is so old and so deep it explains in many ways the visceral reactivity. Why are we fighting today about AP African American history? Arkansas’s banned it, Florida’s been fighting it, and it’s because it tells this alternative story about the country that’s not just settlers, pioneers – a naive mythology of innocence.”Jones examines that mythological origin story and its promised land. He spotlights the “Doctrine of Discovery”, a little-known or understood series of 15th-century papal edicts asserting that European civilisation and western Christianity are superior to all other cultures, races and religions. For Jones, it is “a kind of Rosetta Stone for understanding the deep structure of the European political and religious worldviews we have inherited in this country”.The initial edict, issued by Nicholas V in 1452, granted the Portuguese king Alfonso V the right to “invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens [Muslims] and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery”.Jones says: “Then there’s a series of these documents that get issued between 1452 and 1493, each of which build on this idea but essentially all say the same thing: that if the land is not occupied by Christian people – and that Christian identity is the thing that determines whether you have your own human rights or not – then the Christian kings and queens have the right to conquer those lands and take possession of everything that they can in the name of the state and the church.”This provided convenient theological justification for the first European powers that came into contact with Native Americans to seize lands and exploit resources. Spreading the gospel by the sword was married with huge economic incentives.From this perspective, the enslavement of Africans was not America’s original sin but a continuation of genocide and dispossession justified by papal doctrine. The New York Times’s 1619 Project was a long-overdue corrective to established narratives but it was not the final word.Jones reflects: “The 1619 Project was very important culturally in the US because it at least did move us out of this room with white people gathered around a table like you see on the postage stamp or the paintings of the beginning of the country and took us back to a different story: the story of enslaved people in the country.“But if we really want to understand our present we have to go back and tell the whole story and that’s European contact with Indigenous people before it is enslavement and the transatlantic slave trade. That all comes from the same source. It is this cultural idea that there is a kind of superiority to European culture that’s justified by Christianity that sets up, in the Doctrine of Discovery, this entire project.”Jones sees connections between the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in the Mississippi Delta in 1955 and the killing and expulsion of Choctaws forced to walk the Trail of Tears, starting in 1831; between the lynching of three Black circus workers in Duluth in 1920 and the mass execution of 38 Dakota men in Minnesota in 1862.When history is put in silos, he contends, such threads are missed. “You don’t get a society that tortures and kills a 14-year-old boy in Mississippi on the basis of whistling at a white woman without this sense of entitlement, of superiority and permissive violence stemming from the Doctrine of Discovery. That was the thing that pushed people into the Mississippi territory, forcibly removing Choctaw Creek Native Americans from their lands, killing many, forcibly removing the others.“If you don’t understand that history, you end up with this shocking, ‘Well, how could a society be this way that this would happen, and then they [Roy Bryant and JW Milam, the white men who killed Till] would get acquitted by their peers, who deliberated for only an hour after the trial?’ But when you understand this longer history, that becomes a little bit less of a mystery.”When Jones visited these sites of trauma, he found communities working across racial lines to seek the truth, build memorials and museums and commemorate their histories in ways unthinkable in the last century. The US is currently in a great “Age of Re-evaluation”, according to Scott Ellsworth, a scholar of the Tulsa race massacre.Jones comments: “For all of these what I thought was fairly remarkable is how recent these moves are in the US to try to tell a different story, a more inclusive story about what happened. In none of these cases do they predate 2000. It’s all in the last 20 years that any of these movements have happened.“If you had driven down through the Delta in Mississippi in 2000, you would not have come across any signs or anything. Even though the whole world knows the story of Emmett Till, you would not have known that it happened in Tallahatchie county, in the Delta. There was nothing there on the ground. A group of citizens about 20 years ago got together and said, ‘No, we should change this, and we should try to tell the truth about the story.’”Till’s casket is displayed at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture; his story was told in the 2022 film Till; and in July, Joe Biden signed a proclamation designating an Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley national monument in Illinois and Mississippi.The 46th president urged America to face its history with all its peaks and troughs, blessings and blemishes. He told an audience in the White House grounds: “We can’t just choose to learn what we want to know. We have to learn what we should know. We should know about our country. We should know everything: the good, the bad, the truth of who we are as a nation. That’s what great nations do, and we are a great nation.”Biden added, a little bleakly: “We got a hell of a long way to go.”Jones believes that Biden gets it. “He’s been fairly remarkable on these issues of racial justice. He, for example, has been one of the only presidents who has used the words ‘white supremacy’ consistently in addresses – and not just before Black audiences. If you look at Biden’s speeches and you search for ‘white supremacy’, he’s not just talking about that in Tulsa during the commemoration speech.