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    A crack in the manosphere: Joe Rogan’s guests are revolting | Sam Wolfson

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    Sam Harris is the kind of guest Joe Rogan loves to have on his podcast: he dresses awkwardly in a sport coat with jeans; he undertook a PhD in neuroscience after a transformative experience with MDMA; his tone is accessible yet patronising; he has a sense of academic authority which belies a set of controversial views that include calling Islam “uniquely uncivil” and almost unfettered support for Israeli attacks on Gaza; he made an app called Waking Up, which promises to be “a new operating system for your mind”. Rogan has hosted Harris on his podcast many times and the pair call each other good friends.But even Harris seems perturbed by Rogan’s more wholehearted embrace of Musk and Maga. “He’s in over his head on so many topics of great consequence,” Harris told his listeners of his own podcast last week. “He’ll bring someone in to shoot the shit on ‘how the Holocaust is not what you think it was’ or ‘maybe Churchill was the bad guy in world war two’ … or he’ll talk to someone like Trump or Tucker Carlson, who lie as freely as they breathe, and doesn’t push back against any of their lies … It is irresponsible, and it’s directly harmful.”Joe Rogan’s podcast success has in large part been about building a community of regular guests from the worlds of comedy, wrestling, psychedelics and non-fiction publishing, a kind of Rogansphere that has begun to feel like a subculture. He hosts his favourite guests time after time, with many of them building entire careers off their appearances on the show.But recently, various members of the Rogansphere have started to turn against their leader. They can’t understand how the host of the most popular podcast in the world seems to have gone from examining both sides to defending Elon Musk at every turn and providing a platform for second world war revisionists.View image in fullscreenIn the past few months, Rogan has called people who thought Elon Musk’s hand gesture was a Nazi salute “dumb”, “crazy”, “illogical and weird” and defended it by saying it’s how Americans used to give the pledge of allegiance in the 1940s. Weeks later, he gave a very sympathetic interview to the podcaster Darryl Cooper, who has previously called Winston Churchill the main villain of the second world war and tweeted an image of Nazis in Paris, saying it was “infinitely preferable” to the drag “Last Supper” scene at the 2024 Paris Olympics opening ceremony.Rogan wasn’t always like this. Over the past decade he has built his podcast into by far the most successful in the world, weathering numerous controversies. He spent much of his career being mislabelled as ideologically rightwing or misogynistic when in fact he’s more of a simpleton who agrees with almost everyone who comes on his show, even when the things they’re saying are contradictory. He has been a staunch believer “in just asking questions” but not so much in listening to or processing the answers. He has supported both Bernie Sanders and RFK Jr, and has taken conflicting views on everything from trans rights to Ye, sometimes hilariously so.The best thing you could say about Rogan is that he is distrustful of all mainstream narratives, in an indiscriminate way. That’s led to him promoting a number of conspiracy theories that fly in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence about vaccines and the climate crisis, but also vocally criticising the war in Gaza and the influence of lobbyists in Washington DC.But his outlook has shifted since Trump was elected for the second time, a victory many credit to a good performance on Rogan’s podcast and Rogan’s subsequent endorsement. On Saturday night at a UFC fight, Rogan ran into Trump, warmly embraced him and said: “I’m so happy for you sir.” Many of his biggest fans, those that discuss episodes in detail on Reddit and Discord, are complaining that he has become a shill for the elites he used to claim to distrust.Rogan has tended to brush off these critiques in the past, saying he’s just an interested comedian asking questions. But even Rogan’s comedy friends have started to bristle at his unwavering support for Musk. Rogan values comedy above all else, investing much of the riches from his podcast in the Austin comedy scene, buying up clubs and appearing regularly as a panellist on Kill Tony, the open-mic standup podcast that takes shots at perceived wokeism. Rogan has a regular cast of comedians on his podcast including Shane Gillis, Kyle Dunnigan and Tim Dillon. These comedians give Rogan his street credibility, and he in turn has given them a huge platform.While they haven’t turned on Rogan yet, they are incredibly disparaging about Musk. Dillon called Musk’s White House press conference “the grossest and cringiest shit anyone has seen for a long time … I disagree with close friends of mine who think Elon Musk is the new Jesus.” Gillis laughed about Musk’s salute on his podcast, and said he thought Musk was “psychotic” and “fucking weird” for lying about how good he is at video games.Rogan meanwhile has recently called Musk “a super genius that’s been fucked with” and “one of the smartest people alive”.This emerging divide between Rogan and his comedic milieu came to a head last month at the recording of Kill Tony’s first special for Netflix (filmed at Rogan’s Comedy Mothership club in Austin). Both Dunnigan and Rogan were on the panel together but Dunnigan was in character, hilariously, as Musk. It was a brilliant and vicious send-up of Musk’s bizarre humour and minimal intelligence that had everyone laughing except Rogan, who avoided making eye contact or saying almost anything for the entire episode. It seemed as though he didn’t want to give any impression to Musk that he was was mocking him.There are no simple ideological lines being drawn between Rogan and the guests that are turning on him. Douglas Murray, for example, is an incredibly conservative pro-Israel historian who supports the withdrawal of visas from students who demonstrated on college campuses last year and has said he wants to ban “all immigration into Europe from Muslim countries”. In many ways he is to the right of Rogan, and used much of his appearance losing a debate on the podcast with his fellow guest Dave Smith over Gaza. Yet he also used his time to admonish Rogan for having too many amateur and conspiracy theory-minded historians on the podcast. “I feel you’ve opened the door to quite a lot of people. You’ve now got a big platform and have been throwing out counter-historical stuff but a very dangerous kind.”Rogan had very little in the way of a meaningful defence. Defending why he had the conspiracy theorist and Pizzagate proponent Ian Carroll on his program, Rogan replied: “I just think I’d like to talk to this person … I brought him on because I want to find out, like, how does one get involved in the whole conspiracy theory business? Because his whole thing is just conspiracies.”There are no smart guys here; both Murray and Rogan have tendency to use circuitous straw man arguments that suit their specific brand of politics. But it does show cracks in the cultural wing of Trumpism.Rogan himself seems to be backing down from a full-throated endorsement of the president’s policies, calling the Venezuelan deportations “horrific” and “bad for the cause”, and calling Trump’s feud with Canada over tariffs “stupid”. Last month he said healthcare should “100% should be socially funded” and was celebrated by Bernie Sanders for doing so.Yet these acknowledgements of bad policies haven’t translated into a lack of enthusiasm for either Trump or Musk, yet. But with Rogan it only takes one convincing guest to change his mind.What’s more, Rogan’s main constituency of listeners, young men, appear to be feeling buyer’s remorse about Trump, with new polling suggesting the group is swinging away from the president. Where his audience go, Rogan tends to follow.On his podcast, Harris told his listeners: “Our society is as politically shattered as it is in part because of how Joe [Rogan] has interacted with information.” Rogan might revel in criticism from progressives, but barbs from his friends are likely to sting. How long Trump can count on Rogan’s cuddles and warm wishes might depend on whether his favourite guests begin to ostracize him. More