“He’s using it, and understands it as one of the deep problems of American history that we currently have to wrestle with. He’s been very clear and seems very genuine about that being something that he’s leaving as part of his legacy. It’s also part of why he made the pronouncement about the Emmett Till national monument, so this becomes a permanent part of the story that we tell about ourselves.”Trump, however, has a polar opposite worldview that Jones says explains why history has become the new frontline in the culture wars. Just over a third of self-identified Democrats are white and Christian; about 70% of self-identified Republicans are. PRRI polling finds that two-thirds of Democrats say America’s culture and way of life has changed for the better since the 1950s; two-thirds of Republicans believe it has changed for the worse.Jones writes how white Christians can “sense the tectonic plates moving” in the demographics of their neighbourhoods, the food in their grocery store, the appearance of Spanish-language local radio and roadside billboards, and the class photos on the walls of their public schools.He says: “I’ve always thought that, in Trump’s Maga slogan, the most powerful word is not about America being great; it’s the ‘again’ part. It’s this nostalgia tinged with loss. What have we lost and who’s the ‘we’ that have lost something? If you just ask those questions, it’s pretty clear. It’s the formerly dominant white Christians who were culturally dominant, demographically dominant, politically dominant and are no longer.“It’s that sense of loss and grievance that Trump has been so homed in on and so astute at fuelling and setting himself up. You hear him say things like, ‘I am your voice’, ‘I alone can fix it’, ‘If you don’t elect somebody like me, we’re not going to have a country any more’. Those kinds of phrases tell you what he’s appealing to.“If we look at the insurrection at the Capitol, it’s so chilling the last frame that the January 6 House select committee showed in their video has two people – it looks like something out of Les Mis – up on a barricade and they’ve got two flags. One is a Trump flag and the other is a Christian flag that they’re flying on the barricades.”Jones has skin in the game. Growing up a Southern Baptist in Jackson, Mississippi, he went to church five times a week and earned a divinity degree. His family Bible, printed in 1815, has generations of births and deaths and marriages handwritten between the Old and New Testaments. Some online genealogical research revealed slave-owners among his ancestors.“My grandfather was a deacon at a church in Macon, Georgia, and one of his jobs on Sunday morning was to make sure no Black people entered the sanctuary. He was literally a bouncer on the outside of the church to keep non-white people out. That was an official role as a deacon in the church. It wasn’t like some wink, wink, nod, nod – that was his assignment for Sunday morning.“It’s been tough, but, on the other hand, one of the things you hear often with these anti- so-called critical race theory bills and with ‘woke’ is ‘not making white people uncomfortable’. But I would rather know the truth, even if it’s an uncomfortable truth, then be ignorant and comfortable.”He quotes James Baldwin, the transcendent and trenchant African American writer: “All that can save you now is your confrontation with your own history … which is not your past, but your present. Your history has led you to this moment, and you can only begin to change yourself by looking at what you are doing in the name of your history.”Jones comments: “There’s a kind of liberation, freedom and growth that can come from facing this history and moving somewhere better together. That’s the invitation, and the reason for doing the work isn’t at all just to feel bad or beat yourself up over what your family did or whatever.“If we really want to live up to this promise of being a truly pluralistic, multi-religious, multiracial democracy, it’s going to take us coming to terms with that history and putting into place something different than we’ve had in the past. There’s no way we can do that if we don’t even understand why we’re in the dilemmas we’re currently in.”Another of his favourite Baldwin quotations describes “white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing”.Jones continues: “Such a great line, and if you think about this impossibly innocent history that we have told ourselves, that we were always upstanding, that we always treated other peoples with dignity and respect, it just isn’t true. In order, again, to right the ship and come to a new place together, we have to have to come to grips with that history.”Only then, Jones says, can America, a nation that likes to claim exceptionalism, be sincere about its unique experiment.“Our current generation is the first that has been asked whether we truly believe what we often claim: that we are a pluralistic democracy.“Before, many white Christian Americans who are part of the dominant culture could pay lip service to that, knowing that they had enough numbers at the ballot box, knowing that they had enough control on business, enough control of local institutions, that they still had a lock on power. This is the first generation where that’s not true.“The question is called in a way that’s new and that’s why there’s so much visceral reaction, because there’s a way in which we’ve never honestly had to answer the question. But now it’s being put in a way that we’re going to have to answer it.”