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      Trump chose the wrong hill to DEI on | Stewart Lee

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      In the second world war, Navajo code talkers transmitted sensitive US military information in their own undocumented language. Which was nice of them, as their immediate ancestors had been dispossessed and destroyed by white settlers, and then had all their water poisoned with uranium. “Were it not for the Navajos,” concluded major Howard Connor, at the time, “the marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.” And that famous photo of the American soldiers raising a flag would just have shown some Japanese boy scouts letting off a party popper.But last month Trump’s defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, said: “I think the single dumbest phrase in military history is ‘our diversity is our strength’.” Predictably, some Navajo code talkers had to have bodyguards to protect them from white American servicemen who thought they were Japanese. Plus ça change, as they say over there in that Europe.The Navajos’ efforts went unrecognised. When the son of one of the code talkers got to live the American dream by opening a Burger King in Kayenta on Navajo lands in 1986, he made the building a partial museum of his father’s unit. I visited it 30 years ago, with the comedian Kevin Eldon (Narvi the dwarf smith in TV’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power), and it remains the most edifying fast food restaurant I ever ate in. It was even better than that KFC near Bletchley Park that does that delicious Alan Turing chicken strips and alphabetti spaghetti meal deal ™ ®.The Kayenta Burger King also has a more extensive archive of code talker artefacts than any official government repository. Especially since, last week, videos, photos and stories of the Navajo code talkers were temporarily removed online as part of Trump’s assault on diversity. A page commemorating corporal Ira Hayes, a Pima of the Gila River Indian Community, and one of the servicemen photographed raising that Stars and Stripes at Iwo Jima, also disappeared for a while in Trump’s thwarting of the woke. Boris Johnson must be delighted. But I wonder if Trump’s actions please the British daytime TV treasure Lorraine Kelly?Kelly’s interview in the Times on 14 March, culled from a book promotion appearance on Times Radio, seemed to suggest she believed gender and racial diversity are wrongly prioritised in the workplace at the expense of offering opportunities to the (presumably white) working class. The headline spoke for itself: “Lorraine Kelly: Diversity push is leaving working-class people behind.” Was our Lorraine an unexpected supporter of Trump’s anti-diversity agenda?Probably not. This is the rightwing press, or the press as I call it, that we’re talking about, and Kelly didn’t quite espouse the view the headline implies. Even the elements of the radio interview that the paper chose to transcribe show a Lorraine Kelly principally concerned about how the cost of living affects working-class access to media jobs, and she made explicit that she hoped to see diversity initiatives tackle exclusion on the basis of class in addition to concentrating on gender and race. It’s a subtly different position and an example of the nuanced thought that has made Kelly the Socrates of the sofa, while her competitor Richard Madeley stares out of his kitchen window at a donkey in a field while thinking about bread.But this is how papers work. For two decades I was lucky enough to review records (remember them?) for the Sunday Times. So when they asked me, 20 years back, to write an insider comedian’s view of attempts to boycott the Edinburgh comedy awards because the sponsor, Perrier, was owned by Nestlé, which pushed unsafe formula milk initiatives to the developing world, what could possibly go wrong? And the money didn’t hurt either!I wrote a balanced piece about how the boycott was morally the right thing to do, with the appended caveat that high-profile supporters were asking a lot of young broke performers to walk away from a cash bung of £10,000 that might shift at least some of their debts. The headline? “‘Emma Thompson needs to grow up’, says comedian Stewart Lee”, which wasn’t anything I said, but perhaps fitted the paper’s agenda better, and left me apologising, cap in hand, to the charity Baby Milk Action and Miss Thompson herself, who has conspicuously failed to cast me in any of her hit films since.Despite the fun-size fascism we’re seeing across the Atlantic, the woke folk panic still sells papers and farms online engagement. The Times got what it wanted out of massaging Kelly’s quotes, and in the US the fourth estate is finished, jeopardising democracy worldwide. Maybe it’s time for writers to work out what they believe and stand up for it. But the British press is staffed by a class of professionals happy to drift between the Times, the Telegraph, the New European and yes, even the last liberal papers, refining their opinions as required by their offshore billionaire employers. It’s as easy as changing the look of your byline photo from sensible suit and tie to a beatnik polar neck jumper and beard. And that’s just the women. These days.Ironically, some wag at the Times has chosen to illustrate Kelly’s interview with an old photo of her GMTV colleague, the black fitness expert Mr Motivator, holding her aloft on the roof of a building. Presumably there were dozens of more motivated white working-class Mr Motivators, but the woke agenda meant they never got the opportunity to lift a Scottish woman. Let’s see if we can’t see a white working-class TV fitness instructor raising Lorraine Kelly high above their head by the end of 2025, but ideally let’s do it without playing into the divisive playbook of Trump, Musk, Vance and Farage, apportioning blame to the disadvantaged, while consolidating their own chrome-plated futures. More