      The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy: And the Path to a Shared American Future is published in the US by Simon & Schuster More

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      The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy review: necessary chronicle of US racist history

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      Robert P Jones, founder and president of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), holds a divinity degree from Southwestern Baptist Seminary and a doctorate in religion from Emory University. He is a son of the south, pained by the nexus between Christianity and slavery. In White Too Long, published in 2020, he wrote of church stained-glass windows that paid homage to Confederate generals, Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson. The deadly shooting at a Dollar General in Florida last week was just one more reminder that the past is always with us.In his new book, Jones draws a straight line between religion and European migration to North America and slavery and the subjugation of Indigenous people. He identifies and repeatedly criticizes the “doctrine of discovery”, as prime culprit and enabler.Enunciated in 15th-century papal decrees, adopted in 1823 as part of US common law through the supreme court case Johnson v M’Intosh, the discovery doctrine offered theological and legal justification for conquest and its aftermath. Jones extensively quotes Robert Miller, a law professor at Arizona State University and a citizen of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe.“In essence, the doctrine provided that newly arrived Europeans immediately and automatically acquired legally recognized property rights over the inhabitants without knowledge or consent of the indigenous peoples,” Miller wrote, in 2012.Jones adds: “Despite its near-total absence from white educational curricula … Native American scholars have been highlighting the impact of the doctrine of discovery for at least half a century.”He meticulously details events that further scar US history. It is a first-rate chronicle of horror. Jones lays out the lynchings of three Black circus workers in Minnesota, in 1920, and of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955. He recounts the Tulsa race massacre of 1921, the destruction of “Black Wall Street” and the deaths of 300 African Americans.He also delves in detail into the US government-sanctioned execution of 38 Dakota males in Mankato, Minnesota, in December 1862. It remains the single largest event of its kind in US history. Abraham Lincoln played a central role.On the page, Jones lays out his pathway to a “shared future”. He advocates “reparations” for the descendants of enslaved Black people and argues for “restitution” to Native Americans.“This is a tall order,” he acknowledges. But he remains undeterred, writing: “We cannot shrink before the difficulty of the task … the creativity of our solutions is directly proportional to, and a measure of, the strength of our convictions.”With a significant exception – support from three-quarters of African Americans – the public holds a negative view of reparations, according to a 2021 survey. Nearly 70% are opposed, including 80% of whites, 65% of Asians, 58% of Hispanics and 49% of Democrats and Democratic-leaners. That’s a lot of hearts and minds to persuade.This fall, the Democratic-dominated California legislature will consider a reparations plan. After the US supreme court rejection of race-based affirmative action, and a similar rejection by Californians in 2020, the legislature may want to tread lightly.Jones can be swept away by his convictions. In 2016, in The End of White Christian America, he wrote an “obituary” and recited a “benediction” for what he perceived as the passing of white Protestantism. To say the least, he jumped the gun.Donald Trump’s election showed that primacy lost is not the same as extinction. Even in its lessened state and amid the rise of religious “nones”, Christianity remains a force in American life. As mainstream Protestantism slides and younger evangelicals leave the fold, the landscape of Sunday morning is being reshaped.