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      Presidents at War: how battle has shaped American leaders

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      In his new book, Presidents at War, Steven M Gillon considers how the second world war shaped a generation of presidents, a span that takes in eight men – but not all of them served in uniform between 1941 and 1945.Gillon likes to “ask people, ‘There are seven men who served in uniform in world war two and who went on to be president: who are they?’ And most people think Jimmy Carter did, and they forget Ronald Reagan.”Carter was born in 1924 and came of age in wartime. But the submariner turned peanut farmer turned politician, who died aged 100 in December, graduated the US Naval Academy in 1946, the year after the war. Reagan, meanwhile, joined the Army Reserve in the 1930s and spent the war years enlisted – but stayed at home in Hollywood, where he made his name as an actor, narrating films and joining fundraising drives.“Reagan was the most fascinating for me,” says Gillon, emeritus professor of history at the University of Oklahoma and scholar-in-residence at the History Channel. “I once bought the story about: ‘Oh, he wanted to go and fight but his eyes were too bad.’ In fact, there’s all these machinations going on behind the scenes that keep him from going overseas, to make sure he stays in California so he can make movies, while at the same time creating this public image of a guy who has been off to war, and he comes home to his wife [Jane Wyman], and there’s a picture of him in his uniform, kissing his wife – who in fact he slept with every night during the war.”Gillon focuses on how the war affected men who led their country through the cold war with Russia, into the quagmire of Vietnam, and eventually into the first Iraq war. To Gillon, “those presidents who came closest to combat were the ones who were most restrained in their use of force afterwards,” meaning Dwight Eisenhower, who commanded Allied forces in Europe, and John F Kennedy and George HW Bush, who flirted with death in the Pacific, JFK as a torpedo boat captain, Bush as a navy flier.“Reagan is the exception of so many of these things,” Gillon says. “Reagan never sees war. He thinks he saw the Holocaust camps, but he didn’t. He just makes stuff up, and he thinks it’s true. But what I did not know was how he came out of the war with the real fear of nuclear weapons, and he belonged to an organization for international control of atomic weapons, largely a liberal organization, as he was involved in other liberal organizations like Americans for Democratic Action.“While he shed all the other liberal ties, he never shed that fear of nuclear weapons. And despite all his bombastic language, he was very restrained in the use of force. I mean, the only thing he did was create a phony war in Grenada [in which 19 Americans died] and see 241 Americans killed in Lebanon [both in 1983], and that was a peacekeeping mission.”View image in fullscreenIn response to the Beirut embassy bombing, Reagan launched limited strikes. He also bombed Libya, in 1986, and funded and fueled conflicts elsewhere, his efforts in Nicaragua creating the Iran-Contra scandal. But on the global scene, Gillon “was surprised at how restrained Reagan was. And then his fear of nuclear weapons made him open to [Mikhail] Gorbachev’s overtures” for detente and arms control “during his second term … this was where Reagan followed his own instincts and in this case his instincts were right, and he was the right person to do it because he had such strong anti-communist credentials. So that was a twist I had not appreciated before.”Gillon’s book contains more twists. Many involve Lyndon Baines Johnson, like Reagan no stranger to distorting facts for political gain. A congressman when the US entered the war, LBJ got himself into uniform for a Pacific fact-finding tour. Hitching a ride on a bomber, he survived an attack by Japanese fighters.“There’s controversy over whether that took place the way he described it,” Gillon says. “There was an article written by some aviation historians who said it never could have happened. And then, years later, the Japanese pilot who had actually led the attack against the American planes said he remembered Johnson’s plane. He remembered crippling it, and he said the plane was so wounded that he knew it wasn’t going to do any damage, so he broke off and went back into the main attack.”Johnson’s plane made it back to base, leaving him alive to tell tales of his own bravery on the campaign trail. Gillon shows how those tales grew more shameless but thinks the basic story “is definitely true”, including how a bathroom break meant Johnson lost a spot on a plane which was shot down, killing all onboard.“Yeah, Johnson was just cool as a cucumber. And I’m sure he was thrilled when he landed.”Gillon was born in working class Philadelphia in 1956, in the shadow of the war. Too young for the Vietnam draft, fascinated by the presidency, he graduated from Widener and Brown and then taught at Yale and Oxford. Recent books include America’s Reluctant Prince, about his late friend John F Kennedy Jr, and The Pact, about Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, a Democratic president and a Republican House speaker whose relationship resonates loudly today.With his latest book, Gillon focuses on the major lessons of the second world war, particularly the cost of appeasement, Hitler’s triumph at Munich in 1938 a constant ghost at the feast. Such lessons, he says, “some forgot, like Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam, while others, like Kennedy and Bush, those who really saw battle and the horrors of war, you see them thinking about world war two all the time when they’re making big decisions, whether it’s the Cuban Missile Crisis for Kennedy or it’s the invasion of Iraq with George Bush”.View image in fullscreenLooking to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Gillon describes how both served but did not see battle. Both were in the navy. Ford’s closest brush with action involved a fire aboard his ship during a Pacific typhoon. Nixon was posted to tropical islands, working logistics and supply, failing to reach the front line.Vietnam dominates Gillon’s book. US involvement began under Eisenhower, accelerated under Kennedy, swirled into nightmare under Johnson and finally ended under Nixon – though he had lengthened the horror by thwarting peace talks for his own political gain. Gillon retells the extraordinary Anna Chennault affair, in which a Washington socialite acted as a go-between with the government of South Vietnam, relaying Nixon’s urge to boycott talks till the 1968 election was done. When Johnson learned of it, he told a senior Republican: “This is treason.” The senator agreed. Johnson called Nixon, who denied it. Gillon writes: “According to some reports, after hanging up, Nixon collapsed with laughter.”In 1968, Nixon beat Hubert Humphrey. The war did not end until 1973. Reading Presidents at War, it is striking to realize that no future president who was of an age to serve in Vietnam did so.Bill Clinton opposed the war, studied abroad and denied accusations of dodging the draft. Joe Biden secured student deferments then was exempted on account of teenage asthma. George W Bush, the son of a war hero, went into the Texas Air national guard, which, Gillon notes, “is a place notoriously where rich, powerful people put their kids during war”. Al Gore, John Kerry and John McCain did go to Vietnam – but lost presidential elections.As so often, Donald Trump is a whole other matter. He obtained student draft deferments but also found a doctor to say “bone spurs” in his heels rendered him unfit for service. He has also said avoiding sexually transmitted diseases while dating in New York was his “personal Vietnam”, making him feel like “a great and very brave soldier”. It’s not a line to endear him to Gillon, who says he cast his first vote for a Republican president, Ford, but whose epilogue to Presidents at War makes clear his distaste for Trump, his view of military matters and his reported negative comments about those who serve.“I have my political point of view but when I write history, I try to be really fair-minded,” Gillon says. “And I can’t be fair-minded toward Trump. I just dislike him so much that I don’t think I could write a book about him. I wrote a book about Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, and what made me happy was that both Clinton and Gingrich liked it. I take great pride in being fair of mind towards someone like Newt Gingrich, who I have no political affinity for, but I just can’t get to that point mentally with Trump. I can’t write a book that I feel I can’t be fair.”

      Presidents at War is out now More

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      D-day: Biden calls for supporting Ukraine in struggle against ‘dark forces’

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      Joe Biden has marked the 80th anniversary of the D-day landings in Normandy with an impassioned call to western allies to continue supporting Ukraine in the face of the “unending struggle between dictatorship and freedom”.Speaking on Thursday at a ceremony at the Normandy American cemetery attended by his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, and dozens of surviving veterans from the second world war, Biden drew parallels between the Allied troops who fought to free Europe and the alliance of nations that came together to defend Ukraine against Russian aggression.The president warned that democracy was under great threat than at any time since the end of second world war. Describing Vladimir Putin as a “tyrant bent on domination”, Biden said the Russian leader and “the autocrats of the world are watching closely to see what happens in Ukraine, to see if we let this illegal aggression go unchecked.“To surrender to bullies, to bow to dictators, is simply unthinkable,” Biden said. “If we do, Ukraine will be subjugated and it will not end there, Ukraine’s neighbours will be threatened, all of Europe will be threatened.”Biden honoured the American second world war veterans who, alongside allied soldiers, stormed the beaches of Normandy to drive out the forces of Nazi Germany.“We know the dark forces that these heroes fought against 80 years ago. They never fade,” he said.This D-day milestone carried particular significance as it was likely the last major ceremony attended by significant numbers of veterans, many of whom are aged 100 or more.“On behalf of the American people and as commander-in-chief, it’s the highest honour to be able to salute you here in Normandy,” Biden told them.Biden and the first lady, Jill Biden, greeted the veterans one by one and thanked them for their service. During the ceremony, Macron bestowed the Legion of Honour, France’s highest award of merit, to 11 American veterans and one from Britain in recognition of their sacrifice. The ceremony was attended by more than 150 members of Congress and dozens of members of the French parliament.On Wednesday, Biden arrived in Paris for the start of a five-day visit in France, during which he will underscore the US’s steadfast commitment to European security and contrast his foreign policy vision with his 2024 election opponent, Donald Trump.“Isolationism was not the answer 80 years ago and is not the answer today,” Biden said, in a veiled reference to Trump’s American First doctrine. “Real alliances make us stronger, a lesson that I pray we Americans never forget.”While in Normandy, Biden will hold talks with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to discuss “how we can continue and deepen our support for Ukraine”, the White House said. Biden is also expected to visit a cemetery where American soldiers who died in the first world war are buried. Trump opted not to visit the same site during a 2018 trip to France, citing bad weather, a move that drew intense criticism at the time.More than 25 heads of state are attending D-day commemorations in Normandy, including the Ukrainian president, Germany’s chancellor Olaf Scholz, and Britain’s prime minister Rishi Sunak and members of the royal family, as part of Europe is in the grip of the largest war since 1945. Russia will not be represented at Thursday’s ceremonies. More

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      Uniting America review: how FDR and the GOP beat fascism home and away

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      Uniting America review: how FDR and the GOP beat fascism home and away Charles Lindbergh casts a shadow over Peter Shinkle’s new book, which ends with a warning about Trump and his partyThe subtitle of this remarkable popular history is “How FDR and Henry Stimson Brought Democrats and Republicans together to Win World War II”, Stimson being the Republican Franklin Roosevelt chose as secretary of war on 19 June 1940, the same day he chose another Republican, Frank Knox, for secretary of the navy.‘It’s on the tape’: Bob Woodward on Donald Trump’s ‘criminal behavior’Read moreThose appointments came five weeks after the king asked Winston Churchill to form a unity government in Great Britain, two weeks after 338,000 French and British troops were rescued at Dunkirk, and four weeks before Roosevelt was nominated for an unprecedented third term, all events featured in this compelling volume.But Peter Shinkle’s book is a great deal more than a celebration of the bipartisanship that was a key factor in American success. It also offers brisk accounts of all US campaigns in Africa and Europe, a detailed description of how Pearl Harbor happened, and the best explanation I have read of why the government pursued its disastrous policy of interning Japanese Americans.Besides all that, there is terrific social history of the ways the war changed the status of women and African Americans. Practically the only important social impact Shinkle omits is the war’s effects on gay and lesbian Americans, a