“American megachurches are thriving by poaching flocks,” an Economist headline blared. “Denominations are out. Brand identity and good vibes are in.” There is plenty to like about community and ice cream. Doctrinal orthodoxies have not fared well in the marketplace of US religion.Jones has refused to fully quit “defund the police”, the protest slogan that flourished after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis officer in May 2020 but which Republicans predictably seized on to depict Democrats as soft on crime. Jones has also tweaked James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist, for emphasizing class over race.“We can’t continue to paper over racial injustice with economic policy,” Jones wrote in 2021, in the aftermath of the Republican Glenn Youngkin’s upset win in the Virginia governor’s race. Riffing off Carville’s famous 1992 campaign message for Bill Clinton, about the economy, Jones delivered his own: “‘It’s the culture, stupid’ – or less euphemistically, ‘It’s the white supremacy, stupid’ – must be the new mantra of political analysts today.”That’s a lousy bumper-sticker. Besides that, the data reflects that inflation, jobs, the economy and healthcare are the most pressing priorities for American voters. Only 6% place discrimination top of their list of concerns. By the numbers, it looks like Carville got it right.Jones also implicitly criticized Carville for calling the “defund the police” movement “lunacy”, writing: “I agree with Carville that ‘defund the police’ has been unhelpful. It’s neither a savvy political slogan nor an accurate depiction of what most police reform advocates actually want to do.”Not a “savvy political slogan” and “unhelpful” are understatements. Last year, after Republicans took back the US House, James Clyburn of South Carolina, a member of Democratic leadership, put it this way: “‘Defund the police’ is killing our party and we’ve got to stop it.”New York City and San Francisco have experienced major exoduses. Safe streets and thriving tax bases are necessities for vibrant urban centers. Heading for 2024, Joe Biden and Donald Trump are locked in polling dead heats. Despite his many indictments, Trump retains traction. Racial resentments helped propel him into the White House in 2016. They may do so again.
      The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy: And the Path to a Shared American Future is published in the US by Simon & Schuster More

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      The Women of NOW review: superb history of feminist growth and groundswell

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      What do a bestselling author, a segregationist congressman and a Black legal scholar have in common? Through a series of serendipitous events, Betty Friedan, Howard Smith and Pauli Murray lit fires that ignited the largest social revolution of the 20th century.Friedan wrote the 1963 blockbuster The Feminine Mystique. Smith added “sex” to Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In 1965, Murray wrote the first legal analysis comparing Jim Crow to gender discrimination. With the benefit of hindsight, this unwitting but timely partnership can be seen as the launchpad of the second wave feminist movement, a movement synonymous with the National Organization for Women, or NOW.Almost 60 years after its inception, we think of NOW as a mainstream national feminist group. But in 1966 it was founded on the radical idea, as Katherine Turk describes it, “to organize and advocate for all women by channeling their efforts into one association that sought to end male supremacy”.In a world where most women were denied credit cards and mortgages, entrance into marathon races, medical school and law school, jobs as bar tenders, editors, pilots, and factory managers, ending male supremacy seemed unfathomable.Turk’s The Women of NOW is a fascinating account of the foundational organization that for many decades served as the central tentpole of this multifaceted movement. Despite the hundreds of books that make up the rich cannon of modern women’s history, Turk has done a much-needed service, writing the first full history of NOW.A professor at the University of North Carolina, Turk devoted 20 years, beginning with her undergraduate thesis, to telling this complex story. With gumshoe reporting precision, she traveled the country, unearthing hundreds of boxes and thousands of files that had been collecting dust in library archives. Combining this detailed documentary roadmap with interviews, Turk weaves the root story of an organization that drove the most transformative mass movement of the modern age.Turk makes sense of NOW’s unwieldy geographic spread and 60-year history by telling it from the points of view of three very different leaders: Aileen Hernandez, Mary Jean Collins and Patricia Hill Burnett. Hernandez, an experienced Black union organizer, Collins, a young working-class political activist, and Burnett, a rich Detroit housewife and former Miss Michigan, personify the broad reach of the organization which tried, and sometimes failed, to represent all women.Collins, who became president the Chicago chapter in 1968, greeted her new cause with giddy enthusiasm, saying joining NOW was “like waking up from a dead sleep, like ‘this is wrong; and everything is wrong.’ And away we went.” Their goal was nothing short of reprograming American society; revamping the way people lived, worked and loved.Hernandez, the most professional of the three, was one of the first five commissioners of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. When the commission opened in 1965, its main mission was to strike down workplace race discrimination. To the surprise of its leaders, a third of complaints came from women. When the agency decided it would do nothing in response to complaints from stewardesses who were fired when they turned 32, and AT&T telephone operators denied higher-level jobs, it became clear to Washington insiders like Pauli Murray, Catherine East, Mary Eastwood and Sonia Pressman that the country needed a women’s version of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. On 30 June 1966, 28 women, with Friedan their fearless if flawed leader, created an organization to “bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society and in truly equal partnership with men”. NOW was born.Turk thoughtfully recounts the feminist groundswell and the growth of NOW. It counted just 120 members in 1966 but it grew to 18,000 members and 250 chapters in 1972 and to 40,000 members and 700 chapters in 1974. NOW took on big corporations like Sears, AT&T and the New York Times (over its gender-segregated classified ads). Covered by the mainstream press, lawsuits, protests and press conferences helped spread the word. But as grassroots chapters proliferated, so did different priorities.Growing pains started early and never really subsided. Riven by divisions over race, class and sexual orientation, the organization that aimed to represent all women would eventually sink from its own weight, if not before powering the women’s movement in the 1960s and 70s.Hernandez and Murray, two of the most influential and strategic members of NOW, winced at white women’s “racist slights and oversights”. Lesbians like Rita Mae Brown rebelled against homophobia. But on 26 August 1970, hundreds of thousands of women from all backgrounds took part in the largest nationwide women’s protest in history, the Women’s Strike for Equality. This was the moment the movement went viral.Two years later, when the Equal Rights Amendment passed the House and Senate with huge majorities, Now had enjoyed a five-year run of victories in its righteous and politically popular cause. Seeing the ERA as a one-shot inoculation against systemic sexism, NOW leaders made the fateful decision to double down on the amendment’s 38-state ratification, a single-issue mission that would alienate Black women and invite organized opposition. The effort to amend the US constitution ultimately foundered in the face of powerful conservative forces lead by Phyllis Schlafly and Ronald Reagan.As Turk deftly guides her readers through NOW’s roller coaster of victories and defeats, we come away with a clear blueprint for change – replete with cautionary tales – as we face new challenges to women’s freedom and equality. The Women of NOW can show today’s feminists the path forward. It is a must-read.