subject covered best by Allan Bérubé’s definitive book, Coming Out Under Fire.Shinkle is a veteran reporter who has written another fine book, Ike’s Mystery Man, about Robert Cutler, the closeted gay man who was Dwight Eisenhower’s right-hand man for foreign policy in the White House. That book also combined political and social history. But his new volume is broader and more important.There are probably more books written about the second world war than any other 20th-century event, but every generation needs to be reminded of its triumphs and tragedies. Shinkle does a splendid job mining for new nuggets of information and fresh perspectives.There are two big reasons for focusing on Stimson. Not only did he play a vital role in practically every important military decision from 1940 to 1945, he also kept an extremely detailed diary, which makes it possible for Shinkle to tell us exactly what he was thinking.Besides canny portraits of Roosevelt, Stimson and George Marshall, the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, there are a host of subsidiary characters. The first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Black activist A Philip Randolph are two of the most important heroes while Charles Lindbergh, the celebrated solo pilot to Paris who became a fierce isolationist and a virulent antisemite, is one of its principal villains.There has been a raging debate for decades about how the surprise Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor came about, and whether Roosevelt and his aides ignored information from Japanese diplomatic cables because they wanted to bring America into the war.It turns out almost all of the answers are in Simpson’s diary, including this key sentence: “The question was how we should maneuver [the Japanese] into the position of firing the first shot, without allowing too much danger to ourselves.”One of the biggest problems Roosevelt faced in 1940 and 1941 was how to counter isolationists like Lindbergh, whose affection for the Nazis and hatred for the Jews made him as popular in some quarters as he was despised in others.Before Congress, Lindbergh denounced the bill that gave Britain resources to survive the Blitz. There was much he didn’t like in the world, but “over a period of years [on both sides] there is not as much difference in philosophy as we have been led to believe”. After the House approved the extension of the draft by a single vote, Lindbergh declared “the greatest danger to this country” posed by its Jewish citizens “lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government”.While Roosevelt’s White House denounced that speech for resembling “the outpourings of Berlin”, former president Herbert Hoover “readily defended Lindbergh, a sign of the enduring political power of both the aviator and isolationism”.That power of these isolationists explains why Stimson did not record “shock, horror or anger” after Roosevelt informed him of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Instead, he wrote, “my first feeling was of relief that the indecision was over and that a crisis had come in a way which would unite our people … For I feel this country united has practically nothing to fear while the apathy and visions stirred up by unpatriotic men have been hitherto very discouraging.”Roosevelt refused to desegregate the armed forces, largely for fear of alienating southern Democrats. But Shinkle reminds us that Roosevelt’s civil rights record was much more complicated than that failure suggests.Ike’s Mystery Man review: astonishing tale of a gay White House aideRead moreRandolph, who was president of the first important Black union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, used the threat of a March on Washington by 100,000 citizens to pressure Roosevelt into signing a landmark executive order prohibiting discrimination and segregation by military contractors. One activist wrote that the Fair Employment Practice Committee Roosevelt impaneled led to “more progress” against “racial and religious discrimination than [in] any other period in American history”.Three million women were employed in the defense industry by the end of 1942, as well as new divisions of the army, navy and coast guard, similarly transforming their status.Jacqueline Cochran commanded the Women Airforce Service Pilots, which graduated 1,100 women training inspectors and test pilots. “Menstrual cycles didn’t upset anyone’s cycle,” Cochran wrote. Women flew “as regularly and for as many hours as the men”.Shinkle ends with all the ways history is repeating itself today, including a description of “Trump’s fascism”. The resurgence of that hateful ideology, and the budding isolationism of many Republicans eager to end support for Ukraine, are two reasons why this vivid volume is so timely and important.
      Uniting America: How FDR and Henry Stimson Brought Democrats and Republicans together to Win World War II is published in the US by St Martin’s Press
      TopicsBooksHistory booksFranklin D RooseveltSecond world warUS politicsDemocratsRepublicansreviewsReuse this content More