      The Women of NOW: How Feminists Built an Organization That Transformed America is published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

      Clara Bingham’s book The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Remade America 1963-1973 will be published in May 2024 More

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      in US Politics

      Biden privately admitted feeling ‘tired’ amid concerns about his age, book says

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      Amid relentless debate about whether at 80 Joe Biden is too old to be president or to complete an effective second term, an eagerly awaited book on his time in the White House reports that Biden has privately admitted to feeling “tired”, even as it describes his vast political experience as a vital asset.“His advanced years were a hindrance, depriving him of the energy to cast a robust public presence or the ability to easily conjure a name,” Franklin Foer writes in The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future.“It was striking that he took so few morning meetings or presided over so few public events before 10am. His public persona reflected physical decline and time’s dulling of mental faculties that no pill or exercise regime can resist.“In private, he would occasionally admit that he felt tired.”Foer does not cite a source for Biden’s reported private remarks but his book, according to its publisher, Penguin Random House, is based on “unparalleled access to the tight inner circle of advisers who have surrounded Biden for decades”.The Last Politician will be published in the US next week. On Tuesday, as the Atlantic published an excerpt on the withdrawal from Afghanistan, Politico noted tight security around the release and anxiety in the White House.The Guardian obtained a copy.Biden’s age has been a constant of coverage since the former senator and vice-president entered the race to face Donald Trump in 2020. At 77, Biden beat Trump convincingly and became the oldest president ever elected. If Biden wins a second term next year, and completes four years in power, he will be 86 when he steps down.Republican candidates to face Biden have relentlessly focused on his age, with rightwing pundits piling in – despite the fact the clear Republican frontrunner, Trump, is 77 years old himself.But public polling has long showed concern about Biden’s age among Democratic voters. This week, the Associated Press and the Norc Center for Public Affairs showed 77% of respondents (89% of Republicans and 69% of Democrats) saying Biden was too old to be effective if re-elected.In the same poll, only 51% (and just 29% of Republicans) said Trump’s age would be a problem if he returned to the Oval Office.Foer, a former editor of the New Republic, a progressive magazine, does not shy from the issue. But he does stress how Biden’s massive political experience – he won his US Senate seat in Delaware in 1972, chaired the Senate judiciary and foreign relations committees and was vice-president to Barack Obama from 2009 to 2017 – has given him unique strengths in the White House.Citing the Inflation Reduction Act and other attempts to address the climate crisis, Foer says Biden is not guilty of governing in the short term “because [he] will only inhabit the short term”, a failing of older politicians.In something of a backhanded compliment, Foer writes that Biden has sometimes muffed public remarks not because of the challenges of age, but because of “indiscipline and indecision” seen throughout his career.In the same passage in which he reports Biden’s admission to being tired, meanwhile, Foer says the president’s “wartime leadership”, regarding supporting Ukraine in its fight against the invading Russian army, “drew on his weathered instincts and his robust self-confidence”.Regarding Ukraine, Foer writes, “the advantages of having an older president were on display. He wasn’t just a leader of the coalition, he was the West’s father figure, whom foreign leaders could call for advice and look to for assurance.“It was his calming presence and his strategic clarity that helped lead the alliance to such an aggressive stance, which stymied authoritarianism on its front lines.“He was a man for his age.” More

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      in US Politics

      Losing Our Religion review: Trump and the crisis of US Christianity

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      Christianity and the “powers that be” have weathered two millennia, their relationship varying by time and place. Pontius Pilate condemned Jesus to the cross. Emperor Constantine converted. Henry VIII broke from Rome and founded the Church of England. In the US, the denominational divides of protestantism helped drive the revolution and provided fuel for the civil war.In his new book, the Rev Russell Moore opens a chapter, “Losing Our Authority: How the Truth Can Save”, with the words “Jesus Saves”, followed by a new historical tableau: January 6 and the threat Donald Trump and the mob posed to democracy and Mike Pence.