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      Trump wanted Pentagon generals to be like second world war Nazis, book says

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      Trump wanted Pentagon generals to be like second world war Nazis, book saysEx-president complained to John Kelly ‘why can’t you be like the German generals?’ according to excerpt from the New Yorker During his time in the Oval Office, Donald Trump wanted the Pentagon’s generals to be like Nazi Germany’s generals in the second world war, according to a book excerpt in the New Yorker.In an exchange with his former White House chief of staff John Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, Trump reportedly complained: “You fucking generals, why can’t you be like the German generals?”Kelly asked which generals, prompting Trump to reply: “The German generals in World War II.”According to the excerpt published by the New Yorker from The Divider: Trump in the White House, by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, an incredulous Kelly pointed out that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was almost assassinated by one of his own generals.“No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,” Trump replied, apparently unaware of Claus von Stauffenberg’s plot in July 1944 to kill Hitler with a bomb inside his Wolf’s Lair field headquarters.Kelly reportedly told Trump that there were no American generals who observe total loyalty to a president. Instead, they swear, like all military personnel, to “support and defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic”.The stunning back-and-forth came during a dispute touched off by Trump’s admiration for military parades, gleaned in part by personally observing Bastille Day celebrations thrown in France by that country’s president, Emmanuel Macron.Trump stubbornly wanted a similar military parade to mark the Fourth of July independence day holiday. But his cabinet staff was less enthusiastic, and it became a point of contention.According to the excerpt, a French general overseeing the 2017 Bastille Day parade in Paris turned to one of his American counterparts in Trump’s delegation and said: “You are going to be doing this next year.” The idea was seeded.Trump, on his return to Washington, hatched a plan for the “biggest, grandest military parade ever for the Fourth of July”. But the plans went down badly with Trump’s cabinet staff.“I’d rather swallow acid,” the defense secretary and former Marine Corps general, James Mattis, is reported to have said, offering that a similarly grandiose military parade was unfeasible in part because of the cost and the fear that tanks would tear up the streets of Washington.But Trump was already formulating his vision, telling Kelly: “Look, I don’t want any wounded guys in the parade. This doesn’t look good for me.”According to the publication, the subject came up repeatedly. With each pushback, Trump’s admiration for the military advisers which he used to fawningly refer to as “my generals” cooled.In one exchange involving Kelly and Paul Selva, then vice-chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Trump appeared surprised that the former military men were not supportive.Selva, who had grown up in António de Oliveira Salazar’s Portuguese dictatorship, informed Trump that “parades were about showing the people who had the guns. And in this country, we don’t do that.” He added: “It’s not who we are.”“So, you don’t like the idea?” Trump responded.“No,” Selva said. “It’s what dictators do.”In a statement to the magazine, Trump said: “These were very untalented people and once I realized it, I did not rely on them, I relied on the real generals and admirals within the system.”TopicsDonald TrumpSecond world warUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Last remaining Medal of Honor recipient from second world war to lie in state at US Capitol

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      Last remaining Medal of Honor recipient from second world war to lie in state at US CapitolWest Virginia senator Joe Manchin announced move at memorial for late marine The last remaining Medal of Honor recipient from the second world war will lie in state at the US Capitol, West Virginia senator Joe Manchin announced at a memorial on Sunday where the late marine was remembered for his courage, humility and selflessness.“He never quit giving back,” Manchin said of Hershel W “Woody” Williams. That included raising money for gold star families – immediate family members of fallen service members – with an annual motorcycle ride.“It’s raised hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Manchin said. He joked that the annual ride would not “be stopping, because Woody would come after me in a heartbeat”.Manchin, a Democrat, said he would miss Williams’ phone calls, noting how the military veteran would always give him directions and to-do lists. “I’ll miss him telling me how I’m supposed to vote,” Manchin said. “And when I didn’t, how I made a mistake.”Williams, who died on Wednesday aged 98, was a legend in his native West Virginia for his heroics under fire over several crucial hours at the Battle of Iwo Jima.As a young US marine corporal, Williams went ahead of his unit in February 1945 and eliminated a series of Japanese machine-gun positions. Facing small-arms fire, Williams fought for four hours, repeatedly returning to prepare demolition charges and obtain flamethrowers.Later that year, Williams – then 22 – received the Medal of Honor from President Harry Truman. The Medal of Honor is America’s highest award for military valour.The commandant of the US Marine Corps, General David Berger, said at the memorial that Williams always took exception to the notion that he accomplished that feat alone. He always acknowledged the other men on his team, some of whom never returned home.“Woody may be the most genuine person I ever met,” Berger said, noting his unique combination of humility and humour. “He could make you laugh. He could make you care. That was his gift.”Williams remained in the marines after the war, serving a total of 20 years. He later worked for the Veterans Administration for 33 years as a veterans service representative.In 2018, a medical centre in Huntington, Virginia, was renamed in his honour, and the navy commissioned a mobile base sea vessel in his name in 2020.“He left an indelible mark on our Marine Corps,” Berger said. “As long as there are marines, his legacy will live on.”TopicsUS newsUS politicsJoe ManchinSecond world warnewsReuse this content More

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      Holocaust book Maus hits bestseller list after Tennessee school board ban

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      Holocaust book Maus hits bestseller list after Tennessee school board banAuthor Art Spiegelman says decision to ban Pulitzer-winning novel that depicts Jewish people as mice is ‘demented’ The Pulitzer prize-winning Holocaust graphic novel Maus: A Survivor’s Tale has become a bestseller on Amazon, after a Tennessee school board banned it.Last week, according to meeting minutes, 10 school board members in McMinn county agreed to remove Maus from the eighth-grade curriculum, citing “rough, objectionable language” and sketches of naked women they deemed unsuitable for 13-year-old students.By the American cartoonist Art Spiegelman and first published in 1986, Maus describes the experiences of Spiegelman’s parents in Nazi concentration camps and his mother’s suicide. The book depicts Jewish people as mice and Nazis as cats.“We don’t need to enable or somewhat promote this stuff,” McMinn county board member Tony Allman said, adding in reference to the murder of 6 million Jewish people in the second world war: “I am not denying it was horrible, brutal and cruel.“It shows people hanging,” he said. “It shows them killing kids. Why does the education system promote this kind of stuff? It is not wise or healthy.”Another board member, Mike Cochran, said: “If I was trying to indoctrinate somebody’s kids, this is how I would do it. You put this stuff just enough on the edges, so the parents don’t catch it but the kids, they soak it in. I think we need to relook at the entire curriculum.”Spiegelman, 73, told CNBC he was “baffled”.“It’s leaving me with my jaw open, like, ‘What?’” he said, adding that the board was acting in “Orwellian” fashion.“I’ve met so many young people who … have learned things from my book,” he said. “I also understand that Tennessee is obviously demented. There’s something going on very, very haywire there.”As news of the McMinn ban spread, Maus shot on to multiple top 10 lists in Amazon book categories. As of Monday morning, The Complete Maus was second in Amazon’s overall bestseller category. In history, it ranked first. In second world war history, Maus I, the first installment of the novel, also ranked No 1. Variations took the first, second and third spots as bestsellers in literary graphic novels.Efforts have also emerged to make Maus more accessible to students. One professor at a North Carolina college offered eighth-grade and high-school students in McMinn county a free online class.“In response to Spiegelman’s Maus I and Maus II being removed from the schools by McMinn county, Tennessee school board members, I am offering this free online course for any McMinn county eighth-grade or high school students interested in reading these books with me,” said Scott Denham of Davidson College.“I have taught Spiegelman’s books many times in my courses on the Holocaust over many years,” he added, on his website.Richard Davis, owner of the Nirvana Comics bookstore in Knoxville, Tennessee, offered to loan The Complete Maus to any student. Davis also set up a GoFundMe campaign to buy additional copies. Created with a target of $20,000, it had raised more than $80,000 by Monday.“Art Spiegelman’s masterpiece is one of the most important, impactful and influential graphic novels of all time,” the page said. “We believe it is a must-read for everyone.”TopicsHolocaustTennesseeUS educationSecond world warUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Bob Dole, giant of Republican politics and presidential nominee, dies aged 98