“That the two messages, a gallows and ‘Jesus Saves’ could coexist is a sign of crisis for American Christianity,” Moore writes.Heading toward the Iowa caucus, Trump runs six points better among white evangelicals than overall. As for the devout Pence, a plurality of white evangelicals view him unfavorably.Moore is mindful of history, and the roles Christianity has played: “Parts of the church were wrong – satanically wrong – on issues of righteousness and justice, such as the Spanish Inquisition and the scourge of human slavery.” He is editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, a publication founded by Billy Graham. Losing Our Religion offers a mixture of lament and hope. In places, its sadness is tinged with anger. In the south, the expression “losing my religion”, popularized by REM in a 1991 song, “conveys the moment when ‘politeness gives way to anger’,” Moore explains.Moore’s public and persistent opposition to the election of Trump set him apart from most white evangelicals and would lead to his departure from the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).“The man on the throne in heaven is a dark-skinned, Aramaic-speaking ‘foreigner’, who is probably not all that impressed by chants of “Make America great again,” Moore wrote in spring 2016. “Regardless of the outcome in November, [Trump’s] campaign is forcing American Christians to grapple with some scary realities that will have implications for years to come.”He was prescient. Graham’s son, Franklin, threatened Americans with God’s wrath if they had the temerity to criticize Trump. At the time, Moore was president of the SBC ethics and religious liberty commission. His politics forced him to choose. He opted for Christ and his convictions. He joined a nondenominational church.His new book is subtitled “An Altar Call for Evangelical America” but it aims for a broader audience. It contains ample references to Scripture, but also to the journalist Tim Alberta, Jonathan Haidt of New York University, Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, and Robert Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute, a liberal group.Of white evangelicals, Moore quotes Jones: “Their greatest temptation will be to wield what remaining political power they have as desperate corrective for their waning cultural influence.” Welcome to the culture wars, and to what Ron Brownstein of the Atlantic has called the coalition of restoration.Against the backdrop of rising Christian nationalism and January 6, Moore reads the writing on the wall. He is troubled by the shrinking gap between Christian nationalism and neo-paganism. “The step before replacing Jesus with Thor is to turn Jesus into Thor,” he observes. Moore found the presence of prayers in “‘Jesus’s name’ right next to a horn-wearing pagan shaman in the well of the evacuated United States Senate” disturbing, but not coincidental.The Magasphere and Twitterverse bolster Moore’s conclusions.“President Trump will be arrested during Lent – a time of suffering and purification for the followers of Jesus Christ,” Joseph McBride, a rightwing lawyer who represents several insurrectionists, tweeted last March. “As Christ was crucified, and then rose again on the third day, so too will Donald Trump.”Caesar as deity. We’ve seen that movie before. McBride, however, did not stop there.Hours later, he tweeted: “JESUS LOVES DONALD TRUMP. JESUS DIED FOR DONALD TRUMP. JESUS LIVES INSIDE DONALD TRUMP. DEAL WITH IT.”Three-in-10 adults in the US, meanwhile, are categorized as religious “nones”. Only 40% of Americans call themselves Protestant. The Wasp ascendancy has yielded to Sunday brunch and walks in the woods. “The Father, Son and Holy Ghost, they took the last train for the coast,” as Don MacLean sang. For some, Trump rallies present a variation of community and communion. A younger generation of evangelicals heads for the door. The numbers tell of a crisis of faith.“We see now young evangelicals walking away from evangelism not because they do not believe what the church teaches, but because they believe the “church itself” does not believe what the church teaches,” Moore laments.Predation, lust and greed are poor calling cards for religion. Unchecked abuse within the Catholic church left deep and lasting scars among those who needed God’s love most. Moore notes the Catholic church’s fall from grace in Ireland and posits that “born-again America” may be experiencing a similar backlash, as a powerful cultural institution lacking “credibility” seeks to “enforce its orthodoxies”.Against this backdrop, Catholicism’s boomlet among younger continental Europeans is noteworthy. Recently, hundreds of thousands converged on Lisbon to hear the Pope. The same demographic helps fuel the resurgence of the Spanish far right. Tethering the cross to the flag retains its appeal.That said, Jerry Falwell Jr’s posturing as Trump-booster and voyeur didn’t exactly jibe with Scripture. The ousted head of Liberty University, son of the founder of the Moral Majority, allegedly paid a pool boy to have sex with his wife as he watched.“What we are seeing now … is in many cases the shucking off of any pretense of hypocrisy for the outright embrace of immorality,” Moore writes.America barrels toward a Biden v Trump rematch. The former president is a professional defendant. The country and its religion sag and shudder. Moore prays for revival, even as he fears nostalgia.
      Losing Our Religion is published in the US by Penguin Random House More