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      Bob Dole, giant of Republican politics and presidential nominee, dies aged 98
      Long-time power-broker lost 1996 election to Bill Clinton
      Biden: ‘An American statesman like few in our history’
      Obituary: Bob Dole, 1923-2021
      0Bob Dole, the long-time Kansas senator who was the Republican nominee for president in 1996, has died. He was 98.Bob Dole was a soldier, a politician and a Republican of the old school Read moreIn a statement on Sunday, the Elizabeth Dole Foundation – founded by Dole’s wife, a former North Carolina senator and cabinet official – said: “It is with heavy hearts we announced that Senator Robert Joseph Dole died earlier this morning in his sleep. At his death at age 98 he had served the United States of America faithfully for 79 years.”In late February, Dole announced that he had advanced lung cancer and would begin treatment. Visiting him, Joe Biden called Dole his “close friend”. The two men were in the Senate together for 23 years.On Sunday, Biden said: “We picked up right where we left off, as if it were only yesterday that we were sharing a laugh in the Senate dining room, or debating the great issues of the day, often against each other on the Senate floor.“I saw in his eyes the same light, bravery and determination I’ve seen so many times before in the Senate. Though we often disagreed, he never hesitated to work with me or other Democrats when it mattered most.”Citing Dole’s work on the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Social Security Commission and in creating a public holiday in honour of Martin Luther King – “a bill that many in his own caucus opposed” – Biden called Dole “an American statesman like few in our history, a war hero and among the greatest of the greatest generation”.“To me,” he said, “he was also a friend whom I could look to for trusted guidance, or a humorous line at just the right moment to settle frayed nerves.”The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, ordered flags at the Capitol flown at half-staff.Born in Russell, Kansas, in 1923, Dole left college to serve in the US infantry in the second world war, suffering serious wounds in Italy and winning a medal for bravery.His wounds cost him use of his right arm but he entered state politics and soon became a Republican power-broker, representing Kansas in the US House from 1961 to 1969 and in the Senate until 1996. He had spells as chairman of the Republican National Committee and as Senate minority and majority leader.In 1976 he was the Republican nominee for vice-president to Gerald Ford, in an election the sitting president lost to Jimmy Carter. Famously, in a debate with Walter Mondale Dole said America’s wars in the 20th century had been “Democrat wars”.Mondale said Dole had just “richly earned his reputation as a hatchet man”. Dole denied saying what he had just said, then backed down. He eventually acknowledged going too far.“I was supposed to go for the jugular,” he said, “and I did my own.”He pursued the Republican nomination in 1980 and 1988 and finally won it in 1996, at the age of 73 and two decades after being on the ticket.That put him up against Bill Clinton, a formidable campaigner seeking a second term. Against the backdrop of a booming economy, the Democrat won with ease, by 379–159 in the electoral college and by nine points in the popular vote, the third-party candidate Ross Perot costing Dole support on the right.On Sunday, Clinton said of Dole: “After all he gave in the war, he didn’t have to give more. But he did. His example should inspire people today and for generations to come.”Dole received both the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest US civilian honours.In December 2018, amid ceremonies in honour of the former president (and Dole’s rival) George HW Bush, Dole appeared before Bush’s casket in the Capitol Rotunda. As an aide lifted him from his wheelchair, Dole steadied himself and saluted.In the Trump years and after, Dole came widely to be seen as a figure from another time in Republican politics. On Sunday, the political consultant Tara Setmeyer, a member of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, tweeted: “I cast my first ever vote for president for Bob Dole in 1996. A war hero with a sharp sense of humor … another piece of a once respectable GOP gone.”But Dole remained a loyal Republican soldier. This summer, he told USA Today that though Donald Trump “lost the election, and I regret that he did, but they did”, and though he himself was “sort of Trumped out”, he still considered himself “a Trumper”.On Sunday, Trump called Dole “an American war hero and true patriot for our nation”.In the same USA Today interview, Dole called Biden “a great, kind, upstanding, decent person”, though he said he leaned too far left.He also said: “I do believe [America has] lost something. I can’t get my hand on it, but we’re just not quite where we should be, as the greatest democracy in the world. And I don’t know how you correct it, but I keep hoping that there will be a change in my lifetime.”On Sunday the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, a fiercely partisan Washington warrior who many on the left hold responsible for America losing its way, said: “Whatever their politics, anyone who saw Bob Dole in action have to admire his character and his profound patriotism. Those of us who were lucky to know Bob well ourselves admired him even more.”
      The Associated Press contributed to this report
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